“But it might be your imagination,” I hurried to say. “And no one else would ever guess. It looks great. The whole room looks great.”
I must have been able to say it with a straight face, because she beamed happily. Actually, I suppose if you liked pastel colors, glitter, ruffles, lace, and stuffed animals, it probably was great. It was certainly the most extreme example I’d ever seen of the whole uber-feminine girly girl style. If Mother had done up my room like this when I was ten or twelve, I’d have run screaming into the night and slept in the tool shed.
Martha stuck her head in the door.
“You okay?” she asked. “You want more of that Alka-Seltzer?”
“I’m fine,” Violet replied.
“You don’t look fine,” Martha said. “Here.” She handed Violet a bottle of water. “Keep hydrating. Best thing for you.”
Violet nodded, opened the bottle, and sipped.
Martha nodded and left. I was puzzled. I hadn’t noticed that the two of them were particularly close before.
“She’s a mother hen,” Violet said. “We sort of bonded over the whole horrible experience of having Clay ruin our rooms.”
“I can understand that,” I said.
“We went out to dinner last night,” she said. “To vent about the whole thing. Isn’t that lucky?”
“Lucky? How so?”
“Well, I had a couple of glasses of wine, which I shouldn’t have done, because even one glass puts me under the table.” She giggled girlishly. “Martha put me up in her guest room, and we stayed up past midnight gossiping.”
I suddenly realized where she was going with this.
“So you’re alibied,” I said. “Congratulations!”
It must have sounded as silly to her as it did to me, because we both burst out laughing. Or maybe it was the relief. She was happy to be in the clear. I was happy for her. She was one of the nice ones. Silly, but nice. And knowing that Martha had looked after her properly made me think better of her, too.
“What’s so funny?” Martha had appeared in the doorway again.
“We were just—” Violet began. And then she paused and held her hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear. Mind if I use your bathroom for a sec?”
“Don’t touch the walls,” Martha said. “Wet paint.”
Martha stepped into the room. Violet scurried into the bathroom and closed the door.
“Nice of you to look after her,” I said.
“Some people shouldn’t be allowed out on their own.”
“And your good deed is rewarded.”
“Rewarded?” Martha raised one eyebrow in a puzzled expression.
“At the very time when Clay was being murdered here in the house, the two of you were sharing girlish confidences over your wine.”
“Actually, I was probably holding her head while she worshiped the porcelain goddess,” Martha said. “No head for alcohol, that girl. And I feel a little guilty—we must have spent half the evening trading stories about nasty things Clay had done, and planning silly little pranks to play on him. If I’d known he was about to get killed…” She shook her head.
“But you didn’t,” I said. “And being dead doesn’t make him a saint.”
“I guess we’ll have to go to the funeral,” she said. “And look solemn. And make sure he’s really gone.”
Violet opened the door and scurried out into the room.
“Thanks, Martha,” she chirped.
“Let’s go see if Eustace has any coffee,” Martha said. “Might settle your stomach.”
As they went down the stairs, I could hear Violet chattering with determined cheerfulness about ruching, whatever that was. And Martha answering that proper thread tension was the key.
Not the most likely pair of new best friends, but perhaps working in adjacent rooms under the pressure of our deadline—and with the odious Clay nearby—had worked some kind of magic. And it would be interesting if their newfound alliance survived the end of the show house. But it was nice, for the time being, to see Violet opening up and Martha behaving kindly rather than waspishly.
I heard the toilet flush in Martha’s bathroom. The door to the first part of the bathroom, with the sink and tub in it was open, but the door to the toilet compartment was closed. I waited until after I heard water running in the second sink, in its own compartment on the far side of the toilet, to knock on the door.
“Out in a minute.”
It was Alice, one of the two Quilt Ladies.
“I was just coming to see how you two were doing this morning,” I said.
“Pretty well, considering,” she answered, as I followed her into the bonus room beyond. “Last night was a tough night.”