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At lunch time every day, many workers came out into this dusty, dry, barren area, not because it was inviting certainly, but because it was a change from the interior of the factory. Here they stood about and talked in little groups, sitting on the hoods of cars, crouching in the shade of the larger vehicles, even catching little naps in the back seats if the sun had not made the vinyl upholstery unbearably hot. They drank soft drinks out of cans with straws, or smoked cigarettes lifted out of large purses with loud catches, or even passed around a Thermos filled with rum and Coca-Cola.

On Monday afternoon Becca Blair made a date for the following Saturday night with the man who daily checked the electrical wiring of the plant; she then joined Sarah Howell, who was leaning against the side of Becca'sPontiac, flipping through a copy of
Reader's Digest
looking for the jokes.

They had hardly had time to exchange a few words, when the woman down four from Becca on the line approached them hurriedly. 'Let me tell you what I just heard!' she cried breathlessly, and the three women automatically made a little circle between the two cars.

'First', said Becca, 'you tell us who told you, 'cause I want to know if I'm gone believe it after I hear it.'

'I heard it from my own Anna-Lee', said the woman, who had a girl the same age as Becca's daughter Margaret, 'and Anna-Lee is a good girl, wouldn't tell no lies - not to her own mother - and she got it straight from one of the coloured ladies in the lunch line at school not fifteen minutes ago. I had to pick her up at the school and drive her over to the dentist, so that's how I found out so quick. Anyway, this lady on the lunch line is the sister of Gussie who used to work for the Shirleys, 'course that was 'fore she killed him. I mean, before Thelma Shirley killed James. So far as I know, Gussie didn't have a thing to do with it.'

'All right', said Becca, laughing shrilly, 'we'll believe it. Anna-Lee's word is good by me!'

'What'd you hear?' said Sarah.

The woman spoke with great significance. 'Little Mary Shirley is
back in school!'

Becca and Sarah could make nothing of this.

The woman continued, 'Little Maiy Shirley was in school this morning."

'That supposed to mean something?' asked Becca.

The woman nodded mysteriously.

Sarah said uneasily, 'But she was off to Montgomery with her aunt and uncle yesterday. They were supposed to leave directly after the funeral. They did leave', she said after another moment, 'because I called the house, and Gussie said that they were on their way.'

'Didn't never make it to Montgomery', said the woman gravely.

'What do you mean?' demanded Sarah.

'Well', said the woman, and then she related in a quick low voice, 'Car jumped the road, flew in the creek, smashed up on a sandbar, burst into flames in twenty-five seconds, and then that woman, the policeman's sister - who was already acting very peculiar at the funeral if you ask me what I thought about it - hit her husband over the head with the right front fender till his eyes bugged out...'

Sarah and Becca gasped in surprise.

'Choked to death on his own blood, and floated down the river till he got picked up by a coloured man fishing for rainbow trout since early that morning. It was his only catch of the day. That corpse would have made it to Elba in two more hours

'What happened to Dot Sims?' demanded Becca. 'Why'd she do it?'

'Well, that's the thing', the woman replied. 'Don't nobody know why she did it, don't make no sense, 'cause little Mary saw it all, trapped in the back seat with the car on fire and ever'thing. And if the woman was planning to get rid of him, you wouldn't think she'd have done it in front of a child - that wasn't even her own. She must have known that the child would say
something
about it later, you know what I mean? Unless she was planning for the child to be cremated right then and there, in the middle of the creek!'

Sarah and Becca nodded. 'So what happened to her?' Sarah asked. 'Where is she now?'

'She run up on the road, trying to flag down the Montgomery bus, which was due just about then, and got run down by this fourteen-year-old boy in a Oldsmobile, who didn't have a learner's permit yet, and the police found two quarts of moonshine whiskey in the back seat. The boy said they belonged to his father, but the police made him walk down the line in the centre of the highway and he couldn't do it. And that child, poor boy, is gone get sent down the river for running down a woman that had just gotten through killing her husband.'

'Little Mary Shirley', said Becca, 'what become of her?'

'She was drowning in the back seat of the car, or burning up, I don't know which, 'cause Anna-Lee didn't get
all
the details, and she saw everything, like I said. She's all right, 'cause she's in school, 'cept I don't know how she got rescued, unless it was the bus driver that did it.'

Becca shook her head sadly, 'That poor child is gone have bad dreams for the rest of her life. First her mama and daddy, and then her aunt and uncle. All in the same week. The women in that family are just no good; I wouldn't let no man I had around marry into that pack. Just wouldn't be safe.'

Sarah objected. 'Dot Sims and Thelma Shirley wasn't related by blood, they was just sister-in-laws. There must have been something else

'Something else what?' asked the woman.

'Poor little girl', Becca said, thinking of little Mary.

The whistle sounded, and the three women hurried back into the factory.

Becca and Sarah's friend was not the first person working at the Pine Cone Munitions Factory to hear of the deaths of Malcolm and Dorothy Sims. The wife of one of the policemen on the Pine Cone force was the switchboard operator in the main administration building of the factory, and when her husband called for his midmorning check-in (she lived in constant fear of his untimely demise) he told her of the two corpses in the back of the truck. She managed to relate the story to a number of her friends and co-workers in the next hour, but these women had not known Dorothy intimately - the dead woman had been on the assembly line, but that was several years before - and so the tale did not spread as far as it might have.*

In the middle of the morning, one of the two black utility drivers was sent to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket to buy coffee for the administrators' lounge. Since the driver did not enjoy such an amenity at the factory, he felt he was at least entitled to a cup of coffee and a piece of pie and stopped at the diner by the railroad tracks, where, in slack hours, black men were served so long as they did not seat themselves. There he overheard the two friendly waitresses tell breathlessly of what had occurred the previous evening on the road north out of Pine Cone. When this man returned to the factory the information travelled quickly enough among the black employees, not because they had known the unfortunate couple but because it was another example, and a fine one, of white immorality and imbecility.

The assembly line knew very little. Only Becca, Sarah, and Anna-Lee's mother had heard anything at all, and Anna-Lee had not got everything exactly right. The news travelled no further than these women in the next two hours, for they were pinned to their places on the line, and deafened by the noise of the machinery. During the afternoon coffee break, however, the word was passed down the line.

After lunch in the administration buildings, the more recent murder and death, so strangely paralleling those of the policeman and his wife, were noised about. Bosses perched on the corners of their secretary's desk, telling the story, and invented grotesque details to make them squirm and certain other secretaries and female file clerks related the incident to their employers as a subtle object lesson in what may happen to a man if a woman is driven too far.

Strangely enough, much of this was done in great fun. The employees at the factory had not yet heard enough circumstantial detail to be properly shocked and they waited for the end of the day when they could return home to the newspaper and radio reports which would no doubt tell them what had really happened. Until that 'official' announcement by the media, people in the factory enjoyed themselves with the unexpected, strangely effected deaths.

The rest of Pine Cone was not so isolated as the Pine Cone Munitions Factory. In stores and in homes and on the streets of the town, the deaths of Malcolm and Dorothy Sims were known and discussed with considerably greater accuracy.

Certain persons in Pine Cone could be counted on to know more about those incidents in the town than anyone else, and they were applied to by all who were curious. To begin with, the two friendly waitresses in the diner by the railroad tracks were inexhaustible funds of information and editorial comment on any act of violence in Pine Cone, for it usually happened that they were intimately acquainted with either the perpetrator or the victim. They would shriek discreetly and cover their eyes dramatically against the terrible things they related, but their sources were impeccable and their details reliable.

Another source was the three bag boys at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, who managed among them to speak to three-quarters of Pine Cone's female population over the course of any given weekday. With equal enthusiasm they received and offered the news of the moment, and acted as white-aproned clearing houses for all the more malicious gossip of Pine Cone. These three boys were not particularly well thought of outside their two capacities as movers of packages and broadcasters of domestic information, but within those fields, they were trusted absolutely.

Those who were finicky and wanted the most accurate information available usually called the radio station and talked to the manager. He might not know as much as the sheriff, but he was more willing to talk. And because the radio station in Pine Cone had been set up more as a service for the rural portions of the county than simply for the town's convenience and the sheriff's jurisdiction ended at the town limits, there were often things that were known to the manager of the station that were wholly unfamiliar to Sheriff Garrett.

Today the sheriff wasn't answering any questions at all. Garrett had been very upset by the murder of his colleague the past week, and now the death of James Shirley's brother-in-law depressed him further. There was something about the murders of the two men and the subsequent accidental deaths of their wives that confused the sheriff beyond his even beginning to understand it all. Why had the women done it? For the same reasons, perhaps? What were those reasons? Or had Dorothy Sims acted in imitation of her sister-in-law? But Sheriff Garrett knew that the two women had not got along together and Dorothy Sims was unlikely to'follow the example of Thelma Shirley in anything at all. On the other hand, how could the two murders - being so close together, so similar, among members of the same family - be unrelated? And the women dying afterwards,
immediately
afterwards - had they only looked like accidents? Had Thelma Shirley sliced open her neck on purpose? Had Dorothy Sims deliberately jumped out in front of Jack Weaver's truck?

Sheriff Garrett knew one thing though: it was senseless to prosecute Jack Weaver - a
good
man - for something that was obviously not his fault. The only one who ought to have gone on trial was Dorothy Sims, and she was on the embalming table that very minute. Even if the case were brought before a jury, not a single man or woman in Pine Cone - much less twelve of them together - would think anything but that Jack Weaver had acted as an administrator of divine retribution. He would be let go with only a caution by the judge to turn his truck headlights on earlier in the evening. Dorothy Sims and Thelma Shirley, in getting themselves killed, had saved the county a lot of money in trial expenses and the state wouldn't have to pay for their upkeep in prison, and their punishments had been commensurate with their crimes. But still, Sheriff Garrett considered, it was just real strange.

Until he could figure all of this out satisfactorily for himself, Garrett refused to say anything, except to the manager of the radio station and to the editor of the newspaper, whom he infonned at length of the circumstances of the new set of deaths. He didn't want to be distracted by his friends- and the wivesof his friends, and total strangers - calling up to get a firsthand account of this new horror. He left the gossiping to Deputy Barnes who enjoyed the sense of self-importance he received from the wholesale dissemination of this official information.

By six-thirty that Monday evening, the news had spread all over town, and many of the pertinent facts had been got straight. Then, working from the same basis of information, the same questions that had plagued Sheriff Garrett now fell upon the general population of Pine Cone. Everyone was at pains to determine why on earth the two sisters-in-law had murdered their husbands, who both had been very good men. It was a great, great mishap, and on top of everything, what would come of little Mary Shirley? The poor girl now had no one in the world, except those people who had showed up for James and Thelma's funeral, and who were they? Relatives who never show up except at a funeral may be looking for money, but they certainly aren't wanting a little girl to take back with them.

Some people said it was a suicide-murder pact between the two women. But nobody could guess when they had made up their quarrel. Even those who set forth this idea admitted that it didn't make much sense, but what other explanation was there? Other opinions, such as that it had really been Malcolm Sims who had murdered both James and Thelma Shirley - and that Dorothy was avenging their deaths - were even more farfetched. In fact, the town was stumped and could make no sense out of it at all. In the course of that Monday evening, the only theory that was
not
put forth was that the deaths of the two married couples had anything to do with the seven-times-fatal fire at the Coppage house.