Page 130 of The Girl Who Knew Too Much

“You’re finally going to rewrite the murder scene.”

“This is the last scene. It needs to be different.”

Irene looked past Claudia toward the front door. “Heard enough, Detective?”

Claudia did not bother to glance over her shoulder.

“Do you think I’m dumb enough to fall for that trick?” she asked.

“It was worth a try.”

“Move.”

“So you can shoot me in the back? You really have an issue with doing this sort of thing face-to-face, don’t you?”

“I said, turn around. Outside. Now.”

“I get it; you’re planning to shoot me but you still want to finish me off in the pool. Tell me, why do you like to use water? Was it because that was how you staged the first murder? Or does it have some other significance?”

“Turn around, damn you.”

Claudia was shaking with rage now. The gun wobbled.

Irene obediently started to turn as though she was about to walk out onto the patio.

She yanked Helen’s gun out of her handbag and dropped to the floor behind the chair.

“Get up,” Claudia screeched.

Irene leaned around the side of the chair, revealing the gun in her hand.

“Get out of this house,” she said. “Run while you can.”

The sight of the weapon seemed to transfix Claudia. She stared at it, horrified.

“Drop it or I swear I’ll shoot,” Irene said, keeping the heavy chair between herself and Claudia. “You’ll probably get a shot off, but it will most likely hit the chair. I can’t miss. Not at this range.”

“No,” Claudia whispered. “No, damn you.”

She reeled backward, simultaneously squeezing the trigger.

Her gun roared. The sound was deafening but Irene realized in a rather vague way that she wasn’t dead. The bullet had plowed into the heavily padded back of the chair. Evidently Claudia hadn’t had much experience with guns, either.

Irene leaned around the chair again and pulled the trigger of Helen’s gun, not bothering to aim, just trying to scare the daylights out of Claudia.

There was an audible click. Nothing happened.

Jammed,she thought,or something. She didn’t know enough about gunsto even begin to guess what had gone wrong. A fine time for Oliver to be proved right about the unreliability of firearms.

She had nothing left to lose now. Damned if she would stay where she was, cowering behind the reading chair while she waited for Claudia to put a bullet in her head. She would rather go down fighting.

She leaped to her feet and hurled the useless gun at Claudia, who instinctively ducked and retreated again. This time she stumbled against Henry Oakes’s inert body. She nearly lost her balance.

Irene grabbed the fireplace poker out of the iron stand, jumped to her feet, and charged.

It was the last thing Claudia was expecting.

Confused and disoriented, she stumbled again and looked down, trying to find a way to get past Henry Oakes’s body. She seemed transfixed by the sight of the madwoman closing in on her with the heavy poker. Maybe she was recalling the occasions when she had used a similarly lethal object to knock her victims unconscious before drowning them. Maybe she simply panicked.