Taylor, despite being roughly seventy percent bourbon by that point in the evening, was already reaching for his jacket. “I’m in. I want my name off the suspect list, and there’s an open bar. Two birds.”
“Excellent. We’re all still dressed,” I added. “What’s the harm?”
Vivienne was already tucking her camera into its bag with brisk efficiency. It was clear she suspected her B-roll had become evidence. “I want the rest of that footage anyway. There might be more before that hand. I was filming for twenty minutes before the toast.”
Allison looked around at all of us like we’d lost our minds, which, to be fair, was a reasonable read of the room. Then she sighed, the particular sigh of a woman who has decided that missing the story is worse than being embarrassed by it. “Fine. But I’m not getting out of the van if there are police there. I have enough legal problems with that family without adding trespassing on a crime scene.”
“It’s not a crime scene,” I said. “It’s a garden party that had a medical emergency.”
Nobody in the room believed that sentence, including me.
The drive back to Belle Rêve Manor was very different from the first one. Nobody joked about valet parking. Nobody complained about buckling up. Vivienne was rewatching her footage. Allison was swiping through her phone and murmuring occasionally about potential grudge holders.
“I can’t find any references to a Maxwell family in my notes,” she mentioned.
I wished I didn’t have to drive because I wanted to be more engaged in a conversation with all of them, but I was still too cheap to pay for a rideshare. I’d brought Teddy in his travel bag on the passenger seat, mostly because he was mad at me for leaving him earlier and I felt guilty. Besides, he had a nose for murderers.
The gala had thinned considerably by the time we pulled back into the circular drive. Half the cars were gone. The string quartet had resumed playing, though their tempo had drifted into something more understated. Magnolia trees glowed under strings of lights that no longer felt romantic.
“Dark deeds under a dark sky,” Allison murmured.
"Stay together," I told my little group, which felt like a very Mom thing to say to four adults. "If anyone asks, we're checking on Evelyn."
"We know she's dead," Allison hissed.
"They don't know we know. Discretion, Allison,” Reginald commented.
We slipped through the side entrance, past a cluster of committee members huddled together with the particular stiff-shouldered posture of people trying very hard to look like they weren't gossiping. I caught pieces as we passed.
Should we cancel the silent auction?
Absolutely not, the money's already been raised.
It just feels wrong to bid on a spa weekend right now.
I scanned the crowd for a fitted buff-colored dress and artfully arranged hair and came up empty. No Hyacinth.
"She's gone," Vivienne said, following my gaze.
"Maybe she just left before it got weird."
"Or she left because it got weird," Allison muttered.
Our historical fiction writer doesn’t seem as comfortable acting nonchalant as the rest of us. I wasn’t sure what that said about Allison, exactly.
Or what it said about the other four of us.
Out on the terrace, the caterers were doing the fast, eyes-down work of people who wanted everyone to be done and gone. The small table where Evelyn had stood was already cleared. I’d already seen the cup and straw scooped up before we’d left the first time.
There was no sign that a woman had collapsed there less than two hours ago, except for a faint dark stain on the tiles.
I crouched down near it, and Teddy, freed from his bag the second we'd cleared the doorway, beat me there. He was sniffing along the edge of the stone with the single-minded focus he usually reserved for unattended charcuterie boards.
"What is it, boy?"
He didn't answer, because of that whole he-s-a-skunk thing, but he did trot a few feet toward a linen cart that had been shoved against the low garden wall. It was the kind caterers used to haul dirty napkins and tablecloths back to the kitchen for laundering. He rose up on his back legs, front paws braced against the side of the cart, nose working overtime.
"Teddy, no. That's not yours."
