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

“Come on, Doc,” Sheriff Lens objected. “If you think she let another person into the room, it just couldn’t be!”

“Maybe not a flesh-and-blood person,” Kate said, “but she was dealing with spirits.”

“Kate—” her husband began.

“I know you don’t believe me, but what other explanation is there? She summoned a spirit who took my sharpened paring knife from the kitchen counter, came in here, and killed her with it.”

“Why would the spirit do that?” I asked, trying to reason with her. “She was their friend.”

Her husband was exasperated by the whole business. “Let’s stop imagining spirits. There are none. The woman obviously cut her own throat. There’s no other explanation.”

“Then what happened to the knife?” Sheriff Lens asked.

“Perhaps it was made of ice that melted and mingled with the blood from her throat.”

I shook my head. “Ice wouldn’t have been sharp enough for that wound, and everyone was searched, remember? No one could have been hiding an ice dagger.”

“She might have used a razor blade and swallowed it as she lay dying.”

“After cutting her throat? Hardly, Mr. Hale.” But his bizarre suggestion had triggered something in my mind. In addition to sword-swallowers, there were people who could swallow things like razor blades. Either of the Hales might have taped a razor blade to their leg that might have escaped our search. They might have used it to cut Sandra Gleam’s throat and then swallowed it.

“What are you thinking, Doc?” the sheriff asked.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to take Mr. and Mrs. Hale down to the hospital for a fluoroscope examination.”

“An X-ray?”

I nodded. “Just to make certain there are no sharp objects in them.”

Art Hale grumbled a bit, but I drove them to the hospital after the sheriff’s deputies and the coroner arrived. I was careful not to let them out of my sight, not even for a restroom visit, until after I’d given each of them a full-body X-ray scan. There were no razor blades or any other weapons hidden either inside or outside their bodies. Whatever had killed Sandra Gleam was still in that room, or had been removed by some method I couldn’t imagine. I thought about a case I’d investigated during my early days in Northmont, involving a man’s throat cut by a slender fishing line. But there was nothing of the sort here, nothing that could be found in two body searches and a fluoroscope examination.

I wanted to go back and examine that windowless room again, before the Hales returned to the house. The sheriff solved the problem for me when he requested that the couple accompany him to his office to make a full statement. I asked Hale for the key to his house in case the deputies were gone from there. He took the ring of keys from his pocket and puzzled over them. “I can’t see close up without my glasses. It’s a Yale lock.”

“This one,” I said, detaching it from the ring. “I’ll get it back to you.” I left them with the sheriff, checking first with my nurse April to make sure there were no emergencies.

The coroner and the deputies were still at the Hale house. Watching them work, I realized how much Sheriff Lens had improved on his investigative techniques during my twenty years in Northmont. One of the deputies even took a small sample of grit he’d noticed on the concrete floor. “If it was a spook, he may have brought something over from the other side,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that.

“How about your measurements?” I asked. “Any chance there could be a secret panel or hidden closet here?”

“Nothing like that, Doc. These walls are solid, the floor’s concrete, and the ceiling has only the single light fixture.”

I carried a stool from the kitchen and climbed up to take a look at that fixture. The frosted glass globe screwed on over two light bulbs. Nothing had been disturbed. Next I went to the light switch by the door and unscrewed the switch plate. There was space enough for a small knife or razor blade behind it, though I saw nothing but a spider hurrying to escape into the woodwork.

Nothing.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the answer might lie not in Northmont but in Boston.

Annabel was not happy when I told her I was driving two hours to Boston the following morning and might have to remain there overnight. I knew she couldn’t accompany me. There was too much work to be done at the Ark. “Why was this woman killed?” I asked. “That’s what I need to know. If Kate Hale realized she was a fraud, why would she go to the trouble of luring her to Northmont to kill her in this manner? And why would her husband kill her without at least seeing what her game was?”

“But who can you talk to in Boston?” Annabel wondered.

“Mrs. Hale says there was a sister. Maybe I can learn something from her.”