Felix chokes. “What?”
She raises her head. “I j’accuse myself. That’s French,” sheadds, in case anyone in this room thought she was talking about jetted tubs. Not to name any names.
“You’re not serious,” I protest, ignoring the part where we seem to have switched sides in this argument.
“Like a Category Four hurricane.” Malia looks me dead in the eye. “And I’d do it again. She deserved it!”
“She?” Felix looks from Malia to me, but I’m equally lost.
“Claude’s so-called sister.” Malia makes a spitting sound that is fortunately not accompanied by actual saliva. “I stole her damn cup and she’s never getting it back!”
“You stole her cup?” I repeat after a beat of silence. “The big one?”
“With the flowers,” Felix adds. “And the inspirational cursive?”
Malia nods, her expression caught between defiance and embarrassment. “I didn’t plan it. It was a crime of passion.”
“You really wanted her cup?” It’s hard to think how else a word like “passion” could come into play, when we’re talking about an insulated tumbler.
“Greed?” Felix asks, throwing it back to our googled list of motives.
“No!” Malia is vehement on that, hair crackling like a storm cloud as she shakes her head. “I didn’t covet it. I wanted to take away something she loved. It was a momentary impulse. I saw it, and I acted.” She makes a grabbing gesture with one hand. “Have you ever seen someone so attached to an inanimate object? You would have thought she was carrying the ashes of her one true love.”
Except for the drinking-out-of-it part. I suppress a shudder.
“I’m not a thief by nature,” Malia assures us. “I suppose Ihoped it might chip away at her confidence. Make her think she was losing her marbles. We could have built from there, slowly escalating. Rearrange the furniture when she wasn’t looking. Eerie sounds in the middle of the night. Lights turning on and off. That sort of thing.”
“I could see that,” Felix says, and Malia gives him a grateful smile. He’s not wrong; it’s absolutely the type of scheme this crew would get behind.
“You said you saw ‘it.’” I wait for Malia’s head bob of confirmation. “As in, the cup. By itself.”
Also known as, not in Bernie’s hand. I flash back to the first time I saw her sans cup. Her fingers were still curled like a claw, the same way I hunch one shoulder for weeks after I stop hauling my backpack around all day. The oddness of seeing her without it should have struck me then.
“Do you mind walking us through it?” Felix grimaces, like he knows he’s asking a lot. As if anyone in this building would pass up the opportunity to deliver a witness statement.
“It was the day of the double murder,” Malia begins, staring into the middle distance. “The two of you were bantering over the first corpse.”
“I wouldn’t saybantering—”
“I would,” Felix interrupts me, putting a finger to his lips when I open my mouth to argue.
“Like that,” Malia says, flapping a hand at us. “It seemed likely to go on for a while, so I thought I’d nip over to the kitchen for some honey lemon water. I’m afraid my vocal cords aren’t as resilient as they once were. You’ll want to keep an eye on that,” she sidebars to Felix, who nods.
“I noticed there was something sticky on the counter. Not blood,” she adds, as if this would be everyone’s first guess. “Therewas a grittiness. I opened the cabinet under the sink to get the cleaning spray, and there it was.”
“The cup?” I ask, when Malia leaves it at that.
She nods.
“It was with the cleaning stuff?” Felix follows up.
“That’s age for you.” Malia shrugs. “I once found my reading glasses in the vegetable drawer months after I bought a new pair.”
“You took the cup,” I recap. “And then what?”
Malia looks down at her hands. “I threw it away. I know,” she says, holding up a hand. “I should have tried to recycle. We Boomers have a lot to answer for on that front.”
“In the kitchen garbage?” I measure the distance in my head. It would have taken three or four steps to get there.
