Free The Woman Who Fell From Grace by David Handler Page B

either, Sheriff.”
    He tipped his big trooper’s hat to me. “Good day, Mr. Hoag.”
    “See you later, pardner.”
    He stuck his chin out at me. “Don’t call me pardner.” Then he got in his car and drove away, his deputy on his tail.
    The man was right. Ferns death gave every appearance of being an accidental fall. Except to me. She’d told me Sterling Sloan was murdered. She’d told me she knew something about it. And now she was dead. That’s how it looked to me.
    I took the driveway around back to my guest quarters. Lulu was out cold in her easy chair, paddling her paws in the air, whimpering. Bad dream. I roused her. She woke with a start. Grudgingly, she followed me back to the old house. It was empty now. Everyone had gone back to the east wing.
    We went up the stairs. They were steep. Creaky, too. There was a short central hallway on the second floor. Two bedrooms were open for public view, both of them furnished with lovely old canopy beds, washstands, wardrobe cupboards. One was the master bedroom, the other the room that had been Vangie’s in the movie. There was a definite air of familiarity to it. The brocaded-silk bedcover upon which lay Vangie’s most trusted confidante — Miss Penelope, her porcelain doll. The mirrored dressing table where Vangie sat each night combing out her wild mane of red hair. The vast double-doored wardrobe from which she chose her most tempting outfits. There was also a definite air of weirdness. Because Vangie wasn’t a real character out of history. Vangie was fiction. And this was a movie set.
    The room next to Vangie’s was locked. So was another door across the hall. I stood there in the hallway, wondering what exactly Fern was doing up here in those seconds before she died. She was about to serve lunch next door. Why had she come up here?
    Lulu was sniffing the floor at the top of the stairs. There was a carved banister post on either side of the top step, painted white to go with the hallway decor. Lulu looked up at me when I approached. When she did, I noticed she had white particles stuck to her wet black nose. I knelt beside her and wiped them off.
    The particles were tiny flecks of white paint.
    There were more of them on the floor at the base of each banister post. I ran a finger along one of them. The wood was hard and smooth with several coats of glossy paint over it. Except about three inches from the floor, where a set of thin grooves had been made in the paint. All the way around. On both posts. Fern hadn’t been pushed. Nothing so crude as that. Someone had tied a trip wire across the top of the stairs after she’d gone up. She was easy prey — blind as a bat without her glasses. They’d lain in wait for her to go down — and down she went. Then they’d removed the wire and returned to the house. It could have been anyone in the family. Anyone could have slipped out for a minute while we were having our sherry. That’s all it would have taken. One of them had shut her up. Made sure she’d never tell what she knew about Sterling Sloan. What was it she’d seen? What had been covered up? And how could it possibly matter now, fifty years later?
    But it did matter. That much I knew for damned sure.
    Mercy and Charlotte were in the kitchen getting our belated lunch together.
    “I managed to drop a paper clip in my typewriter,” I said. “Need a piece of wire to get it out.”
    “You’ll have to ask Roy for it,” said Mercy as she took a tray of food into the dining room. “I have no idea where you’d —”
    “Bottom drawer there under the toaster, Hoagy,” broke in Charlotte. “With the tools.”
    There was a flashlight in there, a pair of pliers, a hammer, screwdrivers, twine. There was also a spool of wire and a pair of cutters. I cut myself a length of wire.
    “What’s in those closed rooms upstairs in the old house?” I asked Charlotte.
    She took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator. “They keep the vacuums and cleaning