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At which point, the forensics team from Portland cut in, wanting to know who the hell this woman was and why Ned had allowed her to enter an active crime scene. With imperious dignity, Miranda replied, “I am the owner of this establishment!”

“Co-owner.”

“And I have solved the how of it!”

Now she just needed to figure out the who of it. And the why.

* * *

“T HAT STILL LEAVES the murder in the lighthouse,” said Ned. “The detectives in charge are convinced the second death was a suicide.”

Miranda couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Even with the discrepancy between the height of the chair and the dangling of Fairfax DePoy’s feet?

And how about the grease on the rope? That was to pull the weight of the body over the beam.

The killer looped the rope around DePoy’s neck and then hoisted him up. ”

They were standing in the hallway outside the reading room, having been chased away and properly chastised by forensics. The CID detectives had taken note, though. One of them had gone to the basement to check on Miranda’s proposed solution, while another stayed up top to keep an eye on her.

“My mom used to watch you on TV,” he said, unsmiling. “Back when there were only six channels.”

Miranda ignored this. Never mind that she was in her prime well after the cable TV revolution.

(Those high-tech days!) Edgar had gone upstairs to make sure Emmy was okay, and Miranda could hear his footsteps and the skidding joy of the dog racing about overhead.

Her thoughts went back to the saucer and fork that Owen had left up there the night before.

.. She’d almost seen the significance of this, but the talk of suicide brought her back around to the matter at hand.

“Doc Meadows thinks Fairfax was already dead when he was hanged,” she pointed out to Ned. “How could a dead man hang himself inside a locked room?”

“Dead—or dying,” Ned corrected. “All Doc said was that he didn’t think the noose was the primary cause of death.”

“Lured to the lighthouse, Fairfax saw the chair and the noose and rope, perhaps a speargun in the killer’s hand, and he knew what was coming.

He stuffed the paper into his mouth, tried to swallow the secret the page held, began to choke.

The killer strung him up, assuming it would still pass as suicide. ”

The detective was listening in. A lanky man with a sinewy look about him, he was in a dark jacket and jeans (what counted as semiformal in Oregon).

He said, “Ma’am, with due respect to your Dr. Meadows, he’s a local GP, not an expert in crime scene investigations.

Mr. DePoy could have swallowed the piece of paper and then tightened the rope around his neck as he was choking.

He climbed up on the chair, had a contorted spasm as he died, kicking the chair away.

The rope then somehow tightened up as he fell, which could explain the apparent gap between Mr. DePoy’s feet and the chair. ”

“Apparent gap?” she said. “ Apparent? He would’ve had to be standing in midair when he kicked away the chair.

No. The answer is simple: someone else hoisted him up, pulled too far, perhaps not realizing how short DePoy really was.

When I placed the chair under his feet, he was dangling inches above it. ”

“Nonetheless, it could have happened. In fact, it’s the only way it could have happened, as far as we can see.”

“A rather complex way to die.”

“Ma’am, the deceased was alone inside the lighthouse, with the door locked. It was bolted shut from the inside. The windows were barred, no access to the floor above, no hidden trapdoor in the floor below. The room was entirely sealed off. If that isn’t suicide, what is?”

“And the grandfather clock? Explain that!”

Unaccustomed to the sudden breathtaking leaps Miranda was capable of, the detective turned to the others for help. “What is she talking about? The clock in the lighthouse? The one that fell over?”

Andrew answered for her: “The pieces seemed scattered.”

The detective’s brow furrowed. “A toppled grandfather clock will do that. How is that an issue?”

“It isn’t an issue until it is! And then it is an issue!” she declared, to a deepening of the furl on the detective’s brow.

“Ma’am, I don’t follow...”

“It’s ‘The Case of the Clockwork Corpse’! But the opposite of it.”

Leaning in, Andrew whispered, “He may not be as knowledgeable about the Pastor Fran canon as some of us.”

“A body hidden inside a standing clock!” she said. The pieces of the puzzle were moving, were snapping into place—almost literally.

“A body? Inside a clock? Where?!” said the detective.

“On TV!” she cried.

If sighs could kill... “Ma’am, I really don’t have time for this.”

“In that episode, the nefarious villain Professor Nemesis—”

“Wait,” said the detective. “The nemesis on your show was actually named Nemesis?”

“He had to make room for the body, so he removed the internal mechanisms—when the clock didn’t chime, that was the clue that solved the case.

But here we have something quite different.

The question isn’t ‘How do the clues fit together?’ in the figurative sense, but how they fit together in the actual sense.

The pieces of the lighthouse clock were scattered far and wide.

How do they fit together? Do they fit together? Andrew, darling!”

She yelled as though summoning him from a great distance, even though he was standing right next her.

“Yes?”

“You are still deputized, I believe. That should grant you access to the lighthouse. I want you to go through and put that clock back together again, the inner workings, in its entirety, see if everything fits.”

“You want me to reassemble a grandfather clock? That would take ages. And how would I even know where everything belongs? Who would know how to put it back together? What, am I supposed to call up my ‘clock guy,’ see what he says?”

“Excellent idea! Yes, do call him. That’s the spirit.”

“I don’t have a ‘clock guy.’ I was being sardonic.”

“Oh? Well, don’t. It doesn’t suit you.”

“And what would I even be looking for? Missing pieces?”

“Not missing pieces, extra pieces. One in particular. Something about this long”—she held her hands a foot or so apart—“And this wide.” She held up her thumb and finger in an OK sign. Not the most accurate measurements ever given, but enough to go by, she was sure.

“The assignment seems both incredibly vague and impossibly specific,” said Andrew, his heart sinking. He could see what was coming. “You want me to put a clock back together just to see if there are any extra bits left over?”

“Precisely! I want you to look for something that could be squeezed into the barrel of a door bolt,” she explained.

“The barrel of a bolt?”

“The tubular shaft that the bolt slides into when the door is unlocked. Look for something—a spring, perhaps—that could be pushed into it so that, as it slowly expanded, it would push the bolt back into place, locking the door after the fact.”

The detective had become increasingly animated as he listened to what Miranda was suggesting. “A spring?” he asked.

“A heavy industrial-style spring. Something strong and slow enough to gradually push the bolt into place.”

Fumbling with his phone, the detective brought up a gallery of images.

“We cataloged everything,” he said, and began scrolling through them at a blur until he came to various images of clock parts, as tagged and numbered and photographed on the floor of the lighthouse.

He stopped at one of the items. “Like this?”

It was a thin copper rod with a long but delicate spring running down it.

“Too small.”

He scrolled through to an image of a grooved pendulum weight. “Or this?”

“Too thick—and not springy enough.”

“How about this?”

There it was: a heavy-duty metal spring.

“Taken from Owen’s pile of industrial parts, no doubt,” she said. “Along with the rope and can of grease.”

They crowded in around the detective’s phone. “It certainly looks like it could fit into the barrel of the door’s bolt,” said the detective.

Ned and Andrew agreed.

“You place the spring behind the bolt,” said Miranda, “then pull back on the bolt to open the door, squeezing the spring in. When you close the door behind you, the spring slowly decompresses, pushing the bolt into place and then falling away, onto the floor.”

“Where it would have immediately been spotted when we pried open the door,” said Ned, “except for the other loose pieces scattered about to cover it up, the cogs and gears and gewgaws and various oddments of a clockwork mechanism. The spring among them. It would be assumed to have come from the clock as well, not that it had been used to lock the door behind the killer after the killer escaped. Ingenious!”

“Thank you!” said Miranda.

“So, not suicide?” said the detective,

“Of course not!” said Miranda. “This wasn’t improvised. This wasn’t something thrown together at the last moment. Our killer was planning to kill both men from the start, first Kane and then DePoy.”

Two locked rooms, two impossible murders. Both solved with a decisive Gordian blow by Miranda Abbott. The only thing the detective from Portland could think to say was “Wow.”

“You are so truly welcome!” She swept toward the front door.

“Wait!” said the detective. “Who are you? Really?”

She stopped, flung her scarf over shoulder. “I’m Pastor Fran!”