Chapter 8
Eight
My alarm clock the next morning went off way too early for my liking. The only consolation was that after I put a continental breakfast out, yawning the whole way, it was clear no one else had slept well either.
The dining room was as quiet as a morgue.
Allison was wrapped in a cardigan despite the fact that it was already seventy-eight degrees outside. A classic sign of fatigue, in my personal opinion. She was at one end of the table by herself.
Reginald was at the head of the table reading the newspaper with singular intensity, which made me think he wasn’t actually reading at all, just staring at the page.
He must have been up for a while though because I didn’t get a newspaper delivered.
He had to have walked to the store and picked one up.
Taylor looked green around the gills and he was pouring an electrolyte pack into a glass of water and stirring it very, very slowly.
Vivienne was the only one who looked remotely rested.
“Sleep well?” I asked her, jealous of how perky she looked as she strode into the room. I was a puffy mess of inflammation with dark circles under my eyes.
“Ashwagandha,” she said.
“Bless you,” Taylor said, lifting his head up from his stirring.
Vivienne laughed. “Thank you, but no. It’s an herb. It helps with your circadian rhythm.”
“So does bourbon,” Taylor remarked, lifting his glass in salute.
I'd made a full pot of chicory coffee and a tray of biscuits nobody was eating, and Teddy had positioned himself under the buffet table in a strategic begging formation that he assumed nobody could see.
I could see him. I bent over and frowned at him. “Behave.”
He chittered.
"Did anyone else hear anything last night after we all went to bed?" Allison asked.
"No," Reginald said, without looking up from his magazine.
“Like what?” Vivienne asked. She sat at the table opposite Allison.
"Like footsteps.”
“Probably one of us walking,” Reginald murmured.
“Not even a creak?" Allison insisted.
"Old houses creak, Allison. That is, structurally speaking, their entire personality."
"I heard something," Taylor offered. "But it might have been my own stomach."
"You could have kept that to yourself,” Vivienne told him.
He shrugged. “It was a joke.”
As someone whose joke often fell flat, I could sympathize.
I was saved from further participation in this conversation by the sound of my back door opening, which by now was such a familiar occurrence that Teddy didn't even bother to look up from his position under the table. My assumption was it was Hollis but there was really no telling who it was.
Fortunately, it was the detective, letting himself in the way he always did.
"Morning," he said to me. "You look tired."
"Thank you. You look like you've had four cups of coffee already and are considering a fifth."
"Don’t be dramatic. This is only my third cup." He walked into the dining room and poured himself coffee off of the buffet table.
“Help yourself.”
Yes, that was sarcasm on my part.
No, I didn’t actually mind that Hollis acted like he owned my house.
It was our thing. Our back and forth. Our did-we-like-each-other-or-not game we played.
At least that’s what I was playing.
"I need everyone for a few minutes. Won't take long."
Everyone at the table paused and waited expectantly.
Hollis proceeded to pile a plate high with food and sit down across from Taylor. At least someone was eating.
"Are we in trouble?" Taylor asked.
"Not unless one of you has something to confess," Hollis said, and I watched four faces very carefully not react to that in four distinctly different ways.
Reginald's newspaper didn't move. Allison's hand tightened around her mug.
Vivienne looked, if anything, faintly delighted, like she was disappointed she didn't have her camera out.
Taylor laughed a beat too late and a decibel too loud.
He slurped down the remains of his water and stood up.
He went over to the buffet table, his back to Hollis.
"I read the preliminary from the coroner's office this morning," Hollis said. “I want to walk you through it, because you're all going to hear pieces of it eventually, from reporters or from each other, and I'd rather you hear the accurate version."
"How ominous," Allison murmured.
"It isn’t good. Essentially Evelyn Carrington was stabbed to death," Hollis said.
“Stabbed to death?” Vivienne frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“In the mouth.” Hollis lifted his fork and made jabbing motions toward his own mouth. "One jab to the upper palate, angled back toward the throat. About four millimeters wide. Deep enough to hit the carotid."
“Dear God!” Allison exclaimed.
Someone gasped.
It was me. I gasped. Because…gag. That sounded horrible.
Reginald finally set the paper down.
“What a terrible way to die,” Vivienne said, clasping her own throat like she was imagining being jabbed there.
"Four millimeters," I repeated. That was narrow. I did some mental math I wasn't qualified to do. That was slimmer than a pencil. Skinnier than most things you'd find at a garden party, unless you went looking for something specific.
"That's the diameter of a cocktail straw," Vivienne said. She said it evenly, but she was still clutching her throat.
"That's the diameter of Evelyn's cocktail straw," Hollis said. "Specifically. The ME matched the wound track to a hollow cylindrical object, and the depth and angle are consistent with something entering fast, under pressure.”
“But it’s not like the woman stabbed herself,” Taylor protested, setting a full plate on the table and sitting down. “You’d have to really ram that sucker up in there and we didn’t see anything like that.”
“It’s possible a mechanism inside it triggered while it was in her mouth." Hollis loaded up his fork and started eating.
I personally had lost my appetite.
"Mechanism," Taylor repeated slowly.
"There's also this." Hollis reached into his jacket and produced a photograph, laid it on the table where all of us could see it without him having to pass it around like show and tell.
It was a close-up of something small, metallic, and badly bent, photographed against a ruler for scale.
"This was recovered from the terrace grating yesterday morning.
It's silver. The lab's still running full composition, but preliminary testing puts the alloy in the same range as Evelyn's heirloom cup and straw set.
Same range doesn't mean confirmed match yet, but it's close enough that I'm not currently entertaining coincidence as a theory. "
"So the straw poked her," Taylor said, working through it out loud. "Like, on its own? Sharp end and it just went for her?"
"Straws don't spontaneously develop sharp ends, Taylor," Reginald said, with the weary patience of a man explaining gravity.
"I'm aware of that, Reginald. I said the woman didn’t stab herself, didn’t I? I'm processing."
"The wound geometry, the trace metal, and the fact that the straw itself is the one piece from that entire place setting that is currently unaccounted for," Hollis said.
“Cup's washed and back on a shelf at Belle Rêve.
Tray's accounted for. Napkins, obviously, we've got.
" He glanced at me, briefly, on that one, since I was the reason the napkin was in an evidence bag in the first place.
"The straw is gone. Not broken and swept up.
Not in the trash. Gone, in a way that suggests somebody wanted it gone. "
I thought about the girl at the sink, elbow-deep in champagne flutes, telling me she hadn't seen it.
I thought about Marcus, very sure about the cup and very unsure about anything else.
I thought about how a piece of silver flatware—barware, I mentally corrected myself, because apparently that distinction mattered to some people—didn't simply evaporate from a catering cart.
"So you’re saying somebody built something into that straw," I said slowly.
"On purpose. Ahead of time. Not an accident, not a coincidence, not glass in a drink.
Somebody made a weapon and dressed it up as a piece of Evelyn's fancy heirloom bar set, and then took it back out of the crime scene before anyone thought to look at it twice. "
"That's the working theory," Hollis said.
“How charming,” Allison said faintly.
“Diabolical,” Vivienne said.
Reginald shook his head. "Bizarre. That takes skill." Reginald said quietly. "Mechanically. Whoever did this would need to understand metalwork. Small-scale engineering. You don't rig a spring mechanism inside a straw with a butter knife and a prayer."
"No," Hollis agreed. "You wouldn't."
“Bold assumption to think it would actually work,” Taylor said. “What would spring the mechanism?”
It was a valid question I had no answer to.
The silence that followed had a different texture than the one before Hollis had walked in. That first silence had been nerves. This one felt like the room recalibrating, four adults simultaneously doing the same math I'd just done and not loving where it landed.
"So we're looking for someone who can do metalwork," Allison said, a little too brightly, a little too fast, the tone of someone racing to say the obvious thing before anyone could look at her sideways for not saying it. "That's—I mean, that narrows it down, doesn't it?”
No one agreed or disagreed.
"I'm telling you what the evidence says,” Hollis said. “That's it. That's the whole purpose of this conversation. I’m not asking any of you to solve this crime. Just if you think of anything or know anything, let the police know."
Teddy chose that moment to emerge from under the table, having apparently given up on the begging strategy in favor of a more direct approach, and planted both front paws on Hollis's shoe.
"Not now, buddy," Hollis said, without looking down, though his hand found the top of Teddy's head anyway, a small, automatic gesture that undercut the whole detective posture he'd been holding for the last five minutes.
Teddy, satisfied, curled up on his foot instead and went still.
"What happens now?" Vivienne asked.
"Now we find out who had the skill to build it and the access to plant it," Hollis said. "That's a shorter list than 'everyone who disliked Evelyn Carrington,' which, from what I'm hearing, was most of the Garden District."
"That's not narrowing," I said. "That's a Venn diagram with two circles that are probably the same circle."
"Maybe," Hollis said. "Maybe not. Skill and access aren't the same thing as motive. Some people have all three. Some people have one and think that makes them look guilty when it doesn't." He looked around the table, not unkindly, more like a detective trying to see who flinched.
Nobody flinched.
"What about the straw itself," Allison said, still working her cardigan tighter around her shoulders despite the heat. "If somebody built something into it, wouldn't that take time? A workshop? Tools? That's not something you'd do the morning of the gala."
"No," Hollis said. "Which means whoever did it planned this well before Thursday. Possibly weeks."
"So we're not looking for a crime of passion," Vivienne said, and there was something almost clinical in the way she said it, the documentarian in her already sorting the facts into a shape she could use later.
"We're looking for somebody who decided, calmly, in advance, exactly how they wanted this to happen. "
"That's the read I've got," Hollis said.
Taylor set his mug down harder than he probably meant to. "That's so much worse than I was picturing. I was picturing, I don't know. Somebody grabbing whatever was nearby in a fit of rage. Not somebody sitting at a workbench for a month mad scientist style."
"Welcome to homicide," Hollis said, without much humor in it.
“What can we do to help?” Taylor asked.
"I want the straw back," Hollis said, straightening. "I want whoever moved it, and I want to know why. That's today's job. Yours is to eat your breakfast and stay out of catering carts."
"No promises," I said.
"I wasn't asking you. I was asking them." He nodded at the table. "You, I've given up asking."
"Wise man," Reginald said, and for a second, the tension in the dining room cracked just slightly.
“If you remember anything you think might be useful, let me know.” Hollis shoveled the rest of his food into his mouth at record speed then stood up. He looked at me, and said, "Walk me out?"
He’d never once asked me to walk him out. Curious, I did, Teddy trailing behind us both like he had business of his own to attend to in the back yard, which, to be fair, he probably did.
"You didn't tell them everything, did you?" I said, once the door had closed behind us and it was just the two of us and the magnolia dropping petals across the yard like it hadn't noticed anyone had died two days ago.
"I told them what they need to know to trigger memories.."
"Keeping some cards close to the vest. But you can tell me, right?."
"Nope," he said. He looked back at the house. "My gut says somebody in there knows more than they're letting on. Might be more than one somebody. I'd rather figure out which before I hand them the whole picture."
“Maybe your gut was just saying you needed a biscuit.” None of my guests felt remotely capable of murder to me.
"Maybe. I sure do like your biscuits.”
Sometimes, at the oddest moments, I felt like Hollis was flirting. But I was almost always wrong.
This was one of those times.
“They fall apart too easily,” I lamented. “Crumbly.”
“You overwork the dough,” he told me. “Like you overwork everything.”
I made a face.
He left it there, the way he tended to leave things, and headed off across the yard toward his own porch, hands in his pockets, shoulders set. I stood on the patio watching him go, turning the word skill over in my head.
Somebody had built something beautiful and lethal and hid it inside an antique.
And here I couldn’t even make a decent biscuit.