During the slow season, Wilma didn’t open up till midmorning, ten o’clock, and that was only the grocery store section: the restaurant didn’t open until eleven-thirty, for lunch. The stairs were in the grocery section, in the rear, near a check-in desk that was usually unmanned this time of year. It was somewhat unusual for even Wilma herself to be in the place before nine-thirty; she didn’t live on the premises, but across the street in a two-story white clapboard. That’s where Charley lived, too, though this was the first I’d heard him actually admit it, even if it was common knowledge around here. He said he woke up and Wilma was gone; he supposed she’d decided to come over early and do some cleaning. Sometimes she’d go over about an hour early and do that. This time, while in the process of doing her cleaning, she had apparently stumbled and fallen down the steps. Apparently.

At any rate, it had obviously happened before ten-thirty, which was when Charley came across the street to work, and found her.

I climbed the stairs and walked down the narrow hall to the room Paul Thomas, that is, Turner, had so recently vacated. He hadn’t even shut the door, he’d gone out so fast. The drawers he’d emptied to fill his suitcase hung open like tongues sticking out at me. I went over the room carefully, to see if he’d left anything behind in his haste, and he had. Under the bed, was his stack of girlie magazines. I took them with me.

I stood and looked down the stairwell. Looked at the railing, at those narrow walls. There was only one way Wilma could’ve fallen here and died, and that was if she were unconscious before she started her fall.

I rejoined Charley, who was still sitting in the booth, with his hands folded.

“Who came around?” I asked him.

“I don’t know exactly. I called Sam Keenan and he took care of all of it.”

Keenan was a semi-retired doctor in his early sixties, from Chicago, who now lived in a cottage near mine, year-round.