Free Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard Page B

maybe I'm a little lonelier for human company than I realized, especially since I still haven't been able to make the one call I want to make to the one person I want to see.
    Jenny looks up at her mom as if expecting no for an answer.
    “Can I have some lemonade, Mom, please?”
    “I suppose so,” Anne says, and then to me, “Iced tea for me?”
    “I'll be right back with it.” Then on an impulse, I invite Anne to come with me. Once we're in the kitchen, out of Jenny's hearing, I ask, “How's she doing, Anne?”
    “Jenny's okay, I guess, except she can't play with Nikki anymore.”
    “What? But they're best friends. What happened?”
    “It's because of what happened. Nikki's parents won't allow Jenny into their house anymore.”

    “Oh, I'm sorry. The girls must hate that.”
    “Jenny's miserable. I could just kill the Modestos. It's so unfair. Jenny gets blamed for everything.”
    I refrain from commenting that there is probably a good reason for that, given the nature of her willful, adventurous daughter. Nor do I point out that she herself appears to be blaming Jenny for something, too. I just cluck sympathetically.
    “And—” Anne Carmichael starts to say something else but then stops, frowning.
    “And?” I prod.
    She shakes her head. “I want Jenny to tell.”
    Patience, I advise myself. Now that she's safe inside my house, Anne seems to be growing a little calmer, and I'm all for that.
    “I wish they'd convicted that woman, too,” Anne suddenly blurts out, and I turn to stare at her. She looks upset and angry. “Jenny has nightmares about her, and I worry about it all the time. What if that woman decides it's all Jenny and Nikki's fault? She's free now; she could do anything and nobody could stop her. What if she blames them? What if she thinks if the girls hadn't found the body, then nobody would have been arrested, and her lover wouldn't be in prison. What if she wants some revenge on the girls?”
    She's talking about Artemis McGregor, of course, the “other woman,” who was tried with Bob Wing but acquitted by the same jury that convicted him. I wish I could allay Anne's fears by telling her that her worst nightmare is completely unfounded; unfortunately, I have known killers who did just the kind of thing she's scared about. They waited, they plotted, they took their revenge. Sometimes they got caught at it, sometimes there were only suspicions. Either way, the people they resented were just as dead. I can't bear to think of Nikki and Jenny and their families living under that kind of dread for years to come.
    “I don't think that will happen, Anne,” I say, cautiously.

    She frowns. “You don't know the rest of it yet.”
    “What?”
    “Let Jenny show you.”
    As Anne and I return to the living room with a tray of drinks, I wonder if my visitors realize that everything they are looking at is either man-made or put there by humans. That doesn't make it ugly; it is, in fact, beautiful. But while it looks like “nature,” in fact every inch of it was plotted by architects and city planners, by botanists and that well-known landscape artist, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I place a cool glass in Jenny's free hand, then pass the second glass to her mother. “You've heard of the Pleistocene, Jenny?”
    She looks up at me and nods.
    “During the Pleistocene era,” I tell her, “Florida was mostly veldt, like they have in Africa. There were camels out there, and bison and tortoises as big as trucks, and llamas, and the ancestors of elephants. Isn't that amazing?”
    “Elephants?” her mother asks.
    “Mastodons,” I tell her, lingering over the syllables with pleasure. Imagine that, mastodons in Florida. The proof, claim some naturalists, is visible whenever a new road goes through and ancient ivory is unearthed. I wonder if true crime writers will be dinosaurs one day, when satellites and video cameras record every inch of earth, and science can solve all crimes, so that nobody