"When she hit the basement floor," Mel said.

"I know that. I mean what time?"

"The pathologist says some time between three-thirty and five-thirty. Too bad she wasn't wearing a watch that stopped conveniently."

"That's quite a window of time," Jane said. "I suppose you've asked everyone working there if anyone disappeared for a while."

"Of course I did," Mel said, surprisingly mildly. "Everybody was doing his or her own job and didn't pay much attention to what the others were doing. Some said they went outside on their breaks for a cigarette, a couple took bathroom breaks. You can't break alibis like that."

There was a long companionable silence as they watched Max and Meow, Jane's cats, returning from the field behind her house after a long day of hunting mice and chipmunks. Mel rose to let them in the house, but Jane said, "No, please don't open that door. I want them to throw up the remains outside instead of on my floors."

It was another full five minutes before Jane admitted that she and Shelley had taken Jacqueline and Henrietta to lunch earlier.

Mel started to object, but Jane cut him off. "We had a legitimate reason to meet with them. We're supposed to be doing the decorating and they're the carpenters who are using all the special wood. We wanted to make sure the color scheme we had in mind for the first part of the house to be finished met their approval."

Mel yelped with laughter. "I'll bet you cleared up that part of your talk pretty quickly and plunged into pure gossip."

Jane smiled. "Of course we did. Were you told about Jacqueline's getting shocked and passing out?"

"The electrician told us all about it. The wiring had been tampered with. Not badly enough to kill her because when she plugged in whatever it was, the fuse blew. Or so the electrician says. And so does my assistant, who understands electricity. She passed out because she jumped backward, tripped, and struck her head on a sawhorse when she fell."