Behind me, Susan Raspin screamed.
Sheriff Lens arrived with two deputies within fifteen minutes. “What is it, Doc?” he asked grimly.
“I’ve checked both doors and all the windows. They’re all locked from the inside. I wanted you here to do the break-in. I could see from the angle of her neck that she’s dead.”
“Another suicide in this cabin?”
“That’s what we’re meant to think. But how did she get in?”
The sheriff smashed the glass in the kitchen door and pulled open the bolt so I could unlock the door with my key. Annabel was out of the car now, standing by my side, but I wouldn’t allow her into the house. Once inside, I turned on the lights and confirmed that Mrs. Spring was dead. “Probably more than an hour ago,” I guessed. I gave the sheriff a timetable of when we’d left for dinner and returned, then told him about the dead woman’s visit that afternoon. Her teacup still sat in the sink.
“Nobody here,” one of the deputies reported, finishing his search of the cottage. He even glanced in the tiny crawlspace behind the kitchen sink, removing a little stepladder I stored there.
Sheriff Lens looked over the scene, examining a footstool placed some three inches below her dangling feet. “Get some pictures of this before we cut her down. And fingerprints of the doorknobs and bolts, if I didn’t smudge them too badly.” He turned to me. “What do you think, Doc?”
“It’s a poor attempt to make it look like suicide. The rope was one I had in the kitchen. She’s too short to have stood on that stool and put the noose around her neck. Besides which, she assured me just this afternoon that she wasn’t going to kill herself like last year’s widow in this cottage.”
“But how did she get in with the doors and windows locked, and if it’s murder how did her killer get out?”
“I assume there are no tunnels in the basement,” I replied.
“Heck, Doc, these cottages don’t even have basements!”
I went over the locks carefully. They were the latest Yale models, each with individual keys, and Sheriff Lens assured me there was no chance of someone else’s key opening my doors. Likewise, a careful inspection of all the windows showed no cracks or defective locks. I turned my attention briefly to the fireplace, but the flue was barely large enough for a squirrel. I know of trickery involving thread or fishing lines used to pull bolts shut from outside the room, but there was no space around the tight-fitting doors to allow such a stunt. I even considered the remote possibility that the hanging body itself might have been used to pull a string and slide a bolt closed, but there was no string in evidence and those door bolts didn’t slide easily.
“I’m stumped,” I admitted.
“Come on, Doc,” the sheriff chided me. “You’ve solved cases a lot tougher than this one.”
“Maybe it'll look better by daylight.”
I watched while Grace Spring’s body was cut down and removed for the autopsy. Only after the sheriff and his men had departed did I call next-door and allow Annabel to return from her safe haven at the Raspins’ cottage. “Is it all right to stay here tonight?” I asked. “Or would you rather go back home?”
“I’ll be fine here.”
“When I phoned the sheriff to tell him about Grace’s body, Susan Raspin screamed. She seemed to take the news very hard.”
Annabel nodded. “She was still pretty shook up. Apparently she was close to Grace Spring. She said someone had been sending Grace threatening letters, almost like blackmail letters.”
“Interesting.” I thought about that bit of information. “But as the mystery writer Raymond Chandler once noted, blackmailers don’t shoot. They have nothing to gain from killing off a source of income.”
“What could a woman like Mrs. Spring have done that would cause her to be blackmailed?”
“Almost anything, I suppose. She told me her husband died in prison after a drunk-driving accident.”
I checked all the doors and windows again, making certain they were locked and bolted before we went to bed. But sleeping wasn’t easy. I kept thinking of Annabel at my side, only a week or so away from giving birth. Perhaps suicide cottage wasn’t the best place for either of us.
I was up before eight, wandering around the little cottage, going through the kitchen to use the bathroom, and Annabel joined me a short time later. As I fixed breakfast for us, she remarked, “Maybe we should have slept at home. All I could think of was that woman hanging there, even though you wouldn’t let me see her. I guess this really is the suicide cottage.”
“That wasn’t suicide. Someone killed her.”
“Even with all the doors and windows locked?”
“She got in here somehow, and if she could get in, the killer could get out.”
Sheriff Lens arrived a bit after nine o’clock, looking as if he’d been up most of the night. “We have a preliminary autopsy report. Doc’s still working on it, but there are finger marks on her throat. She was strangled before she was hanged.”
“How terrible!” Annabel said with a compassionate tremor in her voice. “But why pick this cottage? Just because of its reputation for suicides?”
“Apparently.” I told the sheriff, “Susan Raspin in the next cottage thinks Grace was being blackmailed.”
“Her husband was convicted of drunk driving a few years back, but some folks thought he took the blame for her. Then he died in prison.”
“She mentioned her husband when she was here yesterday, and apparently she told Susan Raspin she’d been threatened.”
“I’ll dig out the records and look into it. Are you two staying around here, Doc?”
“For now.”
He left us then and I saw Judge Hastings coming over from his place. “Did he have any new information, Sam?”
“Not much. She was strangled before the killer hanged her, so it certainly wasn’t suicide.”
We sat on the porch for a bit discussing it while Annabel remained inside. “If there’s a killer on the prowl, none of us are safe,” he told me.
“Do you have any idea why someone might have been blackmailing Grace Spring? Maybe something about her husband’s accident?”
He thought about it, rubbing his lean jaw. “I heard that case in my courtroom. There was a suspicion she’d been driving, but he took the blame and we had to accept that. A girl was killed and I had to give him prison time. We discovered later he knew he was dying of cancer and maybe that’s why he was willing to take the blame.”
A mailman came by carrying a leather sack. “Does your mail get delivered right to the cottages?” he asked us.
The judge shook his head. “There’s a line of boxes across the road. You must be new to this route. Where’s Cally Forbes?”
“He called in sick this morning. Long as I’m here I might as well give you the mail.”
Judge Hastings accepted a couple of letters but the only thing for Annabel and me was a doctor’s bill that I’d told Lincoln Jones to send us. “I’d better be getting back to Maud,” the judge decided. “She’s having a bad day.”
“Anything I can help out with?”
“No, no. It’s just—”
“Change of life?”
“Yes. Some women like Maud really suffer through it.”
“There’s a new medication that might help. Ask her to make an appointment with April at my office. I’d be happy to come in and examine her any time she wants.”
“Thank you, Sam.”
After he’d left I went back inside. Annabel was resting in one of the easy chairs when the phone rang. The cord was twisted awkwardly and it took me a moment to unwind it. Sheriff Lens was on the other end. “I don’t have much on Grace Spring, Doc. I tried to track the parents of the girl who was killed in that accident but they live in Chicago. They were just here visiting the wife’s brother when it happened.”