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sitting down appeared to overwhelm her; she squeezed her purse and closed her eyes for a long moment.
    Unwin rose from his seat, thinking he might have to catch her. But she steadied herself, blinked several times, and said, “I’m something of a detective myself, you see. I figured out that you are Sivart’s watcher.”
    Unwin knew as she said it that she was right. Lamech had been Sivart’s watcher, just as he was Sivart’s clerk. Now he was all three of them at once: clerk by appointment, detective by promotion, watcher by mistake.
    “My name is Vera Truesdale,” she said, “and I’m the victim of a terrible mystery.”
    Unwin sat down again, knowing he would have to play along for now. He had left his briefcase beside the other chair, so he opened the uppermost desk drawer and found what he was looking for: a pad of notepaper. He set this in front of him and took up a pencil.
    “Proceed,” he said.
    “I arrived from out of town about three weeks ago,” Miss Truesdale said. “I’m staying at the Gilbert Hotel, Room 202. I have repeatedly asked to be moved to a room on a higher floor.”
    Unwin resorted to shorthand to get it all down. “Why do you want to be moved?” he asked.
    “Because of the mystery,” Miss Truesdale said. Her voice had taken on an impatient edge. “If I were staying in a room on a higher floor, they might not be able to get in.”
    “Who might not be able to get in?”
    “I don’t know!” Miss Truesdale nearly shouted. She began to pace the short width of the room. “Every morning I wake up surrounded by . . . odds and ends. Empty champagne glasses, bits of confetti, roses. Things of that nature. They’re scattered over the floor, over my bed. It’s as though someone has thrown a party in my room. I sleep through it, but I don’t feel that I do. I feel as though I haven’t slept in years.”
    “Champagne glasses, confetti, and . . .”
    “Long-stemmed roses.”
    “. . . and roses, long-stemmed. Is that all?”
    “No, that isn’t all,” she said. “The window is open, and the room is freezing cold. There’s a dampness to everything, a terrible, cold dampness. I can hardly stand it any longer. I’m sure I’ll lose my mind if this continues.” She opened her eyes very wide. “Maybe I already have lost my mind. Is that possible, Mr. Lamech?”
    Unwin ignored her question—surely Lamech would not have known the answer either. “I’m certain we’ll be able to help you,” he said, but then set down his pencil and pushed the notepad away. He was already out of his depth. What more was a watcher expected to do?
    “You’ll send him, then,” Miss Truesdale said.
    At a loss, Unwin opened the appointment book on Lamech’s desk. He flipped through the pages until he found the present date. There Unwin’s own name was penciled in for a ten o’clock meeting. He glanced at his watch. Lamech had intended to speak with him in just a few minutes.
    Miss Truesdale was still waiting for an answer.
    “We’ll send someone,” he said.
    She did not seem content with that, and her knuckles turned white as she squeezed her purse again. She was about to speak but was interrupted by a creaking sound that came out of the wall beside the bookshelf. She and Unwin both followed it with their eyes. He imagined a monstrous rat crawling up behind the wainscoting, led by its infallible nose toward the enormous cadaver that Unwin had hidden under the desk. The creaking sound rose nearly to the ceiling, then stopped, and a little bell on Lamech’s desk chimed twice.
    “Aren’t you going to get that?” Miss Truesdale asked.
    Unwin raised his shoulders as Mr. Duden often did in moments of displeasure. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now,” he said. “I have an appointment, one that was scheduled in the usual way.”
    She nodded as though she had expected this all along. “The Gilbert, Room 202. You won’t forget, will you?”
    He wrote that down at the top of the notepad,