Marvin shut the engine off and raised his hands.

Lars called, “Betsy, blow the whistle until you see some backup coming.”

Betsy pulled the brass-headed knob on the dash, sending the horses in the meadow into wild flight. She blew a long and then a row of shorts, then a long again. She kept doing it.

It seemed like a long time before a farmer drove up on an immense tractor, curious to know what these people were doing in his field. He had a cell phone in a pocket.

“So it was Marvin after all?” said Godwin from a stool in the corner. He was wearing immaculate white shoes, socks, and trousers, and not anxious to get anything greasy on them. His pearl-gray silk shirt was also vulnerable and he hitched the stool just a little bit farther from the wall where, he was sure, spiders lurked. Godwin was not afraid of spiders, but surely their little feet were dirty from crawling up and down that dusty wall. If one got on him, it might leave a trail. He had a date with John for dinner, and John had sounded very quiet and gentle when he’d called yesterday. Things were going to be all right, probably, but Godwin always felt more confident when he was dressed especially well.

“No, it was both of them,” said Betsy.

She was sitting on a low rolling chest designed to be sat upon, made of plastic, used by gardeners who didn’t like stooping or kneeling but who had a long row to plant or weed. She was wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless pink blouse, although she was getting too old to be going sleeveless, except among friends.

But everyone present was a friend. Jill was there, sitting on the workbench, her bruises from the fight with Charlotte making bold purple comments on her smooth complexion.

And Lars, of course, since this was his barn. He was in his grubbiest jeans and T-shirt, under the Stanley, “swaging the boiler”-banging a shaped metal plug up the numberless copper tubes, making them round again. It was a long, long job. He’d divided the tubes into areas, and worked on one area at a time; otherwise, he’d fall into despair at the large number there were to swage.

During the wait for backup to arrive, the boiler had run itself dry. Lars should have told Betsy to shut it down, close off the valves, but he’d been concentrating on keeping Marvin from doing something stupid.

Betsy took most of the blame. She should have thought of it, paid attention to the gauges. But the Stanley had sat there in silence and she had fallen into her internal combustion habit of thinking a silent car was a car shut off, and so the boiler was scorched.

“How do you know it was both of them?” asked Godwin.

“Because that was the only way everything fit. She was the one who pulled the trigger. She shot him early in the morning of the Excelsior run, as they were getting ready to leave the house for St. Paul. Then she called Marvin, and he came over and took Bill’s body over to the lay-by in the trunk of his car. Charlotte followed with the trailer they hauled the Maxwell in. It was Marvin who drove the Maxwell in the run, not Bill.”

“But surely people talked to Bill,” objected Godwin. “How could they mistake Marvin for him?”

“Actually they didn’t really talk to him. Charlotte stayed with Marvin until he was parked. She talked to Adam and to anyone who came by, until Marvin was well under the hood and able just to grunt at anyone who tried to talk to him.”

“Why would Marvin help her like that?” asked Godwin.

“Because they were lovers, had been for years. Everything was okay until Bill started spending more time at home. Then he got suspicious. Marvin wanted Charlotte to divorce Bill, but Marvin wasn’t a wealthy man. And while Bill wasn’t taking care of his high blood pressure, he may have had his suspicions about Marvin confirmed before he had that fatal stroke everyone was anticipating.”

“Golden handcuffs,” said Godwin sadly.

“Yes, at least in part. But also, tyrants don’t make loving husbands.”

“What do you think, she just decided she’d had enough and shot him?” asked Jill.

“I don’t think so. She’s a very intelligent person, she would have had a better plan set up in advance. I think she told the truth in her confession; they had a quarrel, he got violent, which he’d done before, and she went for the gun and shot him.”

“Self-defense, then?” asked Godwin.

“Detective Steffans says no. She had to go into another room, unlock a drawer, and then go back with it. She could have left the house instead. On the other hand, one reason she wore those enveloping dresses was because sometimes she had to hide bruises. Bill struck her often, but was careful to hit her in places she could cover up with clothing.”

“The monster!” said Godwin, with a shiver.

“So what put you on to them?” asked Jill.

“Orts,” said Betsy.

That had been said into a break in the hammering from Lars, and he wheeled himself out from under his car long enough to inquire, “Orts?”

“Those little pieces of floss you cut off the end of a row of stitching. When you run it down so short you can’t take another stitch. The end you cut off is an ort.”

“Oh,” he said and went back to hammering.

“What about orts?” persisted Jill.

“The photographs of the crime scene you brought me, remember? There were orts on Bill’s trousers, just like they were on Charlotte’s dress. She said she left them wherever she stitched. Anyone who lay on the floor of her sewing room-where the shooting took place-would come away with orts all over his clothes. But the man who drove into Excelsior and dove under the hood of his car to repair it, had no orts on his trousers. That photograph of him in the Excelsior Bay Times showed them immaculately clean, as clean as Godwin over there.”

Godwin looked down at himself, then smiled at Betsy. “Thank you,” he said.

“That’s it?” said Jill. “Just because of some orts?”

“Well, there were some other things. The way she knew what Marvin was thinking when they came into my shop without his saying a word was exactly the way she knew what ‘Bill’ was thinking when he was sitting beside her in the Maxwell. I thought she did that with everyone she knew well, but she didn’t do it with anyone else. The smile she gave Marvin at the Courage Center pool was the same she gave the person we all thought was her husband. When I found out what kind of a tyrant Bill was, I wondered how Charlotte could feel so affectionate toward him. The answer was, she couldn’t.”

Godwin said, “So you just put it all together in your usual clever way.”

Betsy frowned. “I tried to think of other explanations, but none worked. Broward acted badly about my investigating because he thought he was the only one who knew about Marvin and Charlotte’s affair and was trying to prevent my finding out and telling his sister and brothers. Charlotte lied when she said Bro and Bill teamed up to keep Adam from taking Birmingham Metal.”

“How’d you find that out?” asked Jill.

“I didn’t. Steffans did. Bro told him the reason he came home was because he heard from Bill’s doctor that if Bill didn’t retire, he’d be dead in six months. Since Bro knew Steffans was looking for motives, Bro had every reason to point at Adam-and he did tell him about the Fuller and the race for president of the car club.

“And there was an accident in the tunnel that Saturday, just as Adam said, so his alibi checked out. So it wasn’t Broward and it wasn’t Adam.”

She turned to Jill. “Another thing that bothered me was the medical examiner’s statement about time of death.” She turned to Jill. “You know what I mean. The estimate was, he died between late Friday night and noon on Saturday. That makes the window curiously lopsided, if he’d been killed in that lay-by around noon. But if he was killed early in the morning, that was right in the middle of the window.”