Phoebe's first solution was of the murder of her schoolmaster, Dennis Gordon. That was last January before the war with Spain had started and before Phoebe had been kissed by Elmo Van Haas or seen her first real-life ghost. Her successful detective work had made her a local celebrity and something of a scandal around Point Pleasant. But the winter had finally ended, the spring had bloomed, Elmo had decided that she was worth kissing and, as the reports of Dewey's conquest of Guam filled the early summer newspapers, there was another grisly crime. Eugene Steiner was found dead in his burned-out barn. His hayfork had been driven through his belly, pinning him to the earthen floor. Somehow the fire which destroyed the entire barn, had left his body almost undamaged. Mr. Steiner's daughter, Phoebe's classmate, Diana, was missing and his wife was hysterical and penniless. The murderer was so far unknown. There seemed no reason to kill Mr. Steiner. Because this second murder seemed to Phoebe at least to be connected with the earlier one, Phoebe Demoss assured herself that not only could she solve it, it was her duty to solve it. By that time the girl believed herself to be the detective that all her friends were telling her that she was. Phoebe had read a mystery book called The Levenworth Case. To her it was both a literary masterpiece and an inspiration. It had been written by a woman, Anna Katherine Green. That, by itself, proved that women can do anything men can do even if the hero of Miss Green's story was a man, Ebenezer Gryce. The novel interested her in solving real mysteries and in becoming a great romantic heroine. There wasn't much worth reading around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, but Phoebe had found a terribly romantic, thrilling mystery story about an elegant detective who was a Russian, Prince Zaleski. It had been written by someone named MP Shiel. "MP" could stand for a woman, couldn't it? Maybe, "Martha Phoebe" or "Margaret Phoebe," or something. The mysteries set the girl to fantasizing. She pretended to be a clever detective. She loved it. Fortunately, it all ended happily. Phoebe Demoss was 15, a very frustrating age for an active young woman. Her older sister, Jane was 19 and had been married at the end of June so that now she was Mrs. Childe. She moved the few miles into the village of Point Pleasant to help her husband and his family make beer. Phoebe had always been very close to Jane. She missed her already and wondered what she and her new husband did at night. She needed something to take her mind off her feeling that life was leaving her behind. Pheobe thought a lot about her "first case" as she liked to call it. The whole thing was so sordid and dirty that even though she regarded herself as a perfectly proper Victorian girl, she couldn't help being secretly fascinated. Everyone else in the county and even across the river in Ohio was equally fascinated and repulsed even if they only whispered and wondered about the disgusting details. Dennis Gordon had been a funny little man. He'd been the master at the rural school just south of Point Pleasant in the area that would later become Henderson, West Virginia. He lived with a much larger, bearded man, that he called his brother, but who turned out to be Samuel Asher, his murderer. Just after New Years of 1898, it was Monday the third, to be precise, Phoebe had the terrifying experience of finding Mr. Gordon's body. It was her morning to kindle the stove for class. The older children took turns lighting the stove. Monday was her day so she arrived early with her twin brothers, Monroe and Madison. A girl could never go anyplace unescorted. There was too much danger of her being kidnapped and sold down the river on the first barge to end up in some dreadful flesh den of sin in Natchez-Under-the-Hill or in New Orleans. Several times a year someone in the district lost a daughter (or even a wife) to the "grabbers" as the white-slavers were called. While the twins took the ponies around to the shed, Phoebe filled the scuttle from the coal pile. She suddenly realized that the schoolhouse door was not simply unlocked; it was standing ajar. Indignitly she stomped in to see who was there on her day. She saw the blood on the floor leading from the side door to the stove. Poor Mr. Gordon was slumped against the stove. The cast iron stove door was yawning and his head had been forced into the firebox. The green handle of a long butcher knife protruded from his bloody mouth, the blade driven down his throat. It was quite ghastly. The victim must have been there for days. The blood that he was kneeling in was congealed and frozen. Strangest of all, his trousers were pulled down in the back. His open BVDs exposed a laughably narrow, white rump. Someone had smeared blood on it resembling the letter "D." Without realizing that she'd done it, the girl screamed. Her brothers dashed in wielding lengths of wood as clubs. They were only 13, but thought of themselves as men and their sister's protectors. In spite of their affected bravery, the sight of the bloody dead man promptly sent them both back outside to vomit. With surprising speed and self-assurance, Phoebe recovered from her shock. Almost at once she thought about the detective stories she'd devoured. Suppressing her urge to retch, she very carefully looked around, making a mental catalog of all the "clues" and potential clues. She noticed that there were some partial boot prints in the blood and no burns on Mr. Gordon's face. The stove must have been cold when his head was forced into it. There was a bloody left handprint on the bench closest to the stove and more bloody handprints on the knob and lock of the side door. It appeared that something had been written on the slate and then erased. Mr. Gordon's pony wasn't in the pony shed, so how did he get there, or did his killer ride it away? The twins galloped their pony into Point Pleasant while Phoebe locked herself inside the school with the body. Later on, that action was to make her seem to be extraordinarily daring to all her classmates and neighbors. Almost at once suspicion fell on Diana Steiner's father, Eugene. This is where the first murder seemed to certainly be related to the second, the death of Eugene Steiner. Like most girls, Diana Steiner was a liar; a frustrated, bored liar. She was a typical adolescent fantasizer and, if anything, even more malicious than most teenage girls. Like Phoebe, she was 15 and not a very pretty girl, too heavy, too hard, too nasty in her personality. She was jealous and resentful of the interest that she saw men giving to other girls. For weeks she'd been hinting and inferring that Mr. Gordon had done something with her. The clear implication was that the teacher had sullied the young lady's chastity and compromised her virtue. Of course the rumor, rife with sex and scandal, spread like cholera. By Christmas time almost everyone believe that a dirty old mad had had his way with the "innocent" child. But it was 1898 in rural West Virginia. The law didn't much care what sexual offenses, real or imaginary, happened to a grown woman, let alone to a girl. Wisely, during that age, no court would give credit to such an accusation, but the girl's father might seek revenge. Phoebe knew Diana Steiner and knew that she was a liar. She knew that nothing had really happened between her and the teacher. Diana was just making it up to make herself seem desirable and important. Besides, Phoebe had never seen any hint from Mr. Gordon that he was interested in Diana or in anyone else. In fact, as far as she knew, he didn't have any lady friends at all. But the townsfolk speculated that the teacher had seduced Diana. They figured that that was why the letter "D" had been written on the felon's butt. Her father found out about the filthy seduction and avenged his daughter's honor. It was all very romantic, but not very likely. The first thing that Phoebe wondered about was why Mr. Gordon's brother hadn't reported that he was missing. The second question was, where did the knife come from? There was nothing like that in the school and it wasn't the kind of knife that someone would ordinarily carry on his person. It was the kind that a butcher or farmer would use in slaughtering and butchering hogs. That's what Mr. Gordon and his brother raised. Then there was the very strange way of murdering the man. Why push the knife down his throat? Why not simply stab him in the heart? And why pull his pants down or stick his head into the stove. To the clever wits of Phoebe Demoss, it seemed very unlikely that Diana's father would have gone to such elaborate ends. He would have just beaten the villain to death. The bloody "D" was, she figured just a "red herring," as the mystery stories called false clues. Casper Goodwin was Phoebe's mother's father. He'd been blinded in the war and lived with them on a 160 acre hill-farm five or six miles inside Mason County from the Ohio River. Point Pleasant was the seat of Mason County, just a village, fewer that a thousand people. It was on the east bank of the Ohio River about halfway between Huntington and Parkersburg where it was joined by the Kanawha, flowing west from the capital of the new state of West Virginia. The state had been formed just a few years before Phoebe's birth out of the loyal western part of Virgina when the latter seceded to join the Confederacy. In fact, before becoming West Virginia, the new state was called Kanawha. Phoebe's Grandpa Goodwin had been a Union gunner during the Civil War. He'd been blinded up at Gettysburg. He was 60 now, worldly-wise, very practical and generous. He made harnesses to help to support himself. He was the only person who treated Phoebe like an adult and like a real person, not some hot-house flower. It was her grandfather's insights which gave Phoebe the key to solving the murder. As he sat at his workbench listening in rapt concentration, she explained all the facts to him, even the embarrassing tale about the supposed seduction of Diana Steiner. She shared all her observations, her opinions and her questions. Phoebe's epiphany came while she was explaining that Mr. Gordon didn't seem to have any interest in women so he probably never did anything to Diana, not even kiss her. Without hesitation, her grandfather startled her. "You may not realize it, Bee, but some men have an unnatural love of other men instead of for women. What makes you so sure that your teacher was living with his brother? Could it have been his lover? I saw that a lot in the war." The girl was stunned. She had no idea that such a thing could be. It started an avalanche of adolescent fantasy about how two men could behave like a man and a woman, but it also gave her the solution. As soon as she started to think about Mr. Gordon as being a woman just pretending to be a man, she could see that the killing was a crime of passion. The "brother" must have heard and believed Diana's lies about Mr. Gordon seducing her. The two men quarreled and Mr. Gordon fled. He went to the school for refuge taking a butcher knife along for protection. Samuel Asher brooded, drank and then followed after his "wife" intending to punish the supposed infidelity. In a murderous fury, he killed Mr. Gordon. The knife down the throat and the exposed rear end were reflections of their unnatural relationship. The body's head was stuffed into the stove meaning it should go to hell. Grandpa agreed that Phoebe's (he called her "Bee") version of events made logical sense as fiction, but imagination isn't evidence. If the boot prints and handprints could be matched to the "brother," that might be proof. Like all adolescent girls, Phoebe plotted and schemed. There's nothing quite so devious and Byzantine as a teenage girl. In Phoebe's case, she was conniving how she could get evidence against Mr. Gordon's "brother." She developed a rather transparent plan. The girl carefully explained her intentions to her brothers, Monroe and Madison. They would have to help her. Adventuresome lads, they were willing to accompany her to Mr. Gordon's farm, but they didn't exactly see how or why his brother would have killed him. Phoebe didn't explain the unnatural love aspect, but thirteen year-old boys even in West Virginia had heard about "pansies." While the twins were daring enough for boys of physically small stature, they were cautious about safety, both their own and their sister's. They were all for taking a gun along to shoot the killer if they had too. Monroe snuck Papa's shotgun out, hiding it in their pony's blanket. It was a long ride to Mr. Gordon's farm, almost an hour. As always, the boys shared their dappled gelding. For some reason they'd named him Cherokee. Their sister rode her little gray pony. She'd named him Filipi because the animal was as contrary and uncooperative as a lawyer. The twins chattered, musing about how they would corner the desperate murderer and gun him down in a hail of bird shot. For her part, Phoebe was reflective. She carried a book that she was going to pretend Mr. Gordon had loaned to her and she was returning. She would give her condolences and look for clues while her brothers snooped on their own. The brother wasn't in the house when they arrive, so as Phoebe went to the barn, the boys looked around inside. Right off they saw that there was only one bedroom where the "brothers" shared a single bed. On the wall was a picture of an almost naked man. They found papers on a table with Samuel Asher's name on them and a last will and testament. In the kitchen there was a green handled knife, the mate of the one that had been forced down their teacher's throat. The more they looked around, the more frightened they became. When they saw the knife, their nerve broke. Fetching Cherokee, they hurried to the barn to get Phoebe and get away from there. In the meantime, their silly sister had found the supposed "brother" working in the barn. He was intimidating, at least six feet tall and husky, about the same age as Mr. Gordon, thirty-five or so. His beard was wildly unkempt and he was physically dirty. By contrast, Phoebe was skinny, almost frail, but tall for her age, lithe and quick. She was blonde, blue-eyed, neat and tidy. She might have been pretty but she was flat front and back, and too quick with a cross word. The girl liked yellow. That day it was her yellow bonnet and shawl. She offered her condolences over the loss of his "brother" and told him the "I'm returning a book" story. The man was not happy that she was there. He grunted rudely and wanted to know if that was all she wanted. He didn't even offer her a warm drink after their bitter hour's ride. Although she was there for only a few minutes, she saw enough. Mr. Gordon's missing pony was in one of the stalls. The man wore boots about the same large size of the prints in the schoolhouse. There was still a little splatter of blood on one heel. The man wore no rings on his left hand but had a scar on the thumb. All that matched up very nicely with the clues she'd memorized at the murder scene, but it wasn't solid. When the twins trotted up yelling that it was time to go, the man pulled his handkerchief from his pocket. He was sweating nervously. Wiping his brow, Phoebe saw streaks of white powder. She was sure it was chalk dust. He must have used the handkerchief to erase something from the school's slate board. Phoebe was convinced that she had her man. The children hurried into Point Pleasant. Phoebe gave her story to the constable with the twins adding details especially about the will and the picture of the almost naked man. The constable didn't necessarily believe the yarn, but it was a quiet January afternoon. He got together a wagon load of men chuckling about a girl's imagination and drove to the Gordon farm. Within ten minutes of questioning, Samuel Asher confessed the whole thing. Phoebe wasn't there, of course, but the men who were, confirmed that it was just the way she suspected it was. She was instantly redeemed from being a foolish child to being a "detective" and that was five years before Sherlock Holmes was even invented! The girl's renown was too quickly forgotten in the buzz about the sinking of the Maine and President McKinley's war with Spain. Phoebe's family didn't like the idea of another war even though the President was almost a neighbor. He was from just up at Canton, Ohio, but he was a Republican. Those Republicans like wars, at least the wars that kill other people and make money for the rich people. There was no school for a while because there was no teacher. Still Elmo van Haas, had found a pretext to visit the Demoss farm. He talked to Phoebe and made an excuse to take a walk with her. She glowed with the warmth of male attention. When class resumed in April, this time with an ugly old maid, Clara Bothwell, as mistress, Elmo was very attentive and wanted to secretly hold her hand. He kissed her in the pony shed where they were alone for a minute. It made her quiver all over. Then there were the ghosts, well, not exactly ghosts, but something strange. There are some places that are haunted, or at least that's what Grandpa Goodwin said. He told Phoebe that much of West Virginia was just such a special place, spooked! He said that Point Pleasant was at one corner of a triangle where haunts and specters abounded. They were the reason why the Indians had never settled in the area and why so many pioneers hadn't stayed. Ever since the Indians and their shaman started avoiding the locale, there was an uninterrupted train of eerie reports of very strange occurrences. It wasn't unusual for a perfectly sober person to claim that he'd been confronted by a monster, an eight foot tall gargoyle (as Grandpa Goodwin called them) complete with vampire wings and beastly clawed feet. Sometimes the creatures were seen soaring silently above the trees like gigantic bats whose wings didn't flap, but whose ruby red eyes glowed like coals. There were also the frequent tales of a large black dog prowling at crossroads and along the fresh road cuts into the forest. And that doesn't even account for the lights, orbs and cigars, blinking or brilliant, scampering around in the sky and the tiny gray beings, fairies, maybe or, in Phoebe's case, ghosts. Grandpa Goodwin often repeated the story about how, as a boy, he'd come across three little people while he was coon hunting at night. They were milling around beside a large disk that seemed to be floating in mid-air partly over the Kanawaha River and partly over the shore. They had big heads and scrawny limbs and seemed to be gray or sallow in the yellowish halo surrounding the disk. When, thinking at first that they were fishermen, Grandpa called to them and his dogs chased after them yapping as if they'd treed a bear, they shined a very bright light on him and then they were gone. The disk was gone, too. His hounds scattered into the forest. He never did find one of them. When he got back home the dawn was breaking. It was as if he'd lost two or three hours. Phoebe's encounters, there were two of them, were different. One warm morning in May, she was just emerging from the privy. She had her woman's complaint and was pretty uncomfortable. The privy had just been dug and was a little farther from the house than the old one. A kind of grayish-white thing, maybe a person or a ghost came around from behind the outhouse. It seemed to glow and extended a bony hand toward her. It seemed to want to touch her belly, but she was too quick and sprinted to the house hollering for help. When the family appeared, the specter was gone. Her mother said that it was just one of her brothers in dress-up. It wasn't. From then on, she took the dog with her when she went to the privy, and then only when it was painfully necessary. Her second encounter was at dusk. Her little nine year-old brother, Jefferson, the baby of the family, was in the run flipping stones in a search for crayfish. Phoebe was sent looking for him. On the bank opposite from where Jefferson was whistling, right on the edge of the road there were four little people. They looked pretty much like the first one, but maybe a bit smaller. One was carrying something that looked like it could be a gun or a pipe. Jefferson obviously didn't see them. She was scared to death, but was more terrified that they meant to harm her little brother. Ghosts had no business carrying guns, or pipes for that matter. Shrieking, she dashed toward Jefferson, waving her arms at the creatures as if she were shooing geese. She alarmed her brother more than the little people. When he got around to looking at what she was trying to scare away, the creature with the pipe was almost upon him, just a few feet away. He bellowed and sprang up out of the rill. The children broke records getting into the house. Peeping out the window, their mother saw the foursome still standing in the roadway paying scant attention to one another. She thought they were naked, but they didn't have all the right equipment. One was scratching in the ground with a kind of a wand that he'd gotten from no place in particular. By the time Mrs. Demoss fetched the shotgun, they had strolled into the gully beside the road and were out of sight. Nobody ventured out of the house until Papa came down from the hill. By then he couldn't find a trace, not even footprints in the damp gully, but he bought a rifle and showed the twins how to shoot it just in case of danger. By then it was Independence Day and the second murder, the death of Eugene Steiner had occurred. To Phoebe it seemed to be related to the first murder, the death of Mr. Gordon. It may or may not have been related to the ghosts, the phantoms of unknown origin who popped up time after time. Phoebe was terrified of the ghosts, but she doubted that they were directly involved in Mr. Steiner's killing. Nobody had ever heard of a ghost using a hayfork to skewer a victim to the ground. Phoebe thought that it was most likely a much more ordinary motive, money, love, jealousy, betrayal, something like that. The body was discovered when neighbors saw the smoke of the barn fire and sped to the Steiner farm to help extinguish it. Fires in hay-barns were all too common once cutting started. Even a little dampness in the stored hay, and terrific heat generated. Spontaneous combustion of hay destroyed countless barns and crops. It was the unwritten law that neighbors helped one another whenever there were fires. Arriving at the Steiner farm, Jonathan Engel, the nearest neighbor, found the barn almost completely destroyed. No one could be found in the house or other buildings, not Mrs. Steiner or her daughter Diana. But when the blaze subsided, he found Eugene's body, the hayfork protruding from his abdomen. A length of baling twine was also wound around his neck. About the same time that the Sheriff arrived, Mrs. Steiner and her mother, Florance Hammacker, drove up. They had gone to visit relatives in Charleston two days earlier and were just returning. Diana wasn't with them. She had vanished. Since Eugene Steiner didn't have any known enemies, and no money worth robbing, although his horse was missing, the first suspicion was that white slavers had grabbed Diana only to get into a brawl with her father. In the struggle, the heroic father was slain defending his virginal daughter. Phoebe didn't like that theory. White slavers almost never killed anyone. It just brought out a posse. When they did kill somebody, they shot them and ran like Nixon. They didn't garrote their victim with twine and impale him with farm implements. Besides, if it had been grabbers, what was the body doing in the barn and why had the barn been set on fire? That would just attract attention hindering their escape. Phoebe wanted to inspect the scene for herself. The twins had turned fourteen at the end of June. They were very much older than thirteen year-olds and had just endless things to keep themselves occupied. None of those things now included escorting their glory-hungry sister. She had to promise them a batch of brownies as well as a chocolate cherry cake to induce them to ride with her to the Steiner farm. The ride was full of speculation. The twins knew that they were as good at solving mysteries as their sister. They were pretty sure they knew what had happened. They had both gotten a glimpse of the little people who had tried to accost Jefferson in the rill. They were convinced that they were some tribe of Indians who lived unseen in the forest. They were savages who raided white's farms, killing and abducting. Madison was convinced that the phantom Indians had made a slave of Diana, (she was too ugly for anything else) and killed her father. Monroe figured that they'd stolen the Steiner horse. It was missing, wasn't it? Everybody knew how Indians steal horses? And what had happened to the barrel of cider the Steiners were known to keep? Everyone knew how Indians are with alcohol. Phoebe just didn't believe it. Those little gray people were surely not Indians. It wasn't just white families who had been troubled by them. Negro families from out on the pike had more trouble than anybody. No, this wasn't Indians drunk on cider. This was something more prosaic. "Prosaic" was one of the great words she learned from one of Edgar Poe's mysteries. Mrs. Steiner seemed to be in a daze. She didn't even answer their-banging on the door. The boys found her in the back, half dressed, washing laundry in a mud puddle. Phoebe searched for clues. Inside the house, things were a mess, but it was the kind of mess that a family leaves from living. There were, however, a few odd things. Diana's bed wasn't made. Most girls do that first thing in the morning. Some of the dresses that Phoebe knew she liked to wear were missing. White slavers don't pack a valise. The dog, a large friendly sheep dog, was no place to be found. Strangest of all, in the remains of the barn, there were the clear marks where the hayfork had been driven into the ground, but there were no blood stains. The cider barrel was no place in sight, but it might have been burned. In fact, by July whatever was left in the barrel would have been pretty strong. The alcohol may have speeded the fire. From the Steiner farm, a road goes off toward Henderson. The other one goes down the River toward Huntington. It occurred to Phoebe that whomever committed the crime (unless it really was Indians who could skulk invisibly through the dense woods) would have had to pass by the neighboring farms. In the country, the folk know pretty well who travels their lanes. She resolved to talk to the people living up and down the road, but first something had to be done about Mrs. Steiner. She couldn't be left on the farm by herself. She was simply unable to cope. Her mother lived in Jackson County, up above Point Pleasant at Millwood on the Parkersburg Road. She was a widow who booked coal going up the river to Pittsburgh. There were countless small independent coal mining operators in the mountains of eastern and central West Virginia. Some of their production was sold for a trifle to the Pittsburgh mills. Mrs. Hammacker, was the middleman (or, as Phoebe preferred, "middlewoman") between the miners and the mills' buying agents. It seemed that since Mrs. Hammacker's daughter had gone mad, she would have to go home to her mother, but first, Phoebe would take her home with her. After gathering up some clothes and food, Phoebe helped Mrs. Steiner climb up behind her on Filipi, her argumentative pony. They sauntered down the road in the direction of the Gallipolis Ferry. At each farm, Phoebe stopped to speak to the family. She told them that she was taking Mrs. Steiner home to be sent to her mother. She went on to ask about who they may have seen on the road the previous Sunday or Monday, the day before the murder and the day of the killing. At each place it was the same story. They hadn't seen anyone unusual, not Diana Steiner or her father, no strangers except for a tobacco buyer. After going a mile South, Phoebe turned around and went back toward home. She did the same things going in that direction; let the neighbors know where Mrs. Steiner would be and asked who had been on the road. On Sunday afternoon the tobacco buyer seemed to have gone straight through without stopping at any of the nearby farms. None of them grew tobacco. It was too destructive to the soil. During the canter home, Mrs. Steiner babbled. She didn't mention her dead husband. Mayby she didn't realize that he'd passed away. She bragged about Diana. To Mrs. Steiner, her daughter was a modern marvel. According to her mother, Diana wasn't going to be just a farm-wife. She was well educated and would work in an office making a large salary. As soon as she was old enough, she would be off to the big city to make her fortune. Phoebe thought that Mrs. Steiner was talking about a different Diana than the one she knew. Sure, she was educated, but she wasn't any better a student that Phoebe herself was. It made her think, however that it wasn't such a silly idea to leave the farm and go into business in a big city, maybe Charleston or Washington or even Philadelphia. She could be a detective who solved mysteries that the police didn't care about. She could do it for the rewards and become rich...It was an exciting thought, but it could hardly compete with her recurrent fantasies of playing house with Elmo van Haas or even Christian Schindler. He was going to go to college to be an engineer. He'd be the ideal husband. Phoebe thought that she knew what had happened to Mr. Steiner. It was prosaic. But she needed to know a few things about the dead body and there were some things about the fire which she hadn't worked out. Grandpa Goodwin listened to her theories and why she'd reached her conclusions. He couldn't completely agree and suggested that the girl was jumping to conclusions, but who was the detective here, anyway? Phoebe's reconstruction went like this. Mr. Steiner had been killed during Sunday night. The killer had escaped during darkness. That's why nobody saw anyone on the road and why Diana's bed wasn't made. "So who killed Mr. Steiner?" Grandpa wanted to know. "It had to be Diana," Phoebe reasoned. "Girls don't kill their fathers!" Mr. Goodwin protested. Phoebe wanted to ask why a killer needed a penis, but she was too much a Victorian lady. "Women can do anything men can do. Just listen to my idea." Phoebe thought that Mrs. Steiner and her mother had left on their trip to Charleston on Friday afternoon, leaving Diana and her father alone in the house. During the night Diana got up and murdered her father. She took the body to the barn where she skewered it with the hayfork and set the barn on fire. Then she rode off on the missing horse taking the dog along for protection. She sold the horse for passage and went to some big city outside West Virginia where she intended to enter business. "You must see all the holes in your plot," Grandpa scorned. "I'm blind and I can see them. How did a 15 year-old girl overpower her father? How did she kill him? Why wasn't there blood wherever she'd stuck him with the fork? How did she get the body into the barn and why did she go to the trouble of putting it there? If she started the fire at night, why wasn't it discovered until almost the middle of Monday morning? And, last, but not least, why would she do it?" Phoebe agreed that her solution was weak...fatally weak. She'd have to re-think the clues. The dead body might give her more information, but she didn't relish looking at it. Jefferson was just the opposite. When the nine year-old heard what Phoebe had in mind, he wanted to go along. "It will be all bloody, won't it?" he grinned. His sister could only conclude that she'd been right all along, little boys are savages. Taking the wagon early in the morning, they drove Mrs. Steiner to her mother's home in Millwood. Phoebe had the reins and Grandpa Goodwin rode along with his cane between his knees. So did Jefferson. His excuse was that he would carry Mrs. Steiner's parcel. The woman seemed better during the ride. Being with company seemed to have help her and she acted almost normal. Nobody mentioned her husband or daughter. Phoebe thought that if she was cared for, she'd recover her wits in time. Being a mother is the second hardest job in the world after being a wife. They ate lunch with Mrs. Hammacker. Phoebe was delighted that her savage little brother had behaved like a prince at court, a perfect gentlemen. She promised him a strawberry pie as a reward. Grandpa reminded her that he'd behaved like a gentlemen, too. On the way home, they stopped on Bridge Street in Point Pleasant, Zimmerman's funeral parlor. The body was already embalmed, dressed and in a coffin. There wasn't much to see. Needless to say, Jefferson was vocally disappointed. Then again, actually being confronted with the corpse, the boy was just as glad that it wasn't all bloody. Phoebe wanted to know what had killed Mr. Steiner. The undertaker, Mr. Zimmerman, said that he thought it was the whack he's received on his head. It had broken his skull. Of course there was some other bad bruising, but it probably couldn't have killed him. "I didn't know he'd been hit on the head," Phoebe remarked. "Yes," Mr. Zimmerman assured her, delighted to talk shop even if it was only with a young girl. "It was just about on the top of his head with something heavy, but not sharp. It hardly broke the skin." Grandpa Goodwin was getting into the spirit of this detective work even though he hated being in the undertakers. His time would be soon enough. If you said there was other bruising; where was that?" "That's private," the embalmer blushed. "I'd just as soon not say with the young lady here. But I'll tell you this, Casper, you wouldn't want to be hit like that!" "How about the pitchfork," Phoebe wanted to know. "Why didn't I see much blood?" "Oh" that!" Mr. Zimmerman smiled. "Most non-professionals are misled by things like that. After a person is dead, he doesnlt bleed anymore. That fork was stuck into the body long after it was dead, hours. Why do you people care so much about this thing? What, Phoebe Demoss, are you trying to solve another murder?" "I kind of am, Mr. Zimmerman." "How are you doing? Have it worked out yet?" he chuckled. "I've got some ideas," the girl answered. "How about the twine around Mr. Steiner's neck?" "No, nothing to that. It's like the fork. The twine around his neck was done after he was dead for quite a while. In fact, it cut into his chin more than his neck." Phoebe thanked the undertaker. He'd given her a whole new insight. He offered young Jefferson some cookies from a bowl atop a closed coffin. The lad declined. It was an unheard of refusal. "One other thing, Mr. Zimmerman, if you will; did Mr. Steiner look healthy and how much did he weigh?" Phoebe asked trying to knit a new solution from this mother lode of clues. "He seemed healthy and normal," the man replied reflectively. "Drunk when he died, of course. I'd say he weighed about 12 or 13 stone." "Pardon me?" the girl asked. "About 180 pounds or so." On the drive home, Jefferson talked about the green of the corpse's lips, but grandpa said almost nothing. Ever since the war he was very uneasy around dead bodies. He hated the sweet smell of the embalmer and the grim realization that all too soon, it would be his turn in the box. For her part, the novice detective had two experiments to conduct, one with a candle, the other with baling twine. She regretted that she'd forgotten to ask Mr. Zimmerman about the little white spooks. She wondered if he'd ever embalmed one. At least, this time, she thought she had the correct solution. With Papa's help, Phoebe measured out 180 pounds of shucked corn. She shoveled it into three burlap pokes. It was a lot heavier than she thought. She tied the bags together and tried to pull them with baling twine. The twine held the weight, but it cut her hands. She wrapped the twine around the wooden handle of a hoe. Then, holding the handle, she could easily drag the load around the yard, stopping only once to rest. Try as she might, she couldn't haul the burden up the ladder to the barn's loft. She was satisfied that someone could drag Mr. Steiner's body for quite a distance with baling twine wrapped around his neck. The body could have been dragged into the barn, but not up onto the loft. The twine would have cut into his chin more than his neck, just as Mr. Zimmerman had observed. The candle trick was something she'd read someplace. She couldn't be sure where. Into a mound of loose straw, she adjusted a candle. The flame was above the straw and it burned safely. As the candle burned down, the flame caught the straw on fire. Everyone who used candles knew about how long it took for one to burn down. It was no great accomplishment to make a sort of time-delay fuse. The candle could have been set and lighted at night and not ignited the barn until hours later after the culprit who, Phoebe was certain was Diana Steiner, had made her escape. After thinking about it most of the night, the girl took her proposed solution to Grandpa Goodwin. "Now I'm more certain than ever that it was Diana who killed her father. Here's what I think may have happened. You tell me what you think. Diana and her father were alone in the house on Friday after Mrs. Steiner went on her trip. Diana went to bed but her father had not yet retired. That's why her bed was unmade while his was still made up. Mr. Steiner was drunk and went into Diana's room, maybe to punish her for something." "It might not have been punishment, you know," Caster Goodwin interjected. "Eugene Steiner wouldn't be the first father who'd found his daughter physically appealing especially if he'd been drinking and was alone with her." For some reason that thought really upset Phoebe. The idea had occurred to her, of course, but no one have ever had the brass to put it into words the way Grandpa just had. The idea was strangely tantalizing. There was no real privacy in a nineteenth century farmhouse. She'd. overheard her parents in bed sometimes, but still, fathers ravishing daughters was just a little much for her fifteen year-old psyche. The interruption broke the girl's train of thought. After a pause, she resumed. "Can't we just say he was going to punish her? So, he's in her bedroom and leans over the bed or otherwise lowers his head. She's startled awake and fears that she's being attacked." "Or maybe she really was being attacked and he was trying to lie on top of her," Grandpa suggested. Phoebe ignored the lewd suggestion. "She hit him on the top of his head with something heavy. I saw a pair of brass bookends on her table. She didn't try to kill him. It was an accident. When she realized that he was dead, she was terrified. She didn't know what to do. What would the family do without a provider? what would her mother do without her husband? What would happen to her for killing her father. Maybe she was stunned and in shock. She had to think about it all day, or longer than just one day. She decided that the only thing for her to do was to hide the body and run away forever. There was no place to hide it, so she decided to destroy it in a barn fire. She got the twine from the barn and wrapped it around his neck. Maybe she'd thought about it looking like a suicide. Maybe she twisted the twine around the hayfork's handle the way I'd used the hoe's handle so the cord wouldn't cut my hands. From there on, it's just the way I told you the first time." "Okay," Grandpa considered. "So you're saying that she dragged the body into the barn and set up a candle as a time-delay fuse. Then, while it was still the dead of night, she rode away on the horse and took her dog for protection. Is that it?" "Yes, pretty much." "Why did she stick him with the fork?" "In case his body was found intact, people would think grabbers or bandits had done it," the detective offered. "Weak!" her grandfather reasoned. "How about she did it because she was so mad at him for trying to rape her." Phoebe had never heard an adult use the word rape before. It was pretty shocking, buy Grandpa could be right. "She should have known that the body wouldn't burn on the ground," the man continued. "Why not put him up in the loft or on top of something flammable?" "Well," Phoebe replied, "she wasn't strong enough to drag the body up the ladder. As for the rest, she's a simple girl in a very tense situation. She probably wasn't thinking clearly. I sure wouldn't have been." Grandpa Goodwin was quiet for a few minutes. "I think," he resumed, "that you've got it!" Phoebe was all smiles. She'd solved her second case. But her grandfather burst her bubble almost immediately. "There are two pieces left undone," the old man said. "How do you prove it? And where's the girl now?" Without hesitation Phoebe had a partial answer. "I think she sold her horse and took a boat up to Pittsburgh?" "Why?" "It's a big city with a lot of business. It's outside West Virginia. It's easy to get to right on the riverboats. And I think it's where I'd go if it was me." "Now, can you prove your theory?" Grandpa demanded. "Didn't I just do that?" the girl protested. "All the pieces fit nicely together." "You have a solution, but maybe not the solution. All those things could be coincidental. It could be that the twins are right and the little gray Indians killed Mr. Steiner and abducted Diana. What makes you so sure that she has to be the killer?" "Her Sunday shoes," Phoebe responded. "When I looked around her room, her dresses and other clothing were missing. Also, the new shoes that she wears on Sunday were missing along with her everyday shoes. A girl can't wear two pair of shoes at one time. She had to have packed up her possessions. That's not what would happen if ghosts abducted her." But Grandpa still wasn't convinced. "Suppose she had a boyfrjend that you didn't know about and they eloped. Then some complete stranger, unrelated to these people, say the tobacco buyer, came around and committed the murder." "No, Grandpa, you don't know Diana Steiner. She's as ugly as grilled scrapple. No boy's going to elope with her." Casper Goodwin shook his head wearily. "No, dear, it's you who doesn't understand boys. There's a lid for every pot, believe me! Say that some boy believed her story about having been seduced and thought she'd be cooperative with his desires. Or, that some boys simply adore grilled scrapple. You think that boys are manipulated with brownies and strawberry pies, but they have even stronger appetites, I assure you." Discouraged, the girl wondered if she could ever prove her solution. Still, she stuck by it. The first thing that she did was to write it all down, step by step with the supporting clues and send her solution to the Sheriff. Maybe he could think of a way to prove it. He was no doubt just delighted to receive the meddlings of a know-it-all schoolgirl. It occurred to Phoebe that it had only been four days since Mr. Steiner's body had been discovered. Maybe Diana hadn't gotten all the way to Pittsburgh yet. In fact, for a girl alone, the trip would be very frightening. As far as Phoebe knew, Diana had never been off her farm except to see relatives in Charleston. Then she traveled with her family. What would she do if she was alone and frightened? With great reluctance, Grandpa agreed to take a wagon ride with Phoebe to try to prove her theory. She also talked Monroe and Madison into going along. She told them that it would be an adventure and she promised paw-paw fritters as an inducement. Her plan was simple, she'd put herself in Diana Steiner's place and do what she thought Diana might do. First, she decided that if she had been Diana, she would sneak off in the middle of the night and go south toward Huntington. There were fewer people in that direction who might know her. Her plan would be to board a riverboat going north to Pittsburgh. Starting off in darkness, the girl would be going very slowly. She couldn't get very far. With all that in mind, Phoebe had the twins drive the wagon to the Steiner farm early in the morning. From there they started south going as fast as possible. After a couple hours, when they got down toward Apple Grove, she watched for houses where people may have seen Diana riding by on Sunday or Monday morning. At the fourth or fifth try, she was rewarded. A man at a roadside wagon was selling patent medicine to anyone who happened along the road. It was a tonic to cure cancer and dandruff. He remembered seeing a solitary girl riding a red plow horse and trailing a sheepdog. It had been early on Monday; he was sure. He remembered that she was carrying a bundle and looked awfully young. Phoebe was on the right track! Ever Grandpa was becoming convinced. Her fourteen year-old brothers were excited with the hunt. It was better than treeing coons. A few miles further on they found an old couple working their truck garden. They not only saw Diana, but talked to her. She was crying and seemed lost and desperate. The man said he thought she was in trouble, you know, with a boy. She said her name was Mary Jones and she spent the night in their carriage shed. It was clear to Phoebe that Diana was already losing her resolve. The road was dangerous and the girl was alone. She wouldn't keep going for very much longer, certainly not all the way to Pittsburgh. The detective thought that her prey had quit her journey even before she got to Huntington. The Demoss posse as Monroe called their party went on a few more miles to the village of Homestead. They were about 25 miles and five hours from home. Phoebe surmised that Diana might very well have stopped in the town. She had Madison drive the wagon up and down the few streets searching for some trace of the fugitive. He drew up at a little store. It was lunch time and the place was busy. "You folks looking for something?" a man sitting by the horse trough wanted to know. "You're not from around here are you?" "Down out of Point Pleasant," Grandpa responded. "Yeah, we're sort of looking around." "It's that Mary Jones girl, ain't it?" the sage ventured. "She your kin? Run away?" "Have you seen her?" Phoebe was so bold as to ask. As it turned out, Diana had been trying all over town to get a job. They found her at a house on a side road washing windows for an old woman. The twins grabbed her as if she were a desperado, dragging her to the wagon. They told her that they knew what she'd done and that she'd hang for sure. It was all very heavy handed. Boys are savages. Sobbing inconsolably, the girl confessed everything. It was, she insisted, an accident. Things had happened almost exactly as Phoebe had surmised except Grandpa had been right about why Mr. Steiner had gone into her bedroom. "The liquor gave him impure thoughts," according to Diana. Monroe suggested that it had given him bad eyesight. Back in Point Pleasant, the constable listened to her story. He would have put her in jail to await trial, but you can't keep a girl in a jail. At the trial, Diana was the only witness. The jury decided that it was self defense. Phoebe was more famous that ever! Her story was in the papers as far away as Parkersburg. It made Elmo jealous how other boys paid so much attention to her. A strange man showed up at her birthday party in November. He wondered if she wanted to go to Grafton to try to solve the disappearance of his wife from their Thornton brickworks. For a few days she'd been pursued by a strange gray man with a big head and bony fingers. Then, one night she just vanished.

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