Page 82 of Welcome to Murder Week

Edwina is in fine form, in a gray jacket and skirt, sensible shoes, and a feathered hat that looks like it was designed by the same milliner who made my bedside lamp. She peers dramatically at the crowd through her opera glasses.

“Who’s that?” Selina asks.

“The nosy neighbor,” Naomi says. “She was our favorite.”

I’m glad to know that Naomi and Deborah eventually found their way to Edwina.

Wyatt continues.

“Edwina described Tracy’s Monday visitor as a tall, dark-haired man in well-cut clothes. One man who fits that description is Dev, who owns a bar called Moss and makes his own gin. You may recall that on the table in Tracy’s flat were a bottle of gin, two used glasses, and a thank-you note from Dev to Tracy, all of which suggest a cozy rendezvous between the gin distiller and the hairdresser. But alas, itwas not Dev’s thick head of hair that attracted Tracy Penny but the luxurious mane of another man, a man who occasionally parked a red Tesla roadster behind Tracy’s building at night. Tracy herself led us to the identity of her lover by making a note in her datebook, left open on the coffee table in her flat. The note, in all caps, said ‘Tell Pippa!’ Thanks to Sally, the vicar, who, for the record, isnota gossip, we learned about a dashing man named Stanley Grange, who came every Sunday to church services, where he often drew Tracy’s lustful glances. The vicar told us that Stanley, a tall man with lustrous dark hair, drove to church in a red Tesla with his wife, Pippa. From this fact, it was easy to surmise that Stanley Grange was having an affair with Tracy, visiting her on Mondays and often at night, when he would park his Tesla behind the salon.”

Oohs and aahs from the crowd.

Pippa, in a red dress with a plunging neckline, thrusts back her shoulders, grabs Stanley’s arm, and puts it around her. Stanley sticks his nose back in his drink. Still in character, they look like a truly miserable couple.

“Tracy had threatened to tell Pippa everything, which surely would give Stanley a reason to want her dead,” Wyatt says. “She had even set a deadline, after which if he didn’t confess everything to his wife, she would tell her herself. But before Tracy got the chance, Stanley admitted everything to Pippa. In penance, he took her away to Clitheridge Spa for the weekend, where they were the night that Tracy was killed.”

Pippa looks around the room with smug satisfaction. She kicks Stanley, who looks up from his drink for a moment and then downs the rest of it in one go.

“This leaves us with the least obvious person of all, the person without an apparent motive to kill Tracy Penny.” Wyatt is walking back toward Lady Blanders. “Lady Magnolia Blanders did not planto have her hair done by Tracy Penny. She had never been to Hairs Looking at You and only went there because of a fashion emergency. Like many of you, when Lady Blanders entered the salon, she would have seen the photographs on the walls. But the one that caught her eye, and alarmed her, was a framed magazine article about a riding school that included a full-page photograph of Tracy holding the bridle of a pony on which sat a small child with red hair. A girl, according to the caption, named Ambrosia. When Lady Blanders saw this photograph, she knew she had to act. It was because of this child that Lady Blanders made monthly visits to Sproton House in Whitby—not for spa treatments as she’d claimed, but to see the child she had hidden away in an institution after meeting Lord Blanders.”

The audience breaks into exclamations of shock and confusion.

“Yes, that is the sad story. Lady Blanders had put her first child, born with a disability, into a home for children, the same home that took its residents for equine therapy at Whitby Stables, where Tracy Penny had worked. In terror that Tracy would remember seeing her at the stable, where she often went to visit her daughter, Lady Blanders came up with a plan.”

“I had no choice, I was in a panic,” Lady Blanders says. “Tracy kept saying I looked familiar. I couldn’t risk it. You don’t know my husband. He annulled his first marriage because his wife couldn’t produce an heir. He wouldn’t have married me if he’d known about Ambrosia. It was him or her, and I chose him. And now I was trapped. If he found out I’d been lying all these years, he’d leave me and he’d take our boys. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“Ah, thank you for the confession, Your Ladyship,” Wyatt says. “It adds to the convincing proof we already have gathered.”

“How’d you figure it out?” Bix asks.

“Listen to the story,” Amity says serenely. “All will be revealed.”

“The first clue,” Wyatt says, “was Lady Blanders’s bracelet. Shepoured tea for all those who questioned her, did she not? And she poured magnificently, lifting her arm, making sure that her bracelet caught the light. Her bracelet with letter charms—A, B, andC. At first, we thought them meaningless, just an indulgence, the work of a Swedish designer who Lady Blanders admired. But then Lady Blanders mentioned her sons, Benedict and Charles. Together, they account for theBandCon the bracelet. But what about theA? When asked about children, Lady Blanders said only that she had two sons. She said nothing about a third child, because that was her deepest, darkest secret. The third child was the daughter sent to a children’s home in Whitby. A little redheaded girl who looked strikingly like Magnolia Blanders. Ambrosia. The missingA.”

The crowd bursts into applause. When it quiets down, Wyatt turns toward Lady Blanders. “Your Ladyship, would you like to tell us how you killed Tracy Penny?”

“I would prefer to consult with a solicitor.”

“Then I will proceed,” Wyatt says. “First, she made sure she had a solid alibi, dinner here at the King George Inn with her dear friend Demetra Sissington.”

“Dissy,” Lady Blanders says.

“She also had an accomplice, her devoted maid, Gladys Crone, who had been with her for years, since before the marriage to Lord Blanders. Gladys was there when the daughter was born and sent off to the institution. She was loyal to her employer and wanted to protect her reputation. She would do anything for her. Even get on a horse.”

“Of course!” shouts Naomi.

“Lady Blanders went to dinner by car, as she said, to meet Sissy,” Wyatt says.

“Dissy!” several people shout.

“She dined on snails, also as she said,” Wyatt continues. “Butduring dinner, according to the maître d’, she excused herself to go to the loo. A normal enough occurrence, except for the fact that she was there for quite some time. Long enough for the maître d’ to worry that the restaurant might have given her food poisoning. Thankfully, Lady Blanders returned to the table, not looking pale at all. She even looked quite flushed. By which I mean, very flushed.” Wyatt gives me a wink. He weaves through the crowd and stops inches from Lady Blanders, who, other than a delicately raised eyebrow, doesn’t flinch. Wyatt continues.

“It’s not surprising that Lady Blanders was flushed, because she had not been in the lavatory but had gone on an adventure. She had slipped out the back of the restaurant, where she met her devoted maid, who had come from Hadley Hall on horseback, with the murder weapon in the saddlebag. The maid got off the horse, and Lady Blanders got on. She rode along the footpath that goes behind the shops to Tracy’s building. There, she banged on the back door for Tracy to open up. Inside, Lady Blanders hit Tracy once, knocking her unconscious. Then, to protect herself from spattered blood, she donned a plastic face shield, also brought in the saddlebag and smuggled into the salon, and one of the black nylon robes, and bludgeoned Tracy Penny to death. She then manipulated the crime scene to make it look like a man had been at the salon after her that afternoon. She left an extra-large robe on the back of the chair, and on the counter left a bowl of shaving foam and a brush. She washed the plastic face shield in the sink and put the robe in the washing machine and turned it on.”

“How about that, a toff like her knowing how to do the wash,” Dinda says with a smirk.

“Oh, Lady Blanders was very clever,” Wyatt says. “Almost clever enough. When she was set to leave the salon, she bolted the back door from the inside and took one of the large black umbrellas thatTracy kept for clients who didn’t want their new hairdos ruined by the rain. She opened the umbrella and let it shield her from view as she left via the front door, no doubt unaware that she had been spotted from across the street by Edwina Flasher, who assumed that the tall person hiding behind the big umbrella was a man. It was a stroke of luck for Lady Blanders that Edwina Flasher, who had been sitting in her living room, had left her glasses upstairs and was too nearsighted to realize that the tall person behind the umbrella was a woman. Lady Blanders walked down the alley to the back of the building, got on her horse, and galloped back on the footpath to the restaurant. At the King George, Lady Blanders dismounted, and Gladys got on the horse and rode back to Hadley Hall, which explains the maid’s noticeably stiff, bowlegged walk on the following days.”

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