“Look, Dan,” I said. “I wouldn’t put it beyond your mother, if it was anybody but Rick. I can’t bring myself to believe that she’d . . . Oh, well, the point is that she wasn’t the only person on the range.”
His eyes sharpened.
“You don’t mean Birdsong?”
“Why not?” I demanded. “I mean, is there any reason, just because a man barges in and takes charge of a thing like this, that he’s automatically excluded from suspicion himself?”
“But he hasn’t any reason—”
“You mean so far as you know, darling. And he has. He told me himself he’s got a sense of justice . . . and the fact that Mara and Cheryl and Mr. Keane are getting a tough break at Romney apparently burns him up. That’s aside from any personal quarrel he might have had with Rick. And I certainly couldn’t prove that when he came down
