? TWENTY-EIGHT ?
I SPUN ROUND, MY eyes only slowly adjusting to the darkened room.
From out of the shadows, a figure was moving slowly toward me.
It was Fabian.
“Very clever,” she said again as she came half into the light, and I could see the tight-lipped smirk on her pale face.
“How long have you been there?” I asked, trying to inject a touch of outrage into my voice.
“Longer than you,” she said, fishing a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and putting a match to one, then tossing her hair like French women in the cinema.
“You were expecting me, then,” I said, but other than blowing out a dismissive stream of smoke, she did not bother to reply.
“What made you think of the Marsh test?” she asked. “What made you think of arsenic?”
I shrugged. “Just a guess,” I lied.
“I’ll bet it was,” she said.
We could have stood there all night, I suppose, fencing with words, until one or the other of us decided to use something more deadly.
I saw my chance and I went for it. “But you already knew that, didn’t you—that it was arsenic.”
“Of course I did.” She smiled, taking a satisfied puff. “I was there when she swallowed it.”
“What?”
“The night of the Beaux Arts Ball, two years ago. I was there.”
I must have looked like a gaping loony.
“Some of us were asked to serve at table: Jumbo, Druce, Forrester, myself. A few of the faculty, as well: Miss Fawlthorne, Miss Moate, Mrs. Bannerman, Miss Dupont.
“It’s something of a tradition,” Fabian went on. “Meant to show up the democratic principles of the old hall—even if it’s only once a year.”
“Jolly good of Miss Moate to pitch in,” I said. “It mustn’t be easy for her.”
“Moatey’s a good sort,” Fabian said, flicking ashes on the floor. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t agree. I was still trying to sort out where Fabian and I stood, which side we were on, and what was behind this duel in a shadowed room. Which one of us, for instance, was darkness, and which of us was light?
“She’s had a hard row to hoe,” Fabian said. “Since the accident, that is. Ditched by her best friend.”
Ditched? I was missing something here.
Fabian saw my look of dismay. “Run off the road and into the ditch. Car flipped. Moatey flung out through the windshield. Broken spine, broken neck. They practically had to pick up her bits in a basket.”
I felt my gorge rising. Those injuries would account for that awful froggish expression into which her face had fallen. The poor woman must have undergone eons of surgery.
“It was positively eerie,” Fabian said, echoing my thoughts, “to see her at high table, serving lobster to the very person who put her in the wheelchair.”
I blinked, blankly.
“Francesca Rainsmith,” she said. “Her onetime best friend.”
My throat was suddenly dry. I was finding it hard to swallow. I thought of all those long-gone chemists who had accidentally inhaled a fatal dose of arsine and died with their legs in knots behind their necks. Or had I, without paying attention, taken a drink of water from a contaminated glass?
But no—other than the shock of hearing about Miss Moate, I had exhibited no symptoms.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. We were still circling each other as warily as two roosters in a ring, and I had already made up my mind not to be the first to mention pheasant sandwiches. If she was a member of the Nide, she could jolly well bring it up herself.
“Because you need to know,” she said. “I’ve had my eye on you for some time.”
I shrugged. What else could I do?
“You say you were actually there when the arsenic was administered?”
“I think so,” she said. “I was sitting across from Francesca when Moatey brought her a plate of lobster.”
“From the sideboard?”
“Can’t say. I had my back to it. Oddly enough, I remember Moatey lifting her beloved tea cozy from the plate.”
“She brought Francesca’s lobster under her tea cozy?”
“Doesn’t make sense, does it? I didn’t think much about it at the time, although I do remember thinking that our beloved chairman might have salted her plate with something nasty. He made such a show of breaking up the lobster for her, the claws, the abdomen—she squealed and closed her eyes at the sight of the antennae. Made her feel sick, just looking at them, she said. Funny, isn’t it.”
“Strange” was more the word that came to mind, but then Miss Moate’s oversize tea cozy was big enough to conceal almost anything you might wish to put under it.
Which raised a whole new set of possibilities.
“Which one of them was it, then? Ryerson Rainsmith or Miss Moate?”
“I don’t know,” Fabian said with a sigh. “I really don’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked. “The police, for instance.”
Fabian regarded me with a distant eye, and then she said: “I have my reasons.”
I could have named one of them on the spot, but I didn’t. I decided to steer the conversation into less personal channels—at least for now.