Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

“The lawyers put all the rest, except the furniture, in storage. It’ll stay there until the lawyers figure out who gets what. The wills are more complicated, but that’s the attorneys’ battle. My battle... My concern is who gets the money from the insurance policies.”

“Does the housecleaner still have a key?”

Wilcoxin shook his head. “That’s hers.”

“Any of the neighbors have keys?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I’ll give you the code for the alarm system.”

I left with Wilcoxin’s headache. I spent the rest of that Friday afternoon in my Oakland office, examining the Terrell file and making some notes of my own.

Saturday morning I drove to Alameda. The Terrells had lived at the end of a wide, tree-lined street in a part of town known as the Gold Coast, full of solid old homes. I’d grown up in a Victorian house nearby. The street, like others in this section, dead-ended at the lagoon which had once been the shore of San Francisco Bay, until the late 1950s when developers had filled in a portion of the bay to create the area called South Shore.

The Terrells’ house was a two-story stucco that looked as though it dated to the nineteen thirties. I parked in the double driveway and let myself in the front door. After deactivating the security system, I stood in the entryway for a moment, getting my bearings, waiting for... What? Vibrations, maybe, or feelings. I’ve felt it at other crime scenes. I felt it here.

The investigators had long since located and removed any physical evidence. The gore had been scrubbed away. Drapes covered the windows and there was dust on the nearby stair rail. The house had that air of disuse a place gets when there’s no one home for a long time. It had been closed up since the Terrells’ deaths, while the heirs and their lawyers duked it out over who got what.

In the living room to my left, a sofa faced an empty fireplace. Heavy chairs surrounded a long table in the dining room. A cabinet with empty glass shelves stood against the wall.

Upstairs, I found a large master suite with a bathroom, and three smaller bedrooms sharing another bathroom. Closets, drawers, and cupboards were empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t much left in the Terrell house, just furniture, which, along with the house itself, was awaiting disposition.

I went back downstairs. A small room off the dining room had served as Claude’s office. Behind this, separated from the kitchen by a counter, was a family room. It had once been furnished, according to the photographs in the file, with a sofa, several reclining chairs, a large-screen TV, and other entertainment appliances. Now all the electronic toys were gone.

In front of me, a sliding glass door led outside to a covered patio and a fenced backyard that sloped down to the lagoon. The police report indicated the door had been open a few inches the day the Terrells died.

I walked into the kitchen, noting the location of sink, stove, refrigerator, and pantry. I saw a laundry room, where a washer and dryer crouched in semidarkness.

The breakfast nook was at the back of the kitchen, an alcove containing a round table and four chairs. Between the breakfast nook and the patio door was a bare space where the crime-scene photos showed a tall ficus in a terra cotta pot. The floor tile was slightly discolored where the plant had stood.

I set my purse on the counter between the kitchen and family room and dug out a tape measure and a rough sketch I’d drawn. The police report indicated the bodies of Claude and Martha Terrell were found lying diagonally in the middle of the kitchen, with their feet toward the plant. Claude lay on his left side, right arm resting on his hip. Martha lay on her back, to Claude’s right. The autopsy report said there had been a large bruise on the back of Martha’s head. Had she gotten it when she fell? But her head wasn’t near a counter.

I measured distances, noting the information on my sketch. Then I lay down in the space where the Terrells had died, arranging my body in an approximation of the position of Claude’s body. I gazed at my own right hand, imagining my fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Then I looked down the length of my legs, placing the gun on the floor beyond my feet, thinking that if either Claude or Martha had fired the weapon, it seemed to me the gun would have fallen near their bodies. So how did the gun wind up under the table in the breakfast nook, which was near the entrance to the laundry room?

I stared at the sliding glass door that had been open when the housecleaner found the bodies. Maybe that initial theory of an intruder wasn’t so far off the mark. Murder-suicide didn’t feel right, particularly without a note. Of course, suicides don’t always leave notes that lay out their reasons in neat and tidy prose.