Lucy and the Valentine Verdict (8 page)

“Monogrammed?” Miss Claythorne asked. “With
what?”

The good doctor held the stocking up as if
peering at some delicate stitchery. “An A and a P.”

“Mrs. Peabody’s!”

More than one person said the last. It
seemed to be a bit of a universal line.

Emily Brent, who had thought to bring her
Bible prop with her, took Sir Arthur’s place. “But... I saw...” Her
eyes darted around, finally resting on the doctor.

“What, Ms. Brent? What did you see?”

She looked around again, as if whatever
secret she held was so heavy she risked all by revealing it. “Lady
York, leaving Mr. Blore’s chambers. It was dark, after midnight and
she was wearing a nightgown.”

The group sucked in a breath and swiveled to
stare down our hostess.

Mrs. Peabody plopped down onto the seat next
to me and handed me a mimosa. Kind of liking the way this was
going, I forgot my concerns with dogs and their hair and took a
drink.

I pulled out my notebook and wrote, Mr.
Blore sleeping with Lady York and Mrs. Peabody. Could Lady York
have killed her out of jealousy? Or maybe Mrs. Peabody threatened
to reveal the affair to Sir Arthur?

Below that I scribbled,
Means?

Mrs. Peabody was poisoned, but there had
been no mention of Lady York having access or knowledge of
poison.

I tapped my pen against the notebook and
waited for the next clue to reveal itself.

Miss Claythorne spun and pointed to the
table where the vase full of flowers from the night before had been
moved. “And she had poison. Those flowers!”

Ah... of course.

Lady York gestured to the vase. “Those
flowers? They are just something I picked from my garden.”

“Monkshood, you mean. One of the most toxic
plants known to man.”

“How would you know?” Lady York asked,
clearly trying to reflect the implied accusation back on the
spinster.

Even with no cards, I could take this one.
“She’s a botanist.” Which meant Lady York’s efforts might not be
off the mark. Under Miss Claythorne’s name I wrote,
Means:
Botanist Monkshood
. But I had no motive... whereas with this
new information there was both a potential motive and means for
Lady York.

I checked my list.

Mr. Blore:
Motive:
Affair Means: had access to martini glass.

Lady York:
Motive:
Affair Means: brought monkshood to the party.

Sir Arthur Cannon:
Motive: None yet. Means: Spent time in
Africa
, if we were going with a classic Agatha Christie murder
weapon.

Under Miss Claythorne’s listing, I added a
note about her giving Mrs. Peabody the pill. With this new
monkshood information, that seemed like a red herring, but you
never knew.

Emily Brent:
Motive: Obvious disapproval of Mrs. Peabody’s lifestyle.
Possible past connection? Means:...
I suddenly remembered the
flower pressed inside her Bible. I looked around, wondering if
anyone else had this piece of information. To be fair, I probably
should have shared it... Instead I scribbled it down and kept my
mouth closed for now.

Dr. Armstrong:
Motive: None yet. Means: He was a doctor.

Mandrake Raven:
Motive: None yet. Means: Handed Mrs. Peabody her empty martini
glass.

He also had seemed to be working hard to pin
the crime on Maid Ann.

While I had been reading and editing my
notes, the others had been doing the same. One by one we lifted our
heads and assessed the suspects. Which meant we were all giving
each other the hairy eyeball.

Mrs. Peabody twittered. “Everyone gets so
intense during these things.”

Her (real) husband frowned, but she just
waved her hand at him and settled back in to continue watching.

“Ms. Brent,” I said, deciding to pursue my
most promising lead. “You haven’t told us much about yourself. What
brought you to the party?”

She blinked. “My husband died a few months
ago. Friends suggested a weekend away would do me good.”

My first instinct was to apologize for her
loss and my nosiness which had prompted her to speak of it. Then,
once again, I remembered... play-acting...

“Oh, that is horrible. How did he die?”

“Heart failure.”

“Wait.” Mandrake stepped forward. “George
Brent? The survivalist?”

Ms. Brent nodded her head.

Mandrake looked at me and then around the
room. “Didn’t you hear the story? It was all over the newspapers.
George Brent was a world-famous survivalist. But last fall he ate
some poisonous plant...” He spun and stared at Ms. Brent.

Everyone scribbled furiously.

Her Bible clutched against her shirt, Ms.
Brent took on a defensive stance. “It was an accident. He kept it
for medicinal uses, but somehow his supplies got messed up and a
tiny bit was mixed in with parsnips.” She dropped her head and
murmured a prayer.

“But if he was
world-famous
for his
skills...” I prompted.

She turned on me. “Things happen, Maid Ann.
When the Lord calls you home, you do not get a recall.”

I wasn’t sure how that answered my question,
but before I could push further, Peter raised a hand. “I remember
the case. Ms. Brent was questioned, but her reputation was stellar
and they could find no evidence that she was involved.”

Uh huh
. I put a star next to her
name.

I had other leads to wind up though. I
changed my attention to Miss Claythorne. “What about you? Did you
know Mrs. Peabody before this evening? You mentioned that you
worked for a pharmaceutical company, and she was talking about some
new weight loss drug she’d been trying. Were you involved with that
at all?”

Miss Claythorne looked down her nose. “Most
certainly not. I would never be involved with something so
tawdry.”

I wrote
snot
next to her name.

Mrs. Peabody leaned over. “In real life too.
You should have heard her bossing Mandrake around yesterday.”

“Miss Claythorne and Mandrake know each
other?” I asked in a whisper.

“Not the characters... the real people. They
have the room next to ours. She was telling him what he could and
couldn’t do, which was, say, everything. I thought Harold worried
about how I come off, but he has nothing on that young woman. You’d
think they were about to meet the queen instead of...” She flicked
her eyes toward Lady York who held up both hands.

“We’ll take a fifteen-minute break and then
meet back here for the reveal! Correct answers with motive and
means will be entered into a drawing for a return visit!”

Woohoo
. If I hadn’t
wanted to beat Peter, that would have been enough to make me throw
this thing. But I did want to beat him,
badly
.

As everyone else wandered off for coffee and
bathroom breaks, I stayed with Mrs. Peabody. “Do you have your
cards?” I asked. “Could I look at them?”

“Certainly.” She pulled the folded cards out
of a pocket and slipped them, hidden, into my hand. Then she got
up, standing in front of me for a minute to further hide our
somewhat dishonest collaboration.

Somewhat, because while I was sure no one
else would appreciate out collusion, it had not been specifically
forbidden either. So, I wasn’t cheating. I was being
resourceful.

Unfortunately, the cards didn’t contain
anything too world-shattering, nothing that Mrs. Peabody hadn’t
already said or acted out.

She was a rich socialite widow with a newly
syndicated advice column and took joy in using that power to help
various causes and bring down others. She was to comment on my
weight loss... and complain about the new diet supplement not
working. There was also a drawing of the bottle she’d described
with the man’s arm making a muscle.

Nothing new. I slipped the card into my
pocket and thought.

One by one, people returned to the room. As
each did, I consulted my notebook to see if anything new popped out
at me.

It did.

I not only knew who dunnit, I knew how and
why. I looked up at Peter and grinned.

Peter walked over and stared down at me.
“You know who did it, don’t you?”

My grin widened. “I hear Minnesota is lovely
in the spring.”

He grimaced. “I hear it’s humid.”

I tilted my head to the side in
acquiescence. Compared to Montana, everywhere was humid.

Lady York clapped her hands and motioned for
everyone to take a seat. After handing out “official” slips of
paper for us to write our guesses on, she gathered them up and
repositioned herself back in the middle.

One by one, she read the slips. When she was
done, she tallied the “votes.” Maid Ann with her history with the
victim and access to the martini glass got zero votes.

“Too obvious,” Mr. Blore offered. “Christie
never picked the obvious choice.”

Plus, it turned out I wasn’t the only one to
get a card declaring Maid Ann’s innocence. Half of the guests had.
The other half had gotten one saying Sir Arthur with his African
connection was guilt free.

He also got zero votes.

Captain Egg got one vote but with no motive
or means mentioned.

“I’m a long-shot gambler,” Mrs. Peabody, who
had taken her place back beside me, whispered. “Besides I thought
it would be a hoot if the detective dunnit.”

Her husband seemed to come from the same
camp. His vote was for Mrs. Peabody herself. “Her headache masked a
terminal condition, but she had a double indemnity clause if she
died by someone else’s hand and she wanted to continue her fame and
support of her causes by naming one of them in her will. Means...
she poisoned herself.” He puffed up as he said the last, glancing
around and obviously expecting the rest of us to throw ourselves
onto the ground in shame for our own stupidity.

None of us did. We nodded politely and tried
to avoid eye contact with anyone else to keep from rolling our
eyes.

Lady York was the big winner with Emily
Brent, Mandrake and Miss Claythorne all casting their votes for
her. They mentioned her jealousy over Mrs. Peabody having an affair
with Mr. Blore, along with a possible need to kill the other woman
before she revealed Lady York’s indiscretion to Sir Arthur, along
with her bringing a deadly plant into the house as their supporting
evidence, but I guessed it had more to do with our hostess’s bossy
personality than any link to motive or means.

Mandrake, despite the butler-always-did-it
adage, got no votes, and neither did Miss Claythorne.

Ms. Brent, however, got one.

“She’s killed once,” Dr. Armstrong
explained. “There is no reason not to believe that she won’t kill
again. And she had access to the monkshood and Mrs. Peabody not
long before the poor woman fell.”

I gave him points for sticking to character
so well with the “poor woman.” But it didn’t change the fact that
he was wrong, because I alone, it seemed, knew who the killer
was.

I leapt to my feet. Well, I tried to. I’d
forgotten that I’d sat on the butt-eating couch. Peter, always the
gentleman, held out a hand and tugged me to a stand.

“It was,” I announced, holding up the
obligatory right hand, finger pointed at the sky. “Dr. Armstrong.
How, you might ask do I know this?” I glanced around the room,
debating whether I should add a twirl of my finger over my upper
lip. In a salute to Poirot, of course. Not that Poirot was as
flashy as my reveal promised to be, but it was just a salute. After
catching Miss Claythorne and Emily Brent’s horrified faces,
however, I decided against it.

I took a step back to regain my bearings and
then dug in my pocket to pull out Mrs. Peabody’s card, the one with
the supplement bottle drawn on it. “This!” I said. “Was his motive.
He, Dr. ARM STRONG...” I pointed to the flexed arm on the card.
“...was the creator of the supplement that Mrs. Peabody planned to
ruin with her column. He couldn’t let her do it before the sale he
had planned went through. So, he poisoned her. It wasn’t hard. He
carried his medical bag with him wherever he went. One quick slip
of the hand, a capsule tilted over her glass, and boom she was
down.” I looked around the group. “Did that kill her? Who knows?
She might have still been alive when he ordered us all out of the
room and then, once alone, finished her off. It certainly gave him
time to destroy any evidence that would point back to him.”

I waited, soaking up the stunned silence,
brought on, no doubt, by my genius.

Lady York cleared her throat. “You came to
this conclusion after seeing that?” She pointed to the card with
the medicine bottle drawn on it.

I glanced at the clue, which I still held
out, prominently exposing the fact that I had access to something
no one else had.

“Where did you say you found it?” she
asked.

I chewed on my lip and tried not to look at
Mrs. Peabody.

“Because that card was supposed to have been
found under the body, and...” Lady York flipped pages on her own
notebook. “Yes, Maid Ann was out of the room at the time.” She
looked up, expectant.

Mrs. Peabody objected. “No one told me to
leave it under my body.”

Lady York motioned for me to flip the card
over.
Place under body when fall
was clearly written on its
back.

Mrs. Peabody waved her hand in the air.
“What’s it matter? So I didn’t leave it under my body. I obviously
left it somewhere that Maid Ann found it, and she solved the crime.
She did, right?”

I held my breath.

Lady York sucked in one of her own, an
annoyed one. “I didn’t say that. Actually...” she turned in a
circle, looking at each of us. “The person who named the killer
is...”

She waited, letting the drama build.

“Mr. Blore!”

Mr. Blore beamed. His wife snorted, and
everyone else in the room just looked confused. Except Peter. He
looked concerned, most likely that I was going to say or do
something
inappropriate
or even...
stupid
.