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your time. A pity them tablets was only for indigestion. Any minute now it could all be over. Me eyes would roll back in me head and me knees would do the limbo bend. Well”—mighty sniff—“beggars can’t be choosers. I’m off to throw meself over the cliff.”
    “Not if I have to pump a few rounds of sense into you.”
    Shocked to the core, I looked down at my hand, the one pointing the gun at my faithful daily, as if itching to put another notch on my belt. I didn’t believe this.What would I say to Ben when he came home tonight and asked what I had done to keep busy? This had to be a bad dream, although it felt more like a bad western. Right on cue, the desk clock struck high noon. When the last note shivered into silence, Mrs. Malloy teetered on her high heels, then slumped back in the leather chair.
    “Oh, my God, I’ve shot her!”
    Impossible. There had been no sound, unless … could this be what is meant by a deafening blast? And to think how recently I had been sweating the small stuff. All that nonsense about whether or not to keep my one o’clock appointment with Fully Female. I was a murderess. I would spend my children’s formative years in Holloway. I put the gun in my apron pocket and approached the corpse. On the count of three, I darted a touch at her dangling arm. Oh, my God! Her feather hat slid sideways, falling on the floor like a bagged bird, and at the same moment … the eyes of the corpse opened.
    “Promise me,” she rasped.
    “Anything!” She was alive!
    “Make sure I’m buried in me plum taffeta with the sequins and me sealskin stole—you’ll have to get it back from the cleaner’s. And one more thing … Tell Mr. Walter Fisher to eat his heart out when he closes me coffin lid.”
    What a crazy world. What a crazy day. I hadn’t shot Mrs. Malloy, but it said a lot about my state of mind that I thought I had. Apparently Jock Bludgett had been right when he said I needed more than a new pump. Mrs. Malloy certainly needed more help than I could give and there was no time to lose with the clock ticking on like a bomb and the babies to be fed.
    “Mrs. Malloy, don’t move.”
    Racing out into the hall, I skated across the flagstones,took a peek into the kitchen, blew Abbey and Tam a kiss, got goo-goos in reply, dodged back past the gawking suits of armour, and without pausing to regulate my breathing or shuffle my thoughts into a neat pile, picked up the telephone and dialled one of the few numbers I know by heart.
    Answered at the third ring.
    “St. Anselm’s vicarage.” The wary voice belonged to Mrs. Pickle, Rowland’s daily.
    “Emergency!” I shouted. “I must speak with—”
    “Just a mo.”
    Silence, then a clunk as she laid the phone down. Mrs. Pickle takes her own sweet time about everything. She calls it being conscientious. Standing on the dais, treading water like a kiddy locked out of the loo, I pictured her dusting off the receiver and straightening the paper and pens on the table before setting off at a snail’s pace, looking back over her shoulder every third step because she didn’t like leaving even a telephone caller unattended in the vicarage hall. Might come back to find a couple of church bulletins missing.
    Chewing on the telephone cord, I counted out her imagined footsteps going down the hall. The muffled thump of a door closing. Then all was swallowed in deadening silence. Would Mrs. Pickle have quickened her pace had I given my name? Remembering Jonas’s idea that she was sweet on him, I could have kicked myself. The minutes dragged on and I began to long for the music that had been piped into my ear during my phone call to Fully Female. But Mantovani was not in my immediate future.
    Voices crackled in my ear. Naturally I assumed Mrs. Pickle had unearthed Rowland from his study, but disappointment was only a screech away.
    No clue as to the identity of the screecher. But a man—who wasn’t Rowland—spoke, not into the phone,but