were telling him to stay away from Enid.” She glanced at Enid. “But the notion that you were still in love with her made no sense. Then Orsino mentioned having had an affair with Ryan before Ryan took up with Enid.”
Orsino looked deeply into his coffee cup as everyone turned their attention in his direction.
“That’s when it made sense,” Jane continued. “You weren’t warning him away from Enid because you wanted her, you were telling him to stay away from her because you wanted him all to yourself. Isn’t that right?”
Chumsley reddened. “I didn’t kill him!” he said.
“No,” Jane said, nodding. “You didn’t. And neither did Enid.”
“So it was Orsino, the jilted lover!” Genevieve cried. She was sitting next to Orsino, and now she leaned away from him, her eyes wide.
“It was not!” said Orsino.
“Was it?” Brodie asked Jane.
Jane didn’t answer. Instead she moved on, standing behind Sam.
“Love is only one avenue to murder,” she said. “There are many others. Revenge, for instance. Sam, it must have made you very angry to learn that Ryan was the reason you didn’t get that teaching job.”
Before Sam could respond, Jane continued. “And Genevieve, you think he unfairly won a prize that you deserved to have.”
Genevieve tore a croissant in half but said nothing.
“Brodie, he stole your design idea when you were in school,” Jane said. “And then there’s the small matter of his having stolen Bergen’s commission for the shoe museum.”
“And now we’re back to Bergen,” said Enid. “I think it’s clear to everyone here that of all of us he’s the most likely suspect, particularly if, as you claim, he’s absconded with Walter’s mother.”
“I agree that that would be the most likely explanation,” Jane said. “But then I asked myself, what would Agatha Christie do?”
“Agatha Christie?” said Orsino. “What has she got to do with this?”
“Oh, nothing directly,” Jane answered. “But I assume you’ve all read her at some point, yes?”
All around the table heads nodded.
“And what’s the most maddening thing about an Agatha Christie novel?” she asked.
There was a long silence. Finally Enid said, “She always withholds key bits of information.”
“Exactly!” Jane said. “In every Agatha Christie novel there’s always a scene in which the murderer is revealed, and it always involves the person who has solved the murder informing everyone that Mrs. So-and-so is really the daughter of the maid whom the victim treated unkindly thirty years before, resulting in her family’s descent into poverty, or that the young man who spends every day reading by the pool isn’t a nice young man at all but an alcoholic gambler with designs on the victim’s diamond brooch.”
“That always annoyed me,” said Sam. “You could never figure out who the murderer was because it could be any of them, and Christie never gave you all the clues you needed to figure out which one it was.”
Murmurs of agreement rippled around the table.
Jane cleared her throat. “I’m not done yet,” she said. “There’s something else about Christie’s novels that is a bit predictable, and that is the character who is largely invisible throughout the book but who then becomes enormously important at the end. In fact, you can often identify the murderer simply by looking at who gets the least amount of time in the story.”
“In our case that would be Genevieve,” Orsino said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Genevieve.
“I’m sorry, but it’s true,” said Orsino. “I’ve barely seen you at all this trip.”
“You’re just trying to get back at me because you think I called you a murderer!” Genevieve said.
She started speaking in rapid-fire French. Orsino responded in equally rapid and equally loud Italian. Jane put her fingers in her mouth and gave an ear-piercing whistle. This stopped their bickering.
“Although Genevieve has indeed contributed little in the way of conversation during our excursions, it is not she to whom I am referring.”
As she spoke she moved quietly around the table, until she was standing just behind the chair of her prime suspect. She smiled triumphantly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our murderess.”
“Suzu?” Sam said as they all stared at the diminutive professor.
“I’d forgotten all about her,” said Brodie.
“Well, the poor thing almost never speaks,” added Genevieve.
“What makes you think it’s her?” Enid asked. “What motive does she have?”
“None that I know of,” said Jane. “Which according to the rules of every Agatha Christie novel I’ve ever read means that she
Suzu remained motionless as they discussed her. She said nothing, sitting with her hands folded in her lap.
“We really don’t know anything about her,” Orsino said.
“Now that you mention it, Bergen was the one who suggested I invite her,” said Enid. “I’d never heard of her before.”
“Exactly,” Jane said. “She masterminded this from the beginning.”
“Wait a minute,” Genevieve said. “Suzu was standing with us at the bottom of the tower when Ryan fell. How do you explain that?”
“Oh, that,” said Jane. “Well, she’s a vam …”
Unfortunately, she hadn’t quite gotten this far when imagining how the big reveal would go. Now that she was there, she realized that there was one big question she wasn’t going to be able to answer.
“Yes, Jane,” Suzu said in a calm, even voice. “How do you explain that?”
Jane looked down. Suzu was looking up at her, not smiling. Her dark eyes flashed anger, and Jane could sense that more than anything Suzu wanted to destroy her.
“And she’s hardly big enough to fling a cat,” said Brodie. “How could she hurl a great big thing like McGuinness over a four-foot-high wall?”
Then Jane heard a sound that made her heart shrink to the size of a pea. It was laughter. It started at one end of the table, where Enid was grinning and pointing at Jane, and then it seemed to roll like a great, sweeping wave toward the chair in which Suzu sat with Jane behind her.
“Stop it!” Jane shouted.
But they didn’t. They only laughed harder and louder. All except Walter, who sat looking at Jane with a perplexed look on his face.
Jane wanted to die. She couldn’t even muster the energy to try again. Then, beneath the laughter, she heard Suzu speaking to her. Only it was more like the way Lilith spoke to her, the words forming in her mind instead of reaching her ears.
“It took you long enough to figure me out,” Suzu said. “But of course, as you now realize, you can’t make them believe you. They think you’re insane.”
“Where has Bergen taken Miriam?” Jane asked.
“Don’t worry,” Suzu said. “She’s not dead. Yet. I’ll return her when you give me the Needle.”
“I don’t have the Needle,” Jane said. “I don’t think it even exists.”
“Nice try,” said Suzu. “I’ve seen the doll. Just give the Needle to me.”
“I just told you, I don’t have it,” Jane said. “There was nothing inside the doll.”
“Then you’d better find it,” Suzu told her.
The laughter had died down now, and the people around the table were looking at Jane, waiting for her to say something. Before she could speak there was a knocking at the door. Lucy looked at Jane, who shrugged. There was no reason to keep it locked now.
Lucy opened the door and a girl wearing the shirt of a hotel employee came in. She walked over to Walter and handed him an envelope.
“Your mother asked us to deliver this to you at nine-thirty this morning,” she said.
Walter took the envelope. “When did she leave it at the desk?”
“Last night, I believe,” the girl said.
