“Perhaps you should,” Miss Hardesty said obligingly.
“Well, I was just wondering. Of course the cook will be quite safe in the kitchen, if all the rest of us are out here, the murderer included. But what if the murderer is not included?”
“How could that be?” Colonel Blount-Buller demanded. “If we’re here, and if the killer is one of us-”
“Unless it’s the cook,” Miss Dinmont said, and lowered her eyes. “I’m sure I’m just a foolish woman.”
Dakin Littlefield rolled his eyes at that, while Leona Savage closed hers. The colonel said he somehow doubted that Cook was the sort to club and smother a man, then dash about cutting phone lines and bridge supports and destroying snowblowers.
“Of course she’d have no trouble getting sugar,” Greg Savage said. “There must be an abundant supply in the larder. She could have helped herself to a cup of it, and a funnel to channel it into the snowblower’s gas tank.”
“Anyone who walked into the kitchen could get all the sugar he wanted,” Nigel said, “and there are sugar bowls on all the tables in the breakfast and dining rooms as well. As for a funnel, well, how hard is it to pour sugar into a gas tank?” No one admitted to personal knowledge of the degree of difficulty of such an act. “In any event,” he said, “I’m sure she wouldn’t do any such thing.”
“How can you say that?” Miss Dinmont wondered. “You don’t even know her name.”
“And do you really want to check her off the list of possible murderers?” Gordon Wolpert asked. “Because if we start eliminating people like a trial lawyer issuing peremptory challenges, we’ll very quickly eliminate everyone. What you’re saying, Eglantine, is that the cook’s not the sort to commit murder. Well, neither is anyone else in this house, I’m sure. We’re all decent, upstanding people. That’s quite obvious. And I’m afraid it’s every bit as obvious that one of us decent, upstanding people has so far been responsible for two deaths. So I’m going to suggest that no one be eliminated from our working list of persons under suspicion except for cause. There’ll be no peremptory challenges.”
This soaked in, and we all looked at each other again. It seemed to me that I was being eyed with suspicion by some of our party, even as I was eyeing them with suspicion in turn.
“Let’s move on,” I suggested, and brandished my pen and clipboard.
Gordon Wolpert.
Bettina Colibri.
Dakin Littlefield.
Lettice Littlefield.
Col. Edward Blount-Buller.
“I was just thinking,” the colonel put in, “about the cook and her absence. It seemed at first a dangerous violation of a safety procedure almost as soon as we’d initiated it, but in fact it’s really entirely safe.”
“How’s that?” Wolpert asked him.
The colonel cleared his throat. “If the cook is entirely innocent of the crimes that have taken place here, as seems likely, then the killer is one of us. And in that case the cook is in no peril in the kitchen, because all of us are here.”
“Didn’t I say that?” Cissy wondered aloud.
“But,” he went on, “if by some chance the cook is the murderer, then we’re all quite safe. Because we’re here and she’s elsewhere.”
“In the kitchen,” Mrs. Colibri said.
“Quite so.”
“Preparing our lunch.”
The room went very still. Miss Gloria Dinmont broke the silence. “She could poison us all,” she said softly. “We’d drop like flies, never knowing what hit us.”
“Or writhe in agony,” her companion chimed in, “knowing we’d been poisoned, but unable to get hold of the antidote.”
“A tasteless and odorless poison,” Miss Dinmont said.
“A poison that leaves no trace,” said Miss Hardesty.
“Oh, come on,” Carolyn said. “What difference does it makes if the poison leaves a trace or not? If we’re all discovered lying dead all over the house, what do you figure the cops are going to think? That somebody said something so shocking we all popped off with heart attacks?”
“Besides,” young Millicent said, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a poison that doesn’t leave a trace.”
“It seems to me most toxic substances leave some sort of evidence that would show up in an autopsy,” I said, “but you generally have to look for it.”
“How do you know that, Bern?”
I knew it from Quincy reruns on Nick at Nite, but I didn’t want to say that. “We’re out in the country,” I said, “and a rural cop who walked in on a roomful of dead people with no marks on them would probably write it off as carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective furnace.”
“But there’s no central heating.”
“That might not occur to him. Still, we’ve got what, fifteen or sixteen people in the room? Safety in numbers.”
“What do you mean, Bern?”
“I mean that many people dying all at once under mysterious circumstances would trigger a full-scale investigation. The state troopers would run it, and there’d be a complete toxicological workup. If we’d been poisoned it would show up.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind,” Dakin Littlefield said. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.”
“All I’m trying to say-”
But he didn’t want to hear it. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if the cook was bent on lacing our porridge with rat poison she wouldn’t start off by killing people with a camel and a pillow and a cup of sugar. If Gloria over there in the wheelchair is seriously worried about poison, I’ll volunteer to eat her lunch for her. Assuming we ever get lunch.”
“Ha!” Rufus Quilp thrust his head forward, his little eyes beady and bright. “Lunch,” he said. “Breakfast was ages ago and no one’s serving us lunch. What about that, Eglantine?”
“I’m sure lunch won’t be long now,” Nigel said.
“If we’re not going to get it right away,” Quilp said, “I don’t see why we can’t at least have our elevensies.”
“Elevensies?”
“Normally served at eleven,” Quilp said dryly, “as you might guess from the name. Too late for that now, of course, so you could call it something else, or call it nothing at all, just so one has the opportunity to eat it. A cup of coffee, say, and a scone or some crumpets. Anything that will do to tide one over between breakfast and lunch.”
“Nigel,” Cissy said, “perhaps someone could fetch Mr. Quilp a cup of coffee.”
“And a scone,” Quilp said.
“And a scone.”
“Or perhaps a croissant,” the fat man suggested, “if there are any left, and perhaps with some of those gingered rhubarb preserves.”
“Yes, those are lovely, aren’t they? I’m sure we’ve some left, Mr. Quilp. Nigel, why don’t I just fetch something for Mr. Quilp?”
“Not by yourself,” her husband said.
“Oh. But if I simply went to the kitchen…oh, but…” She frowned, troubled. “Oh,” she said.
“I don’t want to cause a fuss,” Rufus Quilp said. “And if lunch should turn out to be imminent, well, I wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.”
“Fat chance,” Carolyn muttered.
“But if lunch is destined to be rather a distant affair,” he went on, “then I do think I could do with a bit of tiding over. There’s my blood sugar to be considered, don’t you see.”
I found myself considering Mr. Quilp’s blood sugar, and wondered idly if it could render a snowblower hors de combat. While I pondered the point, the colonel took command, dispatching a patrol on a reconnaissance mission. Cissy Eglantine, flanked by the Cobbett cousins, were to go to the kitchen and inquire of the cook just how long it would be until lunch. If our estimated waiting time was thirty minutes or less, they would return empty-handed; if longer, they’d bring back something designed to tide us over.
They were no sooner out of the room than Raffles turned up, threading his way through the room, getting petted and cooed at and fussed over as he went, and rubbing up against the odd ankle along the way. “Oh, it’s Raffles,” Lettice said, reaching to scratch him behind the ear. Her husband asked her how she happened to know the cat’s name, and she said she must have heard someone call him that.