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10:05 a.m. Friday, August 28th, 1992
SAM slipped in through the back door into the staff section, skulked past the empty laundry room, then headed across the hall to check out the kitchen. The door was open, and glancing around the corner she saw the cook, Mrs. Trimble, busy at the stove. Taking that opportunity, she dashed past and down the far corridor to the west end, where Bailey had indicated the staff quarters were located. There she saw three doors down each side of the hall that looked to be bedrooms, and one at the far end that was probably a bathroom. The two bedrooms down at the end also looked the largest, and Sam imagined those belonged to the butler and the cook.
Bailey would surely be put in one of the remaining four, and one of them should be where the maid Talia slept. Sam could search these rooms later if it became necessary, at a time when the staff would all be busy elsewhere—but according to her helper, the four family members were the main suspects, so she wanted to take a look through their suites first. But that would have to wait until after they’d all gone to lunch.
Sam had paused to think there in the middle of the hall when she saw one of the knobs turn and the door start to open. She ducked swiftly into the closest room. Leaving a tiny crack to peer through, she saw a man who had to be the butler going down the corridor, and there was no indication he’d seen her fleeting figure. As the sound of his footsteps faded, she turned to see where she’d ended up. And realized right away she was in Talia’s room.
The scent was too feminine to belong to the butler and too daring for Mrs. Trimble. Sam closed the door firmly so she could turn the lights on without fear of discovery, then felt along the wall until she’d found the switch and flipped it. The room was horribly small and cramped, but it was certainly Talia’s, with maid outfits filling one half of the open closet. There was a little dressing table on the other side of the bed holding an array of cosmetics and a lighted mirror and a cheap little jewelry box.
Sam went across the room to the closet, thinking how providential it had been, her having to hide in this room. Taking a maid uniform down from its hanger, she saw it was actually a two-piece outfit—a black skirt and a white blouse that would be tucked in. And it would make the perfect disguise.
Since she’d seen pictures of Talia and knew the woman was small and dark, Sam figured that if she were seen from a distance wearing one of these outfits, she’d be taken for Talia, unless it was Talia herself who saw her. Sam would just have to avoid the real maid, or letting anyone get close enough to get a good look at her face. Still, she’d stand out far less than in the shorts and t-shirt she was wearing. But she soon discovered another problem.
Donning the uniform, she realized she was a lot smaller than Talia, as even worn over the top of the clothes she had on and tucking in the shirt tails, the waistband of the skirt was too loose to stay up. The blouse was baggy as well, and the skirt’s hem, which must’ve been meant to hang mid-calf, just brushed above the carpet. But Sam had to tighten the waist to make it secure, or this wouldn’t work at all. She rummaged around in the closet, but none of Talia’s belts would be appropriate to wear while working as a maid. Going by those and the clothes in the other half of the closet, the woman liked to dress up. Not that she could have the chance to do that here.
Dismissing the wardrobe with its assortment of impractical attire and flashy accessories, Sam went to the dressing table by the bed. There she found a few odds and ends in the small drawer, but nothing that would help her. Then she opened the little jewelry box and found a large safety pin in among fake pearls and rhinestone brooches. Not what she had expected of Talia and precisely what Sam needed.
Gathering the skirt’s extra material at the small of her back, she fastened it in a bunch on the inside, then whirled around the room for a minute. Seeing that the waist stayed secure and she could move relatively freely, Sam went to close the jewelry box, so she could leave everything they way she’d found it—for the most part, anyway.
She paused with her hand on the lid. The inside of the box was too shallow compared to the outside. Playing with it for a moment, she discovered the top part could be removed, revealing a second shelf beneath. And there Sam saw some stones she knew to be real and very expensive. The kind of jewelry that Kirin had liked to wear, to carry her wealth with her. But what was a maid like Talia doing with these?
Sam replaced the top shelf and closed the jewelry box deep in thought. The maid might be a thief, a criminal who’d been stealing from Mrs. Keener, but would that give her motive to murder Brandt? If he had found her out it might.
Satisfied with her discoveries, Sam thought the time had come to leave this room before Talia came back for some reason. She turned off the light, then cracked the door and listened for the sounds of anyone coming or going. Confident the corridor would be empty, she slipped out.
Bailey had said the back stairs were for the staff to use, and those were the people Sam most wanted to avoid. The guests wouldn’t pay much attention to her and might easily assume she was Talia, but the butler worked with the woman and would presumably know what the maid was supposed to be doing and where, so he wasn’t likely to make that mistake. Talia herself surely wouldn’t.
Intending to use the main staircase and passing the back stairs as she headed for the foyer, Sam saw a small door beneath those stairs and stopped. The tiny room turned out to be a utility closet. And on a shelf inside she found a feather duster, exactly what she needed to complete her imperfect disguise. If a guest saw her, she’d look like she was doing the kind of work a maid was supposed to be engaged in, and she could hold the feathers up in front of her face to hide her features.
She would have to get away before anyone got a close-up view, but she’d have to do that anyway. No one paid attention to servants, at least according to Bailey. Now she’d find out if he was right.
With her feather duster held high, Sam walked through into the foyer and found it empty. Making her way up the stairs, she kept her head down while she flicked the duster along the bannister in a flurry of feathers with one hand. And held the hem of her skirt up with the other to keep from tripping.
Reaching the second floor landing, she found it was also empty for the moment. There wouldn’t be anybody staying in the rooms down the west corridor yet, but Bailey had said the family were all down the east hall. Dusting in that direction, Sam found all the doors closed. Two down one side and two on the other would be the four family members, and at the end of the corridor that fifth door would be the master suite of the late Brandt Keener.
Walking at a moderate pace so she wouldn’t attract undue attention, she headed for Brandt’s bedroom. She heard activity behind the other doors as she passed. Hopefully they were all getting ready to go down to lunch, and while Sam waited for everyone to leave their rooms, she would seize the opportunity to search the dead man’s suite. It might help her understand why somebody would’ve wanted to kill him. Aside from wanting to get their hands on his money.
Unsurprisingly, she found the master bedroom unlocked and slipped inside unobserved. Of course wearing this uniform, she should be able to move in and out of people’s bedrooms without anyone paying particular notice. But under the circumstances, she would rather avoid being seen at all.
Sam wandered around the room and waved the duster in the air as she moved, in case anyone happened to come in. She was searching for clues, but she didn’t know what she was looking for—she only knew she’d recognize it if she saw it. However, the murdered man’s rooms were a disappointment.
With plenty of time on her hands, she had gone carefully through the bedroom, the bathroom, and the walk-in closet. But not a single trace of Brandt Keener remained. His personal possessions had to have all been removed after his death. No clothes in the closet or dresser drawers, no assorted odds and ends even, there or on the nightstand or anywhere. Not a toothbrush in the bathroom or a stray hair.
The place had been cleaned within an inch of its life—surfaces gleamed completely free of dust. She could hardly expect to find a stray piece of paper or an inexplicable stain somewhere, much less a cryptic message marring the woodwork. Hopeless.
Still she searched under the bed and checked all the drawers for secret compartments and anywhere else she could think of, since she had time to kill and even the most thorough cleaning might miss something. Finally, though, she had to plop herself down in a plush chair, admit failure, and wait.
The whisper of voices coming from the corridor brought her up in a flash and to the door, which she opened carefully to show a sliver of the scene in the hall. Elaine Keener was making a production out of going down for lunch, exhorting her son to hurry up and come along. Stanley sulked after her.
Sam waited, and a moment after Elaine’s carrying voice had faded away, one of the doors opened. Out of that room Barbara Keener emerged with her daughter in tow. Once everybody had descended to the first floor, Sam silently slid out of Brandt’s bedroom and slipped into Barbara’s.
Everything there was neat and tidy. There was a paperback romance on the nightstand and a couple bottles of pills—she memorized the prescriptions to relate to Bailey. The bed was perfectly made, but it was probably the maid’s work. In the closet several classy and conservative outfits hung, all new but not particularly expensive clothing. An array of personal cosmetic products in the bathroom revealed a determined effort to hold back the hands of time. But none of it gave Sam the impression the woman was a cold-blooded murderer.
The connecting door was open, and Sam wasn’t particularly shocked to see Stephanie was less organized in her habits. The bedspread was rumpled as if the girl had lain down on top of it for a while, and an unruly mound of books mostly covered the top of a small table by the window. Taking care not to disturb the unstable pile, Sam examined the spines. It was a strange collection of reading material to find a poet partaking of—several mystery novels as well as books on botany, medicine, and criminalistics. Was the girl planning a murder, or trying to solve one? It seemed unlikely that she would’ve researched murdering her father and then kept these lying around to be discovered.
The casual clothes in the closet and lack of cosmetics in the bathroom spoke of a lack of interest in appearances. A vast supply of nicotine patches told of someone trying to kick an addiction.
Sam left Stephanie’s room behind to cross over to Stanley’s. On first impression it looked as if some great struggle had taken place there, but it had only been between the boy and disorder. And chaos had won.
She shook her head. Only an hour or so ago this room would’ve been in perfect shape awaiting Stanley’s arrival, and in no time at all he had demolished every effort to make the room habitable. His clothes that had only just been brought up had already been flung around the room with an air of wild abandon. A few articles remained in an open suitcase in a corner, and a single shirt had somehow actually made it into the closet, and a pair of socks were draped over the edge of an open drawer as if they’d just given up at the finish line. What would the maid think of this mess when she saw it?
To Sam it was clear the boy was not only sloppy in his habits but undisciplined in the extreme. And whoever had murdered Brandt Keener had meticulously planned a crime that had thwarted the police. It was difficult to see the boy as his father’s murderer. Still, if Stanley did decide to kill somebody, Sam imagined he might lazily choose poison.
His half-sister seemed to have a more methodical mind, the kind of intelligence better able to plot a careful crime. But what had each of their relationships to their father been like? Sam had yet to see a single photo of him in any of these rooms.
The connecting door was locked, so she slipped back out into the hall and into Elaine Keener’s suite. Here Sam found a wealth of jewelry spread carelessly across the top of an old oak chest of drawers, and her mind immediately went to that secret stash she had found in the maid’s bedroom. If Talia had stolen those things, this seemed the likeliest source for them. Would Elaine Keener not have noticed such valuable jewelry going missing? Or had she noticed and mentioned it to her husband? Had Keener confronted the acquisitive maid, and had she killed him because of that?
Looking through the widow’s clothes, she found nothing that suggested grieving—the outfits were all bright and colorful and cut to show off the wearer’s figure. They appeared to be highly fashionable and must’ve been hideously expensive. Sam saw this as a wardrobe assembled to attract attention.
She found no books in the bedroom, but Elaine had an elaborate sound system installed and a large flat-screen TV, both of which must have been costly rarities in the nineties. With such tastes the woman had to marry a billionaire to be satisfied.
Both there and in the bathroom were an extensive array of cosmetics consisting of bold, dazzling, glittering colors. They were not primarily meant to hide flaws or imperfections but to draw the eye and make people take notice. Mostly men, Sam thought. Altogether it painted a picture of a superficial woman who was highly materialistic. Not very different from the impression Sam had gotten of Talia. Only the maid didn’t have the money to indulge herself—which could be why she appeared to have turned to thievery. She should’ve married a millionaire.
But of Bailey’s four main suspects, Elaine would seem to have not only the highest expectation of inheriting a bundle from Brandt’s estate, but the need for a lot of money to spend as well. She was the only one of the four family members Sam felt might be a murderer. But that was just from what their rooms had revealed. It wasn’t actual evidence. She hadn’t even met any of these people, nor was she likely to—Bailey would be interacting with everybody though, and what he saw would help her understand them.
Glancing at her watch, Sam decided she’d spent enough time searching. She didn’t know how much longer they might linger over lunch, and she had accomplished her main mission. Or at least what she most needed to do for now.
She slipped out of the room and dusted her way down the hall and over to the rooms on the west end of the house. As yet unoccupied, there was nothing to search, but Sam wanted to stay out of everyone’s way. Later she’d have more to do, but until then she should rest.
She just hoped that while she’d been busy finding a few clues Bailey had been doing his part. She’d given him his instructions, and they shouldn’t have needed his help with lunch, so he should have been able to do what she wanted. It would be some time before she knew, though. Whatever it took, she was determined to expose the truth of who killed Brandt Keener and why.