Page 66 of Killer on the First Page
They pushed more until the gap was big enough for Holly to squeeze through. She entered, weapon drawn.
A pause, and then: “All clear.” Her voice sounded grim.
“Anyone else in there?” Ned shouted.
“Just him.”
From the other side, Holly pushed the door back into place. This was followed by the scraping sound of a deadbolt being pulled back. A moment later, the entire door fell inward, landing with a sharp thud as Holly stepped to one side. It revealed a terrible sight: in the thick light inside the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, Fairfax Hughes DePoy III, celebrated author of historical romantic mysteries, loved by many, envied by others, was hanging from an overhead beam. His face was swollen and distorted, eyes gaping in horror, tongue distended, body slack above an overturned chair.
They entered in silence. Stood staring at the tableau before them.
“Well, that solves the Case of the Missing Rope,” said Holly. The rough cord could only have come from Owen’s.
“Better get an axe, cut him down,” said Ned, his voice hoarse.
Officer Holly went to fetch one from her patrol car, sidestepping the loose metal and debris scattered across the wooden floor. The grandfather clock had toppled and lay shattered on the floor, its mechanical parts radiating outward. Other than the chair Fairfax had kicked aside when he hanged himself, everything else seemed to be in place.
“Clock fell over,” said Ned. “It musta been pushed. Darned heavy; can’t see how it would ‘accidentally’ fall. And the pieces seem to have been, well, kicked away from it, across the floor. How else wouldthese metal parts—these rods and weights, the various cogs and gears, that pendulum over there—have been flung so far? You’d think they would’ve stayed mostly in place.”
“The rope is shiny,” Miranda noted.
Fairfax’s body was turning slowly on a creak. And the stretch of rope over the beam was indeed inky wet.
“And that will explain the Case of the Missing Grease,” Ned said, with a nod to the tub of the stuff sitting next to the fallen chair. “Though I don’t imagine Owen will want either one returned.”
The other end of the rope was looped around the cast-iron leg of the heavy stove. Why lubricate the middle of the rope? It had a coarse, hemp-like texture, but surely grease wasn’t needed to toss a rope over a beam and pull it across?
Here’s what they knew: Windows with thick glass and iron bars. A single door, bolted from the inside. A stairwell to the second floor that had been sealed off and walled in. No trapdoor below, either. Very few furnishings, and nowhere for someone to hide. Fairfax DePoy had been alone inside a locked room. Clearly a suicide.
And yet... it didn’t add up.
Officer Holly came back with a small hatchet. It would have been unfair to ask Andrew to support a dead body as it dropped, so he was given the task of cutting the rope while Ned and Holly held onto the legs, bracing themselves for the moment Fairfax would fall free.
“Wait!” Miranda cried before they could begin.
Something was wrong.
It was the shoes! And the space below them. Hanging in midair like that, the lifts Fairfax was wearing were evident—as was the height between Fairfax’s feet and the floor.
Miranda turned the chair back upright, slid it under Fairfax’s dangling feet. The two didn’t touch.
“How do you suppose he would have managed that?” she asked.
Ned, who had been holding one of Fairfax’s legs, let go. Looked at the gap between chair and shoe. “Tell me this isn’t happening.” But it was. Another impossible crime had been committed in Happy Rock.
* * *
IT WAS ALMOSTtwo in the morning by the time they laid poor Fairfax on the floor of the lighthouse. Ned called Doc Meadows, who had only just finished transporting Kane’s body to the morgue, to tell him “We got another one.”
As they waited for Doc to arrive, Miranda and Andrew stood outside the lighthouse, looking across the water to the other side of the bay. A single point at the far end marked their home.
“Bea left a light on for us,” Andrew said.
Although part of a saltwater inlet, protected as it was from the full brunt of the Pacific by a network of wooded islands and the arm of this peninsula, Tillamook Bay always felt more like a lake to Miranda, with waves lapping in on cat tongues of water and dark forests encircling it. Happy Rock’s Duchess Hotel and the Opera House lay at the deepest curve of the bay, in the innermost reaches of the inner harbor.
“I’ll miss this,” said Miranda, feeling wistful.
Andrew chose to say nothing (wisely).
