Free Smart House by Kate Wilhelm Page A

her look telling him she had known all along that he knew perfectly well where a good restaurant was. He parked and they all got out in front of Ray’s Clam Chowder and Other Fine Food restaurant. Charlie took a deep breath of the cool, misty sea air. Back home it was closing in on a hundred degrees, he thought with satisfaction.
    The restaurant was small, with only two other parties in booths. They seated themselves in a booth overlooking the parking lot and consulted the menu, and suddenly Beth said, “Oh, yes. That’s it.”
    “First we order,” Charlie said firmly. “You two can have the other fine food. I want chowder.”
    They all did, and as soon as the waiter left them alone, Beth said, “If he can convict me of murder, I can’t inherit. The stock still goes back to the company, but he and his mother will inherit the estate. They will be owed for the shares. He’ll make Maddie accept a deferred payment plan, and he will too, and the company won’t have to raise millions of dollars to pay for Gary’s shares. And the company won’t be under the cloud, either, of having a crazy computer that kills people.” She nodded. “That’s his motive.”
    “Is the company really broke?” Charlie asked.
    “Practically. A cash flow problem, as they say. I guess there’s operating money, money due on back orders, and so on, but nothing more than that. Gary sank every cent he got his hands on into Smart House. If they can clear the Smart House computer, they have a new gold mine, of course. God alone knows how much they’ll make when they start selling the advanced programming, the computer systems, everything to do with Smart House.”
    Charlie was studying her thoughtfully. “It seems to me that if there is a human killer, he cut his own throat by casting suspicion on the computer. Everyone there is involved with the company, even if you do say ‘they’ when you talk about it.”
    She blushed and ducked her head. “I guess I never thought of any of it as having anything real to do with me,” she mumbled. “It was always Gary’s, and theirs, not mine.”
    “How long were you married to him?” Constance asked, and although that was not the question Charlie would have put to her then, he leaned back to see where Constance was heading now.
    “Ten years,” Beth said in a low voice.
    “You were both children,” Constance said, also softly, with great sympathy.
    “Yes. We were nineteen when we met. He was getting his doctorate already, and he was so shy and funny looking and awkward. I was the only girl he ever went out with. And I didn’t have any social life either, until he came along. In my own way I was just as funny looking and awkward and shy. Two misfits. We got along somehow. No one understood what either of us saw in the other, and now I don’t either, but then… All those years, for the first seven years, I did exactly what he wanted. He was hardworking, determined to make his mark in the world of computers, full of ideas, some of them wild, some simply wonderful, and he made his mark. He really did. He wanted to redesign the architecture of the machine so that he could develop half a dozen software packages that would be totally compatible and require a minimum of available memory. He did it, too.”
    The waiter came with their chowder. His frank appraisal of Beth was oddly reassuring. He was young, probably younger than she was, but interested. She was oblivious. Constance watched her eat a few bites, and as soon as she seemed to lose interest in the food, Constance asked, “You could work with him on computers at that depth? I’m awed. All I know about computers is that you plug them in, insert a program, and hope for the best.”
    Beth laughed politely. “Actually I only worked with him for the first few years. I took my degree then, and four years ago I told him I wanted to go back for my master’s in English. For the first year that I was back in school, I kept working with him, but