Eddie nodded. “In an uninhabited bedroom. But in the morning the door was unlocked and he was gone.”
“Don’t take it personally, Grey,” said Colonel Andrews. “Perhaps he did not particularly enjoy that jab to the jaw.”
Eddie rubbed his face.
The colonel laughed and said, “The old man would not shut up, speaking nastily about his wife, and your brother, here, decided a fist to the face was just the remedy.”
“Did any of you stay with him?” she asked.
“No,” said Eddie, looking at her curiously. “We locked him up and left. There was a bed in the room and a pitcher of water—”
“And a chamber pot,” the colonel added.
“So how did he get out of the room?”
Colonel Andrews shrugged. “I suppose Mrs. Wattlesbrook let him out. Why? Have you seen the gentleman about?”
“No,” she said significantly. “Is that strange?”
The colonel shrugged again, and Eddie did not answer.
Neville entered and began to clean up.
The butler’s got a thing for the missus, Charlotte thought. But enough to motivate him to murder her husband? He didn’t seem guilty.
Then again, neither had James.
Charlotte joined the gentlemen and ladies for a walk around the gardens and wondered who else might want Mr. Wattlesbrook dead. He’d signed away Windy Nook and Bertram Hall and burned down Pembrook Cottage. Perhaps someone feared Pembrook Park was next.
“What a lovely day!” Miss Charming declared, her face strained, as if desperate for it to be true.
Why so desperate? Charlotte observed her all morning. Between the “halloos” and “what-whats,” before the giggles and after the gusty sighs, Charlotte detected fear.
She followed Miss Charming to her room before lunch and sat on her bed, waiting till she emerged from her bathroom.
“Charlotte! You made me jump out of my skin.”
“Lizzy, I’ve noticed that you seem to be … well, afraid. Of something.”
Miss Charming began to blink rapidly. She looked behind her at the open door, as if checking for eavesdroppers.
“It’s all right, Lizzy,” Charlotte whispered, patting the bed beside her, an invitation. “You can tell me.”
Miss Charming sat, squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded. She whispered wetly, “It’s my Bobby.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“My Bobby. And that toothpick.”
Charlotte wasn’t sure how a toothpick was involved—as a murder weapon?
Miss Charming began t
o talk like an erupting volcano. “Bobby and me’d been together since grade school. We were king and queen of the prom! And then thirty—er, a few years later, I catch him on a mattress sample with that toothpick of a girl. We sold mattresses, you know. Thousands of them. Eighteen stores in the tristate area, best bargains east of the Mississippi. ‘The Mattress Shack has got your back!’ ” she sang. “I came up with that jingle. I was the brains, he was the brawn, till I found him on a mattress sample with an assistant salesclerk named Heather. What kind of name is ‘Heather’ anyway? Sounds like a disease.”
This was not the course Charlotte had been expecting.
“So, you were afraid?” Charlotte prompted.