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Della Mbaye was sixty-seven, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to be a ballroom dance instructor for much longer, with the arthritis creeping into her knees. It was a pity. She loved it—loved teaching people, loved getting to know people. Loved figuring things out about them, too. Della might have been slightly addicted to television shows in which nice elderly ladies solved gruesome murders through the power of observation and being a nosy old biddy.
The latest two students, now, they were fun to try her detective skills on, and she thought about them idly even as she watched them. They had four left feet between the two of them, but Della believed firmly that anybody could learn to dance if they had two working legs, and even if they didn’t, there had been an old soldier with a prosthetic who thoroughly surprised her once.
“I’m still not sure why you’re leading,” Antonia groused at her partner.
“Because,” Zira said, “I looked up this dance on the World Wide Web.”
“And?”
“And there are some moves I want to try.”
Zira and Antonia were an odd couple, certainly. If you listened to the village rumor mill, and any decent elderly lady detective did, Antonia was a London financier and Zira had run a bookshop.
Della found herself worrying about the relationship sometimes. Zira was sweet, plump, old-fashioned, and somewhat timid, and Antonia’s money could surely attract a younger, thinner, more exciting woman. Zira didn’t seem like the sort of person who would hold her interest.
“I thought you were just suffering through the ‘bebop’ for the sake of the waltz.”
“I was,” Zira agreed. “Until I watched the videotape.”
“It’s not a video tape unless there’s actual tape, angel, which means YouTube isn’t—never mind. What moves are you so interested in, anyway?”
“Well, it seems that one partner flips the other one over like this—” Antonia was abruptly swept off her feet with a squawk. “And puts them over his shoulder, like this— spread out your arms, dear, that’s the way they did it on the videotape—” Antonia made incoherent noises.
“The move I think you’re going for,” Della said, “is called the angel. I’ll teach you, but let’s get the basic steps of swing dancing down first.”
“The what,” Antonia said, being gently returned to Earth.
“Ah.” Zira looked slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t actually realize it was called that.”
Zira could lift Antonia as if she were nothing.
What was more, Zira had the faintest glint in her eye, as if she enjoyed surprising her partner.
Possibly, Della thought, the relationship wasn’t as doomed as all that. Teach her to underestimate Zira—which, of course, just made her more curious about the pair. They were odd ones, in several ways . . .
She stepped forward to try and coach them in the basic steps, noticing idly as she did that her knees didn’t hurt at all.