The Secret Ingredient Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery by Virginia Nancy; Rich Pickard Page A

roses?
    Oh, dear , she thought. I’ve greeted my guests looking like I’ve been up to my shoulders in gardening!
    She brushed the spot with the flat of her hand and winced when a slender pine needle, hidden in the smudge of dirt, pricked her palm.
    “How in heaven’s name did that get there?” she asked aloud.
    She hadn’t been out of the house since changing into her dinner clothes. This blouse had come right from the dry cleaner’s bag. She brushed more vigorously, and discovered too late that the prick was bleeding, and now she had a spot of blood on her blouse! Darn it, now she would have to change clothes or pin on a brooch to cover it.
    Before going upstairs to do that, Genia glanced into the family room to see how her guests were managing on their own. Janie wasn’t there yet to start the hors d’oeuvres going around, but all appeared normal. David Graham was pouring drinks at the bar, with Celeste Hutchinson at his elbow, putting napkins under wet glasses.
    To Genia’s eyes it all presented a pretty sight of people and setting. She loved the decorating taste of the owners of this house, especially the living/dining room with its oversized white couches and chairs, its floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace, and windows everywhere, framing the sea beyond. The owners had positioned an oval dining table right in front of the fireplace, near the wide French doors. Someone had ingeniously transformed the antique wooden table at one end of the room by painting it white and stenciling starfish around its edge. Matching small starfish appliqués added a fanciful touch to cream-colored slipcovers on tall dining chairs. Altogether, it was an informal setting, but elegant just the same.
    Jason had earlier filled the fireplace with pine logs—so different in fragrance from her Arizona mesquite—in case the evening turned cool, as it was now doing. Genia saw that Janie had done a lovely job of setting the table, and she herself had added simple garden flowers in pottery bowls. They matched the delicate yellow color of the table linens she had found in a chest of drawers. As the Realtor, Celeste had assured her that the owners meant her to make herself literally at home, and anything they didn’t want her to use, they had locked up.
    Conversation seemed to be humming along nicely.
    “Lindsay! Beautiful suit. Is that a Chanel?”
    “Hey, Larry, I’ve been thinking that if you can get the art festival going, it might attract enough regional attention to get you elected to the state house. Your problem is, you’ve always been too local. Nobody outside of Devon knows you as well as we do. But a big project like that, bringing more jobs than Devon can handle on our own, that could get you grateful voters from far and wide. You ever think of that?”
    “Stanley says—”
    “Oh, don’t mention that man’s name to me!”
    “Not mention his name? He’s going to be here, you know.”
    “That doesn’t mean I have to speak to him.”
    “Did you bring a recipe with a secret ingredient?”
    “We don’t need more rain, Harrison. Can you please stop it?”
    These people were old friends and acquaintances, most of them, and they didn’t need Genia to break any ice for them. As she walked upstairs to the bedroom she had selected for her own use, she thought, It’s strange, about that pine needle. I wonder where it came from?
    When she glanced out her bedroom windows at Block Island Sound, she saw how fast the clouds were moving now. Rain was beginning to thump against the screens. Suddenly, there was no hiding from herself anymore how concerned she felt. Maybe nobody else was worried about Stanley Parker, but she was. He should have arrived long before this. Nobody had seen him. He didn’t answer the phone at his house. He was seventy-nine years old and probably not in the best of health, and he rode a motorbike with his mind on other things.
    “He could have fallen,” she fretted out loud, “or had an accident, even a