Constance Crandall

Constance Crandall is 32 and has taught Sunday school at the family church since she was eighteen. Born in the house where she still lives, the younger of the banker's two daughters, she lost her mother when she was small. She attended a girls' school, never married and says teaching children to read the Bible is the only job where no one asks whether she did what she should.

She shares the house with her father and stepmother, on a block of austere residences with windows and drawn curtains. She wakes early, prays before breakfast and spends Sunday afternoons in a small church room, with low chairs and a blackboard, teaching the six-year-olds to sing hymns. She sews, embroiders, drinks tea with ginger biscuits and is known for never being late to an appointment.

She is sturdy, with a broad, pale face, a square chin, pale, steady eyes and thin lips. She combs her light brown hair back into a low bun and always wears high-collared silk, buttoned to the neck, with a gold brooch on her chest. She speaks softly and slowly, in the sentences of a teacher, and takes offense easily, without raising her voice.

She says she came in through the kitchen door and saw her father on the sofa, eyes closed, as if asleep, and then the rest. She called the maid, sent for the doctor and says she remembers nothing more. About Uncle Jasper, who arrived unannounced on Wednesday, she states that he argued with her father about money in the parlor, and that her father shouted not a cent. About the maid, she recalls that on Wednesday her stepmother gave her notice until the end of the month because of what went missing from the pantry.

Constance knows a daughter who barely called her stepmother mother will have to explain more than the others. It could be the reserve of a woman raised not to show feeling. It could be someone who chooses the names she cites with the same caution with which she chooses hymns. The detective will have to decide which.