“A minister?”Marcus said, when he heard all this. “What the hell did a minister have to offer a woman who was married to one of the richest men in town?”

“Youth, good looks, and charm, for openers,” Miss Howard answered. “Though I think Mrs. Wright is correct when she says that Libby wouldn’t be satisfied with just those qualities. No, it was something else, too. A kind of-respectability, in a way. No, more than that. Redemption, maybe.”

“Redemption?” Lucius said.

“An inside track to God?” I threw in.

“Yes, that’s closer to it, Stevie,” Miss Howard answered, urging the little black Morgan along toward Mr. Picton’s house. “I’m not exactly clear-I want to get the Doctor’s opinion…”

We’d reached the section of our route where the Charlton road became Charlton Street. Standing up to try to peer ahead through the dimming light of the evening, I soon caught sight of the four turrets of Mr. Picton’s house-and I also saw the surrey standing horseless by the porch.

“Well, it looks like you’ll get your chance,” I said to Miss Howard. “They’re back from the Westons’.”

After we’d pulled up to the house, we put the section of boarding and the driver’s seat from the Hatches’ wagon up on the porch and went inside, entering the living room to find Cyrus at Mr. Picton’s piano and our host standing in the far corner, where the Doctor was transferring notes onto a large chalkboard what had appeared. The thing was well on its way to becoming a duplicate of the one at Number 808 Broadway, and Mr. Picton was clearly fascinated by the process.

“Now, this,” Miss Howard said with a smile, making them all aware of our entrance, “is a homey little scene, isn’t it?”

Cyrus stopped playing, and the Doctor and Mr. Picton came over to us quickly. “At last!” the Doctor said. “What news from the Hatch house? Our new board awaits!”

The next hour or so was one of those jumbled times, as everybody tried to explain to everybody else what progress had been made during our first day in town. Things between the Doctor and Clara Hatch had continued to go very well after I’d left the Westons’ farm, and though the girl still hadn’t given out with any actual words, the Doctor was sure that he could eventually coax her to do so. It wouldn’t be easy: Clara was in a state of what the Doctor called “protracted hysterical disassociation,” meaning that what she’d seen was too terrible to make any sense of, either to herself or to anybody else. But Mr. Picton made it clear that we had to get her to talk: he didn’t have a ghost of a chance of getting his boss, District Attorney Oakley Pearson, to agree to summon a grand jury to consider an indictment against Libby Hatch unless Clara was prepared to say flat out that her mother had shot her. We could assemble all the physical evidence in the world, but none of it would count for much in a case that had aroused so much emotion-and would surely fire up a new kind of outrage when we announced our theory of the crime-if the girl didn’t talk. Though he went on for quite a while explaining all this to us, Mr. Picton’s basic point was simple: if you were going to accuse a woman of murdering her own kids, you’d better be damned sure you had not only motive, opportunity, and means, but a witness, too.

Motive, opportunity, and means would still, though, play their parts, and these were things that we could pursue while the Doctor went about the process of trying to get Clara Hatch to communicate. The subject that seemed the most open to investigation that evening was means, being as Lucius had, we hoped, brought the instrument of attack up out of the old well. Asking Mrs. Hastings for a piece of oilcloth what he proceeded to drape over the piano, Lucius carefully positioned his damp brown parcel on the thing, then slowly began to unfold and pull away the paper bag with a couple of his steel medical probes.

“I asked Mrs. Wright if she’d noticed anything unusual about the gun before she dropped it down the well,” Miss Howard said, as we all crowded around Lucius. “Anything that might indicate that it’d been moved or fired. But she said she’d been far too upset to take any notice of those kind of details.”

“Understandable,” Marcus said, watching his brother straighten out the bag, its hidden contents still bulging outward. “Did she say how old the thing was?”

“Hatch told Mrs. Wright he’d always kept it under his pillow,” Miss Howard said. “He didn’t fight in the Civil War himself-he paid a substitute-so that eliminates the possibility of it being a weapon he picked up in the army.”

“Yes,” Marcus answered. “It’s probably one of the more common store-bought brands. And given his age, along with the likelihood that he hadn’t fired guns very often, he probably wanted something easy to use.”

“Right,” Miss Howard continued. “Something like a Colt Peacemaker-it looks like one, from the silhouette. An early edition, too. The first Single Action Army models came out when, in ’71? The timing would be about right.”

“But is it a weapon that would be easy for a woman to use?” the Doctor asked.

It was the kind of question what Marcus or Lucius would ordinarily have answered; but Miss Howard enjoyed the limelight, and the two brothers knew enough to stay out of her way. “I don’t see why not,” she said with a shrug. “A forty-five-caliber pistol might not seem like a woman’s weapon, on the surface, but the Single Action Army used metal cartridges, and had very smooth action. A fairly simple, serviceable piece, really. Add the fact that even the longer-barreled models didn’t weigh much more than three pounds, and she would’ve been fine, even if she didn’t have much experience with guns.”

I saw Mr. Picton give Miss Howard a surprised look, and then turn to Mr. Moore. “Do not,”Mr. Moore said, “push your luck with this girl, Rupert.”

Lucius suddenly looked troubled. “I don’t think I can get the bag off in one piece.”

“Any reason why you need to?” Mr. Moore said.

“If we can prove that the wrapping was manufactured locally,” Marcus explained for his brother, “then it argues against the possibility that this was some other gun dumped more recently by someone else.”

“Well, you don’t need to keep it in one piece to do that,” Mr. Picton said. “Look at the bottom of the thing, Detective-you should find the words ‘West Bags, Ballston Spa, New York’ in small black print.”

Lucius focused his attention on the part of the bag what was draped around the mouth of the gun barrel; then he brightened up. “You’re right, Mr. Picton-it’s there! Let me just cut it loose-” He pulled a surgical scalpel from his pocket and made four neat little slits in the bottom of the bag, then pulled away a rectangular piece of the brown paper and laid it out carefully on the sheet. “There we go. And now we can…”

With slightly faster strokes, Lucius began to peel away strips of the remaining brown paper, revealing a plain, single-action revolver, of the type seen in your standard Western magazine illustrations. Its dark brown grips were dusted with light green mold, and its blue steel chamber and barrel were red with rust. None of the rest of us knew quite what to think until Lucius picked up the gun by slipping one of his probes through the trigger guard, examined it with his brother, and then smiled.

“Thank you, Mr. West,” he sighed.

“You mean it’s in good shape?” Mr. Moore said.

“Let’s just say this,” Lucius answered. “Ballston Spa is, in fact, the home of the world’s finest paper bags.”

Marcus nodded confidently as he took his turn examining the pistol. “Hmm, yes,” he said, trying to control his enthusiasm. “With a little work we should be able to actually fire it again.”

“And that means-” Mr. Moore asked.

“That means,” Miss Howard answered, herself smiling, “a ballistics test.”

Mr. Moore’s face went blank. “A what?”