A Bone to Pick Page 0,3

them back up with my forefinger.

"Maybe you have a minute now to come by my office and talk about it?" I glanced automatically at my watch. "Yes, I have time," I said judiciously after a moment's pause. This was pure bluff, so Mr. Sewell wouldn't think I was a woman with nothing to do.

Actually, I very nearly was. A cutback in funding meant that, for the library to stay open the same number of hours, some staff had to go part-time. I hoped it was because I was the most recently hired that the first one to feel the ax was me. I was only working eighteen to twenty hours a week now. If I hadn't been living rent free and receiving a small salary as resident manager of one of Mother's apartment buildings (actually a row of four town houses), my situation would have been bleak in the extreme.

Mr. Sewell gave me such elaborate directions to his office that I couldn't have gotten lost if I'd tried, and he furthermore insisted I follow him there. The whole way he gave turn signals so far in advance that I almost made the wrong left once. In addition he would wave and point into his rearview mirror, waiting to see me nod every time in acknowledgment. Since I'd lived in Lawrenceton my whole life, this was unnecessary and intensely irritating. Only my curiosity about what he was going to tell me kept me from ramming his rear, and then apologizing picturesquely with tears and a handkerchief. "Wasn't too hard to find, was it!" he said encouragingly when I got out of my car in the parking lot of the Jasper Building, one of the oldest office buildings in our town and a familiar landmark to me from childhood. "No," I said briefly, not trusting myself to speak further. "I'm up on the third floor," Lawyer Sewell announced, I guess in case I got lost between the parking lot and the front door. I bit the inside of my lip and boarded the elevator in silence, while Sewell kept up a patter of small talk about the attendance at the funeral, how Jane's loss would affect many, many people, the weather, and why he liked having an office in the Jasper Building (atmosphere...much better than one of those prefabricated buildings). By the time he opened his office door, I was wondering how sharp-tongued Jane could have endured Bubba Sewell. When I saw that he had three employees in his smallish office, I realized he must be more intelligent than he seemed, and there were other unmistakable signs of prosperity - knick-knacks from the Sharper Image catalog, superior prints on the walls and leather upholstery on the chairs, and so on. I looked around Sewell's office while he gave some rapid instructions to the well-dressed red-haired secretary who was his first line of defense. She didn't seem like a fool, and she treated him with a kind of friendly respect.

"Well, well, now, let's see about you, Miss Teagarden," the lawyer said jovially when we were alone. "Where's that file? Gosh-a-Moses, it's somewhere in this mess here!"

Much rummaging among the papers on his desk. By now I was not deceived. Bubba Sewell for some reason found this Lord Peter Wimsey-like pretense of foolishness useful, but he was not foolish, not a bit.

"Here we are, it was right there all the time!" He flourished the file as though its existence had been in doubt.

I folded my hands in my lap and tried not to sigh obviously. I might have lots of time, but that didn't mean I wanted to spend it as an unwilling audience to a one-man performance.

"Hoo-wee, I'm sure glad you managed to turn it up," I said. Bubba Sewell's hands stilled, and he shot me an extremely sharp look from under his bushy eyebrows.

"Miss Teagarden," he said, dropping his previous good-ole-boy manner completely, "Miss Engle left you everything."

Those are certainly some of the most thrilling words in the English language, but I wasn't going to let my jaw hit the floor. My hands, which had been clasped loosely in my lap, gripped convulsively for a minute, and I let out a long, silent breath. "What's everything?" I asked.

Bubba Sewell told me that everything was Jane's house, its contents, and most of her bank account. She'd left her car and five thousand dollars to her cousin Parnell and his wife, Leah, on condition they took Madeleine the cat to live with them. I