crossed the oyster-shell drive, toward the big target that my lights had picked out in the driving rain the night before. It was glistening in the sun now, and a peacock was perched on it, exhibiting the glory of his outspread train to a crowd of gray little peahens.
Irene waved her arms. “Isn’t he lovely!” she cried.
The cock sailed slowly down, alarmed but dignified, as Irene hastened down the green stretch. The sun glistened on the raindrops caught in the tiny cups of the box leaves. I saw it glistening also on some little glass pebbles lying in the close cropped grass not far from the target. I bent down to look at them, they looked so like diamonds fallen there; and as I did so I saw Irene stop suddenly, ahead of me, and heard her give a strange strangled cry, so frightening that I stopped myself, bent halfway to the round. She ran quickly past the target then, toward the box hedge that formed a back drop for the range, stopped again and stood perfectly rigid, staring down at something on the ground.
I straightened up and stood for an instant staring at this odd pantomime. Then, still rigidly poised there, one hand out in front of her as if to ward off some terrible sight, she moved her other hand in an almost mechanical but so imperative a summons that I ran toward her.
Lying huddled at the base of the box hedge was Rick Winthrop, and a slender, feather-tipped shaft was buried in his throat. A stream of blood had trickled down, dyeing his white coat an ugly brown, and dried along the white folds of his collar.
I stood there for an instant, as petrified with horror as Irene Winthrop. Then I felt my eyes moving back, almost automatically, to the golden ball of the target. The arrow that had been there last night, that Dan and I had seen in the beam from my headlights as we rounded the white oyster-shell drive, was gone.
It seemed to me a thousand years that my eyes had to journey from the empty gold back to the inert figure huddled under the box, and at the feathered shaft stained with blood, to realize that it was an arrow, to understand that Rick Winthrop was dead. It seemed a long time too that we stood, his mother, all the jauntiness gone from her archer’s suit of Lincoln green, and I, staring down at him. I didn’t see as much as simply know that her hand was moving out to touch that arrow. As it closed on the green and yellow crest I felt something cold and wet and alive touch my own trembling fingers.
I couldn’t move my hand, or could hardly look down, without forcing myself to do it. When I did, I was looking into a pair of pale, almost white eyes, very alive and strange, behind a fringe of long curly gray hair.
“It’s Dr. Birdsong, Irene . . .” I managed to say.
“Oh, my God, no! No!” she whispered frantically. Her sharp red nails were buried in my arm.
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