"Something that would make somebody think that our death rate has suddenly gone up."

"Sure it has," Mattie said, waving her hat at the question as if it were an annoying insect. "We seein' more people, too. What's you point?"

"Ms. Leary-Parker?"

A car door slammed. Obviously a connection with the voice.

"Yeah?" Timmie didn't bother to turn from where she was opening the front door.

"Timothy Ann Leary-Parker?"

This time she turned.

So did Mattie. "Oh, no." She groaned. "Not again."

Timmie made it around just in time to recognize the young man who was loping up her steps.

"No!" she protested, hands up in instinctive defense. She probably even cringed back in horror. He never flinched. Never stopped smiling. He just slid a rectangle of folded paper in between her upraised fingers and wished her a good day.

And Timmie was left standing on her porch with a summons in her hand.

"Uh-oh," was all Mattie said.

Timmie stared at the paper with the great seal of Missouri on it. She started to laugh.

"What are you gonna do?" Mattie asked.

Timmie knew perfectly well how terrifying her expression was. She was just glad Meghan wasn't here to see it.

"I think I know," she said, stuffing the paper away like an overdrawn notice, "just who the third husband should be."

And then, because it was the only thing she could do, she showed Mattie into the house and began asking her more questions about Billy Mayfield.

Chapter 11

Mattie didn't know anything else about Billy Mayfield. As was fairly common with swing shift hospital personnel, Mattie saw Ellen at work and at hospital functions and at the Rebel Yell after a tough shift. If family was called for at something, Ellen brought her kids. It was nothing anyone commented on. Victor hadn't made any more get-togethers than Billy had. After all, even spouses who understood the stress weren't necessarily enthusiastic about sitting through the war stories and whining.

All Mattie could really say for sure about Billy was that he'd been a drinker, a wife beater, and a general argument for birth control—unfortunately also not that unusual for the spouse of a caregiver like a nurse. Victor, on the other hand, had been a workaholic cop with an eye to skirts and a belief that nobody could get the job done as well as he. Not reason enough, Mattie agreed, to serve him up on a spit.

As for the hospital, Mattie hadn't noticed unexplained deaths any more than Timmie had, hadn't picked up any outrage over the grapevine other than the usual "administration sucks" variety, and couldn't come up with any suspects the police might like more than Barb.

Which was as far as they got, because right about then Meghan came slamming in the door from school to remind Timmie that on this, her first full day home from exile, her mother had promised her dinner and a movie.

* * *

Timmie got back to business after Meghan went to bed. Armed with hot tea, cold lead, and unlined paper, she decided to wade through the players and incidents in this mess and find out how they were connected.

Two murders, an attempted murder, and at least a dozen people, all needing to be positioned on the paper according to their relationships. Alex, Landry, Billy, Victor. The entire SSS. Van Adder and Mary Jane Arlington and even Murphy. Timmie and her dad and Micklind the red-headed detective. All having had some contact with at least one of the intended victims, and a possible motive to kill. Timmie figured that if she could find just one person who might connect to all the incidents, she might well not have to pull out the second chart, which would be the one about who would benefit the most from what had happened.

After forty-five minutes of work, Timmie stopped to consider what she'd come up with. A spider's web. A spider's web on acid. Good lord, she thought, considering the crisscrossing lines. The only person not potentially involved was her father, and that was only because she hadn't let him near scissors in a month.

But she'd been right. There was a figurative center. A single name from which all the other lines radiated. One person who was connected to everyone else.

Her.

Wonderful. She'd just solved both murders and the shooting. She'd done them all. Now if she could just figure out why.

It was probably as good a time as any for the phone to ring. Unfortunately, when Timmie reached over to the wall recession where the black rotary phone sat like a telecommunications Buddha, she knocked a mountain of newspapers over and almost ended up buried in baseball stats from 1965. Timmie and the phone and the papers all ended up on the floor, which raised a cloud of dust that smelled like newsprint and mothballs.

"What?" she snapped, rubbing her hip.

"You must be psychic. You're already in a bad mood, and you haven't even heard what I have for you."

Giving up the idea of trying to get back to the table, Timmie just dragged the phone right into her lap on the floor and reclined against newsprint. "That's not the way to encourage a continued conversation, Murphy," she assured him. "Especially since I've just found out that I'm the murderer."

Anyone else in town would have blustered. Ellen would have protested. Murphy didn't miss a beat. It was why Timmie liked talking to him. "Good. If it wasn't you, it was looking to get complicated, and I'm still not sure I want to expend that much energy."

"My thoughts exactly. You ready to take my exclusive confession?"

"Sure. Why'd you do it? Enquiring minds are certain to want to know."

She grinned. "Greed?"

"Neither of them had a dime that wasn't going to their wives."

"Revenge?"

"They didn't screw you.... Did they?"

"Watch it, newsboy."

His laugh was as dry as statistics. "And you realized you killed them when?"

"When I made a chart to show how everyone is connected to the murderer, and lo and behold, I was the only one who connected to everybody."

"If you want to escape the razor-sharp minds around here, I'd burn that thing. They'd probably hang you with it."

Timmie found herself grinning again. Damn it, she liked Murphy Ellen thought he was too cynical. Mattie thought he was trouble. Barb thought he wasn't serious about staying sober. Timmie thought they were all right. But she liked him anyway. Listening to him, she could almost smell the smog.

"What did you find?" she asked.

"Billy Mayfield didn't work for the hospital."

"I know."

"He wasn't even ever sick enough to need admission there."

"Not even detox?"

"As my old friends on the circuit are so fond of saying, a person has to want treatment to get it. Billy evidently didn't want. He did, on several occasions, send his wife to the ER to be treated, however, which did not put him in good stead with her compatriots."

"The SSS had a wanted poster made up."

"The what?"

Timmie laughed. "Suckered Sisters Sorority. The honored society of duped women and family court frequenters."

"I don't suppose you have any male members."

"As a matter of fact, we do."

"Good. Fill me out an application. I have three clusters to my commendation."

Strike three, as it were. "Did you ever think you should just be a spectator, Murphy?" Timmie demanded. She resettled against the pile of news and felt something jab her in the small of the back.