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some background-checking work. It hardly kept me busy and now that you’re back …” Her words trailed off, then she closed her argument. “Your name is juice, and we need it to establish MI as the firm to call when someone needs a private investigator.”
    “Let me think about it. Okay?”
    “I need to know tomorrow morning—early. Any later and I’ll have to cancel the caterer and reprint the invitations. Now, tell me about the events preceding Andujar’s supposed suicide.”
    He took in a long breath and let it out slowly before beginning. “Sarah called two days before Rachel was killed, begging me to come for Sunday dinner and talk with Chris. She said, ‘He’s very moody and he won’t tell me anything. I’m worried sick. He’ll always talk to you.’ After Rachel was run down, I forgot all about Chris and my promise to go for dinner. Maybe he’d still be alive if I had just … I need to find out what really happened.”

Chapter 6
     
    The freshly-painted white picket fence around Sarah Andujar’s home simulated fresh recruits standing at attention as Jack and Nora approached the house. Folded towels and bed sheets hung patiently on the porch rail, waiting to cover the more delicate plants in the event of another cool spring night.
    Jack heard the clunk of the deadbolt before seeing Sarah’s pruned complexion peeking through the crack of the door. She inhaled through her first words, “Oh, Jack!” And exhaled through the finish, “I am so glad to see you.” Her cheeks were more sallow than he remembered, her eyes more haggard and cavernous, but crow’s feet still danced around her eyes when she smiled.
    Sarah hid her small hand inside Jack’s while leading her two guests though her home. For Jack, the Andujar home had always held the comfortable feeling of an old, favored sweater, but not today. Today it looked perfect, spotlessly clean, everything in its place, precisely in its place.
    “I made berry-flavored herbal sun tea,” Sarah said, pointing toward a pitcher on the table in her screened sun porch. “I think you’ll like it.” She had also put out a platter with cold-cut sandwiches on little triangles of white bread trimmed of their crusts.
    Jack turned to Sarah. “Forgive me for not coming to dinner that Sunday. Maybe—”
    She reached up and touched her fingers to his lips to stop him.
    Jack had seen her expression on the faces of wives and mothers of men lost under his command in covert operations. A look of pride and despair tossed like a salad in the empty place where their once happy hearts had beaten.
    “There is no need to apologize,” she said, moving her hand from his face. “I had no idea Christopher had—,” her eyes welled. “And please accept my condolences. I remember your wife, Rachel, as a lovely and caring person.” The old woman hugged Jack.
    “Ms. Andujar,” Nora said, “I’m picking up the most wonderful fragrance from your garden.”
    “Thank you. That would be my early-season lilacs and the cucumber magnolia.”
    They all sat around the small table in the sunroom. Jack and Nora each took one of the small sandwiches and a napkin. Sarah reached in and straightened the stack of napkins.
    “Nora. Is that short for Eleanor?”
    “Yes. My mother was a huge fan of Eleanor Roosevelt. I never felt the name fit me so I eventually dropped it. Please call me Nora.”
    “I will, if you will call me Sarah.”
    The old woman sat still for a few moments staring at the flower pattern on the patio chair that framed her thin legs which she kept close together. Then she told Jack and Nora about her stressful experience with Sergeant Suggs when he had come to interview her. While she spoke, a breeze tinkled the wind chimes hanging at the fringe of her patio. She didn’t seem to hear them.
    Sarah’s lips moved as if she were considering but rejecting words. Then she spoke. “Christopher was murdered. Forgive me. I should be clear. I understand that technically my