At the Table
Six people, four cups of tea, one bottle of wine, and a paperback about a woman poisoned at her own birthday dinner. Book club met at Katarina’s apartment because Katarina had the biggest table, and because she was the one who kept the list of who had chosen what.
The argument started before anyone sat down.
“It’s cheating,” said the neighbor from the third floor. He had read the last thirty pages twice, standing up in the doorway with his coat still on. “On page eleven the narrator tells us nobody touched the glass. Then on page three hundred, somebody touched the glass. That’s not a twist. That’s a different book.”
“Read page eleven again,” Katarina said.
He found it and read it out. “Nobody at the table touched her glass.”
“At the table,” Katarina said. “The man who went to answer the door wasn’t at the table. He was in the hall for four minutes, and her glass was on the corner nearest the hall.”
The room went quiet in a way that book club rooms rarely do. Then everybody started talking at once, and it split into two camps almost immediately: the people who felt the trick was fair, and the people who felt they had been lied to.
“A detective story is a game,” said the woman who had hosted the month before. “The writer takes a risk and hides the key in plain sight. This one hid it in a preposition. That’s the best kind.”
“It’s not a game if only the writer knows the rules,” the neighbor said. He had taken his coat off now, which Katarina read as a bad sign.
For twenty minutes they argued about what a reader is owed. Somebody said it was only a book, and that made it worse. Somebody else said the poison was described wrong, that the timing in chapter nine was medically impossible, and three people started looking things up on their phones.
Katarina let it run. Then she went to the shelf and came back with a thinner, older paperback by the same writer, and put it on the table between the cookies and the wine.
“I knew on page sixty,” she said. “Not because of the preposition. Because she did exactly the same trick in this one, twenty years ago. Same four minutes, same door.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“So the clue wasn’t in our book at all,” the neighbor said, slowly.
“No,” Katarina said. “It was in her other one.”
He picked it up and turned it over. Then he looked around the table, and somebody was already writing the title down.
“Next month,” he said.