He nodded, to show he knew what I meant without my finishing that sentence.
“If I could only figure it out,” he said slowly. “How could anybody have shot him in the dark, even with his lighter burning? It couldn’t be done, not surely. It just couldn’t be done—and perhaps it wasn’t.”
I steadied my voice.
“I thought, if you were a really good shot,” I said, “you could hit pretty consistently in the fifties.”
He looked at me very oddly.
“Look, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Everybody who shoots around here uses what they call the point-of-aim method. Nobody shoots point-blank—which is what shooting at Rick with his lighter for a target would have meant. Nobody could have been sure of a hit that way. When you’re hunting with a bow and arrow it doesn’t matter if you miss the first time; the arrow
