I lay there a few minutes figuring out what we would do that day. It wasn’t what I wanted to do that day. There was a murder to be solved. There was no time for sleeping late, reading, a lingering trip to Scene of the Crime, or finding someone to abduct my next-door neighbor and abscond with her to some remote island where he could dump her in some cannibal’s pot. Instead, we needed to continue to question the people of Parkway Arms until we found a clue or a slippage of the tongue that would allow us to conclude the case. I lifted myself from my bed in record time, two minutes and forty-three seconds. I needed to get out of bed, but I didn’t want to pull a muscle, and I wanted to wipe the sleep from my eyes so that no one could shove a Wii Fit board out from under the bed and under my feet. I was successful, and this time success took two minutes and forty-three seconds. On a less stressful day, I might be able to reduce that time by two or three seconds. I stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror.
