Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier

look dreary; it was nothing like the shiny new superstore that had opened out on the Interstate. Nevertheless, it offered a change from the gray monotony of winter in Maine.
    Lucy stopped at the magazine rack and leafed through one of the women’s magazines but decided she didn’t want to get organized and wasn’t interested in perking up her wardrobe or spicing up favorite family meals. What she really wanted to know was who killed Bitsy, and why, information she wasn’t going to find in Family Circle . She replaced the magazine and slowly pushed the cart along, pausing at the meagre display of fresh flowers and potted plants.
    Why didn’t they ever have anything but those ghastly carnations? The red color was an unpleasant reminder of Bitsy’s blood, spreading out on the gray industrial tile of the workroom. She picked up a little polka-dot plant in a pink pot and examined it; it didn’t look worth three ninety-nine so she put it back.
    Dispirited, she pushed on to the produce department, wishing that she hadn’t gotten so angry at Miss Tilley. She shouldn’t have reacted the way she did; half of what Miss Tilley said was for effect. She loved to shock people, and she had certainly succeeded this morning. Lucy had found the old woman’s callousness toward Bitsy’s death shocking, but sometimes it seemed to her that old people didn’t react in quite the same way to death as younger people. She remembered her own grandfather checking the obituaries every morning and his satisfaction when he occasionally discovered he’d outlived a younger acquaintance.
    â€œNever touched a drop and wouldn’t eat red meat,” he’d comment. “Didn’t do him much good, did it?”
    She smiled to herself, remembering a spry old fellow in a plaid flannel shirt neatly topped with a bow tie, and khaki pants held up by suspenders. He certainly enjoyed an occasional glass of whiskey, and insisted on meat and potatoes for dinner every night. Grandma’s occasional experiments with spaghetti and Spanish rice had not been successful. He had lived to be eighty-five even though he never ate a raw vegetable and considered fruit unfit for human consumption unless it was baked inside a pie crust.
    Lucy reached for a bag of oranges and, on further consideration, added a bag of grapefruit. Even if the board members had favored Bitsy, she thought, they would have been thoroughly dismayed by her proposal to sell Josiah’s Tankard. An idea like that would have lost her some friends, that was for sure.
    She stopped, resting her forearms on the handle of the cart, and considered a display of cereal. Now that she’d had time to think it over, Miss Tilley’s attitude toward Bitsy wasn’t really all that surprising. Miss Tilley had devoted her life to the library; she had worked there for fifty years or more. It was much more than a job to her. The library contained everything she held dearest in life, including Josiah’s Tankard. She must have been deeply hurt when she was forced to retire and her job was given to Bitsy. And it certainly didn’t help matters that Bitsy’s attitudes were so radically different from hers.
    If Miss Tilley was entitled to dislike Bitsy, if she regarded her as an enemy, Lucy guessed she couldn’t blame her for taking some satisfaction in her demise. Putting it that way made it seem better, she decided. “Demise” was a much nicer word than “murder”.
    Miss Tilley was just reacting in a very human way. Queen Elizabeth I probably indulged in a chuckle or two when she succeeded in detaching Mary, Queen of Scots’ head from her neck.
    And besides, she was never going to get to the bottom of this without Miss Tilley’s help, she decided. Miss Tilley knew everything about everybody in town, and who had what skeletons hidden in which closet. She also knew a lot about Bitsy, even though that knowledge was tainted