“Good morning, Somerset,” Basil said, hands on the sash of his navy-blue dressing gown, dark circles under dark eyes. “You seem to have recovered, better than Miss Bleuville. Better than Jools. I expected you’d still have a sore head, like many of us do.”
“I do.” Left hand in his pocket, eyes hooded, Kitt said, “But I had a walk and a breath of fresh air. That helped. A little.”
“Well, hope you rugged up, else you’ll come down with what Grant’s got.”
Kitt went for a hackneyed line he knew Mae would appreciate. “Yes, he certainly looked dead last night,” he said, observing Basil for physiological changes; rapid eye blinking, a pursed mouth, nervous laughter, signs that might indicate a lie, a cover-up, or guilt, but there was nothing. “How is Grant this morning?” He adjusted the cuffs of his pale blue cashmere pullover.
“I thought it best to let him be. I’m certain Valentine can look after anything I might need while he rests.”
“You’re a very kind employer.” Kitt pinched the bridge of his nose and screwed his face.
Basil chuckled. “I find a good fry-up for breakfast helps.”
Breakfast. What a magical word. Kitt felt himself grin half-heartedly. “Is breakfast being served?”
“Yes, and you’d better hurry if you want any. Mr Nash is something of a bottomless pit. Valentine’s refilled trays twice already. I know you...you...” Basil half-turned, sneezing three times. “Blast! The last thing I need is the flu. I know you got in late yesterday evening. We all had a good look at the cellar. Have you had a chance to see it?”
“I have. Thank you. What did you think of the Sunbeam?”
Basil’s brows arched in surprise. “You’re interested? I had no idea. Jools never said anything. Well, that’s wonderful, makes it all a bit more exciting when there’s more interest. See you back in the dining room. Left my phone upstairs.”
In the background, Rosemary Clooney’s warm voice musically murmured Hey There and Kitt lingered on Basil’s mention of breakfast. A tingle that had nothing to do with warming toes and limbs struck him as he went to the dining room. He paused at the edge of the space. Ruby, Nash, Reed, Taittinger, and Basil’s temporarily vacant seat, the guests had all made it to breakfast. One of them, all of them, none of them could have killed Grant.
“Do you ever not wear that hat, Somerset?” Nash slopped butter on a slice of toast. Half a second later, he dropped the knife, fumbled to pick it up, and lost it again. The knife clanged against the edge of his china plate, the toast fell into his lap, buttered-side down.
“Uhhh,” Ruby groaned and adjusted dark sunglasses, a green beverage clutched to her bosom. She mumbled a scratchy, “Mornin’,” and sucked green sludge through a straw.
“Yeah, g’morning.” Taittinger, eyes half closed and red from smoking dope in the barn, reached for the cup Mae had placed by his plate. “Help yourself.”
Reed looked up from his tablet. “It took you all this time to smell the coffee, Ian?”
Kitt gripped the back of the chair across from him. “There’s coffee?” The room held the aroma of bacon, maple syrup, and eggs—Mae’s scrambled eggs. A rush of salivating joy nearly made Kitt shout. He moved to the sideboard. He lifted a white plate with a yellow and black Art Deco design he identified as an old Aynsley pattern, and proceeded to inspect each covered dish, rolling back the opaque lid of everything on offer until he found the eggs.
His moment of drooling elation faded.
The equivalent of a demitasse teaspoon of scrambled eggs remained in the tray.
He stared at the dish, the leftover scrap of his black soul utterly destroyed. “Is this last of the eggs?” he said.
“Ask Mr Nosh there.” Taittinger rubbed his temple.
A substantial mound of mouth-watering scrambled eggs sat on Nash’s plate, toast crumbs down the front of his orange jumper. “You should have gotten here a little earlier, Somerset.”
“Clearly.” Kitt’s eyes shifted from the eggs Nash crammed into his mouth to the empty sideboard dishes. Weeks of stewed diner coffee and abysmal fast-food breakfasts in airports had changed him. Never in his life had he wanted to kill a man over something so trivial. A solid clout to Nash’s temple, with the pot of tea Mae had just brought in would suffice, but Kitt preferred to avoid violence before breakfast, and he didn’t want to break vintage china. “Might there any more scrambled eggs, Mrs Valentine?”
“Early bird gets the worm, Somerset.” Nash shook his head, making something of a show of his lack of hangover. Mae poured tea into his cup.
“I’ll leave the worms to you, Bob.” Kitt lifted his eyes to Mae. “Eggs, Mrs Valentine?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
His grin smug, Nash dumped milk into his tea, teaspoon stirred ding-ding against the china cup. “Chin up, people, the ski slopes await.”
“You’re serious about skiing?” Basil returned to the table.
“Y’all mind talkin’ soft like church mice?” Ruby winced.
Reed lifted his mug of tea. “Are we too loud for you, Ruby?” He had a swallow.
“Everything is too loud for me this morning.”
Kitt half-whispered, “The eggs, Mrs Valentine?”
She glanced in Kitt’s direction. “Unfortunately, sir, there was a kitchen mishap last night that left me short on eggs this morning. However, there is plenty of bacon, pancakes, French toast, and a lovely regional dish; a breakfast burrito of spinach, mushrooms, black beans, cheese, and green chile.” She gave him a bland smile and placed the teapot beside Nash. “Shall I fix your plate, sir?”
Kitt knew the expression on his face was one of quizzical disbelief. Bacon? Mushrooms? Mushrooms in a dish was the same as having clumps of dirt in food. He loathed mushrooms. And she knew it. “I’ll look after myself.”
“As you wish.” Still smiling blandly, she watched him slap a pancake on his plate and try to drag a scrape of egg from the chafing dish.
He took his seat at the table, across from Reed again and glanced at Taittinger’s mug. “Is there more coffee, Mrs Valentine?”
“Of course, sir,’ she said, “I’ll get you a cup,” and went to the kitchen.
“God help anyone who stands between you and coffee,” Reed muttered, without looking up from the news he read on his tablet.
For an eternity, Kitt stared at his pancake and three hundred years later, Mae placed a steaming mug beside him. He reached for the yellow-and-black-edged china cup, inhaled the delectable aroma of what he believed was a small lot Tanzanian-grown bean, and almost wept with delight. Kitt brought the cup to his mouth, drank deeply, and immediately coughed. The coffee was horrifically sweet, so sweet it burned his throat.
Mae’s smile was as sickeningly sugary as the coffee. “May I get you anything else, sir?”
Kitt looked down at his coffee and back at Mae. She had turned and proceeded to collect the chafing dish that had once held precious scrambled eggs, taking it to the kitchen.
Was poisoning his coffee her way of trying to tell him something? Or was she still angry? She had every right to be angry with him, but maliciously vengeful was a side of her he had never seen before and he looked into the cup, annoyed, dismayed.
Nash snorted. “If you’re going to be sick, the loo’s down the hall.”
Rather than launch himself across the table to strangle the egg glutton on the other side, Kitt lowered his head, gazed through his lashes, and smiled broadly.
“Vegemite on toast.” Reed didn’t look up from his tablet. “You need Vegemite on toast, Ian.”
“Is that what you ate, Dave?” Taittinger coughed. “That why you’re all bright-eyed?”
“M-m. Brought my own.” Reed pushed a small, bright yellow and red tube across the table. “Two slices of toast with a thin smear of this. Would you like me to pop some bread in the toaster for you, Ian?” he said, his gaze warm and adoring.
“Yes, thank you, darling.” Kitt gave Reed a smile as treacly as Mae’s had been.
>
Nash eyed them both, his laugh prissy and nasal. “Rather than eat that sludge, “perhaps y’all,” he said glancing at Ruby and Taittinger, “might refrain from drinking if you can’t hold your alcohol.”
Kitt kept on smiling, reached for the Vegemite and knocked the sugary cup of coffee from the edge. The aromatic brew splashed across his abdomen and right thigh. The liquid, not quite hot enough to really burn, slopped down upon his lap, darkening his pale blue cashmere jumper. He bolted upright, swearing.
With Nash laughing, Ruby holding her head, and Reed’s brows arched, Kitt set his hat on the table and started for the kitchen, shaking drops of coffee from his hands. “Mrs Valentine,” he called out, yanking off the pullover, pushing through the swinging door, “I need you!”
The door flapped behind him. In the centre of the room stood a large table laden with a basket of fresh fruit, a pitcher of orange juice, a box of mixed mushrooms—and a shallow bowl of eggs.
Eggs.
There it was, what he had always endeavoured to avoid in his relationships with women; the murky with emotions and expectation, where feelings were hurt and bitter tears shed. Only this time it was his emotions, his expectations, and his feelings that were hurt. How astonishing that it came down to eggs. He shuffled his feet with more than a little impatience.
Mae, her head inside a large stainless-steel refrigerator, said, “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“How long are you going to punish me?” He threw the pullover on the table beside the bowl and rubbed his thumb over the lumpy tips of two shortened fingers.
Mae straightened and turned, a bunch of celery in one hand. She looked him up and down, at the wet patch on his thigh, at the jumper in his hand. “I’m not punishing you.”
“Yes. You are.” Kitt leaned against the edge of the table and let his eyes shift to the bowl of beautiful brown eggs he knew Mae would insist on being free range. “You are surprisingly petty.”
She crossed the tiles, tossed the celery on the table, and took the pullover. “They’re hard boiled. Where’s your cowboy hat?”
Kitt lifted an egg. It was room temperature. He set it on its side on the tabletop, watching it as he gave it a spin. The damned egg kept spinning and spinning.
Without a trace of a smug smile, raised eyebrow, or sarcastic tilt of her head, Mae carried the cashmere to the sink and began to rinse it, her back to him.
An arse. He was an arse. “I apologise. I am sorry, but seeing these eggs, the coffee, and all the sugar in it. What would you have me think?”
“I put sugar in your coffee?”
“A sand bucket’s worth.”
“Taittinger takes his coffee with sugar, five teaspoons. You two are the only ones who drink coffee. I wonder if the cup I gave him had any sugar in it at all.” Her shoulders slumped slightly, as if she were appalled by the unprofessionalism of her indiscriminate sugaring.
“If I had to point the finger at anyone here, I’d go with Bob Nash, but I’ve found nothing to implicate him in anything criminal aside from his fashion choices and selfish discourteousness. I’ve found nothing on anyone. I need to get into the barn. Can you help me with that?”
She stopped rinsing cashmere and faced him this time. This time she lifted a brow. “Yes. Was there something else?”
His chin jutted forward. “Are you wearing my watch?”
Brow furrowing deeply, she went to the refrigerator, pulled something from the door, and came to stand beside him at the table. “I’ve only ever witnessed you this way once before, hungover, hungry, and cranky as a wee babe in wet pants,” she said, handing him a bottle of cold water. “What a frightful combination.”
Without a word, he unscrewed the top and guzzled the entire litre of spring water. When he was finished, he held the bottle in his left hand, most of his fingers wrapping around the plastic. Eyes on the floor, he said, “I feel cheated. I haven’t had your scrambled eggs since September, since before I went to Geneva.” He lifted his gaze to hers. “Cheated. Four months without your eggs, Mae. Four months. Through no fault of our own, we’ve been cheated of four months. Except in a way is my fault. I have myself to blame, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I made you grieve again. It was not my intention and I regret, very much, that I put you through hell.”
She undid the leather strap at her wrist and traded his watch for the empty water bottle. “I’ll make you coffee before I go,” she said softly.
Kitt paused, the watch half-secured on his wrist. “You’re leaving? Thank Christ.”
She left his side and put a kettle to boil. “Have you forgotten? I have duties to perform, dogs to exercise, guests to ferry to ski slopes, dead men to lie about finding.”
“Yes. There is that.”
Mae reached for a packet of coffee beans. “What? No instructions, no...” she lowered her voice an octave and mimicked him precisely, “...remember to breathe, Mrs Valentine?”
“Since you asked, look after Taittinger and Basil if necessary, do whatever butler things Grant would have done for him, because that’s the sort of butler you are. Sort out whatever you need to for the lunch this afternoon. After that, you’re leaving.”
“I’m doing nothing of the sort,” she said, a little louder than she’d meant to, and moved across the tiles until she stood in front of him and the coffee beans perfumed the air between them. “My leaving would look suspicious. With a murder in a cosy mystery such as this, on a country estate such as this, suspicion always falls on the domestic help, such as the butler.”
“This is not a cosy mystery. It’s a somewhat gritty cosy romantic spy thriller that tries hard to be amusing. Like you are now.”
“Whatever the genre, have you considered that maybe you need me here?”
“I don’t. After you ‘find Grant’ and get me into the barn, you’re leaving. This is not negotiable.”
“You’re right.” Mae set the coffee on the table. “We are not negotiating anything.”
Head cocked slightly to one side, Kitt stared at her. “You are the most stubborn, contrary woman.”
“Because I don’t let you dictate what I do or make decisions for me? Or because I want to finish what I started, like you?” She grabbed the back of his neck, jerked him down, kissed him hard, then let him go. Abruptly.
Off balance, Kitt bumped into the table and reached back to steady himself. The tips of his fingers upended the bowl of eggs. Amid a crash of blue crockery and the insipid bounce of cracking hard-boiled shells, two bright orange yolks exploded upon white tiles.
He looked down at the gooey, sticky mess that had spattered his shoes, and back at Mae.
Chapter 10
She had expected last night’s paw and boot prints to be covered by fallen snow. She’d expected the bits of Grant’s flesh to speckle the slate patio at the front of the stable-turned-art-studio. She’d expected a dark crimson pool to shine bright against white snow that was somehow whiter in the morning sunshine. Mae was prepared for blood spatter on the sand-toned wall beside fold-back glass doors to make a fleshy, macabre piece of modern art. She was ready for blood on the windowpanes and the stuccoed front, things she hadn’t been able to see in the dark of last night, and she stared at the stippled red, thinking about how one removed blood from painted stucco.
Cleaning vomit was easy, a few towels, a dish soap or laundry detergent, but blood, like spray paint, could be tricky to remove. Blood needed a cleaner with an enzyme in it to dissolve the protein without damaging the surface beneath the stain. Not the bleaching agent in denture cleaner, but perhaps peroxide and white vinegar. She’d have to look in the laundry or the barn to see what was on hand to—
What strange priority her mind made of stain removal over the death of a man. She couldn’t help how her brain viewed the scene automatically, professionally, despite there being no need to be professional because this was not a ‘real’ job; the position was pretend, as pretend as Kitt’s cowboy hat and Australian accent. She kn
ew her reaction was shock, not callousness.
Felix pulled on his lead, wanting to get closer to the body, and she looked at the site of Grant’s death, less than three metres from where she and the dog stood, half-shrouded by a clump of bushy piñon trees. It was chilling, grotesque, and Mae stared with sick fascination, with morbid curiosity, with a strange rush of excitement, the same rush of excitement as when she’d found two dead men last summer. There was just one thing, one very bizarre, unexpected issue with this winter death scene. Mr Grant wasn’t part of it. Instead, Mae stared at a deer.
Its neck had been ripped open.
“LOOKS LIKE WE’RE ALL going to stay here and recover, but Valentine will take you up to the ski run, Bob,” Taittinger massaged his eyelids, fingers beneath his glasses.
“Well, hell, I’m not going alone.” Nash, decked in out shamrock-covered ski bottoms, leaned his snowboard against the side of the display case full of old tin toys. He glared at the others who were in no condition to cross-country ski, snowboard down the Pajarito slopes above Los Alamos or skate the town’s little ice rink. He left the room to change and Mel Tormé crooned Heart and Soul to the hungover audience drooping about the great room.
Felix trotted in, prancing past the wide chair Taittinger shared with Ruby. Suddenly, the dog rocketed around the great room, spun in circles, and bit the rug under his paws. Head bowed to play, he barked and shot off around the room again until he leapt upon the ottoman in front of Reed and Kitt. Half a second later, Felix hopped back to the floor and began sniffing a trail of something. Hunched low, legs spread, Kitt pretended to doze. Head tipped against the little couch, brim of the cowboy hat screening his eyes, he watched the skinny animal for a moment, then set his attention on the others.
The Chungs, the newlywed couple from Hong Kong, wouldn’t arrive until lunch. Kitt hated that he was mildly curious about them solely, as racist and culturally insensitive it was, because they were Asian and might, with the faintest possibility, have a connection to what had occurred in Singapore. Instead of focusing on his shameful thoughts, and desperation and the iniquity of racial profiling, he set his attention on the present, on the people in the room.
Forever in Your Service Page 14