The Blue Last

This giving the doll a life of its own didn’t sit well with her. Her frown was deep as she lay her hand on the doll’s chest, very near Jury’s fingers.

“Remember how you thought this doll was a girl?”

Gemma rushed in to say, “He can be either.”

“Yes, but you didn’t really know that then.”

Her mouth worked with possible answers to this charge, but she came up with nothing.

“All I’m saying is, you might want Richard here to have some sort of identification.” Jury took out his and showed her. “Like this.”

The thought seemed to fill her with wonder. “You mean Richard’s a policeman?”

“Could be, but I’m only guessing. Plain clothes, of course. A detective, more likely.”

Full of this idea, especially since she’d already thought of it, Gemma studied Jury’s ID. “How can he get one?”

“I expect I could fit him up with one from Scotland Yard.”

Gemma looked thoroughly bowled over by this. She took the doll Richard back and looked him over carefully to see if there might be any flaws in his detective persona.

“Of course,” Jury went on, “he might want to ask you questions.”

“Like what?” She looked sharply at Jury.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged.

There was a period of silence while Gemma looked off in the distance, thinking. “I bet he wants to know about when I was in the greenhouse and somebody shot at me. They missed.”

“Yes, I remember you told me that. It must have been frightening.”

“It was. I’m still scared about it because that’s not all!”

There was a silence. Gemma studied the doll. Finally she whispered to Jury, “Isn’t he going to ask me what else?”

“I think he did. You just didn’t hear him.”

“Oh. Well, the rest is someone came in my bedroom and tried to smother me!”

There was another silence.

She said, “He’s not a very good detective.”

“He hasn’t been at it very long.”

“Well, he should ask me if I was asleep when it happened.”

Jury held the doll to his ear and nodded. “That’s what he’s asking.” Then Jury made a point of looking around at the lattice work, at the beech tree and at Melrose Plant, down at the other end with Angus Murphy, both of them dumping buckets of something onto the ground. “Richard has to keep his voice low because you don’t know who might hear. Look down there.” Jury nodded in the direction of the two gardeners.

“That’s only Ambrose. He’s okay. He’s the new gardener,” said Gemma, her voice low. “He’s pretty nice but he argues a lot. His eyes are really green.”

Ambrose? “Hmm. You’re sure they’re not just green contact lenses? He could be in disguise.”

Gemma’s mouth crimped up like an old lady’s at a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “I thought there was something funny about him when he wouldn’t baptize Richard.”

Jury made a sound meant to dismiss the gardener’s expertise. Then he said, “But about your being asleep-”

“It woke me up! Would it wake you up if somebody was choking you?”

“Fast.”

She dropped Richard (who Jury moved quickly enough to catch) and turned her hands so that she could encircle her neck. She stuck her tongue out and made choking noises.

“Terrible!” said Jury. “I wonder you could get the hands off you.”

Gemma missed a beat or two and said, “Oh, they just went away.”

“But then how about being smothered?”

Suddenly recalling this important detail, she said, “That’s right, the hands came back and picked up a pillow and smothered me. I only just managed to bump the pillow off.”

“Thank God. You must be strong.”

Uninterested in her strength and the subject of smothering, she gave a shrug and said, “I guess.”

There came another silence which she broke finally by saying in a fluting voice, “Well? Well? Isn’t Richard going to ask?”

Jury scratched his ear and looked at Richard (who looked supremely indifferent). He was thoughtful while Gemma started jumping as if she could hardly wait to tell the rest of her story. “You mean, what happened next?”

“Yes!” She took Richard from Jury’s hands and looked at him gravely. “I was almost poisoned.”

“I remember that. And the cook very nearly quit.”

“Benny told me about the way this family in Italy used to poison each other. The Medicines. They’d keep poison in all sorts of places, like in a ring. And when the victim was about to drink, they’d click open the ring and dump the poison in. That’s what happened.”

“To you?” When she nodded, Jury said, “The poison was in a ring someone was wearing?”

Emphatically, Gemma nodded.

“But you don’t know who?”

This time she shook her head, just as emphatically, sending her hair swinging like leaves in the wind. She had finished and was now rearranging Richard’s neckerchief.

“That’s really some story.” Jury brought out his small notebook and the stub of a pencil he kept telling himself to throw away. “Here.”

She frowned. “What’s that for?”

“For your statement. That’s what it’s called, a statement. What you do now is write down whatever happened. Didn’t Richard tell you about this?”

Her mouth gaped. “No!”

“Then he’s very lax. Witnesses always have to write their stories down, make their statements.”

“But I’ve already stated!”

“Yes, to me. But it has to be written down, if that’s what actually happened.”

Gemma looked horrified. “It’ll take days to write it. Months! I don’t write very good.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Scotland Yard sees all sorts of writing.”

Gemma gave Richard a sharp rap against the lattice. “Nobody ever told me, not those police who came, they never told me.”

Jury sighed. “That’s too bad; they should’ve taken your statement.”

She was clearly angry with Richard and gave him back to Jury. She stood there, arms folded, looking at the notebook Jury held, and the pencil. “You said, ‘whatever happened.’ ”

“That’s right. We’d hardly need a statement of what didn’t happen.”

Gemma scratched her elbows. “Well, maybe some of it didn’t. Some of it could’ve been-you know-like a bad dream. Like the choking part. It did wake me up, I mean I thought it did, but maybe I was dreaming it all and got mixed up.”

“Hmm.” Jury grew thoughtful again. “That’s certainly possible.”

“And the smothering part, too. It was as if it’d happened. It felt real.”

“If it was a dream, well, of course, you wouldn’t need to put it in a statement.”

With her hands on his knees for support, she jigged on one leg, then the other, kicking her feet back.

“What about the poison, then? Could you have dreamed that, too?”

She shook her head. Dark leaves swirled as she bounced from one foot to another. “I was… just… thinking about what Benny told me… so much… I must’ve… thought it… happened.”

“Well, yes, I can see that.”

She stopped, a sober look on her face. “But the shooting really did happen.”

“Yes, there’s proof of that. You said you went to the greenhouse. Tell me, did Jenny Gessup ever go out