The Murder Was Cancelled at Breakfast

How it begins

The note arrived on the breakfast tray between the marmalade and the touring company's railway tickets.

Beyond her window, the house's ornamental peacocks were beginning another morning of announcing things nobody had asked them to report.

MURDER CANCELLED. PLEASE ADVISE ALL CONCERNED.

Leila Venn read it while holding a piece of toast halfway to her mouth.

She had managed productions with worse administrative standards, but none had put it quite so plainly.

"Mr. Dorr?" she called.

The household secretary appeared in the doorway carrying a stack of correspondence.

"Is there a problem?"

"That depends how attached anyone was to the murder."

Leo Dorr took the note. His expression did not change enough.

Outside the breakfast-room windows, gardeners were arranging chairs on the lawn for the evening performance. Leila's company had come to the country house for three nights, one benefit, and what the proprietor described as an intimate gathering of friends. There were twenty-eight guests and very little evidence of friendship.

"A joke, presumably," Leo said.

"Then someone has an unusually efficient sense of humor. This is my cue paper."

She pointed to the small blue line at the edge, cut from a pad she kept in her traveling case.

Leo looked at it again.

From the corridor came the sound of an argument stopping when someone noticed a servant.

Leila put down her toast.

"Who brought the tray?"

"I'll ask."

"And who was meant to be murdered?"

This time, Leo's expression changed.

She had spent fifteen years learning when a pause belonged to a scene and when it meant an actor had forgotten something important. The secretary's silence belonged to neither category.

At the far end of the table, a guest unfolded the morning paper and asked whether tonight's entertainment would begin on time.

Leila looked at the note once more.

"If everyone follows the revised instructions," she said, "we may have a better chance of that."