end table and dialed the emergency number, David clicked on a few of his Tiffany lamps. When the operator picked up, I explained the situation, gave my name, and David’s address and phone number.
“Did you hear anything while you were in here, David?” I asked after hanging up. “Anything at all?”
“Nothing.”
“How long were you up here?”
He checked his wristwatch. “About two hours I guess. I came up to lie down just before the fireworks. I must have fallen asleep. My god…I still can’t believe this…what do you think happened to Treat? An accident?”
An accident? Yeah, right. One of your guests just happened to be cleaning a gun on your back grounds, and it just happened to go off and accidentally pop through your private bathroom window at exactly the right time to take down a man close to your height and dressed just like you.
I said none of this, of course. With the exception of Ted Ammon’s tragic fate, homicide was unheard of in this burgh. (Ammon had been an upstanding financier until he was brutally bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton mansion by his estranged wife’s electrician, who also happened to be the woman’s lover.)
Okay, so the locals referred to Ammon’s old Middle Lane address as “Murder Lane,” but until that specific crime, there hadn’t been a homicide out here in years. The last thing an East Hampton resident expected was a real murderer to squeeze through their impenetrable privets—and I could see it was going to take a little time for David to accept that a homicide had just taken place in his own house.
“I’m not sure what happened,” I told him carefully, “but, David, back up a minute. Tell me exactly why you left the party.”
He shrugged. “I felt a migraine coming on. They’re allergy induced and I know exactly how to treat them—a cold, dark room and my prescription medication. I popped two pills and came straight to the bedroom. Didn’t bother turning on any lights, just turned up the air-conditioning and lay down. I heard the fireworks going off, but I couldn’t even bear to watch them. I dozed off and the next thing I remember is hearing you scream.”
“Clare, what’s going on?” called Madame from the doorway. “Did you call the police?”
“Yes,” I replied.
I could hear Colleen’s sobs hadn’t subsided and the others were still huddled around the bathroom doorway like witnesses of a traffic accident who weren’t sure whether they should leave the scene.
I glanced at David. This was still his house and I didn’t want to sound obnoxiously bossy, so I tried to pose my directive as a question. “Maybe we should all go downstairs? To the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee and we can wait for the police together?”
“Okay…all right…sure…” Everyone mumbled and began to wander back down the hall and toward the stairs.
“Wait for me,” David said as I swiftly walked away. “I’m certainly not staying up here alone!”
THREE
DEAD bodies freak me out.”
Graydon Faas’s hands shook as he lifted his mug of coffee.
“It’s all right,” said David, patting the young man on the shoulder. “They aren’t a barrel of laughs for me either.”
I had brewed a twelve-cup drip carafe of our medium roast Breakfast Blend and was just finishing gradually and evenly filling seven mugs. (I never pour one cup at a time out of a pot. I always pour a little into each cup until they’re all filled. That way, if there are any inconsistencies in the suspension—too strong at the bottom of the pot, for instance, and too weak at the top—no one cup will suffer from the extreme.)
As David splashed cream into his coffee, I gulped mine black, barely tasting the nutty warmth. Adrenaline wasn’t a problem at the moment, but I feared my energy levels would spike and then fall, which was why I’d chosen the Breakfast Blend. I had many other more complex and robust-tasting blends on hand, but the medium roast had more caffeine than the darker Italian or French roasts, and I wanted to be alert for the next few hours.
Everyone was drinking their coffee now, except Colleen, who was still sobbing into a series of Kleenexes. The girl’s loose auburn curls had begun slipping from their ponytail, and her usually ruddy skin looked pale as a shroud, making her dusting of freckles appear as if someone had roughly grated a cinnamon stick across her barely-there nose. An Irish immigrant here in New York on an education visa, Colleen had just