Accidents Will Happen - Chapter 1

Accidents Will Happen

Chapter 1

“I need to visit the loo.”

            “Please Roger … these people came to meet you. Not me.” Roger liked to use the word, loo. It sounded more cosmopolitan, he said. Doris Trevellian slid a covert glance toward the tray of hors d'oeuvres a waiter carried as he passed by.

            “Well, nature calls,” he sneered. Roger clamped her fleshy chin in a painful grip. “You can hold down the fort for a few minutes, while I take a pee at least, can’t you? My “wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim’rous beastie.’” He released her and gave her a tiny kiss on the cheek as Conan Farrell, another professor from the university spotted them and waved. 

            Roger liked quoting Robert Burns. Doris became enamored with Burns’ work when she’d been Roger’s student.

 “But as this year’s Pulitzer Prize winning poet, they look to you for insight and inspiration.”

Doris cast another look toward a tray set on a coffee table. It had those little sausage thingies. “Roger…” She turned back to find him making his way through the crowd.

Doris checked her watch. Roger had been gone almost twenty minutes. She sighed and reached for a pink petit four on a cake stand. As she opened her mouth to take a bite, a blood-curdling scream ripped though the room. Doris froze, the delicate sweet falling from her hand. The vanilla cake crumbled, the pink frosting smeared under a man’s loafer heel into the rich Aubusson carpet. People moved like steer in a meat-packing chute toward the wide staircase of the Trevellians’ parlor. Doris edged her way through the crowd, finally coming to stand before the winding staircase.

Her blue eyes wide as a deer caught in headlights, a young woman, stood on the bottom step, a kitchen knife dangling from her hand, her low cut pale blue dress drenched in blood.

Jessica? The eager young student Roger recently accepted as his assistant in writing his next book …

As someone spat directions into their cell phone to 911, Doris found herself pushed back near the cake stand again. She reached for a lemon petit four, topped with a yellow rosebud crafted in icing.

She sank her teeth into its rich sugary heart.

It was delicious. 

Meet the author of this story segment: Pat Iacuzzi is a retired art teacher from the Greece Central School District who writes historical fiction. Presently she's working on a suspense novel which takes place in New York's Mohawk Valley just after the French and Indian War. She hopes you will enjoy the efforts of all the "round robin" authors (her Greece Library writers' group) who took part in this story entitled "Accidents Will Happen."