Jeff Myers is our Chief of Police, and as nice a man as you could hope to meet. We were in grade school together, and he was the one boy whom I didn’t mind spitting paper wads at me. Of course he’s married now. Anyway, he showed up in no time flat and handled everything as smoothly as Freni does her shoofly pie dough. In less than an hour he had Miss Brown shipped off to the county morgue, for she was indeed dead. And in that time he had managed to interview everyone in the inn, except for myself. That he did over a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
“May as well,” he said, when I offered it to him. “We were planning to leave on vacation in three hours anyway. No use trying to hit the sack now. I’ll just let Tammy do the driving.”
“Where are you off to?” I asked. Tammy Myers, his wife, is a nice-enough woman, but dingier than a mailbox on a gravel road. They have three children, Sarah, David, and Dafna, who are almost grown. That the woman never misplaced them when they were infants is nothing short of a miracle. If his wife was going to do the driving while Jeff slept, somebody sane needed to know their destination.
“We’re going to Niagara Falls,” said Jeff, “then camping up in Canada for two weeks. I’ll be leaving my assistant in charge.”
“Keep her away from the edge,” I advised sagely.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Now, Mags, about this Brown woman, you say you never saw her again after you showed her to her room? Until Mr. Teitlebaum found her, I mean.”
“That’s right. I didn’t see a sign of her. Of course, she wasn’t easy to see, if you know what I mean.” “Uh-huh. Apparently none of the other guests saw or heard her either, at least not while she was alive. Neither did anyone hear a scream when she fell down the stairs, although one man, let’s see,” he briefly consulted his notes, “a Mr. Grizzle, said he thought he heard a thump. Of course, that might have been Mr. Teitlebaum pounding on your door.”
“Probably. And what about Joel Teitlebaum? What was he doing up, anyway? I mean, he seems like a nice kid and all, but shouldn’t he have a bedtime?” Mama had made me go to bed by nine every night until the day she died.
Chief of Police Myers glanced at his notes again. "Mr. Teitlebaum claims to have been in your parlor, deeply engrossed in one of your books. Something about Amish rabbis I think. Anyway, according to him, after that spider incident with young Linda McMahon, he couldn’t get back to sleep, so he went back down to the parlor. He heard a thump also, but no scream. He said he read another paragraph or two of that damned book—oh, sorry, Mags—before he got up to investigate.”
“Maybe she was too drunk to scream,” I suggested hopefully. If it was a drunk who fell down your stairs, even though they were impossibly steep, didn’t that absolve you of at least some of the liability?
“Maybe,” said Chief Myers, “but personally I don’t think that’s the case. Drunks seldom hurt themselves when they fall. All that booze makes them too flexible. Read about this guy out in San Francisco who fell seventeen stories down an empty elevator shaft. Dead drunk, of course. Hardly got hurt at all.”
Suddenly I remembered why I didn’t like Jeff so much. He had an annoying habit of always letting logic get in the way. “Well, okay, what if she wasn’t drunk then, and somebody pushed her. Then it still wouldn’t be my fault, would it?"
Chief Myers’s sinfully blue eyes danced in amusement. "You would rather it was murder than face a lawsuit?”
I tried to swallow a huge lump that had somehow lodged in my throat. Perhaps Freni’s dumplings weren’t as fluffy as I had always believed. “Murder? Who said anything about murder?”
Jeff Myers chuckled. “Ah, you mean it might have been only a friendly sort of push?”
It was time to retreat, and fast. A verdict of murder, it seemed then, would be just as ruinous to the inn as a lawsuit. “Maybe she fell while sleepwalking, or maybe she decided to come downstairs without turning the hall light on first.”
“Maybe,” said the Chief. “Then again, maybe not. I think your murder theory has its points.”
“My theory?” You see how things always get twisted around, then put back on me? “And what points are those?”
The Chief yawned. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this stuff, but what the hell. This Miss Brown took a pretty bad fall, but it wasn’t the fall that put those marks on her face.”
“What marks?” I hadn’t seen any marks. Then again, I hadn’t looked at her face all that closely. It might have been Yasir Arafat lying there, for all I really knew. “Marks,” said the Chief tiredly. “Kind of like bruises.