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you.” He took over for her. Maybe he wasn’t an automaton after all.
She put a kettle on the stove to boil water for tea for herself, then sent Jasper a text asking him to call her as soon as possible. When she saw Locke looking at her quizzically, she said, “I texted Jasper.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“No, but I didn’t expect to. We had a late dinner reservation.”
Simultaneously she and the detective looked at the clock on the microwave. It was almost eleven-thirty. “If he doesn’t call soon, I’ll try to reach him through the hotel switchboard. He’ll be very upset. Elaine was his friend, too.”
“Yes, mutual friends told us that they had drinks together yesterday at the country club.”
“And stayed for dinner.” Although she had voiced her suspicion of an affair to Jasper, she felt a need now to set the record straight: Their date yesterday hadn’t been behind her back. “I didn’t feel well last evening. Rather than join them, I stayed in and slept through dinner.”
Locke nodded thanks to his partner, who had passed him a cup of coffee. He blew across the top of it. “Why didn’t you go to Atlanta? Was it a business trip for Mr. Ford?”
“No. He’s retired.” Becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the tenor of his questions, she turned her back to him, opened a cabinet, and took down a box of chamomile tea. “The trip was to have been a getaway. I made it as far as the airport, then began feeling queasy. I begged off but insisted that Jasper go ahead without me. It’s a new hotel. Jasper is a gourmet. He looked forward to trying out the chef.”
“What new hotel?”
“The Lotus.”
Menundez left his freshly brewed cup of coffee on the counter, stepped out of the kitchen into the dining room, and got on his cell phone.
“Did you get over it?”
Talia had watched the other detective leave and could now hear him speaking quietly into his phone. She turned back to Locke. “Pardon?”
“The queasiness.”
“It comes and goes.”
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
She shook her head. “I had some dental work done yesterday morning. The prescribed pain pills must not have agreed with me.”
“You were sleeping them off last night while your husband and Mrs. Conner were at the country club.”
“I thought I had slept them off. I guess I didn’t. The upset recurred today.”
Locke set his unfinished coffee on the table. “Do you have an explanation for the house alarm going off this afternoon?”
She followed the direction of his gaze to the control box on the wall next to the back door. “The alarm went off?”
“Not the siren. It was shut off during the warning beeps with time to spare. Strange, because no one was at home.”
She shook her head in confusion. “When was this?”
Menundez returned in time to hear her question. “Five oh-seven,” he said. “Patrolmen were dispatched. Saw no sign of a break-in.”
“A glitch in the system, you think?” Locke asked.
Menundez said, “Or else someone who knew the code was here.”
If they’d been speaking in a foreign language, Talia couldn’t be more confounded. “Like who?”
“We hoped you could tell us,” Menundez said.
“I’m sorry. I know nothing about the alarm going off, so I can’t explain why it did.”
