“Thanks, Dad. I thought you were in the business of offering comfort.” Regan yawned. “Veronica is a handful. She had a party for us this weekend that really turned into something unexpected. Do you remember my roommate, Athena, from Saint Polycarp’s?”

“Black fingernails?” Nora murmured. “She eloped or something?”

“The ‘or something’ is that she was murdered,” Regan said. As they listened, their expressions shocked, she sketched the details of the discovery of Athena’s body. “Superintendent Livingston asked me to try to remember anything Athena might have told me about plans to meet someone. I drew an absolute blank but I’m going to get my journal out of the attic at home and see if that helps and I also have another idea ...” Regan told them about her plan to call Livingston and ask him to fax her newspaper accounts from Greece about Athena’s death.

“That’s a smart move,” Nora said thoughtfully. “It’s like an investigator picking up the file of an unsolved crime years later and seeing something he missed on the first go-round.”

Regan placed the ship-to-shore call from their phone. As she waited for the connection to go through, she sat down on the loveseat. “Let me know how much this costs. I just don’t want it on Veronica’s account.”

Nora and Luke both smiled. “Sure, we’ll bill you,” Luke drawled. “And incidentally, you had two cups of coffee, one orange juice and half a bran muffin.”

Regan was eyeing the clock nervously when the operator rang back to say she had Superintendent Livingston on the line. Quickly Regan identified herself and explained her proposal regarding the Greek newspapers.

“I’ll get them to you directly,” the Inspector told her. “We can have them translated quickly, and possibly there’s an English-language newspaper in the area of the family home. We ourselves have come up with nothing helpful. But there is something else you should know. Miss Atwater had a narrow escape. She will recover, but traces of poison were found in her system.”

“Penelope was poisoned?” Regan gripped the receiver, not believing what she had just heard. “But how?”

Livingston’s tone became cautious. “Apparently she made a paste for biscuits to serve at Lady Exner’s cocktail party. From what she tells us she finished the last of the lot in her room Sunday night. The maid found a piece of one of them crumpled in her bedcovers. Rather reminds one of the saying, ’You can eat crackers in my bed anytime.’ Oh dear. When the poison was found in her system we immediately began an investigation and were fortunate in that she’s a bit of an untidy lady, I gather, and therefore the crumbs.”

“Is it possible she made a mistake and put something in the paste herself?” Regan asked.