I bit my lip as I thought of my modern toaster oven.
“We used to argue about it all the time. When we were speaking, that is.”
“You were friends?”
“Oh, well, we were best friends once. In fact, I was a nurse at the same hospital where Birch did his residency. I introduced them.”
“Really?” Curiouser and curiouser.
“But Harriet changed. It’s sad. She became so competitive, she antagonized a lot of people.” Ardine played with her knotted dog leash. “In fact, I’m sure Harriet’s the one who sabotaged my entry at a show once by putting cockroaches inside. They scurried out when the judges opened the front panel and my chances of winning were doomed.”
“Wow. I can’t believe she’d do something like that.”
She looked directly at me for the first time. “You have no idea what those competitions are like.”
“And would Harriet be the type to confront a killer if she found something awry?”
Ardine frowned. “Not sure what you mean, but yes, Harriet was very confrontational.”
A few raindrops spattered on the bench, and she scrunched up her nose as she looked skyward. “We’d better get going.”
The wine club was busy packing up their coolers, and I smiled at the golden retriever owner who smiled back. Maybe they weren’t all bad.
As Ardine struggled to put the leash on her annoying terrier while he snapped at her, Jasper suddenly wrestled him to the ground. He looked at me, his huge paw still pressing down on the little dog’s shoulder, as if to say, Sorry, Mom, but I couldn’t take it anymore.
Silently I cheered, but said, “Stop it, Jasper!”
“It’s okay, Daisy, this dog needs someone to straighten him out.” Ardine grinned as she clipped the leash.
She put up her umbrella. One of the spokes was broken. “Thanks for being so nice to me.”
I watched as she hurried to her car, the umbrella flying up in the rain.
Chapter Nine
The next morning, Mother Nature provided a taste of impending winter. It was lashing with rain so hard that the storm sewers couldn’t keep up, and there was standing water on the street corners. Jasper loved it—the wetter and muddier the better—but I cursed as I struggled to manage the umbrella and the leash. When we got home, it took longer to dry him off with a slew of old towels than it had taken for the walk.
As it was Friday, Laura was managing the store, so I stopped at Cyril’s to check on the progress of Claire’s present. He was working on the roof, painstakingly attaching the shingles, one at a time. I handed him a cup of coffee from the diner and hid a grin when I spotted a library book about building dollhouses.
“Aye up, you can snicker, but look at this. Queen Mary’s dollhouse. It were a right grand place.” He opened a page and pointed at some photos. “Four years to plan and build. Elevators from basement to top floor. Door handles that close and clocks that tick. It even had water pumped up from the basement.”
I marveled over the description of water running into the tub and the marble-topped sinks in the king’s bathroom. The details were incredible: the wine cellar with its honeycomb walls that held a hundred dozen bottles of wine, a strong room for the crown jewels, the tiny piano equipped with real strings, hammers, and ivory and ebony keys. In the library, each minuscule book bound in leather and embossed with gold leaf was actually readable.
No expense had been spared. The kitchen was constructed with thousands of tiny sections of oak, rooms were paneled in rosewood, and there was silver and porcelain throughout.