Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves

going-away present, because although she didn’t know it and would have fiercely denied it had the idea been suggested to her, once the baby was born nothing would ever be the same again.
    Selfish thought; I put it away with the many others I didn’t like thinking lately. And at any rate wherever Jan had gone, it seemed she wasn’t coming back immediately.
    Outside, one of the seagulls grabbed the fallen morsel and flapped off, leaving the other poking disconsolately at the place where it had been.
    Yeah, buddy, I know how you feel,
I thought. Then, turning, I realized that something in Jan’s house
wasn’t
motionless.
    The laptop screen. When I’d touched it, it had pinged softly and the screen had bloomed to life, showing the Apple icon. But after I’d left it there on the table it had gone on booting up. Now it showed a screen of labeled folders and a cursor, blinking provocatively at me.
    So there I was, alone and uninvited in a stranger’s home. Before me lay, apparently, all the records of her private life; a folder marked “Bills” for instance, and one that said it held letters.
    Let’s see, now. I could respect her privacy, not to mention my own safety. She could walk in and discover me here any second.
    Or I could go for broke. Moments later I’d opened a folder, clicked through the documents it contained, and found at least two reasons to make me envision Jan Jesperson jumping for joy when she learned Hector Gosling was no longer among the living.
    Assuming she hadn’t murdered him herself, a notion that was starting to look increasingly plausible. One of the documents, a list of Eastport ladies including Agnes Bonnet and George’s aunt, Paula Valentine, also featured a schedule of dates and dosages of a variety of drugs. One of them was diazepam, better known as Valium.
    Risky, I thought, to keep such a list. But if you had more than one scheme going you needed some kind of reminder as to who got what substance and when. And if what this schedule suggested was true, Hector could have implicated Jan Jesperson in at least one murder—Paula Valentine’s—and possibly more.
    But the kicker was spread out through the last documents I clicked open. One was a calculation of how much Valium it would take to kill a 160-pound human being, with or without the help of various amounts of alcohol. Was it coincidental that Hector Gosling had been average sized? He’d probably weighed about 160 pounds, which was no help in the strychnine department; still, I found it interesting.
    The second document was Jan’s last will and testament, in which she generously left the whole kit and kaboodle to “my good friend and associate Hector Gosling.”
    And the final item contained Hector’s will, in language a near twin to Jan’s. In it he bequeathed an even larger estate full of cash, stocks, bonds, real estate, accounts receivable, and other valuable doo-dads, to . . .
    You guessed it: turnabout was the only kind of fair play these two had ever cared for. He’d left it all to his partner in crime, Jan Jesperson.
     
     
    “The wills were dated the same day,” I said. “And it looked as if each of them had e-mailed a copy of his or her own document to the other one.”
    Silence on the phone; I interpreted it as Clarissa Arnold’s awestruck admiration for my intrepid sleuthing. I’d called her answering service and by a miracle she’d called me back at once.
    “Which would’ve made sense,” I pressed on. “Neither one of them could afford to have anyone else find out just how wealthy they’d really gotten.”
    I took a breath. “Because rumors are one thing, but the size of those estates, the schedules of assets . . . it would absolutely raise questions about how they had gotten all that stuff. That’s why whichever one survived the other’s death had to inherit the loot. To avoid answering those questions.”
    I thought a minute more. “The probate records would still end up in the public files. But