Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.

Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.

“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”

“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”

“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”

“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”

“Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”

She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”

I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”

“He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”

I looked at her speculatively. She wasn’t that old, and beneath her frown and ostentatious bustle she wasn’t unattractive, but when I put out a tentative question she bristled. She’d been interested and he hadn’t? It might explain her aggressive possessiveness when the Whitbys arrived this morning. Something to ask the neighbors, whether anyone had come and gone at odd hours. An angry lover could have keys. She-he-could have driven Marcus Whitby out to a remote place to die.

In the meantime, I went through the motions here, asking Rita Murchison to come with me to the second floor to see what was out of place. She opened the drawers and cupboards Amy Blount and I had already inspected, but all she could tell me was that the stack of notebooks he usually had on his desktop was gone.

CHAPTER 16

Burke and Hare

I found Mr. Whitby in the basement, inspecting the furnace. “He got a good model, the one I told him to buy. Good fuel rating. I told him he needed that up north here. Of course he knew all about winter, going to the University of Michigan like he did. He wasn’t good with his hands, I never wanted him to have to be a handyman, but I talked him through some of the work when he decided to do this house himself. He was methodical, he did things right. You see how he laid that tile in the bathroom? He called me, we talked it through, he did it right. ‘Course, a furnace, I told him not to try installing that himself, get a plumber, spend the extra money, but he bought the model I recommended.”