He turned to the others. ‘You others on Emily’s team – anybody in here alone at any time?’ They all shook their heads as he stared at each one in turn. All met his accusing glare without flinching.
‘My team. I know we were together most of the time – women in Emily’s bedroom, men in the sitting room changing out of our angel robes. But I visited the restroom myself at one point. Anybody go downstairs before the lights went out?’
Another round of responses in the negative. ‘Only Cruella,’ Marguerite said.
Luke rounded on her. ‘Cruella? But she was on the landing when I got the lights back on.’
‘Oui, d’accord, but she did go down before. To speak to Katie. Probably it was she who turned the lights out.’
Luke snorted in agreement. ‘Anybody notice anyone else missing?’
Hilary said, ‘Dustin went out immediately after you did. I assumed to the restroom as well.’
Luke rounded on Dustin. ‘That right?’
Dustin, who had been relaxed up till this point – almost, Emily would have said, relieved – now bridled. In Cruella’s permanent absence, his old truculence seemed to be returning. ‘Sure, I used the facilities. So what?’
‘So you lied when you said you didn’t go downstairs. There’s only one toilet on the third floor and I was in it. You must have gone down at least one flight.’
Dustin rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, well, if you want to get technical. Yeah, I went down to the second floor. When you said “downstairs” I assumed you meant all the way down here.’
Jamie opened his mouth, then shut it again. Luke didn’t seem to notice. He narrowed his eyes at Dustin, then moved on. ‘Marguerite? Veronica? You two together the whole time?’
‘Oui. And after all, as you said before, we had only just met the woman. Why would we poison her?’
Veronica nodded her agreement.
Luke raked both hands over his cropped head and blew out a long breath. ‘All right. That’s about all we can do with everybody together.’
The doorbell rang. Katie moved to answer it, but Luke stopped her with a raised hand. ‘I’ll go.’
That must be Sam, along with Luke’s deputies and perhaps a crime scene team, though it wasn’t likely the team could have gotten there that quickly from Tillamook. Emily withdrew to a private place within herself and prayed for strength. She had hoped never to have to go through all this again.
TWELVE
Luke showed Dr Sam and Deputy Pete to the Dostoevsky room, while he had his other deputy, Heather, tackle the parlor and then start searching the guests’ bedrooms. Heather would have gamely taken on the Dostoevsky room, but Luke had enough chivalry in him not to wish that on her, tough and capable though he knew her to be. Pete and Heather would have to fill in for the crime scene team – they told him the team couldn’t get there from Tillamook until the roads thawed again. The temperature drop at nightfall had frozen the highway back to a solid ribbon of ice.
Luke himself returned to the library. ‘I’m gonna need to interview each of you individually,’ he told the group. ‘I’d like you all to stay in here, and I’ll go in the dining room and call for you one by one.’ He turned to Jamie. ‘You make sure nobody leaves unauthorized or touches that bar shelf, right?’
Jamie nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny throat. He probably never figured being a tax and estate lawyer would land him in the position of actually helping to enforce the law. But Katie shot him a my hero look, and his chest expanded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, barely short of saluting.
Luke bit off a grin and turned toward Dustin, but his eyes caught Emily’s on the way. Hers were sparkling – with the same observation about Jamie, no doubt. Would they sparkle if she realized what he’d already figured out – that the poison could have been meant for her? It all hinged on when and where it had been introduced. His gut clenched at the thought of Emily being in danger, although he had no idea why any of these people would want to hurt her. Certainly not Marguerite, source of the amaretto, who’d been her best friend for over twenty years. And anyway, he was about eighty percent sure the bottle had been sealed when Emily showed it around that morning.
He turned to Dustin. ‘You first.’
Dustin scowled. ‘That’s right, pick on me. Just because I couldn’t stand the woman. I’m not the only one, y’know.’ His words slurred slightly, and Luke wondered if that suspicious trip to the restroom hadn’t maybe included a visit to his whiskey flask as well.
‘I’m quite aware of that, and I’m not picking on you. Think of it as getting it over with. Like going to the dentist. You could even say I’m doing you a favor.’ He motioned Dustin out the hall door ahead of him. At least the man wasn’t swaying on his feet much yet. He might even be precisely the right amount of drunk – deep enough not to be careful with his words but not too far gone to make sense. ‘Katie, can we get some coffee in there?’ he asked on his way out. Wouldn’t hurt to have insurance against the fellow passing out. ‘And in here, too, if folks want it.’ It was going to be a long night.
In the dining room, Dustin slumped into the first chair he came to. Luke pulled up a chair across from him. Katie brought in the coffee right away; she must have had it brewing already. She poured two cups, set them down, and slid out the door.
Dustin pulled the sugar bowl close and dumped four spoonfuls into his coffee. Luke grimaced and left his black.
‘All right. First of all, it’s time you told me exactly what was going on between you and Cruella.’
Dustin crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Going on? Nothing was going on. What do you think, I was having an affair with that harpy? You must be nuttier than you look.’
‘That is not what I meant and you know it. Lots of things can go on between two people besides an affair. So what was it?’
‘I told you, nothing. Never met the woman before she came here.’
Luke raised one eyebrow. ‘Right. She just waltzed in here and started harassing you for no reason whatsoever.’
‘What do you mean, harassing me? She was nasty to everybody.’
Luke ticked off on his fingers. ‘When she first got here, she claimed to know you and called you Billy. The next day, Emily heard the two of you arguing in your room. Cruella threatened you with the ruin of your career. And this morning, it was pretty obvious she was the one who put the detergent in your coffee. That adds up to harassment in my book.’
‘Well, what about those other two, MacDonald and that chick who writes the cat books? She was harassing them too.’
‘I know it, but I’m talking to you right now. I’ll talk to them later. Now quit stalling and tell me what was going on.’
Dustin took a testing sip of his coffee, then a long gulp. He put the cup down with shaking hands.
‘This doesn’t have to leave this room, does it?’
‘Depends whether you killed her or not. Anything you tell me that isn’t relevant to her death will be kept confidential.’
‘Well, I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t.’ He shot Luke an imploring look. Frankly, Luke had to wonder if this jellyfish had the guts to kill anybody, but if he did work up the nerve, poison would likely be his method of choice. No direct action required, no risk of a face-to-face confrontation going wrong. And damned hard to trace back to him afterward.
Luke stared at Dustin unblinking until the young man started blabbing, the words spilling out faster than he could edit them. ‘All right, she was blackmailing me. We come from the same town, way back. She knew my parents, watched me grow up. She knows me as Billy Williams. But Dustin Weaver is my legal name, I swear. I changed it after I dropped out of college.’
Luke nodded. ‘I know. I checked. So she knows your birth name. What of it?’
‘Well, I – you know I wrote a memoir, right?’
‘Emily mentioned something about it.’
‘Well, when you write a memoir, of course things get slanted a little. You tell it the way you saw it, the way you re
member it, but other people remember it different.’
‘Uh-huh. In other words, you lied, and Cruella knew it.’
‘I didn’t lie. It’s possible a few things in that memoir might not be exactly the way they happened. I may have … embellished. A bit. Here and there.’
‘Or possibly you made the whole thing up out of thin air. You wrote what you wanted to have happened. What you thought would sell books.’
Dustin stared miserably at his coffee cup.
‘So Cruella was blackmailing you. Threatening to expose your lies if you didn’t pay up.’
‘It wasn’t money she was after. She’d been dropped by her publisher – wanted me to use my influence to get my editor to take her on.’
‘Would that have been so big a price to pay?’
He twisted in his chair. ‘Well, I didn’t think I could do it, see? My book did pretty well, but they were pressuring me for a follow-up, and – I don’t have any more to say. I’m bone dry. That’s why I came down here, to try to get inspired. If I went to my editor now and pitched Cruella, he’d laugh in my face. Her stuff isn’t up his alley anyway. It was hopeless.’
‘So if you did your best and it didn’t work – what could she’ve done? You would’ve fulfilled your part of the bargain.’
Dustin gave Luke a withering look. ‘You obviously didn’t know Cruella like I did. That woman didn’t have enough honor to fill a shot glass. She would’ve gone ahead and exposed me out of spite.’
Luke gave Dustin a minute to see the implications. ‘So you were trapped. Desperate. She had you right where she wanted you, with no way out.’
The young man nodded glumly, then looked up at Luke with panic in his eyes. ‘But I didn’t kill her! You can’t really think I killed her!’
Luke just looked at him.
Dustin’s eyes darted around the room as if looking for an escape route – logical if not physical. ‘But – where would I have gotten the poison? If she was even poisoned. Maybe she died naturally. Maybe she had some kind of disease. Did you think of that?’
‘Of course that is a possibility. The medical examiner will have to determine the exact cause of death.’
An ugly smile of triumph spread across Dustin’s face. ‘So you can’t pin a murder on me when you don’t even know it’s a murder. Habeas corpus, right? Or something like that.’
Luke’s patience with this sorry excuse for a man was wearing thin. ‘I’ve got enough experience to be pretty darn sure I know poison when I see it. It may take some time to get the medical evidence nailed down, but in the meantime it’s my duty to investigate as if we were sure. So you tell me. Where would you have gotten the poison?’
‘Nowhere. I mean, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have any idea. Hell, I didn’t even know she was going to be here. I came down here thinking I could escape her. Why would I bring poison with me? And you know I haven’t been out of this house since I came. You saw to that.’
Luke had to admit the justice of these words, even though they were spoken by a desperate, gibbering drunk. But until he knew what the poison was, no possibility could be ruled out. It could have been something concocted from ordinary household ingredients.
‘All right, leaving all that aside, let’s go over your movements this evening. And I’m warning you, you’d better tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because if you don’t, some other person in this house is going to know.’
Dustin gulped the remainder of his coffee and glanced at the pot. Luke topped off his cup and waited while he stirred in four more spoonfuls of sugar and sipped.
‘Starting when?’
‘Let’s start before dinner, when we had sherry in the library.’
Dustin scrubbed his hands over his face. ‘Hell, I don’t think I can remember that far back.’
‘Do the best you can.’
‘I stayed in the library all through that so-called cocktail hour. With no cocktails. You should know, you had your eye on me the whole time.’
‘I did lose sight of you when we all went in to dinner.’
‘Yeah, I, uh – I nipped into my room for a real cocktail.’ He managed a sheepish half-smile. ‘Then you know I was at the table all through dinner.’
‘And after dinner?’
‘There again, you know I was in the front room singing with everybody else.’
‘You didn’t by any chance nip into your room again after dinner, did you?’
‘Did I?’ He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Maybe I did. But in between singing and charades, I didn’t have a chance, did I?’
Luke thought back. He’d had Dustin in view that whole time. ‘No, I reckon not.’
‘So I was with the rest of you all through the whole “charades” charade.’ Dustin chuckled at his own dubious joke.
‘Except when you went to the bathroom.’
‘Oh, right, except for that.’
‘And I suppose you ducked into your room again at that point.’
‘Um … well, maybe I did.’
Luke leaned toward him. ‘Now listen, Dustin. I want you to think real hard. Did you at any time during our team’s turn at charades go into the library for any reason at all?’
‘The library?’ His eyebrows shot up. ‘No. Why should I?’
‘Where were you when the lights went out?’ Those few minutes of darkness were the time Luke favored for the poison to have been added – either to the bottle or the glass. Not only did the darkness give the killer the opportunity to do his work unobserved, but before that time no one could have had any idea Cruella might be drinking amaretto from that particular glass.
Dustin scratched his head. ‘Either my room or the bathroom. Oh yeah, I was in the bathroom, ’cause I think I missed the john a little when everything went black.’ He snickered. ‘Give that girl a chance to earn her keep.’
With an effort, Luke ignored that remark. ‘Did you stay there till the lights came back on?’
‘Hell no, I hightailed it out of there soon as I finished. I figured it was only that bulb till I got out in the hall.’
‘And then what did you do?’
‘I milled around with everybody else till the lights came on. Well, I say everybody, but of course I couldn’t see who was there and who wasn’t. I just heard voices.’
‘Whose voices specifically?’
‘I don’t know. Some male, some female. I wasn’t paying attention.’
Luke doubted this pitiful specimen ever paid attention to anything that didn’t directly concern himself. ‘And when the lights came on?’
‘I went into the parlor along with the rest of our team.’
‘Were you the first one in?’
‘Nah. Probably the last. The rest of you were near the stairs; I was way at the back of the hall.’
Luke sat back and glanced at his notes. They’d pretty much covered everything. At no single point could he be sure Dustin was lying; but if he was telling the whole truth and nothing but, Luke would eat his sheriff’s cap, metal insignia and all.
THIRTEEN
Left in the library with her guests, Emily suddenly realized she and her teammates were still wearing their togas from the charade. In the context the effect was surreal, as if the gods of Olympus had come down to pass judgment on the murderer.
Fortunately they’d all wrapped the sheets over their regular clothing, so she simply tore hers off, and saw her teammates doing the same. Oscar rolled down his pant legs, and normality – in appearance, at least – was restored. But true normality could not be achieved until the murderer was discovered and removed from their midst.
Emily was torn between her relatively new role as hostess and the role she was becoming accustomed to as Luke’s assistant sleuth. Should she look for a neutral topic of conversation, try to make everyone comfortable as each awaited his or her turn to be grilled? Or should she discreetly begin to pump them all for information, listen in to the private conversations in the corners of the room? What would Luke want her to do
? Was there, in fact, anything she could do at this point that would banish the chill from his eyes when he looked at her?
While she dithered, little knots of talk sprang up about the room. Hilary, Devon, Veronica, and Oscar spoke together in low tones on the window seat in the bay; Katie talked with Jamie as he kept his vigil over the bar; Marguerite crouched on the hearthrug, comforting the undisturbed cats; Wanda sat silent in one of the wing chairs by the fire, drumming her fingers on the chair’s upholstered arm. Ian and Olivia huddled together at a small table in the far corner of the room, speaking in earnest whispers. Emily could see that under the table Ian held Olivia’s slender hand clasped tenderly in both his own.
If Cruella had indeed been murdered, of all the people in the house, Emily would favor Dustin as the murderer. But as much as she hated to admit it, if Dustin were somehow to be ruled out, Ian and Olivia would be the next strongest contenders. After all, no one but those three had any history with Cruella that Emily knew of, and therefore the others could have no motive for killing her. Granted, the woman was a nuisance, but one didn’t murder nuisances. Not if one was sane, which all her guests appeared to be. If there had been an exception, it was Cruella herself.
What could Ian and Olivia’s history with Cruella be? Marguerite’s theory of an old love triangle had its points, but it needed filling out. Emily found it difficult to believe a man as sophisticated and amiable as Ian could ever have endured Cruella’s company, let alone been in love with her. A lesbian triangle? But Olivia having loved Cruella seemed even more improbable.
Without actually deciding to eavesdrop, Emily found herself rising and moving toward the fiction shelf, across the parlor doorway from where Ian and Olivia sat. She’d left Hercule Poirot’s Christmas in the parlor, which was now off limits as a crime scene, and as long as all the others were either in conversation or deep in their own thoughts, Emily might as well pass her time with a book.
She skimmed the shelves, but nothing seemed to speak to her. Meanwhile, fragments of Ian and Olivia’s conversation drifted her way. ‘It’s all so far in the past … no need to mention …’ ‘They must know there’s something …’ ‘Let them guess. It’s nothing to do with us.’ That last was Ian speaking. Emily shot a discreet glance in their direction and caught Olivia gazing into Ian’s eyes, her own full of fear and doubt.
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