“Tree looks nice in that new position,” Randall said when we’d finished our detailed inspection. “I just hope your mother doesn’t up and decide to move it again.”
“If she does, I’ll talk her out of it,” I said. “It looks glorious there. You’d hardly know the dining room existed.”
“Yeah, I gathered that was the whole point,” Randall said with a snicker. “But your mother made me cut a couple feet off the bottom to make sure folks could still see Ivy’s ‘Nightingale’ mural.”
The mural that at the moment was still only a few pencil marks on the wall of the upper hall, marks so faint that from down here it still looked like a blank wall. I felt a twinge of increasingly familiar stomach-churning anxiety. Would Ivy still have time to finish all the paintings she’d planned? And if she didn’t, would it be playing favorites to hint that maybe she should give priority to the one Mother had planned to showcase in her room?
Just then the front door opened.
“Meg, darlin’!” Eustace sailed in with a travel coffee cup in one hand and a large brown grocery bag in the other. He bent over to land an air kiss near my cheek. “I hear it was like the shootout at the O.K. Corral in here last night.”
“I was only here for two of the gunshots,” I said.
“I’m going to round up my workmen,” Randall said, and strode off, pulling out his cell phone.
“Only two! Good Lord!” Eustace exclaimed. He was heading through Mother’s room to his own domain, the breakfast room and kitchen. “But I heard someone knocked off Clay, and you found him. I want to hear every detail! Spill!”
“Not till after you’ve talked to the chief,” I said.
“You sure he wants to talk to me?” Eustace asked.
“He wants to talk to everyone.” I followed him into the breakfast room and sat down at the round glass-topped table while he continued into the kitchen.
“Well, I won’t grill you till after the chief has grilled me.” He had opened the refrigerator door and was putting things away: diet sodas, several brown paper-wrapped deli packages, and bottles of water. “But after that, I expect all the dirt.”
“Every bit,” I said. I was staring at something that seemed out of place in the otherwise impeccable breakfast nook. A dirty glass. No, a half-full glass, and unless my sense of smell was playing tricks on me, it was half-full of cheap scotch.
I found myself remembering a night shortly after we’d started working on the house, when Randall had sent over beer, sodas, and pizza for everyone. I’d held out a can of soda and a bottle of beer for Eustace to choose from.
“I’ll take the diet soda, darlin’,” he’d said.
“I’m not a big beer drinker myself,” I’d replied.
“Dear heart, I’m a dry drunk,” he’d said. “Ten years sober come New Year’s Day. If you ever see me popping the top of one of those beers, you tie me down and call my sponsor.”
So why was there a half-full glass of scotch in his room?
He saw what I was looking at.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“If you think it’s a stale glass of cheap, smelly scotch, then yes,” I said.
“Another little offering from Clay,” he said. “The last, I assume, unless he comes back to needle me from beyond the grave. Do me a favor—pour it out and rinse that glass out real good so I won’t smell it.”
“Offering from Clay?” I echoed, as I got up to follow his instructions. “You mean he left this here deliberately. Did he know—”
“That I’m a recovering alcoholic? Hell, yes. He did it all the time, bless his evil little heart. That’s the kind of guy he is. Was.”
I dumped the scotch in the sink, rinsed out the glass twice, and ran enough water to make sure the alcohol smell was long gone from the sink. Then I carried the glass back to the breakfast table so I could take it with me when I left. It was a cheap, heavy tumbler, and clearly didn’t belong in Eustace’s elegant kitchen.
“Chief’s going to want to know my alibi.” Eustace looked somber. “And that’s going to be a problem.”
“If only we’d known someone was going to knock Clay off,” I said. “We could all have arranged to be with someone who could alibi us.”
“I was with someone, but I’m not sure it’s going to do me any good,” Eustace said. “I’m sponsoring someone. He’s almost made six months.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“But holidays are a bad time for him. For most of us. I was with him, helping him through a bad night, from about nine thirty till well past two in the morning. But I can’t give the chief his name unless he’s okay with it. And if he’s not…”