The Ledger of Lies — Chapter 2

By the second interview, the detective had stopped taking notes and started simply watching faces, because the words the six heirs offered her mattered a great deal less than what their expressions did while they offered them.

The eldest daughter’s story never wavered, which was itself suspicious — genuine grief rarely delivered its details in such tidy order. The youngest son couldn’t look at the locked window at all, not once, in either interview.

And the muddy footprint, when she finally matched it against every shoe in the house, matched none of them — which meant, she reflected, that either a seventh person had been in that room, or someone very deliberately owned two pairs of the same boots.