A Catered Christmas. Isis Crawford

there seems to be a problem.” Bernie pointed to Hortense. No one looked down. “What are you going to do for your hostess? Prop her up, attach some strings to her arms and mouth, and have someone move them?”

      “That’s disgusting,” Consuela cried as Brittany Saperstein’s cell went off again. “Show some respect for the dead.”

      “I’m trying to,” Bernie said as Brittany answered her call.

      “You won’t believe what happened,” Brittany said into her cell.

      “I’ve had it with that,” Estes roared as he made a grab for Brittany’s phone.

      Brittany feinted, took a step back, and almost tripped over Hortense. “I have to go,” she told the person on the other end of the line. “I have a situation here I have to deal with.”

      “A situation?” Estes growled. “Is that what you’d call this?”

      Brittany put her hands on her hips.

      “Well, what would you call it?” she demanded.

      “A catastrophe,” Estes replied.

      “Same thing,” Brittany said.

      “No, it’s not,” Estes replied. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

      “I have to agree with Estes on this,” Bernie said.

      “Who cares?” Brittany retorted.

      Bernie pointed to herself. “I do.”

      Consuela gave the gold chain around her neck a tug. “What I want to know,” she said, “is what are we going to do about it?”

      “Yes,” Jean La Croix repeated. “What are we going to do?”

      “I’m trying to tell you,” Estes said.

      “So,” La Croix said, “we are waiting.”

      “We have a problem, and we’re going to solve it. As I’ve been trying to say for the last five minutes, Eric will take her place.”

      Eric’s thumb stopped in midpress of one of the numbers on his cell phone keypad. His head popped up. “I will?” he croaked.

      “You’ve always told me you wanted to, haven’t you?” Estes asked.

      Eric lowered the phone to his side. “Well"—Eric began when Estes cut him off.

      “In fact, I’ve overheard you say any number of times that you could do a better job than Hortense.”

      “I never said that,” Eric stammered.

      “You most certainly did.”

      La Croix stepped forward. “So, Eric, are you going to let me use my pans?”

      “I don’t know,” Eric stammered. “It’s not my—”

      “And I need my knives,” Pearl added.

      Consuela crossed her arms over her chest.

      “If they get to use their things, then I want to use my special salt,” she said.

      Bernie decided that Eric was acquiring that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look.

      Estes stroked his chin. “So, Eric, who are you calling?” Estes asked him.

      Eric bit his lip.

      “Well?” Estes said. “Are you calling the New York Post? The National Enquirer? Your grandmother? Your nephew? Who?”

      “No,” Eric yelped. “I was calling Bree Nottingham.”

      Bernie watched Estes nod his head. The effect was somewhat like one rubber ball hitting the other. He rubbed his hands together.

      “That’s the first decent suggestion I’ve heard in the last ten minutes,” he said. “Bree will know what to do.”

      Libby groaned.

      “I think I feel sick.”

      Bernie took a good look at her sister. In the last ten minutes, the green in her complexion seemed to have mutated from lime to olive.

      “Do you want a drink?” Bernie asked her. They had to have alcohol somewhere around here, and heaven only knows she could use one herself.

      Libby shook her head.

      “A cookie?”

      Libby shook her head again.

      “You sure?” Libby refusing a cookie? Now things were serious.

      “I think I need to lie down.”

      Bernie was leading her out of the room when Libby turned her head and leaned over. Bernie jumped out of the way, but it was too late. Libby had barfed all over her pink suede wedges.

       Chapter 6

      Libby rinsed her mouth out with tap water again, then looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She still looked green. Why did she have such a weak stomach? No one else had puked at the crime scene but her. No one else had made a spectacle of themselves, that was for sure.

      She should have gotten some air when she felt herself going queasy, not tried to tough it out. But oh no. Now she was going to owe Bernie for a new pair of shoes. Why couldn’t she have thrown up on the floor, for heaven’s sake? It would have been cheaper—both financially and emotionally, Libby reflected. She patted her hair in place and went outside.

      As she stepped into the hallway, something that Bernie had said to her when she’d been working in L.A. struck her.

      “Never underestimate the power of stardust on civilians,” Bernie had said. “Proximity to television and movies makes people do nutty things.”

      Libby had told her she was the one who was nuts, but given what was happening, she was beginning to think her sister had been right. Or maybe it was the power of Bree Nottingham, real estate agent extraordinaire, who was responsible for the fact that they were going on the air in a little over an hour. Bree. Just the idea that she was waiting for her made Libby cringe. The only good thing was that Bree hadn’t seen her throwing up.

      “There you are,” Bree said as Libby reentered the room. “Are you feeling better?” she asked.

      “She’s fine,” Bernie said. “Aren’t you, Libby?”

      “Yes,” Libby said in as positive a voice as she could manage.

      Looking at Bree now, resplendent in her black and white tweed Chanel suit and black Manolo Blahnik stiletto boots, Libby was once again struck by her ability to engineer any situation with the aid of those indispensable aids to modern life—her BlackBerry and her cell phone. It was why she was who she was.

      From her experience, Libby would have bet anything that once the police were called, a predictable sequence of events would follow. The police would arrive, the rooms would be taped shut until the forensic team had completed their investigation, people would be interviewed, and the station would be showing a rerun of the Hortense Calabash Show this evening.

      But that’s not what had occurred, no sirree bob, not by a long shot, as her mother had liked to say. Bree had taken one look at Hortense’s body, briskly stepped back out of the test kitchen, whipped out her cell, and summoned the Longely chief of police, Lucas Broad, to Hortense’s estate.

      Libby didn’t know what Bree had said to him, because after she’d said something about “my people,” Bree had walked away, and Libby hadn’t been able to hear the rest of the conversation, although not from want of trying, she had to admit. But whatever Bree had said, she and Bernie agreed it had certainly been effective.

      Fifteen minutes later, there was Old Lucy, as her father called him, studying the scene of the “tragic