The Merchant of Menace

this and starting to feel like I just don’t care who killed the jerk and why. I’m going to quit thinking about it and enjoy the holidays.“
    “Lucky for us that we can just put it aside,“ Shelley said. “Poor Mel can’t.“
    “I know. But we can’t solve every case for him.”
    Shelley laughed. “I’m going to tell him you said that!“
    “Don’t you dare!”

    Jane was so firmly resolved to stop thinking about the murder that she almost succeeded. She fixed a nice family dinner to go with Katie’s chicken soup. She read a couple chapters of a mystery that she thought was too easy to solve, but discovered that her solution had been wrong all along. She tried out a new rinse on her hair that turned out fairly well, but did some serious damage to one of her favorite towels. She found some Static Guard to spray on Willard as the kids had discovered that petting him in the dark generated sparks. She called and had a conversation with Uncle Jim about Christmas dinner, then girded herself to call her sister. Marty, fortunately, was just getting ready to go out to a party and Jane felt blessed indeed that they didn’t have to talk very long. Still, Marty man- aged to make three irritating comments and two downright stupid remarks.
    As she went upstairs to bed, she reminded Todd that he had to get up fairly early the next morning.
    “Why?”
    “Have you forgotten? Pet got those tickets to some Christmas movie that’s opening at ten.”
    Todd was torn. He wanted to see the movie, but didn’t want to have to drag Pet along. Jane pointed out that the tickets were scarce and he hadn’t managed to bag his own—Pet had, and it was she dragging him along.
    Jane went to bed early, slept like a rock, and was wide awake by seven—with nothing to do. She could hardly remember a time when she didn’t have at least the tail end of a “to do“ list pending. She let the pets outside, let them back in and fed them. This always had to be done early on Tuesdays because the trash trucks came later in the morning, terrifying the cats and moving Willard to bark his fool head off. Jane went back to bed with a new mystery book that was already overdue at the library. But she couldn’t quite get into it.
    She was as twitchy today as Julie Newton always was. Maybe that was Julie’s problem—she got too much sleep. She tried picturing Julie as a go-go dancer. It wasn’t hard. Go-go dancing, as Jane recalled, was all twitching.
    Had Julie told Shelley the truth? Even if Julie really had been a stripper and Lance had proof, could it be a reason to kill him? As deep, dark secrets went, it wasn’t a very good one.
    The only person on the files who appeared to really have something to fear from Lance was Bruce Pargeter. And he freely admitted that he despised the man. And he really didn’t have a good alibi for the night Lance was killed. He and his mother were both at home, but she was upstairs and he was in the basement. Even if she had suspected that Bruce had left the house, she certainly wouldn’t have let on. He was her son. And the man who was murdered had been largely responsible for her own husband’s death.
    Jane had the sense that something was stirring around furtively at the back of her brain. Did her subconscious know something it was refusing to let go of? Or was she just hyper because she’d gotten too much sleep?
    At nine, she woke Todd and called Mel. “Anything new?“ she asked.
    “Not a thing except that the files on the disk were a bust, which I guess you know.“
    “Boring, aren’t they.“ She told him about Shelley’s phone conversation with Julie Newton.
    “Yes, Julie called earlier. There was something in the paper this morning about the disk having been found and she put two and two together.“
    “How did the newspaper find out?“
    “We told them. And emphasized that we felt there was nothing of use to the investigation on it. I didn’t want anybody else bashed around in pursuit of the damned thing. And Ginger is doing well,“ he added. “She still can’t remember what happened to her, but her health is much improved.“
    “That’s good to hear.“
    “You sound preoccupied,“ Mel said.
    “I am. There’s something on the fringe of my mind I can’t get a hold on. Something about the attack on Ginger.“
    “The method? The place? The time?“ Mel tried to help her prod the memory.
    “No. Never mind. It’s probably something useless anyway. How’s Addie?“
    “Fine.