At first glance, Paige had told the truth about taking a wine break. There was an open bottle of red wine on the kitchen island and a couple small shards of glass on the tile floor between the island and the sink. But when I swung back to pull a paper towel from a holder on the counter, I saw a puddle of wine near the archway. So how was it Paige had broken the glass near the island but wine from that glass had ended up fifteen feet away?

  I handed Paige the paper towel, tore two more from the holder, and then strode to the puddle and mopped it up. When I turned back, she looked quickly away and insisted she needed to get on with her work or the turkey would be ruined. “It needs to come out of the oven and rest,” she said.

  “Need help?”

  “I work alone.”

  The puddle of wine spoke for itself, so I decided not to mention it. Obviously, Paige had been listening in, but that wasn’t uncommon for a caterer at a dinner party. “Can I ask you something?” I said. “Do you know Anne Rightler?”

  “Not really. I’ve served her dinner.” Paige busied herself with basting the turkey, refusing to pause or look me in the eye. She was young—in her early thirties, I thought—with fair, smooth skin, a straight nose, and the kind of well-defined jawline that seemed to disintegrate after age forty.

  “You’ve served her here?”

  “Yeah. Nora invites her for dinner once a month.”

  “She hires you for the dinner?”

  “A year now.”

  “Did you hear the guests upstairs arguing?”

  Paige squeezed the last of the juices from the baster, set it on the island, and then turned my way with a roll of her eyes. “Every single time they get together there’s an argument over something.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Usually about that room upstairs, or sometimes about donating Nora’s things to a local museum—that kind of thing. The Wallaces and Larsons are always at each other. But what it comes down to every time is money, which is hilarious since they all have more of it than most people.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would they argue over money? Are they investing in stocks together or something like that?”

  “Not that I know of, though Nora lets Dominic Larson control her money way too much.” Paige seemed relieved that I wasn’t going to mention the wine by the archway, and she seized on the new the subject with relish. “Dominic’s the tall guy with black hair. He’s Nora’s financial adviser.”

  “He and Ben Wallace got into a pretty heated argument.”

  “Not for the first time. See, Dominic controls the actual money, but Kendra controls the asset money—you know, the historical stuff in the documents room. Both of them want it all.”

  “I still don’t understand why they’re at odds.”

  Paige searched Nora’s refrigerator and came away with a plastic-wrapped block of white cheese, which she plopped down on the kitchen island. “Kendra and Ben consider themselves the experts. She’s the cataloger with a degree and he’s a lecturer in history, writing a book on this St. Vrain guy. Experts, see? They want Nora’s money so they can preserve her collection and even buy more historical stuff. But Dominic thinks they’re wasting her money—and it’s money he wants to invest and make a commission on.”

  “You’ve picked all this up just by listening to them?”

  “Like I said, they argue all the time, and always about the same stuff.”

  “I’ve got a Band-Aid and antiseptic ointment,” Julia announced as she entered the kitchen. “You shouldn’t handle food with a cut, Paige.”

  Paige stuck her injured hand in the air. “I’m not using the bloody hand.”

  “Except when she took the turkey out of the oven, and then she used potholders,” I said with a smile.

  Julia made a face. “Still . . .”

  “Thanks, though,” Paige said, taking the Band-Aid and ointment from Julia.

  “Any fights break out in the living room?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Julia said. “When I walked through the living room I heard Anne telling everyone about this thief among us.”

  Paige wavered for an instant, but she recovered quickly and proceeded to peel back the wrapper on her Band-Aid. “Sorry, guys, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’ve got five minutes before dinner is served and loads to do still.”

  “Of course,” I said, pulling Julia away from the turkey platter. “Don’t you have an assistant?”

  “Can’t afford one.”

  “Are there mashed potatoes, by any chance?”

  “Already cooked, chopped, and ready for the food processor.”

  Julia and I headed into the living room, but I pulled her aside before we joined the others. “I’m positive Paige dropped the wineglass when she heard Anne talk about a thief,” I whispered. “She was listening.”

  “What are we going to do about the miniature Anne took?”

  “We have to tell Nora. We can’t let Anne leave with it, and we can’t let her keep it in her pocket. She’s sitting on sixty thousand dollars.”

  “Julia, Rachel,” Dominic said, shouting and waving at us as though we were a football field away. “Come on over here. Where are your wine glasses?”

  I reluctantly left the safety of the staircase for a couch seat in the living room alongside Dominic and his wife, Sheila. I saved the armchair next to the couch for Julia. She looked worried about Nora and Anne—and not in the mood to sit next to the fidgety Sheila, who was furiously twisting a lock of her red hair between her fingers.

  “Would either of you like wine?” Dominic asked, glancing from Julia to me.

  Julia declined, but I asked for a small glass of white. As Dominic headed to the kitchen, it struck me that Nora or one of her guests had to have seen that the miniature was missing from the documents room before they headed back downstairs. After all, they had remained upstairs, arguing, for several minutes after Julia and I left. Why had no one said anything? Nora would never have left that room without a last look at the precious painting. And for that matter, where was Anne? She’d left the living room and was who-knows-where in the house—possibly dropping or scratching the miniature.

  I excused myself and headed to a separate little seating area where Nora was talking with Kendra and Ben Wallace. Nora looked up, smiled, and patted the couch seat next to hers.

  “Nora, can I talk to you a minute?” I said, sinking into the overly soft cushion.

  “By all means,” she said.

  Intrigued, Kendra and Ben leaned in, moving in unison. They were both in their late thirties, but that’s where the similarity ended. Kendra had dark, wavy hair, while Ben’s was light brown with fledgling touches of gray, and Ben’s strong, straight nose and wide jaw was a counterpoint to Kendra’s more delicate features. “I meant privately,” I said apologetically.

  “No problem,” Ben said, rising from his chair. “Nora, would you like more wine?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “We’ll talk later,” Kendra said. “I’ve got some other ideas I want to run past you.”

  “Why don’t you go into the dining room?” Nora said. “We’re about ready to start.”

  “Here comes Dominic,” Ben said.

  “Ignore him,” Kendra said, laying a hand on Ben’s arm.

  Dominic was heading for our little group, a glass of white wine in his hand.

  “He’s bringing me the wine I asked for,” I said, thinking that explaining his approach would assure Ben that Dominic’s aim was not to continue their argument. But Dominic’s eyes were shooting daggers: he was ready for another go. I sprang from my couch—not an easy thing, given its oatmeal-like softness—and cut him off before he could reach Ben.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking hold of the glass. An instant later I spun him around with a push to his shoulder. “Would you please get Julia a small glass of white?”

  He gave me a puzzled look over his shoulder. “But she said she didn’t want any.”

  “She says that to be polite.” I gave his shoulder a gentle shove, and off he went, though not without giving me another expression of bewilderment.

  I retook my seat on the couch and mumbled another apology at Kendra and Ben, which the couple finally took as their cue to leave.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said to Nora when they’d gone, “but this is serious. Did you notice that your miniature had been taken from the documents room?”

  Nora smiled wearily, the skin around her eyes crinkling into even deeper crow’s feet. “Yes, Rachel, I did. I thought for sure she’d take something else. She knows how rare that piece is.”

  “Did anyone else notice it was missing?”

  “Everyone did.”

  “Does Anne still have it, then? Where is she?”

  “I haven’t taken it back yet. I need to find a quiet moment so I don’t embarrass her. She went off to the restroom. I’m only hoping she doesn’t drop it on the tiles.” Pursing her lips, she shook her head. “I should have kept my eye on it.”

  “I’m getting the feeling that Anne has done this before.”

  Nora looked me square in the eye. “The past four times she’s been here, in September, October, and twice this month. We’ve all gotten quite used to it.”

  “She steals from you?”

  “She returns everything before she leaves. She says she’s protecting my things, but when I ask her from what or from whom, she says she doesn’t know.” Nora let her eyes stray over the living room before looking back to me. “Except tonight. Tonight’s different. She was excited when I told her Julia Foster’s friend, the one who solves murders, would be here. She says she knows now who the thief is.”

  “Nora, is it possible the thief is Anne? She seems like a sweet woman, but she’s, she’s . . .” I searched for a kind way to put it.

  “She’s not all there?”

  “To be honest, no.”

  A shout came from somewhere on the first floor, jolting me. There was another shout, and then another. At first insistent, the shouts became a frantic alarm.

  “That’s Kendra,” Nora said, struggling to get up from the couch.

  I jumped to my feet and helped Nora get to hers. Julia, too, was rising from her armchair, and Dominic and Sheila were staring at each other on the couch. An instant later, Ben and Paige came flying out of the kitchen, Ben swiveling this way and that in the living room, uncertain which way to go.

  “The hall,” Nora said, gesticulating wildly.

  Ben raced for the hall, Paige and Dominic on his heels, and was rapidly followed by Nora, Julia, and me. I had to push my way around Sheila, who halted halfway down the hall, refusing to take another step.

  At the end of the long hallway, Kendra was riveted to the floor, staring through an open doorway into what I thought must be a bedroom.

  “The cellar stairs,” Nora said, her voice filled with dread.

  I stopped short, not wanting to see what I knew Kendra saw.

  Kendra looked at Ben, her eyes wild. She pointed. “Anne’s down there. I think she’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “She fell all the way down. It looked like her neck was broken,” Nora said, dabbing at her tears with a cloth napkin Paige had retrieved from the dining room. “Was it?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” Chief James Gilroy said.

  “What was she doing going down the stairs?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Did she fall, or . . . ?”

  “We’ll find out.” Gilroy stood, leaving Nora and Paige on the couch, and walked over to Underhill, who was trying without success to comfort Sheila Larson on the other side of the living room. Either Dominic hadn’t tried to soothe her frazzled nerves or he’d given up, and Kendra and Ben Wallace, stone-faced and silent, were ignoring her completely.

  I could have told Nora she’d get nothing but terse replies from Gilroy. It wasn’t his style to speculate. When we’d first met—after I’d discovered a body in my backyard—I had judged him cold and unfeeling, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was a quiet and thoughtful man, that’s all, and he was too good a cop to divulge even a single fact of the case to a room full of possible suspects.

  Gilroy had taken all our statements, such as they were. We had all lost sight of Anne not long after Julia came downstairs with the bandage and ointment for Paige, and very shortly after she told everyone there was a thief in the house. No one had paid much attention to where she’d gone or how long she’d been gone. Nora told Gilroy that Anne had asked where the restroom was—having forgotten its location again—and she’d directed her down the hall. Anne had gone a door too far.

  “I keep that cellar door shut for just this reason,” Nora said. “You open it and you’re at death’s door. Those steps are horribly steep.”

  Julia took Gilroy’s seat on the couch and wrapped an arm around Nora’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Anne opened the wrong door. She wasn’t paying attention—you know how she is. How many times has she used the restroom on this floor?”

  “A lot,” Nora murmured.

  “And still she forgot where it was.”

  But did she forget? I wondered. Even if she had forgotten and by chance opened the wrong door, what had sent her plunging down a flight of stairs? Anne was forgetful, not blind. She wouldn’t have opened the cellar door, seen the steps, and then thought the restroom was now at the bottom of those steps. No. Realizing her mistake, she would have shut the cellar door and opened another door and another until she found the restroom.

  “She wouldn’t have tried to go down those steps,” I said with certainty.

  Paige seemed startled by my remark, and Julia glared at me as though I’d woken a baby she’d just rocked to sleep.

  “Julia, remember how she waited for us at the top of the stairs,” I said, “after she left the documents room? She knew she couldn’t go up or down the stairs without help. Her memory was bad, but was she foolish? Nora?”

  Nora twisted one end of her scarf, wringing it in her hands like a wet dish towel. “No, not at all. People assumed she was foolish because she was eighty-seven, but apart from her memory lapses, she was sharp.”

  “How can you be sharp without memory?” Paige said with a scowl.

  “When we played cards,” Nora said, “Anne kept track of every card dealt. With four people playing. Could you do that? I never could. Just because Anne couldn’t remember where the bathroom was because she hadn’t seen it for a week doesn’t mean she couldn’t see and understand what was right in front of her.”

  “And the steps were right in front of her,” Julia said softly.

  “Even if Anne couldn’t remember the right door, she had enough sense not to think the restroom was in the cellar,” I added a little too loudly. “She didn’t fall.” Julia put a finger to her lips to caution me, and I turned to look over my shoulder. Our voices had carried across the living room, to where the Larsons and the Wallaces were listening with rapt attention. Gilroy, too, had stopped jotting in his notebook and was watching me.

  Ben shifted in his seat and threw his left arm over the back of the couch for a better look at the opinionated woman across the room. “And you’ve known Anne for how long?” he asked.

  “Long enough,” I said.

  “She’s right, Ben,” Nora said, speaking as loudly as I had moments ago. “Anne wouldn’t have tried to walk down those stairs. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Anne did a lot of things that didn’t make sense,” Kendra said, supporting her husband. “Anyway, what else could have happened?” She looked around the room, waiting for a response. Dominic shrugged, and Ben, figuring he and his wife had scored a point, turned back around in his seat.

  And they’d claimed to be Anne’s friends. She deserved better. “Someone could have pushed her,” I said.

  Kendra glared at me. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.

  “One of us, presumably?” Dominic said.

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Sheila said.

  “Or maybe it was you, Rachel,” Dominic said.

  “Let’s be quiet so we can go home,” Sheila said.

  “I mean, you’re the visitor here, not us,” Dominic added. “If we wanted to push Anne down the stairs, we could have done it weeks or months ago.”

  I couldn’t decide if he was trying to taunt me for my outburst or his wife for her timidity. He seemed to be getting pleasure out of doing both. And Gilroy, silent as usual, was watching and listening. He knew how many criminals slipped up and implicated themselves by talking too much.

  “I think the coroner can say whether she was pushed,” Kendra said. “What’s taking the man so long, anyway?” she asked, her eyes darting down the hall. “It’s creepy, thinking of him down there, examining Anne’s body.”

  “Oh, Kendra,” Nora chided.

  I didn’t care how long the coroner took to do his job. I was just grateful he was at the end of the hall and down a long flight of stairs and I didn’t have to hear or see what he was doing.

  “It’s obvious no one here killed her,” Dominic said. “We’ve all been here or in the kitchen since we came downstairs.”

  “That’s right,” Kendra said. “Only Anne went down the hall. None of us have moved.”

  “That’s not true, Kendra,” I said. “For instance, when I got up to talk to Nora, Dominic and Sheila were sitting where you and Ben are sitting now.”

  “I went to the kitchen for your friend’s wine,” Dominic said. “You sent me. Remember?”

  “So why not return to your seat next to Sheila? Why did she move? Why did Kendra and Ben take your seats?”

  “Hang on just a minute, lady,” Ben said.

  Kendra was about to chime in when I held up my hands. “I’m only saying there’s been a lot more moving around than Dominic claims.”

  Sheila sniffed loudly, and Dominic, in the first husbandly move he’d made all evening, handed her his handkerchief.

 

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