The Best of Sisters in Crime (52 page)

I leapt up. “You
son of a bitch!” I screamed. Then I kicked him in the stomach for good measure.

I reached down
to pull off his bear mask. Of course, I was fully expecting to see the
no-longer-smug face of George Pettigrew.

But it wasn’t
George.

Looking up at me
was the tormented face of David McAllister. I was stunned. But of course. The
hand-paw motion. David McAllister had been doing what he always did when he was
nervous: cracking his knuckles.

“David? David?
What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, I’m
sorry,” he blubbered, “I didn’t mean to hurt that old woman in your house. I
just needed Maria . . . . I thought I was going to lose my mind . . . . I
wanted to hurt her. . . and whoever she was seeing. . . . I wanted to make them
pay . . . . I’m just so sorry . . . .”

Maria and Tony
Kaplan appeared at the top of the rocks.

“Goldy!” Maria
shrieked. “Are you okay? The police are on their way. What’s that, a person?”

Later, much
later, Maria and I sat in her kitchen and started in on the untouched platter
of brownies. David McAllister had said he figured Maria had asked for the
apples for Waldorf salad because she was having somebody else over.
(He
knew you better than you
thought
, I told her.) He was crazy with
jealousy, and I had been no help. Worse, when he was in my kitchen, he had seen
“Maria—dinner party” on my appointments calendar. And here I’d thought all he’d
been doing was cracking his knuckles. He cut my wires and broke through my back
door. He knew I made everything from scratch.
(He
knew us all better than
we thought,
Maria said.) So he substituted
salmonella-tainted eggs for the mayonnaise, to make Maria and her dinner guests
sick. When Edith Blanton surprised him, they struggled, and she fell back on
the corner of the marble slab I used for kneading. It was an accident. But
because David McAllister had broken into my house before his struggle with
Edith, the charge was going to be murder in the first degree.

Maria sank her
teeth into her first brownie. “Ooo-ooo,” she said. “Yum. I feel better already.
Have one.”

“I shouldn’t. I
can’t.” In fact, I couldn’t even look at the brownies; my knees were scraped
and my chest hurt where I’d fallen on David McAllister.

“Well, you’re
probably right. If you hadn’t gone after that parfait, you never would have
found Butterball, I mean Mrs. Blanton. Which just goes to show, if you’re going
to give up desserts, you have to do it cold—”

“Don’t say it.
Don’t even think it. And no matter how you cajole, I’m not going to join you in
this chocolate indulgence.”

Her eyes
twinkled like the rings on her fingers. “But that’s what I wanted all along!”
she protested. “Leave more for me that way! Dark, fudgy, soothing . . .”

“Oh all right,”
I said. “Just one.”

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