SEPTEMBER, 1938 “Sophie, You’ve got to stop crying,” Wayne Singer told her. “Get yourself under control. I know this hard for you, but this is the only way we can get through this situation. You want to blame me. That’s all right. I accept that. The whole thing was my idea, and I’m sorry, but we can’t go back. We have to make this work. Otherwise we’ll be in a lot of trouble—maybe go to jail. That wouldn’t do us or Kit any good.” This provoked another flood of tears in the young woman. “I can’t do it. I can’t pretend to be your wife. Don’t you understand? He was my husband—why couldn’t it have been you that got killed rather than Nobel? We loved each other. We had a child together. Kit will grow up without a father. You wouldn’t know what that means--you’ve never been married or had children.” “You’re right,” the man said. It’s not the same for you, but it doesn’t need to last forever. People change—we’ll change. You and Nobel haven’t lived here long enough that folks know you all that well. They’ll forget.” She shook her head. “Oh no they won’t. Maybe you can fool them for a short time. You and your brother have the same appearance—after all you’re identical twins. It even fools me once in a while, but soon they’ll notice the little differences. You don’t talk the same. Your mannerisms are different. You know almost nothing about farming. You wouldn’t be able to chat with other men, about farming—about crops and cultivation and irrigation. You don’t realize, but there’s a lifetime of knowledge that goes into farming.” “I could learn.” “You don’t have time. Another thing, you smoke, Nobel didn’t.” “I’ll quit.” She made a sound of disgust. “Sure you will. As I remember, you’ve quit many times, for short periods. That’s why your girlfriend, Maribell Johnson, or whoever, gave up on you. I don’t believe it’s possible for you to stop. You’ll keep smoking even at the risk of giving away your identity.” “I’d have to stop—there’d be no other choice.” She shook her head. “There’s another choice. You can just go away. Go back to California.” “Why? That would be the worst choice.” He stood and angrily began pacing about the room. “If they should somehow identify the body--which I don’t believe is possible due to deterioration from freezing—they’d come here immediately looking for Nobel, and they’d better find me. If they couldn’t match the fingerprints of the body, with anything they’d find around here, they’d have to decide that the body wasn’t Nobel. In the meantime, I need to lay down my prints, in great profusion, all over the place.” She scowled at the man. “Why? Do you know for sure that identical twins don’t have identical fingerprints?” “Not according to anything I’ve ever heard or read on the subject. They’ve never found matching prints in the whole world.” “So maybe you’d get away with it--with the fingerprints I mean. What about the rest? You’d need to suddenly become simple-minded, which I think you are, already, to have come up with this stupid plan. You should have been satisfied that you got away with it for two years. And what’s the result? A dead brother, a widow and an orphan child.” “He’s not an orphan—he’s still got you.” She gave him a withering stare.” So what is a child without a father? A bastard?” He shook his head. “Of course not.” He decided that explanation was a waste of time. She sat and stared out the window at her son, Kitrick Singer, as he pulled his Radio Flyer coaster-wagon around the farmyard. His face was flushed with the effort because the wagon held the boy’s Fox Terrier bitch, Tippy. Finally he stopped and lifted the dog out of the wagon. She immediately jumped back in. He lifted her out—she jumped in. This went on for some time. At last, breathing hard, he pushed her over and sat down next to her in the wagon. “So then, genius,” she said, turning her attention to the man. “What’s the rest of your brilliant idea? I may as well hear everything, even though it’s doomed to failure. What happened up there in the mountains?” He sat on one side of the kitchen table—she on the other. “Can I have a little more coffee. My throat is dry. This is starting to feel too much like an interrogation.” She let him see her sneer. “Well, you should know. You’ve been interrogated enough.” She poured coffee into his cup, and then some into her own. “Well go ahead.” He nodded. “Yeah. As you know Nobel took my truck and went up into the foothills at Green Canyon—they have a loading chute there. I followed with your car. We hid the truck under some trees and brush and took your car up Dry Creek Canyon to where the cattle had been released last spring. After that we went looking for a cow. We found this Guernsey heifer that Nobel said was a prime specimen. She was with a small herd, and seemed rather tame, which was good. She didn’t run away and we could keep up with her even though we were on foot. We cut her from the herd and drove her south up into the mountains where we’d be out of sight. By that time it was full daylight. “We were spread out to keep the heifer from turning back. Nobel was further up the hill in some trees behind the heifer, when I heard a gunshot and saw the heifer fall. I thought it must have been a deer hunter who’d mistaken the cow for a deer. Nobel let out a yell and went over to the heifer. Then two more shots and I saw Nobel fall.”
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