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to it,” Jeremiah backed away from them. Claire got the impression he was happy to be escaping.
    Norma shoved the door open and gestured for Claire to precede her into the cramped studio—which Claire did, deftly avoiding the stacks of canvases that leaned against the walls as her nose adjusted to the smell of turpentine and oil paint.  
    “So, what do you want?” The old, wooden floor creaked as Norma walked the perimeter of the studio, looking at her paintings and ignoring Claire.  
    Claire was glad to see that Norma was acting normal—not at all like someone who had beaten another person to death just hours ago. But what else had she expected? She already knew Norma didn’t do it.
    Claire gave a mental head shake and looked up to see Norma assessing her with intelligent, dark eyes, the brows of which were slightly raised in question.
    “You haven’t heard about Zoila?”
    Claire saw Norma flinch just slightly. Probably not enough that anyone else would have noticed, but Claire was trained to watch for those tell-tale flinches. The mention of Zoila’s name had hit a nerve.
    “What about her? No one should pay attention to what she has to say. The woman is mad.” Norma stabbed her cane into the floor to accentuate the last word.
    “Really? Why do you say that?”
    Norma narrowed her eyes at Claire. She was too sharp to be tricked into giving anything away. “Why do you ask about her, anyway?”
    “She was murdered this morning.”
    Norma’s eyes widened. “Murdered? By whom?”
    Claire noticed that Norma’s reaction seemed to register genuine surprise. At what,exactly, Claire didn’t know—the murder itself or the fact that Claire was asking. “They don’t know who did it.”
    Norma let out a sigh and lowered herself onto the wooden chair behind the old metal desk, the only piece of furniture in the room.  
    She rested her cane against the side of the desk, then leaned her elbows on the surface, steepling her hands in front of her. Claire noticed her hands were dotted with red paint … at least she hoped it was paint. She stepped closer to get a better look and noticed there was blue, white and brown dots, too. It wasn’t unusual for Norma’s hands to be dotted with paint—she was, after all, a painter.
    “So, you came all the way here to tell me?” Norma asked.
    “Well, yes.” Claire didn’t know what she had been expecting. Maybe she was hoping Norma would tell Claire how her and Zoila had fought about some benign matter that would obviously have nothing to do with her murder.
    But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Why come all the way here? You thought finding out about it from someone else might be too much for a fragile old lady?”
    “Well, no.” Claire hesitated. Norma was anything but fragile. “I saw you fighting with Zoila this morning.”
    “And you think I’m the one who killed her?”
    “No! Of course not. I just thought if you explained what it was about, then I could make sure Zambuco ruled you out as a suspect.”
    “Explain it to you?” Norma’s eyebrows crept up to her hairline. “I don’t think I need to explain myself to you. And what were you doing spying on me, anyway?”
    “I wasn’t spying. I could hardly avoid it. I could hear you from my garden.”
    “What were you doing up at the crack of dawn?”
    “I always get up for sunrise. Anyway, if I heard you, someone else might have heard you, too, so it’s best if you tell me what you were fighting about.”
    Norma’s face hardened. “Well, if you heard us, then you must know what it was about.”
    “I only heard shouting. I couldn’t make out what you were actually saying. Then I looked down and saw Zoila waving some kind of paper in your face. What was on that paper?”
    “That’s none of your business,” Norma huffed.
    “Look, I’m not trying to pry into your business,” Claire reasoned. “Zambuco is looking for people to put on his suspect list—people who had an argument with Zoila. I’m