“How’d you know the faulty wiring was intentional?” Serrano asked. “She coulda had someone wire it who didn’t know what they were doing, or maybe the old girl herself had a go at fixing it.”
“That’s true, but what about the breaker in the basement?” Joe said. “If it hadn’t been jammed, there’s a chance it could have saved her life.”
The bags on the kitchen island were calling to me. I couldn’t stand to waste food. I wasn’t sure why I was so worried about it. The dead woman wouldn’t be able to use the stuff anyway, but between that and the lilac dollhouse, I was only half listening.
“What’s important is the path the current takes through the body,” Joe was saying. “If it flows through one extremity and travels across the heart to another extremity, it’s much more dangerous than from, say, leg to ground. I’ll bet you five bucks right now that the cause of death will be ventricular fibrillation.”
I pictured Harriet grasping her dollhouse with both hands.
“But why was she still holding on to it? Why didn’t she feel the shock and let go?” Serrano asked.
“A high enough current can cause a spasm that makes the person grip and be unable to release.” Joe leaned back in his chair. “You know, it’s funny. Guys can sometimes survive a super high-voltage shock, like from a power line, because it throws you back. It’s not so much the voltage, but the current. Household current is especially dangerous because it exceeds the ‘let-go’ threshold.”
An officer came into the kitchen, and waited patiently until Serrano glanced at him.
“The house is locked up tight, sir, except for the front door. No signs of breaking and entering.”
“Thanks.”
I thought about Joe almost smashing the window. “So could it have been someone Harriet knew and she let them in?”
Serrano nodded toward two mugs set out on the counter. “Looks like she might have been expecting a guest.”
“But she just got home,” I said. “And how could anyone mess with the dollhouse while Harriet was here? Even if she went to the bathroom or something, or left them in the study while she went to make tea, I doubt they’d have had time to work on it. Joe, what do you think?”
“It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t know how they could have gotten down to the basement as well to mess with that breaker.”
After we finished giving our statements, Joe and I decided we were exhausted, and it was too late to go out for dinner. Plus it was pouring now, so the outside veranda wouldn’t be open. We headed back to our 1842 Greek Revival on Main Street. It was situated a block down from Sometimes a Great Notion, where the stores stopped and the houses began. It had been our vacation home for thirty years, until Joe convinced me to take early retirement from teaching.
To the casual observer, our house might appear to be in reasonable shape, but after three decades of never-ending restoration, it was almost time to start over with some of the earlier tasks. Like repainting the huge living room with its twelve-foot-high ceilings, original millwork, and six-over-six windows. Even when we were younger, it had taken close to a week to finish the whole thing, but now, the prospect of a big job like that was overwhelming. I didn’t even want to think about the state of our basement. Fortunately, Joe was very handy around the house, because there was always something that needed attention.
While I set out some honey goat Gouda and creamy blue Stilton on a cedar plank, together with flatbreads, Marcona almonds, and dried apricots, Joe selected a bottle from the wine rack.
Jasper, our goofy golden retriever mix puppy, sat at high attention, his ears pricked, eyes never leaving the board of cheese and crackers. He wasn’t technically our dog. He actually belonged to my daughter, Sarah, who’d rescued him off the streets of New York. She worked in film production as a script supervisor, and seeing as she was in Spain on the set of her latest movie, he was staying with us. Secretly, I hoped it would turn out to be a permanent arrangement.