I heard a rustling noise behind me, turned, and saw that the curtain I’d been leaving closed until I went to sleep had been drawn back and was being buffeted about by a breeze that was taking advantage of my much too widely opened window. My uninvited caller, who was no friend to hotel furniture, could easily have used that portal to leave. If he had left. . . .

I looked cautiously in the closet and then the bathroom, but there was no sign of anyone. Interestingly, the bathroom did not seem to have been searched at all; everything was as I remembered having left it. This made me suspect that whatever it was the intruder had been searching for, they had found it, or they would have made an equal shambles of the bathroom as well. I wondered what—

Oh God, the Swing parts! I raced to the dresser’s second drawer, where I’d put the music when I’d hurriedly changed for the evening, and pulled it open. No, they all seemed to be there, sitting neatly on the clean butcher paper that lined the bottom of each drawer of the dresser.

In fact, nothing seemed to be missing from the room.

I considered calling the front desk to complain, but I didn’t know what they could do about it. The Claremont probably had a chambermaid on duty between midnight and six, but I wasn’t about to ask the poor thing to make up my disaster of a room simply so that I could turn in for the night. So I righted the chair and the night table, fixed the shade on the reading lamp, and otherwise restored the room to normalcy.

I went through all the instrumental parts. Each was intact, and nothing had been changed. Thank God for that. If I had thought Martha’s wrath was a dreadful thing to witness, imagine Gail’s fury if I’d lost the parts for her masterpiece the night before its rehearsal.

I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Until the next morning.

Chapter 40

40

The Next Morning

There was a knock on my door. I travel with a dark gray charmeuse robe that packs well. I went to the bathroom to get it off a hook on the wall, knotted its sash around my waist, and opened the door to my room.

It was Bob Culpepper. “Morning, Lieutenant,” I said.

“Russ Hewett and Martha Prentice are dead.”

I said that ridiculous thing. “They can’t be, I just saw them last night.” He’d probably heard this many times.

“I understand. They’re dead, all the same.” It was such an easy thing to say, and his saying it made it so. “I remembered you’d invited them to come see you here last night. Can I have a word with you?”

I showed him into the room.