That Last Weekend

by Laura Disilverio

  Laurel was simultaneously discomfited by and appreciative of her bluntness. Maybe it was time for them all to be a bit more blunt.

  Dawn slewed around to face Ellie. “Why do you assume it was one of us? Even if it wasn’t suicide, it—”

  “I can’t imagine it was a suicide,” Laurel broke in. “Not using strychnine. It’s a horrific way to die. Barbiturates and alcohol, or carbon monoxide poisoning would have been painless.”

  Dawn dipped her chin. “Fine. Even if someone killed her, it doesn’t have to be one of us. I know you’re going to say that there has to be a link between what happened to her ten years ago and this, but there doesn’t.” Her hands gripped the table’s edge, shifting the tablecloth enough to put their glasses in jeopardy. “It could have been one of the Abbotts, like Ellie said. Mindy. Ray. Someone in her life we don’t even know about. If it was poison, there’s nothing to say the person who gave it to her even had to be here, right?”

  “That’s true,” Geneva murmured, looking struck. “But you said it looked like there’d been a struggle …?” She queried Laurel with a raised eyebrow.

  “I googled strychnine poisoning after Boone told us,” Laurel said. She kept her voice steady, although the photos of poisoned rats accompanying the article had appalled her. “I think that what looked like a struggle was actually caused by Evangeline. Strychnine causes horrible, violent spasms—victims sometimes even break their spines with the force of the convulsions. The lamp and everything—it probably happened while Evangeline was—” She trailed off and no one made her finish the thought.

  “So, Ray could have put it in her—I don’t know—mouthwash,” Dawn said, sounding triumphant. “Then he made up a bogus crisis at work so he wouldn’t be here when her body was discovered.”

  Some of the tension had dissipated, and Laurel suspected it was because they were all focusing on Ray as Evangeline’s murderer, rather than on each other. She hoped Sheriff Boone had similar ideas. She topped off her wine glass with Chianti and passed the bottle. Everyone except Geneva, who was drinking water, refilled their glasses. Laurel’s forefinger tapped nervously on the wine stem. She didn’t know quite how to say what she needed to say, so she decided to spit it out. “I think we should make a pact.”

  “What kind of pact?” Ellie frowned.

  “To stick it out this time. To stay here until we know what really happened to Evangeline.” She ached with the need to convince them. If they left Cygne without knowing, they would drift apart forever, and she knew with sudden clarity that she didn’t want that.

  There was silence around the table. Dawn met her eyes briefly, and then dropped her gaze to her wine glass. Geneva stared off into space. Ellie dipped her napkin in her water glass and dabbed at a spot on her blouse.

  “The sheriff can’t make us stay, but I think we should. We owe it to Evangeline, and to each other.” Laurel kept her voice quiet and level. If the others didn’t want to stay, shouting and pleading weren’t going to change their minds. She held her breath. She owed Evangeline, and she’d let her down last time by being too chicken to search out the truth. She was going to see it through this time, whatever the others decided.

  “I’m in,” Dawn said. She tucked her hair behind both ears so the perfect oval of her face was easy to read. Resolve shone in her eyes.

  “Me too.” Ellie nodded.

  “I can stay for maybe a week,” Geneva said, “but then I’ve got to go home to have this baby.” She patted her belly.

  “Great,” Laurel said, relieved. “We’ll give it a week. If we don’t know by then, we probably never will. We don’t need to twiddle our thumbs and let Sheriff Boone do all the work this time. As long as we’re here, we might as well chip in, whether he likes it or not. So,” she started carefully, “it might be helpful if we tell each other what we were doing last night, to clear the air.”

  “Establish alibis?” Ellie said. She took a long swallow of wine, put the glass down, and challenged them with her stare. “Someone’s been lying for ten years—it’s not like they’re going to start telling the truth now.”

  “We all lie every day,” Geneva said quietly, “in big ways and little, by omission and on purpose, by telling ourselves that white lies are kind, or by convincing ourselves that no one will be hurt.”

  “That’s a cheery outlook,” Ellie observed.

  Geneva shrugged. “Experiencing it during my therapy sessions has made me more sensitive to it in myself and my relationships.”

  “What do you lie about?” Laurel asked, intrigued despite the way the conversation had wandered from her original purpose.

  Geneva knit her brow. “There’s a friend I get together with every six weeks or so even though she brings me down with her constant complaining. We’re not really friends anymore, but I don’t have enough backbone to tell her that, so I agree to lunch with her when she calls. Our whole relationship is a lie, in a way. Then there’s the little things, of course, like telling a coworker her lemon cake is delish when it tastes like mulch, and faking the occasional orgasm because I’m too tired to try for the real thing and I don’t want Geonwoo to feel bad.”

  Dawn smiled in a way that implied she’d done the same, and Ellie spit out a few drops of wine on a startled laugh.

  “I lie to myself.” The stark words came from Dawn. Her smile had disappeared. “I tell myself that I’m okay with being a scientific illustrator, that I’m still an artist, but I don’t believe it. Not deep down. And then I tell myself that it doesn’t matter whether or not I’m an artist of any kind, that it’d be perfectly okay if I, if I sold shoes or was an airline pilot, but that’s an even bigger lie. What I’m coming to realize is that if I lie to myself all the time, I’m by default lying to everyone else, especially Kyra. I told her I’d given up trying to place my art with a gallery, but that was a lie. Short of the way I feel about Kyra, there’s not much in my life that isn’t a lie.” Her lips curved in a bleak approximation of a smile. “No wonder she hasn’t returned my phone calls since I came here.”

  Her honesty and vulnerability pierced Laurel. There was no adequate response.

  “That sucks, Dawn,” Ellie said. “Really. I’ll bet a therapist could help you work through the artist thing, the job thing. Have you tried one? It sounds like we could all use one—I certainly could. Do therapists offer group discounts?” she asked Geneva.

  Fractured laughter greeted her attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

  Geneva shook her head and directed a look at Laurel. “You?”

  She rolled her wineglass between her palms. She’d felt this moment creeping up on her since arriving at Cygne. Now it was here, nudging her off the thirty-meter platform diving board. Her stomach seemed to swoop and collapse as she took the plunge. “I’ve lied to all of you for years.” A chair shifted back, and Dawn’s knife clattered to the floor. Did they think she was going to confess to pushing Evangeline off the balcony? She hurried on before she could back away—again—from telling them. “I cheated.” She swept them all with her gaze. “In college, the poli sci paper. I copied Evangeline’s paper. She took the blame. When I got called into the dean’s office, and saw Evangeline there, I knew it was over. I was going to be expelled. There would be no law school, no joining my dad’s firm. I was shaking like an aspen leaf. And then, before I could say anything, Evangeline piped up and said she’d copied my paper. I could have spoken up. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The moment went past, and then a whole minute where I didn’t hear a thing the dean was saying, and then, well, it seemed like it was too late.”

  She swallowed hard. “I’ve never known why she did it, and I never had the guts to set the record straight. Well, she’s dead and it’s too late, but you should know she didn’t cheat. I did.” Her teeth chattered from nerves and she ground them together for a moment. “We never talked about it, strange to say. I was too ashamed to bring it up, and she�
��well, I don’t know why she never mentioned it until this weekend. The strangest part is that even though I knew I should be grateful to her, I resented her taking the blame. Ridiculous, I know. She saved my ass, and it made me wary of her.” Geneva opened her mouth as if she was going to say something therapisty, but then shut it, shaking her head. “That’s part of the reason I came back,” Laurel finished. “I’ve always felt I owed her. I’m sorry.”

  There was silence as the others absorbed her confession. Laurel sat as if turned to spun glass: immobile and fragile. Would they forgive her? God knows she hadn’t yet managed to forgive herself. Would they shun her? The thought made her tremble, and she laid both palms flat on the table to steady herself.

  Dawn crossed her arms over her chest. “I feel bad that it was easy to believe Evangeline had cheated,” she said. “I never suspected it was actually you. Never. We don’t know each other as well as we think we do, do we? I always thought you were a straight arrow, but now it turns out you’re a cheater. Maybe you’re a murderer, too.”

  Her voice was reflective, not accusatory, but still the words burned like acid. “I’m not. I’m sorry,” Laurel said again. “There’s no excuse. I was under a lot of pressure, worried about getting into Yale … there’s no excuse. It’s the worst thing I ever did.”

  “My worst thing was way worse than that,” Ellie said with a minatory look at Dawn. “But it wasn’t murder.”

  “It was a despicable thing to do,” Geneva said, “cheating and letting Vangie take the blame, but it doesn’t make us—me—hate you. You screwed up—you’re human.” Her brown eyes reflected her disappointment.

  “It was a long time ago,” Ellie offered.

  Almost two decades. Laurel knew that the ameliorating effect of time had taken some of the sting out of her confession for her friends. Would they have been angrier if she’d told them the truth right away? A couple years later? She inhaled through her nose, inflating her lungs, feeling like it was the first breath she’d taken in long minutes—maybe years.

  “I notice no one’s copped to lying about pushing Evangeline or poisoning her,” Ellie said after a moment, “so I guess we’re back to alibis.”

  “Knowing where we all were after dinner doesn’t really tell us much, though, does it?” Dawn put in. “Not if the poison could have been added to something she already had with her. Does it have to be ingested or would skin contact do it?” She focused on Laurel for an answer.

  “The website I looked at said it can be fatal if inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through eyes or mouth,” Laurel said. “It supposedly has a bitter taste.”

  “Eye drops!” Ellie said. “Ray could have put some strychnine in her eye drops. Did she use eye drops?” She looked around, brows raised, but got only shrugs in reply.

  “I’m going to find out more about the mysterious Ray,” Laurel declared. If Dawn was right, if the murder wasn’t connected to Evangeline’s fall, then Ray was as good a suspect as any. Better, in fact, than the four of them, none of whom had seen Evangeline in years. She shared her thoughts with them.

  “How will you find him?” Ellie asked, at the same time that Geneva said, “Don’t you think the police have a better chance of locating him?”

  “They don’t know what he looks like,” Laurel said. “About the only thing he told me about himself is that he played basketball as a ‘Blue Demon.’ When Geneva and I drove to town today, we passed a high school whose teams are called the Blue Demons. What if he’s from right here in New Aberdeen, like Evangeline? I’m going to visit the school tomorrow and see if their library has yearbooks. Maybe I can find his picture.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Ellie said.

  “We need to go at this like we’re creating reasonable doubt,” Laurel said. “We know Sheriff Boone thinks one of us did it, so we need to make him focus on an equally viable suspect or suspects.” Taking charge energized her. The shock of finding Evangeline’s body and the news that she’d been murdered had immobilized her. Well, that was over. She wasn’t going to sit around with her head in the sand while Boone built a case against one of them. “To do that, we need to find out more about Evangeline’s recent life,” she went on, thinking aloud. “There could be all sorts of things going on in her life that we know nothing about. Do you all want to help?”

  “I do,” Dawn said immediately.

  “Sure,” said Ellie, and “Tell me what to do,” said Geneva.

  Dinner forgotten, they pushed plates out of the way. Ellie pulled a receipt and pen out of her purse and prepared to take notes. Geneva propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her fisted hands. Dawn pulled her hair back with both hands, twisted it into a knot, and secured it with a pair of hair elastics she’d been wearing around her wrist.

  “Okay.” Laurel smiled grimly. “Let’s figure this out. One of us needs to get a copy of Evangeline’s mother’s will—it should be a matter of public record—and suss out her financial situation.”

  “I’ll try to do that,” Geneva said.

  “Ideally, we’d get her bank and credit card records, too, but there’s no way,” Laurel said regretfully. “The police will pull those. Was she working?”

  Dawn half raised her hand. “She was last time I saw a Facebook update, but that was before she started all those treatments in Mexico. If she was out of the country a lot, she might have quit. She was doing medical billing and insurance work for an orthopedic clinic here in town. She hated it.”

  They fell silent, remembering Evangeline’s joy when she landed her first job as a flight attendant—she had always wanted to travel “to every place worth seeing in the world”—and her bitterness when she realized her paralysis would make it impossible to continue as the international tour guide she’d become after five years with the airline.

  “Would you be comfortable talking to her coworkers?” Laurel asked.

  “Not really. It feels like we’re invading her privacy, but I’ll do it.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ellie volunteered.

  Dawn gave her a grateful look. “What do we ask?”

  “Okay, good,” Laurel said. “Try to find out what they knew about her personal life. When did she start dating Ray? Where did they meet? Were they having any issues? Was she involved with any groups outside work—church, a book club, a support group? Get details, names if you can. Was she worried about money … or anything else? Where did she go in Mexico for her treatments? Were there any conflicts at work? Really, just get someone talking and listen hard.”

  A brief silence fell as they thought about the tasks they were taking on. Geneva broke it. “I was thinking … as long as we’re going to stay, I think it would be nice to have a memorial for Evangeline. Nothing fancy, just us sharing some memories. By the lake might be nice.”

  The others nodded. “That’s a lovely idea,” Dawn said. “We can say our own private goodbyes.” She choked up on the last word. Ellie silently passed her a tissue and she dabbed at her eyes.

  After a moment, Geneva stretched and yawned and said she was turning in early. She and Dawn left together. Ellie announced she was taking a short walk before going up, and might talk to Scott. Soon, Laurel was alone. She let her gaze wander idly over the glasses, crumpled napkins, and crumbs. Finding Ray and poking about in Evangeline’s life were all good and well, but she wasn’t going to blind herself to the fact that everyone in the castle had a damn good reason for wanting to kill Evangeline.

  Sixteen

  Motive wasn’t enough, Laurel reminded herself, gathering up the remaining glasses and napkins and heading toward the kitchen, a table knife in her right hand just in case. And, as far as she knew, all of their motives were dusty with age, practically ancient history. Of course, that didn’t mean the wounds were completely healed, or that old slights had no power. Look at how she’d fired up when Evangeline threatened to make an issue of the plagiarism
. Still, they’d all had opportunity, staying at the castle where no one locked their doors. As for means, well, if strychnine was used as rat poison, how hard would it be for any of them to buy some?

  Using her hip to bump open the kitchen’s swinging door, she overheard Mr. Abbott saying, “… know what the police will … poking around.”

  The couple were seated at the kitchen table, its round maple top pitted and scratched from years of hard use. Mrs. Abbott was slumped over a steaming mug, and Mr. Abbott was leaning over her, one hand on her shoulder. Laurel wasn’t sure if he was reassuring her or shaking her. They both turned when the door swooshed shut, and Mrs. Abbott sloshed what looked like coffee, and smelled like it had a tot of bourbon in it, onto her hand.

  “Ooh!” She shook droplets off her hand and her husband handed her a handkerchief.

  “Did you need something?” Stephen Abbott directed a look at Laurel that made her remember he’d been something high-powered on Wall Street before they took over managing the B and B.

  “Just bringing you the rest of the dishes,” she said, hefting the glasses in her hands and then placing them and the knife on the counter. The bulk of their dinner dishes were piled nearby, and a pot full of soapy water soaked in the deep stainless steel sink. A lemony scent rose from it. “I know it’s Mindy’s day off, so I thought I’d bring these through.” She rinsed her hands under the faucet. Her gaze trailed around the room and her eyes widened at the sight of a mousetrap tucked into the slot between the commercial-sized refrigerator and the lower cupboards.

  “That was thoughtful of you,” Mrs. Abbott said with an effort.

  “It’s sad that your last week here has been spoiled,” Laurel said.

  Mrs. Abbott turned a grave face her way. “It’s sad that Evangeline got killed,” she said. “Tragic. We had our differences, but I wouldn’t wish a death like that on anyone.”

  Gesturing toward the mouse trap, Laurel asked, “Are rats a problem in this area?” If she looked under the sink, or in the pantry, would she find rat poison?