Nursery Crimes by Ayelet Waldman Page A

that family. This isn’t a game. They’re grieving.”
    “I will be careful. I just want to get a sense of them, on a more personal level. I’m not even going to ask any questions.”
    “I’m just giving you my two cents.”
    “Duly noted. And I will be discreet. I promise.” I gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. “Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Peter?”
    “Yes?”
    “How would you feel about cooking up a little casserole?”
    “Oh, my God. No. Definitely not.”
    “Please. Oh, please.” I kissed him on the cheek.
    “I can’t believe you.”
    I reached out to a grocery bin and tossed a few bags of spinach into our cart.
    “What’s that for?” Peter asked.
    “Spinach lasagna. Only make it with fewer onions this time. Most people don’t like as many onions as you do.”

Nine
    T HE preschool gig sure paid well, I thought as I pulled up in front of Abigail Hathaway’s oversized Tudor house in the Santa Monica Canyon, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods on the Westside. A manicured lawn stretched from the brass-riveted front door down to the curb. A brick path meandered down the lawn between carefully tended beds of winter flowers. In the driveway were parked two cars—a bright-blue Jeep, and one of those BMW two-seaters that a certain kind of middle-aged man feels compelled to purchase immediately upon seeing James Bond tooling around in one on the silver screen.
    Gee, I wonder which car belongs to Daniel Mooney? I thought.
    I got out of my suburban-matron heap, careful not to wrinkle the baby-blue maternity smock I had found crumpled at the back of my closet and had actually managedto iron in preparation for my incursion into Mooney territory. I looked innocuous and very, very sweet.
    Reaching into the backseat, I grabbed the handles of a shopping bag containing a spinach-and-feta-cheese lasagna that Peter had obligingly whipped up. I walked up to the front door, stretched my face into a sickly sweet smile, and knocked briskly. While I waited for an answer, I reached into the shopping bag and took out the foil pan of lasagna. Without warning and with a sudden jerk, the door opened. Startled, I gave a little jump. Not much, but just enough to tilt the lasagna pan and send a stream of tomato sauce out from under the foil wrapper and all over the front of my smock.
    “Oh!” I said with a gasp.
    Abigail Hathaway’s daughter stood in the doorway. “Oh, no!” she said, reaching out and steadying the pan. “You got it all over yourself!”
    I looked down at the splash of red festooning my chest and belly.
    “Lovely. Just lovely,” I said, ruefully.
    “I’m so sorry,” the girl said.
    “No, no! It’s not your fault! Don’t be sorry. It’s me. I’m just a complete klutz. I’m the one who’s sorry.” I motioned toward the sauce-covered pan. “This is for you and your . . . your dad.”
    “Thanks,” she said, although she clearly didn’t mean it.
    “It’s lasagna.”
    “Great.” Looking vaguely nauseated, she gingerly took the pan from my outstretched arms.
    “Would you like to come in and get cleaned up?”
    “That would be terrific. My name is Juliet Applebaum. I knew your mom.”
    Standing in the doorway, holding a pan of lasagna, Abigail Hathaway’s daughter started to cry. She cried notlike the grown woman she looked like, but like the child she was. Huge, gasping sobs shook her narrow chest and tears poured down her face. Her nose streamed and, arms filled with lasagna, she turned her head to the side, trying ineffectually to wipe her nose on her shoulder. As she lifted her shoulder to meet her nose, the pan slipped from her hands, falling to the floor with a wet
splat
and spilling tomato sauce over her shoes.
    “Oh, no! Oh, no!” the girl wailed, dropping to her knees and trying to stem the tide of sauce making its way across the floor in the direction of a pink and white Oriental floor runner.
    I looked around me for a cloth, anything to catch the spill before it ruined