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He’s still holding my hand.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good night, Cath.”
The way he whispers my name is as intimate as a kiss.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Inside, I lean my head back against the door with my eyes closed like a young woman in an old movie after a dreamy date.
“Interesting evening?” Wyatt says.
Wyatt and Amity are on opposite couches, Amity in a floral nightgown and matching robe and Wyatt in flannel pajamas. They’re each cradling a wineglass, and there’s a nearly empty bottle of red on the coffee table. Something about Amity seems off.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Amity’s feeling bamboozled,” Wyatt says.
I ask them to give me a minute and I go upstairs to the bathroom, where I pee and splash cold water on my face. I take two Tylenol and go back downstairs. When I’m settled in the armchair, Amity tells me about her day. That afternoon, she went to Bakewell as planned to visit the Rutland Arms Hotel, where, according to several guidebooks and websites, Jane Austen had stayed while writingPride and Prejudice. Amity’s tea was delightful—crustless sandwiches with watercress and scones with clotted cream. Before leaving, she bought a history of the hotel, which she read that evening, upon which she made the unpleasant discovery that it was all a myth, cooked up as a marketing ploy more than a hundred years ago and embellished ina 1936 guidebook by the Bakewell town clerk, apparently in cahoots with the proprietor of the Rutland Arms. In truth, Jane Austen had never visited Bakewell or anywhere in Derbyshire.
“I was hoodwinked!” Amity says. “I so wanted to walk in Austen’s footsteps. Isn’t it rotten when the facts ruin a good story?” She pours herself more wine and gives me a good long stare. “Enough about me, tell us why you look soglowy.”
Wyatt swivels around and up onto his knees. “You were with the beautiful bartender! Is he for real?”
I sink into the upholstered chair.
“Maybe?”
“Does it matter?” Amity says. “Role-play can be extremely sexy. In my last novel, the main characters met in an improv class.”
“Proximity to danger is also a turn-on,” Wyatt says.
“So true,” Amity says. “Douglas and I used to make love on the trampoline in our backyard. Hidden by tall hedges, but transgressive enough to be very exciting.”
“And Cath might be sleeping with a murderer!” Wyatt says.
“I’m not sleeping with anyone,” I say, my stomach taking a little tumble at the thought.
But they’re not wrong. The element of mystery is probably why flirting with Dev is so irresistible. And if something happens, and I’m still not sure either of us wants it to, it will be temporary by default. It will have the same predetermined expiration date that gives summer romances their freedom and ease. You can be all in because when time’s up it’s an easy-peasyCheerio, old chap, it’s been grand.
“Whatever you do, don’t get so blinded by lust that you miss important clues,” Wyatt says. “At this point, our culprit could be anyone. Your bartender, Germaine, even Constable Bucket.”
“Would they do that, make the people running the show part ofthe crime?” I ask. “Wouldn’t that go against the Detection Club’s motto to play fair?”
Amity waves a hand dismissively. “Agatha Christie broke the rules all the time. In one of her best-known mysteries,The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the man recounting the story of the murder turns out to be the one who did it.”
“He manages to describe the crime without incriminating himself?” I say.
“Absolutely. Christie almost got kicked out of the Detection Club for making the narrator the culprit, but in the end, Dorothy Sayers voted to keep her in.”
“Good marketing decision,” Wyatt says.
“Even when she didn’t break the rules, Christie was brilliantly confounding,” Amity says. “The best isThe Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.”
She tells us how in that book, Christie’s plot rests on a false assumption made early on by the characters. A famous American actress hosts a party at her home in an English village during the local fete. A young woman, a fan, tells the actress how she’ll never forget meeting her years ago, because she had German measles at the time and dragged herself out of her sickbed to meet her idol. Shortly after that conversation with the actress, the young woman is poisoned by a deadly cocktail. But when it is discovered that her cocktail had been accidentally switched with the actress’s drink, everyone assumes that the actress was meant to be the target, which makes sense considering the fan was such a nobody.
“The entire investigation, most of the book, really, focuses on Miss Marple trying to figure out why someone would want the actress dead,” Amity says, getting up and taking the empty wineglasses into the kitchen. “And there are several plausible suspects. But it turns out that the young woman, the fan, was the target all along. Yousee, years ago the actress had given birth to a brain-damaged child. And when the young fan told the actress about going to meet her even though she had the German measles, the actress realizes that she had contracted the illness from this young fan and that’s why her child was born the way it was. She kills her in revenge.”