Free The Late Clara Beame by Taylor Caldwell

never knew you until a short time ago.”
    “I don’t know anything about you,” Henry told him, “except what I’ve gotten from you. And a few others.”
    “I refuse to defend myself against ridiculous suspicions.” John’s face was flushed. “Has it ever occurred to you that there may be someone else in this house besides us, somebody hidden?”
    The fire quieted on the hearth, then suddenly leaped high.
    “Someone in this house?” Henry repeated. “That’s impossible.”
    “How many rooms are there?” John asked. “Eight bedrooms on the second floor, and one room and the attic on the third.” Henry paused. “That’s funny. I thought I heard someone on the third floor, this morning, when I got up. But I assumed it was Mrs. Daley or Edith, though they don’t sleep on the third floor. Let’s go!”
    The three men hurried from the room.
    When they encountered Mrs. Daley on the second floor, her arms full of linen, Henry asked her: “Were you up in the attic this morning? I thought I heard footsteps.”
    She was alarmed. “Why, no. Neither was Edith. No one goes up there, except in the spring and fall. Do you think there’s a burglar?”
    Henry patted her arm. “We’re just going to look around. Keep an eye on Mrs. Frazier until we come down, will you?”
    They climbed the steep attic stairs in almost total darkness and Henry pushed open the big trapdoor. It moved easily and the dusty attic, filled with shadowy shapes, lay before them. At the far end of the room there was a closed door. It opened into a bedroom, unmade, neat, and bitterly cold. This was where Evelyn often slept, instead of in his own room over the garage, if the house was filled with guests.
    The window in the room had been opened. Snow was melting on the floor. John Carr went to the window and peered out. “Look!” he shouted to the other men. Just below the window, some seven or eight feet, was the roof of the room over the attached garage. There were footprints in the snow, which led to the far side of the roof.
    “So that’s how it was,” Henry said. “You could go ten feet from the house and be lost. Look, the prints are already filling in. In a few minutes they’ll be gone.” The wind lifted the snow, and even as they watched, the edges of the holes blurred and smoothed.
    “Look here.” John was holding something in his hand, and the small object gleamed faintly in the half-light. It was the jacket of a bullet. “A forty-five, I think. On the floor.”
    “But why here?” David asked him. “This window doesn’t face the woodshed.” He squinted out into the storm. “But look. If you go along that roof, where the prints are, you can turn and face the woodshed! But who in hell — ?”
    “That’s always the question,” John Carr commented. “Who? Why? Something in your dark past, perhaps? Examine the victim and you’ll get your best clues about a murderer or would-be murderer. Let’s go down where it’s warm, before we all get pneumonia. And let’s interrogate, as the mystery novels call it.”
    They went downstairs, shuddering in the cold, and grouped themselves around the fire.
    Alice listened earnestly to their description of the attic bedroom, then interrupted. “But the shot couldn’t have been fired from the roof of the garage. The hall window on the second floor had been opened, facing the woodshed, remember?”
    “Trust a woman to ruin a perfectly good solution,” David said gloomily. Then added: “Just a moment,” and left the room.
    “She’s right, you know,” John said. “Intruder or not, he came down to the second floor and fired from the hall window. Still, I found the shell in the attic. But we can’t have two separate murderers. That would wreck the whole picture. I like tidy explanations. The shot was fired either from the hall window or the roof of the garage. Take your choice. If from the hall window, what was our boy doing in the attic? Have we got an unseen witness, after all?”