Wanting Sheila Dead(94)

“Did anyone do that?” Borstoi asked.

“At least three of them did,” Gregor said. “The Asian girl called Alida came back for her umbrella. The one called Suzanne came back for her purse. Janice came back to go to the bathroom. And then there’s when they came back.”

“Do you think that’s likely? First in the house?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Well, maybe. It’s hard to get the timing straight. But there were no judges here today, so that leaves the judges out. Did you ever get that Emily girl to talk to you?”

“It wasn’t me,” Borstoi reminded him. “I have talked to the Merion police. They brought her in. She gave her name as Emily Watson, got an attorney appointed, and just shut up. Then when it turned out that she hadn’t actually fired any bullets, and her gun wasn’t the one that did, well—”

“There was nothing to hold her on.”

“Something like that,” Borstoi said.

Gregor walked over to where the bullets were and knelt down. He was not a lab technician, or a forensics expert, but he didn’t need to be one for this. The bullets were buried deep in the wood. It wasn’t that somebody had fired at Sheila Dunham and missed. It was that somebody had fired at the floor. He stood up and backed off.

“Well,” he said.

“I know,” Borstoi said. “And I know there are cameras in this room, security cameras, and there were cameras filming what was going on here. But I get the feeling we’re going to be in the same shape with this as we were with the murder yesterday.”

“The security camera didn’t do any good?”

“It had been turned off,” Borstoi said. “Or, to be specific, it had had its wires ripped out at the wall.”

“There were live cameras in here today as well,” Gregor said.

“Yes, there were,” Borstoi said, “but I don’t think they’re going to be any more help than the stationary ones, and you don’t think so, either. Do you walk on water? Do you have any idea of what’s going on here?”

“Well,” Gregor said. “There is one thing. And I’m not trying to sound conceited. There’s the mirror in the study, the one on the wall above the fireplace there.”

“What about it?”

“It’s been moved. Specifically, it’s been allowed to lean very slightly forward. I’ve been in this house before, you know. My wife grew up here, and when I was first back in Philadelphia—”

“Oh, the Hannaford thing. I remember. I was still in a uniform then.”

“I went and looked at some of the pictures of that. The mirror always hung flat against the wall. When you looked into it, from whatever part of the room, you could see a lot of things, but you couldn’t see what was right under it on the hearth. But yesterday, the first thing I noticed was that you could see the body on the hearth in that mirror, at least if you looked at it through the doorway. And the body had been—how should I put this? It was as if it had been arranged.”

Len Borstoi looked impressed. “That’s very good. It had been moved. How did you know that? Or was it one of your sources of information?”

“No, it was a guess,” Gregor said. “I just assumed that it was highly unlikely that the second murder I should see in this house would end up damned near replicating the first one.”

“You mean, you think somebody arranged the body so that it was in the same position as the body of old Mr. Hannaford?”

“Well, it’s like I said. That, or a really incredible coincidence.”

“And the mirror?”

“So that I couldn’t mistake what I saw. So that from far off, as soon as I looked at the scene, the first thing I’d notice was the resemblance.”

“All right,” Borstoi said. He looked half amazed and half amused. “Was there a point in doing that kind of thing? Why would anybody want to go through all that trouble?”

Gregor looked at the wall, and the floor, and the ceiling. He looked at the bullets embedded in the hardwood.

“I think,” he said, “the idea was to take my mind off whatever was actually going on there. To distract me from the obvious.”

“And what’s the obvious?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “the most obvious thing is that Sheila Dunham is not dead.”





TWO



1


The other girls were avoiding her. They had been avoiding her since yesterday. Coraline had taken a long time to come to that conclusion, but now she found it inescapable. Only Janice was being nice to her, she felt, and that was probably because Janice was nice to everybody. She couldn’t help it.