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at controllin ’ myself, so you just have yourself a good hiss and spit.” She shrugged and grinned. “Trouble is, back in those days, it was mostly me givin ’ the other gals’ men the eye.”
    “How did your sweetie feel about that?” I inquired, and Margo hooted.
    “My sweetie of the week or my next-in-line sweetie? Sugar, you know I like men better’n I like chocolate candy, but up until I met John Harkness , I could take or leave ‘ em all.”
    I knew my libidinous friend well enough to know what she said was true. I also knew that chapter in her life had ended the day she’d married John. The best-looking hunk in Connecticut couldn’t tempt Margo to be unfaithful to her husband of four years.
    “So if you’d been my classmate at Brewster High, I would have had to worry about you instead of Mindy Marchelewski , is that what you’re telling me?”
    “Don’t know about that, but you can bet if I’d been at Brewster, Mindy would have had to worry about me .”
    I laughed along with her but sobered quickly as the events of the previous evening came back into focus.   I had left Joanie and Ariel to the ministrations of concerned onlookers and rushed into the cramped women’s room to find Mindy slumped on the floor. I called her name repeatedly and attempted to locate a pulse beneath her jaw and in one limp wrist, but I didn’t find one, so I shoved my way back out the door and yelled at the gawkers to call 911. Officer McCarthy, who’d been moonlighting as the security officer required for such events in a public building, had quickly taken over, pushing back the crowd and summoning medical help before attempting CPR. My next clear memory was of Mindy’s still form being taken by stretcher to the waiting ambulance.
    Margo read my expression and took a stab at lightening my gloom. “You’d think by now you’d be able to take a dead body or two in stride , Miss Marple ,” she joked gently. Over the past few years my partners in Mack Realty and I had been drawn into an unusual number of local homicide inquiries. Apparently, the real estate business was fraught with opportunities, not to mention motivations, for collateral mayhem, even in the picturesque and historic area known as Old Wethersfield.
    “It’s Mrs. Fletcher, according to Armando, and I have no desire to channel either one of those ladies,” I growled. “I knew Mindy Marchelewski personally.”
    “Didn’t like her, though,” Margo reminded me.
    “That doesn’t mean I wished her dead.   I wasn’t crazy about Prudy Crane or Alain Girouard either, but it wasn’t fun finding them dead, as I recall,” I moped, referring to two other investigations in our shared past. “I’m seriously beginning to wonder if I’m a jinx or have bad karma or something.”
    Margo sank down beside me on the sofa and propped her chin on one fist. “Do you know, I’ve been havin ’ the same idea, Sugar. It seems like ever since I met you at that revoltin ’ law firm in Hartford, it’s just been one murder after another. There was the lawyer, and then Prudy . After that came the skeleton in the Henstock sisters’ basement and the executive’s brother who turned up dead at the Wadsworth Atheneum gala. Then there was the mysterious death at the retirement home. Let’s face it, hon , you’re just bad news waitin ’ to happen. The only question is, who’s next?” She shrank away from me in mock horror and moved to the end of the sofa.
    I regarded her sourly. “Very funny. You know perfectly well that every one of those unfortunate incidents had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It’s pure coincidence that I—make that we—got involved in the investigations at all. One of them wasn’t even a murder. If you and Strutter and I hadn’t become friends and then business partners, you wouldn’t even have known about those things.”
    “You are who you know,” Margo agreed, grinning. “Just my bad luck, I guess.”
    I grabbed a sofa pillow and