Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Page B

saying something. She was no oil painting but when she looked at my dad she was almost pretty.
    “Here,” she added, reaching into the cookie jar and coming up with a couple of homemade date bars. “Wouldn't want it to be said I turned my back on a starving man.”
    She thrust them gruffly at him and when he'd departed with them she turned back to me. “Missus,” she began; one thing I hadn't been able to train her to do was call me by my first name.
    “Missus, here's what I think. Eugene Dibble's brains had about enough powder to blow him to hell, which I'm guessing is what happened one way or another. And from what I've heard, Mac Rickert is exactly the man Eugene would've needed if he was all involved in some kind of drug deal and it was too big to handle by himself.”
    “But would Dibble be smart enough to realize that?” I asked. “I mean that he needed someone else, with experience in this kind of thing, badly enough to consider sharing the profit?”
    Which he'd have had to do and from what I knew of Dibble myself, I felt confident it would've half killed him. Bella shook her head, sliding the casserole into the oven.
    “No, I wouldn't expect so. But you never can tell, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And what if for once he did something the proper way for a change?
    “That is,” she amended darkly, straightening, “if there is a proper way to do a thing like that.”
    “Huh,” I said, thinking over what she'd told me as footsteps thudded up the back porch. Moments later Wade came in, kissed me on the ear, and went upstairs to change his clothes.
    Behind him came Sam with the two dogs, Monday white-faced and arthritic beside Prill, a youngster by comparison. But at the moment they were both so invigorated from their walk, their names might as well have been Romp and Stomp.
    “Sam, put them out in the ell until they calm down, please,” I said, and he was quick to comply. Though we'd finished the chartering-a-plane talk, he knew I wasn't at all happy about it, and he wanted to appease me.
    Last came Victor, uninvited and unexpected. But that man could smell shrimp casserole a mile away. “Hello,” he said pleasantly, putting an extra bottle of wine on the table, then went on into the living room without offering even one critical remark.
    Bella watched him go. “Is he mellowing?” she asked me. “Or is it my imagination?”
    “Yeah, right,” I scoffed, “and after that, Hannibal Lecter's going to become a vegetarian.”
    I'd have gone on but Sam called out from the hall closet to say he'd just broken the light switch in there and did I have any more of them so he could replace it?
    That keep-Mom-in-a-good-mood program could operate to my advantage, I realized, if I figured out how to work it right. The trouble was, Sam didn't know how to fix a light switch.
    Also, I didn't have any. So I ran down to the hardware store again and when I got back I had to turn off all the power in the house because I couldn't remember which circuit ran the closet wiring, and we did replace the thing.
    Power off, old fixture out, wires onto new fixture—wrapped clockwise around the connection screws—and lastly, new fixture in. Not counting the hardware store trip it only took us about fifteen minutes, though afterwards Sam said he was glad he hadn't decided to become an electrician.
    Too much nitpicking, he opined of my efforts to teach him how to avoid becoming an electrocuted person; he'd have assumed the circuit was dead once the breaker switch was pulled, instead of checking with the circuit-tester gadget I made such a religion of using.
    But it was pleasant, doing it together. Then while I was putting the tools away Ellie arrived, along with her husband George Valentine carrying baby Lee, her high chair, and what I estimated was most of the other baby equipment in the world. Soon after that the oven timer went off, the baby woke up shedding clothing items and demanding to be entertained, and the