Artful Dodger (Maggie Kean Mis-Adventures) by Nageeba Davis Page A

Stubbornness and persistence are usually not adjectives we use to describe weak, lonely old ladies. You might want to spend time with a thesaurus looking up some new words if you want to convince the judge that Elizabeth was a crazy old lady with cotton for brains.”
    “You little—” he began, but I cut him off.
    “Yeah, I drive men crazy that way,” I said, sauntering off down the hall, praying he wouldn’t follow. A door slammed behind me and I was fairly sure Preston had stomped into the library to drown his sorrows in bourbon.
    Elizabeth always began her fancy dinners with champagne cocktails and martinis in the library. I could still see her, standing in my studio, staring out the window and regaling me with stories about her evening while I worked on my latest sculpture.
    “Ah, Maggie, you should have seen Marianne floating into the room, wearing some little slip of a thing that was three sizes too small, with a décolletage that dipped down to her navel, the whole ensemble precariously held up by two thin spaghetti straps. I spent the whole evening waiting for the straps to break and for her superb breasts to flop into the lobster bisque, but the damn things held up magnificently.” She turned to study my work in progress and sighed deeply. “Unfortunately, nothing happened, and it was another mundane evening with the kind of dull, polite conversation so often associated with a good cause.”
    “And these are the evenings you’d like me to attend?”
    “Ah, yes!” she said, clapping her hands together. “We would have such a delightful time together. It would be wonderful to share them with someone who sees the world the same way I do. Who knows? If you’d been there last night, we might have found a way to snip the straps on Marianne’s dress just to see everyone’s expression.”
    I had forgotten about that mischievous sparkle that danced in her eyes whenever she wanted to do something this side of naughty.
    “Elizabeth, someday when I have nothing else to do— and I mean nothing else—I’ll let you drag me to one of these dinners of yours. In the meantime, I’ll just have to be content with your stories to spice up my boring little life.”
    I forced the memory aside and swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand as I reached Elizabeth’s office. The door was open an inch or two, so I nudged it a little and quickly stepped in. The room was dark and eerie, her scent still permeating the air. I closed the door softly and leaned against it. The moonlight slid noiselessly through the windows and bounced off the back of the same chairs we’d occupied earlier, still arranged in a semicircle in front of her desk. Shadows pooled on the carpet like dark stains. Realizing I had very little time to spare before Preston became suspicious, I tiptoed to Elizabeth’s desk. Her leather chair squeaked as I sat down behind the desk and began to open the drawers one by one, not sure what I was looking for. I could only hope that if I came across something important, it would have the sense to be stamped and filed in an envelope marked IMPORTANT MURDER MATERIAL.
    It came as no surprise that Elizabeth’s desk was meticulously organized. The center drawer held perfectly aligned pens and pencils, paper clips, personalized notepads, and other types of stationery. The larger drawer on the right-hand side was actually a small file cabinet filled with twenty or thirty separate folders, each one neatly labeled with the names of different charities and organizations Elizabeth contributed to in some form or other over the years. In the last drawer on the left, there were folders stuffed with financial information. I pulled a few and flipped quickly through the pages, but the numbers began to run together in my head and were nothing more than gibberish to me.
    Without warning, the faint sound of footsteps disturbed the silence, growing louder as they rapidly approached Elizabeth’s office. With my heart pounding and my