Auld Lang Syne by Judith Ivie Page B

Ari and I don’t even know them very well, but we figured we’d better show up. The salon owner made it pretty clear it was a command performance.” I remembered that she and Ariel both worked at Shear Heaven, the exclusive West Hartford salon and day spa.
    Armando cleared his throat. “You say your friend was with you when you found the note. What is her opinion about all of this?”
    Joanie gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Opinion? If you think I’m an airhead—and I know you do because you always did, Kate, admit it—you’re not totally up to speed on Ari. Compared to her, I’m Hillary Clinton. She’s even more scared than I am, which is why I’m here alone.”
    It was my turn to draw a blank. “I’m not following you.”
    Joanie grabbed the little purse and shook it in my face. “Ari thinks the message might be for her. She thinks she’snext on the hit list.”
    My head was beginning to ache. “In that case why would someone leave a threatening note, if that’s even what this is, in your purse instead of hers?” I asked, still not comprehending. I was really going to have to make an effort to stop conversing with inebriates.
    Joanie dropped the purse back in her lap and clapped both hands to her head. “Oh my god, I forgot to tell you. See, that’s the whole thing, why Ari was the one who found the note. She thought this was her purse, not mine. She has one exactly like it. We were together when we bought them at a big sale at the mall last year. So we were in the loo tonight, and both bags were on the counter, and she grabbed this one instead of hers.”
    “And the note fell out?”
    “Well, yes. That is, Ari picked it up off the floor.”
    “You saw her do that?” Armando piped up, obviously going down the same path I was. He’d met Ariel, after all, and knew something of her activities back in the day.
    Joanie squeezed her eyes shut in an effort to remember. “Not exactly. I was searching through her bag for my comb, thinking it was mine. She bent over to pick something up. When it finally dawned on me that we’d switched bags by mistake and turned around to tell her, she handed me the note.” She opened her eyes and looked from one to the other of us. “Why do you want to know?”
    This was going to be a little tricky. “I was remembering how the three of you used to enjoy playing tricks on people in high school.” Tricks? Make that vicious, potentially life altering pranks, I thought. “It occurred to me that Ariel might have, well …”
    “ … put the message into your purse herself,” Armando helped me out.
    “As a little joke, of course,” I hastened to add. The sort of mean-spirited, tasteless humor on which you all used to thrive, the inner voice editorialized. A chuckle stuck in my throat.
    Joanie’s eyes widened. “Ari? Why would she do an awful thing like that to me? She knows how freaked out I’ve been over what happened to Mindy.”
    Why did any of you do the hateful things you did so gleefully and frequently to your Brewster classmates and who knows who else over the years? I shook my head in an effort to get Jaded Kate to quit the comments.
    “To be funny, I guess.” I shrugged. “Anyway, we don’t know that’s what happened here. I’m just running through the possibilities. When was the last time you remember for certain that the note was not in your purse?”
    “I opened it tonight before I left my apartment, but it was just a crack to shove in my license and the twenty, so that doesn’t count. I keep my car keys in the pocket of my cape, so I never opened the purse again until we were in the restroom, and then it was Ari who opened it, not me. I guess that would make it Saturday night when I went to the ladies’ room a few minutes after we got to the reunion. I had it open then, and there was no note.”
    “That was around ten o’clock. Was Ari with you at that time?”
    Joanie shook her red head slowly. “No, I went in by myself. When I came