Jill Churchill: The Merchant of Menace

Mel looked as exhausted as Jane felt. She wondered if men didn't sometimes wish they could use makeup to spruce themselves up a bit. "Ginger's okay?" she asked, as she slipped some bread into the toaster for him.

“Not okay. But she'll make it," he said. "She's suffered frostbite, a concussion, and has a broken wrist. She only regained consciousness about an hour ago."

“Did you get to talk to her?"

“Yes, but she wasn't making much sense. Hadno idea what she was doing in a hospital. The last thing she seems to remember is talking to me in your driveway. The doctor says she'll probably get more of her memory back, but may not ever remember what happened to her."

“So you don't know who hit her?"

“Nope. It wasn't that much of a blow, though. But it must have thrown her against the gas meter at the side of the house and she hit her head on it and apparently snapped her wrist trying to break her fall. At least, that's what the emergency-room people speculated. They were a lot more concerned with her temperature. She must have laid there in the cold for several hours. If she hadn't been wearing a hat and gloves and a heavy coat, she'd have probably died of exposure."

“Do you think that means whoever it was didn't mean to kill her?" Jane asked.

“Whatever the original intention was, she was left to die. It comes to the same thing as far as I'm concerned. If you hadn't peered out the window and seen her, she would have."

“Is this a tribute to what you call my snooping?”

He smiled. "I guess it is. It saved Ginger's life.”

While he was feeling mellow and benevolent, Jane needed to ask something else. "What about the computer disk I found? Have the people in your office read it yet?"

“Nope. There are files on it, but they're password protected. They're going to have to get help from the F.B.I. probably. They have super-duper computers that can run through thou‑ sands of combinations of letters and numbers until they hit on the right one.”

Jane poured another half a cup of coffee and debated with herself for a few seconds. " 'Guardian; " she said.

“What?"

“ 'Guardian' is the password."

“How the hell would you know that?" Mel asked. He held up his hand. "No, wait. I'll bet you made a copy of that disk before you gave it to me. Am I right? I should have known! Jane, that was evidence. You had no business messing with it!"

“It wasn't evidence while it was just an unidentified disk in my house," she said. "It was just an unfamiliar… thing."

“You know the law on this? Never mind. How did you figure out the password?"

“Shelley and I figured it out rationally. It's our secret.”

Jane wouldn't have thought it was possible for human features to express both gratitude and irritation at the same time, but Mel managed it. He went to the kitchen phone and dialed his office. "Harry? Try the word 'guardian' on that disk. Just a hunch." He winked at Jane. "Right. I'll wait. A foreign language? What language? Find someone who recognizes it. Okay, I'll call back.”

He hung up and stared at Jane. "Why didn't you tell me that part?"

“You didn't give me the chance. I sent a piece of it to my father though. He'll know. Stay here. I'll show you the printout of the files."

“The printout of the files," Mel groaned. "Are you setting up your own annex to the police department?"

“I might, if I had the extra space," Jane said over her shoulder as she went to the living room to fetch her papers.

Mel studied the sheets. "Looks Eastern European to me. But then I don't know anything except enough Spanish to order a dinner and a few obscene French phrases."

“Oops, your toast's gone cold. I forgot it." Jane put in two more slices while Mel continued to peruse the papers she'd handed him.

“Have you remembered anything else Ginger said when she was talking to you last night?" Mel asked.

“I told you the whole thing then. She wanted to interview me, I said no. She asked if the police had found the disk and I told her no again. I didn't think I should have told anyone and wasn't positive it was the right disk anyway. I feel bad about that now."

“Why? You did exactly the right thing," Mel said.

“But she was probably over in the Johnsons' yard looking for it when she was attacked. If she'd known it had been found, nothing would have happened to her."

“You can't know that, Jane. Someone may have been following and watching her and would have cornered her somewhere eventually."

“Was there any physical evidence in the John-sons' yard? A bloody glove or anything like that?”

Mel frowned. "There is one odd thing. Footprints, we think."

“You think?"

“It's hard to tell. We must have stepped on every inch of the snow yesterday while we were raking it up. The whole yard is footprints. But there are a couple strange ones near where Ginger was."

“Strange in what way? Big, little? Pigeon-toed?"

“Big. And more rectangular than most shoes."

“Something foreign? Ethnic boots of some sort? Aren't traditional Japanese shoes sort of rectangular? Is there a sole pattern?"

“Not much. This is such a light, dry snow that it just packs into the pattern after a step or two. One of my men thinks he can see a row of diamond shapes in one of the prints, but I think he has too good an imagination."

“But you think these weird shoe prints belong to her attacker?"

“They could. Or somebody could have just been prowling around earlier.”

Bruce Pargeter came up from the basement with an assortment of tools bulging out of a large, beat-up toolbox. "You're all done, Mrs. Jeffry. Try running the water in the guest bathroom. Let it run for a while.”

Mel excused himself from plumbing matters and left. Jane noticed that he took her printouts of Lance's computer disk with him. No matter, she could print them out again. Mel hadn't thought to ask her to turn over her copy.

“Bruce, give me a bill right away and let's sit down and talk about redoing that bathroom," Jane said, back in fully domestic mode.

After Bruce had outlined his ideas for redoing the bathroom, which all sounded good, especially considering that Jane had no ideas of her own in the matter, he left. She'd considered trying to keep him there and chat about the murder and the attack on Ginger, but had an eerie feeling that she shouldn't. It was as if she'd had her quota of good luck in finding things out and if she pushed it any harder, she might get in trouble of some sort. She didn't want to know more about it — she wanted the police to solve it and let her occupy her mind with celebrating the holidays.

She checked the computer for return E-mail from her father, but there was nothing but a spam ad from somebody called "HotChick" saying if the recipient of the note would send $29.95 to a post office box address, a complete guide to curing impotence would be forthcoming.

Jane hit the delete button. She used to send irate responses to junk like this, but it was fruitless.

She wrapped the last of the presents, prepared a new grocery list, and hit the mall. By the time she got home, she was nearly asleep on her feet. She checked E-mail again, found none, and decided she really needed a good nap. Not a few minutes of sleep on the sofa, but a real turnoff-the-phone, get-in-bed nap. She set sandwich makings on the kitchen counter and told the kids she wasn't to be disturbed for any reason for at least two hours.

This unusual request must have alarmed the kids, she realized three hours later. While she slept, they had cleaned the house, even their own rooms. Katie had consulted some cookbooks and was preparing chicken soup. Mike had shoveled the entire driveway and put out the trash and recycle bins for tomorrow morning's pickup. Todd had washed, dried, and brushed Willard, who was now so staticky that he looked like a big yellow tumbleweed.