Steamed to Death by Peg Cochran Page B

imagine what the police saw in here, can you?”
    Alice shook her head, and Gigi was about to do the same when she stopped abruptly. She moved closer to the sauna door and examined it carefully, running her fingers across the smooth wooden finish.
    “I think I know what they saw,” she said, straightening up with a look of triumph on her face.
    “What? Don’t keep us in suspense,” Sienna demanded.
    “See that?” Gigi ran her hand across the wooden door again.
    “What?” Alice adjusted her glasses on her nose. “I don’t see anything.”
    “Feel it,” Gigi suggested.
    Alice delicately brushed her fingertips across the sauna door. “Feels like it’s scratched.”
    “Exactly!” Gigi said.
    Sienna shrugged. “So what?”
    “So,” Gigi explained, “I think someone might have put something in front of the door. To block it.”
    Alice’s hand flew to her mouth. “Then it was murder,” she said, her blue eyes round with shock.
    “What do you think they used?” Sienna looked around the bathroom. “It had to have been something close at hand.”
    Gigi nodded. “My best guess would be a chair of some sort.” She gestured toward the sauna door. “Wedged under the handle. Hardly foolproof, but if Felicity panicked . . .”
    “But when I found Felicity”—Alice gulped hard, and her face blanched white—“she was already half out of the sauna.”
    “The killer must have hung around and removed the chair thinking the police would be none the wiser.” Gigi wandered into the bedroom, and the other two followed. “It may have even been the killer who opened the sauna door to make it look as if Felicity tried to get out.”
    Gigi looked around the room. It didn’t lack for chairs—plump chairs, straight chairs, reclining chairs. Any one of them could have been the one the murderer used. She wondered if there might be some sort of mark on the back, and began examining them one by one. Nothing.
    She glanced at a chair in the corner that had an almost abandoned look, as if no one ever sat in it. Something caught her eye. Maybe . . . She moved around the room examining the other pieces of furniture.
    “Well, Anja certainly isn’t much of a housekeeper,” Gigi declared suddenly. “But I think I’ve found our chair.”
    She was rewarded by the dumbfounded looks on the faces of Sienna and Alice.
    “This is going to be good.” Sienna sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand to her back.
    “How on earth?” Alice sputtered.
    “If you look around”—Gigi waved a hand toward the furniture in the room—“you’ll see that Anja, or whoever does the housekeeping, is in the habit of vacuuming around the bed, chairs and so forth.”
    “My mother always taught me to move everything to one side and do a decent job. A job worth doing is a job worth doing well ,” Alice quoted.
    Gigi pointed at the carpet. “You can see that things haven’t been moved. The carpet is so thick, the feet of all the furniture have left indentations in the pile. If,” she added, feeling more like Miss Jane Marple by the minute, “the housekeeper moved them regularly, the marks would not be so distinct.”
    Gigi tilted the chaise longue slightly so they could see the deep well left in the thick rug.
    “But this chair”—Gigi walked toward the chair orphaned in the corner—“is not in its exact former location. You can see the original craterous dents in the carpet, but the legs of the chair don’t match up. They’ve begun creating a second set of marks in the pile.”
    “So the chair was moved!” Alice said, wide-eyed.
    “It would seem so,” Gigi said. “It also”—she gestured toward the chair back—“looks to be about the right height to have made that scratch on the sauna door.”
    Sienna slid off the bed and went over to examine the chair. “It’s wood on back,” she said, peering behind it. “And there are metal grommets along the top.”
    “Yup,” Gigi replied. “Someone used that chair to