Sam rolled his eyes, and said to Virgil, “Throw me some passes.”

“How about some grounders instead? You’re never playing football, if I can help it, so there’s no point in practicing.”

“You played football.”

“I was stupid,” Virgil said.

And so on. The usual.

* * *

—

   They went into town and got a pepperoni pizza, saving a slice for Honus, who was waiting impatiently in the back of the truck, knowing what was coming. They talked about this and that and a house that Frankie was bidding on, for demolition, and how she’d found online plans for a horse stable she thought might be right for the farm. “I took them up to Dave Jensen, and he’s going to print them out on his architectural printer. He said he’d do it today and drop them off tomorrow morning on the way to church.”

And they talked about Brett overdosing, if that’s what had happened.

“It’s very strange, especially the note on his stomach. ‘I did it. I can’t stand it.’ He must’ve meant he killed Quill. But, jeez, he didn’t seem like the type.”

“You get in a jam and you react,” Frankie said. “You don’t think. If you could take it back, you would, but you can’t. That’s why you all think Quill was killed with a laptop—it was an impulse. You don’t plan to kill somebody with a laptop.”

“Yeah, I know. He didn’t like Quill, he told me so himself,” Virgil said. “Then there’s the whole note thing, that it was written upside down from his perspective. How do you do that if you’re stoned on heroin?”

“You don’t know the sequence,” Frankie pointed out. “Maybe he wrote the note sober and then got high later on, then went for the second injection. It’s like that could be the same kind of almost accident as killing Quill. You get freaked out, you react, and then you can’t take it back.”

“I gotta think about it,” Virgil said. “When he wrote the note, there were no practice strokes, no do-overs.”

“I’ll never use drugs,” Sam said. “I plan on dying because I ate too much pepperoni.”

“You could do that,” Frankie said. “The way you pack it away, you could burn a hole right in the bottom of your stomach.”

“Or, you could die because you decided to play football,” Virgil said. “Have you even looked at the Benson boys? John Benson’s your age and he’s gotta weigh a hundred pounds. What are you, sixty? He’d rip your head off.”

“I’m too fast for that. He’d be standing there, holding his dick, and I’d be gone,” Sam said.

“You say ‘dick’ again—”

“I know, you’ll kick my ass,” Sam said. “Or Mom will.”

“I don’t know where a kid his age gets this stuff,” Virgil said to Frankie. “Things have changed since I was in school.”

Frankie was staring at him. “Virgil?”

“What?”

“He gets it from you. ‘Standing there, holding his dick.’ Or how about, last week, ‘His motorcycle is about the size of my dick’? I don’t even know if that’s supposed to mean it’s big or it’s small.”

“Small for a motorcycle, big for . . .” He looked at Sam. “Anyway, I’ll start watching it. The language.”

“Too late,” Frankie said. “This little twerp knows every word there is.”

“That’s true,” Sam said. To Virgil: “You gonna eat that pepperoni?”

“Fuckin’ A.” And to Frankie: “You said he knows all the words.”

* * *

—

At the house, they had some cleaning and straightening to do, and Virgil’s clothes to wash and dry, then they watched a movie and all went to bed. Virgil and Frankie fooled around for a while, after which the house was quiet.

The next morning, Dave Jensen dropped off the drawings for the stable, and they spent an hour going over them. Virgil agreed that his building skills were probably up to the task, with a bit of paid help. “I could do the inside electric, but I’d want help bringing it down from the pole.”

“Help? We’re gonna hire somebody to do the electric, period. I don’t even want you in the vicinity.”

“Wouldn’t hurt to have another well, either,” Virgil said. “Either that or get some work done on the one we’ve got. It’s gotta be eighty years old.”

* * *

—

Later in the day, they checked on Virgil’s house, which he was still leasing until November, and made two trips between Virgil’s and the farm, moving more of his belongings. He’d have to do some touch-up painting where Honus had scratched up the doors, but that could wait.

All minor stuff, but it sucked up most of the afternoon. After supper, Sam had to do homework, and Virgil and Frankie talked about a couple of possible wildlife articles that Virgil might do that would still keep him close to home.

And they talked about the case.

“You’ve been brooding about it all day,” Frankie said.

He told her about Harry’s theory that he knew the killer because that’s the way it would work on a TV show.

“Okay, that’s nuts,” she said.

“He’s right about one thing: I’ve had any number of people who could turn into suspects but haven’t. Not yet anyway. I’m almost to the point where I think it’s a stranger who did the killing. Somebody broke into the carrel—”

“He didn’t break in,” Frankie said.

“Right, didn’t break in. Okay, that’s a problem, because then there had to be a key.”

“It’s like this: there was somebody lurking in the library, looking for something to steal . . .”

“But, like you said, there’s no sign of a break-in,” Virgil said. “He would have had to hide himself in the library and then come out after everybody was gone. Why’d he wait so long? Why’d he wait until midnight if he could have done it at ten o’clock?”

“Too many people around,” Frankie said. “You said there were dorms all around the library, and it was a Friday night.”

Virgil nodded. “I’ll give you that one. He didn’t move until there was nobody to see him coming out. Seems weird. But, okay . . .”