LITMIR.BIZ

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Julie, and Paul had all played inquisitors, Curly the last ordinary Spaniard to have spent the evening wriggling out of their clutches. But after everyone else had been burned at the stake, these last four, instead of finishing the game to a single winner, drew together with a final glance around the otherwise unpopulated living room, and began to confer in low voices.

      “Well, what does everybody think?” Sam began. “Any potentials for Julie’s replacement?”

      Julie patted her whirligig. “I believe Corwin Poe looks promising. I’ve had my eye on him most of the summer.”

      Paul and Curly nodded. “Good,” Sam said, writing in a little blue notebook. “I like him, too. Anybody else? Let’s see. We had Trudy Huerth…Hobart McGruff…Carmine Raincloud Jones…”

      “Carmine might work,” Paul tapped his nose, a habit he had that looked like he was trying to straighten the crook where it had once been broken. “He’s got Cinnamon blood. Might know something about the Sun Dance.”

      “Yes, the way each of us is fluent in our various ancestral languages,” Julie observed satirically.

      “The Sun Dance was Mandan and Sioux, I think,” said Curly. “Carmine’s ancestry was Hopi, wasn’t it? Tamer kind of dancing.”

      “Maybe he’s got a little Aztec or Mayan blood, too,” Sam suggested. “They could be fierce.”

      “Carmine Jones,” Julie declared, “is more enthusiastic about the musical stage than his ancestral heritage, whatever the tribe. I’d say he joined our scenario chiefly because the Spanish Inquisition figures in a few standard-repertory operas, and the other two serious scenarios didn’t. I vote no on Jones.”

      But the vote split, Curly siding with Julie and Sam with Paul. One more tie vote, on Marge Hokstra. All the rest drew a clear majority No.

      Most of the Purgatorio’s decisions required consensus. When they voted instead, not having a tiebreaker, an evenly split vote meant further investigation—in this case, of the potential candidates. And so it went, through six more names.

      “Anyone else?” Sam said at last. “I think we’ve pretty well named them all.”

      Parting her ruby-glossed lips in a grin that showed off her even white teeth, Julie Whitcomb added, “We also had, for a few minutes there at the beginning, Angela Garvey.”

      Everyone laughed.

      That pretty young blond was nobody any of them could under any circumstances want to hurt even marginally.

      * * * *

      Angela had graduated from college in June, spent the next several months working props and make-up for Hodag Crossing’s communiversity summer theater, and arrived back in Forest Green in September to move in with her mother’s old friend, “Aunt” Sally Fulbright, while deciding whether to rejoin Dad, Barb, and Charley in Florida—a state that had never appealed to her that much—or get a place of her own here in her old home town.

      Aunt Sally’s home was about a kilometer this side of the Marquette House, where Corwin had his apartment. His remaining way wound through some of the most wildscaped of the city parks, and several more blocks went past heavily wooded undeveloped lots. It was the kind of stroll she knew he doted on, especially at night.

      He also loved to come in and visit, but tonight Aunt Sally had gone to a movie with a group of friends, leaving only the porch light and one living-room lamp on for Angela.

      As if to postpone saying good night for just a little while longer, he asked at the door, “Have you still that birthmark above your sternum?”

      “Do you think birthmarks move away to some other country?” she teased.

      “May they not on occasion suffer surgical excision?”

      “Well, there was never any reason to excise this one. Harmless patch of pink skin that you used to say looked a little like a heart.”

      “And thus, I have always hypothesized, inspired you to gravitate to the Raggedy world.” Keeping himself to simple words for Raggedy Andy must have exhausted him.

      She caught him looking at her chest. “Corwin Davison Poe! We were little kids when you looked at my birthmark, and you’re certainly not going to have another look at it now we’re grown up! Just pretend it’s melted away, like Raggedy Ann’s own candy heart when she fell in the water and drifted.”

      “Melted away to permeate her entire precious, stuffed body with sweetness. But did not our Camel with the Wrinkled Knees observe at one point that in this matter Raggedy Ann had been laboring under an erroneous opinion, which she subsequently revised with the discovery that her candy heart was still in place?”

      “Maybe just part of it melted. Just the outside edges. Remember, Beloved Belindy said near the end that she thought Raggedy Andy must have a candy heart, too?”

      “To which I think I responded, ‘No, my stuffing is plain white cotton through and through just now, but perhaps some day I will have a candy heart.”

      “And our Camel complimented you on getting the words so very close to what Raggedy Andy actually says in the book. How could you remember that, Cory, and not remember about the Raggedies being brother and sister?”

      “The words concerning Andy’s hope for a candy heart, I suppose remained in the subliminal depths of my hippocampus from rapid and possibly superficial childhood reading of Gruelle’s magnum opus. The relationship subsisting between the Raggedies…there, my forgetfulness could conceivably have an interpretation delicately suggestive of Freudian overtones…”

      “Say good night, Raggedy Andy.”

      They were much of a height. Stepping a little to one side, he leaned close, murmured, “For old times’ sake, Raggedy Ann,” and put a very tender kiss on her cheek. She couldn’t help reaching up and patting his night-stubbly cheek in return.

      Once inside the house, she leaned against the closed door and rubbed the spot on her cheek. Thoughtfully, very thoughtfully.

      What a bundle of contradictions he had grown up into!

      What a bundle of dear, precious contradictions.

      CHAPTER 2

      Monday, September 18

      On the salary of a junior police detective in a town of thirty-five thousand—even a police detective with a nice little legacy of lands and money, the latter going into making the former more livable—Dave Clayton cut corners where he could. This morning he was at the yearly health fair in the Friends’ Meeting House, where flu shots cost less than anywhere else. He was also running late for duty, thanks to uncooperative traffic lights.

      “Hey!” he announced, marching in behind his identification card. “Police detective here.”

      “Detective!” a neat, gray-haired lady in blue tunic and trousers greeted him. “Is there any trouble?”

      “None at all, M.,” he answered, turning the volume down on his baritone voice. Why did people always jump to that assumption? “Just hoping I can get my flu shot and still make it to work on time.”

      “Of course. Are you investigating that dreadful murder right here in Forest Green?”

      “We’ve always got a lot on our plate, M. But, yes, that one’ll be taking precedence until we’ve got the killer in custody.” Which might be a lot sooner if the Old Woman wasn’t quite so tender about risking miscarriages of justice; but Dave kept that thought to himself. Solidarity before the public.

      “Right this way, Detective.” The gray-haired lady led him straight to the head of the line, nodding out apologies on the way. “Here you are, Detective. Nurse Whitcomb, can you take this police detective next?”

      The nurse giving out flu shots glanced up from patting an adhesive mini-bandage on the arm of a little girl about nine or ten. “Surely,

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