“I told her,” Meredith said bleakly.

Oh, great, thought Lindsay. Why couldn’t she have been a Catholic and off-loaded the guilt to a silent priest? “You didn’t think she’d take it badly?”

“I knew she’d take it badly. That’s why I told her. I figured it would make her realize how upset I was about her plan to come out. I guess I thought she’d realize that if I felt backed into a corner so far that I had to do something that went so fundamentally against everything our relationship was about, it was real serious and she should think again about what she was doing.”

“And that’s not what happened.”

Meredith snorted ironically. “You got it. She could not see past her own concerns. All she could see was that I’d been unfaithful to her. She didn’t stop to think why I might have felt driven to do that. She just didn’t get it. Far as she was concerned, I’d committed one of the cardinal sins against the relationship. She was judge and jury and there was only one sentence she could pass. Had to be the death sentence. No mitigation.”

“Didn’t you try and explain?”

Meredith leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “What do you think?”

Lindsay gave a wry smile. “I think you showered her with flowers and cards, filled her answering-machine tape with messages and kept a constant watch on the deck so that if she so much as stuck her nose out the door of an evening, you’d be able to saunter casually up to her and throw yourself at her feet and beg for mercy. That’s what I think.”

“Not far off the mark.”

“And she ignored all your messages, dumped the flowers on your doorstep and didn’t set foot outside from the moment you came home from work to the minute you left again in the morning?”

“She tell you all this?” Meredith asked, resigned to embarrassment.

“She didn’t have to. Like you said earlier, I’ve known the pair of you right from the start. So you followed her over here to try and change her mind?”

Meredith nodded. “Waste of time and money. She’d have no more to do with me over here than she would back home. I guess she just about wore me down. The day she died, I left her another message on the answering machine. I swore it was going to be the last, and I told her so. I said it was her last chance to put it back together, otherwise I was going to assume she meant what she said and take appropriate action.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly.”

“I was wondering how the cops got to you so fast.”

“Wonder no more,” Meredith said wryly. “I left the number, of course.”

“And you knew all about the plot?”

“Oh, sure. Penny used to discuss her plots with three people—her agent, her editor and me.”

“Is that all?” Lindsay asked, dismayed at seeing her circle of suspects shrink towards zero.