Free The Bilbao Looking Glass by Charlotte MacLeod

vicious tongue in the yacht club crowd, which was saying a good deal. She’d always seemed more or less the same, got up in some outfit she’d picked up at the shops around Bearskin Neck, always trying out some exotic recipe and trying to make you eat more of it than you wanted, always deftly slitting somebody’s throat with her tongue the way she’d done Max’s yesterday.
    Could Alice B. have been a happy person? Sarah supposed she must have been reasonably content with the life she’d led. Otherwise, why hadn’t she done something else? If she hadn’t attached herself to Miffy, no doubt she’d have found another patroness. Some people were born hangers-on. Perhaps that was why Alice B. had to dress up in stagey costumes and search out new dishes to surprise Miffy’s guests with and new scandals to titillate them with. Ordinary clothes, ordinary food, and ordinary human courtesy couldn’t have disguised the fact that Alice had no genuine life of her own.
    Cutting down other people would have been her revenge against them for being real enough to make mistakes and get into situations. Maybe Alice B. had always yearned to become the center of some great drama herself, and never dared to venture into one. One mustn’t wish for things, or one would be sure to get them.
    Well, this wasn’t getting the floor mopped. Even Pete had gone to work finally. She could see him through the window, using the old scythe Alexander had always kept so well sharpened with a whetstone. Pete must be angry about having to mow by hand, from the look on his face. Too bad for him. It was his own fault he’d let the grass grow so high it would have kept binding in the mower. From now on, Sarah decided, she’d funnel all her instructions through old Jed. The less she had to do with Pete Lomax, the better she’d be able to endure having him around.
    She still had the apartment over the carriage house to tidy. If Max Bittersohn knew how to make a bed, he’d shown no sign of it since he’d been boarding with her.
    They still hadn’t got things settled about Barbara, either. Though what was there to settle, actually? Maybe she’d ask him to take her grocery shopping instead. They could swing by Miffy’s and leave another bagful of clothes for Aunt Appie in the hope that she’d take the hint and stay longer. Now, if Cousin Lionel could only be palmed off on Miffy, too.
    No hope of that. In the first place, Miffy hated children. In the second, she had no land fit for camping; only a quarter acre or so of perfect lawn with a rigidly pruned privet hedge around it and some ornamental shrubs clipped into cones and spheres. Miffy had to show even Mother Nature who was boss.
    If it had been Miffy instead of Alice B. who’d got brained with the axe, the killing might have made more sense. Alice B. was vicious and sly, but not violent. Miffy was openly brutal. Anybody who objected to getting jumped on became her sworn enemy.
    By now, Miffy had running feuds on with any number of people, many of them year-rounders because she always stayed on so long after the yacht club closed down for the winter and her usual drinking buddies dispersed. Was it in fact possible that Alice B. had been killed in mistake for Miffy? Or was Alice B. so closely identified with her patroness that the killer hadn’t cared which one he got? That of course was assuming there’d been anything personal in the killing, which Sarah had no right as yet to assume.
    As to that list of stolen items, Sarah didn’t know what to make of it. She herself didn’t claim any great expertise but she was a trained artist, she’d spent a lot of time at museums and picked up a good deal lately from Max. Moreover, she’d inherited some good things herself and read up on them because she’d had to peddle a few to antique dealers during the early days of her sudden penury.
    To her, the list seemed almost too good to be true. Surely Miffy must have owned those particular items or she