Read Online Murder Most Merry by ed. Abigail Browining - Free Book Online Page B

and left it on the table where I’d found it.”
    Our client shook his head in wonder. “ Murder on the Orient Express, ” he said. “Or in the Calais coach, depending on whether you’re English or American. It’s beginning to look as though everyone read that manuscript. And I never noticed a thing!”
    “Well, you were hitting the sauce pretty good,” Jon Corn-Wallace reminded him. “And you were, uh, concentrating all your social energy in one direction.”
    “How’s that?”
    Corn-Wallace nodded toward Jeanne Botleigh, who was refilling someone’s cup. “As far as you were concerned, our lovely caterer was the only person in the room.”
    There was an awkward silence, with our host coloring and his caterer lowering her eyes demurely. Haig broke it. “To continue,” he said abruptly. “Miss Quinlan returned the manuscript to its box and to its place upon the table. Then—”
    “But she didn’t.” Perigord said. “Harriet. I wanted another look at Woolrich. Maybe I’d missed something. But first I saw you reading it, and when I looked a second time it was gone. You weren’t reading it and it wasn’t on the table, either.”
    “I put it back,” the agent said.
    “But not where you found it,” said Edward Everett Stokes. “You set it down not on the table but on that revolving bookcase.”
    “Did I? I suppose it’s possible. But how did you know that?”
    “Because I saw you,” said the small-press publisher. “And because I wanted a look at the manuscript myself. I knew about it, including the fact that it was not restorable in the fashion of Into the Night. That made it valueless to a commercial publisher, but the idea of a Woolrich novel going unpublished ate away at me. I mean, we’re talking about Cornell Woolrich.”
    “And you thought—”
    “I thought, why not publish it as is, warts and all? I could do it, in an edition of two or three hundred copies, for collectors who’d happily accept inconsistencies and omissions for the sake of having something otherwise unobtainable. I wanted a few minutes’ peace and quiet with the book, so I took it into the lavatory.”
    “And?”
    “And I read it. or at least paged through it. I must have spent half an hour in there, or close to it.”
    “I remember you were gone awhile,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. “I thought you’d headed on home.”
    “I thought he was in the other room.” Jayne said, “cavorting on the pile of coats with Harriet here. But I guess that must have been someone else.”
    “It was Zoltan,” the agent said, “and we were hardly cavorting.”
    “Kanoodling, then, but—”
    “He was teaching me a yogic breathing technique, not that it’s any of your business. Stokes, you took the manuscript into the john. I trust you brought it back?”
    “Well, no.”
    “You took it home? You’re the person responsible for its disappearance?”
    “Certainly not. I didn’t take it home, and I hope I’m not responsible for its disappearance. I left it in the lavatory.”
    “You just left it there?”
    “In its box. on the shelf over the vanity. I set it down there while I washed my hands, and I’m afraid I forgot it. And no, it’s not there now. I went and looked as soon as I realized what all this was about, and I’m afraid some other hands than mine must have moved it. I’ll tell you this—when it does turn up, I definitely want to publish it.”
    “If it turns up,” our client said darkly. “Once E. E. left it in the bathroom, anyone could have slipped it under his coat without being seen. And I’ll probably never see it again.”
    “But that means one of us is a thief,” somebody said.
    “I know, and that’s out of the question. You’re all my friends. But we were all drinking last night, and drink can confuse a person. Suppose one of you did take it from the bathroom and carried it home as a joke, the kind of joke that can seem funny after a few drinks. If you could contrive to return it, perhaps in