Living Witness(117)

“You ought to,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, well,” Canton said. “What I mean is, there really wasn’t any time. It had to have happened really fast. And I can’t figure out how it did happen. I mean, I suppose we were back there longer than we think were, but it couldn’t have been that much longer. If you see what I mean.”

“I do see what you mean. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t go into the house?”

“You’re the chief investigator here,” Canton said. “I suppose Dale is going to bitch at you, but I don’t think he can do anything.”

That was Gregor’s assessment of the situation, too. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and tried the front door. It was locked. He looked at Canton.

“This door has been locked the whole time? I got in there this morning.”

“I unlocked for you,” Canton said. “We have a key, but we keep the place locked. Just to be safe, if you see what I mean.”

“And you locked up after me when I left this morning?”

“Absolutely,” Canton said. “I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.”

“Right.” Gregor motioned to the door. Canton came forward and opened up. The door swung on its hinges. The hallway beyond it was dark.

“You always think of the twenties as being such a happy era,” Gregor said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bright young things. And yet they built all these houses, and they were all so dark.”

Canton Weeks said nothing at all, and Gregor bent down to step under the crime tape and go inside. He turned the light on in the hall. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun was out, and this house still needed artificial light.

“There ought to be a ghost in the attic,” Gregor said.

He went down the hall to the living room, and through the living room to the dining room. The mess that had been made of the papers on the dining room table when Judy Cornish had been killed—or, at least, around the time Judy Cornish had been killed—and that had still been evident when Gregor had looked in this morning, had now been corrected. That must have been Lisa, going through things when he had asked her to see what might be missing. She had protested that she couldn’t really know what was missing, and that was true. But he couldn’t know, either, and yet he had looked through these papers once, and he was about to do it again. But first he was going to look through the house.

He went through the dining room into the kitchen. It looked as blank and unused as it always had. He wondered if Annie-Vic used it when she was in residence, or if she had someone in to “do” for her now that she was old. He looked into the pantry, which was a big windowless room at the back, lined with shelves that were themselves lined with Mason jars which seemed to hold close to a century’s worth of canning. The jars were labeled, with both a description of the contents and the year they were being put up, and some of the years had an almost fantastical quality—1924, 1936. If Annie-Vic had been poisoned by eating ancient home canned goods, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He left the pantry and went into the back hall. There was another door there. He tried it, and it was locked. What was more, there was a small latch bolt near the top, and it was bolted solid. Gregor doubted that it would have been much of a problem for somebody to bust through it, but nobody had, and that meant that nobody had gone out the back door this afternoon.

And if somebody had, he’d have had a good chance of running into Tammaro at the back.

Gregor went back to the dining room. The papers were in neat stacks. He wondered if that was how Annie-Vic herself had left them, before they’d been disturbed by whoever was in here yesterday. He looked at the first stack and saw that the paper on top of it concerned the new teachers’ contracts. He thumbed through a few more pages and found more material on the contracts, material on the teachers’ pension funds, material on the buying of textbooks, material on the construction of the new school complex, even material on class scheduling for the upcoming school year. Annie-Vic was, as Catherine Marbledale had indicated, concerned with the nuts and bolts of the running of the school district.

He was just going on to the second stack when Dale Vardan marched in, puffing. He would have been like a Gilbert and Sullivan character, Gregor thought, if he had only been funny. Dale Vardan was not only not funny, he didn’t ever seem to find anything funny, either.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” he said. “This is a crime scene. You could be destroying evidence and not even know it.”

“I think I know how not to destroy evidence at a crime scene,” Gregor said. “And as for whether or not I should be here, this is my crime scene, and my criminal investigation, unless I or the town of Snow Hill voluntarily decide to give it up to you, which we are not going to do. Have any of your people managed to remember to search the house this time?”