From the set of her mouth—I knew that stubborn line from compressed lips all too well—I thought she was going to balk. I decided that starting with a specific question would probably work better.

“It was strange about the door at the bottom of the stairs being blocked that way. Do you know if it was blocked earlier in the evening?”

“Expect it was,” Azalea said after a moment’s thought. “Think they keeps it like that. Them stairs is old and in bad shape. It’s real dark in there, too. That light don’t do much good.”

“Where did you enter the staircase? On the second floor or the third?”

“Second. Ain’t much call to go up to the third floor, and them stairs even worse than the ones down from the second floor.”

This reminded me of questioning my children during their teenage years—not much volunteered, so I had to keep coming up with the right things to ask. “Why did you come down those stairs? Why not use the main staircase at the front of the house?”

“Back stairs was closer,” Azalea said. She paused, then all at once the floodgates burst. “Reason I went upstairs, some lady come in the kitchen with her skirt about falling off. Needed it sewn up or she was gonna be parading around showing what the good Lord never intended the rest of the world to see. I said I’d sew it up for her, and Clementine said to go up to the second floor. They’s a little room at the back, right across from them stairs. Miss Dickce turned it into a sewing room.”

That spate of information ceased as suddenly as it started.

“You went up by the front stairs, surely?”

Azalea nodded.

“How long were you in the sewing room with the lady and her skirt?”

“Ten minutes, maybe. Lady got dressed again and went back downstairs.” She glanced down at her hands, pleating and unpleating her handkerchief. She’d been doing it for several minutes.

“But you stayed up there. Why?”

“Had some personal business to take care of.”

It took me a moment, but I suddenly realized what she meant and was evidently too embarrassed to say openly. She’d needed to use the bathroom.

I nodded. “Okay. What happened after you took care of your personal business?” I was getting a headache from the tension I felt. I wasn’t enjoying this, and I’m sure Azalea wasn’t, either.

“I’s about to go back downstairs, but when I opened the door I heard some people arguing right there in the hall. So I stayed where I was. Hoping they’d go away.”

“Could you tell who the people were? And how many?”

Azalea grimaced. “I could tell just fine. They was two of them, Mr. Cassity and Miz Cassity. They wasn’t yelling or anything, but you could tell they wasn’t happy with each other.”

An argument between Vera and her husband—could it be as simple as that? Morty pushed Vera down the stairs in a fit of anger?