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how Betty Terns had suffered through the years. If I heard how much she’d suffered, I would feel the need to help her, and I had enough problems. I was tired. I was supposed to be a matchmaker, but I had no ideahow to go about it and would probably bankrupt my grandmother. I had gained ten pounds. Half of Cannes, and almost all of its police force and fire department, had seen my underpants. And most important, I had to shower in antiseptic as soon as possible because I had just spent an hour resting my arms on the table where poor Randy Terns had bashed his brains out.
    Peter Terns didn’t seem to sense my discomfort, couldn’t tell that I had problems of my own. He planted his feet on the sidewalk in front of my house, halfheartedly dusted off his tie, and looked me in the eyes. “My mother was married for fifty-four years,” he said.
    “Th-that’s wonderful,” I stammered.
    “Wonderful? It was hell. My father treated her like crap.” A vein on his forehead popped out.
    “Domestic abuse is a terrible thing,” I said, taking a step back.
    “It sure as hell is. You know what he did?” I took this as a rhetorical question. “Dad didn’t like to share.” He spit out the last word with a sneer that made me step back again. To my horror, he made up the difference, advancing toward me. “She should have left him long ago,” he said. “But she stayed with him, and what did it get her? What did it get
me
?” He hit his chest for emphasis.
    Peter took out a cigarette, the go-to drug for the Terns family. I jumped on the break in his little tirade to say goodbye and hightailed it up the driveway. Just as I reached my front door, I heard Peter grumble to himself, something like, “… if he slipped or not,” and “… rat’s ass if someone knocked his head, he deserved it.”
    I locked the door behind me and checked on Grandma. She was sleeping soundly in her canopy bed, probably dreaming about Cupid, not about bashed-out brains.
    I grabbed a well-deserved cookie from the kitchen and went back up to the attic. After I’d spent fifteenminutes scouring through index cards, Peter’s words came back to me with a jolt.
    Share? What didn’t Randy Terns want to share? Whatever it was, it sure made his son Peter angry. Angry enough to bust open the walls in his house, most likely.
    Peter wasn’t shedding any tears over his father’s death. In fact, I hadn’t noticed any tears in the Terns household. Instead, they were almost ghoulish in their curiosity about the exact cause of Randy Terns’ demise. Supposedly he had slipped, cracked his head open on the corner of the table and died on the floor.
    I was starting to understand what was so interesting about the kitchen table being clean. Something was definitely fishy about Randy Terns’ death, and at least one of his children thought he deserved to be murdered.

Chapter 3

    I f you’re lucky, if you’ve done your job right, the couple has a twinkle after their first date. But you have to investigate this twinkle. Is it a good twinkle or a bad twinkle? Don’t kid yourself. Bad twinkles exist. Tragedy has happened many times from bad twinkles. Romeo and Juliet, for example. That was a case of a bad twinkle. If they’d had a good twinkle, they could have done without the drama and poison and probably lived happily ever after. So you need to ask them about their twinkle. Investigate a little. Go ahead. Don’t be shy. It’s what you’re supposed to do
.
    Lesson 30,
Matchmaking Advice from Your Grandma Zelda
    I WALKED up a block to Main Street and took a left. It was a gorgeous day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the temperature was a dry seventy-eight degrees, and the breeze was blowing, sending me wafts of wild-flower scents. This part of Main was covered in cobblestones with narrow sidewalks and quaint stores. If you were looking for antiques, silver jewelry, pies, and tea, you didn’t have to look any farther than Main Street in the historic district