Case file
The King Cake
The premise
New Orleans, the sixth of January, 1926 — Twelfth Night, the first ball of the carnival season. For forty years the Krewe of the Golden Bough has opened the season the same way: the same hall at the St. Aurelius Hotel, the same midnight rite. The captain cuts the king cake and takes the first slice by right. Somewhere in the cake waits the golden bean. The girl who finds it in her slice is queen of the season.
Last night the rite ran as it has always run. At 00:00 Colonel Hector Vane, captain of the krewe, cut the cake and ate the captain's slice. At 00:05 the bean named its queen. At 00:20 he left the floor, saying the heat had got into him. At 02:30 the floor committee found him in the robing room. At 03:00 the doctor they fetched lifted the glass at his elbow, smelled it, and said one word: almonds. Prussic acid. Poison — at the krewe's own table.
Carnival is carnival: the police captain owes this krewe forty years of favors, and his men arrive at 09:00, not one minute before. The hall doors are shut. You have three rounds.
Who is at the table
Everyone introduces themselves with one public line before a word is said. Nothing below is a clue — this is only what the whole table already knows.
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Prosper Delery
Lieutenant of the krewe for eleven seasons — the man who keeps the books, the keys and the order of the rite. If the captain is the krewe's face, Delery is its hands.
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Adele Sarpy
The captain's elder sister, widowed young and returned to run her brother's house. For thirty years no plate has reached Hector Vane that she has not looked at first.
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Gaspard Fontenot
Banquet steward of the St. Aurelius, and the man the krewe trusts with the wine the law says does not exist. Every ball he runs is served twice: once on the menu, once off it.
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Ottilie Renshaw
The banker's daughter who found the golden bean in her slice at five past midnight. The season's queen — crowned on the one night she had other plans for.
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Elias Broussard
Leader of the twelve-piece that has played the Golden Bough's balls for six seasons. From the bandstand he watches four hundred masks the way a pilot watches water.
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Sylvie Charbonneau
Third generation of the Charbonneau bakery on Chartres Street, which has made the Golden Bough's king cake for forty years. This was her first season with the ovens hers alone.
Where you are
The hall of the St. Aurelius: the ballroom floor, the bandstand, the supper room, the service pantry — locked, for reasons the law would understand — and the robing room where the krewe keeps its crowns. Four hundred masks went home at 02:00; the six of you are in the floor committee's book from midnight to the finding. The cake stood on its table from 23:40, sealed in the bakery's box until the captain's own knife opened it. The season is one night old.
Everyone at the table gets a character, three cards and one rule: you may hide things, you may not invent them. Between the acts a dossier appears on every phone with a new fact about somebody in the room — and it never clears anyone.
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