Gone Gull by Donna Andrews

Author:Donna Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Chapter 17

“And you don’t know what woke you?”

Luckily by the time Chief Heedles had arrived I’d recovered from the shock of finding Victor’s body—at least, sufficiently recovered that I’d been able to give her the condensed version of my middle-of-the night adventures while escorting her to the door of the studio wing. Then I’d dragged a chair in from the great room and sat just inside the door to make sure no one followed her except Horace and Dad and Officer Keech and eventually the other three Riverton police officers. Michael texted me that he had joined Eric and the boys in the caravan, and that they were fast asleep. I felt better, knowing he was with them, and managed—after a fashion—to shove my anxiety over them aside and focus on what the chief was doing.

And right now she was asking for details I wasn’t sure I could provide. Particularly not when I knew that I had only to turn my head to see poor Victor’s body, still awaiting the medical examiner. The proximity didn’t help my focus.

“Meg?” the chief said.

“What woke me? No idea. I thought I heard a noise. Now I figure maybe it was the pot falling on Victor. At the time I had no idea.”

Over my left shoulder I could tell that Horace and Officer Keech were clearly enjoying themselves—not in any inappropriately gleeful manner, of course, but you could see they were getting a lot of professional satisfaction out of processing what I gathered was an interesting crime scene. For the last quarter of an hour they’d been taking turns sketching in Lesley Keech’s notebook, trying to figure out precisely how the killer had rigged the pot so it would fall on whomever entered the door. I wasn’t sure knowing the precise mechanical details of how the booby trap worked would bring us any closer to finding who’d done it, but I didn’t want to rain on their parade. From the chief’s carefully patient expression when she checked on their progress, I suspect she felt the same way.

“Do you think whoever killed Prine also killed Victor?” I asked.

“Too early to tell yet. Did any of the acts of vandalism involve similar mechanical contraptions?”

“Not that I could see,” I said. “They all seemed distinctly low-tech. Using materials at hand—slugs from the yard, soy sauce from the dining hall. Some of them seemed pretty spur-of-the-moment—opening windows, twisting the dial on a kiln. Not like this. Someone had to do at least a little planning to pull this off, right? Then again, if Horace and Officer Keech hadn’t been here, would we really have figured out there was a booby trap? I mean, they’re experts, and they’re still trying to figure out how it worked. It’s possible we might have assumed Victor’s death was a terrible accident, and that those little bits of wood and string were just rubbish that happened to be lying around.”

“You get a lot of fifty-pound pots falling from the ceilings around here?” the chief asked.

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