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you asked.”
    While my aunt had yet to bop down the aisle to Here Comes the Bride , she felt compelled to ensure I didn’t escape taking that trip. While I couldn’t fault her for her loving concern, I did take issue with her methods. More than once, I’d been sent on an errand only to be accosted in the store by a guy with a fistful of flowers and a dinner reservation down the block. I guess my refusal to do any more of Millie’s shopping had resulted in more drastic measures.
    “Mike’s not the country club type.” Unless I was performing, neither was I, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to be pressured into a relationship with Detective Mike or anyone else. Since my aunt wasn’t about to agree with my point of view, I faked a wide yawn, plead exhaustion, and bolted upstairs. Did I know how to handle confrontation or what?
    My sore muscles whimpered with relief as I cranked the shower to scalding. For several minutes, I just stood under the steaming water, trying to wash away the mental image of David Richard collapsing to the ground. When I was clean and dry, I pulled on a pair of worn flannel pajamas, set my alarm for the crack of dawn, and climbed into bed.
    An hour later, I was still staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come. No matter how fatigued my body was, my mind wouldn’t hit the off switch. Tired of lying in the dark, I flipped on the light and padded over to the desk. A moment later my laptop hummed to life.
    As a performer, I’d had a couple of opportunities to act out murder on the stage. My favorite was playing Rosa in the Mystery of Edwin Drood . The music was challenging, the humor dark, and the audience got to vote on the person they believed was responsible for the murder and watch that ending play out on stage. I was thrilled when the audience voted for my character. On stage, being an accused murderer was fun. Real life? Not so much.
    Since none of the murderous shows I’d performed in involved potassium cyanide, I decided to Google it. Less than a minute had passed between David chugging his water and his becoming intimately acquainted with the stage floor. A poison that potent should be hard to acquire, right?
    According to the Internet, Mike was right. The hallmarks of potassium cyanide poisoning were seizures and red cheeks. Crystals of potassium cyanide were reported to smell like bitter almonds, which explained the paramedic’s report on David’s breath. The small salt-like crystals were easily dissolved in water, and if I did the math right, a teaspoon of the stuff mixed in David’s water would have been enough to fell a small elephant in almost no time.
    My stomach clenched. Had the poison been added before or after my run-in with David? As a singer, drinking from my water bottle was a reflex, something I did without thought. At least twenty minutes passed between the time I smacked into David and the moment he took that deadly drink of water. The bottle hadn’t been full when I picked it up off the floor. Like mine, the bottle had been half empty, but the bottle David Richard toasted me with had been filled to the top with water. That meant someone had refilled the bottle and added the drug sometime between the time David waltzed into his dressing room and his appearance on stage.
    My stomach muscles unclenched. Even if I had ended up with the wrong bottle, I wouldn’t have suffered David’s fate. More important, after filling my own bottle, I had gone upstairs and waited in the wings of the stage. Several backstage techs walked by while I was there, which meant I had an alibi for the time of the poisoning. While Mike said I wasn’t a serious contender for the murder-suspect title, a rock-solid alibi would take me out of the running for sure.
    Phew.
    Now that I had a method of proving my innocence to the cops, my mind started working. If the crystallized version of the poison smelled like bitter almonds, I doubted the drug was tasteless. Of course,