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

heart attack.”
    From the jewelry she had brought with her from Arizona, Genia picked out her grandmother Andrews’ pearl and diamond brooch. Even it reminded her of Stanley because it was big and old-fashioned, emblematic of a wealthy, privileged era: a three-inch starburst of diamonds emerging from a cluster of pearls at the center. Genia loved it, not because it was beautiful—it wasn’t, particularly—or valuable, but because her grandfather had given it to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother, who had passed it on to her. Everytime she pinned it onto her own clothing, she felt as if she were reattaching herself to her family. She was thinking of having the brooch dismantled and its stones and pearls mounted in smaller pieces, so that each of her children could have part of it. Now she pinned it to her silk blouse, figuring the blouse was already ruined by the blood.
    “There,” she said, patting it and checking it in a mirror.
    She hurried around the upper floor, closing windows.
    Then she went back downstairs to launch a more serious search for the old man. Lew will kill me , she thought, if I’ve let anything happen to you, Stanley .
    Leaving her guests to fend for themselves, Genia returned to the kitchen and found nearly the whole Eden family there. Janie was filling an ice bucket; her brother had his nose in a fistful of fresh mint, which Genia assumed he had picked up at Stanley’s greenhouse, and their mother was washing blueberries at the sink.
    Genia immediately asked her grandniece, “Did you find him?”
    “No!” It sounded blunt, almost surly.
    All three of them stopped what they were doing and stared at the girl, and even Jason looked a little shocked. He was six feet tall, two inches more than Janie, and slim, like her. Both twins had expressive faces; at the moment, hers looked angry, his looked surprised. He was “dressed up” for the occasion in clean blue jeans, with a belt, a white summer shirt, and even a tie. There was dirt on the knees of his denims, suggesting he had knelt to pick the mint.
    Genia was momentarily too surprised to speak.
    When Janie looked up and caught them staring at her, she blurted out, “I rang the bell for five minutes, at least, and nobody answered, and I hope he doesn’t come at all!”
    “Mr. Parker?” Jason asked her, sounding puzzled.
    “Yes!”
    “Janie!” her mother remonstrated.
    “But why, honey?” Genia asked the girl.
    “Because he’s awful, and I hate him.”
    Suddenly her smart, sophisticated, seventeen-year-old niece looked and sounded like a hurt and angry young girl, and Genia couldn’t for the life of her imagine why.
    “Janie, dear, was Mr. Parker rude to you?”
    “I told you, I didn’t find him, and I don’t want to talk about it.” Janie cast an unreadable look at her brother, who looked at her as if she’d suddenly gone crazy. With uncharacteristic spitefulness, his sister said in a taunting voice, “Do I, Jason?”
    “How do I know? What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
    “Young lady—” their mother started to say in a lecturing tone. But Genia waved a warning hand at her and interrupted.
    “Whatever it is, Janie, I’m sorry you feel this way, but we’ve got a dinner party to put on now. Jason, will you please go down the path and look again for—”
    “Yeah,” the boy agreed, and in a moment he was gone.
    Behind her daughter’s back Donna made an apologetic face.
    The way her dinner party was going, Genia wasn’t entirely surprised when thunder rumbled so close to the house that it shook the kitchen windowpanes. Frighteningly soon after that lightning hit somewhere close enough to raise the hair on her arms and make Janie exclaim out loud in startled fear. The rain began to pour in buckets—or lobster pots, as one might say around here—and all she could think of was Stanley’s out in this . She wanted to hand out yellow slickers to all of her guests and make them go search for him, but she