Bowled Over by Victoria Hamilton

detective talk to you?”
    “He sure did. I might have swooned, if I’d thought he would catch me. That is one handsome man.”
    Jaymie smiled, and it felt good. Valetta was quirky and humorous, but a fast friend of the
forever
type. She was full of contradictions: by turns she was a gossip who knew how to keep a secret, a cranky spinster (by her own accounting) who was a romantic at heart, and a woman who supposedly disliked children, while they flocked to her good-natured matter-of-factness.
    “Did the handsome detective ask you about my bowl?”
    Valetta set her empty tea mug on the wooden step. “He did…called me early this morning. First, he asked me if you had taken it away with you on your walk.”
    “He
didn’t
!” Jaymie gasped. So she was a suspect, as she feared. How could he not suspect her, though, when it was her bowl, and she and Kathy had argued that very day and had, by her own admission, a long-standing enmity? “What did you say?”
    “I said you did not have it, I could guarantee that, and he asked how I was so sure. I said, well, first, it would have been hard for you to conceal a bowl while walking arm in arm with your guy and wearing shorts and a T-shirt.”
    Foolishly, Jaymie felt her heart thump, and she wondered what the detective had thought when he’d heard that she and Daniel were commonly viewed as a couple. But that was silly, and she knew it. As attractive as she found the detective, and as intriguing as she had found him in their interaction during the murder investigation in May, he had made it clear she was a quaint small-town girl, in his eyes.
    “Then I told him the truth: I know your bowl was on the table when you walked away because there was still salad in it, and I dished it out to a couple of other people.”
    “I wondered what had become of the rest of the salad. I figured you had just thrown it out.”
    “No, it was real good. Never waste good food. I dished some up to a guy in an Uncle Sam suit, and then…” She paused, chewing her cheek, a sign she was worried about something. She gazed down the road and squinted.
    “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    Valetta pushed her glasses up on her nose and frowned. “I gave the bowl to Johnny Stanko to finish up the rest.”
    The memory of Stanko walking away, muttering that he ought to “whack” both Kathy and Craig came back to her. “Oh!”
    “Now, I know what you’re thinking, Jaymie, but I won’t believe it,” Valetta said, tears gathering in her eyes. “I won’t believe he killed Kathy!”
    “I didn’t know you were close to him.”
    The other woman was still for a moment while the sounds of summer filled the silence: a lawn mower’s steady thrum, children’s voices at play and the
chirr
of an annoyedchipmunk. She waved as a car passed, and Hoppy trotted up to her on the top step, resting his chin on her knee. She scruffed under his chin, and he flopped on his back, exposing his belly. “I babysat Johnny when he was just a kid,” she finally said as she petted the little dog’s belly, smoothing the ruffled fur into a swirl on his pink tummy.
    “I thought he had an older sister who died recently. Why didn’t she babysit him?”
    “She ran away from home when she was just fifteen or so. She didn’t come back to Queensville until their parents died. There was some insurance money, and she bought that little house, while Johnny drank his share away.”
    “And now she’s gone, too. Sad for him. Valetta, I hate to say it, but he said he ought to whack them both, Kathy and Craig. And then Kathy dies,
with
the bowl that he had in his hands!”
    “I know, I know! I told that detective everything. God forgive me,” she whispered, her head down. She was silent for a long moment, then raised her head and said, voice trembling, “But I will not believe Johnny killed Kathy Cooper.” She looked Jaymie in the eye. “He has worked so hard to change his life: sobriety, peacekeeping, making up to folks for all