"Oh, Mr. Dundee!" Carolyn Drake squealed. "You're not going to make us play that awful 'death hand' again, are you?"
They were all crowding about him—the men and women who had been Nita Selim's guests at her last bridge and cocktail party....
"Not only are the bridge tables exactly where they were at this time on the evening of May 24," Dundee answered so significantly that all stopped chattering to listen, "but everything else in the house is precisely as it was then. Fortunately, not even the electricity has been cut off! But to make sure I have forgotten nothing, I wish you would all follow me into Mrs. Selim's bedroom and look for yourselves."
Like sheep, they crowded into the little foyer and on into the bedroom. There stood the big bronze lamp, set squarely in front of the window frame and in a direct line with the musical powder box on dead Nita's dressing table.
At 5:25, Penny Crain, Karen Marshall, Carolyn Drake, and Flora Miles, who had been requisitioned by Dundee to play the part of the murdered woman, were seated at table No. 2, and behind Karen's chair stood Lois Dunlap. Clive Hammond and his new wife were again together in the solarium. But there Dundee's restaging of the original scene in the tragic drama ended. Everyone else, including Lydia Carr and Peter Dunlap, were huddled together in a far corner of the living room.
"Now, Mr. Miles!" Dundee called. "Your cue! Never mind the comedy about 'How's tricks?' Simply go into the dining room, with Mrs. Dunlap, to mix cocktails. You'll find all the ingredients still on the sideboard, exactly as there were when Mrs. Selim sent you to mix drinks on May 24.... And Mrs. Miles, will you, pretending that you are Nita Selim, go to powder your face at Mrs. Selim's dressing-table?"
Her face white and drawn, Flora Miles stumbled from the room, just as her husband, dumb for once with rage, entered the dining room with Lois Dunlap.
Dundee was about to follow the latter two when an interruption occurred. Followed by a plainclothesman, a middle-aged man entered the living room. Tall, broad-shouldered, determined, he strode to the bridge table, his handsome head upflung, his brown eyes fixed upon the widened brown eyes of Penny Crain.
"Dad!" the girl breathed; then, joyously: "Oh, Dad! You've come home!"