Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

nice, expensive little gun, and it had one bullet of the type that killed Harley still in it. So, Jim had motive and opportunity enough, Scott thinks. Hattie told me that the charges against Miz Day have been dropped, anyway. I think John Lee is picking her up from the jailhouse in Muskogee right this minute.”
    Alafair put her elbow on the table and shook her head. “Well, I’ll be.”
    Josie patted the table conspiratorially. “What’s this I hear about John Lee Day and Phoebe?” she asked.
    Alafair opened her mouth to answer before a thought struck her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Did you say that the derringer still had one bullet in it?”
    Josie nodded, perplexed. “Yes, one empty chamber and one chamber loaded with a .22 caliber bullet. Why?”
    Alafair’s heart suddenly plummeted to her boots. One bullet in Harley’s head, and one bullet in the blackjack tree, and one bullet in the gun. Three bullets in a two-shot derringer. She had twisted herself in knots to keep Phoebe’s involvement in all this a secret. She should have known that the truth always comes out. Where did that third bullet come from? Did somebody reload? Or was there a second gun? She leaned back in her chair and covered her eyes with her hands.
    “What is it, child?” Josie asked, alarmed.
    Alafair dropped her hands into her lap and prepared to tell Josie all.
    ***
    “I’ll be switched from here to Dallas!” Josie exclaimed, after Alafair had finished her tale. “No wonder you’ve been so interested in finding out who killed Harley Day! Well, I’m glad you finally told me, Alafair. This is quite a burden to bear all by yourself.”
    “So you can see the dilemma, now, Josie,” Alafair said. “Phoebe and I found one bullet in a blackjack, which lines up with John Lee’s story about shooting at Harley and missing. There was one .22 slug in Harley’s head. Then Jim Leonard says there was still a bullet in the gun when he found it.”
    “You didn’t notice if the gun was loaded when you found it at the still?”
    “I didn’t think to look. I just expected it was empty.”
    “Scott has the gun, and it has one bullet in it, now,” Josie pointed out. “He has to be thinking the same thing we are. Three bullets, two-shot derringer. Somebody reloaded. It’s the most likely thing.”
    “Or that derringer isn’t the one that killed Harley,” Alafair speculated.
    “Another gun?”
    “Maybe.”
    Josie crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. “Well, then, we’re back where we started. Anybody could have done it.”
    Alafair’s forehead crinkled, and she sat back in her chair, trying to quiet the frantic noise in her brain. In the few moments of dead silence that followed, a thought floated up from the depths of her mind, ephemeral as a butterfly. She leaned forward, trying to grasp it. “I stopped by Zorah Millar’s just before Mary dropped me off here,” she said.
    Josie blinked at this incongruous comment. “Yes?” she urged.
    “She told me that before Maggie Ellen Day ran away from home, she gave the girl the means to protect herself.”
    “You reckon that means she gave her a gun?”
    Alafair clicked her tongue, exasperated. “That comment went right by me. I could kick myself!”
    Josie waved away this superfluous comment with a flick of her fingers in the air, and got back to the point. “You’re thinking that Maggie Ellen Day might have done it. But how? She ran away a long time ago.”
    “So everybody says. But did she come back? Both John Lee and Naomi told me that she planned to come back eventually to get the kids away from Harley. Maybe she did just that.”
    “In the middle of the night?”
    “Well, it makes sense. If she was afraid of Harley, she might want to do it on the sly.”
    Josie nodded. “All right, then. She sneaks back onto the farm in the middle of a snowy night, intending to spirit away some or all of the kids, and maybe her mother, too. She has her gun that her aunt gave her for protection. Then, as she gets near the house, she sees the object of her hatred lying by the house in a filthy, reeking heap, freezing to death. It’s dark, it’s cold, there’s nobody around….”
    “It’s the first time she’s clapped eyes on him in a year,” Alafair continued. “All of a sudden it all comes back to her like a thunderburst, all the misery, all the humiliation. And she does it.”
    “Maybe she feels real good at first,” Josie finished the tale, “but then it