23

The crowd thickened at the base of the platform as mystery buffs moved toward the steps, eager to congratulate the winners. Annie lost sight of the Chief for a moment, then saw him bulling his way through a clot of contentious losers. The druggist from Broward’s Rock was shaking his head in disgust. Wells stepped around him and reached out to clap Bobby Frazier on the shoulder, and she heard snatches of his low-voiced command, “… arresting you … murders of Corinne Webster and Idell Gordon. I wish to inform you of your rights …”

Those near enough to hear stood still to listen, but most of the Mystery Night participants continued to press noisily toward the platform. Lightning flickered on the horizon.

From her vantage point, Annie saw Bobby’s head jerk back, but he made no move to escape Wells’s grasp. His eyes searched the crowd. She looked, too.

Gail stood at the other end of the platform, caught up in a milling stream of people. She stood on tiptoe, her eyes wide, her face stricken. She struggled to push her way past the crowd, and she began to scream.

“No, he didn’t do it. He didn’t!”

Bobby started toward her, but Wells yanked his arm. Bobby gave one last despairing look, then walked with Wells to the circular drive where a police car waited.

Stymied by the surging crowd, Gail turned and ran toward the platform steps. She stumbled up them in her haste and darted to Annie. As she yanked the microphone away, her voice, high and strident, boomed across the night. “I killed my aunt! I killed Corinne Webster and Idell Gordon. I did it!”

Lucy huddled on a chair beside Gail’s bed, clinging to the girl’s hand. The convulsive sobs were beginning to ease.

John Sanford closed his bag and motioned for Annie to come out into the hall.

He rubbed a hand against the stubble on his chin. He looked tired and thin and irritated. “The girl’s about to snap. That shot will take hold pretty soon. For Christ’s sake, what got into her? What a damn fool thing to do! I’ve known that kid since she was born. She couldn’t kill a cat. Frazier probably did it. A guy like him would never pass up a chance to marry millions.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve got surgery in the morning. I need to get home, get some sleep, but I want you to take this.” He opened his bag and lifted out a couple of tablet samples of Valium. “See that Lucy takes these and goes to bed. She’s about ready to collapse.”

After he left, she eased open the door and stepped back inside Gail’s room. The girl’s breathing had slowed. Despite her efforts to stay awake, her eyelids kept flickering shut.

Annie walked across the room and stood beside Lucy, who never even looked up, her gaze locked on Gail’s pale face. Sanford was right. Lucy needed help, too. She hunched in the chair like an aged crow in bright garb, her red and gold silk dress a shocking contrast to her grieving face.

Annie gently touched her shoulder.

Lucy slowly looked up, her eyes full of distress. “This is so hideous, so dreadful. To see Gail scream and cry …” Tears slipped down her cheeks, staining the silk of her dress, falling as gently and steadily as the spring rain against the windows.

“Shh now. She’s asleep. It will be better tomorrow.”

Lucy lifted the flaccid hand, held it to her cheek. “She loves him terribly. Oh, God. What are we going to do?”

Annie felt incredibly weary. The delicate Dresden clock on the bedside table chimed twice. Two A.M.

“We can’t do anything more tonight. Max is seeing about a lawyer for him, but I’m afraid it pretty well tore it when he confessed, too, after Gail did. Wells got it down. And that seems to me pretty much all they’ll need since they found a pencil with his fingerprints on it in Idell’s office.”

“A pencil?”

“Wells thinks it fell out of his shirt pocket. He always carried a couple of extra pencils there.”

Lucy lifted her chin. “He could have gone by Idell’s office that night just to talk to her, to see what she knew, then decided to keep quiet when she was found dead.”

“He says he went by to talk to her about the reward—and what she thought she knew. That’s when he says he dumped cyanide in the sherry, too.”

It was almost three by the time Annie got Lucy settled at her house, though she refused the Valium. Returning to the Inn through the steady rain, Annie felt like she’d been flattened by a bulldozer. Max wasn’t in his room. Was he still at the jail, or was he trying to explain to a bewildered lawyer the ins and outs of a complicated case: Two dead women, two confessed murderers, one in jail, one ignored.

She sat down in the lumpy chair next to the window. The shutters hadn’t been closed for the night. The tan-colored Society building looked insubstantial in the rain. That was where it all started. No, not really. It had begun years ago, when Corinne Prichard Webster began her imperious course through life. That was the beginning, Corinne’s arrogance, Corinne’s absolute determination to control. But the end of her life had been determined in that quiet building. And the end of Idell Gordon’s life had been determined the night she looked out her window and saw someone she knew leaving the Society late at night.

Who had she seen?

Annie jolted upright.

Not Bobby, for God’s sake.

Idell was a born gossip. Her mouth never stopped clacking. She talked whether she had anything to say or not. The appearance of Bobby Frazier coming out of the Society Building late at night would have been startling. She certainly would have mentioned it to someone. That meant—Annie pressed her fingers hard against her temples. She was tired, so damn tired, but she knew she was close to a revelation. It meant the person Idell saw that night was someone she knew whose late night appearance at the Society was surprising but not shocking.

A Board member.

She jumped up, began to pace, then gradually her eagerness flagged. Okay, a Board member. They’d been there before: Lucy, Sanford, Gail, Roscoe, Edith, Sybil, Miss Dora. Even the appearance of Leighton would not have surprised Idell. He could have been running an errand for Corinne.

So all she’d done, in her own mind at least, was clear Bobby. And probably Tim.

Damn, damn, damn. It was impossible, a mess. They’d never get it right. And she was too tired to take another step or think another thought. Suddenly, she had an overpowering desire to lie down and sink fathoms deep into sleep. The bed was covered with Mystery Night materials, dumped without any attempt at order as Max hurried to get to the police station and Annie to the Prichard House. Wearily, she began to move the boxes. At least the Sticky Wicket murder was history now. Too bad the clues to Corinne’s murder couldn’t be tabulated as neatly. Physical clues like snapping red flags. But, actually, actions pointed toward the murderer, too, because murder arose from actions: Lord Algernon’s repeated involvement with other women, his wife’s jealousy, her avid dependence upon gambling, her desperate efforts to extricate herself from debt, all leading up to the final moment when she struck down her tormentor. And the obvious and pathetic attempts of her loyal maid to—

Annie stood in the middle of the room, clutching a poster container.

Actions.

Images flooded Annie’s mind, Corinne’s imperious will to rule, the abiding anger resulting from love denied, the conspiratorial eagerness of Idell Gordon to talk, talk, talk, the location of the pond, the telltale placard describing the superstitions of the Low Country, Miss Dora’s desperate assertion of Annie’s guilt, the croquet mallet with her own fingerprints, a few smudged, Idell’s certainty that more money could be had for silence, her offer of sherry to her murderer.

And Annie knew with certainty who had murdered Corinne Webster and Idell Gordon.

She walked back to the chair, dropped into it, and absently put the poster container atop the air conditioner. She knew, and she took no pleasure in knowing.

But Bobby was in jail, and Bobby could be convicted of murder. Would a jury understand his confession, understand it was a last, desperate, foolish attempt to protect the girl he loved?

Only one thing could save Bobby Frazier.

She jumped up, began to pace. Once, she reached out and touched the phone, ready to call Chief Wells.

But he would never believe her.

She continued to pace.

One action she could take. It would be a gamble. It could have no effect, or it could result in another death.

She didn’t want to do it. It was a fateful step. But, finally, she reached out and picked up the telephone and dialed.

It was answered after one ring.

“Yes.”

“You killed Corinne. And Idell.”

Silence. Annie could hear her own heart hammering.

“How did you know?”

As Annie spoke, her own voice was equally weary. She listed her reasons, then said, “You know, only one thing will save Bobby Frazier—your confession.”

There was no answer. Perhaps the lightest of sighs, then the connection was broken.

Annie wedged a straight chair beneath the doorknob. She moved the rest of the materials from the bed and turned off the light. She lay down, but her eyes didn’t close for a long, long time as she watched the tiny line of light that seeped beneath the door. It was almost an hour later that she heard Max come into his room. She wanted very much to call to him, but this decision had been hers and hers alone. She would carry it by herself. She listened to the falling rain.

Max carried the last of the boxes into Death on Demand, then he turned and faced Annie.

“What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Love, I’ve known you when you were up and when you were down. I’ve made love to you in the moonlight, danced with you until dawn, witnessed table piggery unbounded, admired your intellect, your serve, and your verve—and I’ve never known you to say less than three thousand words a minute since the day we met. So something is screwy as hell this morning. I know we haven’t had breakfast, and we drove our cars separately back to the ferry, but you haven’t said anything but uh-hun and hmm since we got back to the store. You haven’t even commented on the strategy the Atlanta lawyer has in mind for Bobby Frazier. So what gives?”

The bell rang as the front door of Death on Demand opened.

She looked past Max up the central aisle of the store.

Bobby Frazier, his eyes red-rimmed, his jaws covered with the stubble of beard, walked toward them.

Tears brimmed in her eyes. “The case is over,” she said, and she reached out to grab Max’s hand.

“Over? How can it be over?”

But she was watching Bobby.

He held out his hand, palm up. A cream-colored envelope bore Annie’s name in a sloping, feminine script.

“I had to lean like hell on Wells to get it for you. But she wrote this to you, and I knew you should get it.” His mouth twisted down. “Sometimes it’s handy to be a reporter—when you’re not in jail. I even threatened him with false arrest. But he had her other note, her confession.” He swallowed jerkily. “She’s dead. She had some more of the cyanide.”

“Dead. Who’s dead?” Max demanded.

They spoke at once, Bobby’s voice somber, Annie’s tear-choked.

“Lucy Haines.”