Alan squeezed his fist viciously shut, opened it, and then there were none.

“Uh-huh. So maybe my bad news is your good news. Someone else was involved, Alan. We don’t know who killed the Cobb woman’s dog, but we can be almost positive that it wasn’t Wilma Jersyck. “Alan’s feet came off the desk in a hurry. The cartwheels slid out of his sleeve and hit the top of his desk in a little silver runnel.

One of them came down on edge and rolled for the side of the desk.

Alan’s hand flicked out, spooky-quick, and snatched it back before it could get away. “I think you better tell me what you got, Henry.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s start with the dog. The body was turned over to John Palm, a D.V.M. in South Portland. He is to animals what Henry

Ryan is to people. He says that because the corkscrew penetrated the dog’s heart and it died almost instantly, he can give us a fairly restricted time of death.”

“That’s a nice change,” Alan said. He was thinking of the Agatha Christie novels which Annie had read by the dozen. In those, it seemed there was always some doddering village doctor who was more than willing to set the time of death as between 4:30 p.m. and quarter past five. After almost twenty years as a law enforcement officer, Alan knew a more realistic response to the time-of-death question was “Sometime last week. Maybe.”

“It is, isn’t it? Anyway, this Dr. Palm says the dog died between ten o’clock and noon. Peter jerzyck says that when he came into the master bedroom to get ready for church-at a little past tenhis wife was in the shower.”

“Yes, we knew it was tight,” Alan said. He was a little disappointed. “But this guy Palm must allow for a margin of error, unless he’s God. Fifteen minutes is all it takes to make Wilma look good for it.”

“Yeah? How good does she look to you, Alan?”

He considered the question, then said heavily: “To tell you the truth, old buddy, she doesn’t look that good. She never did.” Alan forced himself to add: “Just the same, we’d look pretty silly keeping this case open on the basis of some dog-doctor’s report and a gap of-what?-fifteen minutes?”

“Okay, let’s talk about the note on the corkscrew. You remember the note?”

“’Nobody slings mud at my clean sheets. I told you I’d get you.’ “The very one. The handwriting expert in Augusta is still mooning over it, but Peter jerzyck provided us with a sample of his wife’s handwriting, and I’ve got Xerox copies of both the note and the sample on the desk in front of me. They don’t match. No way do they match.”

“The hell you say!”

“The hell I don’t. I thought you were the guy who wasn’t surprised.”

“I knew something was wrong, but it’s been those rocks with the notes on them that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind.

The time sequence is screwy, and that’s made me uncomfortable, yeah, but on the whole I guess I was willing to sit still for it.

Mostly because it seems like such a Wilma jerzyck thing to do. You’re sure she didn’t disguise her handwriting?” He didn’t believe it-the idea of travelling incognito had never been Wilma jerzyck’s style-but it was a possibility that had to be covered.

“Me? I’m positive. But I’m not the expert, and what I think won’t stand up in court. That’s why the note’s in graphanalysis.”

“When will the handwriting guy file his report?”

“Who knows? Meantime, take my word for it, Alan-they’re apples and oranges. Nothing alike.”

“Well, if Wilma didn’t do it, someone sure wanted Nettle to believe she did. Who? And why? Why, for God’s sake?”

“I dunno, scout-it’s your town. In the meantime, I have two more things for you.”

“Shoot.” Alan put the silver dollars back into his drawer, then made a tall, skinny man in a top-hat walk across the wall. On the return trip, the top-hat became a cane.

“Whoever killed the dog left a set of bloody fingerprints on the inner knob of Nettle’s front door-that’s big number one.”

“Hot damn!”

’Warm damn at the best, I’m afraid. They’re blurry. The perp probably left them grasping the doorknob to go out.”

“No good at all?”

“We’ve got some fragments that might be useful, although there isn’t much chance that they’d stand up in court. I’ve sent them to FBI Print-Magic in Virginia. They’re doing some pretty amazing reconstructive work on partials these days. They’re slower than cold molasses-it’ll probably be a week or even ten days before I hear back-but in the meantime, I compared the partials with the Jerzyck woman’s prints, which were delivered to me by the ever-thoughtful Medical Examiner’s office last evening.”

“No match?”

“Well, it’s like the handwriting, Alan-it’s comparing partials to totals, and if I testified in court on something like that, the defense would chew me a new asshole. But since we’re sitting at the bullshit table, so to speak, no-they’re nothing alike. There’s the question of size, for one thing. Wilma jerzyck had small hands. The partials came from someone with big hands. Even when you allow for the blurring, they are damned big hands.”

“A man’s prints?”

“I’m sure of it. But again, it’d never stand up in court.”

“Who gives a fuck?” On the wall, a shadow lighthouse suddenly appeared, then turned into a pyramid. The pyramid opened like a flower and became a goose flying through the sunshine. Alan tried to see the face of the man-not Wilma jerzyck but some manwho had gone into Nettle’s house after Nettle had left on Sunday morning. The man who had killed Nettle’s Raider with a corkscrew and then framed Wilma for it. He looked for a face and saw nothing but shadows. “Henry, who would even want to do something like this, if it wasn’t Wilma?”

“I don’t know. But I think we might have a witness to the rockthrowing incident.”

“What? Who?”

“I said might, remember.”

“I know what you said. Don’t tease me. Who is it?”

“A kid. The woman who lives next door to the jerzycks heard noises and came out to try and see what was going on. She said she thought maybe ’that bitch’-her words-had finally gotten mad enough at her husband to throw him out a window. She saw the kid pedaling away from the house, looking scared. She asked him what was going on. He said he thought maybe Mr. and Mrs. jerzyck were having a fight.

Well, that was what she thought, too, and since the noises had stopped by then, she didn’t think any more about it.”

“That must have beenjillian Mislaburski,” Alan said. “The house on the other side of the jerzyck place is empty-up for sale.”

“Yeah. Jillian Misla-whatski. That’s what I’ve got here.”

“Who was the kid?”

“Dunno. She recognized him but couldn’t come up with the name.

She says he’s from the neighborhood, though-probably from right there on the block. We’ll find him.”

“How old?”

“She said between eleven and fourteen.”

“Henry? Be a pal and let me find him. Would you do that?”

“Yep,” Henry said at once, and Alan relaxed. “I don’t understand why we have to roll these investigations when the crime happens right in the county seat, anyway. They let them fry their own fish in Portland and Bangor, so why not Castle Rock? Christ, I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce that woman’s name until you said it out loud!”

“There are a lot of Poles in The Rock,” Alan said absently. He tore a pink Traffic Warning form from the pad on his desk and jotted Jill Mislaburski’ and Boy, 11-14 on the back.

“If my guys find this kid, he’s gonna see three big State Troops and be so scared everything goes out of his head,” Henry said. “He probably knows you-don’t you go around and talk at the schools?”

“Yes, about the D.A.R.E. program and on Law and Safety Day,” Alan said. He was trying to think of families with kids on the block where the jerzycks and the Mislaburskis lived. If Jill Mislaburski recognized him but didn’t know his name, that probably meant the kid lived around the corner, or maybe on Pond Street. Alan wrote three names quickly on the sheet of scrap paper: DeLois, Rusk, Bellingham.