Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves

repeated as if testing the idea. “But Jake, you don’t really think …”
    “She does.” I angled my head at the ceiling.
    Charmian was upstairs in Jonathan's room; we’d decided she should stay here instead of going to a motel, so I had another guest, which I wanted about as much as typhoid fever. But I just couldn’t bear the thought of sending her to stay alone.
    Now Ellie and I were in the dining room, cleaning up chunks of plaster. Rag ends of wallpaper clung to the plaster pieces and broken sticks of lath. “What a mess,” I mourned.
    Raines's eyeglasses still lay out on the table. “He meant to come back,” Ellie said, picking them up.
    “If he was going to jump, he wouldn’t be needing them,” I countered. Experimentally, Ellie took off her own and put his on.
    “Criminy,” she said, peering through them.
    I thought she was talking about the glasses being so strong, about how if he’d been wearing them, as perhaps he ought to have been, he wouldn’t have fallen.
    “Take a look,” Ellie said, handing them to me.
    But when I put them to my eyes, I saw … nothing. Or nothing different, anyway. “Plain glass.” I got more distortion looking out through the old panes of the dining room window.
    “These are fakes,” Ellie said. “No prescription at all. But for what? So he would look more intellectual?” She peered through them again. “Or to make it look as if he needed them. Like a disguise?”
    “I don’t know, Ellie. And what difference does it make now, anyway?”
    I dropped the last chunk of plaster into a trash bag and swept up the dust, already making a mental list for the hardware store: more plaster, and new filters for the respirator I’d be wearing when the plaster dried, so I could sand it all down again without having to get in line for a lung transplant.
    And that sanding needed to be complete inside of four days, since last time I looked, the untimely death of a mysterious visitor that no one knew anything about was not grounds to cancel a Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting.
    I tied the trash bag with a wire twist—wondering if maybe I could just crawl inside the bag and stay there— and set it in the butler's pantry, which was turning into ground zero for the repair project.
    Tools, tarps, a bucket, and a jumbo packet of sandpaper like a harbinger of the dark days to come stood where the good china and crystal had resided, in the golden days before I moved here. Once upon a time, this house had been home to people of quality: vigorous businessmen and ladies whose housekeeping outranked mine by several orders of magnitude.
    Sadly I regarded the pantry shelves, where now the only eating or drinking implements were a set of plastic cutlery, paper plates, and a thermos for when we went on picnics.
    And then I spotted it, glittering in the corner beneath the low shelf: some kind of high-tech gadget. Battery-pack handle; it was obvious that it twisted, to turn the device on… .
    At the other end, the glassy, rounded tip of a long, stalky appendage glowed suddenly. Ellie peered over my shoulder to get a closer look at the thing. “Is that an eyepiece?”
    She pointed at a roundish, eye-sized aperture in the body of the thing. “May I see it?”
    She grasped the black stalklike part in one hand to keep it from waving around, held the cylindrical body of the object with the other hand, and peered into it.
    “Oh! Jacobia, it's a …”
    I’d figured it out: a fiber-optic viewing device. Victor, my ex-husband the philandering brain surgeon, had brought this sort of thing home sometimes to show to Sam, in case Sam might like to follow in his father's footsteps.
    The thought made me shudder, especially since right now Sam was with his father and, probably, one of his father's young lady friends. Victor found them even here in downeast Maine, and when he couldn’t find them, he imported them. And of course Jill Frey was with them, too.
    I frowned at the high-tech gadget. “What the