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“Let’s see.” Wyatt stretches his legs onto the coffee table. “We’d never heard of the game of conkers, so we had zero chance of knowing how many strikes per turn are allowed. I’m not really up on the proclivities of Henry the Eighth, and it went downhill from there. Plus, Amity and I each had a moment of personal humiliation.”
“The shame!” Amity says, moving into the kitchen. “How could I not have known that the person on the back of the ten-pound note is Jane Austen?”
“How was I the jackass who didn’t know which bird is called the laughing jackass?” Wyatt says. “I mean, kookaburra, obviously. What else could it have been?”
Amity comes back, somehow holding three mugs. It’s coffee, and it’s good and strong.
“Deborah and Naomi were brilliant,” she says. “They have an extraordinary amount of useless knowledge. They knew that Prince Harry proposed to Meghan Markle over a meal of roast chicken, that Greece has one hundred and fifty-eight verses in its national anthem, and that the collective noun for a group of unicorns is a blessing.”
“And now you do too, Amity,” Wyatt says.
Amity smiles. “I suppose I do.”
She looks at me expectantly, obviously wanting to know everything. And then she frowns.
“Are you okay?”
“We missed you,” Wyatt says with a wink. “Good night?”
“Yes,” I say. “It was fun.” That’s it, keep it light. A romp. Fun. “But the strangest thing happened on the walk home.”
Wyatt cradles his coffee. “Do tell.”
“This might sound completely deluded.” I take a seat and tell them about the viaduct, the arches, the river, and how it was exactly as my mother had described it in the story she used to tell me. I almost wish they’d laugh and brush it off, tell me I’m being foolish, but they don’t.
“There’s no doubt about it, your mother knew this area.” Amity picks up the bulletin board and puts it down on the table. “Swans, bluebells, the church with the crooked spire, Stanage Edge, and now the bridge with five tall arches.”
“She’d been here before,” Wyatt says. “That’s got to be it.”
“I know my mother, and it doesn’t make sense,” I say.
“Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think,” Amity says. “We never know what’s going on inside another person’s mind, no matter how close we think we are. Trust me, I know.”
“How am I ever going to figure this out?”
“You mean how arewegoing to figure this out,” Amity says.
“We’re going to keep asking questions,” Wyatt says. “We’re going to be good sleuthhounds and ask everyone not only about Tracy Penny but also about Skye Little. And you must keep noting any associations that come to mind. You might remember something significant.”
The doorbell rings, and for a split second I think it’s someone coming to tell me the answer, to clear up the mystery once and for all. But Amity returns with a manila envelope that she says was delivered by Germaine’s assistant, the one with the clipboard. She was supposed to give us the autopsy results yesterday at Tracy’s flat but forgot.
Amity slides the page out and puts it on the table so we can all read the results at the same time. There’s a lot of gibberish medical stuff that sounds legit, not that we’d know otherwise. Then we come to the significant part. Not surprisingly, the cause of Tracy’s “death” was loss of blood due to the wounds on her head. The weapon was an “as yet unidentified object, perhaps like a hammer, but smooth with sharp edges and with the inflicting end in a square shape of approximately 2? inches.”
“Square?” Amity says. “Maybe a meat tenderizer?”
Wyatt shakes his head. “Those are bumpy, not smooth.”
He takes an index card and draws a square object with a long handle as we imagine it to be, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen. This case seems to get harder the further along we get. We’re four days into our investigation with only a day and half remaining before the deadline to submit our solution. And all we know so far is that it was someone, possibly a tall man with good hair, in the salon with something that resembles but is not a meat tenderizer.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We reconvene in the living room when Amity and Wyatt have showered and dressed. Wyatt seems ready for action. He stands in front of the bulletin board like a general mapping out an attack. He lists the most pressing questions:
Who sent flowers to Tracy?
Who is Pippa, and what was Tracy planning to tell her the day after her murder?
For whom did Tracy don and doff the black negligee? Was it the driver of the red Tesla that Bert had seen parked behind the building?