Was it deceptive?

Hard to say. It didn’t fool me, but then how could it? I knew better. It could pass for a bundle of rags, certainly, but so could the mortal remains of poor Orris. Could it pass for a body?

Not if some passing animal pawed at it, like a mad laundress bent on separating whites and colors.

Not if anyone took a really close look.

On the other hand, what would happen if my little subterfuge was spotted? The logical assumption, it seemed to me, would be that I had done the faking. And why would I have done such a thing? Because I was a murderer, obviously, and because I had hotfooted it, and wanted to delay pursuit.

In which case they’d assume I was off the premises, which, for my purposes, was the next best thing to being dead.

No time to brood about it, though. No time to worry and wonder. I had things to do.

I got busy doing them.

I’d been on the verge of sleep earlier, lying next to Carolyn in Aunt Augusta’s Room, but once I was up and dressed I’d caught a second wind, and it carried me a long ways. I was still going strong when the eastern sky began to show the first signs that eternal night had not yet descended upon the planet. There would indeed be a dawn, and it looked as though I’d be around to see it.

I was perhaps fifty yards from the front door of Cuttleford House when I noticed that faint glow in the east. You might think it would have heartened me, but all it really did was make me aware of the lateness of the hour, which in turn served to remind me that I’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, that I was cold and wet and exhausted, and that if I didn’t get into a warm bed soon I might very well drop in my tracks.

I walked the rest of the way along the path to the front door, past the sugar-sabotaged snowblower, past the little red wagons. I used my picks on the lock and tickled it open, but the door wouldn’t budge. A close look showed why. Someone had slid the heavy bolt across.

It was hard to imagine why. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere, cut off utterly from the rest of the world and snowbound in the bargain. Cissy Eglantine’s fixation on the proverbial passing tramp notwithstanding, I had a hunch the nearest indigent wayfarer was hustling passersby in Boston Common, trying to raise busfare to Miami. So why bolt the door?

Habit, I guessed. It had been bolted until I let myself out earlier, and evidently someone had passed it during the night, noticed the unbolted state in which I’d left it, and shot the bolt home. Had I world enough and time I could have dealt with it, but it was simpler by far to walk around the house and find an unbolted door.

There was always the kitchen door, which may or may not have been bolted, but I didn’t get to find out. Before I reached it, in fact just after I’d passed the three lawn chairs with their grisly burden, I came to the door of a glassed-in back porch, the sort of room where people go to take the sun without having to endure fresh air. The door was all small panes of glass, and there’s not much point fastening elaborate hardware on a door like that, as anyone who wants to get in can just break one of the panes and reach in. So the lock was about what you’d expect. A clever woman could have opened it with a bobby pin. I used my picks. There was a latch as well, one of those hook-and-eye arrangements. All you have to do to defeat them is slip a wallet-size plastic calendar between the door and the frame and give a flick upward, lifting the hook from the eye, and that is precisely what I did.

I locked up after myself, slipping the hook back into the eye, and inclined my head respectfully when I caught sight of the three lawn chairs, each bearing a late member of our little company. Then, without further ado, I quit the little sunroom and began working my way through the maze of rooms.

The house was not entirely silent. There was the odd creaking noise to be heard, and the occasional footfall. With that many people under one roof, it was unlikely that there was ever a moment when not a creature was stirring. If that created the possibility that I might run into somebody on my way back to Mr. Rathburn’s room, it also meant I could put a foot wrong and step on a creaking board myself without raising suspicion. It didn’t matter greatly if people heard me moving about, just so nobody had a clear view of me.

So I kept to the shadows and scouted out each room before I entered it. The staircase and the upstairs hallway were dangerous areas, open and exposed, and I intended to spend no more time traversing them than I absolutely had to.

I was two-thirds of the way up the stairs when it hit me. Three lawn chairs?

I kept going.

I’d left Rathburn’s door unlocked in the interest of saving time going and coming, and for a change no one had happened along to alter the status quo. I let myself in, closed the door, and concentrated on picking the lock shut, which is essentially the same process as unlocking it, though understandably less exciting. It gave me something to think about, which kept me from having to consider the implications of the third lawn chair. But it didn’t take very long, and it took no time at all to work the little sliding bolt, and there I was, tucked safely away in Rathburn’s room, with plenty of time to wonder what that third lawn chair was doing there and just whose mortal remains might be weighing it down.

How, I wondered, could I have failed to notice the three chairs? Well, I told myself, I’d had a long day and a busy night, and it was fair to say I was exhausted. Nor was it entirely accurate to say I’d failed to notice the chairs. Obviously I’d noticed them, or I wouldn’t be agonizing over them now. What I’d done was fail to register the fact that there was one more corpse-laden chair than there ought to have been.

What did it mean?

Maybe it didn’t mean anything at all. Maybe there’d always been three chairs there, two of them pressed into service to hold the bodies of Rathburn and the cook, and one holding something completely uninteresting. Lawn and garden supplies, say. Perhaps all three chairs had been so encumbered originally. Then the clutter on two of the chairs had been transferred to the third, and the bodies shifted, and all three draped with sheets.

Possible, I decided, but not probable. It was far more likely that the third chair, like its fellows, had a corpse on it.

But whose?

The answer would have to wait. For all I knew it could be just about anybody. The only person I could rule out with any real certainty was Bernie Rhodenbarr. Last I saw of him, poor devil, he was at the bottom of the gully.

What I needed was an hour of sleep.

Well, no. What I needed was more like eight hours, but that was out of the question. Failing that, an hour or so would give me a chance of functioning with some semblance of efficiency. It wouldn’t set me up so that I’d be operating at the top of my game, but that was all right. After all, I wasn’t planning to drive or operate machinery. I just wanted to solve a few murders and go home.

Rathburn’s effects didn’t seem to include a travel alarm clock, and Cuttleford House wasn’t the sort of establishment where you could ring the desk and leave a wake-up call. I thought maybe I could just lie down with my eyes closed and rest rather than sleep, but I saw right away that wasn’t going to work.

So I just gave up and let go. I’m usually a fairly light sleeper, and I figured I’d wake up when Carolyn raised the alarm. If not, well, I’d hear them banging on the door. The bolt would keep them on the outside, and they wouldn’t figure it was bolted, they’d figure their key wasn’t working, and when that happened…

I don’t know what I thought would happen after that. Because by the time I’d got that far in my thoughts I was asleep.

I slept for an hour and a half, and nothing in particular woke me. There were sounds to be heard-people walking around, stairs creaking, old plumbing making the sounds old plumbing makes-but none of them sufficiently intrusive to wake a person up. But they say everybody has a personal inner alarm clock, and evidently mine was working.