all about it. We had gone out for a walk and we were starting back because the weather had gotten so bad. We saw Mrs. Kimball as she was heading toward the cemetery.”
“But did you stop to talk?”
“No,” Electra said. “I keep thinking that if we had called her back, stopped to talk or something, she might not have done it. But I suppose you can’t think that way.”
WHEN BRITTA ANNOUNCED that it was time for dinner and the group moved to the dining room, Sweeney felt as though she’d stepped into a production of the Nutcracker Suite.
Tiny white lights cascaded along the walls and the long table had been set to resemble a medieval banquet hall, with wreaths of evergreen boughs studded with pomegranates for centerpieces and goblets the size of small mixing bowls, filled with crimson wine that matched the velvet tablecloth. It was lovely, but slightly creepy, too, a little Martha-Stewart-gone-awry for Sweeney’s taste.
She sat down at the place headed by a little red card with her name on it and a middle-aged woman in a black-and-white uniform who helped Britta with dinner parties came out with plates of rare rack of lamb, decorated with sprigs of mint and accompanied by pecanstudded rice pilaf and asparagus. Each place setting was topped by a small bowl of mint sauce.
The effect was lovely, but struck her as somehow obscene. Sweeney was of the decided opinion that vegetarians had been put on the earth merely to vex her. She loved rare lamb. But as she sat down before the bloody meat, she felt a wave of nausea roll in her stomach.
“In any case,” Anders said after they’d all begun to eat. “It solves our little problem about the condos, doesn’t it?”
“Anders!” His wife gave him a look that was part horror and part admiration.
“You know,” Patch said. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Now that Ruth’s gone, Sherry can do whatever she wants. And if Carl gets his hooks into her, anything could happen.”
“That’s true,” Patch said. “The sky’s the limit. An amusement park, maybe? How about a casino?”
“It isn’t something to laugh about,” Britta snapped. “Someone’s dead.”
“But it isn’t our fault, Britta. We didn’t kill her.” Willow’s eyes were cold and full of challenge. Sweeney looked quickly from her to Britta and back again. There was something there, a barely concealed hostility she hadn’t noticed before.
Anders took a long swig of his wine and looked around at them. The room was very quiet. “Maybe one of us did kill her.”
“Anders!” Britta gave him a stern look.
Suddenly everyone glanced down at where the children were, Trip and Gally, quiet, Gwinny still in her flamboyant outfit, with a sweatshirt over the blouse.
“That’s nonsense,” Sabina said quickly. “But if she was murdered, I suspect it was something very commonplace. She caught the burglar. She slighted someone in town.” She pronounced the words “in town” with a slight emphasis, as if to say that the colony and the town were two different things.
“If that’s all it takes to commit murder, any one of us might have killed her, even you, Sabina,” Willow said.
Sabina looked embarrassed. “But if I had killed her, I would have been smart enough to arrange an alibi. Isn’t that what people do? As it is, I was all alone that afternoon. No one can vouch for me.”
“Me either,” Anders said happily. “I had gone for a run. All by myself. What about you, Patch?”
Patch glanced down at his plate. “Guilty as charged,” he said. “I was stacking wood out back. Then I went for a run, too.”
“You all sound as though you wouldn’t think it was wrong if one of us had killed her,” Rosemary said, looking shocked. “Surely murder’s wrong whatever the reason or method.”
“I don’t know,” Anders said. “Say one of us had killed her because of the condos. To preserve the colony. Wouldn’t that be worth it?”
Toby’s eyes lit up. “What’s one life up against the preservation of the colony, you mean. It’s a good question. Is the colony a historical and cultural resource so worth defending that even murder would be justified?” He loved these kinds of circular philosophical considerations.
“Of course not,” Britta said. “Murder is never justified.”
“It is in time of war,” Toby said. “In order to defend a way of life or a political ideal. A number of times over the past century we’ve made the decision that we were justified in killing to protect some vaguely defined ideal of democracy. Why