“I know she had an appointment with her attorney to sign the incorporation papers, but that only took half an hour. Yet she didn’t get home until after I’d closed the shop. We hardly had a chance to talk, I was getting ready to go out when she came in, and I left her changing to go to the meeting at City Hall.”

“Maybe she went to a movie,” Hud suggested. “It was her day off, after all.” He took her by the upper arms and gave a gentle shake. “I wish you’d let this alone,” he said.

“I can’t, Hud. It’s on my mind all the time, like one of those dumb songs that start in and won’t go away. I can get busy in the shop or figuring out Margot’s computer, but if I stop for just a minute, it starts in: Who murdered Margot? Who murdered Margot?”

He embraced her, and this time she let him. “Poor kid,” he said. He felt her lean into him and tightened his embrace just a little.

But that only made her pull back. She said, “Hud, I understand you and Margot were not exactly friends.”

“Who told you that?”

“Is it true?”

He grimaced. “Well, she was kind of mad at me, but that was a long while ago.”

“Because you dumped your second wife for your third.”

“I see my secretary has really been dishing the dirt.” He didn’t bother to sound amused this time.

“It wasn’t her, someone else told me.”

“You don’t think I hated Margot, do you?”

“No, it seems to have been the other way around. What happened?”

He sighed. “I got to know Margot through my wife Eleanor. We used to go out as a foursome, Eleanor and me, her and Aaron, and we all got along swell. Then I hired Sally as an assistant and thought I’d found true love. It was like Fourth of July fireworks.” He made an upward spiral with his hand. “Whoosh, whee, bang!” He dropped the hand. “Darkness.” He sighed. “I was the world’s greatest jerk, but by the time I found that out, Eleanor was dating a banker in Kansas City and not inclined to listen to anything I had to say. And Margot had been named to the board of directors of the art museum, which I thought for a while she maneuvered herself into as a way of getting at me. But while she never really forgave me for what I did, she was too interested in what was good for the museum to damage it in order to hurt me.”

“Was she alarmed about you flirting with me?”

He felt a little alarmed himself. “Did she say something to you?”

“Kind of. Hinting that you weren’t altogether one of the good guys.”

He nodded. “That’s fair. Because I’m not, you know.”