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.He’d thank her profusely, might even kiss her cheek.That thought gave her a funny feeling inside.Her son had never kissed her.How could he? He’d grown up thinking Edna was his mother.Edna had done a marvelous job with him, Claire had to admit.It wasn’t her fault he’d taken his father’s genes.Claire pushed the thought of Sean’s father from her head.He wasn’t worthy of anything more than a fleeting memory.The slime had run for the hills as soon as the “p” word had come from Claire’s lips.The air was filled with the delicious chocolate aroma.She wondered how potent the poison was all the way outdoors.Should she hold her breath or would the air disperse it? Claire walked slowly up the driveway.As she got about halfway, the timer went off.Her heart did a flip-flop.She took an extra deep breath and stepped indoors.She took one pan from the oven, hurried to set it on the back porch to cool, raced away and took a breath, then did the same thing for the second layer.Sitting on the windowsill, they looked perfectly normal.Claire left the blanket hanging in the doorway and the ingredients on the counter.Her meticulous nature pecked at her to clean things up, but she wasn’t certain the air was fit to breathe yet.She’d wait till morning to wash up and whip the buttercream frosting.One single slice of cake for Sean.Not the whole thing because he might give a piece to someone else.Claire poured some brandy.Yes, morning was soon enough to dispose of the remaining cake; break it into chunks and wash the pieces down the garbage disposal.Just some bleach afterwards and it would all be gone.The authorities would determine that the cake killed Sean, but who’d baked it would remain a mystery.* * * *Claire couldn’t sleep.Just after 3 a.m., she got up and went downstairs.She pulled back an edge of the blanket and poked her head into the room.A blast of cold air hit her.She sniffed.Was that a chocolate smell, or her imagination? The air should certainly be all right to breathe by now, shouldn’t it?Everything seemed all right.At the stove she put the kettle on for chamomile tea.While the water heated, she went out to the porch and peeked at the cake layers.They were beautiful—tall and fluffy.The potion hadn’t destroyed the rising properties of the baking powder.Well, the tasting would be the most telling factor.And only one person was slated to taste this cake.Too bad.Such a lovely specimen.Usually while making frosting, Claire couldn’t keep herself from sampling thick fingerfuls of it, but today she couldn’t get the image of the monkshood mixture from her brain.She hadn’t put poison in the frosting, but the vision was too strong to take the chance.By 4:14 a.m., the cake was iced in wide sweeping swirls of creamy goodness.She slipped on a new pair of gardening gloves and took a china plate from the dish drainer.It was a pretty plate, with tiny roses etched along the outer edge, and a gold rim.Claire didn’t know where that had come from.Maybe the same place as the Popsicle stick.For some reason, the notion was humorous, and she spent some time envisioning the people who’d visited her home, bringing food.Would one of them have also brought Popsicles? She couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten a Popsicle.Still smiling, she wiped around the plate’s surface, making sure all the fingerprints were removed.It had crossed her mind to use a paper or foam plate, but one—she didn’t have any in the house, and two—the cops were good at tracing such things.Surely some store clerk would recall her buying a package just a day before the murder.Claire took the gloves off long enough to cut a wedge of cake.If her townspeople thought she’d been famous for her cake before, what would they think in a week? She laid the slice on the plate, careful not to smudge frosting or drop crumbs.She rinsed the cake cutter under scalding hot tap water, then put the gloves back on.They were too unwieldy and she had to try more than once to pull plastic wrap from the box, tear it along the little metal cutter and shape a double layer around the plate.Finally it was done.She stood back and viewed her work.It looked good.Nothing to trace back to her.The plastic wrap was a common variety.The rest of the cake had to be disposed of, but right now it was most important to get the kitchen cleaned up.She had a dishwasher but didn’t trust it to remove all the trace evidence.She’d learned about trace evidence on CSI.So maybe television wasn’t so bad.Claire boiled water in her largest pot—a lobster cooker—and drank tea while everything soaked for at least ten minutes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]