“Wow, you guys really cleaned this place up.”

I whirled around and saw Jessica standing in the doorway.

She was holding a gun.

Chapter 23

“Yes,” I said. “We cleaned it up. You’d hardly know a murder happened here.”

Jessica looked ill-kempt and scruffy, as if she’d been sleeping in the clothes she was wearing and not remembering to comb her hair. And I wondered if she was on something. The hand holding the gun was shaking slightly. And was it just because of the dim light, or were her pupils unnaturally dilated?

“How did you get in here, anyway?” I asked. “We changed the locks.”

“Climbed a tree to get onto the roof,” she said. “And broke a window in my room. My old room. The one that creepy witch has painted all black and red.”

She must have done it after my tour of inspection, perhaps while I’d been busy taking photos. And maybe the noise I’d heard was her, not the raccoon on the deck.

“Downstairs,” she said. She inched into the room, backed away from the door, and then jerked the gun slightly toward it. “Move.”

She was motioning me toward the door. Well, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? Here in the master suite there was only one way out, past her and the gun. Once I was out in the hall, there were the two stairways, which meant two escape routes. And downstairs would be even better.

“I said move,” she snapped.

“I’m moving,” I said. I made my way carefully to the door, not turning my back on her as I slid across the room and then backed out into the hall.

“Turn around,” she said. “And walk downstairs. Slowly.”

She was so wild-eyed and twitchy that I didn’t like turning my back on her, but I figured it was more dangerous to disobey.

She followed me downstairs, far enough behind that there was no chance of turning around and jumping her.

“Into the living room,” she said. “Far enough. Now kneel down.”

I didn’t like it.

“Look,” I said. “There’s no need to do this.”

“Fat lot you know,” she muttered from behind me. “Kneel down.”

I turned slightly so I could see what she was doing, and crouched a little bit, as if to suggest I was about to obey her.

“Everyone knows Clay was a total jerk,” I said. “I figure he must have tried to attack you or something. You’d get off on self-defense. Every designer in the house would—”

“I didn’t kill him!”

She accompanied her shout with a hard punch to my stomach. I was frozen—only for a few seconds, but long enough for her to grab my arms and wrap something around them. By the time I could struggle again, my arms were tied behind me, and I was lying on my face on the living room rug.

“Stupid people,” she muttered. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Then did you see who did?” I twisted slightly so I could see her.

“Of course not,” she said. “He was dead when I came in.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Then let’s tell the police and everything will be okay.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. I heard a small clatter.

I wriggled a little more so I could see what she was doing. She had knocked the two middle stockings off the mantel, brass hooks and all, and was leaning into the fireplace and reaching up as if looking for something.

I decided to take a chance that some of my hypotheses were correct.

“Look,” I said. “I know you used to live in this house. And you’re looking for something you left behind. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help you.”

She stopped and turned to look at me.

“I’m looking for the money,” she said.

“You left money here?” I asked. “How much?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s a lot. It was my parents’ money.”

“Well, where did they leave it?”

“If I knew that I’d have it by now,” she said. “I thought it was in one of the secret compartments.”

She sounded younger than eighteen. Did Emily, the neighbor, overestimate her age? No, she didn’t just sound younger than eighteen. She sounded like a cranky child. I had a bad feeling about this.

“Have you looked in all of the secret compartments?” I asked.

“All I could find. My dad must have made some I didn’t know about. He liked to do that—make secret compartments, and then he’d hide candy in them for me to find.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“But maybe he made some extra secret compartments for the money.”

She was knocking on the mantelpiece, as if trying to find a hollow spot. I had managed to pull my arms far enough to the side that I could crane my head and look over my shoulder to see what she’d tied me up with.

It looked like a leftover bit of the black-and-red braided cord Mother had used to trim the couch and the chairs. I started picking at it with my nails, and casting my eyes around for something sharp I could rub it against. I vowed I was not going to die tied up with these little bits of string.

“Damned passementerie,” I muttered.

“What?” Jessica said.

“I said, did your parents leave behind a lot of money?”

“Yes,” she said. “We were rich. I had a pony, and I had ballet and piano lessons, and Daddy was building me a pool so I could practice a lot and make the swim team. And then the stupid bank took our house away.”

Probably not a good idea to point out that people who really had a lot of money didn’t usually have their houses foreclosed on.

Jessica had started knocking on the walls by the fireplace. She must have found something she liked the sound of. She walked out into the hall, putting the gun down on one of the end tables as she went.

I felt a little better now that she wasn’t holding the gun.

Until she walked back into the room holding a large ax.

I redoubled my efforts to unravel the passementerie.

“The stupid bank cheated us.” Jessica took a vicious hack at one of Mother’s freshly painted walls. “They took away my pony.” Another hack. “And then they took away our house. One day Mommy picked me up at school and told me we were leaving. And they wouldn’t let my parents come back in to get their money.”

“Are you sure they left it in the house?” I said. “And not somewhere else? Because you’ve done a really good job of searching the house over the last six months.”

“I know it’s in the house,” she said. “My mother must have said it a million times. ‘You can’t have a pony. You can’t have dance lessons. We don’t have any money. All our money’s in the house.’”

I winced, and not because she’d just reduced fifteen or twenty square feet of Mother’s “Red Obsession”–painted wall to wreckage. “All our money’s in the house.” I could remember saying those very words in those first few years after Michael and I had bought our house. The size of the mortgage payments had made us nervous in those early days, even before you factored in all the money we’d paid to the Shiffley Construction Company to make the house habitable. We’d had to economize a bit. All our money was in the house.

But not literally. We hadn’t had Randall Shiffley’s workmen build little hiding places in between the walls and under the floorboards to stash our meager post-down-payment savings in.

Maybe Jessica’s parents had. But even if they had, what were the odds they’d left behind tons of cash when they moved away? However abrupt their departure might have seemed to eleven- or twelve-year-old Jessica, her parents would have had time to clean our their hiding places.

And did she really think the left-behind treasure would still be there after the house had been empty for six years, despoiled by vandals and squatters, and completely rebuilt by Randall and his workmen?

Yes, apparently she did. She was working on another wall now, alternately hacking out chunks and stopping to sift through the rubble she’d created. And she was getting more and more jittery and agitated. Was she on something? Or suffering from some kind of mental illness? Either way, I needed to get untied and away from her, because she seemed to be spiraling down into some kind of frenzy.