by Mary Bowers
After that, he only needed to make sure Orwell didn’t eat any of that frosting. If Orwell died, it would all have been for nothing.
But that was all right: Phineas was standing right there when Orwell declared he was going out for cake, and he didn’t want Vanessa tagging along. Which, as it turned out, would have been impossible anyway: by that time, she was already dead on the kitchen floor.
When it was time for the speeches, Vanessa limbered up her nasty muscle by trying to embarrass me in front of everybody. Then she went back to the kitchen, passing up the opportunity to invite Michael to come and be alone with her in the kitchen. She couldn’t. She had already added ipecac to the frosting. You have to frost a cake before you can cut it, and if she was cutting a cake, she would have had to offer him a piece.
So she pottered around in the kitchen by herself, setting up Orwell’s reward, spreading on the extra frosting, cutting two slices and sitting down to eat one, which as far as she knew was only laced with ipecac. She thought she would be mildly sick. Instead, she died, alone in the kitchen, unloved and unattended, while everybody else in the building faced the other way and cheered for Orwell. I’m not sure we would’ve heard her fall. The specialists say she wouldn’t have been able to scream (Phineas didn’t), but I’ll always wonder if a Roman Coliseum-style roar was going up in the main hall as she was falling down in the kitchen.
And as to why she’d make herself sick, I have no explanation, but Gavin does. Naturally, he thinks it was all about him. Vanessa was on a campaign to get Gavin fired. After Orwell had gotten sick the first time, he accused Gavin of being negligent (or worse). Vanessa figured having a second spoiled or tainted cake, delivered by Gavin, was going to be another nail in his coffin, with the benefit of making Orwell grateful to her for taking the bullet, so to speak. And she didn’t plan to make herself very sick. Just enough to make Orwell worried. And she did it at a splashy event like ParaCon to magnify the consequences. With any luck, Orwell would’ve fired Gavin on the spot.
Where did Phineas get the cyanide? Paracelsus told us proudly that he had a jar of it in his laboratory at home in Savannah. “Naturally. A research scientist needs a fully-stocked laboratory.” And Phineas sometimes functioned as his lab assistant, he added. “I needed to pay strict attention to my experiments. I couldn’t be watching a mere lackey every minute.” Chemical analysis proved him right: the cyanide that killed Vanessa was chemically identical to that which killed Phineas, and the cyanide from Paracelsus’s lab.
As for why Orwell left the conference looking for cake when he knew there was one waiting for him in the kitchen, we know exactly why he did that. He told us.
“They were always squabbling like children,” he said. “Since Vanessa had joined us, there had been nothing but dissention, and I was growing weary of it. Even cake wasn’t fun anymore. I had used it to represent one of the irreducible elements of living, and those around me had corrupted it until it only suggested gluttony and power. They were spoiling it for me. I decided to teach them a lesson, go forth, and find my own cake, just to prove that I could. After the conference, I decided I was going to draw Gavin aside and suggest that he effect a personnel change at the earliest opportunity.”
“You wanted him to get rid of Vanessa,” I said, in plain English.
“That’s what I just said. Now that we had Pixie, we no longer needed Vanessa,” he added. “Little Pixie has a more gentle, innocent presence. I find her soothing.”
“Well,” I said, “if you ever get tired of Pixie, why don’t you just get yourself a dog?”
I don’t think he’s going to get tired of Pixie, though. It’s entirely possible the hard-bitten Pixie of the Ladies’ Room will never appear in Orwell’s World. She’s a smart cookie, and she knows which side of the crumpet the extra frosting goes on. Gavin admitted to me that he’d brought Pixie in hoping to jettison Vanessa. Pixie was just as attractive, in a more ethereal way, and on the surface, she was harmless. She didn’t have Vanessa’s brains and she wasn’t overly ambitious. She was just a waif looking for somebody to take her in, and that storyline is going to suit everybody for a long time to come, I think.
I did wonder if Orwell was ever going to meet anybody Gavin didn’t want him to. But that’s the price he pays for letting somebody else take all the responsibility. I think he knows that, and it’s a bargain he’s more than willing to make.
Finally, it was just an indication of how unpopular Vanessa was generally that nobody got worried about her sooner. After the fact, several people said they not only hadn’t been worried about where she was, they’d hoped she’d stay there. Kind of a sad epitaph.
Michael spent a few days brooding, afterwards. I think he felt guilty, though there was no rational reason why he should. But he had been her last failure: she’d returned to Tropical Breeze a celebrity, and she’d planned on sweeping up the town’s most eligible bachelor and toying with him for a while. But Michael wouldn’t play, everybody at ParaCon tried to avoid her, and in the end, Orwell was about to reject her. When I remember all that, I’m not jealous of her lavender eyes anymore. On some level she must have known all that. But it was hard for me to lament her fate. She just wasn’t a nice lady.
* * * * *
Orwell is writing another book. He swears it’s his last. He’s calling it Everything Else. He told me he wanted to call it Cake, but Gavin had a fit.
* * * * *
Sparky has a new reality show. It features himself and Ricky Larson. He has a featured guest on every show, and Orwell has appeared on it more than once, much to Gavin’s fury, I’m sure. It also features a segment with Paracelsus, who doesn’t appear with Sparky and Ricky at all, so the show may actually last. They’re calling it Sparky and Ricky.
Somehow, to me it always suggests a rattling, backfiring jalopy.
* * * * *
I drove out to Spuds to check on Purity a few weeks later. She seemed surprised when I called on the phone to see if she’d be around that day so I could drop in. And she seemed pleased, too.
Her home, studio and workplace, where she holds personal consultations and gives séances, is in an old barn behind her mother’s farmhouse. She has it fixed up pretty nicely, and it has a kind of country-cabin feel. She welcomed me in and gave me tea and cookies, and we talked about the weather and the potato crop and what should be done about the feral cats running around in the fields.
I couldn’t seem to ease the conversation around to what I’d come to say, so I finally just said it.
“You know it wasn’t your fault, don’t you, Purity? He used you.”
“I know.” She smiled bravely. “I’ve never been lucky in love. And he was so handsome, in his bespoke suits and his long, shiny hair. He had such pretty manners. Not like the men today.”
“Had you been seeing him much?”
She shrugged. “Just at the conferences. He never paid much attention to me before that day. And of course, he suddenly found himself irresistibly attracted to me when he needed me to cover for him. When he needed me to clear the way for him to gain entry to the kitchen. I’m so stupid!”
“Why? Because you didn’t realize he was planning to kill somebody? Don’t be so hard on yourself, Purity. He said at the end that he really did like you. He didn’t have to say that, you know.”
“I know.”
I didn’t tell her that I had spent a lot of time mulling over the possibility that he’d been waiting for her behind Girlfriend’s the night of Operation Wee Folk to lure her away and silence her, not apologize to her. We’ll never know now. I’d be more convinced that he hadn’t if Sparky hadn’t shown up before he could make a move.
“By the way, how are the Wee Folk these days? Do we have a truce?”
“Oh, they’re fine. I don’t seek them out. They don’t like that. But spring is here, and they come alive in the spring. The change of seasons affects them much more than it does us. When it’s time for the bunnies to be born, they’re energized. That’s t
he time of year to reach out, if you want to. Where did Sparky cause the disturbance at Cadbury House?”
“At the cemetery.”
“It might be wise to leave a gift there. It would be a beautiful gesture.”
“A little jacket?”
“Something colorful and pretty. It doesn’t have to be of material worth. They have all they need.”
So it was that I found myself laying awake at night about a week later, thinking about all the things that had happened because of ParaCon. I couldn’t get back to sleep, and Michael had been to yet another banquet and was noisily snoring. I looked at the time and saw it was nearly five o’clock.
The night was quiet. Not like that first night, when the dogs had awakened me with their barking. I got up and looked out the window, over the silver river. All was calm; not even a breeze. I looked back at Michael and decided to sneak out.
Once out in the spring night, I inhaled deeply and looked up at the stars. Growing up in Chicago, with its constellations of city lights, the constellations of the sky had been dimmed. Here on the quiet coast, the sky exploded with diamonds, and I felt bolder than I should have, me alone in a tee shirt and flip flops without even my cell phone this time. In my hand was a silky purple scarf with a sparkly brooch full of crystals.
“Well, if I’m gonna do it, I may as well do it,” I muttered. I walked across the yard, pausing outside the kennel. The dogs were quiet, and I walked on, going up the hill.
There’s a fence around the cemetery, with a fancy wrought iron gate, and I went toward the gate and looked up again. Sparky had reclaimed his spycam, so I was sure I was unobserved. Actually, I’d ordered him to remove it, and to never put another app on my phone without my permission, which he wouldn’t be getting anytime soon.
I walked over to the nearest bush and threaded the scarf lightly through the branches, being careful not to damage it. Then I stood there a few minutes like an idiot, smiling at it. I peered into the coastal scrub to see if anything Wee was watching, but I didn’t see or feel anything.
Laughing at myself, I turned around and began to walk back toward the house when something caught my eye. It was round and glossy, and somebody had wedged it lightly into the cemetery gate. I didn’t know how I missed it the first time. I walked over toward it slowly, and as I stared at it, trying to make out what it was, I did begin to get that feeling. That crawling of fingers over your scalp that tells you to watch out for things your five normal senses don’t tell you about.
It was a length of silk woven into a complicated rosette, and later, when I looked at it under the light, I realized it was the pink and turquoise tie that Purity had brought the night we got revenge on Sparky and his bot.
Later on, I pinned it to a sun hat that I bought in Miami. I get a lot of compliments on it, but nobody’s ever asked me where I got it, and I wouldn’t tell them if they did.
* * * * *
After I came back down the hill, I sat on the seawall for a while and waited for the dawn. I was alone. Bastet hadn’t come with me this time. She only seems to want to be at my side when I’m about to step in it somehow. Otherwise, it seems like she’s Michael’s cat now. She was probably curled up on the pillow next to his head at that very moment.
I like to think I was the one she came to in the first place. When I’ve given it any thought at all, I’ve decided I must be a natural receiver, something she finds useful. She’s the broadcaster, and I happen to be tuned to her station. But I’m beginning to suspect that she’s stayed with me this long because she likes my boyfriend. Whether she was jealous of Vanessa, or because, like me, she didn’t want Michael to become a murder suspect, she decided to get involved. I’m never sure how much of my success at unraveling mysteries is my own hard-headed Midwestern common sense and how much of it comes to me in those strange dreams. Maybe we just work well together. Different skill sets.
When I saw lights going on in the master bedroom upstairs, I stood up and stretched.
Michael had a meeting of the City Council in town that morning, and he said he was going to shower and get out early. I decided to go in and join him, maybe give him a lesson on what to do when your lover gets into the shower with you.
He was late for the City Council meeting.
THE END