The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,60

cook just how long it would be until lunch. If our estimated waiting time was thirty minutes or less, they would return empty-handed; if longer, they’d bring back something designed to tide us over.

They were no sooner out of the room than Raffles turned up, threading his way through the room, getting petted and cooed at and fussed over as he went, and rubbing up against the odd ankle along the way. “Oh, it’s Raffles,” Lettice said, reaching to scratch him behind the ear. Her husband asked her how she happened to know the cat’s name, and she said she must have heard someone call him that.

When, he wondered. Last night or this morning, she said, and why did he want to know? Because this was the first he’d seen of the cat, he replied, and he wondered when she’d had time to see it, and make its acquaintance.

“Why, Dakin,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous of him. He’s a pussycat!”

“How do you know it’s a male?”

“Because he miaows in bass,” she said. “Darling, how do I know? I suppose whoever called him by name also referred to him with a male pronoun.”

“And he’s the resident cat here, is he? What happened to his tail?”

“He’s a Manx,” Millicent Savage said helpfully. “And he doesn’t live here. He came here with Carolyn and Bernie.”

“Well, I don’t suppose he’s the killer,” Littlefield said. “He might have clubbed the poor jerk in the library and clawed the bridge supports, but I can’t imagine him doing a number on the snowblower.”

“He’s been declawed,” Millicent said.

“I give up,” Littlefield said. “He’s innocent.” He started to say something else but stopped, probably for the same reason that everyone else in the room had stopped talking. Cissy Eglantine, back from the kitchen, stood framed in the doorway. The Cobbett cousins stood just to the rear of her, as if they were trying to shrink into her shadow.

She looked across the room at her husband. For a moment she didn’t say anything, and then she said, “Nigel, I spoke with Cook.”

“And what did she say, dear?”

“I’m afraid she didn’t say anything.”

“It’s hard to get much out of her, I’ll grant you that. Did you ask her directly when lunch will be ready?”

“No.”

“You didn’t? Whyever not?”

“I couldn’t,” she said, and her lip trembled. “Nigel, mind you, I’m not absolutely certain, but—”

“But what?”

“Oh, Nigel,” she said, and sighed. “Nigel, I believe she’s dead.”

CHAPTER

Seventeen

“She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.

There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.

She was as Cissy and the Cobbett girls had found her, seated in the oversize oak armchair to the left of the old six-burner gas stove. A low flame kept a cauldron of thick soup simmering on a back burner. In the large old-fashioned sink, water dripped from a leaking faucet onto a coffee mug, a couple of spoons, and a shish kebab skewer. A radio, its volume turned way down, brought in a mixture of country music and static.

“That’s where she always sits,” Cissy said, “and that’s how she always sits. I thought she’d just nodded off, you know, with the cookbook open on her lap. But then she didn’t answer when I spoke to her, and I made myself touch her, you see, and, and give her a little shake, and—”

“Steady, Cecilia.”

“I’m actually quite all right, Nigel.” Her eyes sought mine. “Is she dead, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I don’t suppose she could be sleeping soundly, could she?”

Her hands, large for a woman, reposed in her lap, the fingers of one still curled around the handle of a wooden cooking spoon. I pressed my fingertips to the back of her hand, her upper arm, her broad forehead.

“I’m afraid she’s dead,” I said.

But she was a good deal subtler about it than either of her two predecessors in death had been. One look at either of them and you knew what you were dealing with. Cook, on the other hand, looked as though she might be sleeping, and her body temperature, while discernibly lower than the traditional 98.6°, had not yet dropped down to the level of luncheon meat. I supposed