Beth
No!” It’s out of my mouth almost before I know I’m going to say it. “Don’t drink it!”
The others stare at me, their mouths hanging open, and slowly they lower their glasses.
All except Everett, who tuts and tips his glass back to swig from it anyway.
I spring toward him and knock the glass from his hand, sending it hurtling through the air to smash against the black marble fireplace in an explosion of glittering icelike shards.
“What the hell are you playing at?” Everett barks.
I’m not sure exactly when I knew something was wrong—perhaps when Sadie’s worried gaze hit mine, or when I saw a coldness in Nina’s eyes that wasn’t there thirty years ago—but I’m as certain as I can be. There is something in that whiskey.
I ignore Everett and swing around to check on Sadie. She looks so young, suddenly. She gives me that same trusting smile she always used to when she was a child, and then she peers down into her own glass.
“There’s definitely something in it that shouldn’t be there,” she says, swirling the contents gently. “Something oily . . .”
Everett is all bluster. “What’s going on? Are you saying that Averell woman is trying to poison us, now that she’s failed to burn us in our beds?”
I turn to Nina, who’s just swallowed a whole glass of the stuff.
I’m concerned for her, but I can’t help thinking, How could she not have had something to do with this?
I desperately want to believe, like Everett, that Leonora is wholly responsible.
But Leonora is locked in the study, and how would she have known we’d end up drinking the whiskey?
“You just drank it . . . ,” I say to her, stupidly.
She gazes back at me. “You were right, you know,” she says eventually. “About Mum poisoning me, when I was a child.”
The room is utterly silent as the other guests absorb this revelation that the photographer is in fact Nina, Leonora’s daughter.
Nina gives a heavy sigh. “I made Mum admit it. After—you know, after Markus died. She said it was”—she mimics Leonora’s voice—“just a gentle herbal preparation, that’s all. Just enough to keep me out of the way when my grandfather visited.” Nina’s face crumples. “Can you imagine how that feels?”
I swallow hard. “But what about now?” I gesture at the whiskey bottle.
“How did this happen?” I search her gaze, and there’s plenty of emotion there—anger, frustration, self-pity—but no surprise, no shock or anxiety at having drunk another dose of her mother’s poison.
And suddenly, I’m thinking of the last time I was in this house, of the horror and fear on Leonora’s face before she ran up into the smoke to look for Nina . . .
“My God,” I say. “I always thought it was your mum who started the fire in my bedroom. I was sure I hadn’t left anything on.
I thought maybe she was creating an excuse to get rid of me, but”—I shake my head—“Leonora loves this house. Too much. Definitely too much to risk burning it down—either then or now. Whereas you . . .”
Nina doesn’t take her eyes off me. She says nothing, but even after all these years, I can still read her—her wounded air of always being in the right, no matter what.
I step closer to her, my heart pounding painfully. “You did this, didn’t you? Brought these people here. Put something in their food to make them sleepy. Started the fire . . . It was you, wasn’t it?”
Nina shakes her head and laughs softly. “Oh, Beth. You’re being ridiculous.
You must be exhausted.” She sits forward, as if that’s an end to the conversation, and she pulls a white scrunchie hair band from her pocket, scoops up her hair, gathers and twists it until it’s captured in a bun on the back of her head.
Deflated, I glance around at the others.
Is Nina right? Is this my exhaustion talking?
I’m hoping that Sadie, at least, might offer me some reassurance, but she’s staring at Nina with a fascinated expression, and when she blurts out a question of her own, I genuinely believe I’ve lost my grip on the whole situation.
“What time is it, Nina?” Sadie says, enunciating her words with care.
Nina raises her eyebrows, then draws back the cuff of her coat. “Ten past four.”
“Your watch . . . ,” Sadie says. I follow her gaze to Nina’s white sports watch. Sadie sounds both amazed and triumphant. “You’ve been sitting in your car outside Mum’s house, haven’t you? These past few weeks. In a dark gray Audi . . .”
I look from Sadie to Nina, my bewilderment greater than ever. “Is that true? Why? Why would you do that?”
Suddenly, Nina’s face collapses into a childlike expression—hurt and resentful, as if she’s been the victim of a cruel trick. She glares at me as though it were all my fault, and she can’t seem to resist bouncing the blame onto me.
“I rang your old workplace, but they’d only say you didn’t work there anymore; they wouldn’t tell me anything else.
I watched your house for hours, Beth, and you never went in or out.
All I saw was this sad daughter, and people carting away your furniture .
. .” She shakes her head bitterly, as if the whole world has conspired against her.
“You never answered your invitation, Beth. You made me think you were dead.”