The Thanksgiving Day Murder by Lee Harris Page A

long have you known her?”
    “I probably met her about four years ago. Maybe four and a half.”
    “Where?”
    “At this advertising agency we worked for. Hopkins and Jewell. She was there when they hired me.”
    “And you just became friends.”
    “We went to dinner sometimes, saw a play, gossiped about office things.”
    “Did you meet any of her other friends?”
    “Not that I remember. I don’t think she’d been in New York very long.”
    “Where had she come from?”
    “Somewhere in the Midwest. She sounded Midwest.”
    I ate a juicy piece of watermelon. “Had she been married before?”
    Susan didn’t answer right away. For the first time she seemed to weigh her words. “Natalie wasn’t the kind of person to let it all hang out. You always got the feeling about her that there was a lot beneath the surface. I respected her for it. She never told me she’d been married before. In fact, she told me she hadn’t been. But I thought there might have been someone once who meant a lot to her, someone she’d had a hard time forgetting. It doesn’t mean she was married.”
    “But you got the feeling she wanted to settle down.”
    “We both did. She wanted to get married, to have a baby, to be a family person, but she wanted to do it with the right man. She wanted to love him.”
    “Did she love Sandy?”
    “Passionately.”
    “I saw your picture in the Gordons’ wedding album. You were Natalie’s maid of honor. Tell me about the wedding.”
    “It was small, tasteful, expensive, traditional.”
    “How did she do with Sandy’s relatives?”
    “There were only a handful of relatives there. I’d guess most of the guests were his old friends and their wives. He joked that one of the men had gone to kindergarten with him.”
    “She get along with them?”
    “Natalie gets along with people. She knows how. Wherever she is now, she’s getting along.”
    We had finished our salads and Susan moved the plates to the kitchen counter. “Feel like a cookie?” she asked.
    “No thanks.”
    She smiled. “Bless you. If you’d had one, I’d have had to join you, and I don’t need the calories. I just keep them in the house because of my husband.”
    “You’re really doing everything right, aren’t you?”
    “You have to. In the dark ages—when I was born—there was so much people didn’t know. They ate the wrong foods and drank the wrong drinks, they were afraid to exercise. This may be my only child, and I’m doing it right because with a baby, you can’t go back and correct your mistakes.”
    I kept my opinion of her rather strong views on child-bearing and generation gaps to myself, but I was pleased she had led into a subject that I wanted to ask about. “Did Natalie confide to you that she was pregnant before she disappeared?”
    It was the second time she paused and considered. “She didn’t know for sure, but she thought she might be. She was waiting to be tested. She was supposed to go the Monday after Thanksgiving.”
    “I see.”
    “Sandy had changed his mind about having a baby. When they were dating, he said he didn’t want another child. He has a couple of older children from his first marriage and he didn’t want to start over at his age.”
    “But she married him anyway, even though she wanted a baby.”
    “I told you, she was crazy about him.”
    “Had she told Sandy her suspicion?”
    “No. She wanted to surprise him when she knew for sure.”
    “It’s nice that he changed his mind,” I said. “It really shows the marriage was working.”
    “It was working. It was a great marriage. And I’ll tell you something. I was jealous to the core when she said she might be pregnant. I can’t tell you how much I wanted a baby. Do you have kids?”
    “I was just married last summer.”
    “Don’t wait too long. The clock is ticking.”
    “What clock?”
    “Your biological clock. Let that body of yours do what it was born to do.”
    I promised her I would. “You’ve been