In the Still of the Night

make a difference if this Walker person was stupid enough to go on instinct instead of proof. After all, she had the motive. Nobody else did.
    Unless by some freak chance Lorna had told part of the truth about her youthful relationship with Julian West and there had been more to the story. But what motive could West have? He’d thrown Lorna over fifteen years or so earlier. They’d gone their own ways.
    “I was hurt at first,“ Lorna had told her years ago when Addie thought they were friends before Anthony came along. “Any girl would have been. But after a while I realized that I would have broken it off sooner or later anyway. Marriage had to be two minds becoming one and Julian wasn’t willing for that to happen.”
    Addie didn’t agree in the first place that two minds should be one. And she knew better now than to give any credence to what Lorna said. Had it all been a lie? Had Lorna merely made it up? West had to be prodded into remembering who she was. But Carpenter had tipped him off the moment they entered the yellow parlor. But maybe that was just Carpenter’s way. To get the first word in and act the “perfect servant.“ But West hadn’t seemed especially pleased or displeased to greet Lorna. There was nothing but mere courtesy in his greeting to her.
    An unlikely casting for “first assassin.”
    Addie also qualified as prime suspect because she had the greatest access to Lorna. It would have been easy to just tiptoe through the little hallway with the bath on one side and the closet on the other. She alone of the whole house party wouldn’t have needed to risk being seen in the hall. She could have slipped right through the hall, choked the life out of the despicable woman and gone back to bed. In theory. Surely Walker was considering this.
    As she started feeling worn and tired, Addie closed her eyes. What about the rest of them? Had others had relationships with Lorna that they’d forgotten or pretended to have forgotten? Surely Lorna didn’t pick out Addie as her only challenge. Lorna was the type who always had to have what she wanted. She’d taken Anthony from Addie. Had she taken something else half so valuable from someone else at Grace and Favor who resented her even more than Addie did?
    Perhaps someone Lorna had forgotten she’d ever known and done an ill-deed. Or someone who had a loved one who suffered at Lorna’s pretty, pampered hands. There had to be a logical explanation. Nobody in the whole crowd seemed like a natural-born killer. And even Julian West hadn’t suggested that he, his cousin or Bud had actually killed anyone in the Great War. They’d been support staff, not fighters.
    But maybe it was someone none of them had met. A person who waited, watched her, followed her here and sneaked into the house to kill her and let the others, Addie in particular, become the suspects. Was Chief Howard Walker bright enough or experienced enough to think of that?

    Raymond Cameron was pacing around the front of the house under the watchful eye of a deputy. “Can’t leave the house, sir,“ the deputy said.
    “I’m not leaving,“ Raymond said. “We were told we couldn’t. I just had to get some fresh air.“
    “Just stay in sight, then,“ the deputy said. “Five minutes is all.”
    Raymond went over and sat on a bench that had been built around a shady tree. An oak, he guessed. And the bench was new, still oozing a little sap through the clean white paint. He spread out his monogrammed handkerchief to sit on so he wouldn’t ruin his trousers. He leaned back against the tree, half turned away from the deputy.
    Let him just stand there like a lump and stare at me, he thought. You don’t recognize me any more than Lorna did.
    She’d looked straight through him. If he’d known she was going to be here, he wouldn’t have come. He wouldn’t have even replied to Lily’s invitation. The minute he saw her, however, floods of memory engulfed him.
    That summer when he was eighteen he had worked in his uncle’s office, to see if he had taste for the legal profession and would wish to pursue it when he entered college in the fall, only to find that Uncle Joseph just wanted an errand boy, not someone to mentor. His parents wouldn’t allow him to quit the job and go to Europe for the rest of the summer as he wanted to do. Until he met Lorna.
    He’d been so damned innocent. She must have been nearly as old as his mother, but nothing like a mother. More like a slightly