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First a ‘who-done-it?’ party and now arsenic in the elderberry wine and bodies in the window seat.”
    Excited, Connie leaned toward me and gushed, “I bet you’ll never guess who’s going to play one of the old maids.”
    Having just come from a meeting with Richard Holmes and knowing what actress of the right vintage, was currently gracing our town, I didn’t have to be a psychic to make an educated guess. But Holmes had made me swear not to tell a soul, including and especially his wife, that I was investigating Ouspenskaya on his behest or that I had even talked with Holmes about his wife. When I answered, “Lady Cynthia herself,” I didn’t know that I was indeed poaching on Ouspenskaya’s turf.
    “Desdemona Darling,” Connie cried. “And I met her.”
    “No?” I articulated in awe. Buzz may look like Cary Grant, but when it comes to chewing the scenery, Archy has no equal.
    “It’s not for publication, which means not even Lolly knows, and if you breathe a word of this I’ll kill you, Archy McNally.”
    And if I breathe a word of something else, Holmes will kill me. But how long can I hold my breath before an acute lack of oxygen does me in? I found myself in a no-win situation, which is the plight of a discreet inquirer in a town where “show but don’t tell” is a practicing religion.
    “How did Madame snare Desdemona Darling?” I wanted to know.
    “Desdemona and her husband are here for the season and she and Lady C go back to the days before the big war. They both started out as models, you know.”
    Lady C was indeed a model. A unique one, so the story goes. She has a face that could scare the bejesus out of a voodoo witch doctor and a body that could safely be called the forerunner of Viagra.
    “So when Madame told Desdemona about her plans for Buzz,” Connie said, “Desdemona said she would be glad to lend her name to the project.”
    “Has Desdemona Darling met Buzz?” I asked, fearing the worst.
    “Oh, yes, Archy. That’s when she agreed to do the show.”
    I wondered if the board of the Palm Beach Community Theater was aware that those two muses of perpetuity—their patron and star—were hell-bent on turning Arsenic and Old Lace into Desire Under the Poincianas.
    I drove Connie back to Tara and then headed home. Our castle is a tall Tudorish affair on Ocean Boulevard with a leaky copper mansard roof. My suite is on the third floor, so I am the one blessed when the angels weep, as mother once explained rainy days to me when I was just a kid.
    I parked on the graveled turnaround in front of our three-car garage, careful not to block the entrance to the left-hand bay where my father always keeps his big Lexus. The middle space was occupied by an old, wood-paneled Ford station wagon, used mostly for shopping, including numerous trips to nurseries in search of yet another variety of begonia for mother’s garden. Hobo waddled over to give my trouser cuffs a sniff and, satisfied that I was a member of the household, he waddled back to his manse.
    The Ford was missing and I was hoping our housekeeper, Ursi, was out with mother and not Ursi’s husband, Jamie, who was our jack-of-all-trades houseman and the man I wanted to have a word with. If Connie was the doyen chronicler of Palm Beach society, Jamie Olson was her below-stairs counterpart. However, our Jamie was as communicative as Harpo Marx. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of local scandals, past, present and about to occur. His informants were the Palm Beach servants, who enjoyed trading tidbits of gossip about those they served.
    I found our Swedish-born houseman seated in the kitchen, enjoying a mug of black coffee. “Jamie,” I said, taking a seat opposite him at the table, “have you heard of a psychic named Serge Ouspenskaya?”
    “Uh-huh,” he answered.
    “What do you hear?”
    “He might be the real thing.”
    Six words in a row. I was making progress. “Says who?”
    “Max.”
    “Who’s Max,