“So you know the truth,” she said. “Funny, it’s actually a relief. It’s been hell keeping it bottled up inside me for so long.”

She put her feet up on the coffee table, and I was surprised to see that she was wearing pink bunny slippers. No-nonsense Doris in bunny slippers? I guess you never know what people are going to wear in the privacy of their own homes, a lesson I should’ve learned after that episode with The Blob and my teddy.

She glanced down at the Times article, and her eyes grew hard.

“That bitch walked away from the accident without a scratch. And poor Glen never walked again. We never heard a word from her. No apology. No flowers. Not even a crummy get-well card. For two years, I watched my husband die, day by day, all because of Marybeth.”

She picked up the printout and crumpled it into a tight ball.

“After Glen died, I hired a private eye to track her down. I joined her gym and ingratiated myself with her friends. Eventually they asked me to join the PMS Club. I wasn’t planning to kill her. Not at first, anyway. In the beginning, I just wanted to see what kind of person could walk away from a tragedy like that without a second thought. I thought that maybe once I got to know her she wouldn’t be so bad, that I’d discover something about her that would explain her actions.”

She shook her head, waving away that notion.

“But I hated her from the minute I met her. She was everything I feared she’d be, and worse. And so I knew I had to kill her.”

Omigosh. She was confessing. Right here and now. The case was over. All I had to do was get her to sign a confession, and I could start working at Union National with the adorable Andrew Ferguson!

“I was going to drain the brake fluid from Marybeth’s Porsche. Have her die in an auto accident. It would be poetic justice.”

She smiled grimly.

If I ever wrote a memoir, I knew what the title of this chapter would be: The Killer Wore Bunny Slippers!

“But each time I tried to do it,” she said, “I lost my nerve. It’s not easy draining brake fluid from a car without attracting attention.”

“So then you decided to poison her with peanut oil?”

“No,” she said. “Then I got lucky. Somebody else killed her for me.” She gave her bunny slippers a happy wiggle. “All’s well that ends well, eh?”

“So you didn’t put the peanut oil in the guacamole?”

“Nope,” she said, her eyes glinting steely gray. “Wasn’t me.”

With that, she picked up the crumpled Times story and tossed it into the fireplace.

So much for her confession. I thanked Doris for her time and left her alone with her memories of Glen.