The rat’s expression was somber, but Vera thought she detected a gleam in his eyes. She said, “There’s a bit of paperwork, of course. But if you could just fill these forms out, we can make sure Dorothy is safe and getting all the help she needs. Unless you object?”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried over and over again to talk with her and try to understand what she believes. So have friends, all to no avail. I think that what you’re proposing is the right course of action.”
Orville passed him a clipboard with several papers attached to it. “These are the forms, sir. The top one is spousal consent and power of attorney. The next one simply says that Dorothy is going to a facility which is run by the Shady Hollow hospital. And the last is just a municipal form asking for a lot of little details. Perhaps we should all go inside?”
“No, no, I can do it right here,” the rat said, accepting the clipboard. “This is what needs to be done.” He filled out all the forms with surprising speed, and then offered the clipboard back to Orville. “Hope that’s all, Officer. I suppose it’s better if I don’t speak to Dotty about this.”
“Doro,” she called from her spot. “Edward always called me Doro. Always.”
The rat shook his head sadly. “It really is getting bad. All right, then. If you all can escort her to the hospital, I’d be so grateful. I’ll check in on her in a day or two, just to see she’s getting what she needs.”
Orville was scanning the forms, and nodded with satisfaction. “Yes, this is more than sufficient.”
“Oh, one more thing,” Vera said. “I was just wondering…when I interviewed you for Adora’s obituary, you said Thomas was the older brother.”
The rat froze for the barest instant, unprepared for the mention of this subject. But he said, slowly, “Yes.”
“Fourteen minutes hardly seems to count as older. Edward was born fourteen minutes after the other twin, named Thomas. That’s what the vital record said when I saw it…one of the only records of the birth you didn’t manage to steal or destroy, because it was locked away in a disused storeroom with a missing key. But you worked hard to get rid of all the other evidence of your existence…didn’t you, Thomas?”
“You mean Edward,” he said.
“No, you mean for us all to think you’re Edward,” Vera said coldly. “You snuck into Shady Hollow a couple of weeks ago, hid out at the vacant house of Professor Heidegger to get your bearings, and then you came to this location late in the night to kill your twin brother, Edward, and assume his identity. You intended to kill Dot the moment she got here too, because she’d be the one creature who was most likely to see through your act. But when you checked in with Mr. Fallow—probably after going through Edward’s papers that first night—you discovered that the inheritance had an unexpected caveat. You had to be married, and both spouses had to be alive to inherit.”
“This is madness,” he said.
“Madness? That was your backup plan,” Vera continued. “When Dorothy realized you weren’t Edward, you did everything you could to make her look mentally unsound. If no one believed her, you could keep up the façade.”
“Stories. Dorothy is delusional.”
“No, she’s not. And you knew that you were in trouble the moment Edward’s body was discovered in the woods. I remember something Orville said—any true local would know that that patch of woodland is rumored to hold a buried treasure. Folk have been digging for the better part of a year to find it. But you’re not a local, so you didn’t know. If you’d chosen any other area to bury the body after you beheaded it to hide the identity of the victim, your crime might never have been exposed. Poor Thomas. That’s what you get for moving away from home.”
“Do I have to listen to this, Officer?” Thomas asked, appealing to Orville.
“If it’s not true, you have nothing to fear,” Orville responded. “Of course, if it is true, that means you falsified an official document in the presence of an officer of the law. I can hold you on that charge alone.”
“But you can’t prove that this wild charge is true, can you?” the rat replied, now in a frosty, confident tone. Thomas smiled, looking around as though he were viewing a slightly amusing local theater production that had nothing to do with him. “It’s a very interesting tale, to be sure, Miss Vixen. Worthy of Bradley Marvel, perhaps. But none of those so-called facts prove me a murderer. It doesn’t even prove that I’m anyone other than Edward.”
“When I was in your house to do the interview, I checked the rug in the foyer. Though you’d scrubbed and bleached the floor underneath it, you couldn’t remove the rug itself without drawing attention to it. And it still had blood on it, because you killed Edward in the foyer, perhaps right after he let you in.”
“You say there’s blood,” Thomas said, now with a triumphal glint in his eyes. “But you can never prove it. And the deputy is well aware that I burned that old rug. I just didn’t care for it.”
“Maybe he missed a spot on the floor itself,” Vera murmured to Orville.
He nodded. “You’d better let me inside to verify what I see in the foyer, Mr. Springfield.”
“Oh, certainly.” Thomas flung open the door to reveal the bare wood of the foyer. “See? Looks much tidier now, doesn’t it? And that also means we’ve only got the word of this nosy reporter, who claims she saw blood. Sounds like her word against mine.”
“See this, Orville?” Vera pointed to the damaged finish of the wood. “That’s what happens when bleach interacts with the wax on the floorboards. Dorothy never keeps bleach in the house, so I bet you could go over to the general store here in Mirror Lake
