I was still thinking about the elevator when I found myself at the bottom of the stairs. To my surprise, the siren call of my nice, comfortable bed wasn’t as strong as it had been a few minutes ago. Okay, my eyelids were still drooping, but I was also dying to find out what all those witnesses, suspects, and innocent bystanders were up to in our kitchen.
And also to my surprise, I was hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—breakfast? Had I had a midmorning snack? Even if I had, odds were it was time for lunch.
I braced myself in case the kitchen still reeked of seafood and flung open the door.
Dozens of anxious faces looked at me. And I seemed to have interrupted a migration in process. People were slowly filing out the back door, many of them carrying kitchen chairs. Sammy was standing by the door, holding a clipboard, supervising the departure.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Chief’s orders,” Sammy said. “He said he wants everybody out of his crime scene until Horace has a chance to check it out, and until Horace says otherwise, the whole house is the crime scene. So we’re taking everyone out to the barn.”
Wasn’t the chief worried that some of these people—including the poisoner—might begin to suspect that he had a particular interest in the kitchen?
“He’s probably just tired of people sneaking out of the kitchen and coming to the library to bother him,” I said.
Sammy chuckled slightly.
“You could be right,” he said. “We’ll have an easier time keeping them out of his hair if they aren’t in the house.”
I wasn’t sure how much evidence they’d find in the kitchen, though, even if the murderer had done something there to poison Dr. Wright. Clearly someone had made a start at cleaning it. Probably Rose Noire, who cleaned furiously whenever she had to get something out of her system—like Dr. Wright’s rude treatment of her.
Though it would be interesting to see if anyone had insisted on helping her.
“By the way, I was sorry to hear about Hawkeye,” I said to Sammy. “How is he?”
His face fell.
“He’ll be fine, thanks to Clarence and your dad,” he said. “But I’m worried that we won’t be able to catch the guy who did it, with all this going on. All our officers are here, and I’m not sure the state police are really taking the search seriously.”
“Hey, if you got enough information for any kind of a search, that’s good, right?” I asked.
“It was a dark blue SUV,” he said. “But I only got a partial license plate. Debbie Anne’s going to get the DMV to give us a list of possible vehicles, but the more time passes, the smaller our chances of getting useful evidence.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I patted him on the shoulder. I understood why the chief was putting all his officers on the murder investigation. But I also understood how Sammy felt about his dog.
Just then I spotted the tea kettle on the stove and realized I hadn’t told the chief everything I knew.
I ducked out into the hall, fished my cell phone out of my pocket, and called the chief.
“I thought of something I should have told you,” I said. “I don’t know how I overlooked it—except when I was telling you about what happened, I thought Dr. Wright had been killed with the statue. So the tea didn’t seem important.”
“What tea?”
I glanced up to make sure there was no one in the living room and cupped my hand around the cell phone.
“The weak tea Dr. Wright drank, along with her dry toast. Rose Noire made it for her,” I said as softly as possible. “I think that might be how she got the poison.”
A pause.
“You think your cousin poisoned Dr. Wright?”
“Good heavens, no! She wouldn’t poison a fly. At least not deliberately.” I thought, briefly, of all those noxious healthy drinks she kept bringing me. But that didn’t really count.
“Then why do you think I should know about the tea?”
“She was making it in the kitchen,” I said. “Weak tea and light toast. I wasn’t there the whole time she was doing it, but when I was there, she was fussing nonstop about how rude and obnoxious Dr. Wright was and making it clear how much she resented having to take a tea tray to her.”
“And there were other people in the kitchen?”
“There are always other people in the kitchen,” I said. “The kitchen and the library are where people hang out, and just then Dr. Wright was tying up the library. So anyone could have been in the kitchen. And Rose Noire wasn’t just brewing tea and slopping it into a mug; she was running from the kitchen to the pantry, arranging the sort of gracious tea tray Mother always insists on.”