Free Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes by Marcia Muller Page B

clothing—were they actually ink?”
    â€œI was a calligrapher, and working on a project involving red ink.”
    â€œYou were doing calligraphy even though you were too ill to attend a banquet for the secretary of state?”
    â€œI felt better by then.”
    â€œWhere were you working on this project?”
    â€œWhere . . .?”
    â€œJudy testified that you returned to the house form somewhere with stains in your dress.”
    â€œJudy was mistaken. A child awakened by a noise is easily confused.”
    â€œWhat sort of noise?”
    â€œWhy, almost any kind.”
    â€œNo—I mean, Judy, specifically, that night.”
    â€œI . . . don’t know.”
    â€œBut she’d been awakened—”
    â€œAnd saw me downstairs with stains on my dress and assumed I’d been outside. I usually did my calligraphy work on the big table in the library.”
    â€œI see. And so far as you know, there was no one on the estate that night but you and Judy.”
    â€œ. . . That’s right.”
    I didn’t like what her reaction to the series of questions had told me. Most people can’t entirely mask a lie. They betray themselves with physical gestures, changes in posture and voice level, innumerable small signs. In Lis’s case it was a faint tic at the right corner of her mouth. No matter how candidly she met my eyes, she couldn’t control that, and the questions about Judy seeing the stains on her dress had especially aggravated it.
    Lis was hiding something, but what? What could have been—still was —so important that she would have died in the gas chamber in order to keep it secret?
    As I studied her, she lowered her eyes, pleating the fabric of her cape between her fingers.
    After a moment I asked. “Can you think of anyone else I should talk with?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWas there a friend you confided in?”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œYour husband’s affair with Cordy McKittridge. Your feeling toward her.”
    She rose suddenly and moved toward the cliff’s edge. Uneasy again, I followed. She stopped a safe distance, however, facing southwest toward the Golden Gate. Beyond the rust-red towers of the bridge a bank of fog hovered, ready to reclaim the city once darkness fell.
    Lis said, “From here I can see almost every place except where it happened.”
    â€œMaybe that’s just as well.”
    â€œI don’t think so. I have to face the nightmare if I’m going to go through with the mock trial.”
    â€œBut not by looking at Seacliff and brooding. You wouldn’t recognize much, anyway; it’s all changed.”
    â€œYou’re probably right.”
    â€œLis, I asked you a question. Did you tell anyone about your feelings toward Cordy?”
    She continued to stare at the cityscape. After a moment she said, “I spoke of Cordy McKittridge to two people, and two people only—my husband and my daughter.”
    â€œAnd what did you say?”
    She turned candid aquamarine eyes on me. This time there was no evidence of the facial tic. “I told them that I wished Cordy were dead. I sad I would gladly cut her heart out.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    â€œWhat kind of woman would say a thing like that to her ten-year-old daughter?” I asked Jack.
    He shrugged, clearly troubled.
    We were seated on the sofa in his office at a little after nine on Monday morning. The worktable was still strewn with papers, but they looked as if they hadn’t been touched since yesterday. I was on my third cup of coffee; he’d downed at least that many and still seemed half asleep.
    â€œDammit!” I pounded the arm of the sofa with my fist and only succeeded in hurting myself. “She didn’t even act as if she thought she’d done anything wrong.”
    â€œDon’t get all riled up,” he told me absently.
    â€œHow do you expect me not to? I should have trusted my initial