This is your life, Livingston thought as he asked for and received a pass to visit the ailing Penelope. Scratching his neck, he rushed to the lift. If I’d sat in that lobby for ten thousand hours, I’d have turned into a life-sized hive, he thought.

Penelope Atwater was in room 210. If possible, Livingston decided, she looked worse today than she had last evening. As he drew up a chair to the bed, he felt genuinely remorseful that he had to question her. When she breathed in his direction he also felt sorry for himself. He waited patiently as in response to his inquiry about how she felt, she flooded him with precise and unwanted information. “But,” she croaked, “at least I’m alive, which is more than I can say for my sweet old roommate.”

Livingston glanced at the stripped bed under the window. “I’d assumed she’d been discharged.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Penelope belched. “Oh, beg your pardon.”

“Hmmm, yes, of course.” Livingston turned to the business at hand. “Miss Atwater, I do hate to trouble you, but you seem so absolutely sure there was no possibility that you might have mistakenly included arsenic as an ingredient in your hors d’oeuvres.”

“I call them my tasty pasties,” she quavered.

“Quite so. Now if my notes are correct, you took the remaining ... er ... tasty pasties up to your room. That would suggest that since they all came from the same batch, if they had been completely eaten by the guests on either Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon, someone else would have gotten ill. The fact that only you became ill after bringing the leftovers to your room is rather odd.”

Livingston pulled out his notebook and flipped the pages rapidly. “You did not feel particularly well Saturday night but recovered enough to enjoy more tasty pasties on Sunday afternoon as well as a normal dinner.”

“Oh yes.” Atwater’s eyes brightened. “For Sunday dinner, after you and the young ladies left, Lady Exner and Val and Philip and I enjoyed some bangers and mash. You see, Saturday night I had really just a touch of normal distress which accompanies a delicate constitution. Sunday night was entirely different. It wasn’t until I went up to my room and treated myself to the last of the tasty pasties on my bedside table that I became violently ill.”

Livingston looked up sharply. “I understood that you brought the remaining tasty pasties up with you when you retired Sunday evening. Are you saying that you had left them in your room earlier?”

Penelope looked guilty. “You see, they go over so well and I was afraid the girls would eat them all up, so, when I excused myself for a moment, I slipped six or seven of them in a napkin and took them to my room.”

“So they were in your room for anyone to see most of the afternoon and evening?”