LITMIR.BIZ

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volume and set it aside on the coffee table. “Voilá!” she exclaimed. Under the book was not, as Dubykky expected, another rock display but a collection of small arrowheads arrayed point outward in three concentric circles.

      “Close,” he said. He had, after all, simply asked her to get some interesting rocks.

      Mildred tossed her head at him. “They’re so perfect!”

      Too perfect, Dubykky suspected but didn’t say so. He asked where Mildred had found them. When she answered that it had been at Boudreau’s Gifts and Desert Antiques, his suspicions were settled. But it didn’t matter. That Mildred had even remembered something he’d asked of her was a positive sign. And the collection of arrowheads, even if counterfeit, would serve the purpose well enough, he supposed. He looked forward to watching Cledge react to it.

      While Gladys sat in the easy chair, picked up the heating pad, stuffed it behind her neck, and resumed her headache, Dubykky and Mildred took down a landscape painting from the wall and replaced it with the rock slices. Both she and her mother gave simultaneous advice to ensure that the frame hung level. Dubykky then cast around for another spot on the wall to hang the arrowheads. He reached for a prewar photograph portrait of Victor Warden, as approximately the same size.

      “No, not Daddy!” cried Mildred, affronted.

      At the same time her mother cried, “No, not Victor!”

      “Oh, Will, how could you?”

      Dubykky, his back to them, didn’t know which had spoken, they sounded so much alike when complaining, but it didn’t matter. He sighed to himself. Victor Warden’s features were ever fresh in his memory. Only nine years had gone by since Victor’s death. His lamentable but necessary death. And here he was, smiling mildly out of the frame just as he had habitually smiled in life. It was such a waste that Victor had to go. Mildred’s face was so much like her father’s that they were nearly interchangeable, except for Victor’s pencil mustache and Mildred’s thick, wavy brown hair, which was like Gladys’s. Victor’s was as matte-black as coal. And whereas Mildred was constantly mimicking the expressions of actresses, to Dubykky’s disgust, Victor’s face had always been mild and pleasant.

      Victor Warden, his friend and victim. How Dubykky regretted having to kill him.

      The doorbell jolted Dubykky from the reverie. There was a hesitation while Mildred looked to Gladys as head of the household to answer the door, but her mother pressed a hand to her temple and grimaced gingerly. So Mildred went instead. Dubykky removed a framed crochet of Home Sweet Home and hung the arrowheads. The ceiling light reflected from them in oily bronze glimmers.

      To Milton Cledge, when he was welcomed by Mildred into the Warden home, it was as if he were entering a television program. First of all, everyone was so darned photogenic. Mildred’s beauty dazzled him.

      She had on an airy blue-and-white dress of thick, wavy horizontal stripes and blue high heels, both of which served to give her figure animation. Gladys, by contrast, was sedentary and dressed in a nondescript rose dress but also possessed elegant, fragile good looks. His senior law partner, Cledge realized, fit the tableau as well, even dressed in his workaday gray three-piece suit and dark gray tie. It was a funny thing to Cledge that out of Dubykky’s presence he could never recall precisely what the man looked like, and even in his presence Dubykky did not draw attention to himself. Yet, here with these two attractive women, his dark hair and darker eyes, his slightly sallow complexion, and his slender, straight posture made him seem mysteriously aristocratic, or perhaps aristocratically mysterious. Cledge had no experience with either dark mysteries or aristocracy.

      Gladys smiled wanly, apologized for not feeling well, and still sitting, offered him a limp hand to shake. Cledge astonished himself then. Maybe it was Mildred’s bedazzling effect. Or maybe, in front of her and Dubykky, he felt on stage in a way, as if whatever he did right then would set the tone for the evening. In any case, he wasn’t the type for witticisms or the offhand pretty remark. Yet out it tumbled.

      He said to Gladys, smiling, “I’m feeling overcome, too, just being among such lovely people in such a lovely setting.”

      Everyone beamed back at him, Gladys proudly, Mildred interestedly, and Dubykky with amusement. To underscore his appreciation, particularly of the room’s collection of assorted Queen Anne-style furnishings, Cledge turned in a slow circle. His eyes passed over the large frame of rock slices and bounced back. He stepped closer to study them.

      “Pretty, aren’t they,” said Mildred. Her regard, however, went to Dubykky. Her expression told him she was about to be jealous of Cledge’s interest in the pretty rocks instead of her arrowheads, and this fretted him a little. Mildred could be fractious if she felt upstaged.

      “Magnificent,” Cledge agreed, to which Mildred shrugged. He studied the collection minutely.

      It gave Mildred the opportunity to glance covertly at the Britannica article. She said, a little artificially, “Don’t you just love malachite? Who’d believe that two copper atoms, three carbon dioxide molecules, and a hydroxide could create such brilliant hues of green? And that jasper! It’s like a picture of the earth’s rock strata itself!”

      Cledge gave her a strange glance, while Dubykky walked to his side.

      “Mildred can’t help herself,” he explained. “She’s a librarian through and through.”

      Mildred’s face was beginning to darken at that when Cledge, still gazing at the rocks, exclaimed, “And one with exceptional taste. What an amazing lapis lazuli!”

      Behind Cledge’s back Mildred stuck out her tongue at Dubykky, then said, “Do you like arrowheads? We have a collection of those, too.”

      Cledge betrayed no especial interest in arrowheads and only reluctantly let Mildred lead him away from the rocks. But when he saw them up close, he sucked in his breath and breathed out a slow “ah.” He said, “They’re so perfect.”

      It sounded forced to Dubykky, but not to Mildred. And it struck home. She was capable of many gradations of smile—part of her armamentarium of calculated expressions—but only one that wasn’t calculated. It was her innocent, unselfconscious smile of pleasure, and on the rare occasions it broke loose (unlike the others, it was never planned), it infused all who saw it with a pleasure as genuine and intense as hers. It burst out now, brilliantly. Cledge, turning toward her, caught the full force of it. He was dumbstruck.

      Well, one down, thought Dubykky, watching Cledge. Now for Mildred.

      Gladys, her headache again forgotten, broke the brief silence. “Milly,” she said. “Check on the meatloaf, won’t you. I’ll get the salad together. And Will, shame on you. Offer Mr. Cledge a drink. What do you like, Mr. Cledge?”

      “Above all, I’d like you to call me Milt, and I’d welcome a scotch and water,” he answered a little breathlessly.

      Gladys, pleased, followed her daughter through the narrow passageway into the kitchen-dining room. Cledge lowered himself into an easy chair a bit unsteadily. Dubykky reached behind and flipped closed the Britannica, then went to the liquor cabinet and poured out a stiff measure of Cutty Sark and a drop of water. He handed the glass to Cledge, who took a sip at once. When he looked back up at Dubykky, his eyes were wide and watery.

      “Good,” he croaked.

      Gladys was only a passable cook. Mildred was talented. Completely uninterested in food for its own sake, Dubykky never inquired about her methods. He knew from experience that the most talented cooks were somehow touched by evil, as Mildred was. Yet he recognized full well how proud she was of her skill. For this reason, he expressly asked her to make meatloaf. Hers was universally admired. Its effect on Cledge nearly equaled the effect of her smile. What’s more, Dubykky saw Mildred seeing its effect on Cledge. But it got better.

      “Very tasty, dear,” Gladys said, as a matter of course. Like Dubykky, she was apathetic about food so long as it didn’t make her ill.

      “Tasty?” Cledge replied in a tone of astonishment. “Why, this

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