Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

awfully glad I didn’t have to cross-examine her.
    Liz went through the honeymoon business (establishing that though the witness had ordered mussels, her new husband had had a perfectly harmless fillet of sole), and then asked Alice if she’d seen anything unusual that night.
    “My mussels had just come,” said Alice, “and Bob and I were talking about what color to paint the house. I ate one and then stopped for a minute to listen to Bob; he had some art courses in school and knows a lot about color. Bob wanted to paint the trim terra-cotta and cobalt blue. I wasn’t sure exactly what color that was—the blue, that is—and it kind of gave me the creeps. Cobalt, I mean—it’s sort of dangerous or something”—she looked confused—“at least I thought so. My fingers started to tingle. I thought it was my imagination at first; but Bob took both my hands and held them—kissed them, you know. Then he said, ‘Your mussels are getting cold.’ So I picked up my fork, but I dropped it—I didn’t know why, I just couldn’t seem to hold it. I was going to ask the waiter for another, but then someone got up and started walking—toward the men’s room, I guess—and he was staggering; we thought he was drunk. He fell down and some people went to help him, and then I heard a scream—”
    Liz asked, “Was it a woman who screamed?”
    “Yes. I looked and saw she was flinging her hands about, as if she were shaking water off them—” Here, Alice demonstrated. “She was yelling something about electricity. I got real scared then, because that was the way my fingers felt—like I’d gotten a shock, or maybe hit my crazy bone. I started to feel sick.”
    “What did you do then?”
    “I told Bob I was going to throw up. I knew I ought to go to the ladies’ room, but I was too scared to move. The woman at the next table, who’d just been sitting there up till then, all of a sudden fell out of her chair.”
    “In a faint?”
    “Oh, no, it wasn’t like that. She moved her chair back and tried to get out of it, but—I don’t know, it just seemed as if she’d lost her balance or something. She kind of fell over on her side. Bob went to help her, but she couldn’t seem to get her feet under her. She couldn’t get up at all, so finally her husband and Bob helped her lie down.”
    “Let’s reiterate a minute,” said Liz. “At this point, a man and a woman had collapsed and another woman was screaming about electric shock. You yourself were experiencing tingling and loss of coordination—”
    “And nausea,” said Alice.
    “And nausea. How would you describe the overall scene in the restaurant at that point?”
    I half expected to hear her intone, “Fear stalked Full Fathom Five!”
    But she said, “It was real quiet. Then this young man on the other side said something about poison in a loud voice and it seemed as if everyone started talking at once. It got loud as anything.” She paused, looking very white. “I was really scared—and feeling terribly sick. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. Bob helped me lie down on the floor, and after that, people started running around like crazy. People in white jackets—from the kitchen, I guess—were trying to help the sick people. A man who said he was a doctor came and started to take my pulse, but then he heard someone sort of trying to catch their breath—I mean, we both heard it—and he left me. After that, Bob held my hand and kept saying to take it easy, that they’d called some ambulances. And I just kind of closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see any more.”
    “What happened after that?”
    “The next thing I remember, they put me on a stretcher and took me to the hospital.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Jones.”
    It was Dad’s turn. He said, “Not a very good way to spend your honeymoon.” He smiled at Alice and she smiled back. “No,” she said. The color started coming back to her face. “I think you’re a very brave woman.”
    “You wouldn’t if you’d been there that night.” Dad had her chatting like an old friend.
    “Did you have difficulty breathing?”
    “No. I was lucky, I guess.”
    “Did you ever throw up?”
    “No—I just felt as if I were going to.”
    “It must seem kind of like a bad dream in retrospect.”
    She looked at Dad as if he were the only person in the world who really understood her. “Sometimes I can hardly believe it really happened.”
    “Tell me, Mrs. Jones—have you ever had the