A secret passage leading off of the secret passage? Nothing was beyond imagining. The sheriff and I went over every inch of the stairs and wall and ceiling, but there was no other passage. I’d run out of ideas.
We went back down to the library and I saw that Meg’s assistant, Penny Hamish, had arrived. “What’s happened here?” she asked me. “I saw the sheriff’s car and now—” She glanced in at the body on the library floor and then looked away.
“Aaron Cartwright’s been killed,” I told her. “You’d better phone Meg with your scoop.”
“Not much of a scoop when it’s a weekly paper,” she complained. “It’ll be old news by next Thursday.” But she spotted the telephone on a side table beneath a banjo clock and gave the number to the operator.
I turned my attention to Mr. Snyder, the birdbath salesman. He looked rumpled and unhappy, no doubt regretting he’d chosen this morning to return. “What brought you back here?” I asked.
“I needed my sample, so I brought him a picture of it, hoping that would satisfy him till the real birdbaths arrived.”
Sheriff Lens grunted. “You won’t be getting it for a while now. It’s a murder weapon and we’ll need it as evidence.”
Snyder started to protest, but saw that it was useless. Penny hung up the phone and told us Meg Woolitzer was on her way. “She’s bringing her camera.”
“No shots of the body,” the sheriff said. “She knows better than that.”
Snyder was growing restless. “Can I go now?”
“I’d like to ask you some questions first,” I told him. “What time did you arrive here?”
“Just after ten o’clock. I didn’t come earlier in case he was a late sleeper.”
“Mr. Cartwright was usually up before six,” George told us again. “That’s why I was so surprised when he didn’t appear for breakfast.”
“You heard nothing in the night?” I asked. “No sounds of a struggle?”
“Nothing.” He hesitated and then added, “Once, toward morning, I thought I heard the phone ring, but I may have been dreaming. It didn’t ring a second time.”
Sheriff Lens took me aside and said, “Doc, this Chabber guy has got to be involved. He was alone in the house with Cartwright when the killing took place.”
“What about the locked room?”
“He had three or four hours to figure out a gimmick before he called you and me.”
I sighed. “Don’t you see, Sheriff, that being alone in the house with Cartwright is enough to point to his innocence? Since the killing couldn’t have been suicide, it would have been to George’s advantage to suggest an intruder by leaving the front door ajar. Alternatively, he could have used those hours to dispose of the body, hiding or burying it. Creating the illusion of a locked room is the last thing he would have done.”
“This locked room is no illusion, Doc.”
“I know.”
The sheriff’s deputies and a photographer had arrived, along with the coroner. The birdbath weapon was being checked for fingerprints, though I was pretty certain they’d find none. Before long Meg Woolitzer arrived, accompanied by Seth Grey. That was a surprise, though I knew she and the school-bus driver were seeing each other. “What happened here?” he asked me.
“Somebody killed Aaron Cartwright,” I said, gesturing toward the library where the coroner was making it official.
“I was at Seth’s house when Penny phoned me,” Meg explained, not bothering to say how her assistant knew where to find her. “He gave me a ride over.”
“Your newspaper was on his desk, with my picture on the front page. The doors were locked and the windows barred.”
“Do you think the killer was taunting you, challenging you to solve another locked-room murder?”
“I don’t know. It’s a possibility. But we have to remember the murder weapon, that miniature birdbath, was in the room already. It was nothing the killer brought along. That implies the killing might have happened on the spur of the moment rather than with premeditation.”
“What time was he killed?”
“I’d guess about three or four hours before we found him. No later than seven o’clock.”
She glanced over at the body and then quickly away. “But he’s dressed. He’s not wearing nightclothes.”
“George says he was an early riser. There also might have been a phone call from someone. He could have been expecting a visitor.”
“But who? And why?”
“You were the one who chose this place for launching your scrap-metal drive. I hate to ask you this, Meg, but where were you around six this morning?”
She flushed a bit and answered, “I spent the night with Seth. I was at his house. I like to relax on Wednesday nights after the paper goes to press. We had a few drinks and I got sleepy. I guess Wednesday nights are my weekend.”
“Penny knew you were there? That’s where she phoned you.”
“Penny knows my habits.”
I glanced at Seth Grey, standing off to one side. He answered my unspoken question. “She was at my house all night. I can tell you she didn’t have anything to do with this business.”
“All right.” Penny Hamish had come up to join us and I left them. Sheriff Lens was in the front hall with Snyder. The salesman was anxious to be out of there, pleading that he had other calls to make.
The sheriff took me aside. “What do you think about this Snyder fellow, Doc? It’s quite a coincidence he turned up here just as Cartwright was being killed.”
“But what motive could he have to kill a good customer? Would he have used the miniature birdbath, the very object he came to retrieve, as a murder weapon?”
“I don’t know, Doc, but what other explanation is there? Do you think Cartwright heard a prowler and came down to look around?”
“I think he’d have sent George down to investigate a prowler.”
“Then where are we?”
“Let me think about it, Sheriff. There’s something here we’re not seeing.”
I went out to my car, maneuvering it around a lineup that now included Snyder’s truck, Sheriff Lens’s car, vehicles for his deputies and the coroner, and Seth Grey’s car. Aaron Cartwright had probably not had that many visitors at once in his lifetime.
Annabel came home early from the Ark when I told her what had happened. She could see that I was troubled, believing somehow that my photograph in the Advertiser had caused Cartwright’s death. “You can’t blame yourself, Sam. And you can’t blame Meg for running that picture. The idea that someone killed him in a locked room as a challenge to you is ridiculous.”
“Then why was the paper left there, unfolded to show my picture on the front page?”
She couldn’t answer, but told me, “Think it through, Sam. Put yourself in the killer’s position, inside his skin. That’s what I try to do sometimes with my sick animals.”
I smiled at her. “Does it help?”
“Once in a while it does.”
“All right. Taking all the facts as we know them, someone might have phoned Cartwright in the early morning. That someone could have been the killer. Cartwright let them into the house and library, perhaps bolting the door so George wouldn’t disturb them.”
“What time would this have been?”
“Somewhere around six, probably. No earlier, or he’d have turned on the library lights. But it’s full daylight by six this time of year. It couldn’t have been much later than that because of the dried blood and condition of the body.”
“This birdbath weapon was in the room, so the killing probably wasn’t premeditated. Someone called him, they met in the library, and the killer bashed his skull in.”