Then the others were there, and before Hackett’s unbelieving eyes they dragged their pastor back into the bedroom. Johnny was half out of his chair, staring.
“Set your back against that door, Burney,” rapped Hemus. His expressionless glance was on Johnny. “Orville, watch him.”
Johnny felt his arm clutched and paralyzed. Orville Pangman said in a low voice, “Don’t try nothin’, Mr. Shinn, and ye won’t git hurt.”
And Samuel Sheare’s eyes were on him, too. And a great roaring came into Johnny’s ears, and he felt for the back of the chair.
“We’re givin’ ye one last chance,” said Hube Hemus. “Mr. Sheare, will ye change your vote?”
“No,” said Samuel Sheare.
Johnny struggled to get away from those eyes. But they bored through his lids, burning.
“Mr. Shinn, will you?”
Johnny said, “No.”
“Then we know where we stand,” said the First Selectman. “Ye tricked us. I think I saw it comin’ a long time ago. It’s our own fault for lettin’ Judge Shinn talk us into this, for lettin’ you sit in with us, Mr. Sheare, for lettin’ this stranger from New York take his place amongst us like he belongs. We had our trial. We had it in our minds when we caught that murderin’ furriner. Ye’re only tryin’ to take him away from us, like Joe Gonzoli was taken away from us.”
The only thing left was the Governor and the National Guard...
“He ain’t escapin’ us through a hung jury. That’s what you want, ain’t it? But you’re not takin’ this killer tramp away from us. Are they, neighbors?”
A growl answered him.
Those twenty-four sticks of fresh-cut firewood, Johnny thought wildly. All of a sudden they were running through his head like a fence. What was there about that wood...
“Come on!”
But Constable Hackett was in the doorway, licking his lips.
“Hube—” began Hackett uncertainly.
“You, too?” shouted Hemus. “One side!”
And Burney Hackett fell back, and the mob swept by him and out through Fanny Adams’s bedroom door, dragging Samuel Sheare and Johnny Shinn with them. They thundered down the stairs and into the astounded room where Judge Shinn waited over coffee with Andrew Webster and Ferriss Adams and Roger Casavant and Usher Peague, while Josef Kowalczyk sat at the pine table with his face on his outspread arms and the Hemus twins standing over him.
The damned firewood. What was it again? Oh, yes, what had happened to them. What had happened to them...
And suddenly there was nothing to be heard in the room, nothing at all. The men at the table slowly turned, and the prisoner raised his head, and they remained that way.
“Hube,” said Judge Shinn.
But he knew. They all knew.
“This trial,” said Hube Hemus, “is over. The verdict is guilty. The punishment—”
Josef Kowalczyk dropped out of his chair and to the floor like a snake. On all fours he slithered along under the table until he reached Lewis Shinn’s place. There he entwined himself around the Judge’s legs.
The twins jumped. Tommy Hemus flung the table aside. His brother dropped on the clinging man.
The Judge shrieked, “Stop, stop!”
What had happened to them...
Tommy Hemus brought his left arm up. It caught Judge Shinn full across the throat. The old man gagged. He staggered back, and the twin clawed at the prisoner in his brother’s clutch.
Something happened to Johnny Shinn. Something devastating, like the clap of the Last Judgment.
There was no warning. Suddenly, there it was.
The answer.
The answer!
The room was a hell of shouting, plunging people and crashing furniture. Constable Hackett fell against the corner cupboard; the glass shattered and Fanny Adams’s old silver tumbled out. Mathilda Scott was down, screaming as Peter Berry’s heavy shoes trampled her. Elizabeth Sheare crouched in a corner like an animal. Her husband was trying vainly to reach her, his lips moving in frantic soundlessness.
“String ’im up!” Merton Isbel roared.
Old Andy Webster, Peague, Casavant, Adams were struggling in the grip of frenzied men and women. Eddie Pangman and Drakeley Scott were suddenly there, in the thick of it.
Johnny found himself fighting through the wreckage. It was like an episode in one of his recurring dreams, in which fists struck him, nails tore his skin, knees doubled him up, and all the while there was no pain, no feeling of any kind, just the cool remoteness of a bodiless mind, as if all the rest of him were dead but the spirit and will to think. And somehow, he never knew how, or even why, he was on the table kicking at reaching arms, stamping and shouting and screaming and pleading.
“Wait! Wait! If you’ll hold it — if you’ll give me a chance — I’ll hang Kowalczyk for you with my own hands if I’m wrong... I’ll give you your damned proof!”
“Funny thing,” Johnny was saying, “funny and grim. Simplest thing in the world... But it had to be got to. It was camouflaged. Hidden under a mess of people. And people had nothing to do with it. That’s what’s funny. Dead wood and people. And it’s the people who turn out to be the dead wood.”
He was feeling lightheaded. With the dusk had come fireflies and mosquitoes, and they were winking and buzzing everywhere, impervious to slaughter, dancing the humid evening in. The road was as airless as Fanny Adams’s bedroom had been. The lights of the cars lined alongside the bushes showed up the vacuum dance of tiny wings, and the sounds of what was going on where the people were came hollowly to the two men leaning against Peter Berry’s delivery truck.
“What?” said Judge Shinn. He was fingering his throat.
“The alibis,” said Johnny. “Three days of alibis for mere people. And all the time the important ones were being set.”
“Important what, Johnny?”
“Alibis.”
“Alibis for whom?”
“Alibis for what,” Johnny corrected. “Why, for cars.”
“For cars?” The Judge stared. “Is that—”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “Remember Burney Hackett? ‘I parked my car in the garage.’ And ‘it’s only a one-car garage.’ Burney Hackett owns one automotive vehicle. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” said the Judge, “because it’s true.”
“And where was Hackett’s only car at two-thirteen P.M. Saturday? It was some nineteen miles from Fanny Adams’s house, being driven back by Hackett from Lyman Hinchley’s office in Cudbury.
“And the Berrys,” said Johnny, murdering a mosquito. “A passenger car, a delivery truck, and a wrecker from the public garage. At two-thirteen P.M. Saturday the passenger car was locked in a parking lot in Cudbury while Emily Berry and her children sat in Dr. Kaplan’s office. At two-thirteen Saturday the delivery truck was standing in Berry’s garage, where it had stood since at least ten minutes of two, when Berry began tinkering with it to find out why it didn’t start. And what’s more, the truck was boxing in his wrecker, as he complained on the stand. Three vehicles, all accounted for.
“Hosey Lemmon?” Johnny shook his head. “No conveyance of any kind. You told me that yourself.
“Prue Plummer’s car? She said on the stand it was at Wurley’s garage in Cudbury being overhauled for a trip. She said Peter Berry saw Wurley’s mechanic take it away. A statement she’d hardly have made in Berry’s hearing it if weren’t true. Out.
“The Hemuses. Two available vehicles, according to Hube’s testimony: the passenger car he drove to the village, and the farm truck his family took to follow. At two-thirteen Saturday the car was parked before Berry’s store in plain sight. At the same time his truck had to be on the Hemus place, because no one else in his family left the farm till the news of the murder came.