The Perils of Panacea by Judy K. Walker

Author:Judy K. Walker [Walker, Judy K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Judy K. Walker

27

Cissy wanted to walk off some of her drink, which suited my plans as well. She’d given my brain a nudge. I went out to the car and got my laptop and a change of clothes. (All I had was an extra tank, button-down shirt and jeans, but Cissy was right—it had to be an improvement over my nasty shorts.) I changed in the coffee shop restroom without dropping any garments in the toilet, then ordered a latte and the simplest pastry I could find. The milk would take the edge off the caffeine, and there wouldn’t be enough sugar in the muffin to make me shake. In theory.

After spending a few minutes catching up on email (i.e., deciding I could ignore most of it), I settled in to see what I could find out about Elise Steinway. I was paranoid enough to not use a paid database to research her before her body was found, but not so paranoid as to avoid generic search engines. Elise’s name wasn’t as uncommon as I’d hoped, and it was hard to find much on My Elise (correction: JD’s Elise) in the Elise Steinway haystack. I did find her in some photos of local fundraisers (thank you, Cissy, for the nudge). Her husband didn’t appear in any of the pictures with her, but he was in the background of one with another woman on his arm. She had dark hair and was younger than Elise, and I wondered if she was Elise’s friend from the club. I also wondered if the poor intern who’d captioned the photos had gotten a lecture about not including donors with their mistresses.

I made a note of the mistress and some of the other women in the photographs, along with the occasions. After another twenty minutes of trolling through the photos, I’d found that many were taken at a local yacht club. I even found Elise in one. It was almost lunchtime—what did I have to lose?

Leaning over to put my laptop in its bag, I realized I could smell my sneakers. Ugh! That’s what I got for swimming in the marina with them. Carlyle wasn’t exactly a shopper’s paradise. Where could I pick up a pair of decent sandals? A pair of big dangly earrings, made with small green stones by a local artisan, caught my eye by the counter as I was busing my table. Those would be good too. Maybe I could write them off as an expense (on the case I wasn’t getting paid for).

I stowed my laptop in the trunk and looked up and down the street, waiting for a cute little boutique, or even a chain shoe store, to appear. No luck, but there was a Salvation Army store. It was worth a shot.

A tuba and a sewing machine sat in the big display window, like the opening of a kids’ joke. I ignored the tug of the used books and walked to the shoe racks. Normally, the thought of wearing shoes

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