As she considers her options, she meets up with a strange older woman who offers to help her out. As Deborah trails along behind her to some of the furniture reps' parties, she meets several people from her past, including a former college friend who comes through with a place to stay. Dixie Babcock dropped out of law school to become an unwed mother. Since that time, her daughter, Evelyn, married a lothario and was killed in an accident. Evelyn's husband, Chan, is highly allergic to penicillin.
Someone slips some into a brownie at one of the showrooms.
He's dead within moments of eating the sweet. And Deborah comes under suspicion because her purse is found nearby, together with an empty penicillin bottle, her prescription for a sore throat. Somehow I find Deborah less appealing when she's away from her home venue. When she leaves that scene, the story becomes intrinsically less interesting. There was some elementary background about the furniture industry, but nothing terribly fascinating.