The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,61

she’d get there soon enough, even in a warm kitchen, but she had a ways to go yet.

“How did she—”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of violence. She wasn’t shot or stabbed or dropped from a height.” I raised an eyelid and stared. I didn’t see any sign of pinpoint hemorrhage, or anything else but a rather glassy eyeball. I closed the lid and straightened up.

Everyone was talking at once, filling the air with questions and suggestions. We’d all rushed there in a body at Cissy’s announcement, although I couldn’t swear that no one had slipped off along the way.

“Maybe it was natural causes,” I heard someone say.

“Around here,” someone else countered, “murder is a natural cause.”

“Shock. Don’t people die of shock?”

“If they’re struck by lightning. Or touch an electrical wire.”

“I mean the kind of shock that gives you a heart attack. She might have had a weak heart, and I don’t suppose she was on a low-fat diet. The shock of the two deaths earlier—”

“Cook didn’t even say anything,” Cissy remembered, “or look much disturbed. After the first death she made breakfast, and after the second she came in here and started lunch.”

“And a good lunch, too, from the smell of it.” Rufus Quilp had pushed his way through to the stove, and was lifting pot lids and sniffing. “Lamb stew,” he announced. “Seasoned with rosemary and thyme, and can that be fresh dill? Wherever would she get fresh dill?”

“Not this time of year,” someone said.

“And here’s a lovely pot of rice,” he said, “all nice and fluffy, and there’s a big wooden bowl of salad on the counter, just waiting to be tossed.” He replaced the lid on the stew pot. “I think we should eat,” he said. “I think we’ll all be much better able to cope once we’ve eaten.”

There was a general murmur of assent, which died down when Carolyn stuck her face up next to the cook’s, then stepped back shaking her head. “Didn’t work,” she said. “I was trying to smell her breath, but she’s not breathing.”

“Why would you want to smell her breath?”

“I thought there might be the odor of bitter almonds, Bern.”

“If she’d ingested cyanide,” I said. “But doesn’t she look awfully peaceful for a victim of cyanide poisoning?”

“I don’t know, Bern. Does it make you writhe in agony? If she was poisoned, it must have been with something nonviolent.”

Leona Savage remarked on the irony of it. Minutes ago we’d discussed the possibility of our being poisoned by the cook, and now it looked as though the cook herself might have been poisoned.

“And she’s holding a spoon,” her husband observed. “A cooking spoon. I think I see what happened.” He gestured, miming the action. “She was at the stove, stirring the stew. She took a taste of it. When the poison hit her—”

“The poison?”

“In the stew. At first maybe all she thought was it needed more salt, but then it hit her and her legs got weak and she had to sit down.”

“Is that what happens when you take poison? Your legs get weak?”

“It must depend on the poison,” he said. “At any rate, she didn’t feel too hot and she sat down. Evidently it was a gentle poison, and it just made her nod off and then killed her in her sleep.”

“Cook didn’t like people in her kitchen,” Molly Cobbett said. “If anybody tried to put anything in her stewpot, Cook would pitch a fit.”

Nigel confirmed this. “If you wanted to get taken to task, all you had to do was lift the lid of one of her pots. I can’t think she’d have stood still for it if someone salted her stew for her.”

“She wouldn’t have known,” I said. “Because she wouldn’t have been here when it happened.”

“But she was always in the kitchen.”

“She was in the bar with the rest of us a little while ago, remember? She slipped off to the kitchen while we were arguing about one thing or another. Did anyone notice when she left?” No one had. “Well, she was in the back; she could have slipped out unobtrusively enough.”

“And someone slipped off after her? And poisoned her, and then slipped back again?”

I shook my head. “It would have happened earlier,” I said. “She didn’t toss this stew together in a few minutes. She must have started preparing it while we were eating our breakfast. It’s been cooking all morning. When Orris had his accident and Earlene screamed almost loud enough