“That’s perverse,” Carolyn said.

“The English word for it is ‘eccentric,’” Wolpert said. “He’s got the worst of both worlds, but evidently it works for him. I suppose you could say that he’s like the proverbial fellow with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the other in a bucket of ice water. On the average, he’s perfectly comfortable.”

I wondered what kind of work Gordon Wolpert did that gave him the option of extending his stay. I might have asked, but that would only have invited the same question in return, and I hadn’t yet decided how to respond.

So we talked about some of the other guests instead, and about Cuttleford House and its staff. Wolpert had met the Misses Dinmont and Hardesty, but he hadn’t had much chance to size them up. “The one looks as though she’d be trying to get everybody out on the Great Lawn for field hockey if it weren’t for the snow,” he said. “And the other has a Magic Mountain air about her, doesn’t she?”

“ Magic Mountain?” Carolyn said. “You mean the theme park?”

“The Thomas Mann novel,” I said gently. “The one set at the sanitarium. Do you think Miss Dinmont has TB?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he said. “Not TB, I wouldn’t think, but most likely something else with initials. She just seems to me to have the air of somebody who came here to die.”

I had that sentence echoing in my mind for a while, so I missed most of what he had to say about the Eglantines and the handful of people who worked for them-Orris, a pair of chambermaids, and the cook. We’d met Orris, for all that was worth, and hadn’t yet set eyes on the others, although the cook had made her wondrous presence known.

“Nigel and Cissy Eglantine have made a good thing of this sprawling old pile,” he said. “I don’t know what he did before this, but he certainly has the knack for playing hotelier. I suppose you’ve seen his array of single-malt whiskies.”

“He has quite a collection.”

“I don’t know that you can label a Scotch ‘rare,’ but I gather some of them are the product of distilleries with extremely limited production. There are more varieties than you might imagine. I’d have thought it a confined area of expertise.” His eyes sought mine. “A small field indeed,” he said deliberately. “Nigel has developed quite a palate for them.”

“Oh?”

“Late in the evening,” he said carefully, “or at times of stress, there’s something about him that will remind you of Basil Fawlty. But most of the time he’s the perfect host.” He cocked his head. “Of course, he’s not the first person to make a show of appearing sober when he’s three sheets to the wind. Everybody does it. But it’s a sham, isn’t it?”

“I suppose you could call it that,” I agreed.

“And a petty sham at that,” he said, his eyes on mine. “You could call it that, couldn’t you? A petty sham?”

I gave a noncommittal nod, and it seemed to me that he looked just the slightest bit disappointed.

There were books in the Morning Room, too, and after Gordon Wolpert had left us I picked up one of them and turned its pages. “Frances and Richard Lockridge,” Carolyn read over my shoulder. “Writing about Pam and Jerry North. Maybe we’ll be like Mr. and Mrs. North, Bernie. Isn’t there a book where they go on a vacation?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“And while they’re off somewhere, there’s a murder. And they solve it.”

“I should hope so,” I said, “or otherwise there’s no book.”

“So maybe that’ll happen to us.”

“Maybe what’ll happen to us?”

“Maybe somebody’ll get killed, and we’ll solve it.”

“No one will get killed,” I said. “There won’t be anything to solve.”

“Why’s that, Bern?”

“Because we’re on vacation.”

“So were Mr. and Mrs. North, and then murder took a holiday.”

“Well, this time around murder better take a siesta. I want to kick back and relax, and I want to eat three great meals a day and sleep eight hours a night, and then I want to go home with Raymond Chandler. I don’t want cops poring through my luggage, and that’s exactly what I’ll get if we wind up in the middle of a murder investigation. And why should that happen in the first place? We’re in a perfectly peaceful place with perfectly charming people.”

“That’s how it starts, Bern.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Perfectly nice people, some of them slightly wacky, but all of them well-bred and well-spoken. Some of them may not be what they seem, and a couple of them have a dark secret in their past, and they’re isolated somewhere, and somebody gets killed. And then somebody says, ‘Oh, it must have been some passing tramp who did it, because otherwise it would have to have been one of us, and that’s plainly impossible because we’re all such nice people.’ But guess what, Bern?”

“It’s really one of them?”

“Every last time. And it’s not the butler, either.”

“Well, that part’s right,” I said, “because that’s where Cuttleford’s imitation of an English country house begins to break down. There’s no butler.”

“That doesn’t mean there won’t be a murder.”

“Sure it does,” I said. I closed the Mr. and Mrs. North mystery-hardcover, no dust jacket, spine shaky, some pages dog-eared-and put it back where I’d found it. “I haven’t got time for a murder, not to commit and not to solve. I’m tired. I want to turn in soon and sleep until the snow melts.”

“You can’t sleep, Bern.”

“Want to bet?”

“Even if you want to,” she said. “Remember? You’re going to be up all night. You’ve got a book to find.”

“That’s what you think.”

“You’re giving up? Well, I’m disappointed, but I can’t honestly say I blame you. It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack, except it wouldn’t.”

“I see what you mean.”

“You do?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s the opposite of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It’s more like a needle in a needle stack. Not just any needle, but one particular needle in the midst of all the others.”

“A needlestack,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across one.”

“So? When’s the last time you saw a haystack?”

“I’m sure I wrote it down,” I said, “but I don’t have my notebook with me. What’s the point?”

“The point is every room is crawling with books, and the library alone has more volumes than you’ve got in your store, including the back room. So it may be an easy place to find something to read, but it’s an impossible place to find something specific, even if it’s there to start with, which it probably isn’t.” She took a deep breath. “So I can understand why you’re abandoning the hunt.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“What else? I said you’ve got a book to find, and you said, ‘That’s what you think.’”

“Right.”

“Meaning you’re not going to bother looking.”

“Meaning I don’t have to look.”

She looked at me.

“Meaning I already found it,” I said. “So why shouldn’t I treat myself to a good night’s sleep?”

“The top shelf,” I said. “You see the section closest to the wall?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, it’s the section immediately to the right of it. See the one I mean?”

“I think so,” she whispered. “I don’t want to look directly at it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to arouse suspicion, Bern.”

“We’re in a library,” I said, as indeed we were, having gone there directly from the Morning Room. “Looking at books is a natural occupation in a room like this. And it’s a lot less suspicious to stare right at them than it is to glance furtively.”

“Is that what I was doing? Glancing furtively?”

“Well, it looked furtive to me. I don’t think it made any impression on anybody else because nobody else noticed.”

Not that we were alone. The two guests we’d seen earlier were gone. The intense man with long dark hair who’d been writing letters (or ransom notes, or working out the square root of minus two, for all I knew) was nowhere to be seen, and the older woman (whom Gordon Wolpert had identified as a Mrs. Colibri, a widow of undetermined origin) had gone off as well, leaving The Eustace Diamonds on the table next to the couch. But two others had taken their place. Leona Savage, Millicent’s mother, was reading a Bruce Chatwin travel book and periodically consulting the globe, and a very fat man who’d been introduced to us earlier as Rufus Quilp was dozing in an armchair, with a book open on his ample lap.