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cup with laudanum powder and a dropper lay out on a tray in the kitchen all through the afternoon and
night, providing ample opportunity for anyone within the household to add anything they chose. And
in the morning, hot water was poured over the powder, as indeed must have happened every day.
Rose was evidently the one who used the dropper, to put as much of the mixture as she required in her
morning cup of tea. She dosed herself, to put it another way.”
Emma nodded and turned back to Sang. “What would happen to the cup with the
laudanum mixture after Mrs. Weaver had her breakfast? Who would wash the cup?”
Felix said something to the cook who said something to the maid. The maid said
something to the cook who turned and repeated it to Felix. Emma waited.
“The cup would sit unwashed on its tray until nurse come back,” Felix said. “Only nurse
touch cup.”
“But Adelaide’s fingerprints were the only ones not on the drawer knob,” Geraldine
said. “If they are telling us the truth it would seem hers would have been the only ones we found
there.”
“Unless she wore gloves,” Emma mused. “But would she be that clever? Fingerprinting
is scarcely known in Europe and Tom said even the ranking officers were hesitant to try the technique
here.” She turned back to Felix. “Ask them if, at times, the Secretary-General and Sang would take a
dropperful of the laudanum as well.”
But this time the chain of translation was unnecessary.
“Lady take in morning,” Felix said with confidence, not bothering to confirm this
information with the women. “Then Uncle in kitchen when he had his breakfast. Just a “- and here he
made the pinching motion which Emma was coming to understand was the new symbol for murder –
“and then cup sit until Sahib Weaver come home. He take also, if he please, and then nurse wash cup
when she come in afternoon.”
Emma sank back uncertainly against the table while the nurse and cook stood watching
her with wide solemn eyes. “But it would seem this flies in the face of Trevor’s theory,” she said to
Geraldine. “The theory we’ve all been working under, at least unofficially, for the last two days. For
if the killer knew that Anthony Weaver was customarily the last one to partake of the laudanum, he
was likely not the target.”
***
The Khajuraho Temple
3:50 PM
“Come in, my dear,” Miss Hoffman said. “There is no one here to frighten you.”
Adelaide slowly made her way into the kitchen of the schoolhouse. It was a makeshift
affair to be sure, for Hindu temples customarily do not have kitchens. In fact, the entire operation of
the school was a tribute to one woman’s unfailing ability to improvise, for Leigh Anne Hoffman had
created a dormitory fit for a group of young girls from a high-ceilinged prayer room and classrooms
from porches. This kitchen had once been a storage shed and the working vegetable garden beyond it
had been full of statuary. After being assured by a visiting Cambridge professor that the art within the
courtyard was mundane, Leigh Anne had used a rope and her own body weight to topple the Hindu
deities, one by one. The concrete bases where they once had stood surveying their realm still existed
among the neat rows of peas, potatoes, beets, and carrots. The girls now perched on them to water
the garden, keeping their feet from the mud and looking like small goddesses themselves.
“Come in,” Miss Hoffman repeated. “Take up a knife, will you, dear? And start on the