Free Topping From Below by Laura Reese Page A

the distance to the door.
    “How did you know?” I ask him, my voice barely a whisper.
    He picks up a wooden spoon and stirs the sauce. “You’re not a very good detective. I’ve seen you around, following me, showing up a few too many times for it to be a mere coincidence. Besides, Franny showed me your picture.”
    Watching me, he tastes the sauce, furrows his eyebrows, adds a pinch of spice. He replaces the lid and turns to me. Leaning against the counter, he folds his arms and cocks his head, smiling just a little. “As a matter of fact, she told me a lot about you. More, I’m sure, than you want me to know.”
    I’m shocked into silence. I can’t believe he knew, all along, my identity. We stare at each other without speaking. I’m still stunned; he’s only amused. He looks down at my wineglass and sees that it’s empty. He gets the bottle of wine, uncorks it, and takes a step toward me. Reflexively, I tense. He sees my fear and smiles, then pours me another glass of wine.
    “What were you planning to do?” he asks me, saying it as if he were inquiring about the time of day. “Why are you here?”
    I tell him the truth. “I want to find out more about you. I think you killed my sister.”
    I expect M. to act insulted or outraged, but he only raises one eyebrow, mildly intrigued. “You know, of course, the police don’t share your opinion.”
    “They don’t have any evidence—that’s all I know.”
    He nods thoughtfully. “So you came here to … what? Collect evidence? Disclose the murderer?” He is making fun of me.
    “Yes,” I say, trying to hold in my anger.
    “What if I told you I didn’t kill her. Would you believe me?”
    “No.”
    “Ah,” he says, thinking. “I suppose not.” He crosses over to the refrigerator and pulls out a head of romaine, scallions, tomatoes, and marinated mushrooms. He washes the tomatoes and begins to slice them into small wedges. His insouciance infuriates me. I want a reaction from him.
    “She kept a diary,” I say. “She wrote about you. I know what you did to her.”
    “‘Franny’s File,’” he says, still slicing. “The police mentioned it, of course, but I already knew about it. From Franny.” He looks up at me. “And I doubt if you knew what I did to her. You wouldn’t be here if you did.”
    “I intend to find out.”
    “Really?” The word sounds like a challenge. He gets a wooden bowl for the salad and dumps in the tomatoes and mushrooms. He slices the scallions. “How do you plan to do that?”
    I don’t know anymore. My plan was to put myself in Franny’s place. Find out everything I could about M., get him, somehow, to betray himself. Now I don’t know what to do. He is still making the salad, tearing apart lettuce leaves as if this were a friendly dinner date.
    “If you really believe I killed Franny, you should stay away from me.” He takes a sip of wine and regards me with an unworried casualness. “What’s to stop me from killing you?”
    I’ve already thought of this. He’s a clever man, and that’s what is protecting me. The police know of my consuming passion to put him behind bars, and if anything happens to me, now or later, they would zero in on him. It would be too much of a coincidence: two sisters, the same man. I tell him so, and he nods.
    “Yes, if you die I better have a good alibi this time, hadn’t I?”
    When I hear this, my body stiffens. Even though Franny’s body was decomposing when she was found, the Yolo County coroner, using a sodium chloride test on her eyes, analyzing the vitreous humor, the clear gel behind the lens, and also evaluating the degree of insect infestation and rate of bodily decomposition, and processing the scene markers—the dated store receipt on the counter, the mail in her mailbox, the time recorded on the unretrieved message on her answering machine, an open newspaper on the table—using all of these, the coroner was able to establish a time of death, give or take a few