Grime and Punishment: A Jane Jeffry Mystery by Jill Churchill Read Free Book Online Page A

of what had occurred. "I'll be over in a few minutes to pick up the kids."
    “Oh, no need, Jane. They're happy as clams here. I've fixed a nice angel food cake. I know how Mike loves them."
    “And I suppose he's wolfing it down now and spoiling his appetite for dinner?" This was one of Thelma's favorite tricks. She used to do it all the time with Steve, asking him to stop by to visit her in the late afternoon for some reason, then filling him up so he wouldn't want whatever Jane had fixed.
    “Oh, were you cooking dinner tonight? I had no idea," Thelma said with a little laugh.
    “I always cook dinner," Jane lied. She eyed a Kentucky Fried Chicken box from the evening before in the wastebasket.
I must not lose my temper with her,
she told herself.
She's doing me a favor at the moment and that puts her in a position of power:
"I'll be over in a few minutes.”
    She then reported in to Dorothy Wallenberg. "I'm running over to pick up Todd. I appreciate your helping me out."
    “Jane, what in heaven's name happened at Shelley's?"
    “The cleaning lady was murdered."
    “Murdered! My God! You said before that she died. I thought a heart attack or something. Murdered? Who did it?"
    “Nobody knows. Please, Dorothy, don't tell Todd about it being murder yet. I want to sort of ease into it with him later. Without any warning, it would scare him to death."
    “Of course it would. It scares me, and I'm worried about you being right next door. Shelley's home alone right now, too, isn't she? Thank God her children were gone. Don't worry about getting Todd. He's out playing with the kids, and I'd promised to take them all out for Burger King. Let me just bring him back to you later."
    “Thanks, Dorothy. That sounds wonderful. The police ought to be gone by then and it'll be less horrible.”
    As she backed out to go get Mike and Katie, the last police car pulled away. All that remained was a red MG. That had to be Detective VanDyne's. Somehow he looked like the sort of bachelor who'd have one.
    When Jane got to her motherin-law's, Thelma was greedy for details about the crisis. She was a stately, angular, blue-haired lady with a perpetually haughty look, but her usual frosty manner thawed as she exclaimed, "Murder! Good Lord, Jane. How terrible! Well, it just goes to prove what I've always said you and the children ought to move in here with me. It's not safe for you to be living alone.”
    Jane gritted her teeth and took a deep breath. "Thelma, you'd have hardly been able to prevent this, and none of us were endangered anyway." This, she knew, was beside the point. Her motherin-law had been harping for months on how they ought to move in with her. The bedrooms in her elegant condo were the size of skating rinks, but there were only two of them, and Jane sometimes had nightmares about living there and having to be Thelma's "roommate." Of course, Thelma didn't really want them there; what she was really angling for was an invitation to move in with them.
    “She'd be packed in thirty seconds," Jane had said to Shelley the week before, "if I even hinted that I might agree. It would be like having Gen- eral Patton around the house. Slapping the troops — namely me — for their own good."
    “You've got to stand firm, Jane," Shelley had advised. "She'd have you asking her permission to pee within the week."
    “It's this modern permissive society," Thelma was going on. "When standards are allowed to slip, we're all in peril."
    “I can't see how that figures, Thelma. We don't even know anything about this woman or why she was killed."
    “Mark my words, it'll all come out eventually and you'll see I'm right. Ah, children, your mother has finally come to pick you up," she said as Mike and Katie came out of the second bedroom, which was fitted out as a TV room. Thelma had every video game in the world, part of her insidious campaign to make herself indispensable. She managed, too, by some mysterious process that Jane found highly