The porch steps of the female senior staff cabin creaked as I climbed them, and I had to give the door a hard shove to open it. A single light shone in the hallway, throwing the far reaches of the space into deep shadow. In the room to my right, someone was snoring as though to wake the dead. Bad choice of words, once again.

  Velvet has a private double-size room on the second floor. As well as a single bed, she has enough space for a small couch—taken out of service in the guest rooms when a lit cigarette fell into the cushions—plus a table large enough to hold a toaster and a kettle and tea and coffee things. I hadn’t carried my keys with me tonight, and I hoped she’d left the door unlocked. She had, and I edged it open, trying not to make a sound. I slipped in and closed the door behind me. A thin line of moonlight peeked through not-quite-closed curtains, giving barely enough light to maneuver by. Velvet’s slow breathing came from the bed, but she didn’t stir.

  I slipped off my shoes and hiked up my dress prior to getting my stockings and girdle off, as I edged my way to the center of the floor and the mattress that would be my bed. My probing foot touched it, and I reached for the pillow under which I’d put my pajamas. I’d change in the bathroom down the hall.

  My fingers touched something warm and moving. It growled.

  I leapt back with a scream, lost my footing, and crashed into the table. The dishes rattled, and the kettle fell to the floor with a crash. The toaster followed it, and I, unable to keep myself upright, followed the toaster. A chorus of frantic barking began.

  Velvet screamed. Someone down the hall shouted, “What? What?”

  Velvet leapt out of bed, sweeping a candlestick off the side table as she moved. She loomed above me, brandishing the weapon, her pale face and night-tossed hair ferocious in the thin line of moonlight. “Elizabeth? What are you doing?”

  A bulldog waddled over to me and licked my face. I shoved him aside and scrambled to my feet. “What’s Winston doing here?”

  Rapid hammering on the door. “Are you okay in there, Velvet?”

  “Yes, we’re fine. Mrs. Grady disturbed the dog.” Velvet switched on the light. “Go back to bed, everyone.”

  “How can we be sure you’re not being held prisoner and told to say that?” a woman called.

  I opened the door and stuck my head out. Women clustered in the hallway, dressed in a wide variety of nightwear, cream on faces, curlers in hair. Curious faces stared at me. One woman brandished a baseball bat. “This isn’t a movie,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  Grumbling to themselves, they did so. I slammed the door.

  My aunt Tatiana’s bulldog looked up at me, eyes shining, tongue hanging out, stubby tail wagging.

  “What,” I said, “is Winston doing in my bed?”

  “I told you I was looking after him tonight,” Velvet replied.

  “You did not.”

  “I didn’t? I intended to. Sorry.” Velvet replaced the candlestick. “Tatiana’s gone to have dinner with her friend who’s the head housekeeper at Kennelwood. It’s her friend’s birthday, so she expected it would be a late night, and she doesn’t want to pay for a taxi, so she’s spending the night. She asked me to look after Winston. I thought I told you.” She picked up the toaster, gave it a shake, and when nothing rattled too loudly or fell out, she put it back on the table. Then she did the same with the kettle. “Nothing broken.”

  “Except my pride in front of my employees. Which still doesn’t answer the question as to why Winston is in my bed.”

  Velvet walked up to the dog, leaned over, and wagged her finger in his face. “I told you to stay in your own bed.” She pointed, and the dog crossed the floor to settle himself in a plush beige dog bed, whereupon he promptly went back to sleep.

  Velvet dropped onto her own bed. I pulled off my stockings and wiggled out of my girdle.

  “As long as I’m awake . . . How’d it go at the hospital?” She took her watch off the night table and checked the time. “It’s late. So late, it’s early. Almost time to get up.”

  “Elias Theropodous died,” I said.

  “Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that. Have you been at the hospital all this time? You must be exhausted.” She stood up again. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Yeah, that would be nice. I don’t suppose you have anything to eat, do you?”

  “Sorry, no. Randy, Todd, and I heard the commotion and went back to the hotel to see what was going on. Someone said Elias had fallen down the stairs and hit his head and he was being taken to the hospital. Is that what killed him?”

  “Unzip me, will you?” I turned my back to her and she did so. I stepped out of my dress and scooped up my pajamas. Fortunately, they’d been under my pillow so they weren’t covered in dog hair and slobber. “The doctor thinks he was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned!”

  “By something he ate or drank at Haggerman’s.”

  Velvet sucked in a breath. “That can’t be good. Has anyone else been taken to the hospital tonight?”

  “Not that I know of, and if no one else got sick . . . then Elias had to have been poisoned deliberately.”

  “You mean murdered? Surely not.”

  “I’m going to the bathroom. While I’m gone, think over this evening. Did you see anyone paying particularly close attention to what Elias was eating or drinking or possibly fiddling with his drink?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I didn’t get to bed that night. I changed into my pajamas, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and got ready to turn in. But when I got back to Velvet’s room, she had a pot of tea on the table, and we sat together on her bed and talked. As the sun leaked through the curtains we went over and over details of the night before, while Winston moved from his bed to the floor at my feet. When we’d remembered all we could, for now, of the events of this evening, we naturally arrived at other topics of conversation.

  “Todd’s nice, don’t you think?” Velvet said as she pretended to concentrate on stirring sugar into her third cup of tea.

  “Nice enough, I guess. If you like the handsome, charming type. He seems to like you.”

  She looked up, eyes sparkling. “Do you think so, Elizabeth? I mean, he was paying attention to all the women last night, right? Even the older ones like Olivia and Gloria and some of the guests.”

  “That was part of the job. He had to be charming to Rebecca, and I got the feeling they aren’t too fond of each other.”

  “I sensed that too. Do you suppose they’re going to continue filming? Now that Elias is gone, I mean.”

  “Matthew Oswald said they’ll carry on for now and wait to hear what the studio decides. Don’t they say ‘the show must go on’?”

  Velvet’s radiant smile competed with the morning sun streaming into the room. I reached out and put my hand on hers. “Take care. Move slowly.”

  “Have you ever known me to act rashly, Elizabeth?”

  “Velvet, I have never known you not to.”

  * * *

  * * *

  We finished our tea and got ready for the day. Velvet tied her long blond hair into a bouncy ponytail and dressed for her morning exercise classes in white shorts and a short-sleeved, tight-fitting blue shirt nipped at the waist before taking Winston for a quick walk. I rummaged in her too-small closet for something suitable for me to wear. I hadn’t brought much from my house, so I decided that yesterday’s skirt with a fresh blouse would have to do.

  “Are you coming for breakfast in the staff dining room?” Velvet asked when she was back from her dog-walking duties and Winston was slurping enough water out of his bowl to fill a small Catskills lake.

  I secured my key chain to my belt. I’m always forgetting my purse, so I took a tip from an illustration of the chatelaine of a medieval castle, and I keep my keys (and I have a lot of them) clipped to my belt during the day. “No time for breakfast. I’m not looking forward to it, but I need to break the news to Gloria before they all assemble at the dock and Matthew speaks to them. I should have done it last night, but . . .”

  “Can you take Winston to Tatiana? She’s usually in the laundry room at this time of the morning.”

  “I’ll look for her after I’ve spoken to Olivia and Gloria. If I go anywhere near the main building, I’ll be sucked into one problem or another and I won’t get to them in time.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I should have known better. News travels mighty fast in the Catskills.

  As soon as Winston and I walked into our house I knew Gloria had already heard the news. She was in my bedroom, sitting in a chair in front of the dressing table, staring at herself in the mirror while a hotel hairdresser fussed over her. The actress wore a loose robe, and her eyes and nose were tinged red. She cradled a coffee cup in her hand. Olivia sat on my bed watching. She also showed signs of recent crying and twisted a lace handkerchief between her fingers. Another woman stood quietly in a corner, holding a small case.

  “You heard,” I said.

  My mother nodded.

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you last night, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Wouldn’t have mattered,” Gloria said. “I still can’t quite believe it.”

  “I didn’t realize you and he were close. Close your eyes,” the hairdresser said as she stepped back and sprayed hair spray over Gloria’s head.

  I not only closed my eyes but also held my breath.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  Gloria studied herself. “It will do.” The hairdresser gathered up her things and left, mumbling sorry to me, and the makeup artist took her place behind Gloria’s chair.

  “I tried to call Matthew,” Gloria said, “but he wasn’t in his room and didn’t answer the page. I’ll assume today’s filming will go as planned until I hear otherwise.” The makeup artist opened her case and selected a small bottle. Gloria turned her chair so she was facing the woman, tilted her chin, and again closed her eyes. “Were you there, Elizabeth? Last night. With Elias.”

  “I went with him to the hospital. He fell down the steps and didn’t recover consciousness. I’m sorry.”

  “Was it the fall that killed him?” Olivia asked. “Or did he have a heart attack and then fall?”

  “Uh . . . ,” I said.

  My mother stood up, nodded to me, and left the room. Winston and I followed.

  “Why do you have the dog with you?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask. How did you hear about Elias? I hoped to be the one to break the news.”

  “The hairdresser’s brother-in-law’s an orderly at the hospital. When he got home from work he told his wife that Elias Theropodous had been brought in and had died. That woman immediately called her sister, knowing she’s been assigned to work on Gloria’s hair. I can only assume the blasted woman has bragged nonstop to everyone in the entire mountains about that. She ran in here before we were barely awake, totally out of breath, and shouted out the news. You should consider firing her, Elizabeth. She said she didn’t realize we didn’t know, but she did.”

  My mother wasn’t being overly harsh. Gossiping about the guests was strictly prohibited. All that meant, of course, was that staff gossiped about them when I wasn’t around. But to gossip about a guest to a guest? Yes, fireable.

  “How did Gloria react when she was told?” I asked.

  “With shock, I’d imagine. Why do you ask?”

  “Weren’t you there?”

  “No. I let the hairdresser in and went into my room to start getting ready for the day.”

  “So you don’t actually know that Gloria was shocked?”

  My mother narrowed her eyes. “What does that matter to you? Gloria and Elias’s relationship is their business.”

  “It’s about to become ours, I’m afraid.” I told my mother about the supposed cause of death and Dave Dawson’s suspicions.

  She fell into a chair with a moan. Winston sniffed at her legs. “The police. Here. Again.”

  “Matthew’s planning to tell the entire crew when they gather at eight o’clock.”

  Winston leapt to his feet and let out a bark. Footsteps sounded on the porch steps followed by a knock at the door. I opened it to see a busboy bearing a tray laden with table settings for two and two covered dishes. “Good morning, Mrs. Grady. Miss Peters.”

  I held the door open, and he put the tray on the dining room table. Olivia and I always have our meals prepared by the hotel’s kitchen. My mother doesn’t cook. She’d never learned how, as from a very young age her life had been devoted to dance. Aunt Tatiana, who had learned to cook, taught me as a true daughter of New York Russian immigrants should. I generally enjoy it, but these days I don’t have the time.

  Olivia and her first husband had divorced almost as soon as I’d been born, and my mother had continued climbing ever higher through the ranks of Broadway dancers. She’d handed me to Aunt Tatiana and her late husband, Rudolph, to raise above their corner store in Brooklyn. Some years we went months without seeing Olivia, particularly if she was working on a movie in California, but she wrote to me when she had the chance and phoned most Sundays. One of my fondest childhood memories is of Uncle Rudolph clutching the telephone and bellowing, “Long distance!” and me scrambling across the floor to grab the receiver. My mother had come for a visit on my tenth birthday, wrapped in a miasma of French perfume, diamonds dripping from her ears, silk dress rustling, bearing brightly wrapped gifts and casually tossing her fur coat over the kitchen chair. She told me that, as I was now a big girl, I could call her Olivia, rather than use the Russian accented mama, as Aunt Tatiana had taught me.

  My father, Paul Davis, who I’ve always been in regular contact with, is a jazz musician, but I inherited not one whiff of musical talent from either of my parents, and so I never even considered following my mother into show business. Instead, I went to business college and worked as a bookkeeper and later a personnel manager for a big department store.

  When Olivia unexpectedly inherited this Catskills resort, she asked me to manage it for her. “What do I know about the hotel business? Or about any business? I trust you, Elizabeth,” she’d said over lunch at the Russian Tea Room. “There are few people in the world about whom I can say this.”

  Her caution was well earned: only a few months prior, her third husband, the cursed Jack Montgomery, had fleeced her out of her life’s savings and disappeared.

  I said yes without thinking about it. I didn’t want to be involved that closely in Olivia’s life, but I was bored with my job at the department store, tired of my small walk-up apartment, and my romantic life (what there was of one) was going nowhere.

  How hard could it be, I’d thought, managing an efficient, well-run, well-established hotel?

  Very hard, as it turned out.

  I’d been stuck with the bill for lunch.

  “I didn’t order breakfast for you, dear,” Olivia said. “Shall I?”

  I checked my watch. “No time. I’ll have them bring something to my office. It’s seven now. I need to deliver Winston to Tatiana and check in at the office as to any crisis that’s arisen overnight. Any more crises, I mean. I want to be at the dock when the movie people arrive. Come on, Winston, let’s get you home. Winston? Winston? Where’s the dog?”

  Olivia shrugged. “He must have run outside when the waiter left. You know Winston. He’ll find his own way home. Eventually.”

  Chapter 9

  Matthew might have intended to break the news of Elias’s death to the movie crew, but clearly that wasn’t necessary. The news had traveled, and fast. When I made my way down to the dock, everyone—guests and staff as well as movie people—was talking about nothing else.

  Promptly at eight o’clock, Matthew called for attention and led a short prayer for Elias. He then gave a small speech saying how much the man would be missed. He finished by telling us the filming would continue as planned until he heard otherwise. I peeked out from beneath my half-closed eyelids during the prayer and studied the people who’d gathered.

  Rebecca wept openly. Gloria stood stoic and dry-eyed, next to Olivia, but I read nothing into that. She was enough of a professional to control herself so as to not to ruin her camera-ready makeup. The expression in her eyes told me she was very far away. Onlookers had gathered, both to watch the filming and to hear the news, and some of them cried or shook their heads in dismay. Otherwise, not many people, if any, appeared particularly upset. I’d heard far more people wondering if they were going to be out of a job than commiserating over the death of the director.

  I suppose one doesn’t get to be a three times Academy Award winner by being personally popular.

  Dave Dawson stood at the fringes of the movie set, near the catering table. He was alone, and he spoke to no one, other than to exchange a few words with the Kennelwood staff laying out coffee and Danish.

  Not many of the guests seemed to have noticed him. The chief was excessively thin with long arms and legs that swung in every which direction in a jangly gait. His cheeks were sunken and his nose too large, and he peered at the world through thick eyeglasses. Not exactly a movie image of a policeman, but I suspected the crowd assumed he was an actor, dressed in uniform for a scene.

  “If there’s one thing I know for sure about Elias T. Theropodous, he would want us to carry on working on his final picture,” Matthew said. “Let’s honor him, ladies and gentlemen, by doing the very best work today that we can. Gary Denham worked closely with Elias from the earliest days of this project and he’s more than capable, and willing, to take over. Gary.” With a great flourish Matthew indicated the chair stamped director.