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The house wasn’t completely ready for human habitation yet, but that was only a matter of time. With Gran’s unfortunate interior decorator having been struck down on the battlefield and carted off, the road was clear for more sensible minds to figure out how to repopulate the house with the kind of stuff that turns a house into a home.

And Marge and Tex had decided to wrest control away from Gran, and to do whatthey wanted for a change, and Gran had reluctantly decided to let them. She’d even dropped her plans to turn the house into a show home, where hordes of visitors would come shuffling through on a daily basis, preventing a normal existence for the Pooles.

So the new house would have some old stuff making a comeback, and some new stuff to appear onto the scene, sourced from the visits Odelia’s parents planned to pay to the many furniture stores and home decoration shops that festoon our neck of the woods.

“So how did you do it, Max?” asked Harriet as we all sat side by side on the porch swing, which had been dragged from the storage facility where the Pooles had kept their stuff until the house was ready. “How did you figure out that Titta killed her sister?”

“Well…” I said as I marshaled my thoughts. “I think I first started putting two and two together when I saw that missing photo album.”

“What missing photo album?”

“You’ll remember that when Neda’s house was burgled a second time—or seemingly a second time, since it was never burgled the first time—that the only thing that was found missing was a photo album. At the time I thought it was odd that the missing album would look completely different than the other ones. I mean, Neda had a dozen or so of them, and they were all expensive ones. Fancy, you know. But this? This was a small album, and looked as if it was handmade. It looked… Oriental. So that made me think.”

“Why would anyone want to steal a photo album?” asked Brutus.

“Unless it held a clue to the identity of Neda’s killer,” I pointed out. “Which it did. That photo album belonged to Titta. It contained pictures of the orphanage she wanted to show to her sister—the orphans she cared so much about, and for whom she was making a plea with Neda to donate money.”

“Which Neda wanted nothing to do with,” said Harriet, nodding.

“Exactly. And then of course there was the witness on the red bike.”

“What witness? What red bike?”

“Well, the morning Neda was killed, a traffic accident happened just down the road from where she lived. Head-on collision. And one of the drivers had seen a person pass by on a red bike—a potential witness. And since they couldn’t come to an agreement on who was to blame for the accident, one of the drivers desperately wanted to get in touch with that witness to support their statement. They had no idea if it was a man or a woman since the witness was wearing a hoodie, but they knew they were on a red bike.”

“One of those rental bikes,” Dooley explained.

“Yes, Titta had come down to Long Island on the Jitney and had rented a bike from one of the rental agencies that rent to tourists. So I suddenly put two and two together and wondered if this witness could possibly be connected to our murder case.”

“And she could,” said Dooley.

“Odelia contacted the rental agency, and showed them a picture of Titta, which they recognized. Turns out she’d been in town the morning Neda died, and not in Brooklyn with her friend Kirstin as she claimed. Chase got in touch with Titta’s friend again, and this time she admitted she had no idea where Titta had been. Titta said she’d been in a traffic accident, and could her friend tell the police, in case they called, that she was in Brooklyn, since she didn’t need the aggravation. So Kirstin did, as a favor to her friend.”

“That wasn’t nice,” said Dooley.

“Or it was too nice,” Brutus grunted.

“So how about the safe?” asked Harriet. “How did Titta manage to open her sister’s safe?”

“Well, that safe has always been in that house. It was installed by Titta and Neda’s dad. And since Neda had taken over the house, she’d also taken over the safe. Now Neda had never seen the need to change the combination—possibly she didn’t even know how. So Titta took a gamble and discovered that the safe still operated on the same combination she remembered from when she lived there herself twenty years ago.”

“Did she take those jewels and that money and that gold for the orphanage?” asked Harriet. “Cause I could understand if she did. Noble cause and all.”

“She took it so she could make the murder look like a robbery gone wrong.”

“It wasn’t really murder, though, was it?” said Brutus. “It was an accident.”

“That’s for the judge to decide,” I said with a shrug. “Not up to us, Brutus.”

“So how about that diary?” asked Harriet. “What was the deal with that?”