The Locked Room

The rain had not stopped for two days, which meant the river road was impassable, which meant that whoever had taken the Kellner jewels was still in Riedenfeld.

Magistrate Hans Bremer stood in the Kellner drawing room and counted problems.

The first problem was the window. It had been locked from the inside with the original seventeenth-century mechanism, and a seventeenth-century mechanism — he had examined it twice — could not be manipulated from outside. The thief had not come in through the window.

The second problem was the door. It had been locked from the outside, key removed, and neither the Kellners nor their staff could account for any missing key.

The third problem was that these two facts together suggested the jewels had been removed by someone who had simply ceased to exist after the theft.

The fourth problem — and Hans pressed his thumb against his temple as he acknowledged it — was standing by the fireplace, watching him work with an expression of polite innocence that he had last seen on her face at age seven, when she had broken his office window with a cricket ball and denied everything.

"Lena," he said.

"You're doing the thumb thing," his daughter said. "You only do that when you've already worked something out and don't want to say it."

"Tell me what you were doing in this house last night."

She turned to look at the fire. Outside, the rain continued its patient erasure of the town.

"The same thing you were doing," she said finally. "Looking for them."