Миранда Джеймс - Twelve Angry Librarians

Cathleen groaned. “And here I was, trying to forget the whole darn thing.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t that bad. We’ve both been to worse. Gavin was an obnoxious twit on Thursday night, but he didn’t seem to be as intent on malice as he usually was.”

“Really?” That struck me as interesting. “I would have expected him to be in full-on attack mode. Didn’t he basically force you all to attend the party?”

Nancy shrugged. “He didn’t force me. He had no power over me anymore. I only went because Cathleen begged me to.”

“I knew Nancy could make him back off if he started in on me,” Cathleen said. “I just couldn’t deal with him.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I couldn’t, either. In my case, I ended up hitting him. That’s not really the way to handle a problem like the one Gavin presented.”

Nancy quirked her eyebrows at me. “I bet it felt good, though. There were a few times I longed to let go and slap the you-know-what out of him, the smug little twit.”

Her voice had grown heated, and her body language tense, as she spoke. Nancy didn’t seem as immune to Gavin as she might want others to think. The anger hadn’t disappeared, obviously.

I let that pass, however. By now I was pretty sure who killed Gavin, and it wasn’t either Nancy or Cathleen.

“Back to the party,” I said. “Will you tell me what you observed, in the order that it happened, if you can?”

They exchanged a glance, and both of them shrugged.

“Why not?” Cathleen said, and Nancy nodded in agreement.

“You start,” Nancy said.

Cathleen launched into a summary of her observations of the party. Much of what she told me tallied with what I’d already heard from Randi and Marisue. Cathleen and Nancy had stayed on after my two friends left, however; that was the time that interested me the most.

Nancy took up the narrative from Cathleen at the point when Randi and Marisue left. “Sylvia, that odd woman who was such a close friend of Maxine’s, left soon after your two friends did. Mitch Handler didn’t stay more than five minutes after Sylvia left.”

“So at that point, the only others there besides you and Cathleen were Harlan Crais, Maxine, and Gavin. Is that correct?” I asked.

“No, Bob Coben was still there, I think.” Cathleen frowned. “Wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “He was, for maybe another ten minutes or so. Said he had to meet someone. Sounded like a hookup to me.” She shook her head. “I don’t see the attraction myself.”

Cathleen rolled her eyes. “You can’t get past the earrings and the tattoos. He’s really good-looking, I think.” She sighed. “I’d’ve gone out with him, but I’m probably old enough to be his big sister.”

Nancy snorted. “Big sister, yeah. More like his mother, you mean.”

Cathleen bridled at that, and I was afraid they were going to get into an argument if I didn’t intervene. “When Coben left, there were just five of you still at the party.”

Cathleen gave Nancy one last speaking glance before she said, “Yes, that’s right.”

“Anything unusual happen from then until you left the party?” I asked.

“Not that I can recall,” Nancy said. “We were ready to go ourselves, and I think Harlan was, too. I said something about being tired and ready for bed, and Harlan chimed in. Said he was pretty exhausted, too.”

“Gavin was a little annoyed, I think,” Cathleen said. “But he didn’t make a big fuss like he usually did at one of his forced gatherings. He liked to keep everyone there as long as possible so he could torture us more.”

“No, he didn’t make a fuss.” Nancy frowned. “That was a bit odd, and then he did another odd thing.”

“You mean the food,” Cathleen said, and Nancy nodded.

“What about the food?” I asked.

“There was quite a bit left over,” Cathleen said. “And it was good stuff, too. I guess the hotel catered it.”

“It wasn’t the usual cheese tray Gavin picked up at the local discount warehouse, that’s for sure,” Nancy said.

“No, thank goodness.” Cathleen eyed the food that remained on the table near us. “In fact it was pretty much the same as this.”

I wasn’t sure where this was leading, and they were taking too long to get to the point. I tried not to sound irked when I asked, “So what was it about the food that was odd?”

“Oh, just that usually Gavin made sure nobody took any of the leftovers with them,” Cathleen said.

“He always wanted to keep them for himself,” Nancy said. “That’s how cheap he was.”

“This time, though, he told us to help ourselves to whatever we wanted, even his precious bottled water,” Cathleen said.

The mention of bottled water startled me. “Did any of you take food and water with you?”

“I took some food. I love those pinwheel-looking things with the cream cheese and spinach,” Cathleen said. “So I took several of those, and a couple of those little Greek pastry things with the spinach inside. What are they called? I can’t remember.”

“You mean spanakopita?” I asked. “I love it, too.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Cathleen said. “So I took that and the other. I love spinach, in case you couldn’t tell.”

I looked to Nancy, and she shook her head. “I don’t care for spinach, and I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the other stuff. I didn’t even take any of Gavin’s precious water.”

Nancy laughed suddenly. “Maxine was always like a squirrel around a table full of nuts, though. She stuffed several napkins full of food into her knitting bag, along with a bottle of water.”

“Yes, she did,” Cathleen said. “You’d think the woman hadn’t eaten in days. I took a bottle of water, too, and so did Harlan.”

My heart started racing. I worked to keep my voice steady when I asked Cathleen whether she had opened the water bottle.

She looked at me strangely, then nodded. “Yes, I drank it yesterday. Why, did you think it was poisoned?”

THIRTY-TWO

I nodded in response to Cathleen’s question.

“Oh, my good heaven, you did think it might be poisoned,” Cathleen said, suddenly looking a bit green. She shuddered. “But why? Why would you think the water was poisoned?”

Nancy stared at me, obviously confused. “Did you think the killer poisoned more than one of Gavin’s water bottles?”

“He—or she—poisoned two of them, at least.” They obviously didn’t know how Maxine Muller died.

Nancy’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean Maxine?”

“Yes,” I said. “The killer might only have poisoned a couple of them, although I’m not sure why he’d need to have poisoned more than one.”

“Because Gavin never shared with anyone,” Nancy said. “The killer could have, with almost overwhelming certainty, counted on the fact that Gavin, and Gavin only, would drink the poisoned water.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But there were at least two poisoned bottles. So why poison a second one? And maybe a third or a fourth?”

Nancy paled suddenly. “Thank the Lord I didn’t take one of those bottles. What happened to the rest of them?”

“I imagine the authorities have them now,” I said. “I suppose they will test all the remaining ones, that they know about, of course.”

Cathleen seemed to have recovered from her earlier shock. “Somebody needs to talk to Harlan, then, since he took one of the bottles. Maybe his was clean, though, like mine.”

“Either it was, or he hasn’t opened it yet,” Nancy said with a certain grim humor. “Charlie, maybe you’d better go ask him.”

“Yes, you should,” Cathleen said.

Given that I was pretty sure now that Harlan Crais was a double murderer, I wasn’t all that keen on approaching him. If he were the killer, I reasoned, he would know which bottles were poisoned. If he weren’t, though, he could be in danger if he’d somehow been given a poisoned bottle. What should I do?