Little Tiny Teeth

“And”—she offered a crooked grin—“I’m really sorry I socked you. How’s the lip?”

He laughed. “Forget it, Maggie, the lip’s fine. However,” and he leveled a finger at her, “you still owe me that beer.”

When she went into the dining room, Gideon sank into a pensive silence while Phil and John continued to toss around ideas. A grotesque thought, almost too bizarre to consider seriously, had begun noodling away at him. Was it possible that they had it wrong, that everybody had it wrong?

He got up, went to the railing without a word—“Have we offended the fellow in some way?” Phil asked John— and gazed outward toward the wall of darkening green, his hands trailing

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abstractedly back and forth over the ebony-stained teak rail, warm and smooth against his palms. The steaming, still rain forest, so much closer here on the Javaro than it had been on the Amazon, slid monotonously by. Below him, the brown river whispered against the metal side of the ship. Gideon didn’t see the jungle, didn’t hear the water. His mind was absorbed in poking like a prodding finger at this not yet wholly formed idea of his, probing for flaws, testing for soundness, searching for a place to put the piece that didn’t fit. . . .

Only yards from his face, a brilliant red macaw suddenly fluttered up from a branch with an indignant squawk and flapped away into the dimness of the interior. It startled him enough that his mind jumped from the unproductive rut it had dug itself into, and the final piece fell into place.

He thumped his fist gently against his palm—an unconscious gesture of self-satisfaction—and turned to face the others. “We got it backwards,” he said softly, urgently. “Sonofagun. Everybody got it backwards.”

“What are we talking about now?” Phil wondered.

“Got what backwards?” asked John.

“The way it happened. The order of events. First we assumed Maggie was thrown overboard after Arden. Then we assumed—”

“Still talking about me, I see,” Maggie said, coming from the dining room with her refilled bottle. She put her hand to her heart and wiggled her fingers. “Flutter, flutter.” Her left eyebrow was characteristically arched, her mouth ironically set, her voice typically mocking, but there was something unmistakably wary in her expression, in her taut shoulders.

Damn, Gideon thought. Why did I burst out with it like that? Why couldn’t I shut up until she was gone? Surely she’d heard

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enough to guess where he was going, and it was too late to start waffling now. Maggie was too smart for that, too quick on the uptake. There was but one way to go. He took in a breath and went there.

“Maggie,” he said, “you killed Arden. You threw him overboard.”

In the charged silence that fell on them John and Phil goggled at him in mute amazement.

Maggie, however, was up to the challenge. “Oh, really?” she said sardonically, her eyebrow arching even higher, her voice falling even lower. “Was that before or after he threw me overboard?”

“Arden never threw you overboard.”

“If this is your idea of a joke, I have to say—”

“No joke.”

She faltered. Her composure began to disintegrate. A tic jerked beside her right eye. “Gideon, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but you’re on dangerous ground here. Arden did throw me over, or at least somebody did, but you keep changing your mind about who, and after that he—”

“Uh-uh, Maggie, that whole thing about him, what happened there on the deck—it was all a lie.”

Her face had stiffened. Her words spattered out like bullets. “I don’t know just who the hell you think you are, mister, but if you think for one minute—”

“We were just up on the roof, Maggie. You left some blood up there. We collected it. What do you want to bet that a lab test doesn’t show that it’s yours?”

“Hers?” he heard John murmur in astonishment.

Her face eased. Her hunched shoulders relaxed a little. “Oh, I see where you’re coming from. My ankle...you think . . .” She shook her head and laughed. “I should be angry as all get-out, but it’s funny,

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really. Well, luckily for me, I can prove what I said. Give me a minute, let me get something from my room.” She walked to the stairs, then stopped and turned as she reached them. “You guys,” she said with a crooked grin. “If you don’t take the cake.” She shook her head as if in wonder and trotted up the steps. “Don’t go anywhere,” she called.

“Are you serious?”

“Are you crazy?”

John and Phil had both exclaimed at the same time, and Gideon wasn’t sure who had said what. Still standing at the rail, his elbows leaning on it behind him, he said, “Serious, yes. Crazy, I’m not sure. I don’t know what kind of proof she thinks she has, but I’m damn near certain I’m right. She threw Scofield off, not the other way around.”

John shook his head. “How the hell do you come up with that?”

“It’s the cut on her ankle,” Gideon said. “She said she got it when she hit her foot on the railing upstairs, in