Chapter 6
Six
“Who the devil is Hyacinth Maxwell?” Taylor asked.
I made eye contact with Vivienne. She’d witnessed the David Yurman display. She could back me up.
“Hyacinth is a girl I went to school with at Sacred Heart. She said hello to me on the front steps tonight. Called me hilarious in that way that means the opposite.” I was pacing, tea sloshing.
“She was wearing that bracelet. I saw it. She told me about it, unprompted, like I’d asked. Which I hadn’t.”
“Harper didn’t even know who David Yurman was,” Vivienne said. “I had to let her in on it.”
“Who is he, her boyfriend?” Taylor asked, brow burrowing like he didn’t understand the relevance of any of this.
“That’s exactly what I thought!” I told him, putting my hands on my hips. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“It’s a jewelry designer,” Vivienne told the group. “She wanted Harper to know who the designer was.”
“So she has a habit of pointing out her own jewelry,” Reginald said slowly. “Which either means she’s vain, or she wanted witnesses to notice exactly what was on her wrist tonight.”
“That’s either very stupid or very smart,” Taylor said. “Hiding in plain sight. Could be the most clever thing I’ve heard all night.”
I refused to accept that Hyacinth Maxwell was clever. “I vote stupid.”
“Or it’s a coincidence and half the Garden District owns that bracelet,” Allison said, though she didn’t sound like she believed it. “David Yurman isn’t exactly rare in that crowd.”
“That hand knew exactly where it was going and exactly how long it had to be there,” Vivienne said.
“So presumably she assumed if anyone was looking they wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She was an invited guest,” Reginald mused. “She wouldn’t have expected that she was being filmed.”
I looked down at Teddy, who was standing at attention by the parlor door like he had somewhere to be. Which, if his social media accounts were any indication, he just might. Teddy was an up-and-coming skunk.
“We have to go back,” I said.
“Go back where?” Allison’s voice climbed an octave.
“The gala.”
“Harper, a woman just died.”
“Which is exactly why we have to go back. The gala’s still going strong, I’m sure.
It hasn’t even been an hour since we left.
That man with the microphone said the bar’s staying open, remember?
‘In the spirit she intended.’” I could still hear the tepid applause in my head.
“If Hyacinth is still there, I want to see her face when she hears the word homicide. Or died. Or anything. I want to see what she does.”
“That’s not investigating,” Reginald said. “That’s stalking with extra steps.”
“I prefer to think of it as proactive hostessing.”
“No one called this a homicide,” Allison pointed out.
Taylor, despite being roughly seventy percent bourbon by that point in the evening, was already reaching for his jacket. “I’m in. I want my name off the suspect list, and there’s an open bar. Two birds.”
“Excellent. We’re all still dressed,” I added. “What’s the harm?”
Vivienne was already tucking her camera into its bag with brisk efficiency. It was clear she suspected her B-roll had become evidence. “I want the rest of that footage anyway. There might be more before that hand. I was filming for twenty minutes before the toast.”
Allison looked around at all of us like we’d lost our minds, which, to be fair, was a reasonable read of the room.
Then she sighed, the particular sigh of a woman who has decided that missing the story is worse than being embarrassed by it.
“Fine. But I’m not getting out of the van if there are police there.
I have enough legal problems with that family without adding trespassing on a crime scene. ”
“It’s not a crime scene,” I said. “It’s a garden party that had a medical emergency.”
Nobody in the room believed that sentence, including me.
The drive back to Belle Rêve Manor was very different from the first one. Nobody joked about valet parking. Nobody complained about buckling up. Vivienne was rewatching her footage. Allison was swiping through her phone and murmuring occasionally about potential grudge holders.
“I can’t find any references to a Maxwell family in my notes,” she mentioned.
I wished I didn’t have to drive because I wanted to be more engaged in a conversation with all of them, but I was still too cheap to pay for a rideshare.
I’d brought Teddy in his travel bag on the passenger seat, mostly because he was mad at me for leaving him earlier and I felt guilty. Besides, he had a nose for murderers.
The gala had thinned considerably by the time we pulled back into the circular drive. Half the cars were gone. The string quartet had resumed playing, though their tempo had drifted into something more understated. Magnolia trees glowed under strings of lights that no longer felt romantic.
“Dark deeds under a dark sky,” Allison murmured.
"Stay together," I told my little group, which felt like a very Mom thing to say to four adults. "If anyone asks, we're checking on Evelyn."
"We know she's dead," Allison hissed.
"They don't know we know. Discretion, Allison,” Reginald commented.
We slipped through the side entrance, past a cluster of committee members huddled together with the particular stiff-shouldered posture of people trying very hard to look like they weren't gossiping. I caught pieces as we passed.
Should we cancel the silent auction?
Absolutely not, the money's already been raised.
It just feels wrong to bid on a spa weekend right now.
I scanned the crowd for a fitted buff-colored dress and artfully arranged hair and came up empty. No Hyacinth.
"She's gone," Vivienne said, following my gaze.
"Maybe she just left before it got weird."
"Or she left because it got weird," Allison muttered.
Our historical fiction writer doesn’t seem as comfortable acting nonchalant as the rest of us. I wasn’t sure what that said about Allison, exactly.
Or what it said about the other four of us.
Out on the terrace, the caterers were doing the fast, eyes-down work of people who wanted everyone to be done and gone. The small table where Evelyn had stood was already cleared. I’d already seen the cup and straw scooped up before we’d left the first time.
There was no sign that a woman had collapsed there less than two hours ago, except for a faint dark stain on the tiles.
I crouched down near it, and Teddy, freed from his bag the second we'd cleared the doorway, beat me there. He was sniffing along the edge of the stone with the single-minded focus he usually reserved for unattended charcuterie boards.
"What is it, boy?"
He didn't answer, because of that whole he-s-a-skunk thing, but he did trot a few feet toward a linen cart that had been shoved against the low garden wall.
It was the kind caterers used to haul dirty napkins and tablecloths back to the kitchen for laundering.
He rose up on his back legs, front paws braced against the side of the cart, nose working overtime.
"Teddy, no. That's not yours."
He gave me a look that suggested he disagreed strongly, then wriggled his way up and over the lip of the cart before I could stop him, disappearing into a heap of crumpled linens.
He did love a good linen pile for a nap.
"Harper," Reginald said, low, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed my skunk diving headfirst into the catering supplies, "get him out of there."
"I'm working on it." I reached in after Teddy, pulling back handfuls of soiled napkins, and that's when I found one balled-up cloth napkin, heavier than the others, damp in a way that had nothing to do with spilled champagne. I unfolded it carefully.
Crushed mint. A whole fistful of it, macerated down to a dark, bruised pulp, far more than a single julep would ever need. It had been wadded up tight and shoved deep into the napkin like someone had wanted it gone, not tossed carelessly the way you'd toss the muddle from a used glass.
Was that what I’d seen picked up off the ground right after Evelyn collapsed?
"That's a lot of mint for one drink," Taylor said, peering over my shoulder. He'd gone very quiet, which for Taylor was its own kind of alarming.
"Could be from setup," Vivienne said. "Bartenders muddle in bulk. I used to be a bartender in college."
"Then why hide it at the bottom of a laundry cart instead of the trash?
" I turned the napkin over in my hands. The smell was sharp and green and, underneath it, something else.
Bitter. I wasn't a chemist. I wasn't even a very good cook.
But every instinct I had, honed by four years of a true crime podcast and eleven months of finding dead bodies in and around my own historic property, was telling me that bitter didn't belong.
"Poison," Allison breathed, like she'd been waiting her whole writing career to say the word out loud in a real-life context. "It's poison. Mint hides bitterness. That's a classic. I researched this once."
"We don't know that," I said, though my stomach had gone tight.
"We don't know it's not that," she shot back.
“Fair enough.”
Teddy chose that moment to emerge from the linen cart entirely, triumphant, with a second scrap of cloth dangling from his teeth. I took it from him gently. Not a napkin this time. It was just a bar rag with nothing wrapped inside it. That was disappointing.
“Where’s the straw?” Vivienne asked.
"Not here,” said. "We need to go to the kitchen. If someone's cleaning up evidence, it either went in the trash, or it's still back there waiting to be washed with three hundred other pieces of silver."
“You’re just going to waltz into the kitchen?” Allison scoffed. “Dressed in a gown?”
“I was thinking I might tango instead of waltz,” I joked.
Allison stared at me blankly.
“No one will think anything of it,” I assured her. “I’m a Society member, remember?”