“No.”
“Well, I’m going to get you thoroughly down anyway. I ran into Franklin on my way to class today. In the pharmacy. I was buying Blistex and wishing we were in Florida.”
“Franklin can’t get me thoroughly down,” Susan said. “For a cop, he’s almost a nice man.”
“Well, nice or not, he was just beside himself today. And I’ll bet you can’t guess why.”
“You’re right. I can’t guess why.”
Sharon cut another piece of bread and buttered it. “Well,” she said, “it seems that his hero is in town. The man he most wants to meet. The absolute paragon of law enforcement. The wet dream of every small-town lawman from here to Arizona—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Gregor Demarkian,” Sharon said. Then she put her bread down on the bare wood of the table and said, “I don’t know if he’s here because Franklin asked him here or if it’s just a coincidence or what, but we’ve got those two deaths that were very nicely put down to hunting accidents—especially the one of them—and now we have People magazine’s favorite expert on murder as well. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, Susan, and I just don’t like the way it stacks up.”
3
What Stu Ketchum didn’t like was the way his rifles looked, stacked up on the floor of the gun room the way they were now. Ever since his mother had been found in the snow at the side of the road and Franklin Marshall had come back here to find Stu’s Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle gone from its place on the wall, Stu had been taking his rifles down and putting them back up again, over and over, as if, if he did it enough times he could make the count finally come out right. Finding out that Dinah had not been killed with one of his guns had not helped. It had made him feel just a little less sick, but it had not really helped. Stu didn’t know what would help. Sometimes he thought he had invented a new kind of therapy, shot therapy, weapons therapy, whatever you wanted to call it. Sometimes he would take all the rifles down from the wall and go out into the yard and shoot holes in the side of his barn. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of anything in his barn.
It was now seven o’clock in the evening, and not only were Stu’s guns all on the gun-room floor, but his ammunition was there, too, and his special sights and his tripods and his skeet traps and all the rest of it, all the paraphernalia of using guns for a hobby. Looking at it all piled up like this made him feel dizzy and bewildered. Thinking about himself shooting at things made him feel sick. He kept expecting the missing gun to show up, by magic or by sleight of someone’s hand, and not to notice it until it was too late. He kept expecting to find himself standing outside by the barn pumping bullets into wood and suddenly recognizing the gun he was holding as the one that killed Tisha Verek. He tried to count the number of men he had killed in Vietnam and couldn’t. It didn’t feel like the same thing.
He felt a breeze on his hands and looked up to see that his wife, Liza, had come to stand in the doorway. Behind her, the wood stove in the kitchen seemed hot enough to be glowing. Stu dropped the cartridge he’d been holding and straightened up.
“Yes?”
“What do you mean, yes?” Liza said. “Aren’t you going to come inside? Aren’t you going to eat anything?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t been hungry for weeks. That’s not the point. You have to eat.”
“I’ve been thinking it all through again, the day they died. I’ve been trying to make it make sense.”
“I don’t see why you think you can make it make any more sense than the police have. Come inside and eat.”
“Why doesn’t it bother you?” Stu asked her, but he’d been asking her that for two weeks solid now and getting no good answer. It didn’t bother her because it didn’t bother her. Dinah had been her mother-in-law. Liza hadn’t had much patience for her when she was alive. Tisha Verek had been nothing at all. Stu tried to fathom it and couldn’t. His gun. His mother. It all seemed much too connected to him.
“I don’t like you out here fooling around with those guns,” Liza said. And then she retreated, back into the kitchen, back behind her door. It had been that way between the two of them since Dinah died. Maybe it had been that way between the two of them forever.
Stu got up, picked his stainless-steel Plainfield Model Ml gas-operated semiautomatic out of the pile, found a clip for it and loaded. Then he went out into the yard and positioned the gun on his shoulder. This one was more like a machine gun than a standard semiautomatic. It looked like a machine gun, too. It made a lot of noise when it fired.