[first lines]
Jessica Fletcher: Oh, the weather's so beautiful. It should be a wonderful day. But it isn't. It was in the paper this morning. A wonderful person died a couple of days ago. She was very dear to me, even though I never actually met her. The paper said she was 101, though she could have been a lot older. Lady Austin was like that, an enigma shrouded in mystery, very much like the books that she wrote. Abigail Austin. When it came to mysteries, she was very simply the best. Her books will live on long after mine are gone and forgotten. You know, the obituary reminded me of something that I'd forgotten. Years ago, she was involved in a real-life mystery. Oh, yes. As you know, that's something that I'm familiar with. But for Lady Abigail, I think it was, well, a somewhat disconcerting situation. It was two years after the war, and she had sailed aboard the Queen Mary, which was one night out of New York City when the trouble started.
