"I wasn't asking you. I was asking them." He nodded at the table. "You, I've given up asking."
"Wise man," Reginald said, and for a second, the tension in the dining room cracked just slightly.
“If you remember anything you think might be useful, let me know.” Hollis shoveled the rest of his food into his mouth at record speed then stood up. He looked at me, and said, "Walk me out?"
He’d never once asked me to walk him out. Curious, I did, Teddy trailing behind us both like he had business of his own to attend to in the back yard, which, to be fair, he probably did.
"You didn't tell them everything, did you?" I said, once the door had closed behind us and it was just the two of us and the magnolia dropping petals across the yard like it hadn't noticed anyone had died two days ago.
"I told them what they need to know to trigger memories.."
"Keeping some cards close to the vest. But you can tell me, right?."
"Nope," he said. He looked back at the house. "My gut says somebody in there knows more than they're letting on. Might be more than one somebody. I'd rather figure out which before I hand them the whole picture."
“Maybe your gut was just saying you needed a biscuit.” None of my guests felt remotely capable of murder to me.
"Maybe. I sure do like your biscuits.”
Sometimes, at the oddest moments, I felt like Hollis was flirting. But I was almost always wrong.
This was one of those times.
“They fall apart too easily,” I lamented. “Crumbly.”
“You overwork the dough,” he told me. “Like you overwork everything.”
I made a face.
He left it there, the way he tended to leave things, and headed off across the yard toward his own porch, hands in his pockets, shoulders set. I stood on the patio watching him go, turning the word skill over in my head.
Somebody had built something beautiful and lethal and hid it inside an antique.
And here I couldn’t even make a decent biscuit.
Nine
Maggie lived in a shotgun duplex in the Bywater, with a very professional podcast studio that was her pride and joy.
"You look like a raccoon," Maggie said, by way of greeting, when she opened the door.
"Chubby?"
“Dark circles,” she said, gesturing under her eyes. “And ready to fight someone.”
I stepped over her trumpet as I entered the front door and moved through the living room. “That sounds about right.”
"Bad night at the gala, obviously."
“And Hollis dropped by this morning to both question me and my guests and warn us.”
I set my bag down and dropped into my usual chair in her living room. Teddy had stayed home, sulking, because Maggie's next door neighbor had a very large, very judgmental porch cat, and the last time I'd brought him along there'd been a standoff through the mail slot that took twenty minutes to de-escalate.
Besides, Teddy didn’t always adhere to the sign Maggie would put on the studio door that read, “Shh, recording.” He obviously didn’t read but I suspected even if he did he wouldn’t care.
Maggie handed me a mug of coffee I hadn't asked for but definitely needed and dropped into the chair across from me, pulling her knees up under her, headphones already looped around her neck like a scarf. "I've heard four different versions of what happened to Evelyn Carrington today and at least one of them involved a swarm of bees."
I almost laughed. "There were no bees. Don’t trust the internet."
