He shook his head.

“Maybe it won’t be a problem,” I said. “Even if he says no, you probably won’t be the only person in the house without an alibi.”

“No,” he said, looking slightly more cheerful. “Not even the only person without an alibi who hated Clay’s guts. I do hope your mother’s alibied.”

“Probably alibied ten times over,” I said. “Michael’s giving his one-man show of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol tonight, so we have tons of family and friends coming into town to see it. If I know Mother, she was up till midnight visiting.”

Deputy Sammy appeared in the doorway from the living room.

“Mr. Goodwin? The chief’s ready for you now.”

Eustace stood up and squared his shoulders.

“Wish me luck,” he said, and sailed out.

I followed him and Sammy out into the living room. Mother was standing in the center of the room, gazing at the tree. Apparently she’d recruited Tomás and Mateo to work on the redecoration. They’d placed two stepladders next to the tree and were scampering down to grab ornaments and then back up to put them on the tree with Mother directing them in sign language and scraps of broken Spanish.

I glanced over at the French doors. Eustace was talking, gesticulating dramatically. I had a feeling he’d be there for quite a while.

Randall and my cousin Horace were standing at the top of the stairs. I ran up to join them.

Chapter 8

“Hey, Meg,” Horace said. “The chief says it’s okay for you guys to have the room back.”

“Great,” I said. “How bad is it?”

Randall stepped aside so I could see.

The master bed frame stood, stripped of its hangings, its bed linens, and even its mattress.

“We took all the bedding down to the lab,” Horace said, following my look. “And there was almost no blood on the walls.”

I didn’t see any blood on them. But it looked as if someone had gone after the walls, the floors, and the furniture with an ax. And there was fingerprint powder all over everything—the furniture, the carpet, and the walls up to a height of six or seven feet.

“Soon as your mother’s finished with Tomás and Mateo, I’m to turn them loose in here,” Randall said. “First thing’s to scrub off all that powder. Then we can patch and repaint.”

“And clean or replace the carpet,” I suggested.

“Roger.” He was scribbling on his list. “Couple of my guys are headed down here with some new drywall, and the hardware store’s mixing up a big batch of that god-awful red paint. We’ll get it back as fast as we can to where it was when Clay left yesterday, so start talking to whoever you think you can get to finish it off.”

“We’ll also need a new mattress,” I said. “King-sized.”

“And I assume we should be replacing the black sheets.”

“Part of the design,” I said.

“See you later,” Horace said. “Got to get back to the lab.”

“Oh, my!”

I looked over to see Violet standing in the doorway. She was holding something—a rolled-up rug, by the look of it—and staring at the room.

“What’s left of the crime scene,” Randall said.

“Horrible,” Violet said. She turned and fled—presumably across the hall, to her room.

“I should go and see if she’s all right,” I said.

Randall nodded. He was holding a box of trash bags. As I was turning to leave, I saw him pull one out and stoop down to start picking up some of the debris on the floor.

I followed Violet. She was standing in her room, holding her head.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she replied.

Probably a monster headache, by the look of her. She was pale and hollow-eyed, and I noticed she was shading her eyes against the light.

“Want me to help you with that?” I asked, pointing to the rolled-up rug.

“Please.”

I tore the brown paper off the roll and set it down on the floor. I figured it would go where the damaged rug had gone, and Violet didn’t correct me. Then I unrolled it, revealing a very familiar-looking petit-point rug.

“Is this a new rug or the one Clay damaged?” I asked.

“The damaged one.”

“It looks great!” I exclaimed.

“It’s Daphne’s doing,” she said. Daphne, the proprietor of the Caerphilly Cleaners, was well known as a miracle worker when it came to removing stains. In a less enlightened era, her competitors would probably have tried to have her burned at the stake. “I can still sort of tell where the paint was,” she added.

“But it might be your imagination,” I hurried to say. “And no one else would ever guess. It looks great. The whole room looks great.”

I must have been able to say it with a straight face, because she beamed happily. Actually, I suppose if you liked pastel colors, glitter, ruffles, lace, and stuffed animals, it probably was great. It was certainly the most extreme example I’d ever seen of the whole uber-feminine girly girl style. If Mother had done up my room like this when I was ten or twelve, I’d have run screaming into the night and slept in the tool shed.

Martha stuck her head in the door.

“You okay?” she asked. “You want more of that Alka-Seltzer?”

“I’m fine,” Violet replied.

“You don’t look fine,” Martha said. “Here.” She handed Violet a bottle of water. “Keep hydrating. Best thing for you.”

Violet nodded, opened the bottle, and sipped.

Martha nodded and left. I was puzzled. I hadn’t noticed that the two of them were particularly close before.

“She’s a mother hen,” Violet said. “We sort of bonded over the whole horrible experience of having Clay ruin our rooms.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“We went out to dinner last night,” she said. “To vent about the whole thing. Isn’t that lucky?”

“Lucky? How so?”

“Well, I had a couple of glasses of wine, which I shouldn’t have done, because even one glass puts me under the table.” She giggled girlishly. “Martha put me up in her guest room, and we stayed up past midnight gossiping.”

I suddenly realized where she was going with this.

“So you’re alibied,” I said. “Congratulations!”

It must have sounded as silly to her as it did to me, because we both burst out laughing. Or maybe it was the relief. She was happy to be in the clear. I was happy for her. She was one of the nice ones. Silly, but nice. And knowing that Martha had looked after her properly made me think better of her, too.

“What’s so funny?” Martha had appeared in the doorway again.

“We were just—” Violet began. And then she paused and held her hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear. Mind if I use your bathroom for a sec?”

“Don’t touch the walls,” Martha said. “Wet paint.”

Martha stepped into the room. Violet scurried into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Nice of you to look after her,” I said.

“Some people shouldn’t be allowed out on their own.”

“And your good deed is rewarded.”

“Rewarded?” Martha raised one eyebrow in a puzzled expression.

“At the very time when Clay was being murdered here in the house, the two of you were sharing girlish confidences over your wine.”

“Actually, I was probably holding her head while she worshiped the porcelain goddess,” Martha said. “No head for alcohol, that girl. And I feel a little guilty—we must have spent half the evening trading stories about nasty things Clay had done, and planning silly little pranks to play on him. If I’d known he was about to get killed…” She shook her head.

“But you didn’t,” I said. “And being dead doesn’t make him a saint.”

“I guess we’ll have to go to the funeral,” she said. “And look solemn. And make sure he’s really gone.”

Violet opened the door and scurried out into the room.

“Thanks, Martha,” she chirped.

“Let’s go see if Eustace has any coffee,” Martha said. “Might settle your stomach.”

As they went down the stairs, I could hear Violet chattering with determined cheerfulness about ruching, whatever that was. And Martha answering that proper thread tension was the key.