“Oh, that reminds me,” she said, getting to her feet. “I promised I’d help.”
“Help what?”
“In the kitchen.”
“That’s not what,” I said. “It’s where.”
“I said I’d help with the cleanup.”
“You?”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said, “it’s not your job. For another, you happen to hate helping in the kitchen.”
“It’s an emergency,” she said. “They’re shorthanded, what with the cook being dead and all.”
“And all,” I said.
“So I thought I’d help.”
I noticed the way she was avoiding my eye, and light dawned. I asked who she’d be helping.
“Whoever’s in there,” she said. “Look, I’ll just-”
“Molly Cobbett,” I said.
“She’s probably in there, yeah. So?”
“And her cousin Earlene?”
“She’s probably got other jobs to do.”
“So Molly’s alone in the kitchen.”
“She probably is,” she said, “and now that you mention it, that’s probably not safe. So that’s all the more reason for me to go keep her company.”
“Maybe I should come too,” I said.
“No need, Bern.”
“Two’s dangerous, remember? Suppose Molly turns out to be the killer?”
“Very funny.”
“Or suppose you turn out to be the killer.”
“Even funnier, Bern.”
“I just don’t want to see you make the wrong move,” I said. “I know you dreamed about her, but-”
“It was some dream, Bern. You have no idea.”
Oh, no? “She’s a country girl,” I went on, “from a sheltered background, and she probably doesn’t know the first thing about lesbians.”
“You didn’t see the way she was looking at me.”
“Well, you’re exotic,” I said. “Hip and urban and-”
“And gay,” she said. “And she’s a Cobbett, which means there’s probably not a whole lot she hasn’t done. The only thing that makes me exotic is that I’m not a blood relative. Listen, I’m not looking to put the moves on her. I just want to go keep her company in the kitchen.”
I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted to keep company with, in the kitchen or elsewhere. The only object of my affections in the neighborhood was Lettice Littlefield, and I wasn’t too sure how affectionately I felt toward her just now. Anyway, they were on their honeymoon and there was a killer on the premises, so her sneering husband was likely to be keeping her on a short leash.
What I really wanted to do was escape, and there’s one tried-and-true way to manage that feat without actually going anywhere. I remembered Emily Dickinson’s words on the subject: There is no frigate like a book. “Frigate,” I said, more or less, and went into the library.
I looked up at Raymond Chandler, looked over at the library steps, looked at the camel and the throw pillow. I wondered if a person could actually sit down and work out a murder scheme involving a camel and a pillow. It had to have been improvised, I decided, or else the whole thing had an impossibly Monty Python tone to it.
It was a pity, I thought, that I hadn’t heard any of the conversation that had been murmured in this very room while I lurked in the doorway. One of the participants had almost certainly been Jonathan Rathburn, the other the person who cameled and pillowed him to death. Had I crept in a little way I might have found out what they were going on about, and might have learned the identity of the other party. Conversely, if I’d just blundered in noisily, switching on lights and begging pardon for the intrusion, I might have prevented a murder. And, if that first killing hadn’t taken place, perhaps the others would have been nipped in the bud as well.
I could have saved them all, I thought. If only I’d been a little more furtive, or a little more oafish. Either extreme might well have done the trick. It was this middle-of-the-road crap that caused all the trouble.
Well, as Emily D. would say, frigate. High time I sailed away from all this. I went over to the shelves and started looking at the books.
I stayed there in the library, reading, then went upstairs to Aunt Augusta’s Room and ran into Millicent Savage in the hallway. She’d won, she told me triumphantly. She was going to be allowed to remain in Uncle Roger’s Room. I told her I thought she should stay with her parents.
“Why?” she demanded. “So you can burglarize Uncle Roger?”
“What’s he got to steal besides a pipe and slippers?”
“And the pipe’s smelly,” she said, getting into the spirit of things. “And the slippers have holes in them.”
“Poor old Uncle Roger.”
“No, it’s Poor Miss McTavish! Gross old Uncle Roger.”
“I still think you should stay in your parents’ room,” I said.
“Why?”
“I just think it would be a good idea.”
She looked at me. “You think there’s going to be another murder,” she said, “but you won’t come right out and say so because you don’t want me to be scared. But if I’m not scared, I’ll want to go on staying in my own room.”
“It’s a poser,” I agreed.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think there’s going to be another killing. But I won’t be the victim.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I’m just a little kid,” she said. “Nobody’s going to bother killing me. You’re the one who should be scared.”
“Me?”
She nodded solemnly. “Somebody’s going to be murdered tonight,” she said, “and it might be you.”
An hour or so later I was in yet another sitting room. This one boasted no antelopes on the wall, just a couple of edged weapons. One of them had a wave-shaped blade about eight inches long, and I took it down from the wall to admire it. I couldn’t swear to it, but what it looked like to me was a Malayan kris, a frequent denizen of the very same crossword puzzles that welcomed the oryx and the zebu. I ran my thumb across the blade, decided it was sharp enough for headhunting, and hung it back on the wall.
I’d stopped at the bar first, where I’d poured myself a drink and made the appropriate notation in the book. I was making the drink last, just wetting my lips every few pages while I worked my way through Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel of journalists in Africa. There’s a passage fairly early on in which a dour newspaperman reminisces about once having made and launched a dugout canoe, whereupon the thing sank like a stone. I was a little vague on the details, but I remembered that I’d laughed for ten minutes the first time I read the book. I didn’t know when I’d be likely to hit it, and I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as funny this time, and that I’d wind up wondering why I’d ever thought it was funny in the first place.
Better to be anxious about that than to worry about being bridged and mushroomed and cameled and pillowed to death. While I couldn’t be sure how my favorite passage would hold up, so far the book was an excellent choice. There were, to be sure, hundreds if not thousands of books on the shelves that I hadn’t read, but this was a night to be reading something I could count on. I wanted to escape, but on familiar paths.
I’d passed Raffles earlier in the upstairs hall, and you’d have thought I’d done something to offend him; he paid me no attention at all, and he’d have sailed on by with his tail held high if he’d had one. He turned up again after I’d been reading for half an hour, having undergone a personality transplant in the interim. He came over, rubbed against my ankle, draped himself over my feet, and purred with such energy that I felt the vibrations clear to my knees.
He was still in place, still revving his motor, when I heard footsteps and looked up at Carolyn. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got a good book to read and good whisky to drink and a comfortable chair to sit in. I’ve got a cat who has the decency to act as though he loves me, even though we know how unlikely that is. It’s not a bad life. I hope I don’t get killed.”