Page 38 of Killer on the First Page
“We appear to have an impossible crime on our hands,” said Ned.
Chapter Ten
Tough Guys Don’t Last
“Ionly see three points of entry,” said Ned. “This door over here, that window over there, and the furnace grate in the floor back here, behind the door. Hang on a sec. Edgar, what’s that?”
Ned had noticed a circular piece of tin about the size of a saucer that had been attached to the wall at roughly eye level, next to the glass cabinet, and held in place by finishing nails. The tin had a faded image of a fish painted on it, a crimson carp, perhaps?
“I took it from an old cookie tin. Scarlet Sturgeon was the brand, I think. It covers a hole in the wall where a stovepipe used to be,” said Edgar.
“I see. No secret passages? Behind the cabinet or the bookshelves?” Ned wasn’t joking.
Edgar shook his head, still unnerved by the presence of the dead man sprawled on the chair in the middle of the room. “When I renovated this room, I stripped it down to the studs. The exterior is solid brick, but the interior is hardwood and plaster—no cavity walls with gaps between the bricks, no hidden chambers lurking within. Just good old solid eighteenth-century craftsmanship.”
Era-appropriate paisley wallpaper and a pressed tin ceiling hadbeen added to preserve the room’s Victorian feel, but those were embellishments added later.
“It was originally the servants’ dining hall. I turned it into a reading room.”
“Didn’t think to paper over that hole?” Ned asked, still looking at the tin circle pinned on the wall.
“I was going to install a traditional potbellied stove to warm the room with firewood rather than the radiator. But in the end, it was too expensive.”
“The arrow could also have come through that hole in the wall. It’s a straight line from that to the chair Kane died in, nothing in between.” Ned fiddled with the tin covering, trying to see if it would move. “Could someone have replaced the tinaftershooting an arrow through the hole, and then pulled the nails in from the other side?” he wondered.
Ned tried each finishing nail in turn, but none jiggled; none were loose.
“The hole is only on this side,” said Edgar. “When I redid the wall on the other side, I papered it over. I’d given up on the idea of adding a wood-burning stove.”
“Not a point of entry, then,” said Ned. “How about the vent?” He bent down with a creak of the knee to examine the heavy iron grate embedded in the floor next to the door. “Heat vent?” he asked.
“Ventilation,” said Edgar. “The furnace heats the water in the radiators, pumps it out, and then separately draws air in through these ducts.”
“Right,” said Ned, as though he should have known better. “Not forced air. Radiators.”
The slab of iron on the floor was an ornate arrangement of curlicues and geometric patterns. Ned worked his fingers into the gaps,tried to lift, but couldn’t. He looked closer. “What the heck? The edges have been painted over. That your handiwork work, Edgar?”
Sheepishly, “Yeah.”
“Next time, maybe hire Tanvir,” Miranda said to a loud silence from Edgar.
Upstairs, they could hear the clatter of his dog pacing back and forth. “My dog is getting agitated,” said Edgar. “Can we wrap this up?”
“Can’t rush these things, Edgar. Have to figure this out. The door was locked when Kane was killed. No sign of a bow. The transom is closed, the hole in the wall is papered over on the other side, and the grate is too heavy to move, and even if it could be, it’s been sealed shut by Edgar’s finesse with a paintbrush—no offense.”
“None taken,” said Edgar, though his eyes said otherwise.
“Kane was in this room, alone, with no way for anyone to enter or escape. So who fired that arrow?”
Even more baffling was the position of the body, with the book splayed open on his chest—the pages facing out—and skewered into his heart. It looked like a macabre joke, a dark comment on authorial vanity. Pinned by his own words.
Ned scratched the back of his neck, looked to Doc for help. “What do you figure, maybe he fell backwards into the chair? He’s slumped in the chair facing the cabinet now, but I don’t see how the arrow could’ve been fired frominsidethe cabinet. His body must have hit the chair and then slowly turned—swiveled, in fact.”
“That part makes sense,” said Doc.
“So,” said Ned, trying to visualize it. “Kane is here at the door. He starts to unlock it. Stops. Turns around, holding up a copy of his book for some reason. He couldn’t have been standing in front of the door when he was hit, though. If he was, he wouldn’t have fallen into the chair, he would have fallen against the door. The only placeit could have come from is the transom above the window. Except the transom is latched down. And even if the killer could figure a way aroundthat, he still had to slip away without leaving any footprints in the flower bed outside the window. Even with those gaps, as a general hypothesis, does that work for you, Doc? An arrow from the transom?”
“Not so sure about that, Ned,” Doc Meadows said. He was considering the angles involved. “You’d have to figure an arrow that was shot from the transom would’ve had to have been pointed downward at the target. But the arrow that’s buried in this fella’s chest seems to have gone in at a perfectly straight angle. No downward trajectory, so to speak. Hey, Edgar, you’re about my height.” Doc called him over.
