“Well, the vacuum cleaner is normally in the broom closet, but it was sitting in the kitchen, by the back door, there.” She pointed. “And there wasn’t no bag inside it.”

25

STONE AND DINO WENT and stood in the bedroom doorway, so as not to disturb anything further by entering the room.

“He’s sitting up in bed,” Stone said, “so whoever shot him woke him up first.”

“Unless he wasn’t asleep when the guy arrived,” Dino said.

“The TV isn’t on, and there’s no book present, so he wasn’t sitting up in bed reading. Nobody just sits in bed, doing nothin’.”

“Maybe you’re right. But why would the guy wake him up?”

Stone shrugged. “Maybe he had something to say to him before he shot him.”

“Like what?”

“Like, ‘Here’s one from your pal, Joe,’ or whoever ordered the hit.”

“You should write novels.”

“Short stories, maybe. There’s always a little story that goes with a murder. This wasn’t the burglary story, was it?”

“Nothing seems disturbed.”

“Let’s take a look outside,” Stone said.

They walked through the kitchen, where Hilda was sitting, disconsolately, drinking coffee, and out the back door. The sea was, perhaps, thirty paces away, and they avoided walking on the path, looking for footprints.

“Got a good one here,” Dino said, pointing.

“Deck shoe,” Stone said. “See the little ridges? That narrows the suspect list to everybody on the island and everybody on the coast of Maine.”

“Big deck shoe,” Dino said. “Size eleven or twelve. There are other partials here, going in both directions, but just this one good one.”

“That’s more than the cops found at Dick’s house,” Stone said. “I’d consider that a break.” He walked down to the rocky beach and pointed. “Some scrapes on the stones here; our man arrived by boat and pulled it ashore, but only a foot or two.”

“Must have been a sizable boat,” Dino said. “Not just a whatchamacallit…?”

“Dinghy.”

“Yeah.”

They walked back up toward the porch, and Dino pointed: “Sand and dirt on the porch.”

“That’s about it,” Stone said. “Let’s take a look out front.”

They walked around the house.

“Too many cars and people here to find any usable footprints,” Dino said, “but I’m satisfied the killer came by boat.”

Stone walked up to the porch, where the Old Farts and Jimmy Hotchkiss had sat down. “Where’s the nearest house?”

Rawls pointed. “Over there, a couple of hundred yards.”

“The cops will want to know if anybody heard the shot.”

“Why? We know he was shot.”

“Fix the time of death,” Dino said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anybody got any thoughts about this killing?” Stone asked the group.

“We’ve all got the same thought,” Harley Davis said.

“Don and Dick were of different generations,” Stone said. “Would they have ever worked together on something?”