“I’m going to hold the master bedroom a few more hours,” the chief said. “But there’s no reason not to release the rest of the house. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions, and when I’m done, I can let you get back to your work.”

“That would be fine,” Mother said.

“Here, take my chair.” I stood up and stepped aside. “Chief, may I do a tour of inspection?”

“Just stay out of the master suite till I give the word,” he said. “I’ll be interviewing all the designers this morning. Try to avoid discussing the case with any of them until after I’ve had my chance. Sammy!”

The deputy raced into the study.

“Start calling the designers.” The chief held out his copy of my contact list. “Start with Mr. Goodwin.”

“Right, chief!” Sammy dashed out again.

Randall, Dad, and I followed, and the chief closed the French doors that separated the study from the foyer.

“Meg, if you’re sure you’re all right…” Dad began.

“Nothing wrong with me that a real night’s sleep won’t fix,” I said.

“Then I’m going to head down to the hospital,” he said. “I don’t want to miss the autopsy.”

He dashed out.

“I’ve already got a punch list of things we need to fix,” Randall said. “Most of them in the master bedroom, so I’ll have to wait till Horace finishes his forensic work. In here, nothing much. Couple broken crystals in the chandelier, and a bullet hole over there.”

He point to one wall.

“That’s a bullet hole?” I exclaimed. The hole was more fist- than bullet-sized.

“Okay, the hole where Horace dug out the bullet. Looked to me like a .22, which is also what I bet they’ll be taking out of Clay. I saw the wound. Luckily the bullet that hit the chandelier just ricocheted and landed down the hall. Anyway, we can patch the hole pretty quick, though I’m afraid Miss Ivy will need to redo that part of her mural.”

Poor Ivy. She had already been worrying about how to finish all the walls. And she was making it harder for herself by having pretty much nothing but wall. At the moment, the only pieces of furniture in any of her spaces were a small nondescript cabinet in the back of the foyer and a large bronze Art Nouveau umbrella stand beside the front door. I had a feeling she was only using the cabinet to store her paints in and would whisk it away before the house opened. The umbrella stand was probably staying, because she clearly enjoyed seeing her painting of “The Little Match Girl” peeping out from behind it. Maybe I should suggest altering her design to cover the unpainted stretches with a big piece of furniture or a tapestry.

No, better not. I’d figured out that the designers rarely appreciated what I thought were brilliant practical suggestions.

“We’ve pretty much cleaned up what the water leak did to the den,” Randall said. We both glanced over at the French doors. Mother was gesticulating dramatically. I suspected she was giving the chief chapter and verse of Clay’s sins.

I walked through all the rooms, starting with the upstairs, with Randall trailing me. We found a few small things to add to his list, but none of them appeared to be the result of the intruder. No sign that the intruder had damaged anything on his flight path through the Princess Room, the back bathroom, the quilt room, or the garage. No sign that he’d been in the Goth room, the kitchen, the dining room, or the great room.

“Tree looks nice in that new position,” Randall said when we’d finished our detailed inspection. “I just hope your mother doesn’t up and decide to move it again.”

“If she does, I’ll talk her out of it,” I said. “It looks glorious there. You’d hardly know the dining room existed.”

“Yeah, I gathered that was the whole point,” Randall said with a snicker. “But your mother made me cut a couple feet off the bottom to make sure folks could still see Ivy’s ‘Nightingale’ mural.”

The mural that at the moment was still only a few pencil marks on the wall of the upper hall, marks so faint that from down here it still looked like a blank wall. I felt a twinge of increasingly familiar stomach-churning anxiety. Would Ivy still have time to finish all the paintings she’d planned? And if she didn’t, would it be playing favorites to hint that maybe she should give priority to the one Mother had planned to showcase in her room?

Just then the front door opened.

“Meg, darlin’!” Eustace sailed in with a travel coffee cup in one hand and a large brown grocery bag in the other. He bent over to land an air kiss near my cheek. “I hear it was like the shootout at the O.K. Corral in here last night.”

“I was only here for two of the gunshots,” I said.

“I’m going to round up my workmen,” Randall said, and strode off, pulling out his cell phone.

“Only two! Good Lord!” Eustace exclaimed. He was heading through Mother’s room to his own domain, the breakfast room and kitchen. “But I heard someone knocked off Clay, and you found him. I want to hear every detail! Spill!”

“Not till after you’ve talked to the chief,” I said.

“You sure he wants to talk to me?” Eustace asked.

“He wants to talk to everyone.” I followed him into the breakfast room and sat down at the round glass-topped table while he continued into the kitchen.

“Well, I won’t grill you till after the chief has grilled me.” He had opened the refrigerator door and was putting things away: diet sodas, several brown paper-wrapped deli packages, and bottles of water. “But after that, I expect all the dirt.”

“Every bit,” I said. I was staring at something that seemed out of place in the otherwise impeccable breakfast nook. A dirty glass. No, a half-full glass, and unless my sense of smell was playing tricks on me, it was half-full of cheap scotch.

I found myself remembering a night shortly after we’d started working on the house, when Randall had sent over beer, sodas, and pizza for everyone. I’d held out a can of soda and a bottle of beer for Eustace to choose from.

“I’ll take the diet soda, darlin’,” he’d said.

“I’m not a big beer drinker myself,” I’d replied.

“Dear heart, I’m a dry drunk,” he’d said. “Ten years sober come New Year’s Day. If you ever see me popping the top of one of those beers, you tie me down and call my sponsor.”

So why was there a half-full glass of scotch in his room?

He saw what I was looking at.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“If you think it’s a stale glass of cheap, smelly scotch, then yes,” I said.

“Another little offering from Clay,” he said. “The last, I assume, unless he comes back to needle me from beyond the grave. Do me a favor—pour it out and rinse that glass out real good so I won’t smell it.”

“Offering from Clay?” I echoed, as I got up to follow his instructions. “You mean he left this here deliberately. Did he know—”

“That I’m a recovering alcoholic? Hell, yes. He did it all the time, bless his evil little heart. That’s the kind of guy he is. Was.”

I dumped the scotch in the sink, rinsed out the glass twice, and ran enough water to make sure the alcohol smell was long gone from the sink. Then I carried the glass back to the breakfast table so I could take it with me when I left. It was a cheap, heavy tumbler, and clearly didn’t belong in Eustace’s elegant kitchen.

“Chief’s going to want to know my alibi.” Eustace looked somber. “And that’s going to be a problem.”

“If only we’d known someone was going to knock Clay off,” I said. “We could all have arranged to be with someone who could alibi us.”

“I was with someone, but I’m not sure it’s going to do me any good,” Eustace said. “I’m sponsoring someone. He’s almost made six months.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“But holidays are a bad time for him. For most of us. I was with him, helping him through a bad night, from about nine thirty till well past two in the morning. But I can’t give the chief his name unless he’s okay with it. And if he’s not…”