She played the second clip again and saw the same thing. This time it looked like Mina heading downstairs.
She played a few more clips. Mina up, Mina down. Horse being led by a boy walking across the yard. Mina up. One of the girls out in the yard leading her horse, presumably to the riding ring. Mina down.
Hold on.
As she grew close to the time of death she spotted a new figure in the flashing.
Lyndsey.
That’s Lyndsey going up the forbidden stairs.
Twenty minutes later Lyndsey went back down the stairs holding something large.
A container of puppies, no doubt.
A few minutes later, a Mina-shape came rushing down the stairs.
Fifteen minutes after that, Mina went up the stairs and shortly after that the stairs were swarming with EMTs and police.
Charlotte lowered the phone to her lap and stared at the ancient stove across from her as its red digital clock turned from one second to the next.
Everything fits Mina’s story.
Lyndsey went upstairs, summoned, according to her, by Miller himself—
Wait. He was bed-bound. How did he reach her?
She closed the camera app and checked the call log.
There it is.
Miller had called Lyndsey shortly before she was caught on camera heading upstairs.
Lyndsey’s telling the truth, too.
Lyndsey came back down, with the puppies, and then Mina went down to get her phone and call for help. No one went up the main staircase between the time Mina last saw him alive and when she returned to find him dead.
So if someone went upstairs to finish him off, they had to have gone up the servant stairs.
Unless that person was Mina.
Charlotte walked to the hall at the back of the kitchen. Finding it empty, she tried the door on the left that logically should have led to the servant stairs. She guessed right, and found herself staring up the steep steps to the upstairs hallway, the upper door having been left open by Mina.
Fifteen minutes.
The person who went up those stairs and killed Miller with an iron rabbit only had fifteen minutes to sneak up there. They had to know Mina was downstairs and that Miller was still alive.
Very opportunistic. Very small window.
Charlotte scowled.
Very unlikely.
“Charlotte?”
Charlotte heard her name called from the kitchen and walked back down the hall.
Mina had returned in a pair of tights and a long shirt that hung to her knees. Her hair was wet and loosely towel-dried.
“I was looking at the stairway,” she explained.
Mina ruffled her hair with her fingers. “Sorry for the way I look. I figured you’d rather see me wet than wait until I put on my face and did my hair.”
“Who knew Mr. Miller wasn’t dead?”
“What?”
“Who could have known that he was down but not dead?”
“Just me, I guess—”
“And the girls. You said you talked to them here?”
“Oh, yes. Well, I told them he’d fallen and that I was calling an ambulance, so they knew he was alive.”
“And you said you called it out to Lyndsey?”
“Yes, but she was gone.”
“But you did scream it outside? What did you say exactly?”
“I said, he’s alive.”
“So anyone on the grounds could have heard that?”
Mina frowned. “I suppose so.”
Charlotte nodded. “I’m going to go see if the stable boy is here.”
Chapter Twenty
With Mina’s direction, Charlotte walked through the back door, located at the end of the hall she’d just been in. Someone could have sneaked in the back door and up the stairs unseen while Mina was talking to the girls in the kitchen. It would have been fairly easy.
The question was, who would think to do that? Who would hear he’s alive screamed from the house and think, well then, I should probably run up the back steps and brain him with a rabbit?
Maybe it was someone already in the hallway? Maybe someone heard that he’d fallen as Mina was telling the girls and gone up to see. Maybe, finding him supine, they’d grabbed the rabbit in an opportunistic fit of anger and…thunk.
Well, according to the autopsy report, thunk thunk.
Charlotte spotted a turquoise blue bike leaning against the side of a long row of stalls. She found a young man in the third stall down, cherry-picking lumps of horse dung from the hay bedding inside.
“Todd?”
The boy looked up. He was a muscular kid, built thick with a floppy mop of yellow hair that hung over his eyes. He wasn’t bad-looking, with high cheekbones and a square jaw, but he had a crooked nose and a collection of tattoos that suggested he probably hadn’t made a lot of plans beyond his immediate future.
“Yeah?”
“Were you here the day they found Mr. Miller?”
He stopped picking and leaned on the pitchfork. “Boy, you get right to the point.”
“If I was getting right to the point I’d just ask you if you killed him.”
Todd barked a laugh. “You’re funny. You sayin’ he was murdered?”
“No, we’re just making sure all the bases are covered.”
“You a cop?”
“Not exactly. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh yeah? Who hired you?”
“Mina.”
Todd nodded and returned to mucking the stall. “Well, I didn’t kill him.”
“Were you here the day he died?”
“Yeah, but not when it happened. I worked that morning and was long gone by the time they found the old man.”
“Did you see anyone that morning?”
Todd stopped working again and leaned the apple-picker against the wall. He walked out of the stall and pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Eyeing Charlotte, he lit one.
“How old are you?”
She
