Fiji looked at him with a bright smile. “I wish your staff wanted to get him in jail as much as you do. Any other news, Sheriff?”

“Yes,” Smith said. “I do have news.”

His voice was so grave they all hushed and turned to him, even Lemuel.

“It’s strange you should have brought up August Schneider’s car. Because we’ve determined Aubrey Hamilton was, in fact, hit by a vehicle.”

“I thought I saw a bullet hole,” Olivia said quietly. “But you told Bobo she wasn’t shot.”

“You saw a roundish hole. But the pathologist says it’s not a bullet hole, but a puncture where something on a vehicle—probably a truck, from the height—pierced the bone. That hole enlarged as tiny pieces of the bone flaked away during the time she lay there.”

Bobo said slowly, “She was hit by a truck.”

They all turned to look at Smith, who nodded. He looked from one to the other, quizzically.

“Oh,” said Manfred, finally understanding what they’d all pieced together. He lowered his face to his hands.

“You all know something I don’t know,” Smith said. “I think you’d better tell me.”

There was a long moment, a moment when the room fell absolutely silent.

“I don’t guess we know anything you don’t already know,” Fiji said finally.

An unhappy sheriff left a few minutes later, after threatening them all if they didn’t tell him what he’d overlooked.

“He was so mad,” Fiji said unhappily. “And he seems like a nice guy.”

“That nice guy thought I’d killed Aubrey,” Bobo reminded her.

“That’s his job.”

“All that aside,” said Olivia, “what do we do now?”

“When we’re sure he’s gone, we’ve got to go talk to the Lovells.” Fiji sounded sure but still unhappy.

“Will you explain to me what’s going on?” Manfred said. He had that note to his voice, the one that tells the listener that the speaker knows he is going to receive very bad news in a very few minutes. He suspected he knew what that news was; he wasn’t certain.

But no one enlightened him.

Lemuel glided out the door to return after a few minutes. “Sheriff’s gone,” the vampire reported.

Olivia looked at her watch, a slim silver thing that looked expensive to Manfred’s uneducated eyes. “It’s time for the gas station to close,” she said. “We might as well go now.”

The Rev said, “I’ll go prepare.” And he went over to the chapel.

Manfred trailed along, feeling left out and apprehensive. No one specially invited him, but no one told him not to come, and all the others seemed to be going.