Eric stammered.
“You most certainly did.”
La Croix stepped forward. “So, Eric, are you going to let me use my pans?”
“I don’t know,” Eric stammered. “It’s not my—”
“And I need my knives,” Pearl added.
Consuela crossed her arms over her chest.
“If they get to use their things, then I want to use my special salt,” she said.
Bernie decided that Eric was acquiring that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look.
Estes stroked his chin. “So, Eric, who are you calling?” Estes asked him.
Eric bit his lip.
“Well?” Estes said. “Are you calling the New York Post? The National Enquirer? Your grandmother? Your nephew? Who?”
“No,” Eric yelped. “I was calling Bree Nottingham.”
Bernie watched Estes nod his head. The effect was somewhat like one rubber ball hitting the other. He rubbed his hands together.
“That’s the first decent suggestion I’ve heard in the last ten minutes,” he said. “Bree will know what to do.”
Libby groaned.
“I think I feel sick.”
Bernie took a good look at her sister. In the last ten minutes, the green in her complexion seemed to have mutated from lime to olive.
“Do you want a drink?” Bernie asked her. They had to have alcohol somewhere around here, and heaven only knows she could use one herself.
Libby shook her head.
“A cookie?”
Libby shook her head again.
“You sure?” Libby refusing a cookie? Now things were serious.
“I think I need to lie down.”
Bernie was leading her out of the room when Libby turned her head and leaned over. Bernie jumped out of the way, but it was too late. Libby had barfed all over her pink suede wedges.
Libby rinsed her mouth out with tap water again, then looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She still looked green. Why did she have such a weak stomach? No one else had puked at the crime scene but her. No one else had made a spectacle of themselves, that was for sure.
She should have gotten some air when she felt herself going queasy, not tried to tough it out. But oh no. Now she was going to owe Bernie for a new pair of shoes. Why couldn’t she have thrown up on the floor, for heaven’s sake? It would have been cheaper—both financially and emotionally, Libby reflected. She patted her hair in place and went outside.
As she stepped into the hallway, something that Bernie had said to her when she’d been working in L.A. struck her.
“Never underestimate the power of stardust on civilians,” Bernie had said. “Proximity to television and movies makes people do nutty things.”
Libby had told her she was the one who was nuts, but given what was happening, she was beginning to think her sister had been right. Or maybe it was the power of Bree Nottingham, real estate agent extraordinaire, who was responsible for the fact that they were going on the air in a little over an hour. Bree. Just the idea that she was waiting for her made Libby cringe. The only good thing was that Bree hadn’t seen her throwing up.
“There you are,” Bree said as Libby reentered the room. “Are you feeling better?” she asked.
“She’s fine,” Bernie said. “Aren’t you, Libby?”
“Yes,” Libby said in as positive a voice as she could manage.
Looking at Bree now, resplendent in her black and white tweed Chanel suit and black Manolo Blahnik stiletto boots, Libby was once again struck by her ability to engineer any situation with the aid of those indispensable aids to modern life—her BlackBerry and her cell phone. It was why she was who she was.
From her experience, Libby would have bet anything that once the police were called, a predictable sequence of events would follow. The police would arrive, the rooms would be taped shut until the forensic team had completed their investigation, people would be interviewed, and the station would be showing a rerun of the Hortense Calabash Show this evening.
But that’s not what had occurred, no sirree bob, not by a long shot, as her mother had liked to say. Bree had taken one look at Hortense’s body, briskly stepped back out of the test kitchen, whipped out her cell, and summoned the Longely chief of police, Lucas Broad, to Hortense’s estate.
Libby didn’t know what Bree had said to him, because after she’d said something about “my people,” Bree had walked away, and Libby hadn’t been able to hear the rest of the conversation, although not from want of trying, she had to admit. But whatever Bree had said, she and Bernie agreed it had certainly been effective.
Fifteen minutes later, there was Old Lucy, as her father called him, studying the scene of the “tragic misfortune,” as Estes kept insisting on calling it. Then he and Estes and Bree had huddled together for a ten-minute confab, while everyone else milled around the green room. At that point, Libby was all set to have Estes tell everyone the taping was off. Which was more than fine with her.
“No way, Sherlock,” Bernie had whispered when Libby had told her. “Bet you ten bucks.”
“You’re on,” Libby had whispered back.
She’d really wanted Bernie to be wrong. All she wanted to do was go home, take a bath, down some aspirin for her headache, and get to work on her soup for the next day. Was that too much to ask? Evidently it was, because two minutes later, Lucy had walked over and announced to everyone that the show was going to go on as planned. The police would work around the shooting schedule.
Bernie had just smiled and stuck out her hand, palm upward.
“Told you,” she said.
“The trouble with people today is that they don’t have any respect for the dead,” Libby had grumped as she slapped two five-dollar bills into Bernie’s palm.
“You sound like Mom,” Bernie had told her as Bree materialized beside them.
How does she do that? Libby wondered as Bree looked at the money in Bernie’s hand, then looked back up at Libby.
“I forgot to pay Bernie for the eggs she picked up this morning,” Libby stammered. She didn’t know why she was lying to Bree. There was no reason to, but Bree always made her feel crass.
“Actually it was the snails,” Bernie added. “Haven’t you heard? We’re raising our own. Kind of a test run. Did you know that some archaeologists think that snails were the first animal that man domesticated?
