Calamity at the Continental Club

by Colleen J. Shogan

  Clapping her hands together, she said, “May I please have your attention? Before we move this meeting upstairs, the Continental Club suggested the Mayflower Society might want to offer an official toast to two of its longtime supporters, Grayson and Kiki Bancroft, who so recently met their untimely deaths. On behalf of the esteemed membership of the Continental Club, I want to extend our sincere condolences.” She paused briefly in an apparent attempt to find the right words. “We are deeply saddened that these deaths occurred at our beautiful mansion.”

  Apparently, no one in the Mayflower Society held the Continental Club responsible for the murders. The bar erupted in applause, with several people commenting, “Long live the Continental Club!” and the like.

  “At this point in time, I’d like to turn the floor over to Professor James Mansfield, a close friend of the Bancrofts,” she said.

  “He was certainly a friend to Kiki Bancroft,” Meg said, loud enough for the crowd to hear.

  I punched her lightly on the shoulder. In a slurred voice, I said, “Shut up, silly. Other people can hear you!”

  She raised her glass in response. We clinked our tumblers and giggled.

  Professor Mansfield, who was not clued into our ruse, shot us a dirty look.

  Meg wobbled on her high heels. “Now we’re in trouble,” she said.

  “SHHHHH!” I put a finger to my mouth as if attempting to quell the misbehavior of my best friend.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I monitored the crowd. Horrified stares returned my gaze. The most appalled belonged to Buffy and Winston Hollingsworth. God, I hope this works, I thought. Otherwise, I would be in the doghouse more than Clarence had ever been.

  Ignoring us, Mansfield proceeded with his speech. “As many of you know, I had a special connection with the Bancrofts, particularly Kiki.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.” Meg slugged down a gulp of her supposedly alcoholic drink.

  Mansfield gave us another angry sideways look but continued without comment, “We were kindred spirits, united in a common love of American history.”

  “United in other ways, too,” I said.

  Meg smiled and gave me a sloppy high five. “Good one, Kit.”

  That was enough for the professor. He turned toward us. “Excuse me, ladies. May I finish my comments uninterrupted?”

  Doug had covered his eyes with his hands. Maybe we were overdoing it.

  “Of course, Professor Mansfield,” I said, staggering a bit as I rose to my feet. “Please continue. We’ll stay quiet.” I plopped back into my chair and jabbed Meg in the side with my elbow.

  Mansfield droned on, telling stories about his trips with Kiki and lauding Grayson for his generous donations to preserve American culture and history. Most college professors in my experience loved a captive audience, and James Mansfield was no exception to the rule.

  Finally, he finished and Bonnie asked if there were any more remarks. Everyone looked around, hoping that the silence would hold. When no one spoke up, Bonnie announced the business meeting would start in fifteen minutes upstairs.

  Meg grabbed me by the arm. “It’s now or never. Are you ready?”

  “Let’s do this,” I said. “Otherwise, our crazy behavior will have been for nothing.”

  Carrying our fake drinks, we sauntered over to Cecilia and Drake’s table. Trevor and Doug were seated directly behind them. Doug gulped. He knew we were about to spring into action.

  Meg aimed a sexy smile at Drake. Standing next to his chair, she draped her arm around his shoulder. With a heavy purr, she asked, “Do you like to play darts, Drake?”

  Drake, who had apparently continued to drink the real stuff, slurped on his half-full martini. In her fitted floral dress, Meg was hard to resist, even with his wife sitting right next to him.

  “Sure,” he slurred. “I love darts.”

  “Maybe we should try to squeeze in a game before that boring business meeting,” said Meg.

  Drake appeared dazzled. She could have offered to drive him to the moon. He didn’t care, as long as she continued to pay attention to him.

  I went over to the board and removed all the darts. “I’ll play, too,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Meg. “It’ll be a threesome. You’d like that, wouldn’t you Drake?”

  Drake looked as though he’d just won the lottery. He nodded his head vigorously while Cecilia sat stone-faced next to him.

  I handed Meg three of the darts, including the one with the distinct-shaped wing. She waved them in her right hand, which was coming dangerously close to Drake’s exposed neck. “Anyone else want to play?”

  That was enough for Cecilia. “Watch what you’re doing!” she said.

  I positioned myself on the other side of Cecilia. “What’s wrong with you?”

  She straightened up in her chair. “Nothing, except your friend is acting like a drunken idiot with those darts in her hand.”

  I grabbed the pear-shaped dart. “Are you afraid of darts or something?”

  Cecilia recoiled as I pointed the dart at her. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  A small circle of onlookers had gathered around us, tracking our conversation with amusement, curiosity, or both.

  Meg stomped around the table and approached me from behind, holding her tumbler in one hand and the remaining darts in the other. “This is stupid. Are we going to play darts or what?” Meg appeared so authentically sloshed, I felt like we were in a Tennessee Williams play. She stumbled in her stiletto heels and pushed me toward Cecilia and Drake. The dart was pointed directly at Cecilia’s exposed upper arm. I made sure the pointed end contacted her skin.

  Cecilia looked down at the red mark on her arm and screamed, “Help me!”

  After I straightened myself up, I asked, “Why are you so worried, Cecilia? I only grazed you with the dart.”

  She shrieked, “You have no idea what you just did.” She gasped for air. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Do you need some sort of medical attention?” I asked. I was no longer pretending to be drunk, but Cecilia was too distraught to notice.

  Pointing to her mouth and hyperventilating, she said, “I need CPR.”

  “Well, you’re in luck, because the police just happen to be around the corner,” I said. “Detective?”

  Maggie Glass opened the glass door connecting the bar with the outdoor patio. She approached Cecilia. “Ma’am, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I … can’t … breathe,” she sputtered.

  Detective Glass picked up the dart and examined it. “I can’t imagine why that would be the case. This is an ordinary dart, and it only scratched you.”

  “That’s … enough,” she croaked.

  “Enough for what?” asked the detective.

  “To kill me, you dolt,” stammered Cecilia.

  Detective Glass leaned closer. “And why would a minor scrape from a dart kill you?”

  Cecilia clawed at her throat. “There’s poison on it.”

  Detective Glass raised her eyebrows in feigned surprise. “Poison? And how would you know about that? Unless you put it there?”

  “Who cares how I know? Just get a paramedic here before it kills me!” Cecilia’s face was drained of color and beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.

  “No need to worry about that,” I said, with a heavy dose of smugness.

  Cecilia scowled. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m glad you believed our performance,” said Meg. “It was perfectly staged, if I do say so myself.”

  Cecilia glared, and her face went from deathly pale to red.

  “We would have never allowed Kit and Meg to wave around a dart with the remnants of a lethal poison on the tip,” said Detective Glass. “So I switched out the deadly dart earlier this morning with this replica.” She picked it up from the table and ran the tip back and forth over her hand. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Doug spoke up. “The other dart, however, is on its way for forensic analysis. I’m su
re the crime scene investigators will find a fatal South American concoction on the tip. Perhaps curare? Or the poison dart frog?”

  Drake was three sheets to the wind, but even he knew this wasn’t looking good for Cecilia. “Are you a murderer?” he asked. Then he hiccupped and covered his mouth.

  “Shut up, you fool,” she said. “I’m not saying another word until I talk with my lawyer.”

  “A wise choice,” said Detective Glass. “Please come with me.” She took Cecilia by the arm and guided her toward the exit.

  The other Mayflower Society members had watched the scene unfold. After the police left with Cecilia, the crowd erupted in applause. Meg and I curtsied and took a bow.

  Winston Hollingsworth came over with Buffy in tow. He put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze. “Good show, Kit. We didn’t doubt you for a minute.” He shook his finger at me. “I knew you were up to something!”

  From the look of utter shock on Buffy’s face, she’d definitely doubted me, especially when Meg and I kicked our stunt into high gear at the end. Despite her astonishment and without saying a word, my future mother-in-law embraced me. And it wasn’t the polite hug I was accustomed to receiving from Buffy. Instead, she gathered me up in a big bear hug. She squeezed me so tightly, I almost couldn’t move my arms.

  “Th-thanks,” I stammered. Buffy tousled my hair and pushed a strand out of my eyes.

  “No, thank you, Kit. Without your help, an innocent man, my husband, might have been subjected to countless days of suspicion and heartache. Now we can return to Boston without a cloud hanging over our heads.” She smiled and took Doug’s hand in her own. “You’ve picked the right person to marry.”

  Doug put his arm around my waist. “I know, Mother. Believe me, I know.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  An hour later, we sat inside a wood-paneled room as the Mayflower Society convened its annual business meeting. Doug, Meg, Trevor and I had been invited to join the gathering to provide a coherent explanation for the events that had unfolded inside the garden bar.

  I looked around the wood-paneled room. “Hard to believe we ate dinner here four days ago. It seems like an eternity.”

  “With two more people alive,” said Doug.

  In the absence of a president, Professor Mansfield served as the chair for the meeting. After waiting while the acceptance of the minutes from the last gathering and a brief treasurer’s report were read, Professor Mansfield turned to the four of us.

  “This annual gathering of the Mayflower Society will be considered the most unusual and tragic of our meetings. No more eulogies for Grayson and Kiki Bancroft will be given today. There will be another time and place for that. However, as a learned society, we are entitled to understand what happened to our members, or so I believe. Luckily, we had several enterprising sleuths who worked with the police to solve these horrific crimes. I turn the floor over to the them so they can provide us with an explanation.” He motioned for us to stand and take the floor.

  The whir of the air conditioner was the only sound in the room. Thirty pairs of eyes shifted on us as we approached the podium. Because of the murders, only a small fraction of the members had stayed for the entire conference. Those who remained were the diehards, the true supporters of the Mayflower Society. Professor Mansfield was right. They deserved to know what had transpired over the past several days.

  Doug kicked us off. “Many of you know my parents, Winston and Buffy Hollingsworth. My fiancée Kit and I live nearby and joined them for the annual Mayflower Society gathering. Things started to go south when Kit found Grayson Bancroft’s body early on Thursday morning.”

  I provided several details about my unfortunate discovery and our initial interactions with Detective Glass. Then came the more interesting part, namely, how we solved the crimes.

  “Unfortunately, several of you had reason to want Grayson Bancroft dead, including Doug’s father.” Winston Hollingsworth broke into a hearty belly laugh when I mentioned his name.

  “There was no shortage of motives. Once we knew the murderer couldn’t have entered from the outside, we had to focus on whoever was already present and determine how Grayson was killed and who might have had access to the weapon, whatever it was—”

  Meg interrupted me. “And how that person pulled it off in the middle of the night without anyone knowing.”

  I smiled. “Good point, Meg. While visiting Mount Vernon, we realized that the timing of Grayson’s death was significant. As we all know, George Washington died quickly after catching a cold during an early morning ride around his property. Grayson couldn’t have lingered long, either. That posed a problem. Most poisons are slow acting. This one wasn’t.”

  Trevor chimed in, “Then we went to the National Archives, where the plot thickened.”

  “We met Kiki Bancroft and learned she wanted to honor the generous donation her husband had pledged. But that wasn’t the most important clue we gathered that day.” I cleared my throat. “Instead, Professor Mansfield said something that started to make me suspicious.”

  Professor Mansfield raised his eyebrows. “I did?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t know it at the time. Nor did I. You mentioned that Thomas Jefferson detested the edits made to the Declaration of Independence. When I thought about our conversation later, it was the first time I became convinced that Cecilia Rose might have a legitimate reason to want Grayson Bancroft dead. Writers really hate other people messing around with their books.” I added, “Or historic documents, for that matter.”

  “Cecilia wanted to stop writing the popular Savannah books, but Grayson wouldn’t allow it,” said Doug. “She had other ideas for novels, but she was chained to the series by its popularity.”

  “Jefferson didn’t kill anyone, but he was pretty darn angry, too,” Trevor added.

  “However, none of that matters if you didn’t figure out how Cecilia killed Grayson,” said Meg.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “That leads us to our third stop, the Smithsonian. Doug and I spoke with a curator of their current exhibit on poisons. She provided us with a lot of valuable information.”

  I briefly recounted the description of curare and the poison dart frog and the significance of the South America connection. Then Doug took up the thread. “That led us to think Kiki Bancroft had somehow killed her husband, even though she wasn’t in Washington at the time of his death. Imagine our surprise when we rushed to the Continental Club, only to find out that Kiki herself had become the next victim.”

  “That was truly baffling,” I admitted. “But then Buffy Hollingsworth gave me the final clue I was looking for.”

  Buffy squealed. “Me? I solved the mystery?”

  “In a way, you did,” I said. “Or maybe the credit should go to Clarence, our dog.”

  Laughter erupted in the audience. Little did they know that Clarence had helped us solve a murder on Capitol Hill only a few months earlier.

  “After Kiki’s murder, you mentioned that Clarence had uncovered a pill case full of Ambien from Cecilia’s purse during the dinner party we hosted at our condo,” I said. “But Cecilia had made a point of telling me earlier what sound sleepers she and Drake were. Something didn’t add up.”

  “When Kiki was killed, we knew she had to have an accomplice on the inside,” explained Meg.

  Meg was getting ahead of herself, bringing up Kiki’s involvement. A murmur rose in the crowd when a few people realized what we were implying. All in good time.

  I went on, “And we had evidence that one person had made sure her partner didn’t wake up during the night. In fact, Drake told me he didn’t remember anything from the night Grayson died until the alarm went off.” I paused. “It didn’t matter much at the time, but the sleeping pills made a lot of sense once I knew about them.”

  Professor Mansfield was listening intently from the front row. “It all adds up, but it doesn’t seem like enough to go on.”

  “I almost forgot,” I said. “There w
as another important clue. I picked up on this one. Charles, the Continental Club bartender, told me the dartboard inside the bar had been recently donated to the club. After Kiki’s death, Cecilia excused herself from our table, claiming she needed to talk to someone from the club about getting a receipt for a recent donation.”

  “That’s when Kit started to put the pieces of the puzzle together,” Doug said proudly.

  “Almost. That detail didn’t make sense to me until later that day when we went home and I was able to review my notes from all our conversations. We still had no idea how the murderer killed Grayson and Kiki. If it wasn’t a syringe, then what was it?”

  Professor Mansfield slapped his knee. “The dartboard! She donated it so she could plant the murder weapon.”

  “Now you’re catching on,” I said. “Kiki wanted her husband dead. Likewise, so did Cecilia—Kiki’s husband, that is. They conspired to kill him, and Kiki came up with the idea to use this particular poison.”

  “Cecilia agreed to do the dirty work at the Mayflower Society gathering,” said Doug. “Once Kiki had supplied the deadly concoction, Cecilia came up with the ingenious idea of donating the dartboard. After she used the tip of the dart to kill Grayson, she simply placed it on the board inside the bar. She had the perfect place to hide the murder weapon in plain sight.”

  “The sleeping pills and the unusual donation to the Continental Club was too much coincidence,” I said. “It had to amount to something. But there was no way to prove it.”

  “That’s when Kit called on us to help,” said Meg.

  I nodded. “We had to set a trap,” I continued. “The only way we could get Cecilia to admit she’d poisoned the dart was to threaten her own life.”

  “So that’s why we pretended to have too much to drink this morning,” said Meg. “We don’t usually act that way.” She paused. “Well, certainly not on a Sunday morning.”

  “We needed an excuse to act crazy when we moved to the bar after brunch,” I said. “How else could we justify almost stabbing her in the arm?”

  Doug explained further, “Kit made sure Detective Glass knew what we were doing. She watched the whole scene unfold from behind the glass doors to the courtyard.”