"Do they seem to know each other? Presently?"
"I don't think so. Beth said something about having a friend in common with Kathy who kept her up on Kathy's life a bit. Avalon and Pooky might correspond. They seem to be slightly better acquainted, or maybe they just hit it off better since they got here. Of course, most of them knew about Beth's prestige. No, on the whole, I don't think they're in touch with each other. That first day, as they were arriving, they were all catching up like mad — where did you end up going to college? Are you married? Have you got children? Those kinds of questions. Now, Lila was a different matter—"
"How's that?"
"She must have researched some of them before she came. At least she did Kathy."
"Remind me who Kathy is. The farm wife in the overalls?"
"Sort of. Wait till you see her today. She's abandoned her act."
"Act?"
Jane explained about Kathy's pretense of being poor and idealistic and Jane's own subsequent discovery of the truth of the matter.
"And she said Lila knew and was trying to blackmail her?"
'Trying, but not getting anywhere. Kathy's whole problem is that she's come to care more for her money
than her image. She'd have faced 'unveiling' rather
than give Lila a penny."
"Maybe___" Mel mused. "What about the others?
Did she try it with anyone else?"
"I think she had something on Pooky, but that's just pure guess. I asked Pooky outright and she denied it, but got very upset. Oh, I'd forgotten — there was something said the first night about Pooky having been held back a grade. Apparently that's very embarrassing to her."
"And the rest of them didn't know this?"
"I don't know. But it doesn't seem exactly black-' mail material. Lila also dropped some not very subtle' hints the first evening about Avalon and drugs. I think she was leading up to claiming Avalon had tried drugs in high school. Not exactly a revelation to ruin a life, I'd think. And she made some crack about Beth's life being placed under scrutiny if she was appointed to the Supreme Court. It sounded like a shot in the dark and didn't seem to bother Beth at all. Oh, and she tried to suggest that Mimi's husband was somehow politically questionable."
"How'd Mimi react?"
"Bored to death."
"What about Crispy? Did she go after her?"
"Not that I know of. Oh, yes. Lila made some rather cruel little digs about how enamored of Dead Ted Crispy had once been."
"Dead Ted?" Mel asked.
"Ted lived in this house when they were in high school. He committed suicide in the carriage house. It seems like they all had crushes on him back then. Mel, you haven't said how Lila was killed."
"Knocked out with a paint can, then smothered," he said calmly.
"Fingerprints?"
He shook his head. "The wire handle on the can had been wiped clean. A hell of a weapon, actually. You could hold the thing by the handle and get a good swing going in a dark place before the victim even saw it coming. And rags don't take fingerprints at all well."
"Come on, Mel. Tell me more of what you know."
"Very little yet. We better get inside. You're shivering and I've got to take Edgar's official statement."
"Mel, what about the practical jokes? What have they got to do with the murder? Are they just meant as a distraction? Or spite? Or what?"
"Hell if I know," he said. "Yet."
15
Jane let Mel go ahead and stood in the driveway a moment, still puzzling over what they'd talked about. It took a crazy to kill somebody. That was obvious. It also took something of a crazy to keep pulling these stupid jokes. It had to be the same person, unless one assumed that two of them were completely around the bend. That seemed impossible odds. Two out of seven. Two out of six, really. Lila couldn't have been either the murderer or the Joker.
Lila!
Jane remembered the notebook again. She'd meant to tell Mel a moment ago, but hadn't wanted to get sidetracked.
She hurried inside, but he was in the library with Edgar. Astonishingly, Mimi and Pooky were hunched in front of the television set, each with a Nintendo controller in her hand. They were competing loudly with each other in a shoot-'em-up game. "I got you! I got you!" Pooky crowed.
"I've got two lives left and three bottles of magic potion. I'll get you yet!" Mimi said, sitting farther forward and executing a complex maneuver that involved both hands and a lot of body English.
"Could you pause the game?" Jane asked. When they had, she said, "I'm going back to work. When Detective VanDyne's through, would you keep him here and let me know?" She started to say that there was something important she'd forgotten to tell him, then thought better of it. "I need to talk to him about some plans we made for next week."
"Next week? You're dating him?" Pooky asked. "Wow! He's really good-looking! Oh, so that's why you've been talking to him so much! It's nothing to do with us; it's that he's your boyfriend."
Jane realized she was blushing and stammering. "I've got to finish up the rooms," she said.
"I'll help," Pooky said.
"No, you're having fun. I'm almost done anyway."
Jane made a break for it before Pooky could argue.
Beth was in her room, sitting in the grandmother chair by the window, reading through a stack of paperwork. There was a hint of the earlier horrible smell, but whether it came from Beth herself or just lingered in the room was impossible to say.
"No rest for the wicked?" Jane asked, gesturing toward the pile of work Beth was sorting through.
"More like no rest for the perpetually understaffed and underfunded."
"Are you all right now?"
Beth smiled and Jane could see for a moment what a very pretty girl she must have been. "I'm fine, thanks. I made a real fool of myself this morning. I'm so embarrassed. I normally don't overreact that way."
"Anybody would have. That was a horrible thing to do to you. Do you have any idea who—?"
"Absolutely none in the world," Beth said.
Jane had suspected that Beth would be too discreet to make guesses or get involved in gossip of any sort, but was disappointed to find that she'd been right.
"Do you know what it was? The smell?" Beth asked. Her voice was actually a bit trembly.
"Some kind of fish bait smell, I think. Harmless."
"Harmless…" Beth mused. "I didn't know…"
"Didn't know what?"
"That anybody disliked me that much." A'definite crack in the last word.
"You shouldn't get your feelings hurt," Jane assured her. "I'm sure it wasn't personal any more than any of the other tricks. Maybe you're the only one who had that roll-on kind of deodorant along that the liquid could be added to. I'm sure that's it."
Beth smiled. "You're a nice person to say that. I hope you're right." Then she sniffed slightly, sat up straighter, and started sorting her papers. Obviously she wasn't accustomed to talking about her feelings to anyone and it made her very uncomfortable.
"Will I disturb you if I tidy up a little?" Jane asked. The room obviously couldn't be tidier, but she was supposed to change the sheets and towels.
"Not in the least. I still can't get over how generous it is of you to help Shelley. She's fortunate to have such a good friend." Unlike Pooky, it didn't occur to Beth to help out.
"I'm fortunate, too. I've had some bad times I wouldn't have gotten through without Shelley."
"Oh? I'm sorry to hear that."
There was invitation in her tone, but Jane didn't accept it. Jane knew how to encourage people to talk and recognized when the ploy was being used on her. "It's such a pity about Lila, isn't it?" She started stripping the bed.
"Nobody should come to a violent end," Beth said tactfully.