“She was in the bar with the rest of us a little while ago, remember? She slipped off to the kitchen while we were arguing about one thing or another. Did anyone notice when she left?” No one had. “Well, she was in the back; she could have slipped out unobtrusively enough.”
“And someone slipped off after her? And poisoned her, and then slipped back again?”
I shook my head. “It would have happened earlier,” I said. “She didn’t toss this stew together in a few minutes. She must have started preparing it while we were eating our breakfast. It’s been cooking all morning. When Orris had his accident and Earlene screamed almost loud enough to wake him, Cook would have left the kitchen to find out what was the matter.”
“She was outside,” the colonel recalled. “I remember noticing her when we were weighing the merits of attempting to retrieve poor Orris’s body.”
I thought that would bring a fresh sob from Earlene, but perhaps she’d begun to get over her loss. “And after that,” I said, “she wound up in the bar. So she was out of the kitchen for a while, and in her absence someone could have gone in and put anything at all into that pot of stew.”
Carolyn said, “Like what, Bern? Mrs. Murphy’s overalls?” Everyone stared at her and she said, “Like the song, ‘Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Oh, come on. I can’t be the only person who remembers that one.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “And as far as what the killer put in the stew, I couldn’t begin to guess. I don’t know much about poisons.”
“Mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont said. “Are there mushrooms in the stew?”
“I would certainly hope so,” Rufus Quilp said. “Who in his right mind would make a lamb stew without mushrooms?”
“Poisonous mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont cried. “Deadly nightshade!”
“That’s not a mushroom,” Gordon Wolpert said.
“It’s not?”
“No. But there are a lot of poisonous mushrooms, or toadstools, or whatever you want to call them. The amanitas are particularly deadly. One’s called the death angel-that may be what you were thinking of. But you couldn’t go out and gather mushrooms in this weather. It’s not the season for them, and even if it were you’d never find them under the snow.”
“If deadly nightshade isn’t a mushroom,” said Miss Dinmont, “then what in heaven’s name is it?”
“A vine,” Wolpert told her. “A close relative of the tomato and the potato. Not to mention the eggplant.”
“Why not mention the eggplant?”
“There’s tomato in here,” Rufus Quilp announced. “And potato, of course. And mushrooms and barley.” If there was an airborne poison as well, I figured his days were numbered, the way he was inhaling. “I don’t believe there’s any eggplant. It’s not usual in lamb stew, though it wouldn’t matter if there were some. I’m sure there’s nothing in here to be concerned about. Why would anyone poison a splendid pot of lamb stew?”
“Why would anyone kill the cook?” Carolyn asked him in return. “Or wreck the bridge and the snowblower? Or kill Mr. Rathburn?”
“I’m sure I have no idea, young lady. What I do have is a gnawing in my belly, and what I intend to have is a bowl of this stew.”
“But if it’s poisoned…”
“If it’s perfectly wholesome,” he said, “then we ought to be eating it. If it’s toxic we ought to keep it at arm’s length. But how are we to tell which it is?” No one had the answer, so he supplied it himself. “What’s required is a food taster. One man has a bowl of stew. If he lives, everyone may freely join in the feast. If he dies, well, at least the others are spared.” He squared his shoulders. “I shall be that man,” he said.
“But Mr. Quilp-”
“Please,” he said. “I insist.”
“But if you should die…”
“Then I suppose you’ll leave me lying where I fall, as seems to be the custom of the house. If you actually go so far as to put me in the ground, an appropriate phrase for the tombstone might be ‘He ate that others might live.’ Hand me down one of those bowls, will you? And the ladle, if you don’t mind.”
In the dining room, Quilp took a seat at a table set for two. He tucked in his napkin and lifted a fork. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do,’” he said, “‘than I have ever done,’ and I fear that’s all I remember of that passage. I’d say grace, but if the stew turns out to be laced with arsenic, that might be a thumb in the eye for the Man Upstairs. So without further ado…”
He speared a morsel with his fork, put it in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. He took another bite, smacked his lips.
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “As you can see-”
He broke off the sentence and a look of alarm spread on his florid face. The hand not clutching his fork moved to the middle of his chest, just over his heart. His lower lip trembled and he slumped in his chair.
Why hadn’t I stopped him? How could I let the man kill himself like this? Oh, in a sense he’d been doing so for years, digging his grave with his knife and fork, but…
“Ha!” He straightened up in his seat, gave a little yelp of laughter, and looked positively delighted by the expressions on our faces. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my, oh my. Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist. You will forgive me my little joke, won’t you?” He plunged the fork into the bowl of stew. “It’s wonderfully flavorful, I assure you,” he said, “and it couldn’t possibly harm anyone. May I urge you all to fill bowls for yourselves and join me?”
“We can’t be sure it’s safe,” Miss Hardesty said. “There are slow-acting poisons, aren’t there?”
“If Cook was poisoned,” said Quilp, “the poison seems to have worked at the speed of light. But I’m sure you’re right. The stew contains a slow-acting poison, and I’m doomed. In fifty years’ time I’ll be stone dead.” He rolled his eyes. “With that timetable, young Millicent might want to hold off. The rest of you can afford to take your chances.”
Mrs. Colibri said she thought she’d wait, not fifty years but, oh, fifteen minutes or so, just to be on the safe side. Several others murmured their agreement. Quilp told us to suit ourselves, but by then he’d very likely have had a second helping, and perhaps even a third. “And if Molly or Earlene could bring me a plate of that salad,” he said, “and some of the seven-grain bread, I think there must be some left. And some butter, of course. And beer, I think, would provide a better accompaniment than wine. Is there some of that nice brown ale, Nigel?”
CHAPTER Eighteen
“Jonathan Rathburn,” Nigel Eglantine said, and put the tips of his long fingers together. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him at all. He rang up early in the week to ask if he could come up for a short stay. You both arrived yesterday, didn’t you? Mr. Rathburn preceded you by a day. It was Wednesday when he turned up, early in the afternoon.”
“How did he get here?”
“I don’t know that he said. If he drove, his car would be parked on the other side of the bridge. But we can’t get there to look for it, and we wouldn’t know it if we saw it, would we?”
“We wouldn’t even see it,” I said, “under all that snow.”
It was snowing again, though not as heavily as before. Carolyn and I were in the Great Library, along with Nigel and Colonel Blount-Buller. That room was pretty much as we’d left it, down to the copy of The Big Sleep still perched on the topmost shelf. There was, however, one significant change. Jonathan Rathburn was no longer crumpled at the foot of the library steps. The steps remained, and his blood still discolored the carpet, but Rathburn was gone.
He hadn’t risen from the dead, nor had he been mysteriously spirited away. The decision to move the body had been a collective one, taken up with not much argument in the aftermath of a satisfying if initially unnerving lunch of lamb stew and salad and seven-grain bread, all washed down with Newcastle brown ale or California zinfandel or Deer Park spring water, as one preferred. Someone, I’m not sure who, made the point that we now had two rooms off-limits and out of bounds because there were bodies in them. While it was no more than a nuisance to be unable to go into the library, we would be hard-pressed to make do without the kitchen.