Part one
It was around six-fifteen in the morning. The trees, the ground, the grass, and the windows of the car were still dripping wet from the thunderstorm which had ended after four-thirty.
There were three of us in the car, and we were waiting for a road to appear so we could proceed.
The driver – the owner of the rusty white station wagon – was named Mary Sanders. She was a college student, and she was the reason for our being there. She was slim and blonde, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans.
I was in the passenger seat, and, in the back seat, frowning, with her arms folded, was my employer, Jan Sleet.
There were several reasons for my employer's rather dark mood:
My employer suddenly leaned forward and pointed. "It looks like some people are as eager to get off the island as we are to visit it."
"That's not surprising," Mary said. "With the storm, and the power and the phones out all night..." She leaned forward also, her voice trailing off, then she reached across to the glove compartment, popped it open, and took out a pair of binoculars.
I heard my employer grunt at the convenience of binoculars suddenly appearing when needed, but I found out later that one of Mary's housemates was enthusiastic about "birding" at a nearby wildlife sanctuary.
"I see Jo," Mary said. "Waiting to get off the island." She put the binoculars away. "We'll have to let the other cars come this way first, before we go across. That's the rule – it's only a one-lane road." She started the car and backed up out of the way.
When the water was down to just an inch or so, revealing the narrow dirt road through the marsh to the island, the first car started to cross toward us. It was the blue sedan that Mary had identified as belonging to one of her housemates. Mary got out of the car and waved, making sure that Jo saw her and didn't just drive past us.
Jo's car pulled into a space on the far side of the road and two women got out. They looked very upset and one nearly bolted across the road to our side, even though cars were passing (very slowly) between us.
My employer looked across at the other car and motioned to me. I quickly got out, opened her door, and helped her to her feet. She was so impatient that she almost slipped on the muddy ground, but I steadied her and we moved to the side of the road, next to Mary.
I could tell that my employer was thinking about barging into the middle of the road, relying on an imperious gesture to stop the traffic, but she glanced at me and I shook my head. Whatever had happened, she could wait another forty-five seconds to find out what it was.
Then the last car passed and the two women rushed across to us.
"He's dead! Stabbed!" the taller one blurted out to Mary. "Knifed! And we– The phones are out–"
"Please," my employer said, stepping forward, "I am Jan Sleet–"
"You're Jan Sleet!" the shorter woman said. She'd been driving, so I assumed she was Jo.
"The sleuth, yes. First, the person who was stabbed – is he alive or dead?"
"Dead, ma'am," the taller woman said. "Some time last night. Becky checked him – she's pre-med – and she said he was stabbed hours ago..." She looked like she was about to cry.
"So, you were not leaving the island in order to obtain medical assistance?"
"We were going to call the police – if we could find a working phone–"
"The phones are out – all over the island – and the power–"
My employer held up her hand, and I knew what was coming. And, I had to admit, it did make sense.
"The police do have to be called, obviously," she said, "but you don't have to call them. This is Marshall, my assistant, and he will go and make a preliminary report from the first available telephone.
"Meanwhile, the rest of us will go to the house and I will start to ask questions. To help the police, of course. And I'll take charge of the crime scene and the evidence."
She glanced at me, and we both smiled. I had no counter-argument, and she knew it.
She turned to Mary. "We can go back with your friends. Please give Marshall your car keys."
Mary looked somewhat stunned. She nodded and reached into her pocket, pulling out a ring that held several keys, a whistle, a very small plastic teddy bear, and a tag with her name and phone number on it.
I waited for Jo to get the sedan turned around, then she backed up off the road again to let another mainland-bound car pass by, then she pulled out to return to Heron Island.
Part two
I was not going to start knocking on people's doors and asking to use their phones – not when they would hear what I was saying and then probably ask questions that I would not be able to answer, and then possibly start calling their friends and family to spread rumors.
Also, I knew that driving just a few minutes more would get me to the campus of Claremont College, where there were pay phones.
(My employer had said that she was going to take charge of the crime scene until the police arrived, but I knew that she was not going to be impatient for them to actually show up.)
The next question was who to call. It was still early – did Sheriff Rhonda get to her desk this early? Would it be better to call her direct number, which she had given me, or the main number of the police station?
I was definitely not going to call the sheriff at home, because she'd never given me that number. I knew it, although it was unlisted, because we'd been to her house and I'd seen her telephone, but it would have been rude to call it.
The main building at the college was not yet open, but the pay phone in front wasn't being used, so I parked there, in front of a No Parking sign, and called Claremont Police headquarters. I identified myself, named my employer, and said that we'd heard a report of a murder on Heron Island.
I was put on hold for a few moments, then Rhonda picked up.
"Marshall," she said.
"Rhonda."
"You've got a dead body? I thought all the phones on the island were out – we've been getting calls for the last ten minutes."
I thought of commenting that the officer who'd answered my call should have taken more careful notes.
"The phones are out, from what I've heard, and I definitely do not have a dead body, nor have I seen one. I–"
"Where are you now?"
"Pay phone, in front of the Shepherd Building, Claremont College–"
"I'm coming. Wait there."
I calculated how long it would take for her to arrive, factoring in how fast she could drive, and quickly trotted across the road to the cafeteria. I bought a cup of coffee and a doughnut and carried them back to the car as I heard a siren approaching. I got into the car and started it up.
Rhonda frowned as she pulled up next to me. I rolled down my window.
"Your car?" she asked. She glanced at the No Parking sign.
"Nope," I replied. "It belongs to one of the women who lives in the house where the reported murder reportedly took place."
She made a face. "Park it somewhere. Somewhere legal, if possible. You're coming with me."
I'd noticed that Mary's car had a student parking sticker, so I drove it across the road to the lot in front of one of the dorms. I parked it, locked it, and transferred my coffee and doughnut to Rhonda's cruiser.
"Seat belt," she said, and when I was buckled in she pulled out on the road toward Heron Island.
"So," she said, "tell me what you know." She glanced at me. "About the murder." She was not driving fast, and the siren was off.
"A young woman, a college student named Mary Sanders, came to see us last night."
"In the middle of the storm."
"Yes. She wanted us to accompany her back to the house where she lives, on Heron Island, right away – before the tide came in to cover the road."
"She lives in Heron House?"
"Why, Rhonda, however did you know?"
She rolled her eyes. "It's been relatively quiet recently, but in years past, when there were more male students living there, we had to visit on a pretty regular basis. Loud parties, bands playing, excessive drinking, drugs, women mistreated..." She shrugged. "Like the dorms, only even worse.
"The people who live on the island – the other people who live on the island – they really don't like that sort of thing. Anyway, your boss didn't go?"
I shook my head, pretty emphatically. "Stormy night, insufficient inducement, we'd just got settled in for a comfortable evening at home, with good coffee and books to read–"
"And there were no dead bodies."
"Not as far as we knew then."
I wondered, and not for the last time, what would have happened if we had gone to the island with Mary the night before, in the storm, before the island was cut off from the mainland for the night.
When we reached the road to the island – the part which was under water at high tide – there was a car pulling out onto the far end, about to cross the marsh toward us. Rhonda flashed her lights and ran her siren for a moment, and the car backed up to let us cross first.
On the island side, the unpaved road split into three even more primitive roads – basically just pairs of ruts that went into the thick woods in three different directions. I knew which one she should take (I'd found out earlier), but she obviously knew also, so I didn't mention it.
"So," I said as Rhonda drove slowly through the woods, "Just you? Seems like a minimal response to a murder."
"If you say What do I pay taxes for? I'm going to sock you."
I hunched my shoulders and looked appropriately cowed.
"Seriously, we're swamped this morning. The nursing home lost power during the storm, there was a pretty bad accident on the highway, and some other things. Nobody from last night's shift has gone home."
We were going gradually uphill, the crude road winding through thick trees, and then we came upon a house. It was quite large for that area – definitely not a summer cottage. It was two stories, with perhaps an attic above. Rhonda pulled into the parking area, which contained Jo's blue sedan and a small van with the special controls on the steering wheel which are used by people who have limited or no use of their legs.
We stepped out of the car. There was no sign that our arrival had been noticed, although I was sure that it must have been. The morning was completely still except for a slight breeze, and a few rather tentative sounding birds.
Rhonda stepped up on the porch and knocked on the door. I followed, taking a moment to appreciate the pleasant smells of the trees and the ocean. I couldn't see the ocean, but I could tell it was close.
A woman opened the door for us. She was not one of the women who had been in the car earlier – she had long, bushy, red hair and freckles.
"Sheriff," she said. "I'm glad you're here."
She rolled her wheelchair back to allow us to come in. The lights were on, so apparently the electricity had been restored.
Part three
The large deck across the back of Heron House looked like a stage set for some reason – like that moment when the curtain goes up and the actors are all in place, about to start doing things.
There were railings on the open sides, with one small staircase in the left corner. That led to a narrow path which went beside the house to the parking area in front.
Near the staircase, leaning back in a wicker chair with her long legs extended in front of her as if she didn't have a care in the world, was my employer. There was a mug of coffee on the small glass table next to her, and a tiny muffin on a large plate. She was not eating the muffin, but it was in the exact center of the plate. I had the idea that she had carefully positioned it there as part of setting this scene.
Mary, who had brought the case to us the night before, was standing by the edge of the deck, near the center of the long side that overlooked the beach. Two other women, Jo and the taller woman who had been with her on the road, were standing on the far side of the deck from my employer. It appeared that they'd been talking intently, but now they were frozen in silence, apparently because of the sudden arrival of the sheriff.
"Greetings, Rhonda," my employer said with a smile. "The body is down on the beach." She gestured with her cigarette, and then she looked at me. "The staircase is rather steep and appears to be precarious, so it will be interesting to see..."
Her voice trailed off as Rhonda elbowed me in the ribs and jerked her head toward the front of the house. I followed her out.
"I've been here before," she said. "When I was a deputy. The staircase down to the beach is a horror show. I think they keep it just to freak people out, especially the drunks. But there are other ways to get down there. We'll have to cut through the neighbor's property, but she won't complain."
We walked along a narrow path that seemed to be mostly theoretical, tightly hemmed in by pine trees, and she said quietly, "Is she making progress, do you think? Progress she's not ready to share with you, or me?"
I shrugged. "I don't know."
She smiled. "Of course you don't."
We came out of the woods into the yard of a smaller house with a well-trimmed and pleasant lawn. A woman in a sweatshirt, baggy shorts, and beach sandals looked up from some flower beds and stood, apparently startled. "Sheriff–"
Rhonda, not slowing, looking very serious and sheriff-y, breezed past her and led me behind the house.
This house was on a lower bluff than Heron House, so we were closer to the beach, and the path was made of stones, with a rope to hold onto as we made our way down.
On the beach, we walked back toward Heron House. The beach was wide and smooth, about twenty feet down to the edge of the water.
We could see the body as soon as we stepped toward the water. It was a black mound in the almost trackless sand.
Not that the sand was pristine – the high tide and the storm had swept in bracken and dead crabs and some other things that I couldn't identify. This detritus went all the way to the edge of the rise that led up to the houses, indicating, to my inexpert eye, that the high tide the night before had covered the whole beach in this area.
As we got closer to the body, Rhonda gestured at a specific point on the beach, clearly telling me that I was to get that close and no closer. I complied. I knew Rhonda well enough by this point to be able to tell when she was open to teasing, and when she wasn't.
From that vantage point, I was able to see the impressions of footprints between the body and the "staircase" that led up to Heron House. They were the only footprints that I could see.
This was the first time I'd had the opportunity to watch Rhonda examine a body, and she seemed to know what she was doing. She could be pretty breezy when talking about death, at least with me ("So, you've got a body?"), but she was very serious about her actual work.
What I noticed first about the dead man, from my distance, was that he was almost certainly not a college student, and he didn't look like a local. He was probably in his late thirties or early forties, wearing a black suit and a pale blue shirt. He had a small beard and mustache – very neatly trimmed.
He might have been a college professor, and I reflected that he was probably the only person on Heron Island in a suit and tie – other than my employer, of course.
His outfit wasn't up to her standards, though. His black suit jacket had silver threads throughout, but it looked cheap and tacky, even apart from the damage it had taken from being on the beach during a rainstorm. It was the sort of jacket that looks more impressive on a stage than it does in real life.
I had a sudden tightness in my throat. I'd had the same sensation almost exactly a year before, in another country, and it had led me to shove my employer into a ditch, saving her life from a sniper's bullet.
I looked up, and I saw someone on the Heron House deck, leaning over the railing and watching us with binoculars.
Part four
Once she'd finished her surveillance of the situation on the beach below, my employer had put down the binoculars, resumed her seat, finished her coffee, and, as far as I could tell, eaten her tiny muffin. In any case, by the time I made it back up to Heron House, the muffin was gone, and she was alone on the deck. If she had eaten the muffin herself, then something must have been going in a direction that pleased her.
(I'd again traveled by way of the neighbor's yard – the stairs had looked even more intimidating from the beach than they had from the deck.)
The next few hours were pretty standard. Rhonda made a series of phone calls, and an ambulance had arrived quickly, followed by deputies and a photographer.
My employer relocated to the front room and watched all of the activity with interest. She was almost completely motionless, looking out through the window, except for occasional forays back to the deck to reacquaint herself with the situation down on the beach. But then, when the dead man's body was on the front lawn, covered with a tarpaulin, she quickly got to her feet, limped outside, and kneeled to examine the body.
The deputy who was apparently in charge protested, and she stood and told him to check with his boss, the sheriff, if he had any doubts about her authority in this matter. She did not say, explicitly, that she had permission to make an examination of the body, but she strongly implied it. He seemed unsure, and she gestured impatiently, looking stern. He must have been impressed by all this, because he scurried off, rather than simply using the radio on his belt.
By the time Rhonda came up to see what was going on, the body had been loaded onto the ambulance, which was gone. My employer was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette, looking once again as if she was having a very pleasant morning, thanks so much for asking.
The sheriff looked around. "Where is everybody?"
"Inside, probably in the kitchen," my employer said. "Something was mentioned about breakfast."
Rhonda nodded. "We're going to start interviewing the residents now. I want to talk to you, also – to find out why you're here – but that will be after the others. If you don't want to stick around – if you'd like to go and get some breakfast yourself – I could stop by your place later..."
Her voice trailed off because my employer was still smiling.
"We have been asked to stay, by Miss Mary Sanders, the young lady who invited us here in the first place. We'll wait on the deck." She gestured with her cane. "Whenever you're ready for us." She smiled again. Rhonda's expression was noncommittal, which was probably the best she could manage at that moment.
I followed my employer down the narrow path that ran beside the house. She walked slowly and carefully – the ground was quite muddy. After we climbed the three wooden steps to the deck, she looked down at the state of her boots and frowned, but she didn't say anything.
When we were seated, I waited a moment, then I said, "You seem pretty sanguine about how things are going so far."
She shook her head, and her expression told me that she had just made a joke about the multiple meanings of the word "sanguine" three days earlier and she wasn't about to make another one this soon.
Given a choice at that moment between information and breakfast, I would have chosen breakfast. However, since no food was being offered, information was better than nothing.
I tried another tack. "Were you expecting Manfred to be dead? Is that why we're here?"
She looked at me with some surprise. "No, not at all. I had no idea he was even on the island (although the fact that he was here is interesting), but it did seem possible – perhaps even likely – that some crime was being planned for last night."
Part five
My employer and I had been comfortably ensconced in our warm, cozy room for the evening. We each had a cup of coffee, and she was smoking her pipe.
Things were usually pretty casual in Claremont, Massachusetts, where we were living, but I knew that Jan Sleet, the amateur detective and "intrepid gal reporter" (as it said on her business cards), was not about to adjust her personal style toward being even slightly less formal. After all, the last two places we'd traveled together had been New York City and Bellona – the latter a South American country in the middle of a civil war – and she'd always dressed in elegant three-piece suits in both locations. So, I knew that living in a beach town was not going to change her habits in the slightest.
This was not only when in public, either. Even when we were alone in our room of an evening, with no plans to go out and no visitors expected, her vest remained buttoned, her tie remained in its proper position, and her shoes (or, really, her custom-made, ankle-high boots) remained on. So, if we did happen to get an unexpected visitor, even on a dark and stormy night such as this one, she was ready.
"We do need to do something about my books," she said suddenly, looking up from her newspaper.
My first reaction was to glance at the window, as another bolt of lightning split the darkened sky, and wind and rain continued to shake the glass in its frame.
She smiled and reached out to tap my forearm. "Not now!" she said playfully, as if she'd been about to order me out into the storm to deal with the cartons of her books which were still in the Arkright family's garage.
Of course, I hadn't thought any such thing – well, at least not after I'd considered it for a few seconds.
There was a knock on our door as I turned my attention back to my book. My employer considered calling out, "What is it, Mrs. Jessup?" (which would not have counted as a great deduction since nobody else was in the building and there was a storm outside), but then she stuck out her tongue at me as I went and opened the door.
It was indeed our landlady. I had an urge to say, "Why, Sheriff Rhonda, what a pleasant surprise!" – since my employer couldn't see the hall from where she was sitting – but I resisted.
"I'm sorry to bother you both," Mrs. Jessup said as I gestured her into the room, "but there's a young lady downstairs and she says it's very important that she see you."
My employer used her cane to get to her feet. "Absolutely," she said, limping toward the door. As Mrs. Jessup turned to step back into the hall and out of the way, my employer asked, "Would it be possible for us to use the parlor?"
Mrs. Jessup was clearly somewhat surprised by this sudden eagerness for company (as was I, I freely admit) and she'd barely managed to say, "Yes, of course," before my employer was halfway down the stairs.
I shrugged and followed her down. Mrs. Jessup trailed behind and unlocked the door to the parlor as we greeted our visitor in the hallway.
"I'm Jan Sleet," my employer said as she shook our visitor's hand. "We've never met, obviously, but your former roommate, Diana, is a good friend of mine. Did she send you here to talk to me, Mary? Or was it Professor Lebrun? I believe you're in one of his classes." She gestured at the open door of the parlor.
Both our visitor and our landlady looked somewhat overwhelmed, but, of the two, our visitor looked less likely to recover quickly. She was young, slender (as far as I could tell under her raincoat), blonde, and drenched.
"It would be easier if we talked on the way," she said, gesturing outside. "I have my car–"
My employer held up her hand, her expression growing stern. She stepped forward, looking down on our visitor, and said, "You have caught my attention, on a slow evening when I have no pressing responsibilities, but you are a stranger. My welcome extends to listening to your problem, but no further, at least so far."
There was an awkward moment as our visitor tried to pull herself together, and I wondered if some of the water on her face might have been tears.
"At this moment," my employer continued, "you have three options. None of them involve me leaving this house now. The options are–" She held up a bony finger, not allowing our visitor to speak.
"One: If someone is in immediate danger, or some other disaster is imminent, then you should call the police right now." She tapped the telephone next to her.
"Two: Let's step into the parlor." She gestured in that direction. "We can sit down and talk. You can explain why you're here, and I can ask questions.
"Three: Not to be rude, but your third option is to go home."
She raised an eyebrow, waiting.
At first, her relentless approach had made our visitor even more tense as she tried to interrupt, but then she'd started to calm down.
I had seen this before, and I'd never been sure if my employer's tendency to browbeat people in these situations (when she thought she could get away with it) was actually intended to achieve this result – calming the person down and asserting that the great detective could solve whatever crisis was at hand – or whether she didn't care one way or the other.
Our visitor seemed to be uncertain about how to proceed, and I had the idea that she was stuck between option two (staying) and option three (leaving). Her expression as she'd glanced at the telephone had told me that calling the police was not something she was considering.
Part six
Mrs. Jessup came to the rescue. Apparently deciding that her duty to a guest outweighed her annoyance at being bullied into opening her parlor, she said, "What's your name, dear? And would you like some hot chocolate? It's a nasty night out there."
"I'm Mary," our visitor said hesitantly, as if she was afraid of being contradicted (although my employer had already addressed her by name). "From the college. Claremont College. And we really should go right away..." She gestured at the door, but she obviously knew that her suggestion wasn't going to be acted on.
"I'll make the hot chocolate," Mrs. Jessup said as we all went into the parlor. She continued through to the kitchen as I took Mary's raincoat and scarf and hung them up in the hall.
We sat at one of the small breakfast tables, and my employer sighed as she realized that our permission to use the parlor would be rescinded, immediately, if she lit a cigarette.
"So, Mary," I said, "what brings you out on this very unpleasant evening? I'm Marshall, by the way."
"I..." she began. She made a face, and I remember thinking, perhaps unkindly, that, after all this buildup, this had better turn out to be interesting.
"I was Diana's roommate, as you said, but I don't live in the dorm anymore. It's..." She shrugged.
"The dorms are not ideal," my employer said. "I know that from experience. Where are you living now?"
"It's an island, near the college. There's a road, but it's underwater at high tide, and sometimes during storms–"
"Heron Island. I'm familiar with it. So, your urgency a few moments ago was because it's nearing the cutoff time, when access to the island will no longer be possible until tomorrow morning?"
Mary nodded. "And the phone lines are down, and the electricity is out. Because of the storm."
My employer got to her feet and limped to the tide table which was posted on the wall, as if she doubted our visitor's assessment of the schedule.
"Is the house haunted?" my employer asked over her shoulder. "I've heard that it is."
Mary seemed surprised by the question – I guessed she'd been ready to bring this up herself, and to fight for the possibility against opposition from the notoriously atheistic detective.
My employer came back to the table and continued as if Mary had actually responded.
"Why do people think that it's haunted, and why is the situation suddenly so urgent that you have come out on this brutal evening to seek my assistance?"
"The house is supposed to be haunted–"
My employer shook her head. "If you want me to investigate a haunting–"
"No, but I need to explain the situation at the house."
My employer waved a hand.
"Heron House – that's the name of the house – was the first house built on the island. It's very old. Back then, when the entire island was owned by the Loomis family, there wasn't a road – the only way on or off the island was by boat. The family owned a fishing fleet, and the house overlooks the harbor, so they could see their ships coming and going. Then, during the Depression (I think this is the history – I haven't really researched it, so it's mostly just what people have told me) the family lost all their money and they had to sell most of the land on the island, other than their house and the property right around it. That's when the town built the road, so the island would be at least somewhat accessible by car.
"Then, some time after that, the surviving son of the family died suddenly, and some distant relatives inherited the property. They live on the West Coast, or somewhere, and they decided that it would be a nice summer place for them, but they wanted to make some money from it, too, so they hired a local realtor to rent out rooms to college students during the fall and spring semesters, and then they'd use it themselves in the summer."
"From what I've heard, this was not popular with the other residents of the island," my employer put in.
Mary laughed, which surprised me, since she'd looked alternately worried and morose every minute since her arrival. "I'll say. They're a very snooty bunch, as far as I can tell. Of course, they never actually talk to any of us unless they have to."
"But if looks could kill.."
"Yeah. Now the house is all girls, which may be a compromise or something–"
"Is that an official policy?"
She shook her head. "Not as far as I know. Guys do apply, but they're always turned down – last semester and this. Everybody kind of knows at this point."
My employer smiled. "Girls being more ladylike and demure, of course, and much less inclined toward riotous misbehavior. My friends at the school have told me about the house. As I'm sure you know, it's a pretty regular routine at this point: Girls get sick of the dorms, move to the house when there's an open room, which there often is, then they get scared by all the goings-on, or they discover that they don't actually want to live in such a... libidinous environment after all, or they get tired of planning their lives around the tide table, and then they move quickly back to the dorms, leaving an open room for the next girl to move in."
Part seven
Mrs. Jessup came in with a tray with four big mugs of hot chocolate. She distributed them, and Mary and I took a sip as Mrs. Jessup sat down on the sofa.
My employer noted that our landlady had joined us, but she didn't comment. After all, it was Mrs. Jessup's house, and she had opened her parlor for our use outside of the regularly scheduled morning hours.
"Did the Loomis family stay in the house during last summer?" my employer asked. She sipped her hot chocolate, to be polite (she didn't like hot chocolate), and then she put her mug on the table.
Mary frowned. "I don't think so. I applied over the summer, and they were very relaxed about when I could move in."
"So, you're new in the house?"
"Yes. I didn't like the dorms last year, and now I'm a sophomore and I can live off-campus, so it looked like a good deal. My parents... they were okay with it when I told them it was all girls. The other girls–"
My employer held up a hand. "Before we get too far into the details, we should make sure that this is actually going to be worth my time and attention. Why are you here?"
Mary paused, and then she said, "We're afraid that the house is haunted."
"And you're hoping I'll come and lay the ghost?" She shrugged. "The idea of being a ghost hunter sounds amusing – mildly amusing – but I do have actual, serious work to do. I have an article I'm writing, and a book that I need to get back to."
"We already have a ghost hunter, actually, a guy named Manfred, and I don't trust him."
That got my employer's attention, although she tried to conceal her reaction.
"Manfred?" she said slowly. "I've heard of him. He was... something of a sensation when I was a student. He had written a book – which I confess I never read – about spirits and hauntings and whatnot in this area, and he made some specific claims about some of the buildings at the college. Which were never proved, as far as I can remember. The oldest buildings were part of a family estate, before it was a college – those may have been the ones he was investigating."
She made a face.
"Is he still hanging around – Manfred? He was not a student, or a professor (although I got the idea that he wanted to be some sort of teacher or something like that – but, to say the least, he lacked qualifications), so I rather assumed that he would move on at some point, when he'd exhausted the supply of ready suckers in this area.
"He was still around when I left college, but people were starting to get sick of him – or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. So, why is he... what purpose is he serving now?"
"He's hunting ghosts. And it looks like we have them."
"Evidence? Is there actual evidence?"
She shrugged. It was hard to tell if she was about to defend a theory that she knew my employer wouldn't take seriously, or a theory that she didn't believe herself. I had the impression that she believed it more than she would be willing to admit in front of this particular audience.
"There are things that we can't explain. Not a lot, but regular – on a regular basis. Things vanish, in the house, and we search all over, decide somebody walked off with them, and later they show up, in very unexpected places. Creepy writing appears on the blackboard in the kitchen, where we make shopping lists, but then it vanishes right away."
My employer made a face, as if she was disappointed that this "evidence" was so paltry.
"There have also been odd noises at night, from time to time, and then we find icky, slimy footprints all around the house in the morning. And one girl who lived there last semester saw a ghost, or said she did."
My employer's mood seemed to perk up.
Part eight
There was a large bowl with fresh fruit in the kitchen of Heron House. I took an apple and a banana and brought them out to the deck, where my employer was sitting and smoking. I felt virtuous because I had not taken the peach. It had smelled wonderful – perfectly ripe and ready to eat – but it had been the only one in the bowl.
I had offered to get something for my employer, but she had declined. She would have accepted a cup of coffee, I knew, but I wasn't comfortable making myself at home to the extent of brewing a pot of coffee. I wondered how long it was going to be before we (or at least I) got a real meal.
"Where is everybody?" she asked, looking out at the water.
"Interviews are happening on the second floor," I told her. "On the far side of the house."
One of us was about to comment that this was undoubtedly to try to keep the snoopy lady detective on the deck from eavesdropping, but then the door to the living room opened and the red-headed woman joined us. She'd greeted Rhonda and me when we'd arrived, but I hadn't learned her name.
She grinned. "The sheriff had better be willing to interrogate me at ground level." She wheeled herself over to us. "Do you think all of this will take a while?" She gestured at the second floor windows.
My employer held out her hand, smiling. "My name is Jan Sleet. I don't believe we've met."
"I'm Elsa," she said, leaning forward to shake her hand. "Welcome to Heron House – I guess that's what I'm supposed to say."
My employer gestured at me. "This is Marshall, my assistant. And I have no idea how long the questioning will go on. Mary has asked that we stay and be present when the sheriff gets to her." She smiled. "I get the sense that the word 'interrogate' might be a bit strong, but I could be wrong about that. We'll find out."
I had stood when Elsa had joined us, of course, but now I resumed my seat, feeling rather awkward. My employer noted this, and it clearly amused her, but she didn't comment.
"So, Mary's your client?" Elsa asked, smiling. She seemed to be enjoying herself.
My employer shook her head as she stubbed out her cigarette. "Oh, no. I'm not a private investigator – I couldn't take on a client even if I wanted one. No, I'm just... nosy." She suppressed a grin. "A nosy reporter, trying to help. As a nosy reporter, may I ask you some questions?"
Elsa shrugged. "Sure. I didn't know the dead guy very well, but if I can help I will."
"How well did you know him?"
"Not at all, really. He came to parties here sometimes, and I could tell he was checking out all the female flesh, but I... wasn't his type." She patted the arm of her wheelchair. "I was invisible to him." She laughed. "Which was absolutely fine with me, I can tell you."
"As far as you could see, was there something – anything more – happening with any of your roommates, or any other regular guests at the parties?"
"I guess you mean... No. I..." She made a face. "I don't think so."
Part nine
"Can you tell me about your roommates?"
Elsa laughed. "I'm not going to tell you any of their secrets. Or mine."
My employer nodded. "That's fine. I'm just looking for a general overview of who lives here. Can you list them for me? With no secrets, of course."
She leaned back. "Well, you've met Mary. She brought you into this, right?"
"She came to see us last night. Apparently the... 'mysterious' events around here had been getting worse?"
"More threatening, not more mysterious." She made a face. "Somebody has been coming into our house, at night, and leaving weird footprints and threatening messages and stuff like that. The mystery is who it is, and why. It's not anything... occult or anything like that."
"So, I gather you're not one of the people who advocated bringing in a ghost hunter?"
Elsa rolled her eyes. "I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't believe we have a ghost, and, even if I did believe we had a ghost, I wouldn't believe Manfred would be qualified to hunt down anything other than a free drink or a gullible female."
"Who was in favor of calling someone in – who did believe that you have ghosts?"
"It was mostly Kim, at first. I thought she was kidding, but then the weirder things got, the more insistent she became, and the more the others started to go along with her – at least to think it was a possibility. She did a bunch of research about the history of the house and the island, but I don't remember the details."
"Kim. I don't believe we've met her."
"She wasn't here last night. I think she spent the night with her..." She made an awkward face.
"Her amoureuse."
"Yeah."
"On the island?"
"Oh, no – at the college."
"Okay. So, there's you, and Mary, and Kim. And we've met Jo, and the woman who was with her, the taller woman."
"Li."
"And Becky, who's pre-med. She did the examination of the body."
"Becks. She's around somewhere."
"So, that's six in all. And four of you were here last night, during the storm."
"Yes. Jo, Li, Becks, and me."
"And how long have you lived here?" my employer asked, lighting another cigarette.
"I've been here the longest, of the girls who live here now. I'm a junior, and I've always lived here, in the house. I... My parents both went to Claremont, and I knew the area, and as a legacy I got a good deal on tuition, but the dorms..."
My employer nodded slowly. "They are not designed for wheelchairs." She frowned. "Thinking about it now, there are steps and curbs and..."
"It's an obstacle course. One of my classes is in a building where I have to have a classmate come and open the back door for me – it's the only way I can get into the building. And one of my classes was moved... Anyway, you get the idea. But this place is a dream. The previous owner broke his leg once and he had ramps put in. They even took out all the thresholds." She gestured at the three steps down from the deck to the muddy path beside the house. "On the ground floor, those are the only steps anywhere."
My employer looked up at the second floor. "How many bedrooms are upstairs?"
"Five – three across in the front and two in the back. Or so I've been told."
"The ones in the front are smaller?"
"Yes – they were for the children, I think. The back on the right, up there, is the 'master bedroom' – or whatever it's called when there's no master in the house – and the other one, on the left, is around the same size as the ones in the front. The 'master bedroom" is the only one with its own bathroom."
"It must get pretty chaotic up there with four girls sharing the one bathroom."
Elsa laughed. "Not my problem. I have the smallest bedroom, off the kitchen, but it has a little bathroom of its own. Sometimes one of the other girls comes down to see if they can use it. Sometimes I let them, and sometimes I don't – depends on my mood."
She grinned, and then she looked at the table in the middle of the deck, which currently contained one apple and one banana. She looked at my employer, and then at me. "Have you eaten?" she asked. "Why didn't we invite you to join us when we were having breakfast?"
My employer smiled. "I really couldn't answer your second question." She shrugged. "We are, after all, interlopers, not guests."
"Well, you were invited, right? Mary invited you – that makes you guests." She looked at me. I attempted to appear stalwart and well-fed.
She gestured in the direction of the kitchen. "Would you like something to eat? Or maybe some coffee?"
I looked at my employer, and she smiled. "Some coffee would be very welcome. We were up rather early this morning. And something to snack on would be pleasant, if that's possible." She gestured at the table. "In addition to the fruit that someone liberated earlier."
Elsa headed off toward the kitchen. I thought of offering to help, but it was her home and I didn't want to imply that she couldn't manage.
I moved my chair around to face my employer, and she looked up at the sky. "Please keep track of the time today, by the way," she said, "and make sure you know exactly when the island will be cut off from the mainland. I do intend to sleep in my own bed tonight."
Part ten
Rhonda came out onto the deck looking unconvinced. Not about anything in particular, I thought, just unconvinced in general. I had the impression that she hadn't been convinced by anything she'd heard since her arrival, and she obviously wasn't expecting her conversation with us to break that streak.
Also, as we found out later, she had a strong feeling that Heron House and its residents hadn't been involved in the murder at all, so all the "information" she was collecting here, in addition to being of dubious accuracy, might well turn out to be irrelevant, too.
Mary had joined us a minute earlier, but she hadn't said anything other than "The sheriff is coming." She'd looked tired, and I found myself wondering where she'd slept the night before, after she'd left us. Well, she was a college student – maybe a better question was whether she'd slept at all.
The glass table held the remains of the food Elsa had provided, which had been excellent. I asked Mary if she wanted something, but she just shook her head and yawned.
When Rhonda sat down, however, she immediately helped herself.
After a while, she sighed, in between bites. "To sum up," she said, "nobody knew the victim was here on the island last night, nobody will admit to liking him or wanting him around, nobody will admit to believing in ghosts or ghost hunters, and can I have some coffee?"
I hurried inside, found a clean mug, and brought it out. I filled it from the carafe and handed it to her. (I made a small bow, mostly because I knew she'd make a face at me.)
"Obviously," she began again, "you three weren't on the island at the time of the murder. But I do have one question for you: Why are you here now?" When she said "you" she was looking directly at my employer.
So, my employer and Mary proceeded to recount the story of Mary's visit to our home the night before, during the storm. Everything they said was factual, technically, but at every point they emphasized my employer's enthusiasm for the idea of disproving the existence of ghosts and debunking the whole idea of "ghost hunters."
I could tell that Rhonda wasn't completely buying it, but there wasn't anything for her to grab onto so she could challenge the story that was being presented to her. But I knew her well enough to see that the whole situation was bugging her, as I admit it would have bugged me.
Once again, after all, there was a murder in her town, and once again we were on the scene before she'd even heard about the murder, and the explanation she was being given was not entirely convincing.
"So," Rhonda said to Mary when the story was done, "what made things so urgent last night that you tried to get help in the middle of a bad storm?"
Mary frowned. "The notes on the refrigerator had been getting more threatening for a while. Saying that we don't belong here, and that we're degenerates..." She shrugged. "And it does... somebody is coming into our house at night, even when we lock the doors – and nobody around here locks their doors. It's not... either it's supernatural or natural, but either way it's creepy."
Rhonda nodded. "Creepy, and illegal. Did it occur to you to call the police?"
"Well, yes. It did occur to me, of course. but... there was... people disagreed. Some people disagreed. The ones who thought it might really be supernatural."
"What was the most recent message?" my employer asked Mary.
She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. "'Cras est dies omnia mutantur.' I may not be pronouncing it correctly." She handed it to Rhonda. "I wrote it down, because they – the messages – they usually vanish pretty quickly."
"Latin?" Rhonda asked.
She nodded. "Becky thinks it means, 'Tomorrow everything gets weird.' Which, considering how weird things have been already, made it seem kind of urgent..."
My employer started to get to her feet, but Rhonda handed the paper to her.
"It's not actually ominous," she said slowly. "It simply means that everything will change tomorrow. The change could be good or bad." She shrugged. "And it turned out to be true, I guess, although perhaps this current situation is not what the mysterious note writer was referring to."
She gave the piece of paper back to Rhonda.
"Did Manfred visit here a lot?" Rhonda asked Mary. "Or only when there were ghosts to hunt?"
Mary made a face. "People talk like he was here all the time. " She shook her head. "He was mostly only here when we had parties – so they always saw him, at the parties, because that's the only time they were here, too."
"Did he stay over?"
"No. Never! No matter how you mean that. He was just a friend – sort of... He wasn't in any sort of relationship with any of the girls in the house."
"Did you see him last night?"
"No – I hadn't seen him for a week or two. He..." She shrugged. "There was a storm last night. As you know. Nobody visits here when there's going to be a storm. They might get stuck on the island for a day or two. The phones and electricity get knocked out, the road gets washed out sometimes... We always stock up on food and candles, and kerosene for the lanterns, and ride it out. It can be kind of fun. We have books and board games and Becks has her guitar, and we have an excuse for missing our classes."
Mary said, "Can I ask a question?"
"Of course," Rhonda said.
Mary looked at me. "What did you do with my car? I looked outside and it's not there."
"Ah," I said. I glanced at Rhonda, since it was really her fault that Mary's car was back at the college, and my employer gave me a stern look over her glasses, as if I might have misplaced the car through carelessness.
There was a series of negotiations then, during which I handed Mary back her car keys, since Rhonda clearly wanted to end up driving Mary to the college campus alone, so she could ask her more questions without company, but she didn't want to admit this, since Mary had already said that she wanted my employer present for any questioning, so it was difficult for Rhonda to justify leaving us at Heron House, with no car, and with the tide waters rising.
So, having surrendered to the inevitable, Rhonda drove the three of us to the campus, in near silence. Mary got her car, and my employer and I took the jitney back to town.
Mary had apologized for not driving us home, vaguely implying that she wanted to make it back to the island before the road was under water. I did the calculations in my head, and she would have had plenty of time, but I didn't say anything.
On the jitney, I found myself wondering again where Mary had slept the night before, however much she might have slept...
"Probably with my friend Diana," my employer murmured, looking pleased with herself. She noted my expression. "Well, not necessarily with her, in that sense, but in her dorm room." She grinned, briefly. "That's how I knew who she was last night, when she visited us. That scarf she was wearing is quite distinctive and apparently knitted by hand. I've seen it in Diana's room several times, and it's certainly not anything Diana would ever wear.
"When I was investigating the Marvel Philips case I saw the list of students who were living in that dorm, so I knew that Mary was Diana's roommate at that time, though I never met her there when I was visiting Diana. Diana didn't get a new roommate assigned to her, so far, so I assume that Mary uses the room as a pied-à-terre, for when Heron Island is cut off from the mainland."
Part eleven
We got off the jitney at the Main Street stop, and, after a brief discussion of the options available to us, we had a light supper at the Wagon Wheel.
Then, after coffee, we strolled in the direction of home. The weather was pleasant – dry and cool, with a nice breeze.
"I think Rhonda is wrong," my employer said suddenly as we turned the corner onto Ocean Drive.
"In general, or about something in particular?"
She stopped for a moment and allowed herself a small snort. "About the case," she said, tapping the side of my shoe with her cane. She looked in both directions, then she led me across the street and down a little path to the water's edge.
"She thinks the body came by sea," she said, looking out over the water in the approximate direction of Heron Island. "She thinks Heron House is irrelevant, except perhaps as a target – that someone came ashore in a boat, during the storm, dumped the body there on the beach, and then left the same way."
"A 'target'?" I asked.
She took out her cigarette case and I put my hand in my jacket pocket, where I carry my lighter, but she didn't immediately take out a cigarette.
"Well," she said, "if Rhonda's theory is true – and it's certainly not impossible – then it would have been quite a coincidence that the mysterious murderous mariner just happened to select a stretch of beach right below a house where the victim was so well known."
She took out a cigarette and I lit it for her.
"But it wasn't intended to be a frame, I would think," I said.
She nodded. "Of one of the girls? I agree. Far too lackadaisical..." She shrugged. "Unless there's something yet to come, of course – to narrow down the focus, to point us in the direction of a specific who, and why. That's possible." She turned to look at me. "I noticed at supper that you've adapted."
"To what?"
"The Town Hall site. It used to bother you – the scorched ground and that huge safe where the building used to be – but now you don't even think about it."
I shrugged and nodded. She was right, mostly.
"I had a thought about it, though," she said. "I saw a flyer on the bulletin board at the Wagon Wheel. There's going to be a used book sale on Saturday, to raise money for the new library. I'm going to donate my books."
"All of them?" I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as I could.
She sighed. "That's going to be your assignment. Please insist, as we go over the books, that I donate every single one. I'm sure for each and every one I will be able to find some excuse why I could never part with this particular book – its contents or its history or both." She sighed. "Be firm with me. I haven't looked at any of those books since I left college, and..."
"And this is a good cause. A worthy cause. Also, books should be read and used and cherished, not left in boxes to get moldy."
She nodded and stubbed out her cigarette with her toe. "That was good, though the part about them getting moldy may have been a bit much."
We turned to go home. This time we had to wait for a couple of cars to pass before we could go back across the street.
"If Rhonda is right," I said, "she'll have a heck of a time investigating this one. Boats don't leave footprints and the beach was swept clean by the storm."
She nodded. "It will depend on investigating Manfred. Who knew him, where he was staying, who had a grudge against him... all that sort of thing."
My gun is always carefully locked up (I'm not telling you where), except when I think I'm going to need it, but I do keep a baseball bat under my bed, within easy reach. When the pounding on our door started at three in the morning, the bat was in my hand before I was even aware of where I was or why I was on my feet.
I moved to the door as the pounding stopped and Rhonda bellowed, "Sleet! O'Connor! We've got an emergency!"
I glanced at my employer, who was putting on her glasses. She squinted at her bedside clock and said, "Well, poo."
I opened the door, and regarded the sheriff. She was in full uniform, and Mrs. Jessup was behind her, in a robe, nightgown, and slippers, her gray hair in considerable disarray.
"Mrs. Jessup," I said, leaning the bat against the foot of my employer's bed, "please accept my apologies, on behalf of all three of us. I'm sure we can handle things from here."
She shuffled off without a word. I turned my attention to Rhonda. "If she kicks us out, we're moving into your house."
She shook her head. "I'm not any happier about being awake at this hour than you are. Mary Sanders is dead, at Heron House. The island is cut off, of course, but I'm going out by boat. Do you want to come?"
"Yes," my employer said, grabbing her cane and getting to her feet. "We'll be downstairs in three and a half minutes." She started to pull off her nightgown.
I got Rhonda out the door and we dressed quickly. I left the bat under my bed, but I brought my gun.
Part twelve
Rhonda drove toward the pier at her usual breakneck speed, with her high beams on. There were no other cars on the street and the windows of the houses we were passing were dark. She wasn't running her siren.
"What do you know?" I asked her.
"The phones are working again. Someone from the house called it in about a half hour ago."
"Accident? Murder? Suicide?" my employer asked from the back seat.
"Knifed. Dead. That's all I know."
"Where?"
"On the deck, or at least that's where the body was found."
She drove onto the pier and pulled up next to a ramp where a deputy stood waiting. "Come on," Rhonda said as she went down the ramp to the floating platform where the boat was tied up. There were gaps between the rough planks where the water was visible.
A man stood at the controls (if that's the right term – I don't know anything about boats). I walked slowly down the ramp, with my employer behind me. She was moving carefully, holding onto the rope railing, but the uneven surface and the tilt and the motion from the water made it difficult for her to keep her footing.
Not that I was gliding along with sure-footed grace and elegance either.
On the platform, there was a wooden box with three steps, to get us up onto the deck of the boat. There was no railing to hold onto, and my employer looked at me, giving me silent permission to help her. I got up to the top step, and then I turned and held out my hand. She gripped it firmly and climbed up, one careful step at a time.
As she reached the top step, I moved backward onto the deck of the boat, and then I helped her over the gunwale (I had to look that word up) so that she was beside me.
She gave my hand a quick squeeze before releasing it.
Rhonda and the deputy cast off the ropes and we were on our way. The boat was compact, with a small cabin area in the front, surrounded by windows, for the pilot. There was a narrow door beside him which probably led down to an indoor sleeping area.
In the rear (aft? stern?) there was a high seat, facing the back of the boat, which looked like it was intended for serious fishing activities. It had a seat belt and shoulder straps.
The sea was a little choppy, and we were moving fast. A big spotlight on the front of the boat illuminated the water ahead of us, but otherwise it was dark. The wind and the engine would have made conversation difficult, so we didn't bother.
My employer was sitting on a small bench, holding onto the boat with one hand and her cane with the other. Her hair whipped around her narrow face, and a couple of times she had to wipe salt spray from her glasses with her sleeve. Her expression was neutral.
If you wanted to travel by car (or jitney) from the town center to the college campus, and then from there to Heron Island, you had to go the long way around, by the highway, because there was an inlet between the two land masses – the town center and the campus – which ran right up to the highway.
By the water, though, it was only a few minutes from the town pier to Heron Island.
During that brief trip, I was torn between two topics I could have been fretting about, knowing I probably wouldn't have enough time to thoroughly worry about both of them.
Should I use my limited time to wonder why Rhonda had come to get us in the first place? Or should I wonder where we'd be landing, and would I be able to get my employer out of the boat and onto dry land with at least some of her dignity intact? (And would we have to use those "stairs" from the beach up to Heron House?)
I hadn't made any real progress on either question when I heard the engine slow and we approached a small pier. The land around it seemed deserted – I didn't see any buildings or lights, just darkness, stars, and trees.
The pier stuck out into the water only about twelve or fifteen feet, just one series of unsteady-looking planks and two big vertical pilings. There were no other boats.
We pulled up alongside the pier and the deputy tied us up.
Rhonda got up onto the little pier somewhat more awkwardly than the deputy had. We were bobbing up and down in the water, and I knew that my employer was not likely to make it to the little dock by herself without ending up in the ocean.
The deputy was up on the beach already, talking on the radio, facing away from us, so I motioned for Rhonda to turn around. Then, when no eyes were on us, I scooped my employer up in my arms and got her safely onto the pier. She weighed next to nothing, so this was quick and easy.
Rhonda led us through the trees (she and the deputy had brought flashlights, fortunately) and onto a familiar-looking dirt road that took us up a hill and around a bend to Heron House. All the lights in the house seemed to be on – they were the only lights I could see anywhere.
I heard the boat start up and head off into the darkness behind us.
Part thirteen
Elsa let us in. She looked rather shell shocked, understandably.
Rhonda could be brusque when she was on duty, but she spoke softly when Elsa opened the door for us. She said that she would examine the body before doing anything else. She didn't acknowledge that my employer and myself were even there, so I greeted Elsa myself as well.
The other women were in the living room, and they barely reacted as we walked through to the deck. The deputy stayed behind in the living room as we went outside.
There were floodlights on the back of the house, illuminating the deck, so it was easy to see Mary's body, crumpled up next to the table, with a knife sticking out of her back.
Rhonda kneeled to check the body for signs of life, but it was obvious that she didn't expect to find any.
My employer looked down at the body, too, but I had the impression that she was more interested in talking to the women in the living room, particularly since she'd been excluded from Rhonda's earlier interviews with them. She watched Rhonda's examination very carefully, though, and I knew that if the sheriff had missed anything she would have stepped in to correct the omission.
I barely looked at the body, except to note that the knife didn't seem to resemble the one which had killed Manfred. I was fairly inured to corpses by this point, but my attention was more drawn to the woods on either side of the deck. The trees closest to the house were brightly illuminated by the floodlights, but everything beyond that was in deep shadow, and I couldn't help but be aware that we were completely visible to anybody who might be in those woods, watching us.
Of course, there was no reason to think that anybody was hiding in those dark woods, in the middle of the night, and the two murders had been committed with knives, not guns, but part of my job was to assess any possible threats.
And I did remember that, during an earlier case in Claremont, in a well-lighted living room, Rhonda had been shot by a rifle from the darkness across the street. And another woman had been killed then, and that bullet had been intended for my employer.
So, even in quiet, pleasant Claremont – college and resort town – things could happen.
Rhonda stood up. "As Dr. Wright would say, this dead body is dead. I'm sorry."
My employer inclined her head slightly, as if she was aware that this was a socially appropriate response to what Rhonda had just said, but her thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
"Shall we go in?" she asked after a moment, trying to appear casual.
Rhonda turned to go inside, and my employer made a face at me behind her back, but it wasn't until later that I figured out what was bothering her.
Part fourteen
The living room of Heron House was noticeably warmer than the night air outside. There was no fire in the fireplace, but apparently the house had some sort of central heating. It was never this warm in the middle of the night where we lived.
I made a mental note to consider buying us a small space heater, if the inn's wiring could support it.
Despite the relatively warm air inside Heron House, however, most of the residents looked cold. Elsa had on jeans and a sweatshirt, but the rest were apparently wearing whatever they had been sleeping in – T-shirts and sweatpants – plus bathrobes and sweaters and slippers, and they were all huddled into armchairs and sofas.
The day before, when it had been just Manfred who was dead, they had been able to tell themselves that he wasn't really a friend, that the murderer might have been a stranger, that the location of the body could have been a coincidence, and so on. There were various walls they could put up between the murder and themselves.
But that was no longer possible. The victim tonight had been their housemate, and their friend (well, maybe), and the body had been found on the deck of their house, not on the public beach below.
Someone had apparently made coffee while they were waiting for us to arrive, and most of the women had mugs. Elsa had a bottle of soda tucked between the arm of her wheelchair and her thigh.
Nobody offered us anything to drink.
The one woman I hadn't met before had a mug next to her, full of coffee, but she was drinking a beer. She was wearing a pair of boxer shorts with big red polka dots and a T-shirt of the style sometimes called a "wife beater." Her short, black hair stuck up in all directions. This was presumably Kim, who had reportedly been on the mainland with a lover the night before.
I brought in two chairs from the dining room for Rhonda and my employer. The deputy indicated that she was fine with standing, as was I.
If nothing else, I thought that standing up might make it easier for me to stay awake.
Part fifteen
Rhonda took out her pad and rested it on her thigh. "Let's start with the basics," she said, looking around the room. "Who found the body, and who called in the report?"
"I was asleep," said the woman in the polka dot shorts. "I heard a noise. From outside. It woke me up."
"Your name?"
"Kim."
"Kimberly Daniels?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"What did you hear?"
She shrugged. "I was asleep. Something woke me up – I don't know what it was. I listened for a moment, then I got out of bed and went to the window to look out."
"Where is your bedroom?" my employer asked.
I didn't look at Rhonda, and she didn't say anything about my employer hijacking her investigation, at least temporarily. I filed this away with my earlier question about why we were there to begin with.
"Upstairs, in the back, overlooking the deck," Kim replied. She gestured at the ceiling.
"The large bedroom?" my employer asked.
Kim nodded, but Rhonda leaned forward slightly and my employer turned her gaze to the wooden beams above us. She took out her cigarette case, but she did not immediately open it.
Kim turned back to the sheriff and said, "I looked out, but I couldn't see anything. I came downstairs and looked out from the window here. I thought I saw something, a shape, on the deck. I turned on the outside lights. There's a switch there, by the window, and another one in the kitchen."
"And what did you see?" Rhonda asked.
Kim slumped a little. "Mary."
"You knew it was her?"
"I saw her hair, and some of her face, and I know that T-shirt she always sleeps in."
"What did you do next?"
"I ran out, onto the deck, I thought she... and then I saw the knife, and the blood. I yelled for Becky."
"Did you touch the body?"
She shuddered and shook her head. Her posture had been pretty aggressive before, but now she seemed to fold in on herself.
Part sixteen
Rhonda looked at the window for a moment, then she turned back to Kim. "While I think of it," she said, "I didn't get to talk to you yesterday, obviously, since you weren't here last night. Where were you when the murder – Manfred's murder – happened?"
Kim looked surprised. "I wasn't on the island. Other than that, why does it matter?"
This was obviously what Rhonda had been hoping she would say. She straightened up and looked around the room.
"I need to make something clear to everybody," she said. "Yesterday, there was a dead body on the beach. He was a local character, and many people around here knew him. There was no evidence that he had come from this house on that night, or that he had visited you recently. So, when I was here yesterday, I was collecting information, but I thought it likely that nobody here was even involved in the death."
Kim started to speak, but Rhonda kept going. "Tonight, your roommate died, on the deck of this house – your house – and you are all suspects, in both murders. I'm not taking no for an answer when I ask questions." She glanced at the deputy. "What time is the road clear this morning?"
"Around seven, I believe."
"If I don't get straight answers here and now, to all of my questions, I'm going to make a call and – the minute the road is passable – cars will come and take all of us to police headquarters, and we'll continue the questioning there. For however long it takes."
"I want to call my lawyer," Li said.
"No." Rhonda replied. She looked at Kim again. "So, where were you last night?"
Kim did not reply or move, or even, as far as I could tell, breathe. After a moment, my employer sighed and said, "Kim, you're wasting everybody's time. I can understand that you're reluctant to admit that you're in a sexual relationship with a professor, but there's no way it won't come out. Your best bet is to admit it now, tell us the details, and try to convince the sheriff that it had nothing to do with the murder of Manfred J. Raymond."
Kim looked like she was about to throw up. My employer was stone faced – not at all triumphant about her deduction – and I thought she was well aware that she may have been brought along, at least primarily, as a sort of lie detector for the sheriff.
Rhonda looked around. "What about the rest of you?"
Li, the tall one (so far – until this moment at least – being tall was her only memorable characteristic), said, "Becks and I woke up when we heard the scream. We ran to the window–"
Then, realizing how that sounded, she turned bright red and stopped talking. Becky looked as if she was struggling to suppress a laugh – so as not to further embarrass her friend – but finally she got herself under control and said calmly, "Li was really upset about Manfred's death, and so she – as she sometimes does – slept in my room with me."
Li looked mortified, and I could tell that Rhonda was controlling herself also.
Becky, the aspiring doctor, looked quite competent and not easily rattled, which was probably going to be good for her in her chosen profession.
She took over for Li.
Part seventeen
Sometimes you don't realize how tense things are with a group of people until something suddenly breaks that tension, at least for a moment.
Everybody seemed to relax when Becky took over from Li, so much so that I had to wonder why. So far we'd learned that Kim had a lover who should have been off limits for her (and vice versa, of course), and that Li sometimes slept with Becky. This was pretty penny ante stuff, especially in the context of an investigation of two murders. Was there a big secret still to come – other than the solution to the murders? (I would have had a rough time believing that all of the residents of Heron House already knew who had killed Manfred and Mary.)
Becky sipped her coffee and then, as she began to speak, my employer finally opened her case and took out a cigarette. As she reached for her lighter, Kim leaned forward and my employer held out the case so she could take a cigarette also.
"The first thing I remember," Becky said, "I was lying on the floor, and my head hurt."
Li winced. "I... sort of freaked out when I heard the scream, and I..."
"Booted me out of my own bed and onto the cold, hard floor," Becky went on. "I didn't hear the scream, but I did hear Kim calling for me a few minutes later."
Li continued, looking rather sheepish. "I heard the thud as Becks hit the floor. I looked to see that she was okay, and I told her I was sorry, and then she... Anyway, I told her that I had heard a scream from outside, and then we heard somebody yelling her name."
Becky took over again. "It sounded like it was from outside, so we went to the window, but my room is in the front of the house, so we couldn't see anything. We put on our robes and hurried out into the hall."
"And they ran right into me," Jo put in.
"Had you been awakened by the scream also?" Rhonda asked.
"No. I was awake – writing."
It was not clear that Rhonda wanted to know what Jo had been writing, but she began to supply this information anyway, just in case.
"I'm a novelist," she said, adjusting her glasses. "I'm writing a novel, and I find the best time to write is late at night, when everybody else is asleep and things are quiet. So, around midnight, I made myself a big mug of coffee–"
Rhonda held up a hand. "So, you were awake between midnight and the scream?"
"Yes."
"And your bedroom is in the back of the house, overlooking the deck?"
She nodded. "Next to Kim's."
"And did you hear anything before the scream?"
Jo shook her head, then she shrugged. "I was concentrating on what I was writing, but I wasn't aware of hearing anything."
"But you certainly would have heard any sort of fight on the deck, right below your window."
"Oh, yes. It was very quiet."
"Was the light on in your room?" Rhonda asked, and then she laughed. "Okay, that's a dumb question."
"My light was on."
"So, obviously, anybody who was on the deck would have seen the light from your window and they would have known they had to be quiet."
"I guess so."
"What about cars? Would you have heard a car?"
"We always hear cars when they're coming up the hill. When we hear one, sometimes we try to guess if it's coming here, or going past us to Mrs. Billingsley."
My employer, in these sorts of situations, was never reluctant to draw attention to herself, if she thought it would be to her benefit. Sometimes she was quite theatrical about it, which she enjoyed (although she didn't like to admit that).
But she was being very quiet now. She was smoking calmly, looking at whoever was speaking, reacting very little. I wondered if she had seen something and was waiting for the right moment to reveal it.
Part eighteen
Rhonda turned back to Becky. "So, the three of you rushed downstairs?"
Becky nodded. "I wouldn't say 'rushed' – we were all a little..."
"Scared," Jo said. "Understandably. I remember I was thinking about last night..."
Becky shrugged. "Anyway, we got downstairs, and Kim and Elsa were on the deck, and Mary was there. I examined her, and she... I performed CPR, because you're supposed to, but she was dead. Murdered, obviously, stabbed... like Manfred."
"Becky said somebody should call the police," Elsa said quietly, "but I was already doing it." She sipped her soda.
"Becky," my employer put in, "what was your estimate of the time of death? What time did you examine the body, and how long did you think she'd been dead at that time?"
Becky sighed. "I wasn't wearing my watch, but while Elsa was on the phone I went into the kitchen to note the time. Three seventeen in the morning. I... I'm not really..."
Rhonda moved her shoulders around as if they were stiff, and Becky took that as a cue, or an excuse, to stop talking. I knew Rhonda well enough to know that she wasn't much interested in an estimate of a time of death from a murder suspect.
"Would anybody like more coffee?" Elsa asked after a moment.
The assent was muted but general, including from those of us who hadn't been offered anything previously, and she turned to go into the kitchen.
"Elsa," Rhonda said, "I would very much like some coffee, thank you, but first please give us your experiences."
She turned her wheelchair back around. "I heard the scream, but I waited. I thought maybe somebody had had a nightmare, or..."
"Perhaps one of your housemates had enjoyed a particularly pleasurable late-night personal experience," my employer put in, and Elsa laughed, followed immediately by Becky, and a minute later by Jo. Rhonda smiled, and I saw the deputy snort and then quickly compose herself. Li turned beet red but otherwise she did not react. Kim frowned, as if this levity had been a breach of proper protocol.
"I waited, and then I heard someone open the door and go out on the deck. I wondered what was going on, so I pulled on some clothes and then I heard Kim yell for Becky. I went out onto the deck, a moment before the others came from upstairs. Kim said she thought Mary was dead, and then Becky confirmed it..."
She waited a moment and then she turned to go. "I'll make more coffee," she said as she wheeled herself out of the room.
Rhonda turned to Kim. "Kim, everybody heard a scream, but your story didn't include a scream. You saw the body, you went outside, you saw who it was and that she was hurt or dead, and you called for Becky, the only person in the house with medical training. What about the scream?"
Kim shrugged. "I must have screamed when I turned on the floodlights and looked outside. When I saw the body."
"But the way the body was lying, on its side, facing the house," Rhonda pointed out, "you wouldn't have seen the knife in her back, or the blood. It would have looked like she was passed out, or asleep. That would have justified going out to check on her, of course, but a scream? To be blunt, this is a house full of college students – has it never happened that anybody passed out or dozed off anywhere other than in her own bed?"
"Also," my employer put in, stubbing out her cigarette, "even if you saw the body, screamed for whatever reason, and then went outside to check, there would have been only a few seconds between the scream and the shout for Becky. That doesn't jibe with everything else we've heard. You screamed, Li ejected Becky out of her bed, Becky landed on the floor, Li asked how Becky was, then they said a couple of other things. Significant time passed between the scream and the shout."
"You need to tell her," Li said to Kim, leaning forward. "Tell her the truth – what you told me. Or I will."
Part nineteen
Until now, Kim had been managing to appear relaxed – unaffected by what was going on – but now she was stuck. She didn't speak or move, apparently trying to calculate some way out of this. And I'm sure that she was aware that even if she thought of the magic words which would get her off the spot, it was already too late for those words to work.
It seemed unlikely that she'd bolt, in the middle of the night, barefoot, probably with no money, wearing just a T-shirt and boxers, on an island that was currently cut off from the mainland, but I checked her position relative to the various exits, and I watched her body language.
"There was somebody else on the deck with the body," Li continued, speaking slowly and deliberately, still looking at Kim. "That's why Kim screamed. He turned and looked at her and then he went to the stairs and down to the beach. After he was gone, it took a minute for her to get up her nerve to go outside. Then she checked the body and yelled for Becky."
Then, looking triumphant, Li turned her gaze to the sheriff. "It was Manfred. And you're never going to solve this if you don't know that – if you don't know what kind of case this really is."
There was a pause and then several people started to speak, but Rhonda said, "Quiet! I'm asking the questions, and everybody should shut up until I ask the next one."
Well, this answered the question I'd been asking myself a few minutes earlier. I was pretty sure I knew now why the residents had relaxed, en masse, when Becky had started answering questions instead of Li.
I did wonder about what Elsa had told us before – that Kim had been the main believer in ghosts, back when Manfred had been merely a ghost hunter, not (perhaps) a ghost himself.
Jo raised her hand, as if she was in school. Rhonda gestured at her, and she said, "I saw him also, or at least I saw somebody. I was writing, as I said, and I saw the deck lights go on. I got out of bed when Kim screamed, and I went to the window. I saw somebody – it looked like a man, in dark clothes, including a jacket with silvery bits, like that one Manfred always used to wear – going to the staircase and down to the beach."
"You didn't see his face?"
"No. His back was to me. After he was gone, I saw Kim go out onto the deck and then turn and yell for Becky. I pulled on some clothes and ran into Becks and Li in the hall."
Elsa was in the doorway to the kitchen, listening and watching. I could hear and smell the coffee brewing, and it smelled wonderful.
I looked around the room. Jo was leaning forward, frowning. She'd taken off her glasses and she was polishing the lenses with the bottom edge of her pajama top. Becky looked bored. She ran her fingers through her frizzy hair, and I got the idea that if it had just been the residents there she would have rolled her eyes and laughed out loud at the nonsense of a dead man prowling the deck of their house.
My employer was at her most impassive. I wondered if she had expected this, but I'd learned not to waste my time asking that particular question. Elsa was hard to read, too.
Rhonda had insisted on her right to be the one asking the questions, but I got the idea that she'd never – in her still comparatively brief career as a sheriff – encountered a situation quite like this one.
"Did anybody else see anything that would corroborate this?" she asked after a pause.
Nobody responded. From the stories the others had told, it was plain that they wouldn't have had a chance to see the mystery figure on the deck – if that figure had existed in the first place.
Part twenty
Rhonda looked around the living room, and then she glanced at the windows. The sky was starting to get light. She stood up as Elsa wheeled herself back into the kitchen.
"I need to make some calls," the sheriff said. She gestured at the phone on the small table by the front door. "Is there another extension, more private than this?"
"There's a wall phone upstairs," Jo said. "Next to my room."
Li leaned forward. "Don't you want to–"
"No," Rhonda said, moving toward the stairs. "We're going to continue this at headquarters, with stenographers and signed statements. Everybody should get dressed and be ready to leave as soon as the cars can get here." She looked at the deputy. "Nobody goes outside or onto the deck." The deputy nodded.
Li tried again.
"Later," the sheriff told her, climbing the stairs. "And nobody makes any phone calls, to anybody," she said over her shoulder. As her feet vanished, she called down, "O'Connor–"
"I'll bring you some coffee," I called back.
"Bless you."
My employer caught my eye and nodded, and then she inclined her head toward the kitchen. I interpreted this as expressing admiration for Rhonda reasserting control over the investigation, and also suggesting that Elsa might appreciate some help.
Elsa looked up as I came into the kitchen. She was filling up a large tray with fresh mugs of coffee, plus milk and sugar. Each mug seemed to be completely unlike the others in size, shape and color.
She smiled as I came in. "Thanks," she said simply as I quickly rinsed out the mugs I was carrying and picked up the tray to carry it into the living room. She followed me with a fresh bottle of soda for herself.
The living room was deserted except for the deputy, who yawned. I held out the tray for her, and she studied the variety of mugs available and selected the largest one. I put the tray on the coffee table, which rested on gaily painted cinder blocks, and looked around for my employer.
She was in the dining room, seated at the head of the big table. I took her a mug and then went up the stairs to the hall, where Rhonda was leaning against the wall and talking on a phone with a very long cord. I handed her a mug and she nodded.
The only other person in the hall was Jo, sitting on a chair with a towel over her shoulder, obviously waiting for the bathroom to be available. I wondered if there was going to be enough hot water for everybody to take a shower before it ran out.
I went back downstairs and I saw that Elsa was now in the dining room with my employer. I took a mug of coffee for myself and went to join them.
"Will you be at police headquarters, for the questioning?" Elsa was asking her.
My employer sipped her coffee and shook her head. "I'm not a suspect, and I have certainly not been invited to assist, so no. And I have some other avenues I want to pursue. I do have a question for you, though. This is, obviously, a house of college-age women. Presumably – to put it delicately – there may have been situations where eligible young men..."
"Do we ever have boys over?" Elsa said, grinning. "Is that the question?"
"Well, I was sort of assuming the answer to that question was yes. My real question is about the protocol. Do young gentlemen stay over whenever invited, or are some of them considered more acceptable than others to the residents of the house? Is there some sort of voting process to determine whether each particular swain is allowed specific privileges here?"
Elsa laughed. "There are no formal rules. In general, we... it works out better if we stay over with the boys – for those who enjoy the company of boys – rather than have them stay here, just because the island is cut off from the mainland for half of every day. But sometimes... we adapt. Frankly, the main problem is the limited number of bathrooms, for those girls who aren't me or Kim. Why do you ask?"
"Because I'd like to find out what would be involved in having Marshall" – she gestured in my direction, as if Elsa might not be sure who she was talking about – "stay over here tonight."
Elsa looked me up and down with a critical eye, as if seeing me for the first time.
"He's quite tidy," my employer assured her. "He's mannerly and unobtrusive, and he makes a very good omelet if requested. I'll make sure he shaves before he arrives." She held up a hand. "He will sleep on the sofa, of course."
Elsa was controlling herself, barely. "Oh, that's good," she said, not meeting my eyes. "My bed is quite narrow."
My employer lit a cigarette and looked at me. She leaned over to whisper to Elsa, not exactly sotto voce, "It's been at least a year since I've seen him turn that particular color."
Part twenty-one
Elsa sighed. "I... I guess you're an expert at this sort of situation, but it just... It seems like we shouldn't be making jokes right now."
My employer nodded. "I'm not an expert on the subject of grief. I've seen quite a bit, and I've experienced it myself, of course, but I haven't studied it. It's not... My best advice is to allow yourself to go in any direction that seems necessary or useful at the moment. I would say that it's important not to act out, or to feel that you should act out, any emotions which you're not actually feeling."
She grimaced. "In my – rather atypical, I know – experience, some of the most powerful and emotive expressions of grief I've ever seen have been performed by people who turned out later to be murderers. People who are hiding a guilty secret seldom allow themselves to joke around after a death." She frowned. "I guess that's excluding psychopaths, but psychopaths, like serial killers, are much more common in fiction than in real life."
"So, you think I'm innocent? I guess that's something."
"To be frank, I have no idea – not yet. It... I can imagine how you might have murdered Manfred, with the body ending up down on the beach, but it would take a lot to sell me on the idea that it really happened. As for Mary, anybody could have done it. Nobody is excluded at this stage."
"Also," I put in, "I think one of the difficult things about your situation right now is that the natural tendency would be for Mary's friends to pull together, but of course it's complicated by the fact that one or more of you may well have killed her."
She nodded. "It's funny. We all had dinner together last night, which doesn't happen very often during the week. Nobody said why, but I think we all knew why we wanted to."
"Will you feel like doing that tonight?" I asked. "I imagine that's become a more complicated question now."
She nodded. "That makes sense. Is that why you're going to be staying over tonight – to check out how we're reacting? Maybe provide some counseling, therapy... that sort of thing?"
I laughed. "What makes you think that I have any idea why I'll be here?"
She laughed also, and my employer stubbed out her cigarette and sipped her coffee, looking pleased with herself.
Elsa drank some more of her soda and yawned. "Police headquarters. Questioning. Signed statements. I don't suppose they have regularly scheduled nap times?"
"Unlikely," my employer said. "Oh, by the way, I do want to ask about those malignant manifestations – the footprints and the Latin writing and so forth. When did those last appear?"
Elsa frowned. "Let me think. Not last night. Not the night before – the night Manfred died... Oh, that's terrible. I'm starting to remember which day is which based on who was murdered that night. Okay, today–" She gestured at the window. "I see daylight, so this is now Wednesday. There was nothing last night – Tuesday night. There was nothing the night before, Monday night, when Manfred was murdered. But Sunday night..."
"Mary told us about the Latin message –'Change will come tomorrow.' But she wasn't here Monday night, the night she came to get us at our home. Was that Sunday night?"
Elsa nodded. "That's right. We found it Monday morning. I remember because I overslept and missed my first class – more or less by accident." She looked out of the front window, stifling another yawn. The sky was lighter now, and the woods around the house were becoming visible.
Part twenty-two
My employer stood with me as I waited for the jitney. "So, why am I staying over at Heron House tonight?" I asked, wondering if I'd get an answer. "Do you expect further violence?"
"I don't believe so. But no, you have another assignment." She leaned over and whispered something in my ear, although there was nobody near enough to us to have overheard.
Then, with her head still quite close to mine, she murmured, "You're looking a little scruffy." She tugged the hair over my ear. "I'll give you a quick trim when I get home. You'll want to make a good impression on the gaggle of nubile coeds you'll be spending the night with."
We were on the campus of Claremont College, and I was being sent home to rest. From what she had just told me, I might have a long night ahead of me at Heron House.
Rhonda had dropped us off at the college on her way back to town. The Heron House residents had been taken directly to police headquarters in a van, and state police investigators were swarming over the murder scene. The body had been removed, of course.
"So, I'm getting a real, actual nap today," I said. "What will you be up to?"
"I – I'm afraid – will have to make the supreme sacrifice."
"Lie back, close your eyes, and think of England."
She snorted a laugh. "No, even worse. I'm afraid I'm going to have to read Manfred's book."
So, in the late afternoon, with my hair trimmed (by my employer) and my face shaved (by me, under her careful supervision), I took a cab to Heron House, making sure that I would get there well before the moment when the island would be cut off from the mainland for the night.
I had packed a small suitcase to bring with me. It was more than I needed for just overnight (assuming this visit was only going to be for one night – and I suddenly wondered why I was making that assumption), but it was constructed with a small secret compartment where I'd packed my gun and a few other items.
I did wonder what kind of reception I would get at Heron House. I had the idea that this might depend less on my personal charm and more on what kind of day the residents had endured at police headquarters.
Jo answered my knock as the taxi turned around and went back down the hill. She regarded me for a moment, then she said, "Can I help you?"
"I'm to stay here for tonight, for protection. I hope that's acceptable to everybody?"
"What if we say no?" Elsa called from somewhere I couldn't see. I thought her voice sounded playful, although that could have been wishful thinking.
"Then I'll have to stay outside," I said, "lurking in the bushes, getting cold and damp, and yet constantly vigilant, on guard and alert to any possible–"
Jo opened the door all the way and motioned me in.
I came in and put down my suitcase. Jo closed the door and said, "Just you? Not any police, or your friend the lady detective?"
I hadn't realized before how small Jo was. The night before, she'd been dressed in pajamas and a huge robe and I hadn't seen her standing up, but now she was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, wearing, apparently, several pairs of socks of different sizes and colors, and large horn-rimmed glasses that dominated her face. The glasses were similar to my employer's, but the effect was different because Jo's face was small and round, while my employer's was narrow and framed by her lank, brown hair. Jo's hair was dark and pulled back into a loose ponytail.
"I have no idea what the police are doing," I told Jo. "We're not privy to their plans. And the lady detective, who is my employer, is, as far as I know, at home."
"You'll be here all night?" Jo asked, looking suddenly thoughtful.
"That's the plan."
She leaned toward me, and I lowered my head so she could speak softly. "I may have some questions for you later. If that's okay."
Then, without waiting for a reply, looking as if she might be afraid that she'd said too much, she turned and padded off and up the stairs to the second floor.
Elsa wheeled herself into the living room from the kitchen. Once Jo had vanished, she said quietly, "The last couple of days have made me realize that I'm not in favor of dying any time soon."
I sat down on a sofa, so we'd be closer to eye level.
"Most people feel that way in the abstract," I agreed, "but it is different when death becomes a more immediate possibility."
"I read some of Jan's articles about Bellona, for a class that I took last semester. Were you with her when she was there?"
I nodded. "Yes."
Her mouth quirked. "I was trying to figure out your relationship with her, when you were here last night. I think it was a way of distracting myself from everything else. Or trying to."
"It's not mysterious, really. I can show you several years of pay stubs and income tax returns."
She gestured toward the kitchen. "I just made some soup. Would you like some?"
I nodded. "That sounds good, but first I need to ask you for a favor."
Part twenty-three
Elsa opened the door of her van and hoisted herself up into the driver's seat, then she reached down, lifted and folded her wheelchair, and slid it smoothly into position behind her. I enjoyed watching this process, and when I was seated beside her she grinned as she started the motor and we fastened our seat belts.
"Want to arm wrestle?" she offered.
I shook my head. "I think I'll pass. Thank you for the offer, though."
"So, what do you want to see?" She took a hair tie from the pocket of her denim jacket and tied back her mass of bushy red hair. She told me later that she'd nearly had an accident on the highway during the summer, driving with her window open, "when my hair suddenly decided to see how much of my face it could cover all at the same time."
"I just want to get a picture of the whole island and who lives here and where their houses are," I said. "Particularly with Manfred's murder, it must have been committed by somebody who was on the island while it was cut off from the mainland, but there's no reason to think it had anything to do with your house or your roommates. And Mary's murder may have been committed by someone you don't even know, someone who dumped the body on the deck of your house to implicate one or more of you."
She nodded very slowly. "That's... It's pretty to think so, as the saying goes, but..." She shrugged. "Anyway, we do have a map inside, if that would help."
"I saw it – on the kitchen wall. It's a tourist map – nicely illustrated but probably not 100% geographically accurate. And maps don't tell everything."
She shrugged and started the motor.
"So," I said, "there's only one more house that way?" I gestured farther along the dirt road.
She nodded. "Mrs. Bannister."
"That's where the path is – down to the beach..."
She was impassive. "So I've heard."
"Sorry."
She gave me a wry smile. "No problem."
"I've been there, to Mrs. Bannister's. And I don't remember any houses back along this road the other way – between us and where the main road splits in three – am I right about that?"
"Are you right that you don't remember?" she said, trying to control her grin. "I would assume so. You'd know better than I would."
I laughed. "Okay, how about this – can you give me a quick overview on the houses on Heron Island, and then we can take a drive around?"
She released the parking brake. "Let's do both at once."
As we drove down the hill, at an appropriate speed for a one-lane dirt road where we might, at any moment, encounter a car coming toward us through the trees, she said, "As you noticed, there is one road onto the island, from the mainland. It has a name, but I don't remember what is. Every dinky little dirt road on this island has a name."
I did remember the name of the road, but I didn't say anything.
"Anyway," she continued as we reached the intersection where our road met the other two, "this road just goes to our house, and Mrs. Billingsley. I think her house was originally for the servants – the Loomis servants – to live, at least most of them, so they wouldn't be cluttering up the main house. Except whoever slept in my little room – that's clearly a servant's room. Maybe for a nanny or something."
We heard a car approaching, and she waited until she saw it to back up onto the Heron House road.
"Do you know all the cars on the island?" I asked as the approaching car, a bright red sports car, turned on the road to our right. The driver – a woman with dark glasses, wearing a scarf covering her hair – didn't acknowledge us.
"Sometimes I hang out the window and yell Hello! while waving enthusiastically," she said. "The result is about the same."
Then she laughed. "In answer to your question, you spend too much time with a detective. No, I know Mrs. Billingsley's car. That's the only other one which would be going onto our road. I have not memorized every single car on the island.
"Most of the houses on the island are along that road – where that car just went. We never go that way – there's a story that one drunken student last semester, coming home from a party on the mainland, went down that road by mistake and... Well, it's not exactly clear what he did, but the police were called, and it started yet another round of efforts to get us thrown off the island."
She looked to see if I was going to ask a question, and then she gestured at the third road. "That one goes to the beach, and there are a couple of summer cottages there, but they're probably closed up now, for the winter. I think the idea may have been that the Loomis family, and perhaps their servants, got one road to themselves, and everybody else on the island got a different road – when the family had to start selling off their land."
She turned to face me. "So, where do you live?"
"In town. At the Ocean View Inn." She'd obviously never heard of it. "On Ocean Drive."
"How is it?"
"It's very pleasant. The owner, Mrs. Jessup, is quite nice. It's usually closed in the winters, but we made a special arrangement."
I was deliberately not including any language to clarify that my employer and I shared a room. I had the idea that Elsa wouldn't have minded having some information on that topic, as long as she could get it without having to ask for it.
As my employer sometimes said, information seldom falls into your lap – you have to dig for it. (The second half of that aphorism, which didn't apply here, was that information which does fall into your lap always has to be viewed with suspicion.)
Later, when we were back at the house and Elsa had parked the van and turned off the motor, I expected her to start the process of lifting her wheelchair back down to ground level, but she didn't move.
"Can I ask a question?" she asked after a moment.
"Of course."
"Does Miss Sleet... She doesn't take any of this spooky stuff seriously, does she?"
I had to laugh. "You'd be surprised how often people ask me what she's thinking about something, and how often I have no idea, and how often nobody believes me."
She laughed, too, then she said, "Okay, I believe you," though she said it with a look which told me that she was well aware that my "answer" had not answered her question.
"Thanks," I said. "Now let me ask you a question you probably can answer. What do you think about all the writing and the footprints and so on?"
She unsnapped her seat belt and stretched.
"Officially, I don't believe any of it. It's been... We've debated it in the house. Sometimes it's been a real debate, like at school. We each take a position and look at the different sides." She shrugged. "You know. Other times it's five in the morning and someone has been walking around the house, writing in Latin and leaving putrid footprints, and we're kind of freaked out."
She squirmed in the seat a little. "I lock my door at night now. I'm the only one on the ground floor, after all. I don't come out of my room. It annoys me to be scared..."
"Makes sense," I said. "I'd call it 'cautious,' actually. As the sheriff pointed out, something threatening is obviously going on, no matter the cause."
"True. I wonder sometimes if it's the rich people, to get us off their nice little island. But I can't... Does that seem like something rich people would do?"
"Instead of lawsuits and court orders and injunctions, or even bribes? I agree – not typical disgruntled behavior of the upper classes."
"So..." her voice trailed off. She looked out the windshield for some time, and then, still not looking at me, she said, "I lied to you before."
I let her continue.
"When I said that Manfred... that I was invisible to him. One time, at a party here, I was in the kitchen, and I went into my room to get something, and he followed me in. He... he grabbed me and nearly knocked me over, and he tried to reach into my top and grab my boobs. I... I hit him as hard as I could." She met my eyes, "I get myself in and out of this chair, I wheel myself around, I work out every day – I'm not weak. He hit the floor, hard, and his head ended up... he was half in my room and half in the kitchen, and Kim was there. She saw what had happened, and she told him to leave. She was pretty fierce, and he split."
I nodded. I didn't point out that she had just given herself a motive (a weak one, admittedly) for killing Manfred, and that my employer had said that she could possibly have done it, even in her wheelchair. I was sure she'd factored that into her decision to tell me.
I decided not to view this information, which had just fallen into my lap, with suspicion, at least for the moment.
Part twenty-four
Elsa and I went into the house. I held the door and bowed her in, which made her smile.
The living room was still warmer than the cool evening air outside. Becky, Li, and Kim were sitting together on the large sofa. I had the idea that they had just been talking, but now they were silent, looking at us. I wouldn't say that their expressions were cold – they were being as noncommittal as they could – but the room didn't seem as inviting as it had a moment before.
Well, as I knew from experience, the arrival of a detective, or her assistant, is often not an occasion for rejoicing. And that doesn't indicate guilt – only the fact that almost everybody has some secrets they would prefer not to have revealed.
Elsa winked at me. "Why don't you go into the dining room, Marshall, and I'll warm up my delicious soup for us." I started to say something, but she added, "I'll call you when it's ready and you can come and give me a hand."
I went into the empty dining room and sat at the table. There were twelve seats, and I assumed that this had been the table where the Loomis family had eaten their meals. I wondered how large the family had been. I wondered how large it was now. I wondered if these would be important facts to know.
In general, I felt like I had very little idea – maybe even less than usual – about what might prove to be important in this case.
My employer had said that she had to read Manfred's book about hauntings in this area, but what was she thinking she'd find there? (And had she actually been serious about that in the first place?)
I couldn't see anybody in the living room from where I sat, but it sounded like Li and Kim were still there. Becky was either gone or silent. I couldn't make out any words.
After a minute, Jo walked past the dining room door, catching my eye and then quickly looking away again.
It occurred to me that I should make myself useful. I went to the sideboard and got place mats, silverware, and napkins, setting two places at the table. When I was done with that, I heard Elsa's wheelchair approaching across the living room (wooden floor, braided area rug, wooden floor again, and then into view).
I didn't rise as she entered. I had already discovered that this particular gesture of politeness didn't work when the lady in question always entered seated – how would you know when to sit down again?
She had a board across the arms of her wheelchair, with a large serving bowl of steaming soup right in the middle. I quickly rose and transferred it to the table, between our two place settings (I put it on a trivet, of course).
She smiled. "The coffee is in the kitchen," she said, and I went to get it, realizing belatedly that I should have removed the chair at one of the two place settings.
When I returned with a mug of coffee for me, and a bottle of soda for her (hoping this would prove to be the correct choice), and two glasses of water, she had moved the superfluous chair herself and was sitting at the table. Both of our bowls were full of soup, and it smelled wonderful – a thick fish chowder.
I sat down and placed my napkin on my lap.
She grinned. "Are we saying grace?"
I laughed. "I haven't in years. Comes from working for an ardent atheist, I suppose. My Catholic parents would be shocked, but probably not surprised."
I took a spoonful of soup and blew on it.
"What about her Catholic parents?" She shrugged. "She's Italian, right?"
"Her father is a paisan, although I don't think he's all that religious. I've never met him. I have no idea about her mother." She seemed about to ask another question in that area. "I'm sorry, but that subject is classified. Completely off limits."
She sipped some soup, glancing at me to see if I was going to say any more about my employer's mother. I didn't.
"Fair enough." She smiled her impish smile. "So, you've never met her father. Have you introduced her to your parents?"
I shook my head. "Not yet. They know what I do for a living, but I haven't been back home in years. I've been too busy, traveling around. I send them a post card occasionally. And birthday cards, of course."
"Because you've been out detecting."
"I've been assisting with the detecting, assisting with the writing, and making sure we have food, shelter, and clothing, and enough money to pay the bills. Sometimes I take steps to make sure we continue to be alive and healthy."
She sipped her soup, then she gave a deep sigh. "I still feel we're – I'm – having too good a time," she said very quietly. I almost had to read her lips. "Not that I'm having a lot of fun right now or anything..."
I nodded. I leaned forward, put my hand on her shoulder, and whispered something. She nodded.
Part twenty-five
After we finished our soup, Elsa said, "I'll do the dishes." She smiled. "I'll find you later on."
She put the board across the arms of her wheelchair again and we piled the dirty dishes on it. After she'd left for the kitchen, I strolled into the living room. Li and Kim were gone, and Becky was standing by the front door.
"Is somebody out there?" I asked, going up beside her and peering out through the glass.
She shrugged. "It's too dark to tell." She turned to face me. "What do you think about all this? Are we all going to get through the night tonight... without anybody dying?" She shrugged. "I asked the sheriff today if she was assigning people – deputies or whoever – to watch us. To watch the house. She–" She almost laughed. "I had the idea that her real answer was 'You're all suspects – why would I tell you anything?'"
I raised an eyebrow.
The laugh finally came out. "Yes – that is a good answer. What do you think of her? She's still really new at this – at being sheriff. My father is a doctor, and he knew Sheriff Baxter very well. Dad used to have confidence in him."
My experiences with Sheriff Baxter had been somewhat different, but I decided not to go into that right now.
"First of all," I said, "you do have to admit that if Sheriff White had said that – that you are all suspects... Well, she would have had a point."
Becky nodded. "Obviously. But, since I know I haven't murdered anybody, I can't help but think of the threat... well, the possible threat, to me."
I shrugged.. "Me, too, actually. The threat to me, I mean – and to all of you."
"So, are there cops or something on the island tonight, or are we all cut off as usual?"
"Honestly, I have no idea. The sheriff doesn't share her plans with amateur detectives or their assistants – no more than she does with suspects."
She was silent, so I went on, lowering my voice a bit. "I'm sure it was difficult, checking Mary's body. I'm sorry you had to do that."
She nodded. "Me, too," she said after a while.
"Would you like some coffee?" I asked.
She shook her head.
Feeling that I had exhausted my welcome in the living room, I went out onto the deck and sat at the glass table. The air was cool, but I was wearing a sweater.
In order to make this look plausible, I had brought my cup of coffee and an ashtray with me. I don't smoke, but I always carry a pack and a lighter in case my employer runs out. I assumed that nobody at the house had spent enough time with me to be completely sure I wasn't a smoker.
(Since we'd moved to Claremont, more than one person had commented that they could smell my employer's cigarettes on me.)
As far as I could see through the windows, the living room was empty. Li was in the kitchen, doing something I couldn't see. She was not looking at me. I could hear Elsa doing the dishes. Kim's windows were dark, but Jo's lights were on and I could hear the faint sounds of her typewriter.
Patience was my watchword, of course, but a couple of times, when the typewriter fell silent for a moment, I made sure to produce a bit of casual noise (glass-topped tables are good for that).
Eventually, the typewriting stopped and a small, round face popped up in the window and looked down at me through large horn-rimmed glasses.
If it had been Elsa, for example, I'd have waved, and maybe even winked, but Jo was no Elsa. She'd been circling around me since my arrival, but I could tell that she was easily spooked and very, very serious. I needed to allow her come to me without letting on that I was aware of her desire to talk to me.
Then, very soon after that, I saw Jo in the living room, through the glass doors. She reacted as if she was just now becoming aware that I was on the deck. I decided that it was appropriate to give her a small, casual wave.
She stepped out onto the deck, and l smiled.
"Do you have a minute?" she asked, as if I might be very busy, all appearances to the contrary.
"Absolutely," I said cheerfully. I gestured at one of the other chairs. "Join me?"
She hesitated, and then she came over and sat down. I offered her a cigarette, but she declined, and I put the pack on the table.
I expected to have to make some small talk to get things started, but she leaned forward. "Is it okay if I ask you some questions?"
I half expected her to whip out a notepad and rest it on her thigh, as Rhonda had done, and I was suddenly afraid that Jo, the aspiring novelist, was going to ask Marshall, the journalist's assistant, how she could get her novel published. Fortunately, she had other things on her mind.
"Did you examine Manfred's body?" she asked.
I shook my head. "No, the sheriff did that. In fact, I was explicitly told to keep my distance while she did it." I thought of elaborating on our relationship with Sheriff Rhonda, but I didn't.
"What about Mary?"
"I watched while the body was being examined, but I didn't participate. Sheriff White and Miss Sleet are much more experienced than I am – there's not much chance that I'd see something they both missed."
"But you've seen dead bodies before."
I nodded.
"So, are you inured to dead bodies at this point? Do you get used to them?"
If this was what she had been eager to talk to me about, I was beginning to be sorry I had made the effort to encourage her to come and sit with me. I had the urge to refer her to Becky, the medical student, to find about how she had felt about checking the body of her friend for signs of life.
Part twenty-six
It was not unpleasant to talk with Jo, but I had to remind myself a few times that patience needed to be my watchword here, since I had a pretty good idea she hadn't murdered anybody.
I could imagine, fairly easily, a person who would be able to grill me about how different people react to dead bodies as a way of concealing the fact that she had produced a corpse or two herself recently, but I had a strong hunch that Jo wasn't that person.
My best guess was that she was collecting background information because she was planning to incorporate a murder into the novel she was writing.
Finally, Jo thanked me for my time, and she headed off and back upstairs to her typewriter.
After a few minutes, I saw Elsa through the glass doors to the living room, and I gave her the high sign we'd agreed on. She came out onto the deck, closing the door behind her to keep the heat inside the house.
She came close to me, and then she put her hands in the sleeves of her sweater, clenching up her shoulders.
"Are you sitting out here in the cold to be unobtrusive?" she asked.
"I have no specific instructions about whether or not I should obtrude. And I'm definitely not going to sit out here all night – I didn't bring enough sweaters for that. However, this is where the action has been focused." I looked around. "Mary's body was right here, after all, and Manfred's body was found down there on the beach. Also, from here I can see the kitchen through those windows, and some of the living room, and I can see a little of Kim and Jo's rooms up there."
Elsa grinned. "You'll like that – Kim does have a tendency to walk around in her underwear."
I looked up at the second floor windows and sighed. "From this angle, even if she turns on her light I'll be lucky to see anything below her neck."
She chuckled as I heard Jo's typewriting resume.
"I've been thinking about... what we talked about in the car," Elsa said slowly. "How did you know – how did she know – what I saw, the night Mary was murdered?"
"I have no idea. Miss Sleet never reveals that sort of information to me – not until the end, and sometimes not even then." I smiled. "I sometimes get the idea that she enjoys keeping me in the dark most of all."
Elsa leaned forward and beeped my nose. "It's a good thing she's not here to hear you being disloyal like this."
I laughed a loud laugh. "It's nothing I haven't said to her, often in frustration."
She smiled, but then she got serious again. She put her hand on my arm. "Yes," she said. "That's in answer to the question you're about to ask. I've thought about it, and I think I should tell the truth, about what I saw last night. About who I saw. But then you'll need to protect me, all night, until the police can get here in the morning." She raised one eyebrow. "If that's not a problem..."
I leaned forward and kissed her, at length.
"Try to keep me at a distance," I said.
Part twenty-seven
Based on what we know now, and according to plan, the murderer was watching, and listening, as Elsa and I talked on the deck. The following morning, footprints revealed that she had stood for some time on the muddy path that led from the deck to the parking area in front of the house.
Then, after we'd moved into Elsa's bedroom, out of her sight, the murderer had heard the sounds of enthusiastic lovemaking, and then (maybe) the quiet conversation that followed, until I emerged into the kitchen (fully clothed), took a beer from the refrigerator, and went out the front door of the house to smoke a cigarette in the parking area.
The murderer then moved silently through the kitchen to Elsa's small bedroom, where she put a knife to her throat.
"What did you see last night? What lies did you tell Marshall? Did you lie to him to get him to fuck you?"
The bed springs creaked as Elsa sat up.
"Do you think I'm going to be as easy to kill as Mary was? I could break you in half."
"Not before I cut your throat. Mary had legs, and I killed her."
"How many people are you going to kill because of that creep Manfred?"
"He was not a creep – we were going to be rich, and... that fucking bitch Mary killed him."
I thought that Elsa could probably have overpowered Kim without my assistance, but I'm cautious by nature, so I stepped back into Elsa's bedroom and took Kim's knife away from her.
Part twenty-eight
I called my employer first, of course.
I reported to her in detail, although I confess that I withheld the fact that Elsa had persuaded me to make a few minor – very minor – adjustments to the original plan for the evening. That fact would come out eventually, I knew, but I felt that this information was not essential at the moment.
I was using the living room phone, and fortunately I was alone, except for Elsa.
My employer listened, asked a couple of questions, drew thoughtfully on her pipe, and then said, "Call Rhonda. If she's going to travel to the island tonight, I wouldn't mind going also. Otherwise, I'll see you in the morning. Comporto-se." She hung up.
I called police headquarters next. I was patched through to Rhonda, who seemed to be at home.
"Good evening, sheriff," I said. "I thought you would want to know that there have been some developments in the Heron Island case."
There was a pause, then she said, "Please tell me about them."
"I'm at Heron House. Kimberly Daniels just attacked Elsa Peabody with a knife, threatening to kill her. Elsa is fine. During the attack, Kim said that she – Kim – had killed Mary Sanders, and she thought Elsa knew something incriminating about it. Elsa and I both heard the confession. Kim said that she killed Mary in revenge for Manfred's murder, which she blamed on Mary."
Rhonda digested this. Elsa ran her fingers through her mass of red hair, looking in the direction of the kitchen. Now that the danger was over, she seemed to be trying to find the best way to think about what had happened.
I'd seen that look before.
Before and during the confrontation with Kim, Elsa and I had been very much on the same page. Now, there was somewhat more distance between us, since she was inside the events and I was outside, both because the people involved were her friends and not mine, and because I had been through this type of situation before, more than once, and she hadn't.
"I know you're at Heron House," Rhonda said. "The house is under observation. Where is Miss Daniels now?"
"Handcuffed to the bed frame in Elsa's room. She's not talking."
"Is anybody injured?"
"No."
"Hang on." She put me on hold for a moment. "Two deputies will be there in a couple of minutes. Please turn Miss Daniels over to them." She sighed. "Please come to headquarters in the morning, to make a statement. I..."
"I can ask Miss Peabody to drive me there," I said. "Once the road is open."
There was a knock at the front door and Elsa went to open it.
"I'll need her statement, too, obviously," Rhonda said.
As Elsa opened the door, Li poked her head down the stairs and asked sleepily, "What's going on down there?" I could see Becky behind her.
Part twenty-nine
I didn't want to get involved in a conversation with Li and Becky at that moment, so I followed Elsa to the front door.
"Come on in," I said to the deputies. "I'm the one who called the sheriff. My name is Marshall O'Connor."
I had never met these deputies before, and they didn't seem particularly interested in meeting me now. They had a perpetrator to pick up, and they wanted to get it done.
I led them back to Elsa's bedroom. I could hear Elsa talking to Li and Becky behind us, but I couldn't make out the words. That was fine with me.
Kim was still sitting on Elsa's bed, her legs folded under her, and she didn't look up as we came in. Her expression was somewhere between stoic and fierce.
One deputy, who seemed to be in charge of this two-man operation, asked for Kim's name and she gave it. He handcuffed her, and then stood aside for me to remove my handcuffs, which had been keeping her attached to the bed.
They took her out, one walking in front of her and one behind. Li and Becky were sitting on a sofa, talking to Elsa, but Li jumped up and ran over as soon as Kim came into view. She tried to talk to Kim, but her friend was still as blank-faced as before and kept walking forward, her eyes on the broad back of the deputy in front of her. I was starting to wonder if her defense for her actions was going to depend on a claim that she was insane. (Which is not to say that I had some kind of worked-out proof that she was not insane.)
In desperation, Li grabbed a pen from a small shelf by the door, yanked up Kim's sleeve, and wrote something on her arm. The deputies paused to allow this, and then they left with their prisoner.
I started to wonder where exactly the deputies were taking Kim, since the road to the mainland was going to be under water until morning, but I caught Elsa's expression and I knew there were more important things to deal with now.
Li plopped herself back onto the sofa, looking upset but determined. Her thin face was sharp and angular in the light from the table lamp next to her. Becky was looking up at the ceiling, tears welling in her eyes, and Elsa was giving me a look that was somewhere between a demand and a plea that I come and help her out.
I pulled a chair over next to Elsa's wheelchair.
"I wanted to help her," Li said defensively. "I gave her my lawyer's number."
"But she tried to kill Elsa," Becky said. Tears were dripping down her cheeks, which were creased with sleep wrinkles, and she still wasn't looking at Li. Other than me and Elsa, nobody seemed to be making eye contact with anybody.
"She was probably confused," Li protested. "She thought that Elsa killed Mary–"
"No," Elsa said patiently, "She said she – Kim – had killed Mary because she thought Mary had killed Manfred."
"But–" Kim began, but Becky turned to me.
"Mr. Marshall, do you know what's going on?" She squinted at me and wiped her face with her sleeve. "Can you explain all this?"
As I started to explain, at least the parts I was willing to explain, I interrupted myself. "What about Jo?" I asked.
"She's probably got her ear plugs in," Becky said. "With those, she can sleep through anything."
I hesitated. "Can you run up and check? It's up to you whether you want to wake her up, but the way things have been going, I want to make sure she's okay."
Becky nodded and made for the stairs, ascending into the darkness. Our corner of the living room was illuminated by two small table lamps – it felt almost like we were huddled around a camp fire together.
Li brought her legs up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. "You think Jo is dead, too?" she asked in a tiny voice.
"No," I reassured her. "That is, I have no reason to think so, but this is not the part where everything gets explained. I don't want to take anything for granted."
Becky padded back down from the second floor and rejoined us in our little circle of light. "Fast asleep and snoring," she reported as she sat next to Li again. I noted that she was wearing glasses now. "She has the covers pulled up over her head."
Elsa caught my eye, her puckish grin starting to come back. "We must have been keeping her awake, poor thing."
Becky looked a question.
"Mr. Marshall and I were in my room together earlier, loudly pretending to have sex. When Jo has a guest over, I can sure hear everything that's going on up in her room. I guess it works the other way, too."
I could tell that calling me "Mr. Marshall" was helping to lift Elsa's mood, so I didn't complain.
Li grimaced. "Forget all that, please," she said, waving her hands. 'Why did those cops take Kimmy away? What did she do? How can we help her?"
Calmly and matter-of-factly, I laid out what was known:
I shrugged. "Did Kim really kill Mary last night? I have no idea. I'm no detective, but I'm not aware of anything that rules her out. If she did kill Mary, was it for the reason she said? I have no idea. If she did think Mary killed Manfred, why did she care enough to seek vengeance? That I'd rather not say – I have no direct evidence."
I didn't glance meaningfully at Elsa, but I was pretty sure she was paying attention to what I was, and was not, saying. Of course, whether she was going to follow my lead or not was a separate question.
"And here's the real stumper," I continued. "If Kim does think that Mary killed Manfred, how is she getting around the fact that Mary was not, as far as anybody can tell, on the island at the time of the murder? I have no idea about that."
Part thirty
"Is she deranged?" Rhonda demanded.
Ordinarily, my employer would have pretended that she had no idea who the sheriff was referring to, but Rhonda had slid an ashtray across her desk as we'd seated ourselves, so she was grateful for that. This was the first time Rhonda had relaxed her rule about smoking in her office, so it was no time to be pedantic (or at least not that pedantic).
"I don't know," my employer said. "That's not my area of expertise." She waved a hand. "I'm not convinced that Kim killed Mary, either, although everybody's stories certainly don't rule her out. But proclaiming that you're guilty of a crime which you did not actually commit does not necessarily indicate mental imbalance. It can be a very sane and clever move, under certain circumstances."
"Mr. Barris is hoping that I – we – can give him more information so he can decide how to charge Kim Daniels." Elsa looked up. "I know she tried to attack you, Miss Peabody – and threatened to kill you – but that's complicated by her confession that she killed Mary Sanders, which as far as I know we can't prove. And she said she killed Mary in revenge for a murder that I can't see how Mary could have committed. She is refusing to answer any questions."
"Since I'm here," Elsa said, "can I say what I'm wondering?"
Rhonda nodded. "Please do."
"Sitting where I'm sitting – figure of speech – I'm worried about what's going to happen next, much more than who's going to prosecute who for what." She paused before continuing. "There was a murder near my house on Monday night, there was a murder in my house on Tuesday night, and one of my friends tried to kill me last night. To be honest, I don't know if I want to go home tonight. And I'm scared for my roommates. The ones who are left."
The sheriff leaned back in her chair. "I can understand that. I had deputies on the island last night, and I'm considering having someone inside your house tonight." She tapped the papers on her desk. "I have your statement about last night, Miss Peabody, and I will be in touch later today. But first I want to talk to Miss Sleet and Marshall, to pool our information."
Elsa put her hands on the arms of her wheelchair. "I understand. Please let me know what the plans are for tonight."
She started to turn, but my employer said, "Elsa, here's one fact which might be helpful. What you seem worried about sounds like a serial killer. As I said before, serial killers are quite common in movies, for obvious reasons, but they are very rare in real life. This is, apparently, a series of murders, but I very much doubt that someone is methodically and systematically murdering, or attempting to murder, the inhabitants of Heron House."
Elsa nodded. "Thanks. That is helpful, actually." She turned and wheeled toward the door, which I held open for her. She winked, visible only to me, as she left. I closed the door and resumed my seat.
My employer took out her cigarette case and I made sure I had my lighter ready. "What I said to Elsa is true," she began, "but I am also worried about possible future violence, so, to anticipate your question, I am willing to share the facts that I know. I have, needless to say, some ideas as well, but they don't lead anywhere conclusive and I'm going to hold them for the moment."
Rhonda nodded. "Okay, let's put Mr. Barris and his job to the side. He's been county attorney for a long time – he can solve his own problems. I was elected to prevent the things that have been happening at Heron House... God, I sound like I'm campaigning, don't I?"
"I know what you mean, and you're right. Nobody has ever elected me to do anything, but I've been in that position, looking down on a corpse that I could perhaps have prevented if I'd done something differently, and I don't want to be there again." She held up a finger. "But I do have some questions myself, five in number, which I'm hoping you will answer for me, if you can."
"Can you list them for me?" Rhonda asked.
My employer smiled and took out a cigarette, which I lit for her. "Of course. Some of them have more than one part."
Counting them off on her fingers, she said:
"One: Why was Manfred on the island on Monday night, during the storm? Assuming he wasn't wandering around in the rain all night, where was he staying?
"Two: Where did Mary spend that night, the night of Manfred's murder?
"Three: Where did Kim spend that night, the night of Manfred's murder? Was she with her professor lover, and does her professor lover really exist?
"Four: On the night Mary was killed, was there any physical evidence on or around the deck to support the idea that somebody in Manfred's clothes – Manfred or not – had been on the deck?
"Five: Your deputies – the ones who were on the island last night – where were they?"
Part thirty-one
Rhonda sighed. "Well, here's what I know. I have no idea why Manfred was on the island during the storm, or even if he was there at all, as opposed to being dumped on the beach from a boat. We've talked to the other homeowners on the island, but nothing has come from that. Without a lot more than I have now, I can't get a warrant to search anybody's house or property."
"And the people who live on Heron Island are..."
"They have money, and influence, and more than one of them has made it pretty clear to me that they didn't think I was up to the job of replacing Sheriff Baxter in the first place."
My employer nodded. "I understand. Do you know where Mary spent the night?"
Rhonda shook her head. "No idea. To tell the truth, until now, until Kim Daniels' accusation, I hadn't been giving that question very much attention. Your own statements place her off the island the night Manfred was killed. You didn't ask when you saw her in the morning?"
"No. It did not occur to me at that moment that she would end up being either a murder suspect or a murder victim, let alone both."
(And, of course, she'd been busy being grumpy about having to get up early, but I didn't mention that.)
My employer leaned forward and tapped her ash into the ashtray. "What about Kim's theoretical lover, the professor?" she asked. "Does he exist (and is he a 'he'?), and was she with him the night Manfred was murdered? "
Rhonda nodded. "He exists. I know his name, but I want to withhold that, since I gave him some assurances about protecting his identity if I could. His wife is out of town, and he says that Kim did spend the night with him, at his home, but there's no direct evidence supporting that, as far as we know so far. So, it's not much of an alibi.
"And I remember you asked about the evidence on the deck. Nothing that pointed toward Manfred or his jacket."
"And the deputies? Where were they staying?"
"Why does that matter?"
My employer shrugged. "Testing one of my ideas."
"Which you're not sharing. Fair enough. They were in an unmarked van, parked in a small lot near the road to the mainland. Well, the 'lot' is actually just a little clear area where people park during the day when they're going clamming. That's it?"
My employer stubbed out her cigarette. "For now. What do you want from me?"
Rhonda smiled and turned to me. "It's what I want from both of you. Marshall, I've read your statement. Was there anything you observed while you were in the house which you left out of the report?"
My employer held up a hand. "That's too general." She smiled. "Marshall observes a lot. You remember his testimony during the Emily Armstrong trial. We'd be here all day."
Rhonda made a face. "Okay. After Daniels was taken into custody, did you search her room?"
"Yes, I did," I replied, after getting a signal from my employer.
"Did you find anything that seemed pertinent?"
"A few notes from a lover – signed with a pet name, but, based on the content, probably from her professor lover. A couple of clippings from the college paper, and one from the Crier, from a few years ago, about Manfred. A Latin textbook, although her class schedule doesn't include any classes where Latin would be involved."
"I'll put something together with that," my employer said. "Mary was a journalism student, and she was doing research on Manfred so she could write an article about him, for the college paper. He was such a notorious character around here that she thought it would make a good story."
Rhonda frowned. "I didn't see anything like that when I went through her papers. I admit I didn't read everything..."
"She didn't keep any of that material at Heron House," my employer explained. "She kept that research in her old dorm room, because she was suspicious of her roommates and their possible connections to Manfred. I read it all today, and I read Manfred's book as well."
"Does any of this tie in with Kim's statement that Manfred was going to get rich?"
"Mary was pretty sure that someone connected with Manfred was doing the spooky manifestations in the house – the footprints and the Latin writing and so on – with the idea that one of her roommates could be suckered into hiring Manfred to 'lay' the ghost. He's provided that 'service' to the prosperous and gullible in this area before. She didn't know who the accomplice was, but she was pretty sure it was one of her roommates. So, I assume that's why she stored the papers related to this particular assignment in her former roommate's dorm room."
"That makes sense."
Part thirty-two
Rhonda shook her head and leaned back in her chair. "So, you don't know who killed Manfred or Mary?" she asked.
My employer shook her head. "If I did, I'd say so. The point of identifying murderers is to stop them, after all. But let's simplify things. How about this: Let's assume, for the purpose of this conversation, that Kim is on the level. She killed Mary, and she killed Mary in revenge for Mary killing Manfred, because she thought, for some reason, that Manfred's death meant she'd lost out on a chance to become rich.
"Now, I'm not saying Kim was correct about any of those statements, but let's assume she was sincere – that she really believes them, whether or not they are objectively true. Where does that take us?"
"If that's true," I said, "then Kim was apparently Manfred's accomplice in the house. The Latin dictionary is actually a legitimate clue – it wasn't planted in her room to implicate her."
"But then why try to spook the girls at Heron House?" Rhonda asked. "Why not their neighbors, some of whom are actually wealthy? Manfred could have soaked them for a lot more than he could get from any of the girls at Heron House."
"According to Mary's notes, Manfred had worked the same scam with one family recently – the Palmers – but they were the only other house on the island without an alarm system. He put on quite a show for them, apparently, driving out their supposed ghosts."
"But does that end up with Kim thinking she could use Manfred to become wealthy? Can you really become wealthy fleecing people – even rich people – by pretending to get rid of their ghosts?"
My employer shook her head. "No, you cannot. Manfred, as far as Mary had been able to tell, was basically broke, living scheme to scheme. There must have been some other prospective source of income – something we don't know about yet."
The sheriff sighed. She seemed to be getting impatient. "I really feel like we need to solve Manfred's murder. Everything else seems to flow from that – like we can't definitely explain anything else until we can prove who killed him."
My employer nodded. "I think that's true. And I have an idea about why Kim blamed Mary for that. If I may lay it out for you?"
Rhonda shrugged.
"This appears sort of circular, so I'll start with the fact that Mary was not on the island, according to all the evidence, when Manfred was murdered. I believe that this is why – bear with me – Kim was sure that she killed him. Let's look at what Mary did.
"She came to our house, in the middle of a storm, with a very puny reason for urgency, apparently expecting me to rush out into the weather with her to lay a ghost, or to expose a ghost hunter. If I'd hesitated even for a few minutes, as any reasonable person would have, it would have been too late, as indeed it was. The island would have been cut off until the morning.
"Her plan was apparently designed – almost guaranteed – to fail to get me to act. But it also established that she was off the island for the night. And then she was waiting with us in her car when the road became passable again in the morning."
"She gave herself an alibi for the murder."
"Exactly. She did everything necessary to give herself an alibi. And Kim, seeing how carefully and deliberately Mary had worked to give herself an alibi, apparently assumed this meant she was guilty of Manfred's murder, and, a fortune having – she thought – just slipped through her fingers, she decided to act."
"Okay," the sheriff said slowly. "But was Kim right? Did Mary kill Manfred?"
"I don't know for sure, but I... I was going to say that I doubt it, but I can't back that up.
"Here are the two questions. One – the simple one – is motive. I have read all of Mary's notes and article drafts, and I found no hint of a motive. There may well have been one, but I have no idea what it might be. She wanted to expose Manfred as a con man – that's not a motive for murder. He hadn't conned her, at least as far as we know.
"Two – and this is the rough one – concocting and carrying out an elaborate plan to give yourself an alibi for a crime, or appearing to, does not constitute evidence that you committed that crime. If you're going to hang this on Mary, posthumously, you'll have to get her onto the island after the road was cut off but before the murder, and then back off the island before the road was passable again. You'll have to figure out where Manfred was – presumably he wasn't wandering around on the island all night in the storm, and it seems pretty obvious that he wasn't at Heron House. Was he staying at another house on the island? I have no idea."
"It's a good thing you have Kim on attempted murder for the attempt on Elsa," I put in. "Trying her for Mary's murder, in revenge for a murder where you don't even have any suspects and where Mary has a convincing alibi – and where's there's no real evidence that Kim is deranged – that's going to be hard."
Rhonda shook her head. "I'm glad I'm not a lawyer."
My employer nodded. "And I'm not a psychiatrist – needless to say – but everybody here seems to be rational. Not always smart, goodness knows, and often gullible, but everybody involved had a reasonable goal, as far as we can tell." She ticked them off on her fingers. "Kim wanted money, and she was being manipulated by an expert. Manfred, the expert manipulator in question. also wanted money. Mary wanted a good story, to get a good grade."
Part thirty-three
My employer and I walked down the hill toward Main Street. The sheriff had made it quite clear that her patience for theorizing about this case was running short, and we'd declined her offer of a ride home from police headquarters.
"Rhonda is too impatient," my employer said as we strolled along. "Some cases can be solved by finding a stray fingerprint or a lucky witness or a scribbled note, but this is not going to be one of those (or at least I'm fairly sure it isn't). This one will require thinking, and looking at the events from every possible point of view.
"For example, we talked about whether Kim was telling the truth about her idea that Manfred was going to make her rich. Did she really think that? That's one question. But another question is whether it was actually true."
We turned onto Main Street. It was a pleasant fall day, and there were quite a few other people on the sidewalk.
"If Manfred did tell her that," I said, "–that he was going to come into significant cash – that would also be two questions. At least two questions. Was he really expecting to come into money, somehow, and, if so, was he really planning to share any of it with her?"
She smiled as I held the door for her to enter the Wagon Wheel. I knew that she hadn't been thinking about food, but I had, and the restaurant was there, and it would have been rude of her to decline to enter it when I was holding the door so politely (and they did have good coffee).
So, there we were, at one of our favorite tables, on the screened-in deck, with menus in front of us, and coffee on its way, and she nodded in acknowledgement of how artfully I had steered us here.
Then she leaned forward and said quietly, "I believe the answer to your first question is no – the money was not real – which renders the second question moot. In general, I wouldn't believe anything that man said, especially about doing anything for anybody other than himself, and, in specific, I think I know what he was telling her, and I believe he was stringing her along to get her to assist him.
"He was very good at figuring out people's weaknesses. He never tried that ghost-hunting nonsense on me, for example, because that wasn't – and isn't – my weakness. And I doubt if it's Kim's either. Hers is apparently money. Li, on the other hand, seems to be from a fairly prosperous background, and her weakness does seem to be the supernatural. If there was a specific target at the house – someone who they were planning to rook with his scam – I'm guessing it was probably Li."
Our coffee arrived, and she sipped hers carefully. I was impatient, I confess, so I used my spoon to scoop up an ice cube from my water glass and drop it gently into my mug. My employer made sure that I saw her look of disapproval as I stirred and waited for the cube to melt.
I was tempted to complain that everything in this case seemed to happen in the middle of the night, but if I'd mentioned being tired – beyond rushing through my first cup of coffee – my employer would probably have made a comment which referred, at least obliquely, to my age.
And, if we'd been at home, she might even have made a comment about certain energetic activities which Elsa and I had pretended to engage in the night before – but that was not a conversation she was going to start in the Wagon Wheel.
She regarded me thoughtfully. "Do you know what I'm thinking about?" She didn't give me a chance to respond. "A number of things, obviously, but I keep coming back to Kim's scream, night before last, when she theoretically saw Manfred near Mary's body on the deck, and then the delay before she went outside and yelled for Becky.
"The sheriff, understandably, will want to discredit Jo's report that she also saw someone on the deck, because then everything is simple. Kim's a murderer, so we don't have to believe anything she says, unless it helps to convict her. Simple.
"But there's... What about this: Kim kills Mary, unobserved and in silence, and returns to her room. After a suitable interval, she pretends to hear something, goes downstairs, turns on the deck lights, and sees someone – more or less resembling Manfred, a dead man – in the middle of her crime scene, hovering over the corpse she had recently produced. That would have caused almost anybody to scream, and it also would have explained her hesitation about rushing out onto the deck. 'Manfred' heard her scream and immediately hied it over the precipice, and then, finally, she got up her nerve to go outside.
"Then, as reported, she calls for Becky, and so on. And then, still shaken, she tells Li what she saw, but then later, under interrogation, she doesn't tell that part of the story, because she knows it's going to sound ludicrous, but Li blows the gaff, and Jo corroborates it, at least somewhat, quite possibly to Kim's surprise, if she'd thought she might have imagined it."
"If Kim killed Mary because she blamed her for Manfred's death," I said. "Do you know where this theoretical windfall was going to come from – this money she thought she was going to get?" I asked. "Do you know how he told her he was going to get rich? He must have had some kind of story."
She looked pleased with herself (even more than usual, I mean). "I think I do. There are hints in his book that he might have had a connection to the Loomis family. Certainly not a legitimate one, but... Anyway, there's no truth in it – no way that he could have turned it into any actual cash – but apparently it was enough to get Kim's interest."
She looked around, rather ostentatiously, as if making sure we were alone on the deck, which we were.
"According to Mary's research," she began, and then her voice trailed off.
Our chowder arrived, and she didn't even react, which was unusual for her. I thanked the waitress, and my employer looked at the street outside for a moment. She took off her glasses and polished them with her handkerchief.
"I have an idea," she said slowly, still looking outside. "I think I know why Mary came to see us as she did, during the storm. At least a possibility..." She shook her head and put her glasses back on. "I'm not telling you. If I'm wrong, you'll think badly of me."
"I can do that anyway," I said as I blew on my soup. She scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue at me (just a little – we were in public, after all).
"So," I said, "Are there questions which you would be willing to answer?"
She frowned at her soup, as if wondering when it had arrived, and then she looked up. "This is why I'm a journalist and you're not. That's a terrible question."
"Do you know what I'm thinking about?"
"That question is even worse."
"It's rhetorical. Obviously."
"Well, you're probably thinking about a certain buxom redhead. Or possibly about whether you're going to get a good night's sleep tonight. Beyond a certain age, I know, the desire for sleep can start to outweigh–"
"Ahem. I'm wondering about Manfred. People at Heron House who have talked about him have emphasized how randy he was, but the only actions we've talked about have been in search of money. May I be blunt?"
She looked around again, to make sure we were still alone, then she grinned. "Of course."
"Who was he fucking?"
She considered this.
"Kim?" she proposed. She looked like she was thoroughly enjoying herself.
"Possibly." I told her Elsa's story about Manfred's attempt to molest her during a party, and Kim's angry reaction. "That could have been a variety of things, but one component might have been jealousy."
"True." She scrutinized my face. "You're not buying it, though. You're doing that thing with your forehead."
I nodded. "People who live together learn a lot about each other, even if they don't talk about it, but this theory would require Kim to have had two older lovers, one of whom her roommates knew about, at least in general terms (her professor), and another who her roommates didn't know about (Manfred). And Manfred often came to Heron House as a guest. As you say, I'm not buying it. I think if Manfred, a frequent visitor to Heron House, had been sleeping with any of the roommates, at least some of the others would have figured it out, particularly since he was not universally admired, and, if somebody had figured it out, I think we'd have got some hint by now."
"Your point is well taken. Not concisely stated, obviously, but cogent." She smiled. "Here's a question for you. Your assignment for today involves a trip to Heron Island. Can you get yourself there without anybody from Heron House seeing you? Including your flame-tressed and curvaceous paramour?"
I nodded. "I think so. Yes." I knew there was no future in protesting about her description of Elsa.
"Good. There are a couple of things I'd like you to investigate on the island."
Part thirty-four
Sometimes when my employer sends me off to investigate something, it's because she actually wants whatever information I might unearth.
Sometimes it's because she has writing to do and is finding my presence in our room to be distracting.
And sometimes it's because she doesn't want to say something to me – something specific – and so she needs me to be elsewhere for a while.
I had a pretty good idea which category this fell into, but I didn't say so. I just nodded, bade her a cheerful good day, and set out on my assigned task.
(Of course, it could have been two or even three of those explanations. Or something else entirely.)
The first part – traveling to Heron Island without being seen by the residents of Heron House – was easier than it might have been. My friend Millie had recently found herself in need of a new job, and she had become a cab driver.
I called her and she picked me up about forty-five minutes later. I outlined the plan as she drove toward the highway.
Her cab was an old Checker, repainted, with jump seats and a sizable tonneau, and I figured there was plenty of room for me to get down on the floor and be invisible to pedestrians and other drivers without being especially uncomfortable.
"Heron Island, huh?" she said. "Your boss is hunting ghosts now?"
This caught me by surprise, and she tossed a newspaper into the back seat with me. It was the Claremont Crier, and the lurid headline and the beginning of the article told me that our quiet, isolated murder mystery had become, or was in the process of becoming, a local sensation.
"Ah," I said. "Well, we think – or at least I'm pretty sure we think – that it's not supernatural."
"Did you read the end of the article?" she asked as she pulled out onto the highway. "Nobody's being allowed on the island who doesn't live there. If they're checking, I'm pretty sure they'll see you down on the floor there. You want me to stop so you can go hide in the trunk?"
Checker cabs have a spacious trunk, but this was not an appealing idea, so we stopped at the house of my friend Professor Lebrun and borrowed a couple of things.
When we approached the police car which was blocking the road to the island, I was behind the wheel, peaked cap on my head and cigarette in the corner of my mouth. Millie was in the back seat, wearing a pair of dark glasses (hers) and a sailor's hat which she'd found in Lebrun's closet.
We stopped as the deputies approached, and Millie rolled down her window in order to hand them a note that I'd written, explaining who I was, and who I worked for, and my desire not to be seen, as myself, making the crossing to the island, as part of assisting the sheriff with her investigation.
My employer hadn't mentioned keeping my visit a secret from the police, after all.
I had met one of the deputies before, and he shrugged and motioned for us to proceed. It seemed like maybe we'd over-prepared, but that's not a bad thing.
Part thirty-five
I drove across the marsh and onto Heron Island. Where the main road split into three, I took the one to the right. It went through thick trees, over bumps and gullies and roots, and finally into a small clearing by the shore. There were two little cabins, side-by-side, and the beach was visible beyond.
The place seemed deserted. The air was chilly in the early afternoon under a slate gray sky. I saw a rusted sign saying that only vehicles with Heron Island parking stickers were allowed to park in the lot, but there was nobody there to enforce the rule, and in any case Millie wasn't staying.
I left the motor running as I got out and held the door for her. She climbed behind the wheel, announced that she was keeping the sailor's hat, and drove off.
This was my employer's plan: These were the only two unoccupied buildings on the island, the only ones we could search, so I had been delegated to do the actual searching.
I zipped up my jacket, which, despite being described as a windbreaker, didn't seem to provide much protection against the chilly breeze coming off the water.
At that moment, wishing I'd brought my hooded sweatshirt, aware that my clever plan to get onto the island had not included an equally clever plan to get back off the island when I was done, I was fairly sure that the only reason I was here was because my employer did not want to get into a conversation about how Elsa and I (mostly Elsa) had modified her plan for the previous evening.
But, here I was, and at least I had some sandwiches and a large thermos of hot coffee to look forward to.
I looked around. Elsa had described the two structures as summer cottages, but they were really just shacks. They were about twenty feet apart, almost identical, and there was no indication that anybody was inside. I got the idea that nobody had used them recently.
I tried the one on the right first. The door was locked, but it wasn't a fancy lock and I got in pretty easily.
The interior was basically one large room, rectangular, with a small kitchen area on one side, and a built-in double bed on the other. The floor was painted boards, with the paint partially worn off. There was a large sliding glass door on the ocean side, leading to a very small deck with a tiny table and a couple of plastic chairs.
I tried the light switch by the door, but nothing happened. I tried a table lamp also, with the same result. Apparently the electricity had been shut off for the winter. I was hoping to be done before it got dark out, but in any case I had a flashlight.
I looked around the room. To my inexpert eye, it looked like the glass doors and the deck had been added much later than the rest of the structure. My guess was that the buildings had originally been bath houses, for people to change into swim clothes before spending time at the beach.
I thought it was likely that building any new structures on Heron Island was impossible (that was true in a lot of the local area), but if somebody had ended up owning this little plot of land the local zoning rules might have had enough leeway for the small decks to be added and for the shacks to be rented out during the summers, to couples with modest resources.
Certainly nobody would have rented them at this time of year – the walls were a single thickness of plywood and they were only slightly better insulation against the brisk ocean breeze than my "windbreaker."
I put my knapsack in the center of the floor, in the center of the braided throw rug that reminded me of the one in the living room in Heron House, and I went to work.
Part thirty-six
I pulled out drawers and opened cabinets (which were mostly empty), including looking under shelf paper and under drawers. I was just looking, not looking for something specific, so I had to be as thorough as possible.
In one corner, there was a small cabinet which was locked with a padlock. It was obviously for things that the owner didn't want to share with the tenants, but none of the items inside struck me as interesting or relevant.
I stood in the center of the room and looked around. The peaked roof was just boards – no attic or crawl space. I looked through the glass doors at the beach and the ocean.
I knew I needed to look around the deck, and then to move to the other cabin, but I decided it was time for a sandwich and one serving of coffee. I got the thermos and a sandwich from my knapsack and sat at the rickety table.
Rhonda had been impatient with my employer's theorizing. She wanted to find clues, preferably clues that pointed in a specific direction, and then she could arrest somebody. And, of course, she had deputies who she could dispatch in various directions in search of those clues, in addition to whatever State Police resources she had access to.
And now that the case was becoming a public sensation, I'm sure she felt that pressure, too.
I wouldn't have minded sitting for another few minutes, looking out at the ocean, thinking about the case, but I wanted to finish examining the other cabin before it started to get dark.
I stood up, stuffed my sandwich wrappings into the outside pocket of my knapsack, and put my thermos away. Obviously I didn't want to leave any trash behind me (and, yes, I'd been wearing gloves throughout).
Lifting my knapsack, I looked at the rug under it. And then, as I perhaps should have done before, I lifted the rug and saw the trapdoor.
I moved the rug to one side and examined the floor more carefully. The "trapdoor" was a rectangular area where the boards didn't match the rest of the floor. There was no handle or anything to use to pull it up, though. I tried to get my fingers under the edge, in the tiny gap, but there was nothing to grab hold of.
I had seen tools in the locked cabinet, but I didn't want to break into whatever was below the floor, if anything, without knowing more about it.
I went out the front door and looked at the side of the house. The house was at ground level in the front, but the sand sloped off toward the beach at the rear, so I was able to circle around and look under the deck, using my flashlight, and see below the floorboards. There were some sort of handmade baffles there, hanging down from the floor of the house. I crawled under and looked behind them, and there was nothing there.
So, evidently there had been something there at some point. Probably, based on my knowledge of cottages in the area, it had been a floor furnace to heat the cabin. They were gas-fired, and had a tendency to have their pilot lights blown out in high wind, hence the improvised baffles. Evidently, when the furnace had been removed, for whatever reason, the floor had been awkwardly patched, and then the rug used to hide the patchwork.
Well, before I searched the other cabin, I decided to find out if it had the same kind of below-floor structure.
It did, and here there was a wooden box resting on the sand, hidden by the wind baffles.
It is, I guess, a measure of how I've been trained that, even after I saw what the wooden box contained, I still searched the second cabin, just as carefully as I'd searched the first one, before I did anything else.
Part thirty-seven
When I was done searching the second cabin, I decided to have another serving of coffee and another sandwich while I considered my next move. The idea of walking back to the mainland, and probably all the way to the college campus, was not appealing. And, of course, I would be welcome at Heron House...
I returned to the first cabin, where I'd left my knapsack. Coffee and a sandwich would help me figure this out.
As I opened the door, I heard a sound from the other side of the cabin, from the beach. It was a sound I was familiar with, but I was not happy to hear it now. It was the tink, tink, tink of a rope (or whatever holds a sail in place on a sailboat – a "line"?) against an aluminum mast. I rushed into the cabin, grabbed my knapsack from the table, and ducked into a corner, out of sight of the beach.
Wide glass doors that go from the floor to the ceiling are very nice when you want to look out at a pleasant scene in your back yard, but not very convenient when you're worried about somebody in your back yard seeing you.
I lay down on the floor and squirmed forward, keeping well back from the glass.
A young man, muscular and tanned, was sailing up to the beach in a small sailboat. He was wearing a faded T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and flip-flops.
And here I was, lying on the floor of a cabin where I had no right to be. I muttered an imprecation which would have raised my employer's eyebrows, or at least one of them, if she'd heard it.
Well, maybe this muscular young man was just parking his sailboat here for convenience. Maybe he'd go right past the cabins and head up the road to Mrs. Bannister's house, or to Heron House, or to somebody else's house. Maybe he'd find me here and call the police (not that either cabin had a telephone). Maybe my situation would be made even worse by the gun in my pocket (although I am licensed to carry).
If I did have to fight this guy, I decided I'd go in as fast and dirty as I could. Those muscles were impressive.
He hopped out of his boat and pulled it up farther onto the sand. He didn't look at the cabin I was in, but he seemed to glance at the other one.
"Yes," I thought, "that other cabin is much more interesting than this one, fella. Just head on over that way. Nothing to see here..."
He reached the other cabin, out of my line of sight. and I heard a series of noises that, more and more, sounded like someone shimmying under the cabin and pulling out the wooden box that was secreted there.
Okay, that changed everything. Now I was glad that I had my gun, because what I'd found in that box had been a black jacket with silver threads running through it, a matching pair of trousers, black dress shoes, a wig, some stick-on facial hair, and makeup.
In other words, a do-it-yourself Manfred kit.
Part thirty-eight
I heard the man take the box into the other cabin. There were no windows on that side of my cabin, so I couldn't see him, but he couldn't see me either.
I quickly made sure I had everything packed up and ready to go. When he moved, I wanted to be ready to follow him, if at all possible.
Then I sat at the table in the middle of the room and considered four questions.
1. Was this going to break the case?
2. If this was going to break the case, is that why my employer had sent me here? Was this all part of her master plan?
3. If this was a coincidence, and it broke the case anyway, was she going to pretend that it had all been part of her master plan?
4. Was this guy armed? I couldn't be sure but I thought about how his wet clothes had clung to him as he'd waded ashore and pulled his boat onto the beach. I thought I would have seen the shape of a gun, the way I'd seen evidence of a wallet, keys, and some other small items. And I knew there wasn't a gun in or around either cabin.
There was no sound from the other cabin. Had I left any evidence of my search? I waited, keeping an eye on the beach, but there was no activity there.
Then, after several minutes, I heard something from the other cabin. It sounded like the front door opening and then closing again.
I went to the front door, opened it a little, and looked out. I wanted to be cautious, but all the caution in the world wouldn't be much consolation if I let him get away.
I didn't see anything moving. I stepped outside and looked toward the other cabin. The door was closed, and my eye was not being drawn to any motion anywhere.
I glanced back at the beach. No changes there.
Okay, this was a potential disaster. I would literally never hear the end of it if I let him get away from me.
I stepped away from the cabin, and I saw a dark-clad figure vanish around a bluff, walking along the beach.
I couldn't follow him that way – there was no cover, and if he'd turned around for any reason he'd have seen me. I decided to assume that he was on his way to Heron House, and I quickly trotted up the dirt road in that direction, moving as quietly as I could.
Part thirty-nine
The most immediate problem was that the dirt road I was on didn't go to Heron House. It would eventually meet the road which went to Heron House, along with the road to the mainland and the road to the other houses on the island (which I thought of as "the rich people's houses"), but if I traveled by that roundabout route "Manfred" would definitely make it to Heron House before I did – if that was where he was headed – and that was not acceptable.
So, as I walked quickly along the road, I tried to keep one eye on the road itself, so as not to trip on a root or something, and the other eye to my right, looking for some sort of path through the thick trees to the other road.
Then I saw it – at least it looked like a rough path. It could have been just a natural gap between the trees, but I took it. It was difficult to follow, but I'd committed to this course so I pushed forward.
I knew I was going in the right direction. The worst that could happen was that I'd miss the Heron House road (which ended at Mrs. Bannister's house) and run right off the bluff and fall down to the beach below.
Well, that seemed rather unlikely, and then I saw a light ahead of me, so I walked faster.
The light was from Mrs. Bannister's house. Her car was in the driveway, but there were no signs of activity.
I reached the road and turned left, trotting up the hill to Heron House.
The front windows in the house were lighted (except for Mary's room, the one in the middle on the second floor), but I didn't want anybody to know I was there, so I ducked around the vehicles parked in front of the house and tiptoed down the path that went beside the house toward the deck and the water. I didn't go onto the deck, though, but I walked beside it, keeping low, until I was near the edge of the ground, where it fell off abruptly toward the beach.
The deck lights were on. I had no idea if that was going to be a good thing or not, but at least nobody was on the deck.
Holding still for a moment, I heard a noise from below. It sounded like somebody climbing the rickety "stairs" from the beach to the deck. I wanted to peek over the edge, but there was too much chance of my being seen.
One thing in my favor, I thought, was that even if "Manfred" was armed after all, he wouldn't have a weapon in his hand when he reached the deck – he'd have needed both hands free to hold on while he climbed up from the beach.
Then he appeared, poking his head up cautiously to see if anybody was on the deck. He looked at the house, at all the various windows, then he eased his way up onto the deck, moving slowly and carefully.
I was quite close to him, keeping still and controlling my breathing as I crouched beside the deck, and at this distance his wig and makeup were pretty obvious.
Once he was away from the edge, before he could turn and see me, if he was going to, I fired a shot into the air.
He turned so quickly that he slipped and half stumbled, grabbing the railing to steady himself.
I hadn't bothered to come up with something clever to say, so I kept quiet, my eyes steady on his. I held my gun in both hands, pointed at his heart. He raised his hands, and I stayed where I was. He tried to say some things, or ask some questions, but I wasn't paying attention to that.
It did occur to me that it was probably to my advantage that he had no idea who I was. I was just a man with a gun.
The door opened and people came out on the deck and said things, but I didn't look at them. I kept my eyes on "Manfred," who was also not looking anywhere but at me.
Breaking the stalemate, a welcome figure, tall and spindly, limped forward, ordering everybody else to stay back.
She searched "Manfred" carefully, standing behind him and reaching around so as not to come into my line of fire. She pulled out a small pocketknife and a wallet and keys, plus some other items, all of which she put into her own pockets. Then she looked at me over his shoulder and smiled, a broader smile than she usually allowed herself.
"Marshall," she purred. "It's very good of you to join us, and so thoughtful to bring Professor Drake with you. You have exceeded my expectations."
Part forty
I was fairly sure that there were deputies on the island, which was one reason I'd fired the shot. Of course, it could have put me in a bad position, at least for a while, being the one who was armed (with a licensed firearm) and threatening another man. But I did not want to let the fake Manfred get away, and when I pulled the trigger I'd had no idea if my employer or anybody else knew who this guy was.
Two deputies showed up a few moments later, at a run, and, fortunately for me, the sheriff was with them. I immediately surrendered my gun, and submitted to a body search and a careful examination of my pistol license.
While this was going on, I could see my employer and the sheriff talking quietly, and then the three of us adjourned upstairs to Mary's room, where Rhonda closed the door and asked ("demanded" might be a more accurate word) to hear, in detail, how I'd been spending my afternoon.
While I told the story, my employer sat at Mary's small desk, smiling and looking out the window, doing her best to give the impression that everything I was saying was old news to her.
Rhonda made a face at my employer's back at one point, having perhaps guessed that this pose was at least somewhat false, but she didn't say anything out loud.
When I was done, the sheriff turned to my employer. "Are you going to lay it all out now – can you explain everything?"
My employer turned from the window. "Yes, I can, and we should go downstairs for that. I think the remaining residents here should learn why this house has been the center of so much trouble."
Rhonda stood up. As she left the room, she said over her shoulder, "You just want a bigger audience for your performance."
My employer used her cane to get to her feet, moving more slowly than usual. She didn't react or respond to Rhonda's comment, but her expression told me that she was not entirely pleased with her own handling of the case.
Mary had come to us for help, she'd been turned away, and now she was dead. It was much more complicated than that, of course, but those facts were true nonetheless.
The great detective was not so distressed, however, that she didn't pause for a moment to study her reflection in Mary's dresser mirror, to make sure that her hair, her necktie, and her pocket handkerchief were all in proper order.
Part forty-one
So, there we were in the living room of Heron House. Becky and Li were sitting together on a small love seat. Li looked nervous and Becky looked tired. The sheriff was on the sofa by herself. Jo sat cross-legged in a large armchair, a quilt wrapped around her. She looked cold, and even smaller than usual. My employer was sitting in a straight-backed chair I'd brought in from the dining room for her, and I'd made sure she had an ashtray within easy reach. Elsa had placed a chair next to her wheelchair, apparently for me, so I thanked her as I sat down. She had a bottle of soda, and the rest of us had coffee.
There was a deputy standing by the door – the same woman who had come with us in the boat two nights earlier. Her name was Cheryl, but I didn't learn that until later.
My employer lit a cigarette and was about to begin when Li said, "Miss Sleet? I..."
She seemed to fold in on herself as everybody turned to look at her, but my employer nodded in her direction.
"Yes, Li?"
Li was apparently unable to speak for a moment, but then she gathered herself up and said, "This has all been very confusing – and terrible, mostly terrible – but... I know it's complicated, yes?"
In other circumstances, my employer would have held forth for a while on the difference between "complicated" and "complex," which she enjoyed doing, but now she simply said, "Yes, Li, it is quite complicated. Would you like the short version, the simple version, first?"
Li nodded.
"On Sunday night, Professor Drake killed Manfred and left his body on the beach below this house. Nobody from Heron House was involved. On Monday night, Kim killed Mary on the deck here, and then later pretended to discover the body. In between those two events, entirely by coincidence, Professor Drake appeared on the deck, disguised as Manfred. Last night, Marshall and Miss Peabody staged a performance on the deck to convince Kim that they knew she was the killer – Mary's killer – and she attacked Miss Peabody and was apprehended by Marshall.
"There were two murderers and both of them are in custody. There is not now, to the best of my knowledge, any danger to anybody in this house. And, if it needs to be said, nothing that has happened has been the result of supernatural forces."
Part forty-two
My employer looked around the room, apparently confirming that nobody else was going to interrupt, and then she began.
"I'm going to start with Mary, because that's how the case started for me, and because she did some very good research which helped me to figure it all out. And because I made a mistake about her, at the beginning, which I want to explain.
"As you all know, Mary came to our home – Marshall and I – on Monday night, in the middle of the storm. She wanted me to drop everything and rush over here because she said there were ghosts, and Manfred was trying to 'lay' them (I believe that's the technical term).
"Because of the hour, and the storm, and the ridiculousness of the whole idea, I declined, but I agreed to come here on Tuesday morning. As you know – Jo and Li – we were waiting in Mary's car when the road became passable, and you told us that there had been a murder.
"I saw immediately what this sequence of events had accomplished. It had given Mary an alibi for the time of the murder. I thought that she had concocted a complicated scheme to murder Manfred and to use me as her alibi, since she had been with me at the moment when the road became impassible for the night, and she was with me when the island was again accessible in the morning.
"To use me in that way would have been audacious, but that was not what actually happened.
"Mary was taking a journalism course, as I'm sure you know, and when she met Manfred, and learned things about him, she decided to write an article, exposing him and his various schemes. I've read all of her notes, and some of them were written rather cryptically, but it's pretty obvious that her first plan was to write the article and expose him in that way. But then she thought of a better plan, one which would have made for a much better story."
She sighed. "What if Manfred was exposed, not by some unknown journalism student at a small liberal arts college, but by a... an internationally known amateur detective and war correspondent, who happens to be living in this town at the moment? Mary's visit on Monday night was not to get me to go to the island right then – it was just to start the process of getting me hooked so that I would be the person who would eventually expose Manfred for the confidence man he was.
"After all, if I had decided to drop everything and charge out into the storm to fight the brave fight for science and rationality that night, I would have found that Manfred wasn't even on the island, or at least he wasn't here performing any sort of 'ceremony' or anything. But she'd been pretty sure I wouldn't come, and I didn't."
Part forty-three
Elsa looked up. "But if that guy on the deck killed Manfred, why did he do it? What was his motive?"
"Professor Drake – he's an adjunct professor, technically – was Kim's lover. And Kim was Manfred's accomplice – responsible for all the weird footprints and Latin writing and spooky stuff, here and in other places. She thought her association with Manfred was going to make her a lot of money (that's a long story) but I don't know if they were lovers. For the purposes of this explanation, it doesn't matter." She looked at the sheriff. "You'll have to look into this, but I believe Professor Drake found out about Kim's affiliation with Manfred, and he assumed that his lover was two-timing him.
"I expect you'll find that he was distressed to discover that his young girlfriend was attached to a shabby middle-aged con man. And he decided to remove that part of the triangle."
"But Kim always told us that her professor was married," Becky pointed out. "That's why he could never come over. He had to hide their relationship from his wife. And of course it could mess up his career."
My employer nodded. "It's true – he is married. I have sources, and friends, on campus, and it was fairly easy to figure out which professor was Kim's lover. When I started to investigate Professor Drake, I found out about his wife, and I also learned that he has a small sailboat, and a rowboat. Which made me think that Manfred was never on the island on the night he died. Professor Drake killed him, and then transported him to the island, in his rowboat, and dumped his body on the beach below this house, probably as a message to Kim."
"But then why did he come back the next night, dressed like Manfred, and kill Mary? That makes no sense," Li protested.
"That would make no sense, I agree. And that's not what happened. Kim killed Mary, as she confessed to Marshall and Miss Peabody, because she blamed Mary – wrongly – for Manfred's death. Professor Drake was going to show up and freak Kim out – he may have thought that her professed belief in the supernatural was sincere – to get back at her for betraying him with Manfred."
"Of course," Jo said slowly, "Professor Drake was married, so him feeling betrayed by Kim's 'infidelity'" – she stuck her hands out from under her quilt for a second to make finger quotes – "was hypocrisy. Definitely." I could tell that she was making a mental note of this, filing it away for her own writerly purposes.
My employer nodded. "Hypocritical, yes, but, from his point of view, understandable. But imagine his surprise upon ascending to the deck here, in his Manfred disguise, and finding a dead body. That was certainly not part of his plan. And then he heard Kim scream, because she'd seen a dead man in the middle of her crime scene, which was certainly not part of her plan. It's no wonder he got out of here quickly at that point, relying on the fact that nobody likes to use those stairs to the beach. Let alone climbing down them in pursuit of a ghost."
"But then why did he come back tonight? Kim's not even here – she's in jail."
Rhonda shrugged. "We haven't released that information to the press. He probably didn't know."
Part forty-four
"I have a question," Elsa said.
I wondered how things would go if her question turned out to be something like, "Miss Sleet, why do you always call me 'Miss Peabody' when you're on a first-name basis with everybody else?" but I needn't have worried. After my employer nodded in her direction, she said, "You mentioned that Kim thought that Manfred would somehow get her a lot of money. I know Kim is... she's always looking for money, but why would she think Manfred would get it for her?"
"That's a good question. Manfred was known to promote the idea, in various indirect ways, that he was an illegitimate son of the Loomis family. This theory is visible in his book, too, if you read between the lines. My opinion is that he told Kim he was going to be rich because of that connection."
Elsa frowned. "Is that true?"
"That he was going to become rich? Of course not. Even if he were a relation of the family, legitimate or not, that wouldn't automatically entitle him to any money. And it wasn't true, as far as I can tell. If it had been true, I think he would have tried to do more with it. He was not one to let any opportunity for profit slip by him."
She looked around. "Are there any more questions?"
Li shrugged. "What happens to Kim now?"
My employer gestured in the direction of the sheriff.
Rhonda sighed. "She's in jail. I don't know beyond that. We'll have some investigations to pursue, based on what I've just learned here, and then I imagine she'll be charged. That's all up to the county attorney."
Li frowned, and Becky turned to her. "Li-Li," she said softly, "Kim killed Mary, and she tried to kill Elsa. She was our friend, but..."
Li nodded, looking down at her hands, which were folded in her lap.
"If I may," I put in, "it might be helpful to consider that she, your friend, is suffering from an illness." I shrugged. "I'm not saying she's insane, and I'm certainly not proposing insanity as a defense – I'm neither a psychiatrist nor a lawyer – but in human terms she's clearly not very well connected to reality at the moment. She murdered Mary in revenge for something which Mary didn't do – and there was absolutely no direct evidence that Mary was guilty – and which would not have justified Mary's death even if it had been true."
Li nodded, still not looking up. Becky reached over and took her hand.
Elsa turned her wheelchair to face me. "Mr. Marshall," she said, "you said 'which wouldn't have justified Mary's death even if it had been true.' Does that mean you think that there are circumstances which would justify murder?" She managed to raise her eyebrows in question and to wink (with the eye which only I could see) at the same time.
Rhonda glanced at Cheryl, and the deputy said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but we should think about leaving now, or we'll be stuck on this island all night."
I winked back at Elsa.
Part forty-five
It was dark, and I stayed close to my employer in case she lost her footing on the dirt road. Rhonda and the deputy were ahead of us, but they were apparently slowing their pace to match ours.
My employer turned to the sheriff. "Are we about to have another thrilling boat ride?"
Rhonda smiled. "Sorry to disappoint you. The boat was here, but they used it earlier, to take Professor Drake to jail."
"A worthwhile purpose," my employer said with a smile. "And traveling by automobile is fine with me."
We reached the spot where the main road split into three, and, a short distance past that, there was a small clear area to the right, where a van and a car were parked. Cheryl the deputy unlocked the van and turned to look at Rhonda.
Rhonda waved. "I'll take these two. You can drive the van back and sign out for the night."
Cheryl nodded and climbed into the van. She turned on the engine as Rhonda unlocked the sedan and got behind the wheel. I helped my employer into the rear seat and then sat beside Rhonda.
The road from the island to the mainland was still dry, so obviously we'd had plenty of time. Cheryl crossed first in the van, and once we were on the paved road she quickly pulled away from us.
Rhonda smiled. "She's in a hurry because once she drops off the van she gets to go home. I'm in no hurry, because as soon as I get to headquarters I'll have a lot of work to do."
"And you may have a question or two for me," my employer put in.
"Well, the girls at the house were mostly concerned with Kim, and with Mary's murder, understandably. But what about Professor Drake? How did you find out about him..."
"Or did Marshall produce him through his own magical efforts, and then I managed to create the idea – after the fact – that both the rabbit and the hat were actually mine? To be honest, I had no idea that Marshall was going to run into Professor Drake, let alone deliver him to Heron House as masterfully as he did." Rhonda glanced at me, and I adopted as modest an expression as I could muster up on short notice.
"You didn't want to reveal his name, at least to me," my employer continued to the sheriff, "but Claremont is a small school, and it wasn't too difficult to find out which professors were sleeping with which students. When I saw you earlier today, I already knew his name.
"I sent Marshall to search the two cabins because they were the only buildings on the island which could be searched, and I wondered if they were being used for anything scurrilous during the off-season. To tell the truth, I was thinking of assignations, not disguise storage. By the way, when you were trying to establish where Kim was on the night Manfred was killed, you called Professor Drake?"
"Yes. And I asked him – after making it clear that the fact that he's involved with a student was no concern of the police department – if he knew where she'd spent the night on Monday night. He immediately said that she'd been with him, and that his wife was out of town for a week."
My employer laughed. "He took a risk, but it was a good move on his part. After all–"
"I'd just handed him an alibi for himself. Obviously."
"Well, it might have exploded in his face, but it was a good gamble."
"And, besides," I put in, "if it was established later on that Kim had actually spent the night somewhere else, it would just look like he'd been lying to protect his lover."
I felt something touch my right arm. I glanced over and I saw a long, bony forefinger, with which I was very familiar, pressing the side of my arm for a moment and then retreating.
"At the risk of stating the obvious..." I began after a moment.
"Oh, go ahead," Rhonda said. "Take the risk."
"I examined that jacket pretty carefully – the Manfred jacket – when I found it under the cabin. I'm not an expert, but it looked to me as if it had been sewn by hand, very carefully, by somebody who knew what they were doing."
"That was exactly my conclusion," my employer said, "about the jacket Manfred was wearing when he was killed."
"So," Rhonda said as she pulled out onto the highway, "it looks like Manfred had two – or at least two – of those jackets, and one of them somehow ended up with Professor Drake. That is interesting."
Conclusion
Professor Frederick Drake was convicted of second-degree murder, among other charges, and the jacket was a key piece of evidence. Manfred had owned two of them, and they'd been custom-made for him, by hand, by an admirer (a lady, as she was described during the trial), and the fact that Drake had been apprehended while wearing the second one had helped to place him in Manfred's rented room, where the evidence indicated that the murder had taken place.
Professor Drake had insisted, however, that he had only gone to Manfred's room to confront him about his relationship with Kim Daniels, and that Manfred's death had happened as a result of the struggle between the men, with no premeditation. Which might have been true, of course.
Kimberly Daniels was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Mary Sanders. Now that Manfred's murder could be explained, it was pretty straightforward, since means, motive, and opportunity were established, plus there was her confession, and her attempt on Elsa's life. Mary's murder had clearly been premeditated. Li offered to pay for a lawyer for Kim, but she declined, using the court-appointed attorney instead.
After Elsa's testimony in Kim's trial, she had been annoyed to find out that one wire service report had described her as a "crippled girl." She made several attempts to register a complaint about this.
I heard from Elsa that the financial situation at Heron House was becoming untenable, and it looked like the other homeowners on the island might finally get their wish to be rid of the college students in their midst. The four remaining women in the house couldn't manage the rent alone, and, after two murders, it seemed unlikely that any new students would want to move in.
More importantly, the mood in the house was getting worse, too. Li was still conflicted about Kim, and Elsa, who had come close to being Kim's second victim, was not sympathetic. Becky was stuck in the middle, and apparently Jo stayed in her room as much as she could, with her headphones on, typing away.
I told Elsa that if she needed to move that I would help her to find a new place which would meet her requirements.
When my employer and I arrived home after the end of the second trial, she sat at her desk for a few minutes, looking out the window, and then she turned her chair around to face me. "We need to talk," she said, "about the... the plan. The variation on the plan – my plan – which you and Miss Peabody apparently, from all reports, from your own report... Well?"
"We performed–"
"You performed – apparently 'performed' is being used here in the theatrical sense – a sexual act, or a series of sexual acts, while putting her in the position – a 'position' ... In any case, that was not part of the plan. My plan, as you and I discussed it."
"Elsa – Miss Peabody – felt–"
"You know, of course, that I never interfere in your personal life." She made a heroic effort to say this with a straight face, and I graciously allowed it to pass without comment. "But I should point out that she was, at that moment, a suspect. Well, not in the attack on herself, obviously, but in two murders."
"I think it amused her," I said carefully, "to imagine the conversation which you and I are having at this moment."
"You and she have discussed–"
"Of course not. But she has apparently been speculating."
"Well, she can speculate away." She sighed and drew her glasses down her nose, regarding me over the rims. "Moving on," she said firmly. "The case is now closed. I think that it would be appropriate for us to have a celebratory dinner this evening, don't you agree?"
I nodded. "I do indeed. That's why I called and made a reservation at La Serata."
She looked surprised, since I had always vetoed the idea of eating there before, because of the expense.
Then she smiled. "Che pensiero meraviglioso."
The End
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