“My God,” Dakin Littlefield said. “They must all have webbed feet.”

“Or royal blood,” Nigel said. “The Cobbetts show about the same degree of inbreeding as the crowned heads of Europe.”

Orris, I’d written down, and now I wrote Cobbett after it. I looked at the name for a moment and then put a checkmark alongside it. I didn’t much like the way that looked, but decided that crossing it out would be even worse.

“Is that all?” I asked Nigel. “I know there are sometimes people behind the scenes whom one never sees, but who keep things running smoothly. Is there anyone else on staff I’ve left out?”

“I’m afraid that’s the lot,” he said. “We all work hard, you see, and put in long hours, so it doesn’t require very many of us.”

“Of course there’s Cook,” Cissy put in.

“Oh, yes,” Nigel said. “Quite right. Mustn’t forget Cook.”

I scanned the room. She’d been among us earlier, a comfortingly stout woman of a certain age who’d taken a glass of sherry and refilled it twice that I’d noticed.

“I don’t see her,” I said.

“I expect she’s gone to the kitchen.”

“But everyone’s supposed to stay right here.”

“I expect she slipped out before we decided that,” Nigel said, “or else she didn’t consider that rule as applying to herself.”

“Cooks are a law unto themselves,” the colonel agreed.

“She’d be preparing lunch now,” Cissy said. “I know it must seem as though we just got up from breakfast, but it’s been longer than that, actually, and she has lunch to prepare. I’d hate to call her away from the kitchen.”

Miss Dinmont wanted to know if she was alone in the kitchen. Because, she pointed out, we’d just agreed that no one was to be alone.

“It’s a bit different for Cook,” Nigel said. “She doesn’t much care for company in the kitchen.”

“And I’m sure she’ll be safe in there,” Cissy said. “Since we’re all out here, aren’t we?”

That brought another brief silence, reminding us that the “we” in that sentence presumably included the murderer. You’d think we’d have gotten used to the idea, but it kept taking us by surprise and bringing us up short.

“I’ll just put her on the list then,” I said. “I don’t believe I caught her name.”

Nigel and Cissy exchanged glances. “We just call her ‘Cook,’” Cissy said.

“She must have a name.”

“Of course,” she said, “but I can’t think what it is. Molly? Earlene?”

“Just ‘Cook,’ mum.”

“‘Cook’ is all, mum.”

“She has a name,” Nigel said. “I could look it up, but…”

“Not now,” I said, and wrote Cook on my list, then looked up. “I don’t suppose her name would be Cobbett,” I said. “Or would it?”

Nigel shook his head, and Molly assured me that Cook was no Cobbett, nor any kind of kin to Cobbetts.

“Just a wild guess,” I said. “And that’s all for the owners and staff of Cuttleford House? Now for the guests.”

Bernard Rhodenbarr.

Carolyn Kaiser.

Gregory Savage.

Leona Savage.

Millicent Savage.

Anne Hardesty.

Gloria Dinmont.

“I wonder,” Miss Dinmont said. “I don’t suppose I should say this, but…” She paused significantly and looked around. When no one urged her to go ahead and say it, she shot a peeved glance at her companion.

“Perhaps you should,” Miss Hardesty said obligingly.

“Well, I was just wondering. Of course the cook will be quite safe in the kitchen, if all the rest of us are out here, the murderer included. But what if the murderer is not included?”

“How could that be?” Colonel Blount-Buller demanded. “If we’re here, and if the killer is one of us-”

“Unless it’s the cook,” Miss Dinmont said, and lowered her eyes. “I’m sure I’m just a foolish woman.”

Dakin Littlefield rolled his eyes at that, while Leona Savage closed hers. The colonel said he somehow doubted that Cook was the sort to club and smother a man, then dash about cutting phone lines and bridge supports and destroying snowblowers.

“Of course she’d have no trouble getting sugar,” Greg Savage said. “There must be an abundant supply in the larder. She could have helped herself to a cup of it, and a funnel to channel it into the snowblower’s gas tank.”

“Anyone who walked into the kitchen could get all the sugar he wanted,” Nigel said, “and there are sugar bowls on all the tables in the breakfast and dining rooms as well. As for a funnel, well, how hard is it to pour sugar into a gas tank?” No one admitted to personal knowledge of the degree of difficulty of such an act. “In any event,” he said, “I’m sure she wouldn’t do any such thing.”

“How can you say that?” Miss Dinmont wondered. “You don’t even know her name.”

“And do you really want to check her off the list of possible murderers?” Gordon Wolpert asked. “Because if we start eliminating people like a trial lawyer issuing peremptory challenges, we’ll very quickly eliminate everyone. What you’re saying, Eglantine, is that the cook’s not the sort to commit murder. Well, neither is anyone else in this house, I’m sure. We’re all decent, upstanding people. That’s quite obvious. And I’m afraid it’s every bit as obvious that one of us decent, upstanding people has so far been responsible for two deaths. So I’m going to suggest that no one be eliminated from our working list of persons under suspicion except for cause. There’ll be no peremptory challenges.”

This soaked in, and we all looked at each other again. It seemed to me that I was being eyed with suspicion by some of our party, even as I was eyeing them with suspicion in turn.

“Let’s move on,” I suggested, and brandished my pen and clipboard.

Gordon Wolpert.

Bettina Colibri.

Dakin Littlefield.

Lettice Littlefield.

Col. Edward Blount-Buller.

“I was just thinking,” the colonel put in, “about the cook and her absence. It seemed at first a dangerous violation of a safety procedure almost as soon as we’d initiated it, but in fact it’s really entirely safe.”

“How’s that?” Wolpert asked him.

The colonel cleared his throat. “If the cook is entirely innocent of the crimes that have taken place here, as seems likely, then the killer is one of us. And in that case the cook is in no peril in the kitchen, because all of us are here.”

“Didn’t I say that?” Cissy wondered aloud.

“But,” he went on, “if by some chance the cook is the murderer, then we’re all quite safe. Because we’re here and she’s elsewhere.”

“In the kitchen,” Mrs. Colibri said.

“Quite so.”

“Preparing our lunch.”

The room went very still. Miss Gloria Dinmont broke the silence. “She could poison us all,” she said softly. “We’d drop like flies, never knowing what hit us.”

“Or writhe in agony,” her companion chimed in, “knowing we’d been poisoned, but unable to get hold of the antidote.”

“A tasteless and odorless poison,” Miss Dinmont said.

“A poison that leaves no trace,” said Miss Hardesty.

“Oh, come on,” Carolyn said. “What difference does it makes if the poison leaves a trace or not? If we’re all discovered lying dead all over the house, what do you figure the cops are going to think? That somebody said something so shocking we all popped off with heart attacks?”

“Besides,” young Millicent said, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a poison that doesn’t leave a trace.”

“It seems to me most toxic substances leave some sort of evidence that would show up in an autopsy,” I said, “but you generally have to look for it.”

“How do you know that, Bern?”

I knew it from Quincy reruns on Nick at Nite, but I didn’t want to say that. “We’re out in the country,” I said, “and a rural cop who walked in on a roomful of dead people with no marks on them would probably write it off as carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective furnace.”

“But there’s no central heating.”