by Rae Davies
“I do.”
She took a bloody mary from Mr. Blore and bobbed a piece of celery up and down in the glass. “Where did you say you lived before that?”
I hadn’t, but the question seemed innocent enough. “Missouri. That’s where I’m from.”
“Oh...” she nodded. “And... family brought you to Montana?”
Well, family or rather my desire for some space from it might have sent me on my way, but I couldn’t say it brought me to Montana. I didn’t feel the need to share that much about me though. So, I made some polite noises about wanting to experience something different and took a bite of quiche.
“And your business in Helena, is it doing well?”
“Well, enough.” Again, I couldn’t see how this was any of her business or why she would care.
“But a young woman alone, building a business... it has to be tough. I’m sure you’re always looking for... financial stability.”
Financial stability was not something I could claim for longer than maybe two weeks at a time, but now I could see where this was going.
“I did not steal your watch. I’m dating a police detective! You don’t think he would notice if it turned up in my shop?” My outrage was enough that I would have stood, but my butt seemed to have sunk a bit too far into the cushions. I struggled like a flailing trout until finally giving up and falling back onto the seat.
Her eyes narrowed in an apprising manner. “This isn’t about the watch.”
I didn’t know what else it could be about, but I didn’t have a chance to find out. From somewhere in the house a bell tolled.
Lady York gave me one last laser-sharp stare and then snapped back into character. “Sir Arthur,” she called. “I do believe it is time for our party to resume.”
As everyone moved back into the living room, Lady York handed out a new stack of envelopes. Mine contained one note. You are not the killer.
Well, that was a relief. I slipped the note back into the envelope and looked around to see if I could catch any telling expressions on anyone else’s face. What I noticed was that everyone else had a lot more to read than I did.
Mr. Blore, still standing behind the bar, pulled something from his pocket and mopped at his face.
I frowned. Was that a...
Sir Arthur stepped into the center of the room. “Mr. Blore, is that a stocking that you have?”
Mr. Blore looked down and blinked as if surprised to find the piece of hosiery in his hand.
Dr. Armstrong strode forward and jerked it away. “It’s monogrammed!” he announced.
Mrs. Peabody wandered back into the room. Standing hidden from view, she made circular motions around her ears.
She was right. This production was bordering on insane.
“Monogrammed?” Miss Claythorne asked. “With what?”
The good doctor held the stocking up as if peering at some delicate stitchery. “An A and a P.”
“Mrs. Peabody’s!”
More than one person said the last. It seemed to be a bit of a universal line.
Emily Brent, who had thought to bring her Bible prop with her, took Sir Arthur’s place. “But... I saw...” Her eyes darted around, finally resting on the doctor.
“What, Ms. Brent? What did you see?”
She looked around again, as if whatever secret she held was so heavy she risked all by revealing it. “Lady York, leaving Mr. Blore’s chambers. It was dark, after midnight and she was wearing a nightgown.”
The group sucked in a breath and swiveled to stare down our hostess.
Mrs. Peabody plopped down onto the seat next to me and handed me a mimosa. Kind of liking the way this was going, I forgot my concerns with dogs and their hair and took a drink.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote, Mr. Blore sleeping with Lady York and Mrs. Peabody. Could Lady York have killed her out of jealousy? Or maybe Mrs. Peabody threatened to reveal the affair to Sir Arthur?
Below that I scribbled, Means?
Mrs. Peabody was poisoned, but there had been no mention of Lady York having access or knowledge of poison.
I tapped my pen against the notebook and waited for the next clue to reveal itself.
Miss Claythorne spun and pointed to the table where the vase full of flowers from the night before had been moved. “And she had poison. Those flowers!”
Ah... of course.
Lady York gestured to the vase. “Those flowers? They are just something I picked from my garden.”
“Monkshood, you mean. One of the most toxic plants known to man.”
“How would you know?” Lady York asked, clearly trying to reflect the implied accusation back on the spinster.
Even with no cards, I could take this one. “She’s a botanist.” Which meant Lady York’s efforts might not be off the mark. Under Miss Claythorne’s name I wrote, Means: Botanist Monkshood. But I had no motive... whereas with this new information there was both a potential motive and means for Lady York.
I checked my list.
Mr. Blore: Motive: Affair Means: had access to martini glass.
Lady York: Motive: Affair Means: brought monkshood to the party.
Sir Arthur Cannon: Motive: None yet. Means: Spent time in Africa, if we were going with a classic Agatha Christie murder weapon.
Under Miss Claythorne’s listing, I added a note about her giving Mrs. Peabody the pill. With this new monkshood information, that seemed like a red herring, but you never knew.
Emily Brent: Motive: Obvious disapproval of Mrs. Peabody’s lifestyle. Possible past connection? Means:... I suddenly remembered the flower pressed inside her Bible. I looked around, wondering if anyone else had this piece of information. To be fair, I probably should have shared it... Instead I scribbled it down and kept my mouth closed for now.
Dr. Armstrong: Motive: None yet. Means: He was a doctor.
Mandrake Raven: Motive: None yet. Means: Handed Mrs. Peabody her empty martini glass.
He also had seemed to be working hard to pin the crime on Maid Ann.
While I had been reading and editing my notes, the others had been doing the same. One by one we lifted our heads and assessed the suspects. Which meant we were all giving each other the hairy eyeball.
Mrs. Peabody twittered. “Everyone gets so intense during these things.”
Her (real) husband frowned, but she just waved her hand at him and settled back in to continue watching.
“Ms. Brent,” I said, deciding to pursue my most promising lead. “You haven’t told us much about yourself. What brought you to the party?”
She blinked. “My husband died a few months ago. Friends suggested a weekend away would do me good.”
My first instinct was to apologize for her loss and my nosiness which had prompted her to speak of it. Then, once again, I remembered... play-acting...
“Oh, that is horrible. How did he die?”
“Heart failure.”
“Wait.” Mandrake stepped forward. “George Brent? The survivalist?”
Ms. Brent nodded her head.
Mandrake looked at me and then around the room. “Didn’t you hear the story? It was all over the newspapers. George Brent was a world-famous survivalist. But last fall he ate some poisonous plant...” He spun and stared at Ms. Brent.
Everyone scribbled furiously.
Her Bible clutched against her shirt, Ms. Brent took on a defensive stance. “It was an accident. He kept it for medicinal uses, but somehow his supplies got messed up and a tiny bit was mixed in with parsnips.” She dropped her head and murmured a prayer.
“But if he was world-famous for his skills...” I prompted.
She turned on me. “Things happen, Maid Ann. When the Lord calls you home, you do not get a recall.”
I wasn’t sure how that answered my question, but before I could push further, Peter raised a hand. “I remember the case. Ms. Brent was questioned, but her reputation was stellar and they could find no evidence that she was involved.”
Uh
huh. I put a star next to her name.
I had other leads to wind up though. I changed my attention to Miss Claythorne. “What about you? Did you know Mrs. Peabody before this evening? You mentioned that you worked for a pharmaceutical company, and she was talking about some new weight loss drug she’d been trying. Were you involved with that at all?”
Miss Claythorne looked down her nose. “Most certainly not. I would never be involved with something so tawdry.”
I wrote snot next to her name.
Mrs. Peabody leaned over. “In real life too. You should have heard her bossing Mandrake around yesterday.”
“Miss Claythorne and Mandrake know each other?” I asked in a whisper.
“Not the characters... the real people. They have the room next to ours. She was telling him what he could and couldn’t do, which was, say, everything. I thought Harold worried about how I come off, but he has nothing on that young woman. You’d think they were about to meet the queen instead of...” She flicked her eyes toward Lady York who held up both hands.
“We’ll take a fifteen-minute break and then meet back here for the reveal! Correct answers with motive and means will be entered into a drawing for a return visit!”
Woohoo. If I hadn’t wanted to beat Peter, that would have been enough to make me throw this thing. But I did want to beat him, badly.
As everyone else wandered off for coffee and bathroom breaks, I stayed with Mrs. Peabody. “Do you have your cards?” I asked. “Could I look at them?”
“Certainly.” She pulled the folded cards out of a pocket and slipped them, hidden, into my hand. Then she got up, standing in front of me for a minute to further hide our somewhat dishonest collaboration.
Somewhat, because while I was sure no one else would appreciate out collusion, it had not been specifically forbidden either. So, I wasn’t cheating. I was being resourceful.
Unfortunately, the cards didn’t contain anything too world-shattering, nothing that Mrs. Peabody hadn’t already said or acted out.
She was a rich socialite widow with a newly syndicated advice column and took joy in using that power to help various causes and bring down others. She was to comment on my weight loss... and complain about the new diet supplement not working. There was also a drawing of the bottle she’d described with the man’s arm making a muscle.
Nothing new. I slipped the card into my pocket and thought.
One by one, people returned to the room. As each did, I consulted my notebook to see if anything new popped out at me.
It did.
I not only knew who dunnit, I knew how and why. I looked up at Peter and grinned.
Chapter 7
Peter walked over and stared down at me. “You know who did it, don’t you?”
My grin widened. “I hear Minnesota is lovely in the spring.”
He grimaced. “I hear it’s humid.”
I tilted my head to the side in acquiescence. Compared to Montana, everywhere was humid.
Lady York clapped her hands and motioned for everyone to take a seat. After handing out “official” slips of paper for us to write our guesses on, she gathered them up and repositioned herself back in the middle.
One by one, she read the slips. When she was done, she tallied the “votes.” Maid Ann with her history with the victim and access to the martini glass got zero votes.
“Too obvious,” Mr. Blore offered. “Christie never picked the obvious choice.”
Plus, it turned out I wasn’t the only one to get a card declaring Maid Ann’s innocence. Half of the guests had. The other half had gotten one saying Sir Arthur with his African connection was guilt free.
He also got zero votes.
Captain Egg got one vote but with no motive or means mentioned.
“I’m a long-shot gambler,” Mrs. Peabody, who had taken her place back beside me, whispered. “Besides I thought it would be a hoot if the detective dunnit.”
Her husband seemed to come from the same camp. His vote was for Mrs. Peabody herself. “Her headache masked a terminal condition, but she had a double indemnity clause if she died by someone else’s hand and she wanted to continue her fame and support of her causes by naming one of them in her will. Means... she poisoned herself.” He puffed up as he said the last, glancing around and obviously expecting the rest of us to throw ourselves onto the ground in shame for our own stupidity.
None of us did. We nodded politely and tried to avoid eye contact with anyone else to keep from rolling our eyes.
Lady York was the big winner with Emily Brent, Mandrake and Miss Claythorne all casting their votes for her. They mentioned her jealousy over Mrs. Peabody having an affair with Mr. Blore, along with a possible need to kill the other woman before she revealed Lady York’s indiscretion to Sir Arthur, along with her bringing a deadly plant into the house as their supporting evidence, but I guessed it had more to do with our hostess’s bossy personality than any link to motive or means.
Mandrake, despite the butler-always-did-it adage, got no votes, and neither did Miss Claythorne.
Ms. Brent, however, got one.
“She’s killed once,” Dr. Armstrong explained. “There is no reason not to believe that she won’t kill again. And she had access to the monkshood and Mrs. Peabody not long before the poor woman fell.”
I gave him points for sticking to character so well with the “poor woman.” But it didn’t change the fact that he was wrong, because I alone, it seemed, knew who the killer was.
I leapt to my feet. Well, I tried to. I’d forgotten that I’d sat on the butt-eating couch. Peter, always the gentleman, held out a hand and tugged me to a stand.
“It was,” I announced, holding up the obligatory right hand, finger pointed at the sky. “Dr. Armstrong. How, you might ask do I know this?” I glanced around the room, debating whether I should add a twirl of my finger over my upper lip. In a salute to Poirot, of course. Not that Poirot was as flashy as my reveal promised to be, but it was just a salute. After catching Miss Claythorne and Emily Brent’s horrified faces, however, I decided against it.
I took a step back to regain my bearings and then dug in my pocket to pull out Mrs. Peabody’s card, the one with the supplement bottle drawn on it. “This!” I said. “Was his motive. He, Dr. ARM STRONG...” I pointed to the flexed arm on the card. “...was the creator of the supplement that Mrs. Peabody planned to ruin with her column. He couldn’t let her do it before the sale he had planned went through. So, he poisoned her. It wasn’t hard. He carried his medical bag with him wherever he went. One quick slip of the hand, a capsule tilted over her glass, and boom she was down.” I looked around the group. “Did that kill her? Who knows? She might have still been alive when he ordered us all out of the room and then, once alone, finished her off. It certainly gave him time to destroy any evidence that would point back to him.”
I waited, soaking up the stunned silence, brought on, no doubt, by my genius.
Lady York cleared her throat. “You came to this conclusion after seeing that?” She pointed to the card with the medicine bottle drawn on it.
I glanced at the clue, which I still held out, prominently exposing the fact that I had access to something no one else had.
“Where did you say you found it?” she asked.
I chewed on my lip and tried not to look at Mrs. Peabody.
“Because that card was supposed to have been found under the body, and...” Lady York flipped pages on her own notebook. “Yes, Maid Ann was out of the room at the time.” She looked up, expectant.
Mrs. Peabody objected. “No one told me to leave it under my body.”
Lady York motioned for me to flip the card over. Place under body when fall was clearly written on its back.
Mrs. Peabody waved her hand in the air. “What’s it matter? So I didn’t leave it under my body. I obviously left it somewhere that Maid Ann found it, and she solved the crime. She did, right?”
I held my breath.
Lady York sucked in one of
her own, an annoyed one. “I didn’t say that. Actually...” she turned in a circle, looking at each of us. “The person who named the killer is...”
She waited, letting the drama build.
“Mr. Blore!”
Mr. Blore beamed. His wife snorted, and everyone else in the room just looked confused. Except Peter. He looked concerned, most likely that I was going to say or do something inappropriate or even... stupid.
I, however, was above that. I had been robbed. I knew it and everyone else in the room, with the possible exception of Mr. Blore, knew it.
I crossed my arms over my chest to hold in my disgust and stared around at the group, hoping at least one or two of them were avid Yelp reviewers with a sense of justice that would force them to post about this outrageous transgression against the sanctity of Agatha Christie and everything she represented.
While everyone recovered from the unexpected outcome and wandered forward to press around Mr. Blore and congratulate him on seeing what no one else had and couldn’t because it was completely without merit, I stood by myself, licking my wounds and trying to recover enough that I could twist my lips into a smile and congratulate him too.
Peter walked up beside me and slipped his arm around my waist. “So Minnesota it is.”
I looked at him. “I didn’t win.”
“You might not have been declared the winner, but that wasn’t the bet. The bet was which one of us could identify the killer. I’m a cop. I know better than anyone how the courts can mess up and let a guilty man go free.”
I gave him a sideways look. “Really?”
He responded with a hug. “Really.”
Mrs. Peabody approached, looking disgusted. “I can’t believe she gave that to him. I will never hear the end of it, and he won a free weekend so I have to come back!”
She was still mumbling to herself when Lady York strolled up. “One of our most creative endings, I think,” she said. “Although yours was a good guess too.” She smiled at me as if we didn’t both know she was lying through her teeth.
