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be. Once I was sure he wasn’t alone or too upset, I let him go and waved him off. Hard thing to do, but he was trying to be as adult as possible and I was trying to let him.
    Time had gotten away from me, and Christian Friends had already started over at the Conejo Community Chapel. I decided that even if I only caught the last half of the meeting, I needed to go anyway.
    If nothing else, I needed to get Linnette and Dot up to date on what happened with our trip to the station, and what Ben had told me. The church building looked homey and welcoming when I pulled up into the parking lot. In the nine months or so that I’d been attending services here it had become a true church home to me. The long brick building with its sanctuary and classrooms reminded me somewhat of my grandmother’s church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The folks in Missouri’s boot heel would never have considered landscaping with palm trees, of course.
    “Great, you made it!” Linnette cheered when I opened the door to the classroom where Christian Friends gathered around in chairs. It felt so good to be wanted I almost burst into tears. Being this emotional all the time hadn’t happened in a while, not since the worst of the mess after Dennis’s death last winter.
    “I made it,” I said, trying not to sound as shaky as I felt. “Let me get coffee and something to eat and I’ll come join you.” The coffeepot still held about four cups of coffee and beside it was half of a really nice looking loaf of some kind of nut bread. “It’s pumpkin,” Lexy Adams called out when she saw me looking at it. “My mother-in-law baked it and it’s really good.”
    I cut myself a generous slice to go with my coffee, slathered the pumpkin bread with cream cheese and found an empty chair. Maybe this wouldn’t be the most balanced dinner I’d have this week, but at least I was among friends. That counted for a lot.
    “Dot tells us that you were at the sheriff’s department with Ben,” Linnette said. “That’s all she would say, so if you want us to know more, you’ll have to fill us in.”
    “I said a little more than that,” Dot piped up. “I told them how rotten I felt about maybe causing your trip.”
    “You didn’t cause our trip,” I said between bites of the pumpkin bread. Lexy had been right; it tasted delicious. Surely all the raisins and walnuts in it made it nutritious, right? “You simply told the truth to Detective Fernandez about seeing somebody talking with Frank Collins. The fact that he assumed it was Ben is his problem.” I looked at Dot, wondering how much more to ask her here. Finishing the last of my snack, I decided to plow ahead.
    “Have you and Buck talked about all this?”
    “Quite a bit,” she said, still looking more solemn than I normally expect to see Dot.
    “Did he tell you that he saw Ben arguing with Frank one day before Thanksgiving?”
    Dot nodded, looking tearful. I explained everything that Ben had told me to her, and to the group in general, and after that Dot looked much more comfortable. “I knew there had to be some good explanation. Ben is just too nice a young man to be involved in anything like this.”
    “Meanwhile it sounds like Frank wasn’t all that nice to anybody,” Lexy said.
    “I think you’re right.” Dot’s lips thinned to a slender line. “I gave him the job because he was family, and because I thought that surely he couldn’t mess it up. I really thought that he’d changed with age like his mother said he had, and he was a responsible human being now.” She shook her head, implying that nothing like that had happened. It also made me wonder how much worse he could have been as a young man. Maybe I didn’t want to know.
    Dot had caught the rest of the Christian Friends up on as much as she knew about Frank’s death. Once we’d discussed everything about Ben and his involvement, or rather lack of involvement that Fernandez had kind of blown out of proportion, they had me