Double Jeopardy

48

Ed Rawls waited until well after dark, then took his rifle with the nightscope out of the house and across the road. He let himself into the old Stone house with a key that Primmy had given him and, without turning on any lights, walked upstairs to the master bedroom and looked out the front windows.

Across the road and up a bit he could see the twins’ bedroom, with its lights all on. The boys were pulling mattresses out of boxes and laying them onto the electric bed frames. They carried the old, charred frames and the old mattresses down to the floor below and piled them in the parking area near the front steps for trash pickup the next day.

Ed took the opportunity to sight in on various spots in their bedroom, dry-firing on each. Finally, the twins came back upstairs with arms full of linens and made their beds. He could have killed them both in a few seconds, but then he wouldn’t have an alibi.

Ed walked back downstairs and around the front yard, which was bordered by an old, chest-high boxwood hedge, probably planted by the twins’ grandmother. Finally, he went back inside and walked up two flights to a guest bedroom, over the master suite. There was no porch up here, but each of the two windows offered ideal perches for him, level with the twins’ bedroom. This would be his spot.

He went back downstairs and, after careful observation, trotted across the road, then walked back to his house.

“How’d it go, sweetie?” Sally asked.

“Couldn’t have gone better. They’ll wake up dead on Monday morning.”

“Perfect.”

“Perfect is good enough for me,” Ed said.

Stone, Primmy, and Carly sat up with their cognac and waved Dino and Viv off to bed.

“I was surprised,” Primmy said.

“At what?”

“That you didn’t try to talk the Petersons out of buying your house.”

“I thought I offered full disclosure,” Stone said.

“Legally, maybe, but morally? Shouldn’t you have told them about your certainty that the twins did everything they were suspected of?”

“They were not in a mood to hear that,” Stone said.

“Nevertheless...”

“Smith had had some doubts, I think, but his chat with Eben resolved them.”

“He bought everything Eden said?”

“Why not? Eben’s a charming young man who is thought to be innocent by half the people who know about him. He and Enos have been pardoned by the governor and had charges lifted a second time by the D.A. He was wholly convincing, Smith felt. And his wife looked as though she was accustomed to going along with his decisions on just about everything. It would have been churlish of me to deny them the house because of my own feelings.”

“As long as you feel you’ve done the right thing, I won’t worry about it anymore.”

Carly, who had been silent through all this, spoke up, “If there were a guillotine available for use, I would be happy to pull the lever.”

Stone laughed. “So everybody’s on board?”

“Oh,” Primmy said, “we’ve all been on board since the seaborne attack.”

“So, you’re both okay with finding a way to kill them?”

“I wouldn’t pull the trigger,” Primmy said, “but I wouldn’t have a problem watching it done.”

Stone laughed again. “I wouldn’t like to be judged by a jury that had you both as members.”

“If that should ever happen,” Primmy said, “please remember to be innocent.”

Finally, everyone went up to bed, except Stone, who poured himself a last, small brandy. He ran once more through the situation and its possible resolution. The Stone twins had put themselves in this situation, he reasoned. And the law, with all its power, had failed to make them accountable for their actions. They had painted Stone, as well as themselves, into a corner from which there were two ways out, and Stone had ruled out dying himself. That left the twins.

He tossed off the last sip of his brandy and went upstairs into the arms of Primmy.