A Great Day for the Deadly(79)

“Yes,” Gregor said, “I thought you were.”

“Yeah,” Pete Donovan said. “Well, Ann-Harriet killed Miriam, stuffed her up there on that shelf by carrying her up a ladder and dumping her in a heap, doused the conservatory in kerosene and lit a match.”

“Why the conservatory?”

“Closest thing that would light. It’s got wood floors. The greenhouse has tile floors. Maybe she doused the body, too, to be safe. It’s a good plan, Demarkian, much better than I would have expected from Ann-Harriet. It has all the elements. If Josh hadn’t panicked and called us, the place would have burned down and the body would have been reduced to ash before we ever saw it. We’d never have been able to prove that Miriam hadn’t burned to death.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said for the third time. Then he left Donovan’s side at the edge of the wall and advanced across the lawn in the direction of the fire. He supposed it was just possible that it had happened the way Donovan said it had, that she had killed and then transported the body up a high stepladder to that shelf. In fact, it must have. Gregor had worked the whole thing out over the last few hours, the who, what, when, where, how, and why. He knew he couldn’t be wrong, because there was no other possible explanation that fit all the facts. Even this fact—this body left in an inaccessible place to be destroyed—could be accounted for in no other way. Still, he was even more impressed with her than he had been. It couldn’t have been easy. She had more determination than any other murderer he had ever met.

He got as close to the fire as he could, right up to the point where the heat began to make his face feel ready to blister. He was held back at that point by a frightened looking boy in a yellow slicker. The slicker had a shield with “Maryville Volunteer Fire Department” written into its borders.

“Can’t go past here,” the boy said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I won’t go past,” Gregor told him. “I was looking for someone who might have seen the body. Someone might be able to answer a few questions.”

“I saw the body,” the boy said. His face went green and he turned away, to look at the flames. “Only for a minute, though. I threw up.”

“Was it that bad?”

The boy heaved. “It was the back of her legs,” he said. “She was all curled up there on her side with her legs sticking out into the room and they had bubbles on them. You could just see the bubbles. It was—”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “I know what it was. Do you know someone named Josh Malley?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. I do.”

“Is he around here somewhere?”

“He’d be a good person to ask about the body,” the boy said. “He saw it before it was—before the heat got to it. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief. I heard Pete Donovan tell my chief Miss Bailey was murdered, too.”

“Does that make it worse,” Gregor asked him, “that she was murdered?”

“Just so long as she was dead before the heat got to her.” The boy turned and looked around, into the arch lights, into the flame light. The lawn was becoming more and more of a mess by the minute. The hose trucks and the hooks and ladders were parked around to the other side. It had been easier to get them there, with no star-gazing wall to get in their way. The activity on this side was heavy even without them. The boy peered at one face after the other and shook his head.

“I don’t see him,” he said. “He was talking to Pete Donovan for a while, though. And then he was talking to Harry Demos from the state police. He’ll be around here somewhere. All right?”

“All right.”

“I don’t mind anything as long as she was dead when the heat got to her,” the boy said again. “That’s all I could think of when I saw her, with those shoes with the high spiky heels and the heels were starting to melt it was so hot in there and then the skin—”

“She was dead long before the heat got to her,” Gregor said.

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

There was what felt like a gust of hot wind but was instead a puff of heated air breaking through a window. Shouts went up from the other side of the house, followed by banging that must have been axes against wood. Gregor looked up to see that the conservatory had lost the integrity of its shape. There was nothing left of it now but charred broken rafters and fire. The rafters were black and growing smaller by the minute. The fire was triumphant and swelling. Gregor couldn’t see any stars in the sky at all anymore. Instead, even the puffs of breath that hung in the air every time he exhaled were tinged with red.