Bernie Rhodenbarr - 08 - The Burglar in the Library by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780060872878
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-02-08T12:40:50+00:00

CHAPTER

Seventeen

“She was a good cook,” Cissy Eglantine said.

There’s a short story of Saki’s that begins like that. She was a good cook, as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went. The stout woman who presided over the Cuttleford kitchen had indeed been a good cook, even an excellent cook, and she, like her fictional counterpart, had gone. She had taken her leave of this world, although she had done so without leaving the kitchen.

She was as Cissy and the Cobbett girls had found her, seated in the oversize oak armchair to the left of the old six-burner gas stove. A low flame kept a cauldron of thick soup simmering on a back burner. In the large old-fashioned sink, water dripped from a leaking faucet onto a coffee mug, a couple of spoons, and a shish kebab skewer. A radio, its volume turned way down, brought in a mixture of country music and static.

“That’s where she always sits,” Cissy said, “and that’s how she always sits. I thought she’d just nodded off, you know, with the cookbook open on her lap. But then she didn’t answer when I spoke to her, and I made myself touch her, you see, and, and give her a little shake, and—”

“Steady, Cecilia.”

“I’m actually quite all right, Nigel.” Her eyes sought mine. “Is she dead, Mr. Rhodenbarr? I don’t suppose she could be sleeping soundly, could she?”

Her hands, large for a woman, reposed in her lap, the fingers of one still curled around the handle of a wooden cooking spoon. I pressed my fingertips to the back of her hand, her upper arm, her broad forehead.

“I’m afraid she’s dead,” I said.

But she was a good deal subtler about it than either of her two predecessors in death had been. One look at either of them and you knew what you were dealing with. Cook, on the other hand, looked as though she might be sleeping, and her body temperature, while discernibly lower than the traditional 98.6°, had not yet dropped down to the level of luncheon meat. I supposed she’d get there soon enough, even in a warm kitchen, but she had a ways to go yet.

“How did she—”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of violence. She wasn’t shot or stabbed or dropped from a height.” I raised an eyelid and stared. I didn’t see any sign of pinpoint hemorrhage, or anything else but a rather glassy eyeball. I closed the lid and straightened up.

Everyone was talking at once, filling the air with questions and suggestions. We’d all rushed there in a body at Cissy’s announcement, although I couldn’t swear that no one had slipped off along the way.

“Maybe it was natural causes,” I heard someone say.

“Around here,” someone else countered, “murder is a natural cause.”

“Shock. Don’t people die of shock?”

“If they’re struck by lightning. Or touch an electrical wire.”

“I mean the kind of shock that gives you a heart attack. She might have had a weak heart, and I don’t suppose she was on a low-fat diet.

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