Free Death of a Political Plant by Ann Ripley

business-related; it will do me a lot of good.”
    “It will?” Nora actually chuckled, in total disbelief. “I see you racing back and forth to work, then running out again to shop, coming back loaded down with groceries in your arms. Giving parents yard tours and taking them on excursions to the Capitol. Taking toddlers for walks in the neighborhood…” She pointed to Louise’s lean arms, revealed by her brief T-shirt. “Look at you: You’re even losing weight. Are you really Superwoman?”
    Louise sank down on the grassy spot next to Nora. As usual, her perceptive poet neighbor had gotten right to the nub of things. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience with house-guests, Nora. It’s just something you have to put up with if you’re a foreign service officer’s wife.”
    “Like bearing the stigmata, perhaps?” Again, those smile lines near Nora’s mouth had deepened.
    “Kind of,” Louise agreed good-heartedly. “Now, London, that was positively the worst. Let me tell you about London.” Then she reeled off what she could remember of those two hectic years living on North Row in Mayfair in an apartment larger than the Eldridges required. The youthful friends of friends of theirs, dirty, tired, and hungry, with backpacks strapped on their bodies, ringing the doorbell at midnight after having made their way from the continent orScotland. American politicians. Friends and former friends and relatives who hadn’t been heard from in years.
    “You mean you let them all in?” Nora’s dark eyebrows went up in astonishment. “Didn’t they even phone to warn you they were coming? Why didn’t you just tell them to go elsewhere?”
    Louise airily waved a hand. “Oh, you don’t do that in the foreign service. In the first place, you’re getting free lodging. Anyway, that was our arrangement. Since the American taxpayer is footing your housing costs, you can’t turn away any American from the door. Of course, we had foreigners, too.”
    “I can believe anything.”
    Louise remembered well some of the European figures, contacts of Bill in his undercover activities, some undoubtedly ex-criminals and enemies of one state or another, dropping in and holing up for a few days in the back bedroom. Like jay was doing right now. “These were old friends or associates of Bill’s, some of them people making a change to London, who didn’t want to move into one of those little efficiency apartments they give to singles.”
    Nora was smiling now. “And I suppose you cooked for them all. Where did you shop, the food halls of Harrods?”
    “That was hard,” Louise admitted, her arms aching even as she remembered the bulging plastic carryalls she would manage in either hand after visiting Selfridge’s or Marks & Spencer. “No American woman has the right arm and hand muscles to survive it,” she added wryly. “Actually, only British women, and they train for years to do it. I finally broke down and hailed taxis.”
    “It must have been nice to live in London.”
    “Quite wonderful, really, but dangerous, because of the IRA bombs.” She decided not to tell Nora that Bill had nearlybeen killed by a bomb planted under a car on his route to work. It was too unpleasant and personal a memory. “We had an enforced busy social life, of course, but the girls flourished. They went to British schools. I took a history class, and volunteered with the other wives to help needy children.”
    “And entertained houseguests.”
    “Yes.” They lapsed into silence.
    Finally, Nora said, “You’ve come so far with your career. You could take another big step: Complete your emancipation from your old life by learning how to say ‘no’ to prospective houseguests.”
    Louise laughed. “I don’t know, Nora. That old life isn’t even over, you know. But as for turning away unwanted visitors, I agree. I have to be more firm.”
    “I’ll keep an eye out for your Jay McCormick, but of course I can’t see much because of the