“Right.” Merv wasn't moving. I figured he meant everyone else could leave.
“Why doesn't somebody put on coffee? We can all use it,” I said.
“I'll do that.” Elaine whacked her knee on the door on her way out.
“Alvin, can you give her a hand?”
Lindsay's eyelids fluttered but remained closed. “Merv, can you help Mrs. Parnell down the stairs?”
“I'm staying here.”
“Don't argue. And that goes double for you, Mrs. P.”
I reached over and checked Lindsay's pulse again. It gave me something to do. Lindsay issued a small hopeful sigh. Her colour seemed healthy. Cream, not white.
“So what's happening?” I whispered to McCracken. “Any leads on Benning?”
Mombourquette raised an eyebrow at McCracken. McCracken shook his head. I studied them.
“Don't worry about me, boys, I have all the time in the world. I wish I could say the same for Lindsay here. But take your time, no need to get off your butts and put Benning back where you should have kept him in the first place.”
Okay, so I couldn't really blame them for Benning's rampage. But when you wake up kissing Alvin's foot, it gets your day off to a bad start.
“You haven't heard?” Mombourquette snorted, and McCracken fired him a warning glance.
“Heard what?”
“We found him.”
“And he's back where he belongs?”
“You could say that.” Even at the best of times, I find Mombourquette's smirk hard to take.
“Lennie,” McCracken growled.
“You might say we have him on ice.” Light twinkled off Mombourquette's pointed incisors.
“Careful, Len.”
“High time, if you don't mind me saying so. I hope you can keep him behind bars this time.”
“Camilla.” McCracken doesn't usually call me by name, but this wedding thing had softened his brain.
“Forever would not be too long.”
“He'll have forever.” Mombourquette's tail twitched with amusement. A slight movement from the bed distracted me. Lindsay's eyes opened wide. “And then some,” Mombourquette said.
“I guess you haven't turned on your radio,” McCracken said.
* * *
They all thundered back up the stairs and crowded into her room as soon as Lindsay began to sob.
“C'mon, folks, give the lady some air.” McCracken pushed us all back into the hallway, closed the bedroom door and stood guard.
I thought Merv would punch him out, with Alvin's assistance. I hoped this unholy alliance would not endure past the immediate emotional situation.
“What have you done to that girl?” Mrs. Parnell pulled herself up to her full height, slightly more than Mombourquette's. She raised her steel-tipped cane, to steady herself I suppose, and accidentally brought it down on his instep.
Lucky for us the paramedics arrived.
Ten
Elaine screamed. When she stopped screaming, she said, “No, I refuse to believe it.”
“Please.” I put a soothing hand on her shoulder. “We don't all have to get hysterical.” She jumped away.
It had taken the better part of an hour to get the paramedics out of the house, to make sure Lindsay was safe and sleeping and to get the rest of the circus downstairs where it belonged. Mombourquette stayed, but you can't have everything.
And Elaine, of all the unlikely people, kept screaming. “Easy for you, Camilla, you didn't even work on it. Holy moly. It's not possible. It couldn't happen.”
“Well, it did.”
“Listen, I was there,” she said. “I worked on that sculpture. There's no way Benning's body could have been in it. Ice is translucent, you couldn't fail to notice a dead body. It was a stunning figure of Justice, by the way, for those of you who were too wimpy to make it to the volunteer team because of inclement weather.”
I put out my hand to steady Alvin. “Let it go, Elaine. You know exactly where we were.”
“Wicked,” Alvin said. “I sure would have liked to have seen that body. Is it still there?”
“Alvin.” I tried to inject a fearsome warning note into my voice. As much as I'd hated and feared Benning, I didn't feel comfortable with his body as a spectacle.
Merv liked the idea too. “Frozen solid, serves the bastard right.”
“What is wrong with you people? I was there! I saw the block of ice. With absolutely no dead body in it. Nothing but ice, ice, ice. Ice all the way. You can see through ice, you know.” Elaine banged on the kitchen table.
“There's a body in it now.” Since there were people in the room who didn't hate Mombourquette, he'd have to keep being himself until they did. Wouldn't take long.
“But there wasn't last night.” Elaine had trouble with the central idea of the body in the sculpture.
“Nevertheless, transport would have been the issue,” Mrs. Parnell said. She jammed another Benson and Hedges into her ebony holder and flicked her silver lighter.
“Transport? Do you think we would have transported him?” Elaine gripped the side of the table and shrieked.
“Takes a certain amount of strength to lift a man, unconscious or dead, never mind encased in ice. Of course, a dolly could make it possible, even for a woman.” Mrs. Parnell let out a two-foot curl of smoke that tickled my nostrils. “Could do it myself on a good day.”
Elaine issued a strangled sound. “Unconscious? No, not unconscious. Oh, God. No, that's too awful.”
I gave Mrs. Parnell a look she shouldn't have recovered from. Not that she noticed. “I'm sure he was already dead,” I said.
“Oh, wow,” Alvin said. “He would have died from exposure. He had that coming.”
“Shut up,” I said.
Elaine started to hyperventilate.
“Sit down and put your head between your knees,” I said. “And listen to me. He would not have died of exposure.” I don't know why I felt such utter certainty. The pathologist probably hadn't even laid his latex pinky on Benning yet.
“Consider this,” Mrs. Parnell said. “If he were unconscious, that would make it murder.”
“But.” Elaine paused for breath between each word. “It's. Not. Possible. Not in our ice sculpture. It must have been some other one.”
“Trust me, it was your sculpture. There's no doubt about that,” McCracken said. “We won't know what happened to him for a while yet. It takes time for the results of the PM to come back. Then we'll see.”
“PM. That's a Post Mortem,” Mrs. Parnell said with an air of authority. “You can learn a lot from those things.”
“I think I'm going to be sick,” Elaine said.
“You are going to be fine.” I turned so my back blocked Mrs. Parnell from Elaine's view. “This is a ghastly end to a terrible series of events. Unfortunately, it ended in murder, however…”
“However, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”
“Alvin! This is no laughing matter.”
“Look, Elaine, don't