“I don’t think anyone could have climbed down the wall from here,” Bella said. “That wall below is concrete and quite smooth. And it’s a long drop. And they couldn’t have climbed up, because I would have seen them.”

I was still staring with the same horrified fascination I had felt the night before. I remembered the scene with all of us clustered in the doorway, Mr. Goldman lying on the floor, all that blood . . . And the sheriff hadn’t ever finished interviewing the rest of us in the library, so presumably he had no way of knowing whether any of us might have cracked under the strain of seeing the body of the man they had just killed. But he had interviewed Mrs. Goldman here, even though she had strongly protested that it was inhumane to make her answer questions where her husband’s body was lying.

And then I looked up, frowning as I tried to capture a thought that had crept into my consciousness. Something that had not seemed quite right at the time. Mrs. Goldman protesting that it was cruel to interview people where her husband was lying dead, and Juan saying, “They can pull the curtains over the body if you do not wish to look at him.”

But how did he know that the body was lying half under the drapes in the window alcove? It was a big room. Mr. Goldman could have been lying anywhere. And Juan had been asleep when the rest of us had piled into the library and seen the body.

“Juan!” I burst out. “It had to be Juan.”

“The Spanish guy who claimed he slept through the whole thing?” The sheriff looked surprised. “What makes you think that?”

“Because he knew where the body was lying, but he couldn’t have seen it if he’d been asleep in his own bed.”

“But why would he want to kill Goldman? Hadn’t Goldman just brought him over from Spain to turn him into a movie star?”

“Yes. And then he appeared to change his mind,” I said. “He told Juan he wasn’t ready for the movies. He didn’t like Juan’s accent. In fact, he made fun of it.”

“But you don’t go around killing people because of their accent.” The sheriff shook his head.

“I hardly know any of them,” I said. “There may be another reason. Juan and Stella seemed to have an attraction to each other.”

“You reckon he maybe wanted to steal the candlesticks? Why else would he have come in here?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you bring him in here and ask him? And when he comes in, see if his eyes go straight to the body. That would prove he knew where it was.”