Two of her three listeners shuddered pleasurably. The third, Lucy Ramsdale, snorted. For a woman who looked as fragile and exquisite as Meissen china, Lucy had a very strong snort. "I told Jeanette Eckert if she sold to those ghouls she deserved to be their first customer and I'd dance at her funeral."

None of her fellow volunteers questioned this statement. Very few people in Wingate would have questioned it. Lucy had never been twiddle-tongued. She had been a beauty, and she still had the finely whittled bone structure-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of a beauty. Recently she'd been involved in investigating several local murders, and unlike those sleuths who believe in keeping their mouths shut, she was still apt to speak her mind. The trait was, at times, the despair of her tenant, Inspector James McDougal, the retired head of homicide of the Connecticut State Police, who lived in the studio behind her house three miles outside Wingate. The studio had been her husband's; Hal Ramsdale had died several years before, and nobody since had been able-- or brave enough-- to curb Lucy's tongue.

"Where the hell's the dagger?" she said now.

-from Beauty Sleep (1977)

...Janet snorted with amusement, then twisted around to glance at the electric clock on her bedside table. It was a present from a grateful author of historical romances, and Janet regarded it ungratefully, remembering how muzzy the woman had been on dates and epochs-- once she'd sent Marie Antoinette to a ball with Charles the Second-- and whenever she was corrected, saying, "But the mood is so much more important, I always think." It was typical of her well-meaning muddleheadedness to have chosen an expensive modern clock of the no-hands variety. At that moment, it was either ten minutes after twelve or two o'clock, and Janet plumped wishfully for the latter because she was paid by the hour for copy-editing.

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that was no help--4:13-- having stopped at the hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she'd wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

She had become so adept at shutting off her awareness of people that now that the odd noises had aroused her, she was as restless as someone who's been awakened suddenly, inexplicably, and can't get back to sleep. After deciding it was only 12:10 she wound her watch and thought crossly, How did it get to be so early? The sun feels more like July than October. The soil around the mums will be baked, and just when the buds are starting. A mirage of cracked, parched earth was so menacingly clear she jumped up from the desk just as another burst of noise overhead gave her an added excuse.

--from Open the Door (1966)