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helping. I didn’t think that perspective needed to extend to her living environment. “Don’t you want something that pops?”
    “Not really.” Checking the price tag, she added, “You’re not going, are you?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t even talked to Mom. It would depend when it is, I guess.”
    “Well, I’m not going.”
    “Did you tell Mom that?”
    She bit her lip. “I told her I’d think about it.”
    I sighed. For a woman who dealt with confrontation day in and day out in her job, Danielle was strangely loath to lay things on the line in her personal life. “Well, if you said you’d think about it, why not think about it? It might be fun . . . a girls’ weekend at the beach, mani-pedis, piña coladas, shell collecting.”
    “Daddy should be there.” She put on a little-girl-lost face, eyes wide, mouth trembling.
    Sheesh . Getting all maudlin wasn’t going to help. “Dad? With Beryl, I presume?” His second wife, a woman he’d married five years ago, after Dani and I had already left home. “They could have a room that adjoined ours, and Mom and Beryl could compare notes while they had their toenails painted.” I put on a New Jersey voice like Beryl’s. “‘Didn’t you just hate the way Ronald tossed his socks near the hamper but never in it, Jean?’”
    “Not like that!” Dani tried to suppress a laugh but failed. “You know what I meant.”
    “Yeah. You meant you want to turn time back a dozen or so years. Not possible, baby sister.”
    “I don’t see why not,” she grumbled.
    I wisely left that unanswered. Instead, I distracted her by telling her about Corinne Blakely’s death and Maurice’s involvement.
    “I can’t see Maurice poisoning someone,” she said.
    “We don’t know that she was poisoned,” I cautioned, even though I had told her that poison was my guess for the murder weapon, since Maurice would have noticed a gun, knife, or garrote.
    “Poison’s a woman’s weapon.”
    “How sexist.”
    “It is,” she insisted. “I read it somewhere. Who does Maurice think did it?” Crowding me onto an ottoman as she passed me, she fingered the fringe on a pillow.
    “Someone whose secrets Corinne was going to reveal in her new tell-all memoir.”
    Danielle stopped examining furniture to look at me. “Really?”
    I nodded. “But I think it might have been her grandson. He struck me as the kind of whiny rich kid who expects to have things—everything he wants—handed to him on a platter. Immediately.”
    “Was he at the restaurant?”
    “Not as far as I know. Good point.” Danielle’s question made me think: Were there slow-acting poisons someone could have administered to Corinne earlier in the day/week/month that resulted in her death at the Swallow? My knowledge of poisons was severely limited. I knew better than to drink household cleaners or splash them in my eyes, and I thought oleander leaves were poisonous to animals—and maybe humans?—but that’s where my expertise stopped.
    “What about this?” We had wandered halfway around the store and I pointed at an olive green sofa with puffy cushions and a faint red stripe thinner than angel hair pasta. Not too bright, not too boring. Best of all, it was on sale. Dani sat on it, leaned back, and reclined with her feet hanging just off the edge.
    “It’s nice,” she said, “but I don’t think it goes with my Aegean Sunset walls.”
    “Maybe I should come over and see the apartment, now that you’ve off-loaded the broken sofa on Goodwill.” I made a frame of my hand and pretended to peer through it. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the place; I haven’t been over since you repainted.”
    “Sure,” Dani said. “How about tomorrow night? Cooper left today for a business trip, some sort of security convention in Las Vegas—ha!—so I don’t have plans any evening this week.”
    I never had evening plans unless I was teaching, so I didn’t feel too sympathetic that she was dateless