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more—more angular? Like a hard edge would make?”
    “How should I know? I’m no doctor.”
    “Neither am I, but I’ve fried enough eggs in my day to know that if I whack them with the round bowl of a spoon it makes a different sort of break than if I crack the shell on the edge of the frying pan, and so do you. Can you honestly believe the sharp corner of that desk wouldn’t at least cut into the flesh and leave some kind of ridge or something?”
    Olson prodded again, a worried expression on his red pudding of a face. “Criminy, Janet, I dunno what to think. What else could it have been? There’s nothin’ else in the way he could o’ fell on. Maybe his hair—”
    “What hair?”
    The marshal’s jaw dropped. He stared down at his old friend as if he’d never seen him before. “Lord A’mighty, I never realized. I can remember when Hank had corkscrew curls down to his waist. Had ’em myself, not that I wanted ’em. Forty years before you was born, I s’pose.”
    He sighed, picked up a clean sheet that had been lying ready beside the examining table for the patient who was never going to come now, and tucked it over his lifelong pal. “You go on over an’ break the news to Elizabeth, Janet. I’ll stay here an’ try to get hold of Doc Brown.”
    Anxious as she was to get out of that place, Janet hesitated. “Fred, there’s something else I have to tell you.” She got her paper bag from the horsehair sofa, and showed him the jar. “Dot Fewter and I found this in Mrs. Treadway’s cellar this morning.”
    He shrugged. “Seems as likely a place as anywhere else.”
    “Fred, listen to me. You know what Mrs. Treadway died of.”
    “Yep. Poisoned string beans.”
    “And you know how fussy she always was about what she ate.”
    “Yep. Fat lot o’ good it did ’er in the end, eh?”
    “All right, now take a look at this jar. Notice it’s full of string beans. Notice that they’ve all been cut into nice, even pieces with a knife, like the ones you’d get in a frozen-food package.”
    “So?”
    “Is that how your mother would have fixed hers?”
    Olson shoved back the ratty tweed cap he was wearing and scratched his head. “’Pears to me she snapped ’em in ’er fingers.”
    “I expect she did. My mother did, too, and I’ve watched Mrs. Treadway do it ever since I was a little kid. Furthermore, there were thirteen other jars on the shelf beside this one, and every single bean in them had been snapped. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
    The marshal scratched his head again. “Maybe she got tired o’ doin’ ’em all the same way.”
    “And maybe pigs have kittens. Look, Fred, I knew Mrs. Treadway as well as anybody in this world did, and there never was a woman more set in her ways. She had certain ways of doing things, and she wasn’t about to change for anybody. I remember saying to her once, ‘Mrs. Treadway, let me show you a new trick I learned in home arts,’ and she said to me, ‘No, thank you. I learned enough new tricks while my husband was alive. I’ll stick to what I know is going to work.’”
    Olson emitted a snort of laughter, then glanced into the office and looked embarrassed.
    “Furthermore,” Janet went on, “I was there and saw the jar she’d eaten from, after Marion Emery and Dr. Druffitt took it out of her fridge. It was one of her own preserving jars and a mate to this one. I couldn’t be mistaken about that, because she’d had them for sixty years or more, and they haven’t been on the market in ages. There probably aren’t any others like them in the whole province.”
    “Did you see any of the beans that were left in it?”
    “No, I didn’t. Dr. Druffitt wrapped it in a cup towel and put it into his bag. That’s why I came down to talk to him today. I meant to show him the one I’d found and ask if the beans were cut like these, because if they were, it’s dollars to doughnuts somebody put them there on purpose to kill her.”
    The marshal took