then they all do, the shovel taller than any of them. Afterward a discussion of whether or not the cat is in heaven with God and Jesus, and the children don't shout for a while.
A certainty came to Graham as he stood, sun hot on the back of his neck: as surely as the Tooth Fairy killed the cat, he had watched the children bury it. He had to see that if he possibly could.
He did not make two trips out here, one to kill the cat and the second for the Jacobis. He came and killed the cat and waited for the children to find it.
There was no way to determine exactly where the children found the cat. The police had located no one who spoke to the Jacobis after noon, ten hours or so before they died.
How had the Tooth Fairy come, and where had he waited?
Behind the back fence the brush began, running head-high for thirty yards to the trees. Graham dug his wrinkled map out of his back pocket and spread it on the fence. It showed an unbroken strip of woods a quarter-mile deep running across the back of the Jacobi property and continuing in both directions. Beyond the woods, bounding them on the south, was a section line road that paralleled the one in front of the Jacobi house.
Graham drove from the house back to the highway, measuring the distance on his odometer. He went south on the highway and turned onto the section line road he had seen on the map. Measuring again, he drove slowly along it until the odometer showed him he was behind the Jacobi house on the other side of the woods.
Here the pavement ended at a low-income housing project so new it did not show on his map. He pulled into the parking lot. Most of the cars were old and sagging on their springs. Two were up on blocks.
Black children played basketball on the bare earth around a single netless goal. Graham sat on his fender to watch the game for a moment.
He wanted to take off his jacket, but he knew the .44 Special and the flat camera on his belt would attract attention. He always felt a curious embarrassment when people looked at his pistol.
There were eight players on the team wearing shirts. The skins had eleven, all playing at once. Refereeing was by acclamation.
A small skin, shoved down in the rebounding, stalked home mad. He came back fortified with a cookie and dived into the pack again.
The yelling and the thump of the ball lifted Graham's spirits.
One goal, one basketball. It struck him again how many things the Leedses had. The Jacobis too, according to the Birmingham police when they ruled out burglary. Boats and sporting equipment, camping equipment, cameras and guns and rods. It was another thing the families had in common.
And with the thought of the Leedses and the Jacobis alive came the thought of how they were afterward, and Graham couldn't watch basketball anymore. He took a deep breath and headed for the dark woods across the road.
The underbrush,heavy at the edge of the pine woods, thinned when Graham reached the deep shade and he had easy going over the pine needles. The air was warm and still. Blue jays in the trees ahead announced his coming.
The ground sloped gently to a dry streambed where a few cypresses grew and the tracks of raccoons and field mice were pressed into the red clay. A number of human footprints marked the streambed, some of them left by children. All were caved in and rounded, left several rains ago.
Past the streambed the land rose again, changing to sandy loam that supported ferns beneath the pines. Graham worked his way uphill in the heat until he saw the light beneath the trees at the edge of the woods.
Between the trunks he could see the upper story of the Jacobi house.
Undergrowth again, head-high from the edge of the woods to theJacobis' back fence. Graham worked his way through it and stood at the fence looking into the yard.
The Tooth Fairy could have parked at the housing development and come through the woods to the brush behind the house. He could have lured the cat into the brush and choked it, the body limp in one hand as he crawled on his knees and other hand to the fence.Graham could see the cat in the air, never twisting to land on its feet, but hitting on