He gave me a look that suggested he disagreed strongly, then wriggled his way up and over the lip of the cart before I could stop him, disappearing into a heap of crumpled linens.
He did love a good linen pile for a nap.
"Harper," Reginald said, low, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed my skunk diving headfirst into the catering supplies, "get him out of there."
"I'm working on it." I reached in after Teddy, pulling back handfuls of soiled napkins, and that's when I found one balled-up cloth napkin, heavier than the others, damp in a way that had nothing to do with spilled champagne. I unfolded it carefully.
Crushed mint. A whole fistful of it, macerated down to a dark, bruised pulp, far more than a single julep would ever need. It had been wadded up tight and shoved deep into the napkin like someone had wanted it gone, not tossed carelessly the way you'd toss the muddle from a used glass.
Was that what I’d seen picked up off the ground right after Evelyn collapsed?
"That's a lot of mint for one drink," Taylor said, peering over my shoulder. He'd gone very quiet, which for Taylor was its own kind of alarming.
"Could be from setup," Vivienne said. "Bartenders muddle in bulk. I used to be a bartender in college."
"Then why hide it at the bottom of a laundry cart instead of the trash?" I turned the napkin over in my hands. The smell was sharp and green and, underneath it, something else. Bitter. I wasn't a chemist. I wasn't even a very good cook. But every instinct I had, honed by four years of a true crime podcast and eleven months of finding dead bodies in and around my own historic property, was telling me that bitter didn't belong.
"Poison," Allison breathed, like she'd been waiting her whole writing career to say the word out loud in a real-life context. "It's poison. Mint hides bitterness. That's a classic. I researched this once."
"We don't know that," I said, though my stomach had gone tight.
"We don't know it's not that," she shot back.
“Fair enough.”
Teddy chose that moment to emerge from the linen cart entirely, triumphant, with a second scrap of cloth dangling from his teeth. I took it from him gently. Not a napkin this time. It was just a bar rag with nothing wrapped inside it. That was disappointing.
“Where’s the straw?” Vivienne asked.
"Not here,” said. "We need to go to the kitchen. If someone's cleaning up evidence, it either went in the trash, or it's still back there waiting to be washed with three hundred other pieces of silver."
“You’re just going to waltz into the kitchen?” Allison scoffed. “Dressed in a gown?”
“I was thinking I might tango instead of waltz,” I joked.
Allison stared at me blankly.
“No one will think anything of it,” I assured her. “I’m a Society member, remember?”
Belle Rêve's kitchen was a study in barely contained chaos. A professional catering operation dropped into a house built in 1850 meant it was chock full of exposed brick and modern steel shoved into spaces never meant to hold it. Nobody stopped us walking in, which either meant catering staff assumed we belonged there, or nobody at this gala had the emotional bandwidth left to police a strange woman and her skunk wandering through a working kitchen.
The others had stayed on the terrace.
"We're looking for a silver straw," I told the nearest server, a young woman elbow-deep in a sink full of champagne flutes.
“Take one,” she said, gesturing to the left. “I just washed about a zillion of them.” She barely managed to contain her disgust. She glanced at Teddy. “Is that a skunk?”
“Yes, my escort for the night. I’m looking for a very specific straw. Etched, vine pattern. It would have come in from the terrace, probably with the cup. I can’t drink a mint julep without it."
Now she looked like she might join the ranks of the earlier server and call me a rich bitch.
But finally she nodded toward a drying rack where Evelyn's ornate silver julep cup sat gleaming, already rinsed, the vines catching the overhead light. My stomach lurched a little at the sight of it, so innocuous. If it had held poison it had been thoroughly washed out.
"And the straw?"
She frowned, drying her hands on her apron. "I don't think I've actually seen it. We usually keep the pieces from that set together. The one lady insisted." She said lady insisted with the weary aspect of someone who'd clearly had that instruction repeated to her multiple times that evening. "Let me ask Marcus, he ran that tray back."
Marcus, when located, was very sure he had personally set the cup on the drying rack and very unsure about the straw, because — and I quote — "man, it's been a night, I wasn't exactly counting silverware. And you know what’s crazy? I heard that lady say, “People never listen until someone dies.” Then she goes down like that. Wild.”
