Everyone looked up. «He hanged himself here? Where?» Maggie asked. «There aren't any open beams or anything.»
«Oh?» Sir Rudy rubbed at his chin. «Probably some chandelier that's long gone. Couldn't have been jolly, being stuck up here. Not even a fireplace. Just some holes somewhere in the floor, some pipes that lead off one of the main chimneys, or so I was told. Pretty modern for the seventeen hundreds. Some little trick conjured up by the fellow who added this wing. He's the one who did most of the prettying up around the place. But nothing I'd like, as the heat couldn't have been that strong, although I imagine the smoke made up for that. Well, I believe I'll push off to the kitchens and find some pots to catch that rainwater in, or it'll be down to the next floor, putting paid to the plaster.»
Maggie waved weakly as Sir Rudy left the room, followed by Evan Pottinger, who said he'd had enough of attics, then turned on Alex. «Sir Rudy sure does like the sound of his own voice, doesn't he? But did you hear that? Two hanged men in the same room, even centuries apart? Well, Alex, I'm waiting. Tell me that's a coincidence.»
«Coincidence? Possibly. Or inspiration,» Alex said, bending over to right an overturned chair. «Would you call this a sign of a struggle?»
«Maybe. Or a messy attic.» Maggie held her own lantern high and turned in a circle. «This is pretty big for an attic room, although this whole place is fairly immense. And cold. And damp. No central heat back in those days. No fireplace in here. Uncle Willis must have been a very bad boy. I wonder what he did. Oh, look, wallpaper. What there is left of it.» She touched the wall. «I think it might have been red, once upon a time.»
«And from that you conclude?» Alex asked, poking about in one of the corners of the room.
«Not a lot, sorry. Just that, maybe, once upon a time, this room wasn't all that bad. Wallpaper. Maybe a chandelier. But still the attic. And did you notice the size of the lock on that door? Maybe Uncle Willis was off his trolley, and they stashed him up here. People used to do that with mentally ill relatives because the madhouses were pretty awful. Then there's Jane Eyre , and Mr. Rochester's wife— that was later, and fiction, but still? Do you think we should go read up on Uncle Willis?»
Alex straightened, began looking around the entire room again. «Not unless you and the Troy Toy wish to join forces on the theory Uncle Willis murdered Undercuffler.»
Maggie stuck her tongue out at him. «Thanks, but no thanks. I guess I was just curious. Doesn't the whole coincidence thing make you curious?»
Alex paused in his inspection of the large chest Evan had looked at earlier and turned to her. «Yes, yes, I thought I'd noticed that when Pottinger moved the dust sheet. Hmmm.»
«Noticed what? And you didn't answer my question.»
«Oh, very well. Indeed, people are curious about ghosts, black-sheep relatives, all that sort of thing, aren't they? And with Sir Rudy so proud of and eager to share his knowledge about his newly acquired heritage. And all those histories he talks about. Maggie? How long has everyone else been here?»
«I don't know. A couple of days? Maybe five? And it's been raining for, like, three or four of them. Definitely long enough to get bored enough to maybe pick up one of those histories, read about Uncle Willis. Okay, I give up. Where is this going?»
«Nowhere that I can think of at the moment, I'm afraid. In fact, all it does is enlarge the number of suspects. If only Sir Rudy and, possibly, his nephew knew about Uncle Willis, this room, the method of the man's demise. But we've just proven that it's possible everyone knew.»
«Gee, thanks. That helped. What are you looking for? What did you see?»
Alex dropped the dust sheet back over the chest, and wiped his hands together. «Dusty, dusty. Of course, we've all been tramping about in here, so there's no helpful trail of footprints to follow.»
«Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you see?»
He lowered the lantern to the floor. «This.»
Maggie stepped closer, peered down at the floor. There were drag marks in front of the legs of the chest, for only an inch or two, in the dust. «Somebody tried to move this chest?»
«And gave it up as a bad job, yes. Lovely old piece, and quite heavy, I imagine. Would you care to give it a go?»
«Not in this lifetime. Besides, there's an easier way.» Maggie dropped to her knees, pushed her hair behind her ears, and leaned forward until her cheek touched the floor, then peered under the chest. «Move the lanterns a little closer… yeah, good. I can't see… wait a minute, I may see something.»
Still with her cheek against the floor—and convinced Saint Just was having himself a high old time watching as her backside stuck up in the air—she held out her arm, snapped her fingers. «Get me something I can slide under here. Where's your cane?»
«Interesting question. But we'll leave that for the moment, even as I tell you that the cane is downstairs, in the main saloon. How about this?»
Maggie felt something against her palm and closed her hand over it. «What's this? What did you give me?»
«I can't be sure, but it could be the handle of what was once a bedwarmer. Is that important to the exercise?»
«I'm cold, I'm getting filthy down here, and you're being sarcastic. Typical,» Maggie said as she maneuvered the handle under the chest. «I'm close to whatever it is now. I'm going to sweep it to the left, okay? Here goes!»
By the time she'd gotten to her feet, brushing herself down in case a pregnant spider had decided to nest in her hair, Alex was standing at his ease, Joanne Pertuccelli's stopwatch swinging from the thin, black lanyard he gingerly held between two fingers.
«Bingo! Our murder weapon,» Maggie said, grinning. «And shame on me for having so much fun, but—damn, we're good!»
«We are that, as far as this goes, yes,» Alex agreed. «Shall I recap? Undercuffler was murdered here, Joanne Pertuccelli's stopwatch the murder weapon, which was probably flung aside when the deed was done, only to be searched for, in vain, by our killer, and therefore left here for us to discover. Our murderer, perhaps thinking—correctly—that the now missing stopwatch would easily be seen as the murder weapon once Undercuffler's body was found, tippytoed back to the attics some hours later, searched once more for the stopwatch, once more fruitlessly, then— remembering the story of the late, unlamented, and possibly not-yet-gone-from-the-premises Uncle Willis—improvised by hanging Undercuffler outside from the scaffold, thus hopefully covering the tracks of the true mode and cause of death. How am I doing so far?»
«Well, the sentences were a little long—Bernie would have broken them up on line edit—but, basically, that's really good. Really, really good. Now tell me how Sam and the murderer got here, leaving no footprints in the dust from the steps all the way to here.»
Alex sighed as he tucked the stopwatch into his pocket. «Always the nitpicker. And no footprints in the dust beyond this room, in case you belatedly might have considered the possibility of yet another staircase closer to the center wing of the mansion. Shall we go join the others and think about that particular question in the warmth and light, preferably over a glass of wine?»
«That's got my vote,» Maggie said, heading for the door.
«Oh,» she said, turning to face him for a moment, «a hidden passageway! Alex—there's a hidden passageway somewhere in this room. Why didn't you think of that one?»
«I did, my dear, but a cursory search showed nothing of interest. I'm also having trouble believing Undercuffler would have casually stumbled onto a secret passageway as he wandered about the manor, hunting up shooting locations, as I believe they're called. Sir Rudy certainly doesn't know about any secret passage. If he did, dear man, the whole world would know by now. He might have given tours. As I said, this will take more thought.»