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)