The Burglar in the Library

  This soaked in, and we all looked at each other again. It seemed to me that I was being eyed with suspicion by some of our party, even as I was eyeing them with suspicion in turn.

  “Let’s move on,” I suggested, and brandished my pen and clipboard.

  Gordon Wolpert.

  Bettina Colibri.

  Dakin Littlefield.

  Lettice Littlefield.

  Col. Edward Blount-Buller.

  “I was just thinking,” the colonel put in, “about the cook and her absence. It seemed at first a dangerous violation of a safety procedure almost as soon as we’d initiated it, but in fact it’s really entirely safe.”

  “How’s that?” Wolpert asked him.

  The colonel cleared his throat. “If the cook is entirely innocent of the crimes that have taken place here, as seems likely, then the killer is one of us. And in that case the cook is in no peril in the kitchen, because all of us are here.”

  “Didn’t I say that?” Cissy wondered aloud.

  “But,” he went on, “if by some chance the cook is the murderer, then we’re all quite safe. Because we’re here and she’s elsewhere.”

  “In the kitchen,” Mrs. Colibri said.

  “Quite so.”

  “Preparing our lunch.”

  The room went very still. Miss Gloria Dinmont broke the silence. “She could poison us all,” she said softly. “We’d drop like flies, never knowing what hit us.”

  “Or writhe in agony,” her companion chimed in, “knowing we’d been poisoned, but unable to get hold of the antidote.”

  “A tasteless and odorless poison,” Miss Dinmont said.

  “A poison that leaves no trace,” said Miss Hardesty.

  “Oh, come on,” Carolyn said. “What difference does it makes if the poison leaves a trace or not? If we’re all discovered lying dead all over the house, what do you figure the cops are going to think? That somebody said something so shocking we all popped off with heart attacks?”

  “Besides,” young Millicent said, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a poison that doesn’t leave a trace.”

  “It seems to me most toxic substances leave some sort of evidence that would show up in an autopsy,” I said, “but you generally have to look for it.”

  “How do you know that, Bern?”

  I knew it from Quincy reruns on Nick at Nite, but I didn’t want to say that. “We’re out in the country,” I said, “and a rural cop who walked in on a roomful of dead people with no marks on them would probably write it off as carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective furnace.”

  “But there’s no central heating.”

  “That might not occur to him. Still, we’ve got what, fifteen or sixteen people in the room? Safety in numbers.”

  “What do you mean, Bern?”

  “I mean that many people dying all at once under mysterious circumstances would trigger a full-scale investigation. The state troopers would run it, and there’d be a complete toxicological workup. If we’d been poisoned it would show up.”

  “Well, that’s a load off my mind,” Dakin Littlefield said. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that.”

  “All I’m trying to say—”

  But he didn’t want to hear it. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if the cook was bent on lacing our porridge with rat poison she wouldn’t start off by killing people with a camel and a pillow and a cup of sugar. If Gloria over there in the wheelchair is seriously worried about poison, I’ll volunteer to eat her lunch for her. Assuming we ever get lunch.”

  “Ha!” Rufus Quilp thrust his head forward, his little eyes beady and bright. “Lunch,” he said. “Breakfast was ages ago and no one’s serving us lunch. What about that, Eglantine?”

  “I’m sure lunch won’t be long now,” Nigel said.

  “If we’re not going to get it right away,” Quilp said, “I don’t see why we can’t at least have our elevensies.”

  “Elevensies?”

  “Normally served at eleven,” Quilp said dryly, “as you might guess from the name. Too late for that now, of course, so you could call it something else, or call it nothing at all, just so one has the opportunity to eat it. A cup of coffee, say, and a scone or some crumpets. Anything that will do to tide one over between breakfast and lunch.”

  “Nigel,” Cissy said, “perhaps someone could fetch Mr. Quilp a cup of coffee.”

  “And a scone,” Quilp said.

  “And a scone.”

  “Or perhaps a croissant,” the fat man suggested, “if there are any left, and perhaps with some of those gingered rhubarb preserves.”

  “Yes, those are lovely, aren’t they? I’m sure we’ve some left, Mr. Quilp. Nigel, why don’t I just fetch something for Mr. Quilp?”

  “Not by yourself,” her husband said.

  “Oh. But if I simply went to the kitchen…oh, but…” She frowned, troubled. “Oh,” she said.

  “I don’t want to cause a fuss,” Rufus Quilp said. “And if lunch should turn out to be imminent, well, I wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.”

  “Fat chance,” Carolyn muttered.

  “But if lunch is destined to be rather a distant affair,” he went on, “then I do think I could do with a bit of tiding over. There’s my blood sugar to be considered, don’t you see.”

  I found myself considering Mr. Quilp’s blood sugar, and wondered idly if it could render a snowblower hors de combat. While I pondered the point, the colonel took command, dispatching a patrol on a reconnaissance mission. Cissy Eglantine, flanked by the Cobbett cousins, were to go to the kitchen and inquire of the cook just how long it would be until lunch. If our estimated waiting time was thirty minutes or less, they would return empty-handed; if longer, they’d bring back something designed to tide us over.

  They were no sooner out of the room than Raffles turned up, threading his way through the room, getting petted and cooed at and fussed over as he went, and rubbing up against the odd ankle along the way. “Oh, it’s Raffles,” Lettice said, reaching to scratch him behind the ear. Her husband asked her how she happened to know the cat’s name, and she said she must have heard someone call him that.

  When, he wondered. Last night or this morning, she said, and why did he want to know? Because this was the first he’d seen of the cat, he replied, and he wondered when she’d had time to see it, and make its acquaintance.

  “Why, Dakin,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous of him. He’s a pussycat!”

  “How do you know it’s a male?”

  “Because he miaows in bass,” she said. “Darling, how do I know? I suppose whoever called him by name also referred to him with a male pronoun.”

  “And he’s the resident cat here, is he? What happened to his tail?”

  “He’s a Manx,” Millicent Savage said helpfully. “And he doesn’t live here. He came here with Carolyn and Bernie.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose he’s the killer,” Littlefield said. “He might have clubbed the poor jerk in the library and clawed the bridge supports, but I can’t imagine him doing a number on the snowblower.”

  “He’s been declawed,” Millicent said.

  “I give up,” Littlefield said. “He’s innocent.” He started to say something else but stopped, probably for the same reason that everyone else in the room had stopped talking. Cissy Eglantine, back from the kitchen, stood framed in the doorway. The Cobbett cousins stood just to the rear of her, as if they were trying to shrink into her shadow.

  She looked across the room at her husband. For a moment she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Nigel, I spoke with Cook.”

  “And what did she say, dear?”

  “I’m afraid she didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s hard to get much out of her, I’ll grant you that. Did you ask her directly when lunch will be ready?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t? Whyever not?”

  “I couldn’t,” she said, and her lip
trembled. “Nigel, mind you, I’m not absolutely certain, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Oh, Nigel,” she said, and sighed. “Nigel, I believe she’s dead.”

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  “She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.

  There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.

  She was as Cissy and the Cobbett girls had found her, seated in the oversize oak armchair to the left of the old six-burner gas stove. A low flame kept a cauldron of thick soup simmering on a back burner. In the large old-fashioned sink, water dripped from a leaking faucet onto a coffee mug, a couple of spoons, and a shish kebab skewer. A radio, its volume turned way down, brought in a mixture of country music and static.

  “That’s where she always sits,” Cissy said, “and that’s how she always sits. I thought she’d just nodded off, you know, with the cookbook open on her lap. But then she didn’t answer when I spoke to her, and I made myself touch her, you see, and, and give her a little shake, and—”

  “Steady, Cecilia.”

  “I’m actually quite all right, Nigel.” Her eyes sought mine. “Is she dead, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I don’t suppose she could be sleeping soundly, could she?”

  Her hands, large for a woman, reposed in her lap, the fingers of one still curled around the handle of a wooden cooking spoon. I pressed my fingertips to the back of her hand, her upper arm, her broad forehead.

  “I’m afraid she’s dead,” I said.

  But she was a good deal subtler about it than either of her two predecessors in death had been. One look at either of them and you knew what you were dealing with. Cook, on the other hand, looked as though she might be sleeping, and her body temperature, while discernibly lower than the traditional 98.6°, had not yet dropped down to the level of luncheon meat. I supposed she’d get there soon enough, even in a warm kitchen, but she had a ways to go yet.

  “How did she—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of violence. She wasn’t shot or stabbed or dropped from a height.” I raised an eyelid and stared. I didn’t see any sign of pinpoint hemorrhage, or anything else but a rather glassy eyeball. I closed the lid and straightened up.

  Everyone was talking at once, filling the air with questions and suggestions. We’d all rushed there in a body at Cissy’s announcement, although I couldn’t swear that no one had slipped off along the way.

  “Maybe it was natural causes,” I heard someone say.

  “Around here,” someone else countered, “murder is a natural cause.”

  “Shock. Don’t people die of shock?”

  “If they’re struck by lightning. Or touch an electrical wire.”

  “I mean the kind of shock that gives you a heart attack. She might have had a weak heart, and I don’t suppose she was on a low-fat diet. The shock of the two deaths earlier—”

  “Cook didn’t even say anything,” Cissy remembered, “or look much disturbed. After the first death she made breakfast, and after the second she came in here and started lunch.”

  “And a good lunch, too, from the smell of it.” Rufus Quilp had pushed his way through to the stove, and was lifting pot lids and sniffing. “Lamb stew,” he announced. “Seasoned with rosemary and thyme, and can that be fresh dill? Wherever would she get fresh dill?”

  “Not this time of year,” someone said.

  “And here’s a lovely pot of rice,” he said, “all nice and fluffy, and there’s a big wooden bowl of salad on the counter, just waiting to be tossed.” He replaced the lid on the stew pot. “I think we should eat,” he said. “I think we’ll all be much better able to cope once we’ve eaten.”

  There was a general murmur of assent, which died down when Carolyn stuck her face up next to the cook’s, then stepped back shaking her head. “Didn’t work,” she said. “I was trying to smell her breath, but she’s not breathing.”

  “Why would you want to smell her breath?”

  “I thought there might be the odor of bitter almonds, Bern.”

  “If she’d ingested cyanide,” I said. “But doesn’t she look awfully peaceful for a victim of cyanide poisoning?”

  “I don’t know, Bern. Does it make you writhe in agony? If she was poisoned, it must have been with something nonviolent.”

  Leona Savage remarked on the irony of it. Minutes ago we’d discussed the possibility of our being poisoned by the cook, and now it looked as though the cook herself might have been poisoned.

  “And she’s holding a spoon,” her husband observed. “A cooking spoon. I think I see what happened.” He gestured, miming the action. “She was at the stove, stirring the stew. She took a taste of it. When the poison hit her—”

  “The poison?”

  “In the stew. At first maybe all she thought was it needed more salt, but then it hit her and her legs got weak and she had to sit down.”

  “Is that what happens when you take poison? Your legs get weak?”

  “It must depend on the poison,” he said. “At any rate, she didn’t feel too hot and she sat down. Evidently it was a gentle poison, and it just made her nod off and then killed her in her sleep.”

  “Cook didn’t like people in her kitchen,” Molly Cobbett said. “If anybody tried to put anything in her stewpot, Cook would pitch a fit.”

  Nigel confirmed this. “If you wanted to get taken to task, all you had to do was lift the lid of one of her pots. I can’t think she’d have stood still for it if someone salted her stew for her.”

  “She wouldn’t have known,” I said. “Because she wouldn’t have been here when it happened.”

  “But she was always in the kitchen.”

  “She was in the bar with the rest of us a little while ago, remember? She slipped off to the kitchen while we were arguing about one thing or another. Did anyone notice when she left?” No one had. “Well, she was in the back; she could have slipped out unobtrusively enough.”

  “And someone slipped off after her? And poisoned her, and then slipped back again?”

  I shook my head. “It would have happened earlier,” I said. “She didn’t toss this stew together in a few minutes. She must have started preparing it while we were eating our breakfast. It’s been cooking all morning. When Orris had his accident and Earlene screamed almost loud enough to wake him, Cook would have left the kitchen to find out what was the matter.”

  “She was outside,” the colonel recalled. “I remember noticing her when we were weighing the merits of attempting to retrieve poor Orris’s body.”

  I thought that would bring a fresh sob from Earlene, but perhaps she’d begun to get over her loss. “And after that,” I said, “she wound up in the bar. So she was out of the kitchen for a while, and in her absence someone could have gone in and put anything at all into that pot of stew.”

  Carolyn said, “Like what, Bern? Mrs. Murphy’s overalls?” Everyone stared at her and she said, “Like the song, ‘Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Oh, come on. I can’t be the only person who remembers that one.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “And as far as what the killer put in the stew, I couldn’t begin to guess. I don’t know much about poisons.”

  “Mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont said. “Are there mushrooms in the stew?”

  “I would certainly hope so,” Rufus Quilp said. “Who in his right mind would make a lamb stew without mushrooms?”

  “Poisonous mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont cried. “Deadly nightshade!”

  “That’s not a mushroom,” Gordon Wolpert said.

  “It’s not?”

  “No. But there are a lot of poisonous mushrooms, or toadstools, or whatever you want to call them. The amanitas
are particularly deadly. One’s called the death angel—that may be what you were thinking of. But you couldn’t go out and gather mushrooms in this weather. It’s not the season for them, and even if it were you’d never find them under the snow.”

  “If deadly nightshade isn’t a mushroom,” said Miss Dinmont, “then what in heaven’s name is it?”

  “A vine,” Wolpert told her. “A close relative of the tomato and the potato. Not to mention the eggplant.”

  “Why not mention the eggplant?”

  “There’s tomato in here,” Rufus Quilp announced. “And potato, of course. And mushrooms and barley.” If there was an airborne poison as well, I figured his days were numbered, the way he was inhaling. “I don’t believe there’s any eggplant. It’s not usual in lamb stew, though it wouldn’t matter if there were some. I’m sure there’s nothing in here to be concerned about. Why would anyone poison a splendid pot of lamb stew?”

  “Why would anyone kill the cook?” Carolyn asked him in return. “Or wreck the bridge and the snowblower? Or kill Mr. Rathburn?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea, young lady. What I do have is a gnawing in my belly, and what I intend to have is a bowl of this stew.”

  “But if it’s poisoned…”

  “If it’s perfectly wholesome,” he said, “then we ought to be eating it. If it’s toxic we ought to keep it at arm’s length. But how are we to tell which it is?” No one had the answer, so he supplied it himself. “What’s required is a food taster. One man has a bowl of stew. If he lives, everyone may freely join in the feast. If he dies, well, at least the others are spared.” He squared his shoulders. “I shall be that man,” he said.

  “But Mr. Quilp—”

  “Please,” he said. “I insist.”

  “But if you should die…”

  “Then I suppose you’ll leave me lying where I fall, as seems to be the custom of the house. If you actually go so far as to put me in the ground, an appropriate phrase for the tombstone might be ‘He ate that others might live.’ Hand me down one of those bowls, will you? And the ladle, if you don’t mind.”