Mallets Aforethought (35 page)

“Huh.” Wade brushed snow out of his hair. “Here we are.”

“Home at last,” I agreed. With flakes twinkling around it and lights glowing from within, the big old house shimmered like the scene in an old-fashioned snow globe. Inside—

—once the dogs had been taken out and the furnace had been checked and the proper radiators had been turned on or off in the various rooms, so the oil wouldn’t quite make an actual
glug-glug
sound while being sucked down by the oil burner—

—we sat at the kitchen table in thick robes and warm, fuzzy slippers, drinking hot cocoa instead of champagne.

“We’re domestic,” I observed, too exhausted to say more.

Wade smiled tiredly. “Yeah. Okay by me.”

Domestic, I thought, and lucky; me especially.

I wondered what Wade would say if I told him it hadn’t been ipecac in the bottle I’d guzzled from that day. Later Victor had sniffed at the licorice smell still lingering on the shards.

Tincture of opium, he’d said; a morphinelike drug. Will must’ve dumped the ipecac, using the bottle to disguise its new contents for some hideous reason of his own. Victor surmised it could’ve been used to keep Agnes Bonnet’s stomach from rejecting the pills Will was dosing her with.

And atop the other narcotics Will had administered to me, Victor had informed me gravely, what I’d drunk had likely held enough sedative to kill me. That is, if my stomach hadn’t been so nervous, it revolted, and if I hadn’t been so primed to believe the stuff would do what it had.

Otherwise I might’ve ended up with Eva Thane in the special fool’s purgatory reserved for accidental suicides. “Wade, do you really think Eva’s gun went off by itself?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Shoddy piece of junk. It could’ve fired if you just looked at it the wrong way. Could’ve happened easy.”

He frowned, considering it all again. “What I think is, she changed her mind at the last minute, then put the gun to her head. Just experimenting, but feeling safe because she’d already decided not to. And—bang.”

It would have been just like Eva, I thought, playacting the ending of her life instead of doing it. Thinking she could still escape, that Chester would go on being blamed for murdering three girls.

“She’d have gotten an awful surprise if she’d tried getting back out of that room, though. No doorknob.”

“Uh-huh,” Wade agreed. “She hadn’t expected to want one. And she got a surprise anyway.”

Because the gun had gone off. And there you had it: in the end, you attracted your own sort of luck.

Or not. The murdered girls hadn’t thought so, probably, and neither had poor Therese.

Even Jan and Hector, I imagined, didn’t think so.

Anyway, I had asked Victor to keep quiet about the opium and he’d promised to. And I wasn’t telling, either.

For now. Wade ruffled my hair. “Hey, it’s getting late. How about if the both of us head on up to bed?”

Music came faintly from upstairs; it meant Sam was home. Not that he had to be when I turned in, but I preferred it. All three animals were settled too, Cat Dancing atop the refrigerator and the dogs in their dog bed, their soft paws twitching in dreams.

So as frost-fronds etched silver witchery on the windowpanes of our old house, the both of us did.

SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. She is currently working on her eighth
Home Repair Is Homicide
novel,
Tool & Die.