“Coincidence,” she said. “There’s a hundred horns like that in Ohio.”
“There are?” I said. “Then the next one will be a coincidence, too.”
“You marked it yourself just now.”
“I haven’t touched it.”
Twila looked at the deputy.
The deputy didn’t even look up.
“She hasn’t touched it.”
“I’ve been watching her hands,” said the man in the VFW cap. “She hasn’t touched a thing.”
Twila’s face went from pink to red.
She snatched up the next item on the table and held it out at me.
“Then do this one, Miss Expert.”
It was a mourning brooch, a black oval set in gold with a lock of braided brown hair under glass.
I didn’t need my pages for that one either.
“The back of the pin hinge,” I said. “Very small. Sixty-two point one.”
The deputy turned it over under his light.
“62.1.”
Somebody behind me said:
“Well, I’ll be.”
I went down the table after that, slowly, and I never once touched anything.
I named a spot.
The deputy looked, and the detective photographed.
The brass spectacle case.
“Inside the hinge, on the left leaf.”
There.
The silver pocket watch with the dent near the crown.
“Inside the case back.”
It took the deputy’s fingernail to open it.
There.
The tintype in its little leather case, showing a young soldier with one hand on a chair.
“Under the corner of the velvet pad. Bottom right.”
Christa was still clutching the box it came from, so the deputy lifted the box gently out of her arms.
There.
The child’s pewter cup.
“Under the handle where it meets the body.”
There.
The cast-iron toy fire engine missing its wheel.
“Inside the ladder bracket.”
There.
That made seven objects, seven second numbers, and seven price tags.
That added up to $3,240.
Then Twila, shaking now, pushed one more brooch across the velvet at me.
It was black enamel with a gold rim, a lot like the first.
“And this one? Is this yours, too?”
I looked at it for a long time without touching it.
“No,” I said. “That one isn’t ours.”
The fishing-lure man laughed out loud.
“She just cleared one for you, Twila.”
It may have been the most important thing I said all morning.
A liar claims everything on the table.
I didn’t want one object that didn’t belong to the county.
I only wanted the truth back in its drawers.
That’s when Christa broke.
“She knows where the marks are because she put them there!”
Scene 17: The Fallout of the Plot
Her voice went high and thin and carried all the way to the kettle corn.
“She’s been in our house! She could have done it anytime!”
Bud Kinnaman took his reading glasses out of his apron and put them on as if they’d help him say it.
“Young lady, this hall was locked at nine last night. Fair board keys only. Nobody came in.”
“Then she did it before!” Christa cried. “At home! She was supposed to be at the airport. She was supposed to be—”
She stopped.
It was so quiet I could hear the kettle corn popping by the north door, like slow applause from someone who hadn’t made up their mind yet.
I hadn’t said a word to Christa in three days.
I looked at the detective, and she gave me one small nod.
“Christa,” I said, “on Sunday the 13th, at 8:34, you called Elwood. You said I’d been caught at the airport.”
She stared at me.
“Nobody was caught. Nobody told you about a pistol. Who told you it was a pistol?”
“I saw—” she started.
“Christa,” Twila said. “Stop talking.”
“You told the detective you saw me pack it at nine,” I said. “But at midnight, you were standing in my doorway. I was awake, Christa. I heard every word.”
I said the next part quietly, and I think that’s why everyone heard it.
“It’s in her carry-on.”
Christa’s mouth opened, and nothing came out.
Detective Havamp didn’t say anything.
She took a sheet of paper out of her folder and laid it flat on the green velvet, right beside the powder horn.
It was my printout of the August listing.
Twila’s Back Porch.
“Two-shot pocket pistol, circa 1866.”
$1,450.
Posted August 8th.
Ended by seller September 11th at 10:14 a.m.
And under the pistol in the photograph, the same green velvet our hands were resting on right now.
One of the dealers whistled low.
“You were selling it in August,” the detective said to Twila. “Before anyone knew it was missing.”
Twila didn’t turn on the detective.
She turned on me.
“You ruined me over a sword!” she shouted.
“A sword?”
“Five years of people laughing behind my back!”
“It was a reproduction, Twila. I only said what it was.”
“You always say what it is!”
Then she whirled on her daughter, and her voice dropped into something meaner.
“You brought it back to me. You swore she’d never look in that pocket.”
“You told me to put it in her bag!” Christa screamed. “You said it had to be the pistol! You said they’d find a gun for sure!”
“Shut up, Christa! Calling the airport was your idea! You wanted her in handcuffs!”
They stood a foot apart, mother and daughter, shouting the whole plan at each other across the open cash bag.
Forty people heard every word.
A grandmother near the front pulled her granddaughter against her coat.
I stood with my gloved hands folded in front of me and said nothing at all.
There wasn’t anything left for me to say.
They were saying it for me.
Garrick was standing at the back corner of the booth, still holding a box against his chest.
Nobody had looked at him in ten minutes.
I don’t think he’d breathed.
“Christa,” he said.
He didn’t say it loudly.
She turned anyway.
“You wrapped it in my sock.”
She opened her mouth and shut it.
Then she said the one thing she shouldn’t have.
