Page 36 of The Girl Who Knew Too Much

“Peggy died in a bathtub, not a pool, but, yes, almost exactly like Gloria Maitland.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“I’m the one who found Peggy’s body. Trust me, there are a lot of similarities between the two death scenes. Blow to the back of the head. Blood on the tiles. Death by drowning. A link to Nick Tremayne.”

“And you don’t believe in coincidences.”

She studied his hard profile. “Do you?”

“No,” he said. “Any idea what Hackett’s Tremayne story involved?”

“Peggy was pursuing the usual angle—TremayneRumored to Be Smitten with Aspiring Actress. This Time It Looks Serious. That kind of thing. But I think something happened in the course of Peggy’s research.”

“What makes you say that?”

“When she started the piece, she treated it like any other assignment. It was going to be a very nice little scoop forWhispers. But at the last minute, just before deadline, Peggy told our editor that she needed more time. She said she had uncovered something much bigger than anotherHot Star Seduces Young Actressstory. But a few days later she was dead.”

Oliver contemplated that for a moment. “How did it happen to be you who found the body?”

Irene watched the road unwind in front of the powerful car. “There’s no big mystery about that. One morning Peggy didn’t show up at the office. When Velma couldn’t get her on the telephone, she sent me to Peggy’s apartment to make sure everything was all right. She was afraid that Peggy had started drinking heavily again. When I got there the door was unlocked. I went in and... found the body in the tub.”

“I can see why a second drowning death would make you start to wonder about a pattern.”

“I went into the living room and telephoned for the police and an ambulance, but it seemed to take forever for them to arrive.” Irene shivered. “I was going to wait outside on the front step but I kept thinking about the scene in the bathroom.”

“What about it?”

“Something didn’t look right.”

“It was a death scene. No surprise that it didn’t look right.”

“I know, but—”

“You went back for another look, didn’t you?”

She winced. “How did you know? You’re right. I don’t know why I felt like I had to do that. Maybe it was just to reassure myself that she really was dead and that there was nothing more I could do. But in hindsight I think it was the blood that bothered me.”

“The blood in the water?”

“No. Well, there was blood in the water, of course, because of the gash on Peggy’s head. But there was also some blood on the floor behind one of the claw-feet on the tub. I found a little more on the tiles under the sink.”

Oliver said nothing. He just listened.

“But here’s what really bothered me,” she said. “There was no bath mat on the floor and no towel hanging on the hook near the tub.”

She waited, wondering if he would conclude she was crazy, paranoid, or simply over-imaginative.

“You think the killer used the bath mat and a towel to clean up after the murder,” he said.

He said it as calmly as if she had made a casual observation on the weather.

She concentrated hard on the view of the road through the windshield, but all she could see were Peggy’s blank eyes staring up at her from under the bloody water.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, with control. “Yes. I think she was struck from behind before she got into the tub. I thinkthere was too much blood on the floor and maybe on the walls to be consistent with a fall in the tub.”

“Anything else?”

“One more thing. I couldn’t find Peggy’s notes. She may have had a problem with the bottle but at her core she was a crack reporter. She kept very good notes. She’s the one who taught me how to get the quotes right and how to make it look as if you’d gotten a quote when the subject never actually gave you one.”