“How’s that?” Wolpert asked him.
The colonel cleared his throat. “If the cook is entirely innocent of the crimes that have taken place here, as seems likely, then the killer is one of us. And in that case the cook is in no peril in the kitchen, because all of us are here.”
“Didn’t I say that?” Cissy wondered aloud.
“But,” he went on, “if by some chance the cook is the murderer, then we’re all quite safe. Because we’re here and she’s elsewhere.”
“In the kitchen,” Mrs. Colibri said.
“Quite so.”
“Preparing our lunch.”
The room went very still. Miss Gloria Dinmont broke the silence. “She could poison us all,” she said softly. “We’d drop like flies, never knowing what hit us.”
“Or writhe in agony,” her companion chimed in, “knowing we’d been poisoned, but unable to get hold of the antidote.”
“A tasteless and odorless poison,” Miss Dinmont said.
“A poison that leaves no trace,” said Miss Hardesty.
“Oh, come on,” Carolyn said. “What difference does it makes if the poison leaves a trace or not? If we’re all discovered lying dead all over the house, what do you figure the cops are going to think? That somebody said something so shocking we all popped off with heart attacks?”
“Besides,” young Millicent said, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a poison that doesn’t leave a trace.”
“It seems to me most toxic substances leave some sort of evidence that would show up in an autopsy,” I said, “but you generally have to look for it.”
“How do you know that, Bern?”
I knew it from Quincy reruns on Nick at Nite, but I didn’t want to say that. “We’re out in the country,” I said, “and a rural cop who walked in on a roomful of dead people with no marks on them would probably write it off as carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective furnace.”
“But there’s no central heating.”
“That might not occur to him. Still, we’ve got what, fifteen or sixteen people in the room? Safety in numbers.”
“What do you mean, Bern?”
“I mean that many people dying all at once under mysterious circumstances would trigger a full-scale investigation. The state troopers would run it, and there’d be a complete toxicological workup. If we’d been poisoned it would show up.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind,” Dakin Littlefield said. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.”
“All I’m trying to say-”
But he didn’t want to hear it. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if the cook was bent on lacing our porridge with rat poison she wouldn’t start off by killing people with a camel and a pillow and a cup of sugar. If Gloria over there in the wheelchair is seriously worried about poison, I’ll volunteer to eat her lunch for her. Assuming we ever get lunch.”
“Ha!” Rufus Quilp thrust his head forward, his little eyes beady and bright. “Lunch,” he said. “Breakfast was ages ago and no one’s serving us lunch. What about that, Eglantine?”
“I’m sure lunch won’t be long now,” Nigel said.
“If we’re not going to get it right away,” Quilp said, “I don’t see why we can’t at least have our elevensies.”
“Elevensies?”
“Normally served at eleven,” Quilp said dryly, “as you might guess from the name. Too late for that now, of course, so you could call it something else, or call it nothing at all, just so one has the opportunity to eat it. A cup of coffee, say, and a scone or some crumpets. Anything that will do to tide one over between breakfast and lunch.”
“Nigel,” Cissy said, “perhaps someone could fetch Mr. Quilp a cup of coffee.”
“And a scone,” Quilp said.
“And a scone.”
“Or perhaps a croissant,” the fat man suggested, “if there are any left, and perhaps with some of those gingered rhubarb preserves.”
“Yes, those are lovely, aren’t they? I’m sure we’ve some left, Mr. Quilp. Nigel, why don’t I just fetch something for Mr. Quilp?”
“Not by yourself,” her husband said.
“Oh. But if I simply went to the kitchen…oh, but…” She frowned, troubled. “Oh,” she said.
“I don’t want to cause a fuss,” Rufus Quilp said. “And if lunch should turn out to be imminent, well, I wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.”
“Fat chance,” Carolyn muttered.
“But if lunch is destined to be rather a distant affair,” he went on, “then I do think I could do with a bit of tiding over. There’s my blood sugar to be considered, don’t you see.”
I found myself considering Mr. Quilp’s blood sugar, and wondered idly if it could render a snowblower hors de combat. While I pondered the point, the colonel took command, dispatching a patrol on a reconnaissance mission. Cissy Eglantine, flanked by the Cobbett cousins, were to go to the kitchen and inquire of the cook just how long it would be until lunch. If our estimated waiting time was thirty minutes or less, they would return empty-handed; if longer, they’d bring back something designed to tide us over.
They were no sooner out of the room than Raffles turned up, threading his way through the room, getting petted and cooed at and fussed over as he went, and rubbing up against the odd ankle along the way. “Oh, it’s Raffles,” Lettice said, reaching to scratch him behind the ear. Her husband asked her how she happened to know the cat’s name, and she said she must have heard someone call him that.
When, he wondered. Last night or this morning, she said, and why did he want to know? Because this was the first he’d seen of the cat, he replied, and he wondered when she’d had time to see it, and make its acquaintance.
“Why, Dakin,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous of him. He’s a pussycat!”
“How do you know it’s a male?”
“Because he miaows in bass,” she said. “Darling, how do I know? I suppose whoever called him by name also referred to him with a male pronoun.”
“And he’s the resident cat here, is he? What happened to his tail?”
“He’s a Manx,” Millicent Savage said helpfully. “And he doesn’t live here. He came here with Carolyn and Bernie.”
“Well, I don’t suppose he’s the killer,” Littlefield said. “He might have clubbed the poor jerk in the library and clawed the bridge supports, but I can’t imagine him doing a number on the snowblower.”
“He’s been declawed,” Millicent said.
“I give up,” Littlefield said. “He’s innocent.” He started to say something else but stopped, probably for the same reason that everyone else in the room had stopped talking. Cissy Eglantine, back from the kitchen, stood framed in the doorway. The Cobbett cousins stood just to the rear of her, as if they were trying to shrink into her shadow.
She looked across the room at her husband. For a moment she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Nigel, I spoke with Cook.”
“And what did she say, dear?”
“I’m afraid she didn’t say anything.”
“It’s hard to get much out of her, I’ll grant you that. Did you ask her directly when lunch will be ready?”
“No.”
“You didn’t? Whyever not?”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and her lip trembled. “Nigel, mind you, I’m not absolutely certain, but-”
“But what?”
“Oh, Nigel,” she said, and sighed. “Nigel, I believe she’s dead.”
CHAPTER Seventeen
“She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.
There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.