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Counselor.”
    “Don’t remind me.”
    “I’m not turning Miss Schiller in, then. I am, however, returning the baby to your custody.”
    He stood up, lifted the bag of flour, and carefully laid it back on the visitor chair.
    “What time do you want to leave on Thursday for Morris?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. If Sara doesn’t come back and get her baby by then, I might be busy babysitting. By Thursday, that girl could drive all the way to Florida.”
    A buzzing sound filled my little office. Rick pulled out his cell phone and answered the call.
    “No kidding?” Rick asked whoever was on the other end of the connection. “My, my. That does change things, doesn’t it?”
    His eyes met mine, and he smiled. “Thanks, Kurt. I’ll be in touch.”
    He returned his cell to his pants pocket.
    “Looks like the widow was right: somebody wasn’t delighted with Mr. Delite,” Rick reported. “Kurt just saw a preliminary report from the medical examiner. Unless Sonny D was pulling a Socrates, it looks like somebody else did the honors.”
    “Socrates?” I said, just before I realized what Rick meant.
    Socrates, one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy, was sentenced to death with a cup of poison hemlock.
    “Sonny was poisoned?”
    “Give the man a cigar,” Rick said. “According to Kurt, the examiner initially thought the cause of death was respiratory paralysis, but then a sample of the stomach contents—”
    I held up my hands to make him stop. “Whoa. Too much information, buddy.”
    “Wuss,” Rick said.
    “Okay, I’m a wuss,” I readily agreed. “Just spare me the gory gastric details.”
    “They think they found traces of hemlock in the stomach. It’ll take a little time to confirm it, but as of right now, Sonny D’s untimely demise is looking pretty suspicious.”
    Rick sighed.
    “Put a new notch on your binoculars, Bob,” he told me. “I think you found another murder victim.”
     
     

Chapter Five
     
    “Honey, I’m home!” I called as I walked into the house just after four o’clock. I dropped my briefcase by the front door and set Sara’s bag of flour down next to it.
    “Sleep tight, Goldie,” I told the flour. “We’ll find your mommy in the morning. I promise. And then we’ll make sure she spends lots of time with you—in detention.”
    Yes, I was still the designated sitter because Sara had—no surprise!—gone AWOL from school for the entire day. By ten o’clock in the morning, I stopped kicking myself in the head for falling for her empty pledge to reform, and, instead, committed myself to setting an example of trustworthiness for every student at Savage High School. I christened the bag Goldie in honor of the yellow medal emblazoned on the face of the sack and dutifully carried it with me all day long. When I ran into Gina Knorsen in the cafeteria at lunch, I caught her smiling even as she shook her head in disapproval.
    “I keep my promise, even if a student doesn’t,” I’d told her. “Honor is my middle name.”
    “Mine’s Patience,” she’d replied. “But your Sara Schiller is sure testing it.”
    “Is that a tongue-twister?” I asked.
    “No,” Gina said. “It’s the truth.”
    I walked through the living room and headed for the kitchen.
    Luce wasn’t home yet, but thanks to her new schedule at Maple Leaf, I could now look forward to a leisurely dinner with my wife every night. Aligning our work days had taken us almost a year of marriage. After an initial couple of months of strained nuptial bliss due to her long evening hours as executive chef, Luce had switched to the early morning catering shift at the conference center, which, unfortunately, wasn’t much better in allowing us newlywed, let alone birding, time thanks to her pre-dawn departures and seven o’clock bedtimes. Finally, she’d hit on the current solution: she was the noon banquet and pastry chef. The result was two-fold: for the first time in our lives, we had similar