Page 166 of Head Room

She got in the passenger front seat.“You do know that your mother will kill you if—”

“Tom’s promised to hold the fort at the church.”

“He’s a brave man.”

Jennifer was the last to arrive, but with good reason.I’d given her an assignment to complete before she left home.

We all piled into Mike’s luxury SUV.

“What put this together for you?”she asked.

“It wasn’t Page Forty-Seven.Or—”

“Page—?”

“—any single thought.It was throughout the manuscript.The names—”

Diana jumped on that.“Ransom Fletcher switching his names around to mask his identity from the Union Army so he could take Peter to Wyoming as a Galvanized Yankee.”

“Like Kyle Vaughn Quetcher Moser,” Jennifer said.

“Yes, but does that connect to Nance and the veterans?”I said.

Before I could explain, Mike interrupted.“I was thinking last night...what turned your thinking away from the vets?”

“Actually, it was the swinging blade trap from the Indiana Jones movie — or circular saw trap, as Jennifer told us.”

“Oh-kay.”Mike’s drawn-out version of the word didn’t convey confidence that I’d connect this to anything reasonable.

“And then I thought about the conversation we had with Orson and Needham.”

“You talked about circular saw traps?”Jennifer asked him.

“Not that I remember.Did we?”he asked me.

“No.But we did talk about conspiracies, believers in conspiracies, and how they both defy Occam’s razor.”

“The simplest explanation most likely to be the truth,” murmured Diana.

“Exactly.Unlike Occam’s razor, the vets were the conspiracy theory of the swinging blades trap, requiring, as nearly all conspiracy theories do, a stretch of credulity.”

“Multiple players and all of them keeping the secret,” Mike added, clearly recalling the conversation with Orson now.

“Right.And this among a group of people whose loose association was primarily based on — besides having been in the military — not wanting to live too close to each other.”

“When you put it like that...”Diana said with dry humor.

“Plus, things I heard Kam Droemi saying.Fragments, but interesting.”

I did not get into explanations abouthead roomresurfacing that memory.

No time.

Mike pulled into the parking lot between the courthouse and the joined buildings of the sheriff’s department and fire department.

Showtime.

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