Six Geese A-Slaying(50)

“Meg, do you mind if we take the truck and the van into your barn,” the chief asked. “We can’t leave the evidence unguarded, and I can’t ask anyone to stay outside with it. The temperature must be in the teens by now.”

“Fine with me,” I said.

“And I’d like a private room where I can talk to Mrs. Will-ner,” he said.

“How about the dining room?” I suggested.

He thought about it for a moment.

“Fine,” he said.

I followed him to the dining room. He flicked the flashlight around, inspecting the room, while I tidied some of the gilded fruit and greenery off the table so he’d have room to work, and lit a few of the oil lamps we kept handy for our frequent power outages. Caroline came in and sat down. Clarence followed her and hovered nearby.

“We don’t want to talk to you,” Clarence said. “Do we, Caroline?”

“I’m sure we can clear this up,” she said. She looked ashen, and I wanted to order her to bed.

“But we don’t want to—” Clarence began.

“Fine,” the chief said. “You’re not talking. You can not talk to me some more later, but right now it’s Mrs. Willner’s turn not to talk.”

“Coffee?” Michael said, appearing with a trio of cups. Clarence grabbed one and fled to the living room after one last pleading look that was wasted, since Caroline was sitting back with her eyes closed. She smiled faintly as Michael handed her the second cup. He handed the third to the chief and left.

“Anything else you need?” I asked.

The chief walked over to open a small door in our dining room wall, pulled the rope until the dumbwaiter was level with the opening, and then ostentatiously propped the door open. Clearly he hadn’t forgotten the time last summer when I’d used the dumbwaiter to eavesdrop while he was questioning suspects in another case.

“This will do fine,” he said. “Thank you.”

I walked out and closed the door.

“I’m going to do some laundry,” I called to Michael. Which wouldn’t sound implausible to him or anyone who knew me. I clean under stress.

“With no power?” he called back.

Rats. There was that small flaw in my cover story.

“I can still sort the dirty stuff and fold the clean,” I called back. And I did go down and throw a load of sheets in the washer, so it was ready to run when the power returned. Then I waited until I heard Michael and Sammy going out the back door.

“We’re off to burgle the Boy Scouts!” Michael called downstairs.

As soon as the door closed, I crept up out of the basement and dashed into the powder room off the kitchen. The powder room had originally been a short servants’ hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. When indoor bathrooms became popular and servants too expensive, the owners had put a door at the kitchen end of the corridor, installed a sink and toilet, and blocked off the dining room end with built-in china shelves. But since only the back of the shelves separated the powder room from the dining room, sound traveled rather well. And given how much the boards at the back of the shelves had warped over the years, I easily found a chink to peek through.





Chapter 20

Caroline Willner sat at one end of our dining table. The coffee had revived her. She had clasped her hands over her stomach and was smiling benignly at the chief, as if this were a social visit rather than an interrogation.

“So of course, when Dr. Langslow asked me to bring the elephants, I thought it was a wonderful idea,” she was saying.

“Yes, I understand that,” the chief said. “I mean what were you doing at the Spare Attic this evening?”

“Loading our truck,” she said.

“Yes, we noticed that,” the chief said. “But according to the records in Mr. Doleson’s office, the storage bin where we found you belongs to Mr. Norris Pruitt. You want to tell me why you were burgling Norris’s bin?”

“We weren’t burgling,” Caroline said. “We were helping Norris empty it.”

“At 10 P.M. in the middle of a snowstorm?” the chief said. “What’s so all-fired important that it couldn’t wait till morning? He got snowshoes and a generator stowed away there?”

“We were rather busy earlier,” she said. “With the parade and all. And I have to go back to the sanctuary tomorrow with the truck, so this was the only time we could do it.”

She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, and smiled innocently at him.

“And Mr. Pruitt will confirm this if I call him?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, but her voice sounded a little anxious.

“And you never considered that maybe this wasn’t the right time to help Norris with his bin? Right after the building’s owner had been murdered?”