Now that was interesting. Evelyn Carrington, foreshadowing her own death?
“Great,” the girl said. “We’ll probably all get fired over that stupid straw.” She glared at me like she dared me to refute its stupidity.
“Thank you for your help,” I said, pasting on a smile and hot-tailing it back to the terrace to inform the others.
"So it's just gone," Reginald said.
"Things don't just go," Vivienne said. "Someone took it."
“It’s somewhere,” Allison said, very unhelpfully.
Teddy was sniffing an azalea bush before he suddenly froze. His tail went up. He let out the low, uncertain not-quite-a-chitter sound I'd only heard him make a handful of times in his life, always right before something bad announced itself.
"Teddy, what’s wrong?"
He wedged himself behind the catering cart where he’d found the mint earlier.
Hollis Broussard stepped onto the terrace from the mansion wearing the exact expression I associated with the very worst nights of my life.
He was still in his work clothes from that afternoon, tie gone, sleeves shoved up, and he had the particular stillness about him that I'd learned, over the last eleven months, to be genuinely afraid of. It wasn't anger. It was worse. It was focus.
"Hollis." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were a Society member."
He wasn’t. I knew he wasn’t or he would have told me sooner.
“I am not a Society member. I’m a homicide detective." His eyes swept the group, cataloguing all of us in about a second and a half.
Taylor had bourbon on his breath and his tie loosened, Reginald was still rigid with his arms crossed, Allison was clutching her phone like a life preserver. There was Vivienne with her camera bag over one shoulder, and me standing there with a skunk hovering at my feet.
"I thought you went home," Hollis said.
“Keeping tabs on me, Detective?”
“I saw your obnoxious van. What are you doing here?” I repeated. “Was there a homicide?”
He held up a hand before I could start. "Later. Right now I need everyone to step away from that." He nodded at the cart. "Everyone on the side lawn and nobody leaves the property until the NOPD say so."
This was even stranger than I was expecting. This shouldn’t have been Hollis’s jurisdiction.
"What's really going on?" I asked, though some cold, sinking part of me already knew the shape of the answer, had known it since the word narcan had drifted across the terrace two hours earlier.
He looked at me for a long moment. Whatever he saw in my face made something in his own expression soften, just slightly. He leaned in closer and spoke just to me. “I heard the call come in. Then I saw you leave and I got worried about you.”
The way he spoke, so low, so gruff, my breath caught in my throat. “Why?”
"I just got off the phone with the coroner's office," he said. "Preliminary read is that this wasn't a stroke. Wasn't a heart attack. There's a puncture wound, small, inside the mouth, consistent with something sharp entering at speed. Whatever did that to her, it wasn't natural."
“Oh, dear,” was the only thing I could think to say.
“What’s going on?” Allison asked. “Harper? Who is this?”
“My neighbor, Hollis Broussard,” I told her. “He’s a detective.”
"You're saying that someone murdered the Carrington woman, aren’t you?” Taylor demanded.
"I'm saying," Hollis said, his gaze flicking over my guests. "That as of about ten minutes ago, this stopped being a medical emergency and became a homicide investigation. And Harper." He looked back at me, and there was no teasing in it now, none of the easy back-and-forth that lived in my kitchen most mornings over chicory coffee. Just the flat, careful tone he used when he meant every word. "I'm going to need you to tell me exactly why you came back to the gala."
Teddy, sensing the shift in the room the way he always did, pressed himself against my ankle and stared up at Hollis with wide, unblinking eyes.
