Suppose, Miss Howard said, that little Thomas had, in fact been sitting in Clara’s lap when the rig stopped. The girl had been shot in the chest, and there was no way that anybody could have shot her in that region without first moving Thomas out of the way. So, Miss Howard said, we had to figure that Libby had taken Thomas and stuck him somewhere else-probably in Matthew’s lap. Libby’d then shot Clara, an act what almost certainly would’ve made Thomas very upset, causing Libby to shoot him quickly Now, the Colt.45 Peacemaker was a powerful gun: the bullet what’d struck Clara had traveled clear through her chest and neck. So the bullet what’d hit little Thomas would definitely have gone straight through him and into whatever was behind him-or whoever was behind him, if we now accepted the idea that he’d actually been sitting in front of Matthew.
This thought got Marcus’s and Lucius’s eyes twinkling again. Was Miss Howard suggesting, they asked, that the two boys had been killed by one bullet? To be sure, she answered; nothing else made any sense, given the state of the Colt. But before anybody went getting too happy, Miss Howard continued, we had to remember one thing: the single bullet might not have been traveling with enough power to make it through both bodies and into the front of the wagon’s wooden bed. If that was the case, we were in trouble; for among the many things Dr. Lawrence’s report didn’t mention was his having taken any bullets out of the dead boys. In other words, if the missing bullet wasn’t in the hunk of wood in front of us, then it’d been buried with Matthew Hatch in Ballston’s town cemetery (which was, it turned out, just around the corner from Mr. Picton’s house). This realization wiped the smiles right back off the detective sergeants’ faces, and also lit a new fire under me and Mr. Moore-joined, now, by Miss Howard-to tear the piece of planking and the driver’s seat into toothpicks in an effort to find the second deadly missile; because without it, we had no way of even suggesting that Daniel Hatch’s Colt had been involved in the shootings.
As we madly pursued our work, Marcus and Lucius went back to working on the gun. Mr. Picton eventually returned to his house for lunch, and over that meal we told him about our morning’s work, which he found intriguing but also very unsettling. Once he’d set back out for his office, we went to work again with even more determination; but the early hours of the afternoon went by without anyone making any discoveries.
The approach of evening brought the return of Dr. Kreizler and Cyrus, who took up positions next to us and joined in the search. Still, though, there were no hopeful sightings. We were beginning to run out of places to look, and it was Mr. Moore who first realized the dreadful implications of that fact. Along toward cocktail time his brow had become positively creased by discouragement; but when Mr. Picton came home and suggested that everyone quit working and have a drink before dinner, Mr. Moore forced himself to put on a cheery face, and urged the detective sergeants-whose eyes had gone bloodshot from a full day of very close work-to accept Mr. Picton’s invitation. The rest of us would be along, he said, in a minute, to which Marcus and Lucius nodded wearily and headed on into the house.
As soon as they were safely out of earshot, Mr. Moore’s face filled with urgency. “All right,” he said, putting his magnifying lens down. “That’s it for tonight. Everybody knock off.”
“But why, John?” Miss Howard said. “There’s still some daylight, and not that much left to do-”
“That’s exactly the point,” Mr. Moore answered. “We’re going to need some part of this thing to be intact in the morning.”
I was still confused; but Cyrus had begun to nod in understanding. “It’s not here, is it, Mr. Moore?”
“The odds are against it,” Mr. Moore answered. “A forty-five-caliber bullet would’ve left a big enough mark that one of us would’ve seen it by now.”
“So why save some of the thing?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want Rupert to have to outright lie in court, or Marcus and Lucius to have to perjure themselves. There’s only one place that bullet can be-and we’re going to get it. Then, tomorrow morning, we’ll put it in what’s left of this thing and let them find it. None of us are going to be called to testify in this particular area, so we don’t need to worry about lying-and so far as the rest of them will know, they’ll be telling the truth.”
The Doctor’s eyebrows arched a bit. “John-you realize that you’re suggesting-”
“Yes, I know what I’m suggesting, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, moving away from the table. “But there’s no other option. We all know we’d never get a judge to order something like this without the mother’s permission. Not based on the little evidence we’ve gathered so far.” He paused, waiting for arguments; but none came. “I’ll check in the basement for a shovel,” Mr. Moore went on. “We’ll do the job tonight.”
Miss Howard, Cyrus, and I looked at one another in a little shock; but the Doctor summed up all our deeper feelings by saying, “Moore’s right. It’s the only way we can be sure.”
All five of our heads started nodding slowly; but much as we may have agreed that Mr. Moore’s plan was the only way to both get what we needed and look out for Mr. Picton’s and the detective sergeants’ legal and ethical positions, that didn’t change the fact that we were contemplating a grisly, frightening, and illegal action, one what had gotten many people hanged-or worse-over the centuries. It took, you might say, a little adjusting to.
Mr. Moore did manage to find a shovel in the basement, along with a couple of lengths of strong rope, and he put them all outside the kitchen door while the rest of us were in the living room. Then we all went in to dinner, the prospect of what we were about to undertake keeping most of us pretty quiet through the better part of the meal. Mr. Picton, fortunately, filled up the silence with a stream of talk about the cases he’d been studying; then it was back into the living room for a little more of the music what Cyrus had been playing the day before. Finally, the time came to head upstairs. We’d have to wait for Mr. Picton and the detective sergeants to go to bed, at which point the rest of us would leave the house separately, to meet up around the corner on Ballston Avenue. From there we’d head down to the cemetery.
CHAPTER 34
The house finally grew completely quiet at just past one o’clock. I left my room carefully and got outside, almost running headlong into Mr. Moore on the front lawn as he made his way around from the kitchen with his shovel and rope. We didn’t see any sign of the rest of our fellow ghouls until we arrived at the appointed meeting spot around the corner. The Doctor and Miss Howard were sharing a cigarette, with Cyrus peering anxiously around at the darkened houses on either side of the street. He could’ve saved himself some sweat, the way I saw it even given what we were up to: Ballston Spa was obviously the kind of town what shut down early and stayed shut down, even on a Saturday night.
“All right now, remember,” the Doctor murmured, as Mr. Moore and I reached them. “What we are about to undertake is a serious criminal offense. Moore and I will therefore be the only ones to actually participate. Stevie you’ll stand watch at this end of the street. Cyrus, you go an equal distance in the opposite direction. Sara will be our last line of defense-she’ll guard the cemetery gate.”
”With the artillery,” she said, producing the weapon what she used on really special occasions: a.45-caliber Colt revolver of her own, one with a short barrel and pearl grips. She checked its chamber with the quick moves of an expert as the Doctor went on: