It was our thing. Our back and forth. Our did-we-like-each-other-or-not game we played.
At least that’s what I was playing.
"I need everyone for a few minutes. Won't take long."
Everyone at the table paused and waited expectantly.
Hollis proceeded to pile a plate high with food and sit down across from Taylor. At least someone was eating.
"Are we in trouble?" Taylor asked.
"Not unless one of you has something to confess," Hollis said, and I watched four faces very carefully not react to that in four distinctly different ways.
Reginald's newspaper didn't move. Allison's hand tightened around her mug. Vivienne looked, if anything, faintly delighted, like she was disappointed she didn't have her camera out. Taylor laughed a beat too late and a decibel too loud. He slurped down the remains of his water and stood up. He went over to the buffet table, his back to Hollis.
"I read the preliminary from the coroner's office this morning," Hollis said. “I want to walk you through it, because you're all going to hear pieces of it eventually, from reporters or from each other, and I'd rather you hear the accurate version."
"How ominous," Allison murmured.
"It isn’t good. Essentially Evelyn Carrington was stabbed to death," Hollis said.
“Stabbed to death?” Vivienne frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“In the mouth.” Hollis lifted his fork and made jabbing motions toward his own mouth. "One jab to the upper palate, angled back toward the throat. About four millimeters wide. Deep enough to hit the carotid."
“Dear God!” Allison exclaimed.
Someone gasped.
It was me. I gasped. Because…gag. That sounded horrible.
Reginald finally set the paper down.
“What a terrible way to die,” Vivienne said, clasping her own throat like she was imagining being jabbed there.
"Four millimeters," I repeated. That was narrow. I did some mental math I wasn't qualified to do. That was slimmer than a pencil. Skinnier than most things you'd find at a garden party, unless you went looking for something specific.
"That's the diameter of a cocktail straw," Vivienne said. She said it evenly, but she was still clutching her throat.
"That's the diameter of Evelyn's cocktail straw," Hollis said. "Specifically. The ME matched the wound track to a hollow cylindrical object, and the depth and angle are consistent with something entering fast, under pressure.”
“But it’s not like the woman stabbed herself,” Taylor protested, setting a full plate on the table and sitting down. “You’d have to really ram that sucker up in there and we didn’t see anything like that.”
“It’s possible a mechanism inside it triggered while it was in her mouth." Hollis loaded up his fork and started eating.
I personally had lost my appetite.
"Mechanism," Taylor repeated slowly.
"There's also this." Hollis reached into his jacket and produced a photograph, laid it on the table where all of us could see it without him having to pass it around like show and tell. It was a close-up of something small, metallic, and badly bent, photographed against a ruler for scale. "This was recovered from the terrace grating yesterday morning. It's silver. The lab's still running full composition, but preliminary testing puts the alloy in the same range as Evelyn's heirloom cup and straw set. Same range doesn't mean confirmed match yet, but it's close enough that I'm not currently entertaining coincidence as a theory."
"So the straw poked her," Taylor said, working through it out loud. "Like, on its own? Sharp end and it just went for her?"
"Straws don't spontaneously develop sharp ends, Taylor," Reginald said, with the weary patience of a man explaining gravity.
"I'm aware of that, Reginald. I said the woman didn’t stab herself, didn’t I? I'm processing."
"The wound geometry, the trace metal, and the fact that the straw itself is the one piece from that entire place setting that is currently unaccounted for," Hollis said. “Cup's washed and back on a shelf at Belle Rêve. Tray's accounted for. Napkins, obviously, we've got." He glanced at me, briefly, on that one, since I was the reason the napkin was in an evidence bag in the first place. "The straw is gone. Not broken and swept up. Not in the trash. Gone, in a way that suggests somebody wanted it gone."
