Deadly Nightshade by Cynthia Riggs

set a dictionary on top.
    “It's probably nothing,” Victoria said.
    “Kept us entertained for a half hour,” Domingo said. “By tomorrow morning, we may be able to see something.”
    Elizabeth yawned.
    “I've got to get my granddaughter home.” Victoria looked at her watch. “Good heavens, it's one-thirty.”
    “You want to spend the night?” Noreen said. “We have plenty of room.”
    “No thanks,” Victoria said. “We'll be fine. I'm just curious to know what's on the papers we found today, that's all.”
    “They need to dry slowly,” Domingo said. “The glass will keep them from curling as they dry. Air can get in around the edges, so it won't mildew.”
    “I guess we'll know tomorrow,” Victoria said.
     
    On the way home, Victoria looked in the side mirror.
    “There's a car following us. A different one. The lights are lower and closer together.”
    “It must be Domingo.” Elizabeth frowned, and Victoria could see her face in the reflected light from the car behind, high cheekbones and wide mouth. “Funny, he didn't say anything about seeing us home.”
    The car followed them along Barnes Road, turned right when they did onto the Edgartown Road, followed them past the airport, and when they turned into the driveway, it continued on past them, turned right on Old County Road, and Victoria could see its taillights disappear into the night.

Chapter 5
    “I haven't seen much of Victoria since the murder,” Chief Casey O'Neill said to her sergeant, who was sitting at the desk across from hers, which he shared with the two patrolmen. Casey leaned back in her chair and lifted coppery hair away from her uniform collar. “She knows who's related to whom, so I don't make insulting jokes about someone's third cousin twice removed.” Junior grinned, eyes turned down, mout turned up. His pale mustache seemed to have been pasted on to him to make him look grown-up.
    “That was my father's sister-in-law's second cousin,” he said. “It's okay to insult 'connections'.”
    “I'm learning. After I've been here a few more years, maybe I'll understand the politics of this town.”
    Junior was filling out monthly reports. He erased something vigorously, then brushed eraser crumbs off his desk with the side of his hand. “Since Victoria heard that scream, she feels personally responsible for the investigation.”
    “She would,” Casey said.
    Junior scooped a handful of blunt pencils from his desk and took them over to the pencil sharpener screwed to the frame of the window that overlooked the pond. “She also feels she needs to protect her granddaughter after the divorce. I guess it was pretty messy.”
    “Tell me about it.” Casey leaned back in her swivel chair. “How's your dad these days?”
    “He's got a one-man show of his landscapes this fall.”
    “All right!” Casey said.
    When Ben Norton, Junior's father, retired as chief of police, Junior assumed he would succeed his dad. Instead, the selectmen hired Mary Kathleen O'Neill, from off-Island.
    After the first buzz of astonishment, the village settled down and waited. Casey was not one of them; she was trained in big-city crime. Wait and see, the village said, see how her graduate degrees equip her to handle wandering grandfathers, missing bicycles, farmer's market parking, and emergencies down unmarked dirt roads.
    Junior had been ready to quit and move off-Island. But he, too, waited. The new chief was making an effort to understand her new town and its people. After six weeks, Junior stayed on.
    He lined the pencils up on the windowsill and inserted them one at a time into the hand-cranked sharpener. In the pond, the pair of swans and their three half-grown cygnets were feeding, their long necks immersed in the shallow water, their tail feathers in the air. The cygnets' white adult feathers showed raggedly through gray baby down. On the other side of the pond, tall stalks of joe-pye weed had opened mauve blossoms.
    “I suppose we won't see