I looked at the phone in dismay.
“I had no idea we had a gluten situation,” I said finally. “What kind of situation?”
“I meant, are a lot of your family going gluten free, or is it safe to have rolls and a bread-based stuffing?”
“I think it’s safe to have rolls,” I said. “As long as you don’t force anyone to eat them at gunpoint. But I have no idea how many people are avoiding gluten. Maybe a gluten-free stuffing would be best.”
“I’ll do both, then,” she said, and hung up.
“Mother-in-law,” I said to Jen.
“Tell me about it.”
I persevered to the end, from the Abramses and Addisons all the way to the Zooks and Zuckers, but finally I had to admit defeat.
“She’s not here,” I said.
“Could be a townie,” Jen said. “A lot of townies pretend to be students at the college. Especially if they’re trying to get into bars.”
“Yeah, but this one wasn’t trying to get into a bar. She was touring a half-completed decorator show house.”
“Was there anything missing after she left?”
“Good question,” I said. I wasn’t about to mention the gun that might have gone missing.
“You should check carefully,” she said. “We’ve started seeing a lot of it. Crooks in their teens or early twenties. They come here and they just blend in. Everyone looks at them and sees students. If you don’t know them you just figure they’re transfer students, or students in a department whose building is on the other side of campus. It’s not like a neighborhood where people get to know each other and call the police if they see a stranger hanging around.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do in hindsight.”
We wished each other a merry Christmas and I left. She seemed sorry to see me go. Clearly her boss’s desire to have someone in the office wasn’t motivated by a heavy workload. I suspected I had been the highlight of an otherwise boring day.
I waited till I was outside again to call the police.
“No dice,” I said. “Jessica was definitely not a student.”
“Blast,” he said. That was usually as close to cursing as the chief went, so I knew he was seriously frustrated.
“I’m heading back to the house,” I said. “Unless you need me to do anything else.”
“Just be careful,” he said.
As soon as I stepped in the door of the show house, Sarah and Violet came running to meet me.
“Did you hear?” Sarah said. “The police found all our packages.”
“Clay did have them after all,” Violet said. “What a horrible man!”
“Martha was livid,” Sarah said. “If he wasn’t already dead, I think she’d probably strangle him over this.”
“And I’d probably help her,” Mother said from the doorway of her room.
I was still taking off my coat when Randall pulled up in a panel truck.
“Got that new mattress for Clay’s room,” he said, as he came in the front door. “Can anyone help me haul it in?”
Eustace said a few words in Spanish to Tomás and Mateo, and they raced out the door.
“And I found some black sheets and a bedspread to replace the damaged ones,” Randall went on, handing me a bag from a well-known discount chain. “Had to send my cousin Mervyn down to Richmond for them.”
“Excellent,” I said, pulling the package of sheets out of the bag.
“These are cotton polyester blend,” Eustace said, in a tone of utter horror.
“Yeah,” Randall said. “That’s what Mervyn could find down in Richmond. Not a hot item in the River City, black sheets.”
“Clay’s were Egyptian cotton with a fifteen hundred thread count,” Eustace said.
“And now they’re locked up in the Caerphilly Police Department’s evidence room,” Randall said. “And even if the chief let us have them back, between the bloodstains and damage from the ax the killer used to wreck the room, they don’t look so pretty.”
“I seem to remember Clay saying he had to special order the sheets from somewhere,” I said. “And they took forever to get here. Even if we knew his source, it’s not as if we have the time to order them all over again.”
“And it’s also not as if the people coming through the house are going to wallow on the sheets,” Randall said. “We’ll probably have a docent in here to make sure no one touches a thing.”
“Well, go ahead,” Eustace said. “Who knows? If you actually put those sorry things on the bed in Clay’s room, he just might rise from the dead to smite you, and save Chief Burke the trouble of solving his murder.”