Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1957 (British Edition)

Sunday’s Slaughter by Jonathan Craig

Four times the maniac had killed — but his madness was no match for the sanity of Henry Ferris!

There was, a large knothole in one of the boards near the room of Henry Ferris’ barn. It was in the north wall, just beneath the eaves, and it gave Henry an unobstructed view of his orchard, and the oblong knoll just beyond. The knoll was not on Henry’s property — it was part of the Kimberly’s place — and it was where Colleen Kimberly came, every Sunday afternoon, to set up her easel and her canvas chair, and paint the things she saw around her.

Colleen was old Sam Kimberly’s only daughter, and she was the prettiest girl Henry had ever seen. He had begun noticing her about a year ago, when she just turned seventeen, and he hadn’t really been able to think about much else ever since. Colleen had blonde hair, like rain-washed wheat, and blue eyes that looked almost black until you got close to her, and, lately, her figure had filled out until it made Henry hurt just to look at her.

Henry was looking at her now, with the help of a ladder pushed against the wall of the hayloft and an old brass-cased spyglass. This was the hottest day they had had all summer, and Colleen had hiked up her skirt, to make herself a little cooler. Henry grinned slyly, wondering how fast she’d pull that skirt down again, if she knew he was watching her.

“It’d come down damn fast, I’ll bet,” he said aloud. He often talked to himself, working alone so much. “And, oh! — wouldn’t she blush, though!” He shifted the spyglass to his other eye and adjusted the focus, so that he could see the play of the slanting sunlight across the almost imperceptible golden down on Colleen’s tapering thighs. “If she only knew I was up here! he thought. Man, if she only even suspected!”

He had talked to Colleen twice. The first time had been five weeks ago, when he had driven himself so nearly crazy in the hayloft that he’d felt he simply had to be closer to her. He had crossed the orchard and ambled over to the knoll, and stood watching her paint for a long time, before she noticed him at all. When she did, she didn’t seem to mind his being there. She didn’t even seem surprised. She had just smiled at him and gone back to her painting of a plum tree.

“That’s real pretty,” Henry had said. “It sure enough looks just like an old plum tree, all right.” It was hard for a man to know exactly what to say to her, Henry reflected. Folks hereabouts said Colleen wasn’t quite bright, and that that was the reason her pa didn’t send her to the high school in town, and wouldn’t let her go out with boys.

But hell, folks hereabouts were always saying mean things like that, especially about girls as pretty as Colleen. Why, they had even said he wasn’t bright, too. He had heard it said more than once — just as if a man could run a farm like this one, year after year, and take care of a wife that was paralysed from the waist down and all, unless he was pretty bright.

Hell, he was brighter than any of them! They were just jealous of him, because he was such a damn good farmer, that was all. Just like they were jealous of Colleen, because she was so pretty.

Colleen hadn’t answered him when he complimented her painting of the plum tree. He stepped closer and squinted at the canvas, and nodded slowly. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “It sure looks like that old plum tree’ll be popping out with fruit any minute now. It’s a right nice piece of work, Miss.”

The girl had smiled up at him and made another dab with her brush. “Thank you,” she said. “I... I’ve been working on it for a long time.” It was then Henry saw that her eyes were really blue, instead of black, the way they had looked through the spyglass.

“Must get mighty lonesome for you sometimes,” he said. “I mean, the way your pa keeps you penned up here, so tight and all.”

Colleen had stopped smiling, and her eyes seemed a little cloudy.

“Me, I get pretty lonesome too,” Henry said. “I don’t get off the place more’n two, three times a month.” He paused. “What with my wife being an invalid and all, I have to stick pretty close.”

Colleen had nodded solemnly and lowered her brush. She sat very still, and a sudden fragment of breeze brought Henry the sweet, slightly-dizzying girl-scent of her.

“If it wasn’t for your pa and my wife,” Henry went on, “you and me might...” He broke off, his mouth suddenly dry. “I mean, we might — well, go to a church supper or something. Maybe even to a movie in town.”

The girl tilted her head to look up at him. “But you have a wife,” she said.

“Maybe not for long, though,” Henry said, trying to sound casual “The doc says she hasn’t got much of her row left to hoe.”

Colleen nodded, her face almost expressionless.

Henry swallowed hard, trying to get the dryness out of his throat. “If... if something happened to her, and if I could make it right with your pa... I mean, would you...?”

The girl frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then raised her brush again and concentrated very intently on the addition of some foliage to her plum tree. “If things were different,” she said. “If they really were, I might.”

Henry had wanted to say more, much more, but he had been physically unable to talk. He had stood beside the girl a full minute before he realised he’d have to get away from her, before he lost control of himself and did something he’d be sorry for. This should have been one of the happiest moments of his life, he thought bitterly as he trudged back to his own farm. But it wasn’t... it was one of the worst.

Things wouldn’t get any different, he knew — not for months and months, maybe even years. Martha might linger for goodness knew how long. Meanwhile, there wasn’t a thing he could do. The property was all in Martha’s name, even down to the rakes and hoes. He could leave Martha, sure — but what then?

All he knew how to do was farm. If he went somewhere else, all he’d be was a hired man. This way, at least he didn’t have to take orders from anybody except Martha — and he had his spyglass and his knothole in the bam wall.

The second time Henry talked to Colleen he had seen her father approaching before he’d been on the knoll more than a minute or two. But he had satisfied himself that he could have her, if it wasn’t for Martha. With Martha dead, and Colleen and he safely married, there wasn’t anything Colleen’s pa could do.

To-day, Henry had spent almost two hours watching Colleen through the spyglass, and now the longing for her had become too strong to bear. He took one last look at the firm, sunbathed thighs beneath the hiked-up skirt, then climbed back down the ladder and hid the spyglass in the hay...

The pickup truck pulled into the yard, just as Henry came through the barn door. There were two bloodhounds in a cage on the back of the truck, and the white lettering on the door of the cab read, Sheriff’s Office — Miller County. Riding in the seat beside the driver was Constable Jim Weber, from town. Weber and the other man got out and walked over to Henry. Weber carried a double barrelled shotgun crooked in his arm. The other man carried a rifle.

“Afternoon, Henry,” the constable said. “This here is Deputy Sheriff Bob Ellert. Bob, this is Henry Ferris. That was his field you was admiring so, up the road a ways.”

“Afternoon, Sheriff,” Henry said.

The deputy nodded and crossed his arms. He was a big man, even bigger than Constable Weber, and he looked hot and uncomfortable, in his khaki uniform with the leather leggings and heavy Sam Browne belt. “Hotter’n the hinges themselves, Mr. Ferris,” he said.

“That’s for sure,” Henry said. “I been looking for it to rain. A good rain’d cool things off a bit.”

“There’s another one loose, Henry,” the constable said.

“What?” Henry said. “Oh... you mean from the asylum?”

“Yeah. And this is a mean one, Henry. He’s one of these maniacs. He got him a meat-cleaver out of the kitchen somehow, and killed a guard with it and got loose. Next thing we hear, he’s taken the cleaver to old, Mrs. Kurtz, over Lordville way. Cut her up like sidemeat.”

“I swear,” Henry said. “You think he’s somewhere around here?”

“He just might be,” the deputy sheriff said. “We’re beating the whole county for him. The Sheriff’s Office and the State Police, and all the local peace officers, like Jim here.”

“We’re warning everybody,” the constable said. “We’re phoning some of them, and calling on the one that ain’t got phones. How’s your wife, Henry?”

Henry sighed. “She’s just the same, Jim, just the same.”

“That’s sure a pity,” the constable said.

“You see this maniac, Mr. Ferris, you call the constable,” the deputy sheriff said. “And don’t lose no time about it, either. That man chopped up two women before they put him away, and he’s chopped up two more people since. Who knows where he’ll stop, unless’n we get him fast.”

“He killed them with a hatchet,” the constable said. “The ones he killed before they put him away, I mean. I don’t know why they didn’t just up and Kang him, the way they should of done. Hell, putting a maniac like that in an asylum is just plain stupid!”

“That’s a fact,” the deputy sheriff said. “You won’t have any trouble recognising him, Mr. Ferris. He’s a big, tall old boy, with a face would scare hell out of almost anybody. He’s got him a face like a shovel.”

“That’s right,” the constable said. “I seen his picture.”

“He’s almost all jaw, that old boy is,” the deputy sheriff said. “Little scrunched-up forehead and crazy eyes, and this great big jaw jutting out there, just like a shovel.”

“Yeah,” the constable said. “It hangs out there like a cowcatcher on a train.” He patted the stock of his shotgun. “I got this old lady loaded up just right for him, too. I got me bird shot in one barrel, and buckshot in the other. If I holler halt, and he don’t do it, that bird shot ought to slow him down mighty fast. And if the bird shot don’t, the buckshot sure’r’n hell will. It’ll slow him down permanent!”

“I got my gun loaded the same way,” Henry said. “I been laying for some chicken thieves.”

The constable nodded. “Just don’t go shooting him, without you give him a chance to surrender, though.” He turned slightly to wink at the deputy sheriff. “Ain’t that right, Bob?”

The deputy grinned. “Sure,” he said. “We got to give him his just rights, like they say in the book.”

Henry grinned back, knowingly. “I’ll give him everything that’s coming to him, don’t worry.”

The constable patted the stock of his shotgun again and turned toward the pickup truck. “Well, we got to be rolling, Henry. There’s a lot of folks down the line haven’t got phones. We got to warn them.”

Henry was reluctant to give up his company so soon. He rarely had callers at all, much less for interesting reasons like this one. “I sure wish you could stay and pass the time of day,” he said hopefully.

“Some other time, Henry,” the constable said, climbing into the truck. He opened the door on the other side for the deputy and leaned back against the cushion. “Give my best to the missus,” he said. The deputy waved to Henry and started the motor.

Henry watched the truck circle around toward the rutted road that led up to the blacktop, and then he walked slowly toward the house and went inside.

Martha was sitting in her wheel-chair near the front door. She was pouring herself another table-spoonful of the patent medicine the doctor had told her was completely worthless. She paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth and scowled at Henry accusingly.

“Where’ve you been all this time?” she demanded, in her thin, — whining voice. “A body could die ten times over, for all you’d care.”

Henry said nothing. He watched Martha swallow the medicine and pour another spoonful. She was only twenty-seven, but she looked at least twenty years older than that. Since the stroke that had paralysed her legs, she had seemed to wither away slowly, day by day, until Henry could scarcely remember exactly what she had looked like when he married her.

Martha had been no raving beauty even then, Henry often reflected, and he often wondered how he had had enough stomach to marry her, even to get his hands on her farm. That was just the trouble — he’d never got his hands on it at all. Martha had let him work it for her, but she had kept it in her own name. He’d never own so much as a square inch of it until she died. The best he had been able to do was hold out a little of the egg money.

Martha swallowed the second spoonful of the medicine, grimaced and screwed the cap back on the bottle very carefully.

“Folks are talking about your never going to church, Henry,” she whined. “And about your working so much in the barn on Sundays. It isn’t right.”

“That barn ain’t no affair of theirs,” Henry said. “And how am I supposed to go to church? I’d be gone three hours or more. Then you’d really holler, for sure.”

“Not about your going to church, I wouldn’t.”

“Then, why do you nag me so about being out to the barn?”

“That ain’t the same thing at all, Henry, and you know it.”

“It sure looks like the same thing to me. It’s me not peeking in on you every five minutes that gets you riled up so much, not where I am.”

“That’s another thing,” Martha said. “What in the world do you do out in that barn, every blessed Sunday? It appears to me you spend more time out there on Sundays than you do all week put together.”

Henry stared at her, wondering whether he should tell her about the maniac being loose, just to change the subject. No — it would only set Martha off on a lot of damnfool questions, and he didn’t feel like talking to her any more than he had to. He didn’t even want to look at her.

He turned, left the house again and climbed back up in the hayloft. The visit by the constable and the deputy sheriff had almost made him forget about Colleet Kimberly, out there on the knoll beyond the orchard, but now he had an urgent need to look at her again. It would be painful, but it was something he had to do. He hoped she’d still be there — that sun was getting plumb brutal, especially if you were one of these real fair-skinned people, like Colleen.

She was still there, Henry found. She had shifted around on her canvas chair, so that she was facing the barn, and the unconscious display of bare legs was more provocative than anything Henry could remember.

“Oh, hell!” he said to himself in the stifling heat of the hayloft. “What makes me torment myself so?”

He lowered the spyglass a moment, to wipe the sweat from his face — and it was then that he saw the man in the orchard. The man was travelling at a fast lope, and, in his right hand, he carried a large meat-deaver.

Henry stared at the cleaver, and then at the man’s huge, undershot jaw. “It’s that crazy shovel-face maniac,” he said aloud. “It’s him, sure’r’n all hell! He’s running through the orchard that way, so’s he can cut around the house and come in the front door.”

Henry came down the ladder fast, smiling broadly. There was no fear in him, no hesitancy. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and the thought pleased him. You talk about your walm welcomes, he thought. I’ll give you one, Mister. I’ll give you one you ain’t never going to forget. ’Course you won’t have long to remember it, but you sure’n hell ai’nt going to forget it.

He ran to the shelf where he kept his shotgun, jerked the gun from its leather case, and crept to the barn door.

The man with the cleaver was at the far end of the orchard now, crouching down, watching the house from behind an apple tree. Even from this distance, and without the spyglass, Henry could see the crazed look in the big man’s eyes.

He’s a mean one, all right, he reflected. He should of been hung to begin with, like the constable said. Just look at him standing out there, thinking about how he’s going to chop somebody up with that cleaver...

The thought echoed and reechoed in Henry’s mind. Suddenly, he began to sweat even worse than he had in the hayloft. He put the thought into words. “Chop somebody up...” he whispered to himself.

Well, why not?

Martha was there in the house, wasn’t she? And helpless in her wheel chair, wasn’t she? The maniac would kill her with that cleaver — that was sure. And all Martha could do was scream.

Suppose he waited till she screamed, Henry reasoned, and then ran into the house with his shotgun? He’d be too late to save her, wouldn’t he? She’d be dead, and he could blow the maniac’s head off. Then he would have the farm all to himself.

The farm — and Colleen Kimberly.

He could have the girl too. Her pa would be glad to get her off his hands, if he could marry her to a widower with all the land Henry was going to have.

It was all so clear, so easy, so sure. Nobody would think a thing about it. He could hear them now — “Old Henry is out in his barn, see, and he hears Martha scream out, and he grabs up his shotgun and comes running, but he’s too late — that maniac has already killed her.”

Henry knelt in the shadow, just inside the barn door, and waited for the lunatic to make his dash for the house. The man moved cautiously around the apple tree, then suddenly broke into a run. But not toward the house — he was racing off in the opposite direction, toward the elm grove just this side of the blacktop.

Henry sprang out of the barn and sprinted after him. No, you don’t! he thought. Oh, no you don’t! You can’t cut out on me now, Mister. I can outrun you any day in the week.

He caught up with the man, in the elm grove. The lunatic slipped and fell, and scrabbled to his feet again — but he was too late. Henry shoved the barrels of his shot-gun into the crazed face and pulled one of the triggers.

The sight of the man’s face and head sickened Henry, but only for a moment. Almost before the man’s body struck the ground, Henry had whipped out of his shirt and wrapped it around the man’s head. Even so, he couldn’t prevent considerable blood from spilling on the ground. He swore. If the constable or that deputy sheriff should come nosing around out here, a little blood could be just as dangerous as a lot.

He worked rapidly and coolly, knowing the shotgun blast might bring a curious neighbour to investigate. He scooped dried grass and leaves over the place where the blood had spilled. Then he pushed the handle of the meat-cleaver into his belt, hoisted the dead man to his shoulder and picked up the shotgun. And, though he staggered a little under the man’s weight, he was able to move toward the house at something close to a run...

Martha’s eyes rounded, and her face blanched, and her hands clawed at the arms of her wheel chair. “Henry!” she gasped. “Henry, what—”

It was the last thing she ever said. Henry used the cleaver with all the practised skill of a hundred butcherings. Then he pointed the shotgun at the wall and fired the second barrel.

He didn’t look at Martha, as he ripped the blood-soaked shirt from the dead man’s head and ran to the bedroom. Hell, he thought, killing people was easy as hell, once you set your mind to it. He stuffed the bloody shirt into the bottom compartment of his fishing tackle box and pushed the box to the rear of the shelf in the closet. Then he took a clean shirt from the bureau and buttoned it up the front on his way back to the crank phone in the parlour.

This time he did look at Martha, and he smiled a little as he asked the operator in town to ring the constable for him. He was thinking about the way the sun had shimmered on Colleen Kimberly’s thighs. It was going to be hard to keep the happiness out of his voice when he talked to the constable, hard to sound the way the constable would expect him to sound.

“Constable Weber left word he’d be at the Shanley place a while,” the operator told him. “I’ll try to ring him there for you.”

“He got her Jim!” Henry yelled, when the constable’s voice finally came on the wire. “That maniac! He’s done killed Martha with a cleaver!... Yeah, I got him, but it was too late. I seen him out in the elm grove, up by the road, and I snuck up there and fired a barrel to scare him into surrendering, but he took off like a damn rabbit...

“No, I didn’t have the craw to kill him right then. I should have, but I just couldn’t do it. He got away from me. I come back to the house — and there’s poor Martha laying there, all chopped to hell and gone, and this crazy swine coming at me with his cleaver. I just barely had time to get my gun up and pull the trigger...

“Yeah, that’s right. He circled around me out there, somehow, and come back to the house.”

Henry let his voice break. He sobbed for a moment, then went on raggedly, “If’n I’d been another minute sooner, I could have saved her. It was all my own fault, Jim...

“Yes, it was too...

“Yeah, I’ll stay right here.” He hung up, shook a cigarette from his pack and strolled between the bodies toward the door.

It was so easy, he thought — so damned easy. He walked out on the porch and leaned back against a post, to wait for the constable. It wouldn’t be much of a wait, he knew — the Shanley place was less than half a dozen miles away.

He had just started to strike a match to his cigarette, when a flash of colour in the elm grove caught his eye. He froze, staring at Colleen Kimberly, while the flame crawled up the match and burned his fingers.

How long had she been there? What might she have seen? He dropped the match, flicked the cigarette away and strode toward her. For a moment, he thought she meant to turn and run away, but then she stood still and leaned back against a tree-trunk, to wait for him.

He stepped close and nodded to her. “What are you doing up here in the grove, Miss Colleen?” he asked.

She smoothed the blonde hair back from her forehead and smiled up at him shyly. “I heard the gun,” she said.

“You just get here?” he asked.

She bobbed her head and pressed her back a little closer to the tree-trunk. “I thought maybe you’d had an accident,” she said softly. “Like my Uncle Carl had that time he shot himself in the foot.”

Henry drew a deep breath. “You was worried about me? Is that what you mean, Colleen?”

She looked away from him and moistened her lips. “Yes. And I kept wondering why you never came back to the knoll. I waited and waited.”

Colleen was really a very small girl, Henry noticed, now that they stood face to face like this. Small and perfect and all woman — and almost his. It seemed the wrong time to be telling her about Martha, but it had to be done.

“Something pretty awful has happened here, Colleen,” he said. “Did you hear about the maniac that got loose from the asylum?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been out on the knoll all afternoon, and everybody else is visiting in town.”

“He was here,” Henry said. He paused. “He was here — and he killed Martha.”

Colleen sucked in her breath sharply. “He killed her?”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “With a meat-cleaver.”

She was staring at him. “He killed your wife?”

Henry nodded, and, for some reason, the look on the girl’s face made him feel a little uneasy.

“With a meat-cleaver?” she asked. “Some man killed your wife with a meat-cleaver?”

Henry bit at his lip. For the first time since he’d talked to Colleen on the knoll that day, he was beginning to understand what folks meant when they said she wasn’t quite bright. She was so pretty to look at that a man didn’t notice anything else at first.

But there was something wrong with her, he realised now. Her voice was clear and sure, but it was like a little girl’s — like a little girl reading words from a book she didn’t understand, saying the words properly without knowing what they meant.

There was something about Colleen’s eyes, too. They never showed any expression at all — at least none to speak of. Like right now. Colleen didn’t look one way or another. She just stared at you, or smiled at you, and all you saw were those beautiful blue eyes with their long, sooty lashes, and all you could think about was how pretty they were. You thought so hard about the eyes themselves, you never even noticed that they never had any thoughts in them, that they never said anything.

Colleen smiled at him and gestured toward the house. “In there?” she said. “He killed her in there?”

Henry didn’t say anything. A moment ago he had been sweating. Now he felt cold.

Colleen shook her head wonderingly, then glanced toward the blacktop. “Somebody’s coming,” she said. “I’d better get back before they see me. Pa wouldn’t like it a bit, me being over here this way.”

The deputy sheriff’s pickup truck was already turning off the blacktop. The cage with the two bloodhounds in it rattled and slid toward the tailgate.

“No use going now,” Henry said. “It’s too late.” He moved away from her and waited for the constable and the deputy to climb out of the truck. He couldn’t afford to think any more about Colleen now, he knew. He’d have to watch every word he said, be on guard for every question.

The constable came up to him, his face compassionate. “Henry!” he said. “Goodness, man, what a terrible thing! What a terrible, terrible thing to happen!”

Henry nodded, pretended to struggle for words a moment, then looked away.

“Leave him be, Jim,” the deputy said. “He won’t be feeling like doing any more talking than he has to.”

“Sure, Henry,” the constable said. “You just take it easy now. Me and the sheriff’ll just take a look inside.” He glanced at Colleen and frowned. “Your pa know you’re over here, girl?”

She shook her head and smiled at Henry, and Henry got that cold feeling again. “Pa isn’t home,” she said. “Henry, do you remember what you told me that day over on the knoll? About going to a movie in town?”

Henry stared down at the ground, trying to keep back the panic. “Maybe you’d best go home now, Colleen,” he said. “Your pa may be home.”

“I never been to a movie,” she said quietly. “Never once in my whole life. Pa would never let me.” She was studying Henry’s face, and beginning to frown at what she saw there. “You promised me, Henry,” she said. “You said that if something happened to your wife, you and I could go to the church suppers and the movies. Don’t you remember, Henry?” She stopped, and now the blue eyes held a sheen close to tears.

The constable glanced sharply at the deputy; then both men looked at Henry, with eyes grown suddenly narrow. No one said anything. The seconds pounded away for a small eternity, and then, abruptly, Henry realised that the only sound in the elm grove was his own rapid breathing.

At last, Constable Weber cleared his throat. “You look just a little sick, Henry,” he said. “Maybe you’d best go inside and stretch out a while.”

Henry walked the mile it took to pass the constable, and the second mile it took to pass the deputy, and walked into the house on legs that threatened to collapse beneath him at every step.

They suspect me, he thought. They suspect me — and pretty soon they’ll know for sure. They ain’t fools — now that they’ve got their suspicions they’ll keep at it till they know.

He picked up his shotgun, reloaded it from the box of shells in the kitchen and carried it with him into the bedroom. He was still cold. He took off his shoes and socks and lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up over him, keeping the gun beside him, pressed close to his body.

He listened to the sounds of the constable and the deputy, as they came into the house and moved about in the parlour. He listened to them leave again. He listened to the grating sound of the blood-hound’s cage being opened, then to the deep voices of the dogs themselves. He heard them, up in the grove for a long time, making the sounds bloodhounds always did, when they were trying to pick out a scent. Then he heard the grate of the cage again, and the sharp click, as someone secured the hasp on the cage-door.

Then, for a long time, there was no sound at all, until he heard the clump of boots across the floor in the parlour, and along the hall to the bedroom. He lay very still, hardly breathing at all, the shot-gun still held tight against his side.

The constable and the deputy came in and shut the door, and stood staring at him. Outside, one of the bloodhounds bayed sadly, then was still.

“Henry,” the constable said, not meeting Henry’s eyes. “Henry, we know what you done.” He took a heavy breath and let it out slowly. “It was the girl that got us started,” he said. “The girl, and what you said about loading your shotgun with birdshot in one barrel and buckshot in the other, just like I told you I’d loaded mine.”

“That man was killed with buckshot,” the deputy said. “But you said you killed him out there in the parlour. That lead in the wall out there isn’t buckshot, Mr. Ferris — it’s birdshot. The buckshot was fired out there in the elm grove. We picked some of it out of a tree trunk.” He paused.

“And we found that blood out there, too. Those leaves should have been scattered around even, not all bunched up like that in one place.” He waited, watching Henry’s face expectantly.

Henry tightened his grip on the shotgun and said nothing.

The deputy shrugged. “We know just how you did it, Mr. Ferris,” he went on. “We even took the dogs up there to the grove. They knew the scent they was after all right, but they couldn’t come near the house, because the man never did. Once we knew you’d done him in, up there in the trees, and carried him down here to the house, we knew all we had to know.”

The constable’s face was grey. He shook his head slowly. “Henry,” he said softly, “I’ve known you all my life. I’m just thankful I don’t have to take you in.”

The deputy took a short step forward. “It’s my territory out here, Mr. Ferris,” he said. “I’ll ask you not to give me any trouble.”

Henry looked at the deputy, but his vision went through him and beyond him, and he smiled at the play of sunlight on Colleen Kimberley’s curving thighs, as she sat there on the knoll beyond the orchard.

He was still thinking of her, when he put the shotgun barrels in his mouth and pressed both triggers with his toe.