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I felt an instinctive urge to hide what I was thinking. I wiped my mind clean of my nasty thoughts and tried not to meet the eyes of any of my fellow club members, who were all waiting tensely for me in the big room. But Sally Allison was a pro at catching reluctant eyes, and I saw her mouth open when she caught mine. I knew beyond a doubt she was going to ask me if I'd found Mamie Wright. Sally was no fool. I shook my head firmly, and she came no closer. "Are you all right, child?" John Queensland asked, advancing with the dignity that was the keystone of his character. "Your mother will be terribly upset when she hears..." but since John, who was after all a wee mite pompous, realized he had no idea what my mother was going to hear, he had to trail off into silence. He asked me a question with a look.
"I'm sorry," I said in a tiny squeak. I shook my head in irritation. "I'm sorry," I said more strongly, "I don't think Detective Smith wants me to talk until he talks to you." I gave John a small smile and went to sit by myself in a chair by the coffee urn, trying to ignore the indignant looks and mutters of dissatisfaction cast in my direction. Gifford Doakes was walking back and forth as if he were pacing a cage. The policemen outside seemed to be making him extremely nervous. The novelist Robin Crusoe was looking eager and curious;
Liza
Those awful turquoise shoes. I kept seeing that empty shoe sitting upright in the middle of the floor.
I heard a soft sweet soothing murmur and knew Liza
"Let's just think about something else," Liza
"Liza
Liza
"Okay, folks," he said peremptorily, eyeing us as if we were rather degenerate strangers caught half-dressed, "we've had a death here." That could hardly have been a bombshell—after all, the people in this group were adept at picking up clues. But there was a shocked-sounding buzz of conversation in the wake of Burns's a
I envied him.
He saw me watching him, observing his excitement, and he turned red. Burns said clearly, "I'm going to take you out of the room one by one, to the smaller room across the hall, and one of our uniformed officers will take your statement. Then I'm going to let you go home, though we'll need to talk to you all again later, I imagine. I'll start with Miss Teagarden, since she's had a shock."
Liza
As I went out to my car very slowly, I was mulling over that phone call. It was a red flag, surely, to alert the club to the near certainty that this murder had been pla