Late Check-Out: Lights OutFour hours until check-out

The door gave a finger's width and stopped. On the wall of the hall is the history board the rental company put up, and every name on it is a name you know.

Hour Two: the accusation

An oak-framed history board on the wall beside a manor stair: four engraved brass plates along the top, four printed sheets pinned in the panels beneath them, and the carved newel post at the foot of the banister. Nobody there.

The rental company's history board hangs by the stair, brass letters on oak, the kind of thing guests photograph:

SALLOWMERE HALL
1612 great stair built
1665 shut up in the
     plague year: the
     Hale household
1912 bought by Edmund
     Locke
1941 requisitioned
1998 sold
2026 restored

Under it, somebody has pinned the host's messages from the week, printed out, as if for you. You read them in order:

night 1  Thank you for
         keeping the fire.
night 2  You remembered
         where you put the
         key. She is pleased.
night 3  You stopped them.
         She knew you would.

Every one signed P.

On the hall table, where the glass case was, somebody has laid out the cards of the old country-house murder game from the cupboard in the dining room, sixteen of them, face up, the way the game ends: a person, a room, and the thing it was done with. Only these cards are not the game's. They are this house's.

Illustrated cards from an old country-house murder game laid out face up in two rows on the hall table, their small paintings showing faces, rooms of a house, a fire and a red lamp, with an empty glass case pushed back behind them. Nobody in sight.

Make the accusation the way the old game does: who, in which room, by which light. Tap them in that order.

The accusation: nothing yet

Down to the cellar.