in the light bulb fails, starts, fails, and returns—some interruption of the supply of electricity—and the flickering casts a strange pattern of shadows across her face, which she doesn’t seem to notice.
The cat, having wound his way among the legs of the table and chairs, reaches with his nose to sniff my skirt. I lean down and hold out my fingertips, and the delicate texture of his tongue meets my skin.
“You know, you haven’t asked me what happened,” I say.
“What happened in Nassau, you mean? No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe I’m supposed to know, am I? It’s confidential.”
“But you want to know.”
“Only if you mean to tell me.”
Tuxedo pulls back on his haunches, gathers himself, and leaps onto my lap.
“That’s interesting,” says Margaret. “He doesn’t like strangers, ordinarily.”
“Do you have strangers often?”
She starts to light another cigarette. “Not often. But sometimes.”
Tuxedo kneads my thighs. A low purr starts up in his throat. He’s got long, fluffy fur, a tail like a feather duster. I lay my hand on the top of his head and stroke all the way down his back. “There was a murder,” I say. “A fellow named Harry Oakes was murdered last July, in his bed, in the middle of the night.”
Murder. It’s one of those words, isn’t it, that sounds as dreadful as the deed itself. Certainly it shocks me to say it out loud like that, though I have lived and breathed this thing for months now, though the terrible end of Sir Harry Oakes haunts me now as it did the first day I learned of it. And you would think that a statement like that—There was a murder—might pierce the composure of anybody, even Miss Thorpe. But maybe I forget that the rest of the world knows all about poor Oakes. Even in the middle of war, people will pay attention to the killing (there’s another dreadful word) of a man so wealthy and famous as Sir Harry, in a location so exotic as the Bahamas, in a manner so gruesome as—well, as it was. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Miss Thorpe’s expression remains cool and ageless, that she doesn’t so much as lift her eyebrows.
“The Oakes murder? What’s that got to do with Benedict?”
“You’ve heard about it?”
“Heard about it? It was all over the newspapers. Such as they are, with paper rationed.” She twitches the cigarette with her thumb. A strand of hair has come loose from the knot at her neck. She pushes it back over her ear. “Didn’t they arrest somebody? Some French chap, I believe. There was a trial. A sensational trial.”
“Not French,” I say. “Mauritian.”
“Oh, of course.”
“Yes. The evidence was fabricated. It was all a giant cover-up. Not to cover up who committed the murder, mind you. Everybody in Nassau knows who killed Harry Oakes. Who had him killed, anyway.”
“Then what were they trying to cover up?”
“Why,” I tell her. “Why he was murdered.”
“Oh, naturally. The why is always more complicated than the who or the how. More interesting and especially more dangerous.”
“In this case, especially.”
“And did Benedict know why?”
“Yes.”
Tuxedo, having softened up my legs to his satisfaction, now settles in the center of my lap and purrs like a motorcycle. I stroke the fur behind his ears, beneath his chin. He seems to be smiling, though his eyes are shut. Margaret smokes her cigarette and stares at the photographs on the mantel, the images of which I can’t make out.
“I should have known, I suppose,” she says. “He told me he was just going to look after the duke, a sort of liaison officer. I should have known it was something more.”
“Oh, I think you knew. Didn’t you?”
Margaret rises from the chair and settles the collar of her dressing gown more snugly around her slender neck. Tuxedo lifts his head and blinks at her as she moves to the fireplace and brushes the frame of one of the photographs with her thumb. If I squint my eyes, I can just perceive a pair of monochrome figures set against the outdoors, drenched in sunshine. I ask if those are her parents.
“No. It’s Benedict. Benedict and me. In Germany one summer, before the war.” She drags on the cigarette. “Our mother was German.”
“Yes, I know.”
She lifts the photograph and strokes the picture’s edge, as if she’s rubbing something away. “We loved it there so much, like it was home. Isn’t that strange? But we always visited in summer, when the sun was shining, unlike Scotland. Benedict loved to