She confirmed it with a nod.
"And I hate to bring it up at a time like this, but your cousin kept a spare key for her. And I don’t know what you plan to do with the house, but I’d rather have it back."
"Of course," she said. She turned on her heel and opened a silver box. "That’s weird." She rummaged around in it some more. "The key should be here."
"Are you sure?" I asked her, because that was proof that she knew exactly where to find it. But why admit it if she could have as easily pretended to have no clue.
Hmm. If her behavior was trying to tell me something, I couldn’t decipher it yet. I’d have to talk it over with somebody else.
"Maybe Jake returned it to her," she suggested.
"Then it would have been in the house."
“That is weird. And frightening," she said. “What the heck is happening in this town?”
She gave me a startled glance, which proved she too understood the possibilities when it came to the missing key to my aunt’s house.
Because with the right kind of information it might have been easy enough to break into the place of an elderly gentleman, even one as smart and alert as Jake.
But my aunt was a witch. And she had a familiar.
I figured either the killer used her absence, which would have meant having a key and choosing a moment when she had Cosmo with her, or they had somehow managed to sneak into her bathroom during library hours. Which, frankly, I did not believe.
After all, there was a downstairs powder room, and it would have been incredibly risky to take the staircase and sneak into her private quarters.
"I’ll have another look," she said.
"I’d appreciate that."
I hesitated. I really didn’t want to leave without properly talking to her, but I couldn’t very well ask her if she had poisoned two people. There was one thing I couldask her, though. "I hope you haven’t heard anything bad about my aunt?"
She arched her eyebrows. Huh. Her skin was remarkably wrinkle-free, to a degree that almost rivaled Linda’s.
"I heard from the detective that some people say they were fighting. But honestly, I told him that was ridiculous.” I smiled at her.
Pamela agreed. "I knew that they were raising their voices a lot more lately, but that was because your aunt and my cousin were both getting deaf.”
"You believe that what might have looked like a shouting match to people who didn’t know them, was just an ordinary conversation?”
"I bet you dollars to doughnuts."
Now I really did warm to her. That made it harder to test a new theory and blurt out, "Somebody saw you a few days before he died. Here. At this house."
“Oh.” She reached for the desk to steady herself. Or was she reaching for the letter opener?
Nervously, I backed off a little. She didn’t seem to notice.
"Shoot," she said. "Who told you?"
"Does it matter?"
She moistened her lips. Her shoulders slumped a little. I assumed there wasn’t a confession forthcoming. "I need a drink," she said. "But not here."
"I know the right place," I said. I closed the silver box for her. Inside was a small cut-glass perfume bottle. It looked empty. Other than that, I spotted an old cigarette lighter and a war medal.
Chapter twenty-nine
We drove to theBlue Moonand knocked on the back door. I’d texted Harper to make sure she expected us. I assumed Pamela would rather not take the front entrance and be either swarmed by people curious about her plans or stuck chatting about her cousin.
