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empty at the top position, so that if something or someone accidentally happened to catch the hammer without cocking it, the firing pinwouldn’t slam back down on anything but air. And as Lucius’s examination went on, the three of them became ever more convinced that Daniel Hatch had followed this procedure. Three chambers of his gun were, like I say, still loaded; but of the remaining three, only two had the kind of powder deposits that would indicate they’d been fired since the gun’s last cleaning. On top of that, the third empty chamber had a larger buildup of rust than the other two, indicating it’d been vacant longer. And as for the unlikely chance that somebody had found the gun, shot it, reloaded it, and dumped it back down the well, Marcus and Lucius felt they could rule that out by the measurement they took of the amount of rust in the barrel: the gun hadn’t been fired in years.

This was all very disturbing. For our theory that Libby Hatch had herself shot her three children to work out, we appeared to need three shots to’ve been fired; but only two had been discharged from the Colt. This gap perplexed Marcus and Lucius mightily, and as they continued to dust the gun for fingerprints, their faces grew as knotted as the old trees out in the yard. They did find several prints that matched Libby’s on both the gun’s grips and its trigger; and there was a partial print on the hammer what they felt comfortable labeling as hers, too; but there was no sign that she’d ever touched the cylinder, which appeared to rule out the possibility that she’d reloaded and refired the thing at any point. We knew that one bullet had traveled clear through Clara Hatch’s neck (and hopefully lodged in some part of the wagon, probably the underside of the driver’s bench); but if only one other shot had been fired, how could we account for two dead boys?

Their mood getting nothing but more glum, Marcus and Lucius carefully recorded all their opening findings on the condition of the gun, and then began to disassemble the thing to get it ready for the test firing. It was Miss Howard who brought hope back into the picture by coming up with a possible solution to the riddle of two bullets and three victims. Going for the stack of Mr. Picton’s files on the shooting, which were lying inside on the piano, she pulled out Dr. Lawrence’s postmortem report on the two Hatch boys, reminding us that nowhere in the thing was there any reference to exit wounds on either Thomas’s or Matthew’s body. And while Lawrence did say that there were powder burns on the children, he didn’t specifically state which children: Mr. Picton had assumed he’d meant all three, being as they’d all suffered gunshot wounds. But that might not’ve been the case. As for Libby Hatch’s statements about what positions the kids’d been in when they were shot, we couldn’t accept those any more than we could believe anything else the woman had said. So we were free, inside of certain limits, to imagine an entirely different sequence of events from the one that Mr. Picton had dreamed up on the basis of the reports.

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