Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) by Judith K. Ivie Page B

attachment be strong enough to pull him back to me when this was all over? I wondered.
    As my mind wandered through the five years of our relationship, I tried to remember when it was that I really knew we were a couple, but I couldn’t remember any specific date or event. It had been more of a realization backed by small, but important, assurances of how important we had become to one another. I remembered a vacation trip, our first together, that we had taken to Disney World in Florida. Both of us had taken our children there many years previously, but we loved the idea of being able to explore at our leisure all of the EPCOT attractions that our kids had dismissed as “ Boorrrring !” So off we went, and despite killer heat and aching legs, we had a ball.
    At that time Armando had not yet become an American citizen, and he was particularly intrigued by the U.S. pavilion. We explored it on a morning when musical entertainment was offered. A crowd had formed in the building’s rotunda to listen to a splendid octet sing several patriotic numbers. Armando’s attention was glued to the singers, and I wandered quietly around the perimeter of the room examining the artifacts displayed on the walls. The music ended, and I stood back a bit from the dispersing tourists and looked for Armando. I spotted him right away, standing across the rotunda from me. He was searching the crowd wildly, a lost look in his eyes that gripped my heart. He was looking for me, I realized, and I instinctively moved through the crowd to reach him. When I got close enough, I raised my hand and waved. “Armando! I’m here!” His head turned toward my voice, eyes still searching, and then he saw me. His worried expression disappeared immediately, and we beamed at each other. As long as we were together, I realized at that moment, we would be okay, and I knew that Armando felt that, too. I sighed deeply, missing him.
    Then there was Girouard’s murder and my surprising willingness, along with that of my new colleagues, to involve ourselves in trying to save Ingrid’s job and reputation. While I still smarted in what I felt was a demeaning role, I was buoyed by the strength and good humor of the other women in the firm who shared that role. Oh, there were a few dingbats and silly bimbos, but by and large, far from being the downtrodden little drones they might have been under the circumstances, the secretaries were a bright, capable bunch who seemed able to present an assured face to the world and let their bosses’ arrogance roll off their backs.
    “We work for the money, Honey,” was how Strutter put it, and I had to admit that the pay and the benefits were excellent. When you have kids to educate and a family that needs health insurance, you do what you have to do, and these women did it with more grace than I could manage.
    I had swallowed my pride and put in a call to Detective Diaz this afternoon to see if the police had any hot new leads on either the cause of death or suspects, but she had simply said that the results of the toxicology tests were not yet available and invited me to keep in touch. The obvious cause of death was the amaretto coffee, laced with some unspecified poison, and the obvious suspects were Girouard’s most recent lover/secretary and his long-suffering wife. Liking Ingrid as much as I was beginning to, and not knowing Vera Girouard at all, I hoped the murderer turned out to be the latter.
    Lastly, there were my growing concerns about living in this condominium community. I was fairly certain I could continue to pay the bills on the place now, but did I want to stay? The rules and regulations had purportedly been drawn up to protect the value of everyone’s property, but if that was their sole purpose, they seemed unnecessarily restrictive. Was I prepared to accept my neighbors informing on me for hanging bath mats on my back railing? Was I willing to hide a two-pound kitten behind drawn curtains for fear of