“She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.
There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.
She was as Cissy and the Cobbett girls had found her, seated in the oversize oak armchair to the left of the old six-burner gas stove. A low flame kept a cauldron of thick soup simmering on a back burner. In the large old-fashioned sink, water dripped from a leaking faucet onto a coffee mug, a couple of spoons, and a shish kebab skewer. A radio, its volume turned way down, brought in a mixture of country music and static.
“That’s where she always sits,” Cissy said, “and that’s how she always sits. I thought she’d just nodded off, you know, with the cookbook open on her lap. But then she didn’t answer when I spoke to her, and I made myself touch her, you see, and, and give her a little shake, and-”
“Steady, Cecilia.”
“I’m actually quite all right, Nigel.” Her eyes sought mine. “Is she dead, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I don’t suppose she could be sleeping soundly, could she?”
Her hands, large for a woman, reposed in her lap, the fingers of one still curled around the handle of a wooden cooking spoon. I pressed my fingertips to the back of her hand, her upper arm, her broad forehead.
“I’m afraid she’s dead,” I said.
But she was a good deal subtler about it than either of her two predecessors in death had been. One look at either of them and you knew what you were dealing with. Cook, on the other hand, looked as though she might be sleeping, and her body temperature, while discernibly lower than the traditional 98.6°, had not yet dropped down to the level of luncheon meat. I supposed she’d get there soon enough, even in a warm kitchen, but she had a ways to go yet.
“How did she-”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of violence. She wasn’t shot or stabbed or dropped from a height.” I raised an eyelid and stared. I didn’t see any sign of pinpoint hemorrhage, or anything else but a rather glassy eyeball. I closed the lid and straightened up.
Everyone was talking at once, filling the air with questions and suggestions. We’d all rushed there in a body at Cissy’s announcement, although I couldn’t swear that no one had slipped off along the way.
“Maybe it was natural causes,” I heard someone say.
“Around here,” someone else countered, “murder is a natural cause.”
“Shock. Don’t people die of shock?”
“If they’re struck by lightning. Or touch an electrical wire.”
“I mean the kind of shock that gives you a heart attack. She might have had a weak heart, and I don’t suppose she was on a low-fat diet. The shock of the two deaths earlier-”
“Cook didn’t even say anything,” Cissy remembered, “or look much disturbed. After the first death she made breakfast, and after the second she came in here and started lunch.”
“And a good lunch, too, from the smell of it.” Rufus Quilp had pushed his way through to the stove, and was lifting pot lids and sniffing. “Lamb stew,” he announced. “Seasoned with rosemary and thyme, and can that be fresh dill? Wherever would she get fresh dill?”
“Not this time of year,” someone said.
“And here’s a lovely pot of rice,” he said, “all nice and fluffy, and there’s a big wooden bowl of salad on the counter, just waiting to be tossed.” He replaced the lid on the stew pot. “I think we should eat,” he said. “I think we’ll all be much better able to cope once we’ve eaten.”
There was a general murmur of assent, which died down when Carolyn stuck her face up next to the cook’s, then stepped back shaking her head. “Didn’t work,” she said. “I was trying to smell her breath, but she’s not breathing.”
“Why would you want to smell her breath?”
“I thought there might be the odor of bitter almonds, Bern.”
“If she’d ingested cyanide,” I said. “But doesn’t she look awfully peaceful for a victim of cyanide poisoning?”
“I don’t know, Bern. Does it make you writhe in agony? If she was poisoned, it must have been with something nonviolent.”
Leona Savage remarked on the irony of it. Minutes ago we’d discussed the possibility of our being poisoned by the cook, and now it looked as though the cook herself might have been poisoned.
“And she’s holding a spoon,” her husband observed. “A cooking spoon. I think I see what happened.” He gestured, miming the action. “She was at the stove, stirring the stew. She took a taste of it. When the poison hit her-”
“The poison?”
“In the stew. At first maybe all she thought was it needed more salt, but then it hit her and her legs got weak and she had to sit down.”
“Is that what happens when you take poison? Your legs get weak?”
“It must depend on the poison,” he said. “At any rate, she didn’t feel too hot and she sat down. Evidently it was a gentle poison, and it just made her nod off and then killed her in her sleep.”
“Cook didn’t like people in her kitchen,” Molly Cobbett said. “If anybody tried to put anything in her stewpot, Cook would pitch a fit.”
Nigel confirmed this. “If you wanted to get taken to task, all you had to do was lift the lid of one of her pots. I can’t think she’d have stood still for it if someone salted her stew for her.”
“She wouldn’t have known,” I said. “Because she wouldn’t have been here when it happened.”
“But she was always in the kitchen.”
“She was in the bar with the rest of us a little while ago, remember? She slipped off to the kitchen while we were arguing about one thing or another. Did anyone notice when she left?” No one had. “Well, she was in the back; she could have slipped out unobtrusively enough.”
“And someone slipped off after her? And poisoned her, and then slipped back again?”
I shook my head. “It would have happened earlier,” I said. “She didn’t toss this stew together in a few minutes. She must have started preparing it while we were eating our breakfast. It’s been cooking all morning. When Orris had his accident and Earlene screamed almost loud enough to wake him, Cook would have left the kitchen to find out what was the matter.”
“She was outside,” the colonel recalled. “I remember noticing her when we were weighing the merits of attempting to retrieve poor Orris’s body.”
I thought that would bring a fresh sob from Earlene, but perhaps she’d begun to get over her loss. “And after that,” I said, “she wound up in the bar. So she was out of the kitchen for a while, and in her absence someone could have gone in and put anything at all into that pot of stew.”
Carolyn said, “Like what, Bern? Mrs. Murphy’s overalls?” Everyone stared at her and she said, “Like the song, ‘Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Oh, come on. I can’t be the only person who remembers that one.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “And as far as what the killer put in the stew, I couldn’t begin to guess. I don’t know much about poisons.”
“Mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont said. “Are there mushrooms in the stew?”
“I would certainly hope so,” Rufus Quilp said. “Who in his right mind would make a lamb stew without mushrooms?”
“Poisonous mushrooms,” Miss Dinmont cried. “Deadly nightshade!”
“That’s not a mushroom,” Gordon Wolpert said.
“It’s not?”
“No. But there are a lot of poisonous mushrooms, or toadstools, or whatever you want to call them. The amanitas are particularly deadly. One’s called the death angel-that may be what you were thinking of. But you couldn’t go out and gather mushrooms in this weather. It’s not the season for them, and even if it were you’d never find them under the snow.”
“If deadly nightshade isn’t a mushroom,” said Miss Dinmont, “then what in heaven’s name is it?”
“A vine,” Wolpert told her. “A close relative of the tomato and the potato. Not to mention the eggplant.”
“Why not mention the eggplant?”
“There’s tomato in here,” Rufus Quilp announced. “And potato, of course. And mushrooms and barley.” If there was an airborne poison as well, I figured his days were numbered, the way he was inhaling. “I don’t believe there’s any eggplant. It’s not usual in lamb stew, though it wouldn’t matter if there were some. I’m sure there’s nothing in here to be concerned about. Why would anyone poison a splendid pot of lamb stew?”
“Why would anyone kill the cook?” Carolyn asked him in return. “Or wreck the bridge and the snowblower? Or kill Mr. Rathburn?”
“I’m sure I have no idea, young lady. What I do have is a gnawing in my belly, and what I intend to have is a bowl of this stew.”
“But if it’s poisoned…”
“If it’s perfectly wholesome,” he said, “then we ought to be eating it. If it’s toxic we ought to keep it at arm’s length. But how are we to tell which it is?” No one had the answer, so he supplied it himself. “What’s required is a food taster. One man has a bowl of stew. If he lives, everyone may freely join in the feast. If he dies, well, at least the others are spared.” He squared his shoulders. “I shall be that man,” he said.
“But Mr. Quilp-”
“Please,” he said. “I insist.”
“But if you should die…”
“Then I suppose you’ll leave me lying where I fall, as seems to be the custom of the house. If you actually go so far as to put me in the ground, an appropriate phrase for the tombstone might be ‘He ate that others might live.’ Hand me down one of those bowls, will you? And the ladle, if you don’t mind.”
In the dining room, Quilp took a seat at a table set for two. He tucked in his napkin and lifted a fork. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do,’” he said, “‘than I have ever done,’ and I fear that’s all I remember of that passage. I’d say grace, but if the stew turns out to be laced with arsenic, that might be a thumb in the eye for the Man Upstairs. So without further ado…”
He speared a morsel with his fork, put it in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. He took another bite, smacked his lips.
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “As you can see-”
He broke off the sentence and a look of alarm spread on his florid face. The hand not clutching his fork moved to the middle of his chest, just over his heart. His lower lip trembled and he slumped in his chair.
Why hadn’t I stopped him? How could I let the man kill himself like this? Oh, in a sense he’d been doing so for years, digging his grave with his knife and fork, but…
“Ha!” He straightened up in his seat, gave a little yelp of laughter, and looked positively delighted by the expressions on our faces. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my, oh my. Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist. You will forgive me my little joke, won’t you?” He plunged the fork into the bowl of stew. “It’s wonderfully flavorful, I assure you,” he said, “and it couldn’t possibly harm anyone. May I urge you all to fill bowls for yourselves and join me?”
“We can’t be sure it’s safe,” Miss Hardesty said. “There are slow-acting poisons, aren’t there?”
“If Cook was poisoned,” said Quilp, “the poison seems to have worked at the speed of light. But I’m sure you’re right. The stew contains a slow-acting poison, and I’m doomed. In fifty years’ time I’ll be stone dead.” He rolled his eyes. “With that timetable, young Millicent might want to hold off. The rest of you can afford to take your chances.”
Mrs. Colibri said she thought she’d wait, not fifty years but, oh, fifteen minutes or so, just to be on the safe side. Several others murmured their agreement. Quilp told us to suit ourselves, but by then he’d very likely have had a second helping, and perhaps even a third. “And if Molly or Earlene could bring me a plate of that salad,” he said, “and some of the seven-grain bread, I think there must be some left. And some butter, of course. And beer, I think, would provide a better accompaniment than wine. Is there some of that nice brown ale, Nigel?”