Free A Sensitive Kind of Murder (A Kate Jasper Mystery) by Jaqueline Girdner Page B

eyes. We wouldn’t answer either my fancy new phone or the doorbell for the rest of the day. Wayne said he’d leave La Fête à L’Oie to his manager for the evening; we would work in our home offices.
    After a quick hug, Wayne headed back to his little room at the end of the hall, and I heard the clacking of calculator keys. Then I returned to my own office next to the entry way and closed the front curtains. It’s lucky no real focus is necessary for paperwork; my brain was throbbing, but my hands shuffled papers, entered numbers in columns, and wrote checks. And all bells rung unanswered.
    Wayne and I had a late dinner, followed by an early bedtime. And for once, when our lips touched, no bells rang but the ones in our heads.
    *
    When I woke up on Thursday morning, I put out my hand to feel for Wayne, but he wasn’t next to me. I rolled off of our mattress bed, put on my robe, and exited the bedroom, looking above me to make sure that C. C. wasn’t in position to leap on my shoulders. She wasn’t. She was behind me, singing opera.
    I led the way down the hallway and found Wayne in my office on the phone.
    He turned. I didn’t think it was to see me in my ratty old robe; C. C.’s opera probably had more to do with it. He smiled, briefly.
    Then he put his hand over the telephone receiver.
    “They want another group get-together,” he whispered.
    “All of us?” I whispered back.
    “Everyone who was at the potluck.”
    I nodded, wondering who he was talking to, but he’d turned away again.
    “We’ll be there,” I heard him say into the receiver.
    I trundled on into the kitchen to the tones of a feline aria, which stopped abruptly when I opened a can of Fancy Feast.
    I was eating oatmeal and blueberries with maple syrup when Wayne joined me at the kitchen table.
    “Who was on the phone?” I demanded before his bottom even touched his chair.
    “Garrett,” he told me brusquely. “He’s arranging it. At Ted’s house.”
    “A meeting?”
    Wayne nodded.
    “When?”
    “Today.”
    We could have been on Dragnet, except for our p.j.s and robes.
    “How are you doing, sweetie?” I asked gently, trying to change the tone of the interaction.
    “Fine,” Wayne muttered, lowering his eyes.
    “Right,” I said, keeping the sigh out of my voice. Fine, perfectly fine. “Have you eaten?”
    “Not hungry.”
    “Oh, Wayne,” I murmured. Then an evil thought gripped me. “I’ll make you breakfast,” I offered.
    Wayne’s eyes came back up, and they were panicked. Wayne did not eat my cooking, but he was too polite to ever mention it. He just kept beating me to the culinary punch.
    “I, I…” he sputtered.
    “How about oatmeal?” I suggested.
    His face blanched, looking a bit like the oatmeal I’d suggested.
    “Okay,” he gave in. “Banana pancakes?”
    “Yum,” I said. Wayne had a dynamite recipe for dairyless banana pancakes. I suspected that carob and a few other spices were involved. But I knew that the end result was worth a second breakfast.
    So, Wayne got out his mixing bowl and cooked. Minutes later, he ate a big stack of pancakes and I scarfed down a smaller one. And, as usual, cooking did the trick. Wayne was ready for a shower when we finished eating, and he was talking again.
    “So Garrett thinks that whoever did it will confess,” Wayne told me as he scrubbed my back in the apricot soap-scented steam of the shower.
    “Oh, please,” I objected. “And this man is a psychiatrist?”
    “He thinks loyalty to the group will force a confession.”
    “So he thinks it was a group member, and not a significant other?” I turned and soaped Wayne’s chest.
    “Yeah, mmmm,” Wayne murmured.
    “Why?” I asked.
    Wayne stopped mmmming.
    “Familiarity breeds contempt, maybe?” he guessed.
    “Did you guys feel contempt for Steve Summers?” I asked, not soaping him anymore.
    Now Wayne was squirming instead of mmmming.
    “Not contempt, never,” he muttered.
    “But?” I could hear an