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and orange hair spoke out ahead of me. “Her name’s Giselle Haskell and she’s an old family connection of those three women you’re so hell-bent on protecting. Her grandmother was their very dear friend and they have asked her to come for a visit.”
    Silence emanated from the cottagers. Trees stopped rustling, and the rain slowed to the occasional drip ... drop, before stopping entirely. The question as to the nature of Miss Chambers’s role in the scheme of things hung on my lips, but I couldn’t get the words out. But while I wilted, Susan rallied.
    “It’s easy to see how you figured out who she was. You with your psychic powers!” The words were punctuated by a sniff. A dainty sound so unsuited to her that I wondered for a wildly ridiculous moment if it might have been dubbed. Were we all in fact actors trapped in some horribly intellectual foreign film that would keep replaying itself until someone figured out what it was about?
    “I didn’t have to resort to mind reading,” the woman with the black and orange hair replied to Susan. “Rosemary Maywood not only told me she was expecting Mrs. Haskell in the early afternoon, she showed me a photograph. That made recognizing her easy. Especially”—the green eyes sparkled—“as Miss Maywood also painted me a very clear picture of Amelia Chambers, who is due at their house at about four o’clock.”
    “Miss Sneaky Pants,” I supplied.
    “That was Miss Maywood’s name for her. Apparently she has brown hair, might be described as good-looking by some, but is painfully thin. Barely a size six at best.”
    “Can’t be you, then,” Irene mumbled, looking at me out the corner of one eye.
    “Never could abide a skinny minny, that’s what I used to tell the wife when she’d talk about going on one of those diets.” Frank also avoided looking directly at me. Instead he poked at a pothole in the road with his stick. “Haven’t been the same since my Jessie passed on last Christmastime. Can’t live with a woman close on fifty years and not feel it. Doctor said I’d like as not crack up. Isn’t that right, Tom?”
    “Said it in my hearing, he did,” came the quick response of a man who knew how to grab an excuse and run with it. “And me and Susan and Irene are worn down to the emotional nub, keeping on the lookout to make sure you don’t do something stupid, Frank, like sticking your head in the gas oven on a Sunday and ruining a perfectly good rump roast and Yorkshire. Very nice it is of Mrs. Pettinger to see to your weekend meals and it wouldn’t do to go upsetting her, now would it?” Tom actually inched his head around to look me in the eye. “Her and the other two—Miss Maywood and Miss Dobson—have enough to contend with without any further distractions.”
    “What Frank and Tom are trying to get across, Mrs. Haskell,” Susan chimed in with the force of a grandfather clock, “is that we’ve all been horribly distracted of late, what with one thing and that Chambers woman. We’re sorry for the gaff—mistaking you for her and being so narky about it, but I’m sure when you sit down and talk with them at the Old Rectory you’ll understand why feelings are running high.”
    “Edna Wilks is worried about those three ladies. Not a bad old stick, she isn’t,” proffered Tom. “Got a bugger of a husband, which means he’ll live to be ninety. That sort always does unless someone pushes them off the twig.”
    “He means Edna that works at the Old Rectory.” Susan showed me a conciliatory row of National Health teeth. “There four days a week, she is. It’s her Ted that does the heavy digging in the garden and cleans out the gutters when needed—that sort of thing. Thora Dobson does most of the outdoor work herself. Put most men to shame, she would.”
    “Miss Chambers?” I prompted.
    “Works for an evil property giant, Mrs. Haskell. One of the richest men in Britain, he is. Though why he had to fix his nasty sights on Knells