The Potato Salad Mystery, part one

When Adela Littleshank came home that night, the last thing she expected to find was a container of potato salad sitting on her kitchen table.
     She checked the back door: still locked. She yanked her bedroom closets open, peered under the bed, and inched the shower curtain back, ready to shriek: no one. Yet, in the kitchen, this potato salad, provenance unknown.
     Not quite unknown, she corrected herself; the salad bore the label of a rather upscale deli.
     It’s an upscale hallucination, she thought, poking the container to see if it was real. It was, and in fact, enticingly cool.

Part two  *  Part three