“Did you prepare Mr. Grimes’s dinner?”
“No, sir, our cook did.”
“Did Mr. Grimes eat the same food as was served here?”
“Yes, sir. No one wanted to eat much, with everything and everyone so upset. The cook had made a lovely carrot soup and soft dinner rolls. Mr. Grimes said that would be plenty for him.”
“Who prepared the soup for transport to the quarry house?”
She frowned in concentration. “Cook ladled it out of the pot and into a jar. I drove and Mrs. Huddleson carried the jar into the house and heated it up. Mrs. Huddleson was in the kitchen with me. We had brought a tureen with us. I poured the soup into it and helped her serve the meal.”
“And you were not in the house while he ate?”
“No, sir. We asked if he needed anything else, and he said he wanted us to hurry up and finish cleaning the servants’ quarters, and let him be. It had been a long day already, so we didn’t mind getting back to work in the other house.”
“Has anyone here who ate the soup become ill?”
“No, sir.”
“You had some of this soup yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was there anything strange in the taste of it?”
“No, sir. It was very good, spicy and sweet.”
Mrs. Grimes said, “I had some as well. It’s as she said.”
The sheriff hesitated, then glanced at Slye.
Slye smiled, then said to Mrs. Grimes, “May we look through the kitchen area?”
“Of course.”
“And perhaps you could ask Mrs. Huddleson to join us there?”
“Unless she’s gone to bed, I’m sure she’ll be there now.”
It was as she had guessed. Mrs. Huddleson, who proved to be of an age with Mrs. Westley, had a kindly face and easy manner. She was sitting with the cook, who was feeding a substantial breakfast to one of the sheriff’s deputies. The man was startled by the advent of his boss, and stood to attention. The sheriff waved him back to his seat and told him to finish his meal.
The kitchen was clean, if not as orderly as the one at the quarry house. It was not in disarray, it merely had the look, feel, and heavenly aroma of a kitchen in use, rather than the sterile environment of the one at the quarry. The cook bristled at the sheriff’s suggestion that the small remaining quantity of the previous night’s soup should be sealed and taken for testing, or that anything could be amiss with her soup.
“Do you think me a poisoner?” she thundered.
While the rest of us made efforts to soothe her-a task made more difficult when the deputy seemed to lose his appetite-Slye roved toward the area where the pots and pans were stored. Our discussion came to a halt when he said, “I believe I’ve found the poison.”
“What!” the cook shouted. Mrs. Westley turned pale.
“Oh, nothing you prepared.” He held up a jar. “This is your silver polish?”
“Yes, sir,” the cook said.
“Who polished the tureen today?”
“I did,” Mrs. Westley said weakly, sitting down in a kitchen chair.
Slye brought the jar to the sheriff. “Many brands of silver polish contain cyanide, as does this one. The tureen was quite large. If this polish was not rinsed well from its inner surface, enough cyanide may have remained to mix with the soup and cause Grimes’s poisoning. There was recently just such a case in the city.”
Mrs. Westley was shaking now, her face buried in her hands.
“An accident, then,” Mrs. Grimes said firmly.
“Yes, of course,” the sheriff said, and a gust of relieved sighs went through the room.
Then the sheriff noticed that Slye was staring out the kitchen window, and had said nothing in response to his pronouncement. “Mr. Slye, do you agree?”
“I don’t think you’ll ever prove it to be anything else,” Slye said absently. He refocused on the sheriff. “It wants only a few minutes before dawn. I know your men are tired, Sheriff Anderson, and no doubt most of them should be allowed to seek their beds. Allow us to return you to the quarry house. I don’t like to delay you, but there are one or two matters upon which I’d like to reassure myself.”
Mrs. Westley looked up at that, frightened. Slye took her hands and said gently, “You have suffered a terrible ordeal, and you have my deepest sympathies.”
She began to weep in earnest. Mrs. Huddleson took her to her quarters.
Mrs. Grimes thanked us and said that she would remain at home, but to call if she was needed at the quarry house. She begged us to let her know if she could be of help in any way.
“It occurs to me to ask a question I should have posed earlier,” Slye said, turning to Mrs. Grimes. “Was your husband allergic to feathers?”
“Feathers? Why, no. In fact, nothing but a feather bed and pillows would do for him.”
“Ah. Thank you. And if I may have a word with Mrs. Huddleson before we go?”
“Certainly.”
Mrs. Grimes asked the cook to go sit with Mrs. Westley and to request that Mrs. Huddleson rejoin us in the kitchen.
“Just one question, Mrs. Huddleson. When you were cleaning Mr. Grimes’s bedroom, did you find any loose feathers on the floor?”
“Oh! Yes, a few. But he had changed the beds around, so I expect that’s when it happened.”
“Changed the beds?”
“Yes.” She glanced nervously at Mrs. Grimes, then said, “Pardon me, missus, but he was out of his head, you ask me.”
“I don’t doubt it, Mrs. Huddleson. You must speak very plainly to these gentlemen, without worry about my feelings. What happened with the bed?”
“I can’t really say. He didn’t want us asking about it, but when we went to work in there-well! We were surprised. And he got irritated and said it no longer suited him, and he could do as he damned well pleased, and not to ask impertinent questions-but we hadn’t. We both worked for him long enough to know better than to say ‘boo’ to him when he was in such foul mood.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huddleson,” Slye said. “We’ll be going now.”
Once we were back in his limo, Wishy asked the question that was on all our minds.
“What the deuce was that about feathers, Bunny?”
“Do you remember the pillow fight we got into when we were seven?”
Wishy gave a delighted laugh. “Do I ever. Earned us each a tanning, and worth every blow. Feathers everywhere.”
“Exactly. Feathers, once no longer attached to their original owner, tend to scatter. Loosed violently from a pillow or mattress, they are nearly impossible to gather up again, as we learned when we were seven and were made to pick up the mess we’d made.”
“I agree, but I still don’t see what this has to do with Old Grimes losing his mind.”
“Oh, everything, Wishy. Everything.”
Slye did not reenter the quarry house, but invited us to accompany him on a walk to the dock. So we followed him across the property to the edge of the sheer drop down to the water. We could see our way now, but I was glad we had not made the attempt in the darkness.
In the growing light, I could see what an oasis it was, a deep, blue, walled-in lake, too perfectly rectangular along its shores, held in place by dramatic, hewn cliffs. Piles of cut and abandoned blocks of stone could be seen rising from the water here and there. The natural world had reasserted itself to some degree, with grasses and trees growing all along the sides, and a few trees rising out of the water closest to the cliffs. The quarry was an alluring place, if you could ignore the occasional rusted-out belt systems, rigging, and other derelict machinery that dotted its shores.
“From what you tell me, Sheriff,” Slye said, when we had paused on a stone landing about halfway down the steps, “loading a boat is more easily done from the other end of the quarry.”
“Yes.”
The sheriff was plainly losing his enthusiasm for Bunny’s methods.