right out of the pot with a serving spoon. Eight o‘clock came, nine o’clock came. The rain came, harder and harder. So hard that it began to stream in under the front door, sparkling and golden in the lantern light. He fetched a mop to soak it up. Then he realized it was leaking in around his living room windows as well. He put a couple of old bath towels down under them to contain it and knelt there with the lantern, checking the floorboards for moisture. It didn’t appear to be streaming any farther into the room. Not yet anyway. Satisfied, Mitch stood back up and let out a sudden and wholly involuntary gasp of shock.
He was face to face with them.
Three figures clad in foul-weather gear stood right there on the other side of the window in the pouring rain, staring in at him. Their features were slightly distorted by the beads of water on the glass, but Mitch had no trouble making out who they were.
It was Bud Havenhurst, Red Peck and Jamie Devers who stood out there. He had not heard their footsteps on the gravel path. Not with all of that rain and wind.
Briefly, Mitch felt as if he’d been bolted to the floor. Here is what he was thinking: My God, it actually worked. He hadn’t expected it to. Not really. Sure, it had worked in that Joan Crawford movie. But that was not real life. And he really did know the difference, whether the lieutenant believed him or not. This was real life-staring at him through the window. And Mitch’s first reaction was total panic. He was not sure if he could actually pull this off. He was smart enough, but did he have the nerve?
He honestly didn’t know. But after that first jolt of shock had passed, an inner resolve did begin to kick in. Determination coursed through his veins. He felt steady. He felt strong. It wasn’t on the level of, say, Popeye after the sailor man had gulped down a can of spinach. But he’d take it. Mitch took a deep breath, strode to the door and flung it open, holding it against the wind with all of his weight.
“Hey, boy!” Bud called to him from out of the stormy darkness.
“Hey back at you!” Mitch exclaimed, a big smile on his face. “Don’t you guys know enough to come in out of the rain?”
“May we?” pleaded Jamie. “It’s really wet out here.”
“Of course.” Mitch stepped aside to let them in.
“We were just checking up on Dolly’s tree,” Red Peck said stolidly as the three of them came tromping inside in their rain boots, the water pouring from them. All three wore shiny yellow rubberized jackets and pants. Bud was clutching a long black Mag-Lite flashlight. “It was that old oak out by the driveway,” Red added, shrugging off his rain hood. His hair underneath was plastered flat but dry.
“I heard it come down,” Mitch said, his heart racing. “Sounded pretty bad.”
“One big limb broke off,” Bud said. “But she was lucky-it landed in the driveway instead of on the house. We’ll have to take a chain saw to it in the morning, assuming it ever stops raining.”
“That’s a mighty bold assumption, pilgrim,” Jamie cracked with an impish twinkle in his eye. “We saw your lantern light, Mitch. Just wanted to make sure you were okay. See if you needed anything.”
So they were going to play games. Fine.
“I’m hanging in,” he said, shoving the door shut. “Nice of you to check, though. Can I offer you a scotch for your trouble?”
“You can,” said Jamie, rubbing his hands together with eager anticipation.
The other two nodded in agreement.
Mitch fetched four glasses from the kitchen, struggling to keep his calm. He’d positioned his bottle of single malt on a bookcase over by his desk. This gave him an opportunity to do what he had to do-flick on his microcassette recorder-while he was busy pouring. Then he brought them their drinks, the scotch glowing like honey in the lamplight.
Bud and Jamie had removed their slickers and stood over by the fire in their rubberized overalls, looking very much like commercial fishermen unwinding after a long day out on the Sound.
Red had unbuttoned his own slicker to reveal the Browning twelve-gauge that he’d been concealing underneath it. He did not raise the shotgun at Mitch. He held it like a safety-conscious hunter would hold it, with the barrel pointed down at the floor.
“What are you planning to shoot with that, Red?” Mitch asked as he handed him his glass.
“Mitch, that all depends on you,” Red responded in a quiet voice.
His three visitors stood there in ominous silence now, gazing cold-eyed at Mitch as the wind howled and the rain tore at his little house. They were no longer the Fab Five. They were the Three Amigos-an aging child star who dealt in antiques, an attorney who dealt in estates and a short-legged airline pilot who had never shot anything more predatory than Bambi. Tuck Weems and Tal Bliss had been the trigger men. With them out of the picture, these three were on unfamiliar turf. And quaking in their boots.
Or so Mitch desperately hoped and prayed.
Bud slid a hand in his pocket and fished out the note Mitch had left for each of them. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded, looking down his long, narrow nose at Mitch.
“It means just what it says,” Mitch replied, pleased by how normal his own voice sounded. “It means that I’m on to you.”
Jamie took a swallow of his scotch. “About what, Mitch?”
“All of it, Jaymo,” Mitch said. “How you banded together to get rid of Niles. How Tuck seduced Torry. Why you had her check into the Saybrook Point Inn. Why Tal Bliss killed himself.” Mitch paused to take in their reactions. Beads of perspiration were forming on Bud’s forehead. Jamie’s breathing had become shallow and uneven. Of the three, Red seemed the coolest and most in control. This was not good, since it was he who was holding the Browning. “Naturally, I intend to go to the law. Only there’s a few things I still don’t understand. For starters, why did you bury Niles out here on Big Sister?”
“Don’t tell him a thing!” Red barked at the others. “Not one word.”
“I don’t see any upside in that, Red,” Bud countered. “It’s not as if he’s going to get that chance to go to the law.”
“Agreed,” Jamie said heavily.
They intended to kill him. Right here. Right now. Mitch swallowed, his eyes falling on the shotgun. Red still had it pointed down at the floor.
“It had to do with the tides, Mitch,” Bud said. “If it had been high tide, we would have taken his body away by boat and buried him under the rocks out on Little Sister. Unfortunately, it was low tide that afternoon. The channel from our dock is narrow. It’s not uncommon for one of us to run aground. We couldn’t afford to take that chance. Not with Niles’s body onboard. Therefore, burying him here was our safest option.”
“But why did you kill him so close to home?”
“Name a better place,” Bud answered. “It’s totally private out here. No witnesses. The women were gone for the afternoon.”
“We met up with him in the barn,” Jamie recalled. “That’s where it happened.”
“Niles was utterly flabbergasted,” Bud jeered. “The bastard couldn’t believe it. He thought we were joking.”
Mitch took a gulp of his scotch, his hand wrapped tightly around the glass. “Who pulled the trigger?”
“Tuck Weems,” Jamie replied. “He shot the girl, too.”
Red was still not saying anything. Just standing there in front of the fire with the shotgun. Outside, the wind howled and the rain still poured down.
“It was stupid of him to use the same gun,” said Mitch. “That was the one crucial mistake you made.”
“Agreed,” Bud acknowledged miserably. “But only with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, we had no reason to believe that anyone would ever find Niles’s body.”
“And Tuck seemed to know what he was doing,” Jamie added defensively. “He ran the early stages, really. All the rest of us did was loan him our cars for his assignations with that girl.”
“Torry,” said Mitch. “Her name was Torry.”
“Tuck didn’t want to leave a recognizable trail behind,” Bud explained.
“And why did you shoot him?”
“Tuck’s conscience started gnawing at him,” spoke up Red, who’d finally decided there was no point in staying silent. Mitch couldn’t decide whether this was a good sign or a bad sign. He suspected it wasn’t good. “Something to do with him becoming a father for the first time at age fifty. Poor guy thought he’d seen God or
