“The Sheares, no car at all.
“Pangman.” Johnny slapped himself in the face. “Same as the Hemuses — one passenger car, one truck. The truck was parked below the barn roof all Saturday afternoon while Joel Hackett handed up shingles to Orville. And the car, Pangman said, was in his garage.
“Scott. Again two vehicles, a car and a jeep. The car was with Drakeley in Comfort at two-thirteen waiting for a banker to say no. The jeep, according to Mathilda, stood out front on the Scott place all day.
“Calvin Waters. Like Hosey Lemmon, no vehicle of any kind, you said.
“The Isbels: one farm wagon, period. So it shares the alibis of old Mert and Sarah Isbel.
“That cleans out Shinn Corners,” said Johnny, “except for you and Dr. Cushman. And you had Russ Bailey drive that decrepit hack of yours back to Cudbury when he dropped us here a week ago, and I established through Dr. Cushman’s nurse that at two-thirteen Saturday the doctor’s car was parked outside his office in Comfort.
“Hell, you can even eliminate Judge Webster, if you’ve got that type of mind. His car didn’t get to Shinn Corners until the day after the murder.
“And that,” said Johnny, “covers the alibi of every vehicle involved with anyone in the case. Except one, the one that’s brought us here. And by the way, how did I pull it off? I don’t remember.”
“Neither do I.” Judge Shinn shivered.
There were shouts now on the still night air, peculiar sucking sounds, clanks and creaks and the muffled straining of an engine.
“But how do you connect the two parts of the argument?” asked the Judge. “Because that’s what they’re going to want to know.”
“No, they won’t,” said Johnny. “They won’t want to know anything after this. All they’ll want to do is go home and milk their lousy cows. Till the next time.”
“Johnny, Johnny,” said the Judge with a sigh. “The world does move. You’ve just moved it a little... If you won’t tell them, will you tell me?”
“It was the wood, the firewood.” Johnny listened; it seemed to him from the confused sounds that it must soon be over. “What happened to Aunt Fanny’s firewood? It was always the sixty-four dollar question, but we were too stupid to ask it...
“The wood was in that lean-to, where Kowalczyk had stacked it at two o’clock. Aunt Fanny painted it before she died at two-thirteen. After she died, after two-thirteen — gone. Taken away.
“Because taken away it was — off the property, an act of total removal, not just a transfer from one place to another. I searched for those twenty-four pieces of wood myself and didn’t find them.
“Aunt Fanny was struck down dead and her striker-downer picked up twenty-four lengths of split log — and did what?” smiled Johnny. “Carried them off by hand? With a fresh corpse a few yards away and the possiblity of interruption and discovery any minute? It would have taken four or five trips — he could hardly have carried more than five or six pieces of wood in one armful... The likely answer was a vehicle of some sort. A car, or a wagon. Took the mental stature of a foetus to figure out! Disgusting.
“If the wood was carted off in a car or a wagon, and only one vehicle has no alibi — or rather, a faulty alibi...” Johnny shrugged.
“I hope,” said the Judge, “I hope you’re proved right.”
Johnny lounged against the truck, waiting. How had he done it? Not through sheer lung power — Mert Isbel had outroared him by many decibels. Yet, somehow, in that pandemonium, he had arrested their frenzy, caught their ears, seized their minds, such as they were. He had no faintest memory of what he had said to them. Maybe — the thought came out of nowhere — maybe they wanted to be stopped. Could that be it? Like kids in a tantrum, begging for their little world to be set right again. Johnny laughed, and the Judge looked at him sharply.
“They’ve got it out!”
It was Usher Peague, bursting out of the blackness of the swamp with his red hair flying like a banner, arms whirling in triumph.
They rushed with Peague up the old wagon road through the marsh, each with a flashlight scribbling nonsense on the dark, the sounds of the people and the machinery suddenly stilled.
They came to the end of the road. Flares had been set up, and they cast a cheap pink light over the scene. The derrick of Peter Berry’s wrecker was dangling the corpse of Ferriss Adams’s bogged coupé from its teeth like a dog. The wrecker was slowly pulling away from the quagmire. Men with two-by-fours and pulleys were maneuvering the car clear of the bog as the wrecker dragged it off. The women of Shinn Corners stood about in silence, watchfully.
“Set it down!” shouted Judge Shinn. “Never mind how! Just so we can get at the trunk!”
The coupé came down with a crash.
Men leaped from every direction.
In a moment the trunk compartment was open...
It was full of firewood.
Ferriss Adams sagged. He would have fallen if not for the Hemus twins.
“One, two, three, four, five—” Johnny kept flinging the sticks to the ground as he counted aloud.
Kowalczyk was there, too, beside Burney Hackett. His hands were still tied with a rope. He was gaping at the wood, his eyes glaring in the pink light.
“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—”
Samuel Sheare’s lips were moving.
“Twenty, twenty-one...”
Hubert Hemus stepped back. There was a look of enormous uncertainty on his gaunt face. He was blinking, grinding.
“Twenty-four,” said Johnny. “And that’s the last, good friends and kindly neighbors.”
Burney Hackett untied Josef Kowalczyk’s wrists. He took the rope over to Ferriss Adams and the Hemus twins jammed Adams’s wrists together and Hackett tied them.
Hube Hemus turned away.
Slowly the people followed.
The peepers and chugarums were really going at it in the Hollow. A calf bawled in Orville Pangman’s cow barn; the Scotts’ dog was howling faintly at the moon. The street light above Berry’s Variety Store on the east corner lit up the deserted intersection.
Judge Shinn puffed a smoke screen from his cigar and complained: “I really ought to screen this porch. Promise myself to do it every summer, but I never seem to get around to it.” He waved his arms at the insects.
“Quiet tonight,” said Johnny.
“Enjoy it while you can, my boy. With dawn’s early light come the reporters.”
The Hackett house, Prue Plummer’s, the Pangman farmhouse were dark. One window of the parsonage glowed.
They smoked peacefully, reviewing the noisy aftermath of the swamp... the arrival of the state police, the magical reappearance of Sheriff Mothless and Coroner Barnwell, Ferriss Adams’s twitching face in the studio as he re-enacted his crime, his hysterical confession, the silent villagers looking on and then melting away, Hube Hemus the last to leave, as if defying Captain Frisbee to arrest him for the wounding of the trooper... They were all gone now, the police and the officials and Adams and Peague and Casavant and Andrew Webster. Only Josef Kowalczyk remained; Samuel and Elizabeth Sheare had taken him into the parsonage, where they insisted he spend the night.
“Hard to believe it’s all past,” remarked the Judge.
Johnny nodded in the darkness. He was feeling empty and restless. “The stupidity is still with us,” he said.
“Always,” said the Judge. “But so are perception and the right.”
“But late,” grinned Johnny. “Anyway, I was referring to myself.”
“Your stupidity? Johnny—”
“For letting that trick alibi of his take me in.”
“What should I say?” growled the Judge. “I didn’t see it at all. Still don’t, entirely.”