When, he wondered. Last night or this morning, she said, and why did he want to know? Because this was the first he’d seen of the cat, he replied, and he wondered when she’d had time to see it, and make its acquaintance.
“Why, Dakin,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous of him. He’s a pussycat!”
“How do you know it’s a male?”
“Because he miaows in bass,” she said. “Darling, how do I know? I suppose whoever called him by name also referred to him with a male pronoun.”
“And he’s the resident cat here, is he? What happened to his tail?”
“He’s a Manx,” Millicent Savage said helpfully. “And he doesn’t live here. He came here with Carolyn and Bernie.”
“Well, I don’t suppose he’s the killer,” Littlefield said. “He might have clubbed the poor jerk in the library and clawed the bridge supports, but I can’t imagine him doing a number on the snowblower.”
“He’s been declawed,” Millicent said.
“I give up,” Littlefield said. “He’s innocent.” He started to say something else but stopped, probably for the same reason that everyone else in the room had stopped talking. Cissy Eglantine, back from the kitchen, stood framed in the doorway. The Cobbett cousins stood just to the rear of her, as if they were trying to shrink into her shadow.
She looked across the room at her husband. For a moment she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Nigel, I spoke with Cook.”
“And what did she say, dear?”
“I’m afraid she didn’t say anything.”
“It’s hard to get much out of her, I’ll grant you that. Did you ask her directly when lunch will be ready?”
“No.”
“You didn’t? Whyever not?”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and her lip trembled. “Nigel, mind you, I’m not absolutely certain, but-”
“But what?”
“Oh, Nigel,” she said, and sighed. “Nigel, I believe she’s dead.”
CHAPTER Seventeen
“She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.
There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.
She was as Cissy and the Cobbett girls had found her, seated in the oversize oak armchair to the left of the old six-burner gas stove. A low flame kept a cauldron of thick soup simmering on a back burner. In the large old-fashioned sink, water dripped from a leaking faucet onto a coffee mug, a couple of spoons, and a shish kebab skewer. A radio, its volume turned way down, brought in a mixture of country music and static.
“That’s where she always sits,” Cissy said, “and that’s how she always sits. I thought she’d just nodded off, you know, with the cookbook open on her lap. But then she didn’t answer when I spoke to her, and I made myself touch her, you see, and, and give her a little shake, and-”
“Steady, Cecilia.”
“I’m actually quite all right, Nigel.” Her eyes sought mine. “Is she dead, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I don’t suppose she could be sleeping soundly, could she?”
Her hands, large for a woman, reposed in her lap, the fingers of one still curled around the handle of a wooden cooking spoon. I pressed my fingertips to the back of her hand, her upper arm, her broad forehead.
“I’m afraid she’s dead,” I said.
But she was a good deal subtler about it than either of her two predecessors in death had been. One look at either of them and you knew what you were dealing with. Cook, on the other hand, looked as though she might be sleeping, and her body temperature, while discernibly lower than the traditional 98.6°, had not yet dropped down to the level of luncheon meat. I supposed she’d get there soon enough, even in a warm kitchen, but she had a ways to go yet.
“How did she-”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of violence. She wasn’t shot or stabbed or dropped from a height.” I raised an eyelid and stared. I didn’t see any sign of pinpoint hemorrhage, or anything else but a rather glassy eyeball. I closed the lid and straightened up.
Everyone was talking at once, filling the air with questions and suggestions. We’d all rushed there in a body at Cissy’s announcement, although I couldn’t swear that no one had slipped off along the way.
“Maybe it was natural causes,” I heard someone say.
“Around here,” someone else countered, “murder is a natural cause.”
“Shock. Don’t people die of shock?”
“If they’re struck by lightning. Or touch an electrical wire.”
“I mean the kind of shock that gives you a heart attack. She might have had a weak heart, and I don’t suppose she was on a low-fat diet. The shock of the two deaths earlier-”
“Cook didn’t even say anything,” Cissy remembered, “or look much disturbed. After the first death she made breakfast, and after the second she came in here and started lunch.”
“And a good lunch, too, from the smell of it.” Rufus Quilp had pushed his way through to the stove, and was lifting pot lids and sniffing. “Lamb stew,” he announced. “Seasoned with rosemary and thyme, and can that be fresh dill? Wherever would she get fresh dill?”
“Not this time of year,” someone said.
“And here’s a lovely pot of rice,” he said, “all nice and fluffy, and there’s a big wooden bowl of salad on the counter, just waiting to be tossed.” He replaced the lid on the stew pot. “I think we should eat,” he said. “I think we’ll all be much better able to cope once we’ve eaten.”
There was a general murmur of assent, which died down when Carolyn stuck her face up next to the cook’s, then stepped back shaking her head. “Didn’t work,” she said. “I was trying to smell her breath, but she’s not breathing.”
“Why would you want to smell her breath?”
“I thought there might be the odor of bitter almonds, Bern.”
“If she’d ingested cyanide,” I said. “But doesn’t she look awfully peaceful for a victim of cyanide poisoning?”
“I don’t know, Bern. Does it make you writhe in agony? If she was poisoned, it must have been with something nonviolent.”
Leona Savage remarked on the irony of it. Minutes ago we’d discussed the possibility of our being poisoned by the cook, and now it looked as though the cook herself might have been poisoned.
“And she’s holding a spoon,” her husband observed. “A cooking spoon. I think I see what happened.” He gestured, miming the action. “She was at the stove, stirring the stew. She took a taste of it. When the poison hit her-”
“The poison?”
“In the stew. At first maybe all she thought was it needed more salt, but then it hit her and her legs got weak and she had to sit down.”
“Is that what happens when you take poison? Your legs get weak?”
“It must depend on the poison,” he said. “At any rate, she didn’t feel too hot and she sat down. Evidently it was a gentle poison, and it just made her nod off and then killed her in her sleep.”
“Cook didn’t like people in her kitchen,” Molly Cobbett said. “If anybody tried to put anything in her stewpot, Cook would pitch a fit.”
Nigel confirmed this. “If you wanted to get taken to task, all you had to do was lift the lid of one of her pots. I can’t think she’d have stood still for it if someone salted her stew for her.”
“She wouldn’t have known,” I said. “Because she wouldn’t have been here when it happened.”
“But she was always in the kitchen.”