Redding Castle was just as glorious at sunrise as it was at sunset. I studied it for a few minutes, marveling at how its many windows shimmered under the brilliant light before carrying a mug of coffee up the staircase to the loft bedroom. There was a small skylight built into the V-shaped ceiling and I opened it. Afterward, I grabbed Nina’s foot beneath the duvet and gave it a shake.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” I said.
She opened one eye, stared at me for a moment, and then closed it again.
I wiggled her foot some more.
“Wakey-wakey, honey.”
Nina kept both eyes closed.
“Who talks like that?” she asked.
“I let you sleep as long as I could.”
“What time is it?”
“Six forty-five.”
Her eyes snapped open.
“What is wrong with you? Who gets up at six forty-five?”
“People who go to breakfast at seven thirty.”
Nina gave it a few beats.
“Jenness, I forgot,” she said.
Nina closed her eyes again.
I swept the duvet off her. She lunged forward, grabbed the edge, and pulled it back up.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “It’s cold.”
“You know, for most people these are normal weekday hours.”
“I’m not normal.”
“I noticed that about you.”
“It’s why I built a jazz club,” Nina said. “So I wouldn’t have to get up before noon.”
“You usually get up way before noon.”
“Not at six forty-five in the goddamn morning.”
“Do you kiss your daughter with that mouth?”
Through the skylight I could hear voices.
“See what you’ve done,” Nina said. “You made me swear.”
“Shh.”
I moved to the skylight.
“I almost never swear,” Nina said.
“Shh.”
I listened hard.
“I don’t see why not,” I heard a woman say. “I like it here. Don’t you like it here?”
“You’re not listening,” a second woman said.
The way the skylight was built, I couldn’t see the ground; had no idea who was speaking.
“I am listening,” the first woman said. “You’re just not making sense.”
“I’m not going to let that—that cousin of yours ruin a good thing.”
“But Redding Castle is a good thing.”
“You might not think so if suddenly you don’t have enough money to train and compete properly.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom. You know that.”
“You wanted to run before going to school,” the second woman said. “Are we going to run or not?”
“I’ll run really slow so you can keep up.”
After that I heard nothing.
Nina was sitting up in bed, wide awake now.
“Hmm,” she said.
Breakfast was served on the patio.
“We still encourage our guests to eat their meals outside or in their rooms,” Jenness said. “Some insist on eating in the dining room. That’s okay. Last year, though … because of the state’s social-distancing mandates, we had to remove nearly two-thirds of our tables. We tried to serve our guests in shifts so we’d have as many tables open for outside restaurant customers as possible. Even so, we lost so much business. We did better with curbside and delivery than I had expected; especially considering how far we are from town. Still … we’re operating at nearly full capacity now, but we haven’t been able to make up our losses.”
“There’re things you can try,” Nina said. “Optimizing the menu; replacing underperforming options with high-popularity, high-profit-margin dishes, that sort of thing. Raise prices.”
Jenness held up her hand; her thumb and index finger were set about an inch apart.
“Only there’s so much you can do before you start affecting customer satisfaction,” she said. “Before you trigger traffic declines.”
“Discounts and promotions? Bundling meals, upsells?”
“I’m willing to try anything and please, Nina, I’m open to suggestions and not only for the restaurant. One of the reasons we survived the pandemic is because of the lake and the forest. During the height of the virus, travelers felt safer spending time outdoors compared to enclosed spaces. Meeting and event space, outdoor dining, green spaces for socially distant gatherings—we have that. We’ve always had that. Only that advantage isn’t as strong now that the bigger hotels and resorts are starting to regain their popularity. And winter’s coming. In Minnesota, winter is always coming. We barely survived the last one.”
While they were talking shop, I glanced up from my eggs Benedict to see two women dressed for jogging move across the patio to a small table. Jenness saw them as well and gave a wave. The older woman ignored her. The younger woman waved back as if she and Jenness were great pals who hadn’t seen each other since summer vacation.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Carly and Madison Zumwalt,” Jenness said. “Carly is my aunt. She’s the youngest of Tess’s children. In fact, she’s twelve years younger than my mom who’s the next youngest. I heard my uncle say once that she had been a great surprise to my grandparents. Zumwalt is the name of her first husband. She’s been married three times. After her last divorce was finalized about eight, nine months ago, she changed her name back to Zumwalt.”
“Why not Redding?” Nina asked.
“Because Maddie’s name is Zumwalt and as a junior at Redding High School she won the Minnesota State Cross Country Ski Championships by thirty-seven seconds and then went to Duluth and won the CXC Junior Cup by twenty-three seconds, which made her a mortal lock to make the Midwest Junior Team, which gives her a good shot at the National Junior Team, which could eventually lead to the U.S. Olympic Team.”
“And Carly wants to bask in her daughter’s glory,” I suggested.
“Jesse Diggins was twenty-seven when she won the United States’ first ever gold medal in cross-country skiing at the Olympics in South Korea. Maddie is seventeen. She has plenty of time to get stronger. She could pull it off. She really could.”
I stared at the young woman for a few beats, checking out her long slender legs and long slender arms until she glanced at me and I averted my eyes. I assumed a cross-country skier would require a lot of leg strength, a lot of arm and shoulder strength, yet nothing about her body seemed overdeveloped. She looked to me like someone who ran cross-country and I was willing to bet she could run for hours without even breathing hard. It made me regret how out of shape I had become.
“Carly wants to sell the castle, too, doesn’t she?” I said.
“How’d you know?” Jenness asked.
“I’m a semiprofessional investigator.”
“We heard them talking outside our window this morning,” Nina said.
“Hey, hey, hey,” I said. “Jen’s going to lose all respect for me if you start giving away my secrets.”
“It’s not a secret,” Jenness said. “Carly told me herself that she wanted to sell the place; told me on several occasions. Told me this morning, in fact. I get it, though. The others grew up here; played in the forest, played on the lake and in the house. Anna and Big Ben built honeybee hives in the forest behind the General Oglesby Cabin…”
Who the hell is General Oglesby? my inner voice wondered.
“My grandparents used to serve the honey it produced in the restaurant; sold jars of it to our guests. Redding Castle Honey. I’m hoping to revive it. Anyway, while the other Sibs grew up here, Carly merely grew old, if that makes any sense. She didn’t really have anyone to play with. Think about it. Big Ben was a senior in high school the year she was born; Anna was a sophomore. Mom was in middle school. From what I’ve heard over the years, Carly was treated less like a sister than a child the others were forced to babysit. She resented it, too. Still does.”
“Tell me how this is going to work,” I said.
“The Sibs have to vote on everything involving the estate. Simple majority wins. I have my mom’s vote. Carly is against me. That leaves my uncles Ben and Alexander and my aunt Anna. I need two of them to see things my way.”
“Ben is married to Olivia,” Nina reminded us.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll take her side,” Jenness said. “Big Ben—how do I say it? Ben is his own man.”
“Good for him,” I said.
From her expression, I didn’t know if Nina agreed with me or not.
“They’re going to meet with a developer, meet her here; the one from town who seems to be the most interested in making an offer for the property,” Jenness said. “Then we’ll see.”
“When?” I asked.
“Friday. Today’s Tuesday. I have three days to find a way to save Redding Castle.”
After breakfast, I asked to see the room where Tess Redding’s body was found. Jenness led Nina and me through various rooms, up staircases and along corridors while reciting facts and figures about the castle as if she were a tour guide: 18,000 square feet spread out over two turrets and four floors; eighteen guest rooms—the ones located at the top of each turret were the most in demand and therefore the most expensive to book—twenty-two fireplaces including one in each guest room, plus the enormous fireplace in the lobby-slash-sitting room; eight cut-glass chandeliers; ninety-foot reception hall that the Sibs had once used as a playroom and was later transformed into the restaurant dining room; elaborately carved oak and mahogany woodwork everywhere.
“The actual castle with the two turrets was constructed in 1883 by my great-great-great-grandfather John Redding,” Jenness said. “It was enlarged and redesigned by his son Douglas in 1912 and then redesigned again into a hotel and resort by my great-grandfather Steven after World War II. He’s the one who added the eight cabins along the perimeter. My grandparents Joseph and Tess added the restaurant in 1968. The entire property amounts to just over forty-eight acres, including five acres of lakefront.”
There was also an art gallery where we stopped briefly to admire paintings by Frederic Remington and James McNeill Whistler as well as a half-dozen illustrations by the legendary editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast. In addition, the gallery contained a Steinway & Sons grand piano that was at least a century old. Nina was clearly more impressed by the piano than the paintings. She ran her hand across the black finish.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Jenness said. “The artwork, the antiques; a lot of them date back to long before 1883. John was an extremely wealthy man and he wanted everyone to know it so he collected a lot of stuff, most of it shipped in from New York and Boston. There’s a copy of a book in every guest room and cabin that narrates the history of Redding Castle. You should read it.”
We left the gallery and continued a short distance down the second-floor corridor until we reached Tess’s room.
“I’m next door,” Jenness said. “We were the only members of the Redding family who actually lived here. The Sibs and their families will visit from time to time; Christmas at the castle is always a big deal. Only no one else has lived here since Carly was married for the first time.”
“What about staff?” I asked.
“Mr. and Mrs. Doty have the cabin next to the barn. They’ve been with us since, God, I don’t know. Since before I was born, anyway. Everyone else lives in Redding.”
Jenness knocked on the door. While we waited I asked, “Did you hear anything the night your grandmother died?”
Jenness’s body language suggested that she wanted to give a different answer than the one she was stuck with.
“No,” she said.
“Did you see anyone lingering about the corridor?”
“No. There are only two guest rooms on this floor and they’re both on the far side of the castle, so there shouldn’t have been anyone near here.”
“Staff?”
Jenness shook her head and knocked some more.
“Is there any other way to get up here besides the stairs leading from the lobby?” I asked.
“Yes.” She pointed at what to me looked like a wall at the end of the corridor. “We call it the servant stairs.”
“Show me.”
Jenness moved to the wall where the corridor ended and pushed against it. There was a discernible click and the wall swung open like the door to a bathroom medicine cabinet. Jenness pulled the door all the way open and I saw a white staircase spiraling downward.
“Where does it lead?” I asked.
“The kitchen.”
“Any other stops?”
“No.”
“Does anyone know about this?”
“Everyone who’s ever worked here.”
“The family?”
“Sure. It’s not a secret. I mean it looks like one—a secret passageway. We don’t tell the guests about it, but we use it to get up and down without going through the lobby.”
“Are there any security cameras?”
“Not on the staircase. Just the lobby, the restaurant, and the parking lot; that’s all.”
We closed the doorway.
“When did your grandmother go to bed?” I asked.
“Ten o’clock. Sharp. Tess liked schedules. Everyone here worked to a tight schedule. Including me. The restaurant closes at nine; the bar would stay open as long as there was anyone to serve but that’s rarely past nine thirty, ten. Tess would supervise cleanup and then she would go to bed.”
“You said her door was locked. Did she always lock her door?”
“I have no idea. It never occurred to me to ask.”
“Do you lock your door?”
“Yes.”
“When did you go to bed?”
“Not long afterward. Usually, I try to catch the news and Stephen Colbert before going to sleep. Not quite the same lifestyle as when I worked at Rickie’s and we used to have a quick bump before going home at around two.”
“You have a TV?”
“I have a computer.” Jenness smiled at Nina. “Tess didn’t like TVs. Well, that’s not necessarily true. It was just that she was very keen that the castle always maintained a nineteenth-century vibe. We use computers in the office, the restaurant and reservation desk, of course, but they’re deliberately tucked away so that guests aren’t able to see them. Tess was fine with providing Wi-Fi for the same reason—it can’t be seen. As for the electronics that guests brought into the castle, whatever they use in the privacy of their rooms was their own business, was how Tess looked at it.
“First thing I did was upgrade the system. During the pandemic, people weren’t traveling as much as they used to but when they did, they tended to opt for longer stays; tended to work from their rooms. It was as if they just had to get out of their own houses; one of the reasons we’ve been nearly full every day starting last February even before they began widespread vaccinations. Fast Wi-Fi and practical workstations—even now that’s a deciding factor on where many travelers stay, especially those hoping to blend a little work with a little play.”
“I knew you were smart when I hired you all those years ago,” Nina said.
Jenness knocked once again. Instead of waiting, though, she pulled a ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the door.
“Olivia?” she said. “Ben?”
There was no answer. Jenness stepped inside, holding the door for Nina and me.
“They said something about going into town together this morning,” Jenness told us. “I just wanted to make sure.”
“Do they live in town?” I asked.
“No. They live in Edina.”
Edina being one of the ritzier suburbs of Minneapolis, my inner voice reminded me.
“Mom and Dad live in Redding and so does Carly,” Jenness said. “Uncle Alex and Eden live in Mankato; they both work for a nonprofit dealing with social justice issues. They’ll be here later today. I put them in the cabin next to yours. Anna teaches at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall; only forty minutes away yet she visits us least of all. The castle is all booked up so she’ll be staying with me when she arrives Thursday, which is fine. Gives me a chance to work on her.”
We stepped deeper into the room. The first thing I noticed was the ornate brick fireplace surrounded by dark carved wood. There was an antique clock on the mantel above it and a painting of several women laboring in a field that reminded me of Monet hanging above that. Open doors on each side of the fireplace revealed a bathroom and a walk-in closet.
The first thing Jenness noticed, however, was the king-size bed with carved mahogany posts and a canopy against the wall opposite the fireplace. She stared at it for several beats.
“Everything was moved out of here after Tess died; almost immediately after she died.” Her voice was just above a whisper. “All of her personal possessions; clothes, photographs, her toothbrush. Why do people do that? My mother; Aunt Anna came up from Marshall to help, too. Do they think we’ll process our grief quicker if there’s nothing to remind us that someone we loved actually lived here? Laundry in a hamper, books on the nightstand, a half-empty bottle of shampoo? The Minnesota United Football Club scarf she used to wear even when it was eighty degrees outside? Jesus.”
Nina slipped her arm around the younger woman’s shoulder and gave her a hug.
“I’m all right,” Jenness said. “No, actually I’m not. I’m all cried out, though. Listen, I have things to do. Like I said before, we’re understaffed, so I’ve been helping with the housekeeping. If you don’t need me…”
“Can I help?” Nina asked.
“Stripping beds and wiping down bathrooms is a little below your pay grade.”
“I’d like to help.”
“Nina…”
“Please.”
Jenness stared at her former employer and for a moment I thought that she was mistaken; that she wasn’t all cried out.
“Take orders from me?” she said.
“Oh, like I haven’t done that before,” Nina said.
“Thank you.”
They held hands the way even the closest hetero male friends never do.
“Do you need anything, McKenzie?” Jenness asked.
“I’m good.”
“Well, come on then.” Jenness pulled Nina through the doorway. “Toilets don’t scrub themselves.”
I closed the heavy door after them and locked it with the dead bolt and unlocked it and locked it again, as if repeating the process would tell me something. It did. It told me that the damned thing was nearly impregnable.
Whoever killed Tess, if she was killed, could not have entered through the door, my inner voice told me.
“Who would’ve thought it?” I said aloud. “An honest-to-God locked-room mystery.”
I turned my back to the door and leaned against it, my arms folded across my chest. Inserted into the wall directly across from me, about midway between the fireplace and the bed, was a large window. Beyond the window was the balcony Jenness had pointed out the evening before.
“Or maybe not,” I said.
I didn’t know whether it was a recent building code thing or not, but these days to gain access to a balcony, like the one Nina and I had in our condominium, you needed to open a hinged or sliding glass door and step out. Back in the day, however, access was often through a large single-hung window. You would push up the bottom sash and climb out. That’s the way we crawled onto a balcony at the Hotel Provincial in New Orleans and at a B and B in Vieux Quebec, the historic neighborhood of Quebec City. And that’s how I slipped onto the balcony of Redding Castle.
Looking up, I had a nice view of the tops of many trees. Looking down I could see the wide L-shaped dock that jutted into Lake Anpetuwi and the canoes and kayaks that were tethered to it. And the concrete steps that led down the steep hill from the castle’s patio to the lake. And a wooden fence that ran along the top of the hill for the length of the property to keep careless visitors from tumbling down the bank. I didn’t pay much attention to any of that, however. I was more interested in the drop from the balcony to the ground. About fifteen feet, I decided.
I streamed a scenario in my head: The killer hid in Tess’s room. He killed the woman, waited until the castle quieted down, crawled onto the balcony being careful to close the window behind him, jumped, and ran off. I had made a similar leap myself three years ago to escape a bomb. ’Course, I had badly sprained an ankle, shattered my collarbone, and suffered a concussion, but I had landed on a motel’s asphalt parking lot with plenty of force. There was grass beneath the balcony.
Really, McKenzie? my inner voice asked.
“It’s possible,” I said aloud.
What else is possible?
I climbed back inside the room.
It was absurdly neat and I wondered if that was the result of Jenness Crawford’s housekeeping staff or just the way Big Ben and Olivia Redding lived. I checked the walk-in closet. Hangers and the drawers of an ancient bureau revealed about as many clothes as you might expect a married couple to pack for a five-day trip.
I examined the ceiling and the walls, rapping on them with my knuckles. Afterward, I dropped to my knees and inspected the hardwood floorboards. I did the same thing in the bathroom, running my fingers over the slate tiles. Following that, I closely examined the fireplace and the walls of the main room. I even moved two stuffed chairs that had been arrayed in front of the fireplace so I could look beneath the round rug they were resting on.
I was searching for another secret passageway and, yeah, I know that sounds silly, like something out of one of the lesser Agatha Christie novels. Except Nina and I had stayed at a 160-year-old B and B in Lanesboro, Minnesota, that actually did have a secret passageway leading from an upstairs broom closet to the downstairs dining room, although it wasn’t much of a secret considering how happy the owner was to show it to us.
I found what I had expected to find—nothing.
What else is possible? my inner voice asked again.
I carefully scrutinized the window that led to the balcony. It did not have a lock.
I slipped back onto the balcony and leaned against the railing. I looked straight down and quickly backed off because of a familiar feeling of panic that the sight had generated in my stomach. See, I’ve had this thing about heights since I was a kid and jumping from high places hadn’t helped any. I didn’t even like to climb stepladders, I reminded myself.
To which my inner voice replied, You big dummy.
I found Mr. Doty inside the barn, its large doors open to the sun. There were no animals inside, unless you counted the twenty-two-horsepower riding lawn mower he was tinkering with.
“Help ya?” he asked.
I placed Mr. Doty in his early seventies. He was tall and thin with gray hair that he combed over the bald spot on top of his head; his face was deeply lined by sun and age and reminded me of a hard maple coffee table that I owned. He frowned when he saw me approaching.
“My name’s McKenzie,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Miss said you might have some questions.”
“You call Jenness Crawford ‘Miss’?”
“The old woman was Ma’am; she’s Miss. Whaddya need?”
“The night Tess Redding was killed…”
“Don’t know she was killed,” Mr. Doty said. “Don’t know that. Miss has her ideas but the police think she’s in the wrong, what I heard. Guessin’ you’re here to prove different?”
“Let’s just say that Miss Crawford asked for a second opinion. The night Tess died…”
Mr. Doty pointed at the wall of the barn. Beyond the wall was a cabin at least twice the size of the one where Nina and I were staying.
“Me and the missus were sleeping,” he said.
“The next morning…”
“The missus does cooking in the morning, mostly breakfasts for guests. And she does housekeeping, too. Been at it near fifty years. Been at it since before I was hired to take care of things. Was how we met, me and her, when I came to work at the castle. Was makin’ a livin’ doin’ odd jobs for people hereabouts ’fore I got hired to do odd jobs here permanent. Couple weeks later, she gave me a jar of honey with the castle name on it. ‘Don’t say I never gave you nothing,’ she said. We’ve been together ever since.”
A little off topic, my inner voice told me. Yet I was experienced enough not to interrupt. One of the first things you learn about conducting interviews, once you get the subject talking it’s a good idea to just let them talk until they say something interesting.
“Anyway,” Doty said, “what happened, the missus was waiting for Ma’am; waitin’ to serve her breakfast, only Ma’am doesn’t show. That’s not like her, Ma’am I mean. So the missus goes up to her room thinkin’ something must be wrong and something was wrong, so she calls Miss and Miss sends the missus to fetch me. Miss was, oh she was pretty upset. Wanted to get inside that room awfully bad. Give me time, I coulda knocked the door down, no problem, but why you want to do that is what I told Miss. Get the ladder and climb up is what I told her. So, that’s what we did. Came back to the barn, found a ladder, and dragged it around.”
“Where was the ladder?” I asked.
Mr. Doty’s expression suggested that the answer wasn’t as simple as it should have been.
“Over here,” he said.
Mr. Doty approached the entrance to the barn and hung a left. I followed him. He led me to the back of the barn. Hanging horizontally on storage hooks were three extension ladders. One was made of wood and looked as old as the castle. The other two were lightweight aluminum. The one in the middle extended twenty-two feet. I lifted it off its hook. I guessed it weighed about forty pounds.
“Not that one,” Mr. Doty said.
“No?” I set it back on its hooks. The second aluminum ladder looked too small to reach the balcony, only about twelve feet. “Not this one?”
“The wood.”
The wooden ladder looked as if it extended over thirty feet, still …
“Seems awfully heavy,” I said.
“Over eighty pounds. What I meant by having to drag it. Leaning it up against the wall was a bitch.”
I gestured back at the middle ladder.
“Why not use this one?” I asked.
“Wasn’t there when I come for it.”
“Where was it?”
“Halfway down the bank between the castle and the lake.”
That caused me to pause for a beat or two.
“Did you leave it there and forget?” I asked.
“Mister, I take care of my tools. The ladder should have been here. Don’t know why it wasn’t.”
“Did someone else on the staff borrow it?”
“No one says they did. Besides, anything needs fixin’ ’round here, I’m the one who fixes it.”
I lifted the aluminum ladder off its hooks and braced it against my shoulder.
“Show me where you found it,” I said.
Mr. Doty didn’t say a word. He turned and started back around the barn and I followed. The way the weight was distributed, carrying the ladder wasn’t arduous in the slightest. We crossed the parking lot and followed the cobblestone path toward the castle before veering off. As we circled the castle Mr. Doty glanced over his shoulder at me.
“You ’kay?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Word is they’re thinking of tearing down the castle and building condominiums or some damn thing. Know anything ’bout that?”
I couldn’t think of a good reason to lie, so I told him the truth.
“Right now it’s just talk,” I said. “It’s the reason why the family is gathering, so they can talk.”
Mr. Doty nodded his head as if he knew it all along.
“Hope that’s all it is,” he said. “Talk. Me and the missus hate to move, been here so long.”
“I know that Jenness is lobbying hard to keep it from happening.”
“Miss reminds me of Ma’am. Good people.”
We soon reached the corner of the castle where Tess Redding’s room was located except Mr. Doty kept walking until we reached the fence at the top of the bank. The fence was a little lower than chest high and consisted of three thick ten-foot rails stretched between two four-foot-high posts, the sections running the length of the cleared property on both sides of the castle to the trees. From a distance, it looked like one of those rustic split-rail fences that you’d see cowboys leaning against while they examine livestock and horses on a ranch. Up close, though, you could see the careful prefabricated cuts and drill holes and the bolts and nuts that held it all together. Beyond the fence, the bank dropped at about a forty-five-degree angle for a good fifty yards to Lake Anpetuwi. The bank was dotted with aspen, birch, pine, and spruce trees and a lot of shrubs that I couldn’t identify.
“Down there,” Mr. Doty said. “About twenty, thirty feet. Reason I didn’t see the ladder right off is that the Anpetuwi Lake Association has this thing about clearing land along the lakeshore. Don’t want no lawns, don’t want fertilizer running off and polluting the lake. Don’t want no erosion, neither. Ma’am was okay with all that except, you look around the lake you see people ignoring the rules all the time.”
I turned my head to glance up at Tess’s balcony.
“Let me try something,” I said.
I carried the ladder to the castle, raised it so that it was vertical, extended it, and rested it against the base of Tess’s balcony. I climbed the ladder without once looking down, scrambled over the railing onto the balcony, stepped to the window, and raised the sash. I crawled into Tess’s room, counted to five, crawled out, and lowered the window. I tried hard not to make any noise and mostly I succeeded.
I climbed down the ladder, again without looking down, pulled it away from the balcony, and collapsed it to its normal length. I carried it to where Mr. Doty was standing at the top of the bank, raised it above my head, and threw it over the fence toward the lake. The ladder bounced on the ground, slid a few feet, and came to a rest against a spruce tree about ten yards away.
“Hey, man,” Mr. Doty said.
I turned and glanced back at the balcony.
“Did you tell the cops about this?” I asked. “About finding the ladder?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t find it until way after they were gone. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
“They never asked.”