out of bed.
And then I got dressed in the darkness and let myself out of the room. But I already told you about that, didn’t I?
I had things to do and I got busy doing them. My first stop was Young George’s Room, way down at the other end of the long hallway. I didn’t have to worry that someone would catch sight of me, because I wasn’t doing anything all that suspicious. I could always say I was looking for an unoccupied bathroom, or stretching my legs, but I didn’t encounter anyone so it didn’t matter.
The only thing that would have been hard to explain was picking the lock and letting myself into Rathburn’s room, and to minimize the chance of discovery I spent as little time at the task as possible. Earlier I’d tried my own key in the lock for starters, and I wouldn’t have been much surprised if it had worked. Those old skeleton keys are often virtually interchangeable, especially when the locks are old and well used.
The key didn’t work, but my picks did, and in not much more time than it would take to turn a key. I darted inside, closed and locked the door, and stopped myself even as I was fumbling for the light switch. No need to let light leak out into the hallway from underneath the door. The average person would never notice, but there was a murderer in our midst. He was the one person likely to notice, and the one whose attention I most particularly wanted to escape.
I stayed put for about an hour and a half, going through the effects of the late Jonathan Rathburn and searching for something in writing that he might have left behind. I found enough to keep me interested until I figured the household had had a chance to settle in for the night. Then I raided the closet for clothes and took the pillow from the bed and let myself out of there.
I was downstairs and headed out the door when I remembered the kris. I remembered what room it was in but wasn’t sure how to get there, and I was tempted to settle for some other imperial artifact—an assegai spear, say, or a horn from the oryx. But I found the kris in due course. Next I rifled a pantry, looking for some kind of twine or cord, and couldn’t come up with anything better than a ball of cotton thread. It didn’t seem very strong to me. Then I came across the fishing line, and took them both.
The line was what I used for actually lowering the dummy, but the thread came in handy for stitching the thing together. I used the pillow and some of Rathburn’s clothes for stuffing, and I tied a pair of his shoes to the pants cuffs by their laces, and tied the cuffs of the jacket sleeves tight around a pair of my own gloves. (If he’d had any gloves, I couldn’t find them.) I couldn’t get the head so it looked right—it was just a ball of clothes tied in shape with string—and up close it was about as deceptive as a scarecrow, which, come to think of it, it rather resembled.
I reminded myself that no one was going to get a close look at it, but all the same I retied it. I wrapped a dark shirt around the top portion, so that it looked like a cap of dark hair over the white undershirt that was supposed to look like a face. Lowering the sucker turned out to be one of those things that are easier said than done, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that (a) I was lying on my belly with my arms out over the edge and the flashlight in my mouth and (b) I was still petrified of falling. I had to lower it slowly, too, because I knew how amateurishly I had constructed it. If it landed with any impact I was sure it would come apart, and while that may also happen with real people dropped from a great height, I somehow didn’t think the results would be convincing in the present instance.
So I lowered the dummy slowly and gently, resisting the impulse to jiggle the line and adjust its position once it had come to rest. I gave the end of the fishing line a toss, transferred the little flashlight from my mouth to my hand, and looked