“The one you always carried everywhere. Until you suddenly stopped.”
Here we go.My hands are twitching with nervous energy. I bite a knuckle to offload some of the tension.
“The handle broke,” she says after a deeply unconvincing pause. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What’s gotten into you anyway? You’re acting very strangely.”
Mervyn crumbles the corner of a piece of shortbread he has yet to taste. “It’s different when you have nothing left to lose.”
“Don’t be a whiner.” She helps herself to a cookie, dunking it in her tea before taking a bite. “You’ll come out of this just fine.”
“Unlike Bradley.” He lets that settle before continuing. “I guess it’s lucky for me I didn’t get in your way.”
“I see what this is.” She sets down her cup and pushes back her chair like she’s about to stand. “You’re trying to pin this on me. Were you the one who put the EpiPen in my purse?”
His mouth opens in an expression of shock even Bernie recognizes as the real thing. “Bradley’s EpiPen was in your purse?”
I hear the sudden intake of breath as Mervyn puts two and two together. His gaze strays to the painting before jerking back to Bernie. “You planted it outside, didn’t you? To throw suspicion on Lainey.”
“Tampering with—” Mr. Namura starts to whisper, before everyone shushes him. He grabs the whiteboard and writesEVIDENCE.
“Why would I tell you anything?” Bernie huffs. For once, unfortunately, I can see her point.
“Because I need to know my legal exposure before I agree to help you,” Mervyn replies, not missing a beat.
“I’m not sure we need you anymore.” She manages to sound both pouty and stuck-up, though the fact that she’s still sitting there tells me Bernie is not as over it as she’s pretending.
“I think you’ll find I have certain information you’ll want to hear.”
When I glance at Grandma Lainey, expecting her to be impressed by Mervyn’s quick thinking, she’s focused on the laptop screen, mouth pursed.
“Fine,” Bernie says. “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
The squeak of a marker draws my attention to Mrs. A, who holds up a whiteboard message reading,WRONG!
“I’m sure you know they were out to get me,” Bernie continues. “That was probably the plan all along—kill Bradley and blame it on me; two birds, one stone!”
Mervyn shakes his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She leans forward to lob her next accusation. “Someone broke into my apartment. Why isn’t anyone investigating that? They knocked over a plant and just left it there, which was obviously a threat. But I had no idea he was allergic to Crystal Light!”
There is a resounding silence before Mervyn unfreezes himself. “Crystal Light?”
Felix looks away from the peephole long enough to catch my eye. I shrug, only slightly less clueless than Mr. Namura, who has grabbed the whiteboard from Mrs. A to write,KRISTAL LIGHT?
She takes the board back, crossing out theKand theIto correct his spelling before erasing the whole thing and writing,FAKE LEMONADE.
Back on stage (also known as the dining room), Bernie has given up any pretense of not wanting to go off. “You were there when I got the message he was coming over. It sounded important, so I rushed back, not even finishing my French toast.”
If I had the whiteboard, I would write,MERVYN WAS HAVINGBREAKFAST WITH BERNIE???But I can’t look away long enough for that, because the plot is still thickening.
“Bradley was usually so charming, but he was rude from the moment he arrived that day. I thought he must be on drugs, because he was completely hyper.” Bernie flaps both hands to demonstrate. “He grabbed my cup like an animal and drank right out of it. He liked to tease me about it, pretending it was full of vodka.” Her scowl makes it clear she wasn’t amused by his jokes. “He said he’d talked to his father, and things were really coming along. I assumed he was talking about Manor Estates. Ha!”
“And then what happened?” Mervyn prompts, when she lapses into an annoyed silence.
“He wanted to see the penthouse. Plopped down on that horrible velvet sofa and started telling me he might keep the couch, even though it wasn’t leather. I told him he wasn’t making sense, because all of this was going away, and he said, ‘Nope, it’s just getting more awesome.’”
