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me, her pale eyes fixing on Colin. "I didn't realize you had company."
    "There was no reason why you should," said Colin blandly. He set down his fork on the edge of his plate. "Good evening, Joan."
    With her mouth back in place, this time pursed in annoyance, the woman was not, I have to admit, entirely unattractive. Her mouth might have been a little thin and her nose a little on the pug side, but the overall effect of high cheekbones, endless legs, and sun-streaked blond hair against perfectly browned skin could have graced a Ralph Lauren advertisement. I was willing to bet that she was one of those annoying people who tan, not burn.
    Her eyes, I noticed, were a little on the narrow side and a very pale blue. I don't usually notice people's eye color, but these particular eyes were still fixed on me in a decidedly inimical way.
    "You haven't introduced me to your… friend." She looked like she was chewing on the ashes I had volunteered to eat.
    "Eloise, this is Joan Plowden-Plugge; Joan, this is Eloise Kelly," provided Colin, lounging back in his chair.
    "Hi!" I said brightly.
    Joan continued to eye me with the sort of hostility better reserved for large insects that have invaded one's bed.
    "Are you a friend of Serena's?" she asked, in the deadly tones of one knowingly asking a losing question.
    "Well…" I had once held Colin's sister's head over a toilet bowl while she was violently ill, but I wasn't sure if that quite qualified as making us friends. "Not exactly," I hedged.
    Joan looked daggers at me. I looked appealingly at Colin, but he was busy looking at no one in particular, while cultivating a facade of amused indifference. Some help he was. Obviously, I was going to have to take care of this little misapprehension on my own, or, as Shakespeare so eloquently put it, risk a predestinate scratched face.
    "I'm a historian," I explained helpfully.
    Joan looked at me as though I had just volunteered to introduce her to the Mad Hatter.
    Okay, maybe it wasn't the most illuminating statement I could have made. I tried again. "Colin has been very generously allowing me the use of his archives," I clarified.
    Joan's face cleared.
    "Oh. You study dead people."
    Clearly, she was of the Pammy school of history, where Genghis Khan hobnobbed with Louis XIV on Bosworth Field—all wearing hoopskirts. After all, if they weren't in the tabloids last week, it was all olden days, anyway. If it meant that she wasn't going to come after me with her riding crop, I really didn't care if she thought Attila the Hun had been one of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles.
    "You could put it that way. Right now, the dead people I'm studying happen to be related to Colin, so he was kind enough to give me the run of his library."
    Libraries were evidently not a subject of abiding fascination to Miss Plowden-Plugge. With a swish of her braid, she dismissed me as an impediment of minimal importance, and returned to Colin. Given her position relative to the table, there was no way she could entirely cut me out of the conversation unless she were to stomp around the side of the table and stand between me and Colin, but she did her best, angling her body to maximize Colin frontage and minimize my presence. In profile, her nose appeared decidedly pug.
    She rested her right hand against the table and leaned towards Colin. "How is darling Serena?"
    Colin lazily tilted his head in my direction. "How would you say she is, Eloise?"
    "You've seen her more recently than I have," I replied in bewilderment.
    "But you were the one who took such charming care of her when she was ill the other night." Colin smiled beatifically at me before turning back to Joan, saying in a confidential tone, "We were at a party given by one of Eloise's friends the other night, and Serena felt a bit rough. But Eloise saw to her, didn't you, Eloise?"
    There wasn't anything in that statement that one could point to as technically untrue. Pammy had thrown a party, Serena had