She scrambled up and grabbed the pen from the mess left on the bed, and then lay flat on the floor against the door, poking at the block. Her earlier efforts to open the door had only wedged it more firmly in place.
After several more painstaking and frustrating attempts, Jennifer finally loosened the block and jimmied it sideways. She stood up. Now for the moment of truth. She could only pray that whoever had blocked her in hadn’t done something more to the door.
She attached Muffy’s leash to her collar, wrapped it tightly around her hand three times, picked up the small flashlight, and cautiously opened the door.
She flashed the small beam about in the dark hall. After she’d gone to bed, someone had turned out all the lights. Except for an eerie hint of red that the moon cast through the stained-glass window, the area lay in gloom.
As best she could tell, no one was in the hallway. She had no idea where a light switch might be, and she certainly didn’t have time to look for one.
She ventured silently, barefoot, into the hall. Amazingly, Muffy kept quiet. Alert and skittish, but quiet.
At the top of the stairs, she grabbed hold of the banister, sliding her hand along the soft wood as she deliberately took each step down the stairs. A loud creak sounded, and she stopped to listen, but nothing below stirred. Then she continued, tugging a reluctant Muffy, who found these stairs difficult enough in full light.
At the second floor landing, Muffy let out a loud woof, her nostrils flaring, and strained hard against her leash, ready to make a run for it, but Jennifer held her back. They had to proceed with caution, not panic.
Nothing and no one were to be seen on the landing. They crept forward to Mrs. Ashton’s door.
She wished she had one of those flashlights that could serve as a blunt instrument, one that took at least five or six D cells. Whatever she was about to walk into, she was unarmed.
Carefully, she grasped the knob on its side with the tips of two fingers. If there were fingerprints, she didn’t want to disturb them. Then she twisted and the knob turned freely. A gentle push opened the door.
She stopped cold. Mary’s room was totally dark. Someone had turned out the light between now and when she’d stuck her head out the window.
She whispered “Mary” as loudly as she dared. No one answered. Groping along the wall, her hand closed on a switch. She flipped it and light flooded the room.
Blood soaked the bed, so much blood Jennifer wouldn’t have known what color the bedspread had been if she hadn’t seen it earlier. It looked as though something had been butchered and bled out—right there in the bed.
Chapter 14
“How many times do I need to go over this?” Jennifer asked Lieutenant Nicholls of the Macon Police. “It takes me longer to tell you than it did for it to actually happen. Let me make it simple: I heard screams, I called 911, I managed to force my way out of my room, I came to see what had happened, I found blood, and I went downstairs to wait for you to arrive. And I did not hear anything on the stairs, not before I left my room and not after. Have you still not found her body?”
“Not yet,” Nicholls told her, “and we still haven’t found the knife.”
“Is that what you think was used?”
“Looks that way from the tears in the bedclothes.”
Jennifer watched uniformed police and the rubber-gloved forensics crew crowding in and out of Mary’s room, as she and the lieutenant sat on a forest green sofa in front of the window on the second-floor landing.
One of the officers came over and nudged Nicholls. “We think a rug may have been removed.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“There’s a bare spot on the right side of the bed where a rug could have been. The bare spot doesn’t have any blood, but there are flecks of red further out. And beyond those flecks is a smear of blood where a rug could have been dragged out a ways. My guess is they rolled the body up in it to take it out.”
“Is that right? Should there be a rug there?” he asked Jennifer.
“I wouldn’t know. The only time I was in that room was for a few moments before I went to bed. I didn’t have time to look around. Ask Melba, the housekeeper. She’ll know.”
“She’s next on my list.” He turned back to the officer. “Did you find any blood on the stairs or the main floor?”
The officer shook his head.
“They probably used plastic sheeting,” Jennifer offered.
Nicholls turned back to her, raising one eyebrow. “Think so?”
“If all that blood came from one person, the victim would have been sopping in it, especially if they moved her, which they obviously did. If they rolled the body off the bed and onto the rug, they could have pulled it, rug and all, onto the sheeting, wrapped it, tied it, and taken it down the stairs. Most other materials are porous and would likely leave some trace evidence. With the sheeting, there wouldn’t be any blood outside of the room. I can’t imagine any other way they could have done it. That would also explain why the blood was contained to only one side of the room.”
“I see. You seem to know an awful lot about evidence.”
“I write mysteries. Fiction. I’m supposed to know.”
“A simpler explanation would be that you were involved.”
Jennifer screwed up her face at him and let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t even go there. You know I didn’t do it. I called you, I have no motive, and most importantly, I have not a drop of blood on me anywhere. You’ll find exactly two partial prints of my thumb and index fingers on the rim of the door knob and my prints on the light switch, and maybe on that wall. I groped around looking for it. I didn’t touch anything else. You may find my footprints, although I doubt it because I took a sponge bath”—no way could she get in that tub—“before bed, and I didn’t put on any lotion because I forgot to bring it with me. I freely admit to stepping into the room, as would anyone who heard what I did.”
“Are you ready to come up for air?” he asked.
She drew in a great breath just to irritate him.
“Watch a lot of TV?” he asked.
“On occasion.”
“We run into those every now and then, TV watchers, always trying to make things more complicated than they actually are.”
“With no body and no weapon, I’d say you don’t need me to complicate the situation.”
“Right. Were you and Mary Ashton the only two in the house tonight?”
“Obviously not. But I thought we were when I went to bed. Melba had already gone when I got home for the evening. I watched Mary put on the security system.”
“Well, it wasn’t on when we got here. You say you couldn’t get out of your room?”
“That’s right. Someone put a wedge under the door.”
“So you told me. Where is it?”
“It must still be upstairs, right behind the door where it was pushed when I opened it.”
He shook his head. “We didn’t find anything anywhere on the landing area that could have been jammed under a door.”
“But it was there. I swear.”
“So you said. One last question. Why were you staying here?”
As she talked, Nicholls had been scribbling notes in a small notebook. When she didn’t answer, he stopped and looked up at her.
She had to tell him. “Mrs. Ashton was afraid for her life.”
Nicholls cocked an eyebrow at her. “What does that make you, some kind of bodyguard?”
“What? You think I couldn’t handle the job?”
That made him snicker. “Obviously not. Really, why were you here?”
“She wanted me to document what was going on, but I was only here the one night, and I didn’t believe...” It was hard for her to even say it. How could she have been so wrong? “I didn’t believe the threat was real. She told me she thought her sister-in-law was going to kill her.”
“Name?”
“Eileen McEvoy. Mrs. Ashton gave me some threats she’d received.” She p
ulled the small notebook out of the pocket of her pajama bottoms and handed it to him. “She had me write down that she gave them to me and about receiving the last threat this morning. That’s the first entry.”
Quickly, he flipped through the pages. “Where are these threats?”
“Upstairs. In the room where I was staying.”
He closed his own notebook, put his pen back in his shirt pocket, and stood up. “Good. Let’s go take a look.”
Even as Jennifer slipped the envelope from between the pillow case and the pillow, she felt reluctant. Something wasn’t right. If Eileen was behind this killing, she hadn’t done it herself. Surely the savagery in the bedroom below could not have been the work of an older woman. Such women generally preferred poison, at least in mystery novels. And if it were a hired killing, why not a single bullet to the head from a gun with a silencer? This looked more like a thrill kill. But then how sane was a hired killer? And who said he was professional?
“Here,” she said, offering the notes to Nicholls.
He took them, shook them out on the desk, and carefully looked through them, using a pair of tweezers.
“Mrs. Ashton told me at least one of those notes was written on stationery like some Mrs. McEvoy had purchased.”
He grunted, and without a word, stuffed the notes back into the envelope and slipped it under his arm.
“They’ll test that blood, won’t they?” she asked. “For DNA.”
“Yep.”
“And they’ll take samples in several places. If some of it’s not—”
“What are you suggesting, Miss Marsh?” He was staring at her again. It made her nervous.
“Nothing. It’s just that there’s so much...”
He smiled at her, a condescending, there-there kind of smile. “We’ll take samples from several areas. In this kind of killing, the murderer is usually injured, either from his own hand or the victim’s. He often bleeds. We’ll be looking for more than one blood type.”
Killing. More like slaughter. So Nicholls was certain Mary was dead.
“And you’re sure it was Mrs. Ashton’s voice that you heard scream?” he asked, one more time.
“I think it was. I heard it through the floor. I was sure at the time, but I don’t know if I could swear to it now.”
“Okay, Miss Marsh. I thank you for your time. Get dressed, get your things together—and your dog—and I’ll have someone take you home.”
“I can drive myself,” she assured him.
He closed his hand over hers for a brief moment, just long enough for her to realize it was shaking. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
He looked at his watch. “I’d like you out of here in ten minutes.” He scanned the room. “All these items yours? You settled in pretty quick.”
“They’re Juliet’s, Mrs. Ashton’s stepdaughter. I only have the two bags and the cosmetics case.” She pointed to them near the desk. She hadn’t had time to unpack.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She’s deceased.”
Again he raised an eyebrow. “You can come back tomorrow for your car, but I don’t want you inside the house. We’ll find you when we need you.”
She nodded and watched as he let himself out the door. She waited a few minutes, listening to his footsteps retreat down the stairs, then pushed the door open all the way. No one was in the hall.
She heard voices drifting up the stairwell. Nicholls was interrogating Melba on the sofa on the second-floor landing. Jennifer crept to the railing and listened.
“...and I left as soon as I’d taken that mutt outside.”
“Was Mrs. Ashton expecting any company?”
“Not that she mentioned to me. She already had that woman staying here.”
“Did Mrs. Ashton seem all right to you?”
“She seemed agitated, but that’s not unusual for her. She’s been that way since the competency hearing. Her sister-in-law tried to take control of the estate. This home has been in the Ashton family since it was built, before the Civil War. I can’t believe that Shelby—that’s her husband, Mr. Shelby Ashton—would have allowed control of it out of the family. He died last year intestate.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Nicholls insisted, “with this kind of property.”
“Shelby had a will, of course, but during his own illness, his lawyer, Mr. David Lambert, died and no one seems to know what happened to it. Mrs. Ashton insisted that Shelby had had it sent over from Mr. Lambert’s office.”
“Do you remember someone bringing the will to the house?”
“No. Mrs. Ashton said she received it personally and took it straight to Shelby and that he destroyed it, along with the copy he had here in the house. Then he died before he could make out a new one. That’s how Mrs. Ashton got control of the estate.”
“I see. We’ll talk about all that later. What I need you to concentrate on right now are the events of this evening. Who knows the alarm system?”
“Just Mrs. Ashton, myself, and Arthur, the cook, but she could have shown anyone how to use it. It’s not that difficult. All you need is the code.”
“Could someone watching her put the system on at night pick it up?”
“Absolutely.”
So Nicholls was willing to suspect Jennifer along with everyone else. As well he should. Even if he didn’t think she’d participated in the actual killing, she could easily have let the killer in.
“If you ask me,” Melba’s voice again, a little higher and a little more disturbed, “you should be talking to that young woman she invited in. I can’t imagine what Mrs. Ashton was thinking, letting a stranger like that into this house. She showed up one day and moved in here the next, just like that. You have to be careful who you let into your home. There’s no telling what havoc they can bring.”
“And you have no idea why Mrs. Ashton asked Miss Marsh to stay?”
“None.”
Jennifer could imagine Melba’s expression. Sour lemons.
She heard a flurry of activity as officers came up the stairs from the ground floor. Time was getting away. Nicholls had only given her ten minutes. Silently, she slipped back to her door.
She’d come out of that room for one reason, and it wasn’t to eavesdrop on Melba’s conversation.
She bent down and ran her fingers along the outside edge of the bottom of the door. A splinter caught in her index finger and she snatched it back. But she had found it. The slight indentation where something had been shoved beneath the door. Someone had blocked her in that room and then removed the evidence.
Chapter 15
One of Sam’s best qualities, and he had several, was that he never complained, no matter how badly or how often she inconvenienced him. That’s not to say he didn’t chastise her mercilessly when she’d done something stupid, because he did. But he was never more than a telephone call away.
When she got home to her apartment, dumped her bags, and let Muffy off the leash, the first thing she did was to dial his number. The phone rang before she realized what time it was: not quite six o’clock. He swore he was already awake, but she knew he wasn’t. He seemed way too groggy, and he answered the phone with “Who died?”
For once, he got an answer to that question.
Within twenty minutes, he was knocking on her door. Although he’d forgotten to comb his hair and button one side of his shirt collar, he looked almost presentable. He held two large cups of coffee, wedged into a molded gray paper carrier, and a bag containing one sausage biscuit, one egg with cheese biscuit, and hash browns.
Sweet. Thoughtful. But grossly aromatic. In her current state, she couldn’t face food or the smell of it, especially not the fast kind.
She pulled plates and mugs from the cupboard, unwrapped the sandwiches, and poured the coffee. She wouldn’t have Sam eating out of paper in her house. And then, sitting at the dining table, she let her biscuit grow cold while sipping the watery coffee and watching Sam devour his food as t
hough no one had been slaughtered at the Ashton mansion.
He swallowed the last bite, wiped his mouth with a napkin, then blotted grease from between his fingers and took her hand across the table. “I didn’t bring food over here so you could watch me eat, you know. There wasn’t much else open. Can’t you try at least one bite?”
She shook her head. He was trying so hard, but even the thought of food made her stomach churn. “Maybe later.”
“Talk to me,” he said.
She pulled back, stood, and taking her coffee with her, began to pace. “It looked like someone had taken a hose and drenched the bed, only not with water. If I remember correctly, the average human body contains something like eight to ten pints of blood. I’d say there had to be close to that much on that bed. How could someone bleed out like that?”
“Only a mystery writer would know how many—”
“That’s not true. Anyone in the sciences or the medical professions, avid readers—lots of people would know it, too. Once the heart stops pumping, the blood stops flowing, so how...”
“They do it to cattle all the time,” he interrupted. “They use a law called gravity.”
God, what an image. It was one of the reasons she was a vegetarian.
“It’s simply a matter of knowing where and how to...” Sam began.
She was right up next to him now. She leaned against his shoulder and put her fingers over his lips. She could pretend detachment, but it was a lie. She couldn’t bear to think about what had happened to Mrs. Ashton. And, of all the people in the world who might tell her how it happened, Sam was the one she didn’t want to hear it from.
He kissed her fingers, then took her hand and pulled her onto his lap, taking her coffee mug from her and putting it back onto the table. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as hard as she could, her ear and cheek pressing against his as though she couldn’t get close enough, the stubble of his beard digging roughly into her skin.
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