“Not until we've got this sorted out. Now, who could have put something in the quiche or the tea?”
Jane sat up straight. "Why the quiche and tea especially?""Because that's all the maid had in her stomach.
Mrs. Pryce had apparently eaten all kinds of stuff." "But I made the quiche," Jane objected. "Exactly," he said coolly, staring back at her. "You don't think I poisoned her?"
“As a matter of fact, I don't, but somebody apparently did, and it's my sad job to find out who and how. I have to assume that the quiche itself wasn't poisoned, or other people would have become ill, too. So it must have been put in her food or her drink after she got her plate and cup. Now, where was she sitting? Who could have exchanged her plate or added something to her food?"
“Anybody," Shelley and Missy said together.
Shelley took up the explanation. "The dining room is a very crowded little space, and everybody was crammed together. We were all reaching over and past each other and banging our elbows together. Mrs. Pryce sat at the head of the table with her back to the hallway and kitchen, where the dishes were set out. We had to squeeze past her and each other to get around at all."
“Did she fill her own plate?”
The three women exchanged glances. "I don't think so," Jane finally said. "At least she wasn't in with the lost lemmings."
“I beg your pardon?"
“I mean she wasn't stuffed into the hallway with the rest of us when we were getting our food. At least, I don't think she was."
“Was she at the table when you got there?" Mel asked.
“Yes, and she had a plate full of food. The first time."
“The first time? What?"
“The first time I sat down. But I'd forgotten a drink and—”
Mel held up his hand. "Hold it. Step by step. Where had she gotten the plate if she hadn't filled it herself?"
“I don't know. It was already there when Shelley and I sat down. What about you, Missy?”
Missy had her eyes closed hard. "I'm trying to picture it. I just can't recall. I seem to think I saw someone set it in front of her, but I can't see who. And I'm not sure but what I'm making that up. I don't mean to invent details, it's just that it's my job to do that, and I can't always turn it off."
“I appreciate your honesty," Mel said, looking as if he'd like to shake her teeth loose. "Can you tell me the order that people came to the table?"
“I have no idea," Missy said. "People came, then went and came back again. When I extricated myself from the crowd in the hall—let me see—I think Grady was there already. Yes, he was, because he accidentally bashed a chair leg into me while I was sitting down. And somebody else. I think Ruth Rogers. Or maybe her sister. I wasn't really paying any attention. I was puzzling over some stuff I didn't remember putting on my plate."
“With coconut?" Jane asked. "Somebody gave me a lump of that, too. Maybe—maybe the tea was poisoned and there was an antidote in the coconut stuff, and that's why someone made sure we all had some. But then, that can't be, because I didn't eat mine, so I should be dead." She glanced at Mel and realized she was making an ass of herself.
He cleared his throat. "Now that you've reasoned that out, could we continue? You said you left the table—"
“Yes, Mrs. Pryce got snooty about not having a drink, and that made me realize I didn't either. So we all went back—I mean Shelley and I did—"
“And you got Mrs. Pryce's tea?"
“No, I did not," Jane exclaimed. "She went ahead of us and had already gone when Shelley and I got to the kitchen. I think she went around the other way, because when we got back, she stepped on Grady's contact lens. She was coming in the dining room from the other doorway."
“Did she have a cup of tea then?" Mel persisted.
Jane grabbed Willard's collar and dragged him away from Mel, on whose trouser leg he was slobbering. "Sorry about that. I don't know if she had her tea. She probably did. That's what she went to the kitchen for, but I was looking down at Grady and half the others crawling around on the floor. In fact, that would have been a great time to put something on her food. Everybody was looking at Grady. Surely you've questioned everybody else about this."
“Endlessly," Mel said with disgust. "And it sounds like a fire drill in a lunatic asylum. Half this crowd doesn't know where they were, much less where anybody else was at any given moment. Look, I'd like for each of you to write down for me exactly what you did, in what order, and what you can recall of where other people were. In the meantime, I want to talk to you about possible motives.”
All three women smiled.
“What? What's funny about motives?”
Shelley broke the news to him. "You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who had more enemies internationally. There are probably clubs all over the world that meet just to discuss what they'd like to do to her.”
Mel slumped in his chair, his gaze shifting slowly from Shelley to Jane. "Someday," he said with great deliberation, "someday when we have lots of time, I'm going to tell you what I think of the people you hang around with, Jane.”
9
“I'm sorry we scared him off before we could talk about motives," Shelley said as the red MG in the driveway roared to life.
“And I'm sorry he left without rescheduling our date," Jane muttered into her iced tea.
“Oh, Jane. I'm sorry," Shelley said. "But you are getting a one-track mind."
“Shelley, it's a track my mind's been on for some time. I'm just hoping my body gets a chance to catch up. I've been a widow for some time, you know. I don't mean to be indelicate, but I didn't bury my hormones with Steve, you know."
“You weren't planning to sleep with him at the ice cream store, were you?" Shelley asked bluntly.
“I was hoping to eventually get the opportunity to be asked," Jane said sourly. "The ice cream store seemed a good enough place to get on that path.”
Missy gave Jane a sympathetic look.
“Still, it is his job to sort this out. It apparently is murder," Shelley went on.
“What I don't understand," Missy said, "is why anybody had to murder her. After all, she was well into her eighties, I would guess. If you really hated her all that much, why not just wait with delicious anticipation for her to die? She was bound to before long. It seems an unnecessary risk to take."
“Obviously someone had to stop her from something she could still do or say about somebody," Jane said, giving up on the prospect of a juicy discussion of herself and Mel VanDyne. She didn't really want to talk about it anyway—except maybe with him.
“It seems to me that she'd already leveled practically everybody in class." Shelley poured herself some more tea, then she walked over to the fence between Jane's yard and hers and snapped a sprig of mint to pop in her glass.
“Yes, you and Jane are about the only ones she didn't zap," Missy said.
“Which makes us suspects, too. Because she hadn't gotten around to us yet," Shelley said cheerfully.
“Shelley! Are you nuts! I'm the one who made the damned quiche, which is bad enough!" Jane exclaimed. "I think, if anything, somebody was afraid she was going to elaborate on something she'd already started on." She got another ice cube out of her glass and tossed it out into the grass for Willard, hoping he and his gnats would stay out there. He thought it was a game of fetch and brought the ice cube back.
“Like what?"
“Well . . . like her calling Desiree a drunk. Suppose she had some idea that Desiree had done something awful when she was drinking. Running over a kid or something. Not that she did. But Mrs. Pryce didn't seem to care much for the truth of her accusations.”