No Cooperation from the Cat Read Free

her!”
    “He’s not revolting,” Jocasta choked. “And there was nothing wrong with her. Not that anyone knew about. He couldn’t have had any idea that—” The great gulping sobs reclaimed her.
    “What happened to her then?” Dame Cecile demanded. She and Evangeline exchanged an exasperated look. “Was it an automobile accident?”
    “A terrorist attack?” Trust Evangeline to go for the melodramatic option.
    “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome?” Dame Cecile was right behind her.
    “Hugh—a glass of water!” Martha ordered. He rushed to get it.
    “Thank you.” Martha appropriated it before he could offer it to Jocasta. I stepped forward hastily, but was too late to prevent Martha from hurling it into Jocasta’s face.
    “Martha!”
    “She’s hysterical, Mother.” Martha returned the glass to Hugh, who absently refilled it.
    “Easy, Jocasta, easy.” I put an arm around her shoulders and sacrificed one of my favourite scarves towards mopping her up. “Just tell us.”
    “It wasn’t my fault,” she sobbed. “I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even in the room at the time.”
    “Of course you weren’t,” I soothed. “What room? Where? And when? What happened?”
    “She collapsed,” Jocasta said. “It was so fast. There wasn’t anything anyone could do to help her. She died—right at the end of her cooking demonstration at an evening class.”
    “Why?” Evangeline leaped in with the question we all wanted to ask.
    “It—” Jocasta’s hysteria hadn’t abated, it had just changed form. She began to giggle wildly. “It was something she ate!”
    Splash!
    “Martha!” This time I had been included in the sudden deluge.
    “Oops! Sorry, Mother. But you can see—she’s off again.”
    “That’s no reason to drown her. Or me.”
    “I said I was sorry, Mother.” But she wasn’t really, I could tell.
    “Martha … dearest…” She was making Hugh nervous, too. This time he ignored the empty glass she thrust at him.
    “So this other woman—this Melisande—” Martha glared at Jocasta. “Is it true that she was the original choice for my cookbook?”
    “Y-e-e-s…” Jocasta shrank back. “Yes, that’s how we started out … it was all tied together. But she … she died … and … and…”
    “And the show must go on!” Martha was working herself into a fury. “And I was second choice !”
    Oh, dear! Oh, my poor darling Martha. I hadn’t realised that it had rankled so. At the back of my mind, Fanny Brice’s rendition of “Second-Hand Rose” began to play:
    Even … the boy I adore
    had the noive to tell me
    He’d been married before …
    Martha was Hugh’s second wife and, no matter that he and the first one had been divorced before he met Martha and the unfortunate woman subsequently murdered, it seemed that it had secretly bothered Martha. And now she found out she was second choice for the cookbook, too.
    “Martha—” Hugh hadn’t realised it, either. “Darling—” He stepped forward and tried to embrace her, but she moved away.
    “You might have told me!” she accused him.
    “How was I to know?” The injustice clearly stung. “You can’t imagine I’d be able to keep up with every piece of fringe activity in the business.”
    Uh oh—wrong again, Hugh. But when Martha gets into this mood, there’s no way any of us can say the right thing.
    “Naturally, we kept it as quiet as we could.” Indignation was doing a better job of drying Jocasta’s tears than sympathy.
    “The book was still in the early stages, so it was only known about in-house. Publicity hadn’t started yet, so the media couldn’t latch onto any story about the editor of a cookbook being killed by one of her own recipes. Naturally, her name will never appear on the book now.”
    “Recipes!” Martha wasn’t letting Jocasta off the hook. “Yes, I noticed that we had some recipes already tested, but I was fool enough to assume that you had been doing some preliminary work