"No-I had an extra at the house."

"So you have three spinning wheels? Wow."

She ducked her head. "Four actually."

"That seems like a lot. Do you use all of them?"

"Well, not this one, at least not very often. That's why you should keep it as long as you want, until you decide what kind you want to get."

I grinned. "How do you know I'm going to want my own wheel?"

"Because you, my dear, are thoroughly hooked"

Meghan snorted. "I'll say."

Erin wrinkled her nose. "You're spinning yarn? Like in the olden days?"

"Well, yes. I guess so. Only, like so many things we do now, it's more for fun than out of necessity. The people who used to spin in order to cloth themselves never had that luxury."

She nodded. "Yeah, I get it. I guess there are a lot of things like that."

Ruth gestured over her shoulder toward the pen where our four pullets were quietly clucking and making the low moaning sounds that count as conversation among chickens. "Like keeping laying hens."

Meghan and I both smiled as Erin jumped in. "But the girls are necessary. How else would we get fresh eggs for breakfast right from our own backyard? Plus they give us fertilizer for the garden, and then turn around and eat all the weeds from it."

"Girls?" Ruth asked, looking amused.

"Well, they are girls, aren't they? Girl chickens," Erin said.

We all liked raising the chickens and keeping them in the backyard, but she was the most enthusiastic. She cared for them exclusively, so the burden on Meghan and I came down to occasionally buying chicken feed, grit and oyster shell. Since "the girls" would likely produce more eggs than we could possibly use in the summer, we'd told Erin she could sell the extras and keep the money for all her hard work.

"Well," I said, spearing a few leaves of chickweed from my salad and holding them up. "At least we get to eat some of our own weeds, too."

Conversation continued, and I concentrated on my dinner. As I chewed, I stubbornly pushed aside the disturbing events of the day and focused on my environment: warm friends, the beauty of the vegetable beds, the bat house mounted on a fence post, the chickens getting ready to roost for the night.

When Ruth touched my arm, I jumped. "Let's take some of these plates in," she said.

We gathered up plates and utensils, waving Meghan and Erin back when they tried to help. Erin slipped into the hen pen, as she called it, and began murmuring to her girls in a low voice. Meghan watched, smiling.

In the kitchen, I quickly set to washing the plates. I love the dishwasher, don't get me wrong, but when we grilled in the summer there were rarely enough dishes to justify starting it up. Besides, the house still held heat from the day, and it didn't seem prudent to add to it.

Ruth said, "The spinning wheel is in the living room."

"Thanks again for that. It's sweet of you to let me borrow it." "

I want you to do something, though." "

I paused in rinsing a plate. "Oh?"

I want you to go over and talk to Chris Popper."

Oh.

Slowly, I dried my hands and sat down at the kitchen table. I'd been so caught up in my own drama that I'd nearly forgotten what Barr had said about Chris killing Ariel. Now I remembered my insistence that she call me if she wanted to talk, and felt torn. She'd lost her husband twice, it seemed: once to another woman and then, finally, to an accident. But would she really have killed Ariel over it? Especially after Scott was already dead?

"Barr and that woman detective think she killed Ariel," Ruth said.

There was a note of distaste in her voice when she mentioned Robin Lane. The fledgling detective had tried to bully information out of Ruth a few months previously. Ruth had been flat on her back in a hospital bed at the time and in a lot of pain. Barr was right. His partner had all the people skills of a grumpy badger.

Cautious, I inclined my head a fraction.

"Barr already told you?" Ruth said. "Well, of course he did. Will you talk to Chris before jumping to any conclusions, and make up your own mind? That's all I ask. Because you know how hard it is to lose a husband. Can you imagine how hard it would have been if, in addition to losing your husband, you'd been accused of murdering his lover on the day of his funeral?"

I blanched. Turned out I couldn't imagine it.

Barr had asked me to foster gossip amongst the CRAC crowd, and I had already offered a listening ear should Chris be interested. Complying with Ruth's request was a no brainer.

"Of course I'll talk to her," I said. "Though I'm not sure what good it will do."

She shrugged and reached for a dishtowel. "To be honest, I don't know, either. But do it anyway."

Kind of pushy, I thought. "Or you'll take away the spinning wheel?" I joked.

Ruth smiled gently.

I stared at her placid face. "You're blackmailing me?"

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "I'm bribing you."

EIGHT

AFTER RUTH LEFT, I took a long shower, dressed in a soft, oversized T-shirt and crawled into bed with one of Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books. Her descriptions of bucolic life in the lateseventeenth-century farmhouse she and her friend Jill had rehabbed in 1920s and '30s Connecticut seemed the perfect continuation of my determined affection for the home life I had with Meghan and Erin.

Meghan came and stood in my bedroom doorway. I put my book down.

"Think tomorrow will be as exciting as today?" she asked with a rueful look.

"I hope not."

"What did Ruth want?"

I pasted innocence on my face.

"Come on. I know she came over specifically to talk to you, and it wasn't just about twisting fiber into yarn."

"She wants me to talk to Chris."

"Oh. Well, that makes sense, since you're a, you know… widow."

"Yeah, that and the police think Chris had something to do with Ariel's death."

"What!"

"Ariel and Scott were having an affair. Barr wants me to talk to Chris, too. Well," I amended, "not just Chris. He wants me to talk to other people at CRAC, too. More like get them talking." I'd sort of left that out when I'd recounted my conversation with him earlier.

She stared at me. "He wants you to?"

I nodded.

"Well. I, um… " Meghan rarely looked as flummoxed as she did at that news. "I guess nothing I say is going to make any difference."

"I'm not investigating. I promise. I'm not asking a bunch of questions or putting myself in danger. I'm just acting as some extra eyes and ears because Robin Lane may be gorgeous, but she has the tact of a sledgehammer when it comes to questioning people about murder."

Understanding settled onto Meghan's face. "Ah. Promise you'll be careful?"

"Cross my heart."

She started to leave, then turned back. "You do lead an exciting life, don't you?"

I snorted. I couldn't help it. "Yeah. Maybe a little too exciting."

She grinned. "Goodnight."

"'Night," I said, and reached for the lamp. It was only ninethirty, but I was ready for some shut-eye. I heard Meghan dialing New Jersey as I drifted off.

Fitful dreams punctuated my nighttime and early morning hours, and sunlight began to creep through my window at four-thirty. Days were long on both sides in the summer.

At six I gave up trying to sleep, showered again, and donned a lightweight skirt and T-shirt in response to the weather forecast; the temperature was supposed to advance into the nineties, which was hot for this early in the summer. Humidity curled in the air like a languid animal after a big meal.