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By Root 2797 0

when I finally reached it, was enough to send a shiver of lonely fear back through me, and I found myself again wondering if maybe I shouldn’t’ve stayed at the Westons’ farmhouse. For if that latter happy spot had a reverse image, it was the joint I was now approaching, no question about it. There was no paint at all on the outside walls of the old two-story building, just some dark shingling that over time had turned a blackish shade of brown, what made it look almost as if the whole house had been consumed by fire without actually being destroyed. There were big, wild hedges growing both outside and inside the busted windows on the bottom floor of the place. In the backyard loomed a huge dead oak tree, under which were a few old, worn headstones inside a rusty iron fence. The front yard, meanwhile, had pretty well turned into a hay-field, and you could hardly see the collapsing barn for a stand of maple saplings and creeping vines that had sprung up in front of it. There was evidence of some kind of life spilling out the front door and onto the grounds—broken bottles, rusted cans, yellowing chamber pots, and washbowls—but they were all scattered in a way that indicated the place had turned into nothing more than a popular spot for local kids in a troublemaking mood. A big rectangular space what figured to’ve once been the garden made up the far side of the yard: bushes, weeds, and time itself were making short work of the fence what had once run around it. Finally, beyond this last sign of human industry was the line of the woods, a line that was doing its best to creep back up and take over the whole area again.

The well, I remembered hearing Mr. Picton say, was down behind the garden, so I began to wade through the overgrown grass and bushes in the front yard until I came to the top of a high hill at the edge of the woods. I still couldn’t see the others, though I could hear them, so I cupped my hands in front of my mouth. “Detective Sergeants? Mr. Moore?”

“Stevie?” I heard Mr. Moore answer. “We’re down here!”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Bear left as you come down the hill!” he answered. “We’re just behind a stand of pine trees!” I started to follow the instructions, then heard Mr. Moore’s voice again: “Oh, dammit, Lucius, I don’t care what kind of pine trees they are!”

About halfway down the hill I did in fact catch sight of Mr. Moore and Marcus, who were standing in their shirtsleeves over a collapsed collection of heavy rocks, in the center of which was a hole what was just big enough for a man to negotiate. A wooden cover for the hole lay to one side of the rocks. Mr. Moore and Marcus’d placed a strong tree limb across the hole, and were slowly pulling a thick rope up through the opening. From the sounds that echoed out of the blackness below, I figured that Lucius was actually down in the well.

“Ow!” he shouted. “Will you please be careful, dammit?”

“Oh, for once in your life stop whining!” Marcus answered.

“Whining?” Lucius shot back. “I like that! I’m down here in this filth, exposing myself to God-knows-how-many diseases …!”

As I arrived at the well, the top of Lucius’s balding head began to appear through it. I gave Mr. Moore and Marcus a hand pulling the rope, and once Lucius was out he rolled over on the ground to catch his breath.

In his arms, he was cradling an old brown paper parcel.

“Is that it?” I said. “Is that the gun?”

“It’s a gun,” Marcus answered, starting to coil his rope. “And we’ve removed the pieces of the wagon that might have bullets lodged in them—the front wall of the bed and the driver’s bench.”

I nodded, then glanced around, noticing that someone was missing. “Where’s Miss Howard?”

“Took the rig back to town,” Mr. Moore answered. “She wanted to find that Wright woman—the Hatches’ housekeeper—and ask her a few questions. What about the Westons’ farm? How did it go? Oh, and you haven’t got a cigarette, have you, Stevie?”

Sighing at the question (he always asked it, even though he always knew the answer), I took out my packet and handed him a stick, then offered one to Marcus, too.