“You’re not anything, stop. It doesn’t matter.”
Well, that was painful.
"She's good for it," he said. "Money, motive, opportunity to plant a bracelet at the scene like a woman with something to hide. I'd put money on her myself."
"I know," I said, reluctantly. And I did know. Everything lined up too neatly not to know it — the payments, the fight, the burial in the hedge, the years of quiet resentment Dorothy had described. It made sense in the specific, satisfying way a good podcast episode made sense, all the loose threads gathering into one clean knot.
Except.
It was too easy.
"She modified a spring mechanism into an antique silver straw," I said slowly. “Narrow enough to fit inside a cocktail stirrer, precise enough to trigger on pressure, and she did it with the kind of hands that get a manicure every ten days."
"People surprise you," Hollis said. "Skills don't always show."
"Sure," I said.
Something about it sat wrong. But I was annoyed with Hollis for saying I wasn’t anything.
So I just agreed, because I wanted to go home and not be in his presence.
“Hyacinth. It had to be Hyacinth.”
“Look, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
I shoved my chair back and stood up abruptly. “All good in the neighborhood,” I said brightly.
The only thing I’d learned today with any certainty was that I was a terrible actress.
Thirteen
“Thanks for coming with me,” I told Maggie as we climbed the front steps to Dorthy Perrault’s house.
“Miss a hastily thrown together Celebration of Life for a woman more people were afraid of then not? Wouldn’t miss it.”
When we walked in, we realized hasty or not, Dorothy, or more likely the Society, would never anything to be referred to as “thrown together.”
The house had transformed into a flower paradise, with a full spread of food in the dining room, a bar with a dedicated bartender, and a wall-mounted TV displaying a rotation of photos of Evelyn. There was a tasteful donation box “in memoriam” for a local children’s hospital and cancer research, with a thick tented card indicating it was Evelyn’s favorite charity.
“Because of the daughter,” a woman murmured as she and her friend took in the display. There was a QR code on the card and she scanned it with her phone. “I just did a hundred. Such a shame.”
“Daughter? I had no idea.”
“Oh, Lord, I always forget you’re new,” the first woman said to the second, in a tone that suggested neither of them ever forget she was new on the Society scene. “Evelyn and her husband had a little girl who died of leukemia in the late eighties. She was never the same. Threw herself into committees and volunteering. Refused to try for another baby. The husband died ten years ago.”
I drifted away toward the buffet, uncomfortable with the conversation. It wasn’t exactly gossip given the circumstances yet it still felt a little that way. It was a tragedy and now it was a footnote in this woman’s story and something that made her decidedly more layered and human than just the formidable society dame. It made me feel yuckier about her murder.
"Small and tasteful," Dorothy had promised me on the phone that afternoon. "Just committee and other friends and family."
“There must be two hundred people crammed into this house,” Maggie marveled. She was wearing a relaxed black dress with striped tights and Doc Martens. She looked like what she was—a cool girl in a crowd of classic Ann Taylor women.
On the other hand, I was having a crisis of identity.
Thrust into the role of innkeeper, historical society member and krewe member, I’d taken on the mantle of Aunt Odette’s life. Which had been nothing like my life before. I’d just been a typical woman in my twenties, with a college degree I didn’t use, creating content, serving on the weekends, and swing dancing. I shopped in thrift stores and constantly wrestled with the urge to cut myself bangs.
Being here at these things, dressed in a conservative navy dress that my mother bought me for job interviews after college—I neither wore the dress or went on many interviews—it felt quite literally like I was wearing someone else’s clothes. Someone else’s life.
“I don’t even know two hundred people,” I told her.
