I was glad to see that Susan and Karen, who’d been hardest on Rosie from the beginning, had both come through for her in the end.

I hoped I could do so as well.

When the doorbell rang, I was deep into embroidering Richard’s name on a Christmas stocking for my room box. I jumped, though it was the sound I’d been waiting for all evening. I’d already told the group that I was expecting company who would take a few minutes of my time. I excused myself now and left to open the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Porter,” Allison said, juggling three posters that kept sliding against one another. “I came as soon as I could. I hope I’m not too late. My youngest needed to go to a parent-teacher conference and I forgot I said I’d babysit, but she’s back now.”

“Perfect timing,” I said and ushered Allison through the atrium, open to the sky, to the dining room table.

Allison had kept her schoolgirl figure, which was on the large, curvy side, not fit for jumping from the shoulders of classmates in uniform, as Cheryl Mellace’s could. In knee-length denim shorts and a white polo shirt, she was mercifully brief in her answers to my obligatory inquiries about her family. The logo on the shirt, it turned out, was a cardinal, the mascot of her middle grandson’s elementary school in nearby Cupertino. I hoped Allison wasn’t planning on getting even with me for my pop quizzes by springing one on me, covering all the trivia she doled out.

We spread out the posters. “If the people you want aren’t on these, don’t worry. I stuck the rest in the trunk of my car, just in case.”

How obliging. I felt worse and worse about this ruse to gather evidence for a murder case. It was the same old means-and-ends issue that I’d wrestled with daily over the past week.

We looked at the posters, one by one. I played along with the “find the student” game, while really checking out the glue job on the project.

I put my finger on a photograph that was particularly badly glued to the backing. “Isn’t this Marsha Lowe?” I asked, touching a figure in the background of a candid from the senior ski trip. “She seems to have dropped out of sight and I just learned we have a mutual friend and I wanted to get in touch with her.”

I had to admit there was something to run-on sentences. They conveyed an excitement in and of themselves.

“Yes, that’s Marsha. You’re right. She met someone on a ski trip to Switzerland and married him and stayed there, but she’s back now, in San Jose.”

For the sake of credibility, I fingered two more students in the photographs. Allison knew them both and was excited to be able to give me information that I already knew. I decided to make her a batch of ginger cookies, soon, to distribute among all her above-average children and grandchildren.

I owed food all over town, it seemed.

“This is just what I wanted, Allison. Would you mind if I kept these photos? I’ll be very careful with them and I’ll be sure to return them.” If they don’t end up as a prosecutor’s exhibits in a trial.

Allison waved her hand and clicked her tongue. “Of course, Mrs. Porter. Who’s going to miss them, huh?”

I lifted the photographs from the poster, being careful to take the dried glue along with them.

“Hmm. Some of these pictures weren’t glued down very well. What kind of adhesive did you use?” I asked.

“Oh, Cheryl picked some up at one of those everything’s-a-dollar stores at the last minute. I guess it wasn’t a very good brand.”

That was more good news for me. Cheryl may have had designer taste in clothes and cars, but not in adhesives.

“Do you have the glue?” I asked. Allison gave me a curious look. “I like to compare different brands of glue for my crafts classes,” I added.

That seemed to satisfy her. “Cheryl took all the unused supplies-the extra poster board, tape, and all. I could ask her exactly where she bought the glue, if you want.”

“No, no. Thanks, Allison, but don’t bother.” I slipped the photos into an envelope. “You’ve already been a great help.”

Allison didn’t stay long, since, as she explained, her cousin from Reno was driving in early tomorrow to attend a birthday party for a friend. More pop-quiz material.

I couldn’t wait to look more closely at the back of the photos I’d stuffed in the envelope. A quick glance while Allison and I were at the dining room table confirmed what she had implied, that the glue was an inexpensive generic mucilage, not the kind sold in the better crafts stores.

And not the kind a miniaturist would use for anything, not for gluing tiny pieces in place, and not for gluing together the lips of a murder victim.

I didn’t think it would work, but I made an attempt to bypass my guest crafters and inspect the photographs under my large magnifier lamp in the corner of the crafts room. I had all of fifteen seconds before everyone crowded around me.

“What’s that you’re doing?” Karen asked.

I placed the photograph, upside down, directly under the light.

“Give me a minute,” I said. “Then I’d like you all to take a look at this.”

I looked through the magnifier at the top of the light and prodded the glue with toothpicks. The glue had congealed into hard brownish clumps. I pictured the source, with an orange rubber tip on the bottle and a slit for the syrupy glue to come out. I hadn’t seen the brand in years but I remembered it as a staple in the crafts rooms of my childhood.

One by one, I had my crafter friends check out the glue, with and without the magnifying lens, with toothpicks, fingers, and noses all brought to bear.

“Is that a glue Rosie would use?” I asked.

“Not hardly,” said Mabel.

“Nuh-uh, y’all,” said Susan.

“No way, Jose,” said Karen.

“Why does it matter?” Maddie asked.

“I think I know,” Linda said.

Chapter 25

I worked out the scenario in my head, over and over, after the group had left and Maddie was fast asleep.

Skip had as much as admitted that the test for matching the glue on David’s dead lips to the glue on Rosie’s locker room box had been hurried and inconclusive. It had been done by a rookie, he’d said. Preliminary, he’d said.

I was convinced that with this sample from Cheryl’s glue and a credible test, we’d have incontrovertible evidence that Cheryl had murdered David and then done everything she could to direct the police to Rosie. She’d even glued his lips together to indicate that a crafter had been at work. Her desire to humiliate Rosie, and even destroy her life, seemed to have no bounds.

It had been a long day, starting with my meeting with Lourdes and ending with Allison (truthfully, ending with sweet potato pie), with a lot of stress at the LPPD in between.

Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’d take the sample photographs to Skip. Then maybe I’d see about arranging a date to finish the witch joke with Henry and Taylor. I’d probably have to promise Henry that I’d never bother him again afterward.

For now, I needed to sleep.

My head couldn’t have been on the pillow more than a minute before a loud thumping noise startled me. It came from the direction of the atrium. June Chinn, next door, had been having problems with raccoons on her roof on a regular basis. Most of the Eichlers in our neighborhood were flat-roofed and easy for an animal to reach. Had the raccoons finally found my roof?

I couldn’t remember whether I’d fully closed the skylight before coming to bed. What a nightmare it would be if an animal had climbed up and then jumped onto my atrium floor and was now trapped inside.

A quick contingency plan formed in my mind, to call animal control if there was a raccoon or other creature in my home. The atrium was closed in, mostly by glass doors that led to the other parts of the house, which surrounded it. To let anyone into my house, I’d have to either enter the atrium and cross it, to the front door, or exit by the patio door from my bedroom and walk all around the side and use my key to let in an animal handler.