“The people have a right to know,” one newspaperman shouted.

  “Run along now, and don’t bother us again,” said the larger and more formidable-looking of the security guards.

  “Olivia Peters owns this joint,” the oldest of the newspapermen said. “I bet she’ll talk to the press.” He ran past us, heading for the hotel. The man who’d come with him peered around and then wandered off.

  “I’m gonna find some guests to talk to,” the woman said to her companion. “Someone must have seen something. You keep that camera front and center. If they give us good copy, we’ll imply their picture’ll get in the paper.”

  She looked at Jim out of the corner of her eyes and gave him a tight-lipped nod of greeting as they passed us. Her photographer opened his box and began assembling his press camera as he walked. Jim smiled at them but said nothing. He did not, thank heavens, attempt to introduce us.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I said. “I have security of my own to call. I’m throwing those people off my property and posting a guard at the road. I’ll evict you as well, if you start bothering my guests.”

  “You’d be better to face the story front and center,” Jim said. “Get the facts out there. Better than rumor and innuendo.”

  “Better for who? Not me.”

  “Any chance of me getting that unused room again?”

  “Not on your life.” I stalked into the hotel. One of the bellhops was filling the newspaper box next to the reception desk with today’s Summervale Gazette. I grabbed one out of his hands. The paper was so fresh, the ink almost rubbed off on my fingers. The last time I’d seen print so large, it had been to announce the end of the war.

  FAMED MOVIE DIRECTOR DEAD!

  DID ACADEMY AWARD WINNER ELIAS J. THEROPODOUS EAT SOMETHING AT CATSKILLS RESORT THAT DID HIM IN?

  FILMING CONTINUES IN SUMMERVALE.

  Elias’s middle initial was T., but never mind that. I was grateful Haggerman’s wasn’t mentioned in the headline. I read quickly. Martin McEnery wasn’t a very good reporter, which was the reason he was stuck here, in small-town Upstate New York working for a small-town newspaper, rather than living his dream with a byline at the New York Times or Washington Post. His article started with background, providing details of Elias’s career, and then went on to talk about the movie he was filming here, including a list of the best-known actors. Only in the third paragraph did he mention Elias been staying at Kennelwood, and had been rushed to the hospital after dinner at Haggerman’s. I considered having the paper removed from the box but decided to leave it. If anyone staying here didn’t know what had happened last night, they would soon enough.

  I asked the receptionist to reserve a meeting room for the use of the police and to call security to my office. I needed to get those reporters off hotel grounds and to post guards at the front gate to ensure they stayed out.

  Jim Westenham and I had become friends, of a sort. I knew he wasn’t a muckraking journalist. He could stay. For now. The moment I found him bothering my guests, he’d be out on his ear too.

  Chapter 10

  I was bent over the accounts book trying to find a hundred unbalanced dollars, when Rosemary tapped at my door and came in.

  “I thought you should know that guests are starting to talk, Elizabeth,” she said.

  “Guests are always talking,” I replied. “There are two main activities in the Catskills: eating and gossiping, in that order. While the movie people are here, gossiping has temporarily taken first place.”

  “It’s more than that. One of those newspaper reporters who was poking around earlier asked a guest if she had reason to be concerned about the safety of the food served here. Unfortunately, that lady was on her way to the beauty parlor, center of all gossip. Not to mention that the local paper did pointedly mention that the man died after eating here. Some people are wondering if Elias Theropodous was killed by something he ate, something prepared in our kitchen.”

  I put down my pencil with a sigh. It was coming up to lunchtime and I had a lot of paperwork to get through. “I was afraid of that. No one has taken sick today, have they?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “Elias ate what everyone else ate. If no one else got sick, then it can’t have been the fault of our kitchen.”

  “I know that, Elizabeth, but people don’t always see sense when it comes to these things.”

  The phone on my desk rang. I picked it up. “Mr. McIntosh from the booking agency’s on the line,” the switchboard operator announced.

  “Then put him through to a reservations clerk.”

  “He insists he needs to speak to you, Mrs. Grady. Not a clerk.”

  I made a face at Rosemary as I said, “Put him through.”

  “Mrs. Grady!” the thick Lower East Side accent bellowed down the line. “I’m getting questions as to how safe it is at Haggerman’s.”

  I moved the phone slightly away from my ear. “I trust your reply is that it’s perfectly safe.”

  “So far, yeah, that’s what I’m telling them. Folks drop dead at hotels and resorts all the time. Comes from catering to a bunch of old geezers.”

  “I hope you don’t say that out loud.”

  “Give me a break here, Mrs. Grady. When the story gets in the papers and on the radio, people start calling me. So I’m calling you.”

  Once again, I explained that only Elias had taken ill, not even any “old geezers.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Long as I don’t hear any more ’bout it, that’ll be the line I’ll take.” He hung up without wishing me a good day.

  I put my head in my hands and groaned.

  “Knock knock,” came a voice from the door. “Anyone home?” Richard Kennelwood stood there, smiling bashfully, holding out a fistful of mismatched flowers.

  I waved him in. “Richard, hi. Can you hold on a minute? I’ll be right with you. Rosemary, anything else?”

  “Deputy Dave . . . I mean Chief Dawson . . . is interviewing people in the writing room who were at the private dinner last night. He had a lot of questions for me about the drinks I made for Elias. I told him I made him a heck of a lot, but I didn’t add a deadly poison to any of them.”

  “You didn’t actually say that!”

  “No. I’d never met the man before. I didn’t even meet him yesterday, I just made him drinks. Dawson admitted I had no reason to kill him. He took away the bottle of bourbon though, for analysis, he said. Waste of time.”

  “Why?”

  “I opened that bottle toward the end of the evening. I finished the one I’d been using and threw it in the trash. It would have been picked up this morning and dumped with all the other used bottles. Of which we get a heck of a lot in a day.”

  “Have the state police arrived yet?” I asked.

  “They weren’t there when Dave talked to me.”

  Rosemary left, and Richard handed me the flowers. A colorful mismatched mixture of geraniums, petunias, leaves of hosta, and other assorted garden plants. I smiled at him. “I hope you didn’t pick these out of my flower beds. Francis Monahan will be in tears.”

  “I raided my own beds. My gardeners will have to deal with my disregard for their craft.”

  “Thank you.” I put the flowers into the glass of water on my desk, admired them once more, and said, “What’s up?”

  The smile died, and he dropped into a chair. “What you and Rosemary were talking about. I’m hearing the same at my place. Elias had breakfast in the dining room yesterday, in full view of several hundred of my guests. Our kitchen catered the set. People are wondering out loud if he was killed by something in his breakfast or lunch. The chef told me a surprising amount of lox was left over this morning.”

  “They must be concerned. We never have lox left over.”

  “His point exactly.”

  I let out a long breath. “We had newspaper reporters here this morning. Including Jim Westenham.”

  “Oh, him.” One corner of Richard’s mouth twitched in disapproval. “A pack of them showed up at my place earlier and charged the phone room, trying to get updates. They soon left after being told the film crew was here. What did you do?”

  “I told my security guards to order them off the property. Except for Jim. He can stay.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know him, and—”

  “Don’t say you trust him, Elizabeth. He’s a newspaperman. Untrustworthy by definition. Remember what happened when you tried to lay a trap for his uncle’s killer? He was supposed to help, but he had other ideas.”

  “That was a misunderstanding.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so.” Richard couldn’t be . . . jealous of Jim, could he? Jim had taken me to dinner at Kennelwood (and the less said of that disastrous evening the better) when he was here before, but he went back to the city with no promises to meet again. “Last I saw of him today he was watching the filming. As for trust . . . Maybe I do trust him not to make up something about us, or to make it sound worse than it is. Elias’s death is a big story, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to try to completely close us off from the press, they—”

  “Mrs. Grady, you’d better come right quick.” One of the office clerks stood in the doorway.

  Richard and I both leapt to our feet. “What’s happened?”

  “Guest’s taken ill. Jackson Brothers’ Funeral Home’s been called, and they’re sending the ambulance.”

  “Why do they need me?” As had been said, we get a large number of elderly guests here. It’s not uncommon for an ambulance to be called or a car grabbed for a rush to the hospital.

  “It’s a girl. A teenage girl. And it was something she ate.”

  Chapter 11

  I bolted out of my office, Richard Kennelwood hot on my heels. We ran down the corridor and into the lobby. At that moment two ambulance workers came into the hotel, pushing their stretcher.

  “Room 318,” a receptionist called.

  At this time of day, particularly with the movie crew here, the lobby was largely empty. But not empty enough. “What’s happening?” people called to me. “Is it another poisoning?”

  “Are we safe here?” a woman asked her husband.

  I bit back a retort.

  “You got here quickly,” I said to the ambulance men, as we waited impatiently for the elevator.

  “We were nearby. Heading to my place for our lunch break when we got the call on the radio.”

  “Good thing,” Richard said.

  A crowd had gathered around the door of room 318. A bellhop was trying to get them to move, but he wasn’t having a great deal of success.

  “You’d think people would be outside enjoying the day,” I muttered to Richard. “Not hanging around waiting for yet another disaster to fall.”

  He, wisely, didn’t reply.

  “What did she have for breakfast?” a woman called to me. “Can you find out? I’m not feeling too well.”

  I bit my tongue and followed the ambulance workers into the room, while Richard tried to help the bellhop assure people there was nothing to see.

  A foul smell hit me, and my throat closed as I tried not to gag. A teenage girl lay on one of the twin beds moaning. The blanket had been tossed on the floor, and I could see that it was thick with a foul yellow substance. Lumps of the same substance were trapped in the girl’s long hair. I turned my eyes away but not before my stomach rolled over.

  A man and a woman who I assumed were the girl’s parents hovered over her. The woman was weeping, and the man had his arm around her shoulders. A young girl watched from beside the window.

  “Mommy!” the girl on the bed cried.

  “She’ll be okay,” one of the ambulance workers said. “She’s talking and she’s brought most of it up. We’ll take her in to be sure.” He leaned over the moaning girl. “Can you move by yourself, darlin’?”

  The girl rolled over. She groaned and then spewed up another stomachful. The ambulance man leapt out of the way.

  “Is she dying?” someone called from the hallway.

  “Drama queen,” the girl by the window muttered.

  I looked at her, and she rolled her eyes. She was about twelve, all knees and elbows, with straight dark hair, a scattering of freckles over her nose, and mischievous brown eyes. She had something clenched in her hand. She caught my eye and slowly opened her hand. A pill bottle. The girl winked at me.

  “Maybe you should give that to the ambulance workers,” I said. “They need to show it to the doctors at the hospital.”

  Her father heard us. He marched over and grabbed the bottle from her hand. “Get out of here, Lacy.”

  “Going, going!” she called in a singsong voice. She skipped merrily out of the room as the men helped her sister, still groaning, onto the stretcher. I followed the younger girl.

  Most of the onlookers had been shamed into leaving, but a few lingered at the end of the corridor and heads stuck out of doors. Jim Westenham had followed the commotion and stood in the hallway, watching.

  The stretcher came out of the room. “Mommy!” the girl on it cried again.

  “I’ll accompany your mother and sister to the ambulance,” Lacy’s father said. “You go for lunch, and I’ll join you there.”

  “Yeah, lunch!” Lacy said.

  “Do you know what happened?” I spoke to Lacy, and tried to keep my voice low.

  “Was it something she ate?” Richard asked.

  Jim Westenham edged closer.

  “Oh, yes. It was something she ate.” Lacy giggled.

  My heart sank. It lifted again when Lacy said, “She ate all of Mommy’s sleeping pills. Anything for attention.”

  I shouldn’t have felt relieved, but I was. The girl hadn’t been poisoned by her Haggerman’s breakfast.

  “None of my business,” Jim said, and he headed for the stairs.

  “Why would she do that?” I asked Lacy.

  “At breakfast Daddy told Miss Fancy-pants she couldn’t go into town tonight with that guy in charge of the paddleboats she’s been making gooey eyes at all week. She thinks she’s soooooo grown up, but she’s not; she’s just a baby. I bet that paddleboat guy never even noticed her—she’s so ugly—but she said he asked her. She got all mad at the table in the dining room, and Mommy told her not to make a spectacle of herself and sent her to our room. She didn’t go to our room, she went to Mommy and Daddy’s room and found the pills. There weren’t enough pills in the bottle to kill her.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Lacy grinned at me. “Because I check every day, of course. You’re Mrs. Grady. Your mother’s Olivia Peters. Carol wants to be a dancer like Miss Peters. As if. She’s already waaay too big here.” Lacy formed cups with her hands and held them up to her chest. Richard choked. I tried not to laugh.

  “Maybe that’s why that boat guy asked her out.”

  Richard choked again.

  “I want to be an actress in Hollywood. I was in my class play last year, and Mrs. Johannsen said I’m really talented. I’d love to meet Todd Thompson. Can you introduce me?”

  “If I get a chance,” I said. “But they are very busy.”

  “Okay. I tried to say hi to Miss Grant and Miss Rae yesterday when they were talking with the gardener about the flowers by the pool, but Daddy dragged me away. He said I wasn’t to bother them. I’m going to lunch now.” She started to turn and then swung back. “Can you ask the cook to make hot dogs tomorrow? They had them on Sunday but not yesterday.”

  “I can do that.”

  Lacy skipped away and punched happily at the elevator buttons.

  “What a horror of a child,” Richard said.

  “I liked her. I liked her a lot. Come on, let’s go downstairs. I expect to have a lot of nerves to calm. It’s far easier to start a rumor than to stop one.”

  The elevator doors swooshed open, and a hotel page emerged. He saw us, waved, and trotted down the hall. “Mr. Kennelwood. Switchboard’s looking for you. You’re needed at your place.”

  “Thanks,” Richard said. “Did they say what it’s about?”

  “No, sir.”

  “If you’re parked in the main lot, you’d be faster to take the staff stairs.” I pointed to the end of the corridor and said to the page, “Will you show Mr. Kennelwood to the delivery doors, please?”

  “I’ll call you later, Elizabeth,” Richard said before turning and following the page.

  * * *

  * * *

  The stopping of rumors wasn’t helped when we found Martin McEnery from the Summervale Gazette enthusiastically fanning the flames. Unfortunately, he’d been in the lobby when the ambulance men wheeled their stretcher and their patient, moaning theatrically, out of the elevator, followed by the weeping mother and the concerned father.

  I should have sicced Lacy on him, but she’d disappeared.

  I marched up to McEnery. “Get out of here.”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Grady. Nice to see you again, looking as bright and cheerful as ever after the shocking events of last night.”

  “What do you want?” I growled.

  “The truth. All any newspaperman wants. I saw none other than Jim Westenham a few minutes ago. If the New York Times has sent their top reporter after this story, it’s a big one.”

  “I’ll admit that Mr. Theropodous’s death is of some interest to the entertainment and gossip columns,” I said.

  “Don’t think Westenham works gossip. He’s a crime reporter, right?”