Murder in Wonderland Read Online Free PDF Page B

in time. The coffee table was still askew. The cups and saucers were haphazard—some were tipped, others were on the floor, the rug awash in spilled tea. She needed salt and club soda to clean those stains, and a lint-free cloth, one that wouldn't leave any bits behind.
                  She went to her everything closet. It was its usual jumbled mess of odds and ends, homeless tchotchkes and gadgets. Something caught her eye as she rummaged: a die from an old board game, who knows which. It was translucent red with white dots that had faded somewhat with the years. She turned it over in her hand, and then went to fetch a pad of paper and a pen.
                  The pad was on the fridge. It contained a grocery list in progress. One of the items was honey.
                  She said the word . She knew she'd forgotten to buy it. She tore off the second page and got herself a pen and went to her dining room table. The first thing she did was remove that horrid tablecloth. The eye stared at her judgmentally. She slid her ever-present trivet over it and sat down.
                  She jotted a neat vertical line of numbers 1 through 6. Then she wrote the names of each book club guest next to it, excluding Tori and herself.
                  Don't think , she told herself. Let fate decide. Then she rolled the die.
                  Four.
                  June Brody.
                  What did she know about June, aside from the fact that she'd acted in a few of Del's stage productions? She wasn't terribly good. She knew that. She jotted down the first few things that came to mind: bad actress, cold, distant, jewelry, husband, rich, tired.
                  Why tired? She figured her subconscious knew what it was doing and continued with another roll.
                  Two.
                  Jill/Jenny Metzger without glasses.
                  She pulled out her phone and texted Del: Which Metzger twin wears glasses for God's sake?
                  A half a minute later: Damned if I know.
                  She gave an exasperated sigh and wrote down twin, charity, wealth.
                  Her phone beeped. It was Ben: Jill wears glasses.
                  She laughed, and then remembered something. She added honey beside Jill's name and rolled again.
                  Six. That was for Ben.
                  She sat with her pen hovering above his name, and then scratched it out.
                  She rolled another four.
                  Then a two.
                  Then a six again.
                  This wasn't working.
                  The die was a way of dissociating from her little list of suspects, but Allie Griffin wasn't a machine that could let randomness work for her. To her, understanding randomness was necessary to understand the world, but randomness was also darkness to her, she realized. There was light that needed in. And what good was randomness anyway when you had questions burning you from the inside that needed solid answers that lodged well in well-lit certainty and predictability?
                  She walked over to where the body had lain. She analyzed the tea stains on the rug; around one of them, a little black smudge. She took a mental snapshot of the scene as it lay before her, then froze the image in her mind and started it up like an old film projector. Only she played it backwards. She imagined the table slowly moving back to its normal spot, the appearance of teacups overturned on it, the steam from spilled tea sinking in the air toward their fresh spills on the rug.
                  Then Tori Cardinal's body faded into view, twisted and unnatural.
                  She focused for a moment on the dead woman's hands. In her mind's