Wanting Sheila Dead(125)

“You’re assuming the murder was done while you were all away on the, ah, challenge,” Gregor said. “In fact, it was done much earlier in the day, before you all left, while you were all getting ready. And it wasn’t done in the study. It was done in the servants’ access corridor that runs behind all the rooms in that wing and this one. It was done there. Then the body was dragged out into the study and placed in a way that made it echo another crime that had once taken place in this house. Then the study door was closed. It didn’t take five minutes, if it took that. Of course, the position of the wall mirror was also altered, but I think that was probably done the night before, when the security camera in there was disabled. It was a silly thing to do. I think it was supposed to make the scene look like one that had happened here before, that I had been involved in, and to get me rattled, or to distract me. It didn’t. It just made it all the more obvious what was happening here.”

“Which was what?”

“Oh,” Gregor said, “it was getting done what the murderer came here—to Philadelphia now, not to this house—to get done. It was so that Janice Ledbedder could kill a girl named Emma Ware, who was once her best friend in Marshall, South Dakota.”

Everybody turned to look, but Janice was just sitting there, smiling.