The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [48]
“You mean I was doped?” he inquired, through chattering teeth. “Really doped? How marvelous!”
Thomas left the boy to the tender mercies of the doctor and Weldon and returned to the drawing room, where the others had reassembled. Joining Jacqueline, who was sitting with Liz, he said, “Percy is himself again. It must have been a mild dose.”
“No harm done except to our nerves,” Jacqueline agreed. That her nerves were indeed affected Thomas deduced by the presence of the purse—large, white, and bulging. She must have gone to her room to fetch it as a child reaches for a furry animal in time of stress. She lifted it to her lap and began to burrow in it with both hands.
“Do you think he took the stuff himself?” she inquired.
Shocked, Thomas silently indicated the presence of the boy’s sister. Liz looked at him. She was dry-eyed and unnaturally calm.
“He might have done,” she said. “He has a bottle of tranquilizers.”
There was a short, uncomfortable silence. Jacqueline continued to burrow. Finally she came up with a battered pack of cigarettes.
“This is the tenth time I’ve failed to quit smoking,” she said, as Thomas took a lighter from the table. “Liz just told me about the tranquilizers.”
“Mother keeps pressing them on him,” the girl said in the same expressionless voice. “She thinks he’s nervy and sensitive. I know he’s a little horror, but…”
“It’s too fashionable these days to blame everything on poor old Mum,” Jacqueline said, blowing out a neatly rounded smoke ring. “That doesn’t mean she isn’t sometimes culpable. But you’re all right.”
Her tone was matter-of-fact. The girl’s face lost some of its pallor. She managed a faint smile.
“I’m okay, you’re okay,” she said. “Sometimes I’m not altogether sure of that.”
She got up and crossed the room to the fireplace, where Frank was standing. He put his arm around her and she leaned against him.
“Well?” Thomas asked.
Jacqueline blew out another smoke ring. The first one had been a fluke; this attempt resembled a mashed doughnut. Jacqueline’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. She tried again, producing a gusty blob with no discernible shape.
“The boy might have drugged himself,” she said. “But that isn’t the most interesting thing about this last incident.”
“What is?” Thomas inquired resignedly.
“You were terrified, weren’t you?”
“You’re damned right I was, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Percy is an obnoxious brat, but I don’t want to see him—”
He broke off, staring at Jacqueline. She looked more enigmatic than usual, thanks to the veil of smoke that obscured her features like the vapor surrounding the pythoness.
“You were scared too,” Thomas said. “Like the rest of us, you expected a catastrophe. And the interesting question is—why did we?”
“Precisely. No one has been hurt or seriously injured. Percy’s absence could have been explained in a number of harmless ways. Yet the moment his mother announced he was not in his room, we panicked.”
“The triumph of instinct over reason,” Thomas said. “God knows the atmosphere around here is thick enough. Darkness, rain, the mournful sighing of the wind, and all that sort of thing—not to mention the shades of dead kings and queens gliding through shadowy halls. We’re haunted by the memories of old murders. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
“How poetic.” But Jacqueline’s tone was affectionate; she smiled at him in a way that made his head spin. Or possibly, Thomas told himself, it was the wine.
“I know what worries me,” he said, “and it isn’t the atmosphere. The joker has taken care not to injure anyone seriously, but what if something goes wrong? What if he picks on someone with a weak heart or an unusual susceptibility to a drug?”
Jacqueline nodded. There wasn’t time for her to comment; they were joined by the