“Who?” Sofia urged.
“The person who’s lying.” Plum reached out and grasped her friends’ hands in hers, squeezing urgently. “The window. Remember? Dude said that when the smoke bomb went off, he and Jude separated. Dude said he went straight to the window to open it.”
Her friends waited.
“So many things are wrong with that story, I don’t know where to begin!” Plum said. “Firstly, why go to the window? Why not the door?”
“Because he was looking for the door, but he found the window first,” Sofia explained, taking the devil’s advocate position.
“Right, except the window is high on that wall. He’d have to climb on the rack like I did to reach it.”
“So he made a bad choice about climbing to that window instead of getting to a door.” Marlowe shrugged. “Doesn’t make him a liar.”
“But don’t you see? It does,” Plum urged. “He never went to the window! I think the window was already open—that window, specifically—to let the smoke out. And he lied about opening it to cover himself.”
Marlowe still looked doubtful. “Why do it at all?” she rebutted. “The smoke, I mean. Why let it out of the kitchen at all?”
“To summon us,” Sofia said.
“Right!” Plum agreed. “He’s a planner. He planned all of this in advance. And the window was to bring all of us rushing in to add confusion. It gave him both time to go back to the refrigerator, open it, and try to kill Jalen! And with all of us there, it deflected suspicion from him, because the killer could have been any of us.”
“I mean, that is all possible,” Marlowe said. “What shows that Dude’s a liar?”
Plum took a deep breath. She needed to make sure she was clear, that her reasoning was explained well. Their lives depended on it. “Because if he was desperately trying to get out, found the rack, realized he could climb it to the window, then—”
Sofia gasped, clapping her hand over her mouth.
Plum nodded. “Then he would have knocked over the pans, like I did.”
“Oh my God,” Marlowe said.
“No pans were on the floor when we went in there. Nothing looked disturbed at the window until I knocked the pans over.”
Sofia nodded vigorously. “If he wasn’t able to see, he would’ve knocked one over. If he’d tried to climb the rack to open a window, he’d have knocked more onto the floor.”
“So the window was already open,” Marlowe said.
“Yes! And the person Jude bumped into . . .” Plum said, leading her friend.
“Was Dude going to get the knife!” Marlowe nearly shouted. Her grip on Plum’s hand was tight.
“Thank God he grabbed the wrong handle!” Plum squeezed Marlowe’s hand in return.
Sofia cursed in Spanish. Then she sprang to her feet and swept the sleeping Henrietta up in her arms. “We have to go warn the others,” she said.