Hyacinth's jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought she'd stop talking altogether.
"She told me to switch them," she said finally. "Two days before the gala, she called and told me exactly which straw would be laid at her place setting, and she asked me to make sure a different one ended up there instead. She said it was sentimental. Her grandmother's, she said, something about wanting the real one at the toast instead of whatever the caterers had polished up." Her voice cracked. "I didn't ask questions, Harper. Why would I? She'd asked me to do a hundred strange, specific things over the past six months, and I'd stopped questioning any of them a long time ago. I walked past the table, I made the swap while everyone was distracted with the receiving line, and ninety seconds later she was dead in front of two hundred people and I understood, all at once, exactly what I'd done."
"You think she rigged it herself," I said. It wasn't really a question by that point.
"I think that a woman who had months to plan her own exit, who wanted the narrative under her control right up until the last second, who spent her whole life making sure the story was always told the way she wanted it told decided how the final chapter went, too. On her terms. In front of everyone." She swallowed. "I think it was a suicide, Harper. I think she asked me to help her stage her own death, and I did it, because I loved her, and because I didn't understand what I was actually holding until it was already too late to put it down. And now I feel guilty as hell."
I sat back in the vinyl chair, the machines humming their quiet, indifferent hum.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “It wasn’t your fault. You were being a good friend.”
"I kept asking myself how I missed it. She used to say all the time, ‘People never listen until someone dies.’”
The line the server had overheard her saying at the gala. "Because you trusted your friend."
It was clean. It was almost elegant. A dying woman orchestrating her last, most dramatic exit. It explained the wire transfers. It explained the swapped straw. It even explained, in its own twisted way, why Evelyn would stand up in front of two hundred people and talk about truth because she'd known, standing there with the cup already in her hand, that the truth was about to come to light.
It explained almost everything.
Except…
"Hyacinth," I said slowly, "who built the mechanism inside that straw?"
Her eyes came up to mine, and for the first time since I'd walked in, something in her expression looked less like grief and more like fear.
"I don't know," she said. "I never asked."
I looked over at Robert. His jaw was somewhere down around his waist at this point. It seemed obvious he’d known nothing about any of this.
"A spring-loaded spike, fine enough to sit inside hollow silver and fire on pressure, doesn't come from a hardware store. That's not something Evelyn built at her kitchen table between chemo appointments. That takes tools. That takes a very particular kind of skill." I kept my voice even, watching her. "If she planned all of this the way you're describing she didn't just decide to die with a sharpened toothpick and hope for the best. Somebody made that mechanism. Somebody with hands trained for exactly that kind of work."
Hyacinth didn't answer right away. Her fingers had gone still on the blanket. “I don’t know. I have no idea.”
“Thank you for being honest,” I told her. “About all of this.” I did believe her.
I also knew who had to have built the mechanism.
Reginald.
“I’ll leave you to rest. Nice to meet you,” I added to Robert, before getting the heck out of that hospital room.
Immediately, I realized I should have asked her about him. I turned and rushed back to the bed.
"Did Evelyn ever mention Reginald? In all those months. Any conversation, any favor, anything about the julep set, the silver, the restoration work on Belle Rêve?"
"Who?”
“Reginald St. Clair.”
“No. She talked about the house constantly. The provenance, the letters, the grant paperwork. She was obsessed with it near the end, more than usual, like it mattered more the less time she had." Hyacinth's brow furrowed, chasing something. “I really can’t remember any Reginald."
I felt the whole shape of the case tilt again, the way it kept doing lately, every time I thought I'd finally gotten it to sit still.
Because if Hyacinth was telling the truth then this wasn't just a grieving woman helping her dying friend stage a dramatic exit. This was Evelyn Carrington, months from death, reaching out to someone with a skill set that happened to match exactly the kind of precision, hidden work that had killed her.
Which meant either Reginald had built a suicide device for a woman he had every reason to hate, not knowing what she intended. Or he was thrilled to help advance her death.
Both of which could land him in prison.
