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“I’ll do that for you.” Kelly-Ann cut a few slabs of cheese, adding dabs of relish and plonking them down on a plate in front of me. I fed a piece of cold roast beef to Oscar under the table. He’d been such a good boy all evening.
“You’re the art teacher?” I asked her.
“Yes. I’m not really supposed to talk to you.” She wiggled further away from me. “You could be the murderer.”
“I promise that I’m not. But I understand that you’re afraid, and I won’t come any closer. I just wanted to tell you that I saw one of your paintings in our room. I can’t see a lot these days, but your work – especially your use of color – is so bold and vivid that it stood out to me.”
“Thank you.”
“Allan’s enjoying working with you,” I smiled, even though my heart was hammering in my chest.
“Allan?”
“Yeah, my friend Allan. He’s the guy with the long, silky black hair. He’s taking your art class. He had to miss the afternoon session because…I needed him, but he was in the studio this evening when the power went out.”
“Nope. I don’t know who that is. I only have three students in the class. I remember them all, and he isn’t one of them.” Kelly-Ann shook her head. “There was another person who signed up for the class, but he never showed up. That’s pretty common. I’ve been in the studio all evening, and I never saw that guy.”
Panic crept along my spine. “And there’s not another painting studio? Like, a small one where someone could work and you wouldn’t see?”
“Nope. Not unless you’re talking about the metalworking studio or the pottery suite.”
“But…” It didn’t make sense. Quoth left for the art class this morning. He came back in his paint-splattered work clothes.
Quoth would never lie to me.Never.
Except that he already had once today.
Another memory assailed me – Quoth flying in the window of our room after Morrie told him about what Hugh said about me. A shiny object dangled from his beak.
Hugh’s pen.
It had to be. It was pen-shaped.
Why did Quoth have it?
Why wasn’t he where he said he was when the power went out?
What is going on?
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
Bree: Mina, I know it’s the middle of the night and you might not see this, but just letting you know that I’m taking Grimalkin to the all-night vet in Grimdale. She’s still not eating or moving much, and she has some strange discharge. We’re in a taxi now. Pax is singing songs about slaying druids to her and that seems to be keeping her calm.
You’re jumping to conclusions,I told myself as I polished off the rest of my hot chocolate and licked relish off my fingers.You don’t know for a fact that the object in Quoth’s beak was the pen. And even if it was, they couldn’t have pulled together this elaborate murder plot, because they wouldn’t be able to predict that the power would go off.
Actually, that was the only flaw in our current theory – to pull off this murder inside the locked room, the killer had to do the deed in the dark. Which means that they had to know the power would go off. But no one could predict the storm…
The door banged, and Heathcliff stepped through the door, followed by Morrie and Quoth, and finally Christina, who sighed with relief. She must have been to the bathroom.
My stomach churned as Heathcliff sat down next to me, the belt of his robe brushing my thigh. I had to find out the truth. But how? If my guys did set this up to frame one of the writers in the room, they did an amazing job.
“Hey.” Charlie ran his hands across the table. “The pen is gone. Someone has destroyed the one piece of evidence that might identify the killer—”
“We placed it back in the library,” Heathcliff said. “I didn’t want it here where grubby fingers might contaminate it.”
“And where are Jonathan and Donna?” demanded Charlie.
“Donna’s in the bathroom, and Jonathan is out in the maintenance shed, trying to sort out the mess,” Heathcliff said, his voice grim. “The power isn’t out because of the storm. Someone cut the lines. Jonathan is trying to rig up the generator now, but he sent us back here to guard you all. Someone wanted Meddleworth House in the dark.”
