Dorothy frowned but stepped back and waved us in.
“Celia’s in bed,” Dorothy said.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
“I wish,” Dorothy said. “She’s complaining about her head and her hips and her knees but refusing even an aspirin. If she doesn’t take one soon, I’m going to pick up that ridiculously heavy lamp on her nightstand and finish her off.”
She gave me a pointed look. “I don’t suppose that’s part of the services you provide these days.”
“I’m retired from the killer-for-hire sort of thing,” I said. “It has to be my idea now.”
“Just thought I’d ask,” she said, and waved us down the hall. “Maybe seeing you three will tire her out and she’ll go to sleep. I’ve already been through half a bottle of whiskey and I’m not sure the second half is going to be enough.”
“Celia’s throwing back whiskey?” Gertie asked.
“No,” Dorothy said. “I am.”
“Dorothy, is that you?”
We could hear Celia yelling before we made it halfway down the hall.
“Are you bringing me a snack?” Celia yelled. “I told you I’m starving. And don’t you try to sneak an aspirin in there. I’ll know. Oh—”
She broke off as we stepped into the bedroom and she stared for a moment, confused. Then her eyes widened.
“There was a man!” she said. “He was dead, wasn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
Celia gave Dorothy a dirty look. “I told you there was a dead man in there when you were trying to haul me off to the hospital, but you didn’t believe me. None of you believed me.”
“You’d just hit a wall,” Dorothy said. “You were ranting like a crazy woman, and why in the world would anyone think there was a dead man in the funhouse? The funhouse, I tell you. There’s something very wrong about that.”
Gertie nodded. “Would have been better if he’d been in the House of Horrors. I was thinking about that earlier and—”
“We’re not staging a movie,” Ida Belle said. “It happened the way it happened.”
I looked at Celia, who was still giving Dorothy a dirty look. “Do you remember what you saw in the funhouse?” I asked.
“It comes and goes,” she said, and felt her head at the hairline. “Like when you wake up one morning and there’s pieces of a dream floating around. I touched him, but he was dead. I know how to take a pulse.”
She sounded defensive and still a little confused. But then, the fact that she hadn’t yelled for Dorothy to call the police and have us arrested was the first indication that Celia wasn’t back to her usual snuff.
“I’m sure you do,” I said, reassuringly. “What happened after you checked his pulse?”
“I ran to get help, but I tripped over something on the way,” she said. “I hurt my knees but I just jumped up and kept going. Then I hit that wall. I don’t know how I could have done that.”
“It was made of glass,” I said.
Celia nodded. “Who was he? That man? Do you know?”
“Rupert St. Ives,” I said. “Do you know him?”
She scowled. “Good Lord, unless you were hard of hearing you knew Rupert St. Ives. The most disagreeable man ever placed on earth. I’m not surprised someone killed him.”
“Preach,” Gertie said, and Dorothy gave her a disapproving look.
I studied Celia for a minute, then glanced over at Dorothy, who shook her head. So Dorothy hadn’t told her about Emmaline. I supposed that made sense given the situation. Celia’s thinking was flawed when she was operating at a hundred percent. Dorothy probably saw no point in feeding her information she might not even remember tomorrow morning and that might cause more distress and delay Celia sleeping by even more time. Unfortunately, I needed answers to questions so that half bottle of whiskey wasn’t going to last.
“When you tripped, did you notice what you tripped over?” I asked.
Celia frowned. “No. I guess I didn’t think…”
Her eyes widened. “I think…maybe…was it another body?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was Emmaline.”
Celia gasped. “Emmaline!” She gave Dorothy a dirty look. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because when I called the doctor, he said to keep you quiet and minimize stress,” Dorothy said.
“Please don’t tell me that Emmaline…” Celia’s voice trailed off again.
“She’s alive,” I said. “But unconscious. She’s at the hospital now and Carter and Walter are with her.”
Relief washed over her face. “That’s good. Really good. Emmaline and I might not see eye to eye on some things but she’s a good woman. A righteous woman. We don’t have enough of them in Sinful.”
“Not by your definition,” Gertie grumbled, and Ida Belle elbowed her.
“But what happened to her?” Celia asked. “What happened to that awful St. Ives?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “We were hoping maybe you would remember something that might help.”
“What in the world could I know?” she asked.
“Did you see anyone else in the funhouse?” I prodded. “Someone who went in ahead of you maybe?”
She scrunched her brow in obvious concentration but finally shook her head. “I don’t recall seeing anyone. One of the God’s Wives dared me to go through that mess. Of course, it’s silly and completely beneath a woman of my station, but then they all did it so I wasn’t about to have my own group determine I was a coward.”
“How long after your group went through did you go?” I asked.
“Probably thirty minutes or so,” she said. “I waited for them at the end and they were all raving so much that I knew I was going to have to do it. We took a restroom break first, then went back to the attraction.”
I tried not to show it, but I was disappointed. An entire marching band could have gone through the funhouse in the twenty minutes Celia wasn’t there. And while there were plenty of people milling around, how many of them would have made note of people going into an attraction when the fairgrounds were packed?
“You’re sure you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?” I asked.
“Good heavens, it’s a carnival,” Celia said. “The whole place is out of the ordinary. Some of it ought to be against the law. But no, nothing that indicated someone was going to be murdered.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “We’ll get out of your hair.”
“That’s it?” Dorothy said. “You barge in at an ungodly hour and that’s all you have for us?”
“It couldn’t wait until tomorrow,” I said.
“Why the heck not?” Dorothy asked.
“Because if Celia had seen the perpetrator, he might have crawled through that window later tonight and made use of that ridiculously heavy lamp.”
For probably the first time in their lives, neither Celia nor Dorothy had anything to say.