Just a hand. Pale, and wearing what looked like a silver bracelet. No watch. No rings. Nothing really distinctive, which felt almost deliberately unhelpful, like the universe had decided I needed a mystery with absolutely zero shortcuts.
The hand set something down on the small table beside Evelyn's cup and then withdrew, quick and unhurried at the same time. It appeared to be a woman’s hand.
"Wait, go back," I said. "Go back, go back."
Vivienne rewound it, and we watched it again. And a third time, because none of us could quite believe our eyes the first two times.
"The drink is already there," Reginald said slowly. "This is probably just a server."
"The cup is already there," Allison finished. "Are they bringing the straw?"
"The straw was already there,” Taylor commented.
“Or swapped it?” Vivienne asked.
“Maybe it has nothing to do with her drink or the straw or anything else. Maybe Evelyn had a stroke,” I said.
The room was quiet.
Even Taylor had stopped fidgeting with his now empty glass. “I’d like to say you’re right, Harper. That certainly would make sense. But is anyone else getting the heebie jeebies from that hand right now?”
Teddy chittered. He clearly agreed.
“It feels off to me,” Vivienne said. “Though I don’t know why. Maybe it was just a medical emergency.”
"Whose hand is that?" I asked, even though I knew good and well nobody in this room had the answer, because if they did, they would've said so. I also knew it wasn’t any of their hands. Taylor had thick mitts. Reginald had pronounced knuckles covered in brown hair. Vivienne’s skin was darker. Allison’s was older.
"Could be anyone," Reginald said.
“Not really,” Taylor said, doubtfully.
I had to agree with him.
“I mean, that’s not my hand,” he said, holding up a palm that could easily hold a basketball.
Everyone made a show of putting up their hands.
It wasn’t until mine was in the air that I realized the only person whose hand that could be was…me.
“I think it’s safe to say the only person here not ruled out is Harper,” Reginald said, forcing a smile. His voice had gone tight in a way I recognized from earlier that evening, when he'd talked about porticos and public humiliation. “I highly doubt she was responsible for anything nefarious.”
I would take that as a compliment. “Thank you, Reginald. I can assure everyone it was not me. I was standing to the left of Vivienne.”
"Half the committee was milling around that table setting up for the toast," Allison said.
"It's not anyone's job to touch her cup, though," Vivienne said. "That's the thing. I watched the setup for twenty minutes before the speech started. Nobody touched that table. The server put the cup down once and then it just sat there. Until this."
I doubted that Vivienne had clocked every single second of that time but I wasn’t going to argue.
"How long before she started drinking?" I asked.
Vivienne squinted at the little timestamp in the corner. "Ninety seconds. Give or take."
Ninety seconds. Long enough to do just about anything to a drink if you knew what you were doing and didn't mind an audience of three hundred looking squarely at you.
"Well," Taylor said, into the silence, "that's just terrific." He set his glass down harder than necessary. "I fell on top of that woman in the middle of a medical emergency! In front of half the Garden District. That footage gets out and I'm the drunk fool who face-planted onto a dying woman while some faceless hand is doing God-knows-what to her drink thirty seconds earlier. My distillery's name is attached to that gala. Do you have any idea what that's going to do to Afterlife Spirits? I've got a launch in Nashville in six weeks."
“How do you know she’s dying?” Allison asked.
