Page 87 of Death at the Dower House
I didn’t understand what he meant—my brain seemed to be dragging, not capable of keeping up with everything that had happened—but Francis did. “Looks like a hundred grains, at least. Maybe more.”
“Enough to kill someone twice over,” Tom said, and Constance let out a cry. Turning on her heel, she ran, still padding on bare feet, out of the room.
For a second or two—a crazy slice of time that lasted a lot longer in my mind that it did in reality—I was certain it was an admission of guilt. Hadn’t I suspected her, after all? Hadn’t I reasoned that she knew about Francis’s Veronal and where to find it, and hadn’t I thought that she might have used it to kill her mother?
And now Francis had discovered a lot of his Veronal missing—enough to kill two people, according to Tom, who ought to know—and Constance was running away.
Francis tore after her with a bellowed, “Constance!”
“Stay with him!” Tom ordered. Crispin nodded, and Tom pushed past me with a murmured apology. I turned to stare after him, blankly, while Crispin dropped down on the edge of the bed next to Christopher and let out his breath.
Twenty
“Gilbert!”Constance howled from out on the landing, and I heard what I assumed was a door opening and then slamming against the wall before bouncing back. “Gilbert!”
I realized, for the first time since I’d been woken from dead sleep by Lady Laetitia’s screams, that at no point had I heard Gilbert Peckham’s voice, not from inside Laetitia’s chamber, nor from anywhere on the landing. Nor had I at any point seen his face or any other part of him.
“What’s happening?” I asked Crispin.
It was more a request for understanding what my brain couldn’t seem to grasp on its own, than the actual belief that he knew something I didn’t. Because of course he didn’t. He couldn’t possibly.
And he didn’t seem to, because he merely shook his head before looking back down at Christopher. “Putting two and two together, I’d say someone has stolen more than a hundred grains of Cousin Francis’s Veronal. Enough to kill someone twice, according to Detective Sergeant Gardiner.”
I nodded. I had caught at least that much. “It’s not possible to kill someone twice.”
“Of course not,” Crispin said. “But it’s possible to kill two people.”
Yes, it was. But— “Christopher isn’t dead.”
“No.” Crispin laid a hand against Christopher’s cheek, perhaps to check his temperature, or perhaps just to reassure himself that Christopher was still there, and still warm. “He isn’t.”
“He—” I cleared my throat. My voice was rusty, as if I hadn’t used it for a long time. “He got lucky.”
Crispin nodded. “I’d say so. Unless whoever gave it to him didn’t want him dead, of course, just out of the way for a while.”
“Who would want Christopher out of the way? Why Christopher?” If it had been Crispin, that would have been a different story. I could imagine that lots of people might want him out of the way, permanently or just for a while. But— “He wasn’t a threat to anyone, and he’s much less objectionable than you are.”
“Same to you, Darling,” Crispin said, which was fair.
“Besides, what good would it do to get either of you out of the way when the three of you shared a room, and you and Francis were wide awake as soon as the ruckus started? That makes no sense.”
He shook his head. “Maybe there’s another reason he isn’t dead. Maybe whoever gave him the drug miscalculated the dose. Or just wanted to give us something else to think about for a while so we wouldn’t worry about whatever else might be happening in or around the Dower House.”
Maybe so.
Up until now I had concentrated on Christopher, but now my ears and my brain started serving up a few impressions from outside the room as well. Laetitia and her brother must have been alerted by Constance’s mad rush across the landing, or perhaps the door slamming against the wall. Or perhaps they simply realized they couldn’t ignore the rest of us any longer.
At any rate, they had appeared on the landing at long last. Marsden was dressed in stripes, and his hair stuck straight up on one side. It made him look a bit more human, less glossily perfect, and as such, I thought it was an improvement.
Lady Laetitia, meanwhile, cut a stunning figure in a slinky nightgown and matching negligee, and the slight dishevelment of her usually sleek bob only served to enhance her amazing good looks. Her eyes were puffy from crying, she was pale and devoid of makeup, and she still managed to look like something that belonged on a silver screen above us all. The gown and negligee, like everything else she had worn this weekend, was black: sheer in places, with strategic applications of lace everywhere that mattered.
Tom did a double-take when he came out from Gilbert’s room and saw her, and even Francis’s eyes widened for a second before he turned away, deliberately, to put his hand under Constance’s elbow as she exited the room as the last of them.
“Well?” I managed, certain they’d tell me that Gilbert was inside, dead to the world, or more likely simply dead, from an overdose of Veronal.
But Tom removed his gaze from Lady Laetitia to look at me, and shook his head. “Empty.”
I blinked. “Where is he?”
