Death Will Extend Your Vacation by Elizabeth Zelvin

wireless router, coils of cable, adapters, and what he called peripherals. He’d have told us what each one did, but he knew from long experience we didn’t want to know.
    “You have to cut them out of the herd,” Jimmy said. His fingers flew on the laptop’s keyboard, and he jounced on his seat to the music in his headphones, of which we could hear only a faint megabass boom. “Who’d be likely to know the most?”
    “Oscar and Phil,” I said. “They were her lovers. And this Ted guy if he shows up.”
    “Stephanie and Jeannette,” Barbara said. “Women who’ve shared a group house know a hundred times more about each other than any guy would.”
    “Sez who?”
    “Feminist psychologists,” she retorted. “Women are relational.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Think about the last five women you slept with.”
    “I can only remember two,” I said. “The others, I was still drinking.”
    “I can’t remember anyone but you, pumpkin,” Jimmy said. “It’s been too long and I’m getting too old.”
    “The five most memorable, then,” she said. “Do you know how they lost their virginity? How many D&Cs they’ve had? How they get along with their mothers and sisters?”
    “You know all that about your friends?”
    “I know all that about women I’ve sat next to on a plane.”
    “You win,” I said. “Let’s say we push harder, talk to all of them: Oscar, Phil, Ted if we can, Stephanie, Jeannette. How about Karen and Lewis?”
    “Them too,” Barbara said, “but they didn’t share a house with her last summer.”
    “They went to meetings with her.”
    “They can’t share what she said in meetings,” Jimmy said. “Anonymity.”
    “But she’s dead.”
    “It’s still wrong,” he insisted. “They’re our housemates. We’ll be sharing shampoo and tortilla chips with them all summer.”
    “The police don’t even think it was murder,” I pointed out.
    “Then they won’t get in our way,” Barbara said.
    “And if they’re right?”
    “So we won’t find anything that proves it was,” she said.
    Barbara and I found Jeannette in the kitchen, stirring a double boiler full of crème anglaise.
    “You have to stir it and stir it and stir it,” she said. “It’s supposed to thicken, but it hasn’t yet, and my arm is killing me.”
    Barbara used her eyebrows to give me a wordless order. I took the long-handled spoon out of Jeannette’s hand and got to work.
    I thought they’d start schmoozing immediately. Nope. They both headed for the refrigerator.
    “Narnia isn’t in there,” I said. “And my back is getting cold.”
    They each snagged a Diet Coke. Barbara closed the door with a regretful backward glance.
    “How can you drink that swill?” I asked as they popped and glugged. “It’s not mostly chemicals. It’s all chemicals.”
    “Better chemicals than calories,” Jeannette said.
    Women. I didn’t bother pointing out that crème anglaise has calories.
    “This stuff is thickening,” I said. I held the spoon upright in the thick goo of egg yolks, sugar, and cream and let it go. It subsided very slowly against the rim of the pot.
    “Let’s see,” Jeannette said. “It should coat the side of the spoon.”
    She came up behind me and leaned over my shoulder. Tendrils of brown hair fell over her forehead. A few wispy curls tickled my ear. I could feel the damp warmth of her body and smell a powdery floral scent. As she reached for the spoon, the shell necklace she wore around her neck swung forward against my shoulder.
    “Sorry!” She flipped it back with a practiced gesture, so it snaked around the front of her neck and dangled down her back.
    “Oh, that’s pretty,” Barbara said. “Let me see.”
    Jeannette had taken command of the crème anglaise again. I stepped back and looked at the necklace, still around Jeannette’s neck but the shells held loosely in Barbara’s hand. It was more of a pendant, really. A very small but convoluted whitish shell hung on a gold chain