“But I’m not sure that it was closed when it was found. Deputy Seth Markey was the one who discovered it. The Sheriff and I were in the other room at the time. As I remember it, it was some time after our return, while we were speculating as to Fyffe’s manner of dragging the phone from the table, that the deputy mentioned that Fyffe had knocked the camera off the table.
“It was closed when we noticed it. Seth hadn’t said whether it had been closed when he found it. Maybe he closed it himself when he picked it up and restored it to the table.”
Mariel, still holding the camera and regarding it curiously, asked suddenly:
“At what time yesterday was Fyffe murdered?”
Her abrupt question took him by surprise. “We got here pretty early in the morning. From the condition of the body and the pool of blood, he must have been dead several hours. As I remember, Lafe Ogden didn’t say at just what time the forest supervisor had received the call for help from the ranger station. But we can learn that easily enough. It would fix the exact time of the murder. But what’s that got to do with it?”
“Only,” Mariel replied slowly, “that if it was dawn or earlier, he couldn’t have been taking pictures without a flashlight. Did you find anything of a flash-pan, or flash-powders?”
“Not a trace,” Otis replied, beginning to lose some of his enthusiasm. “Of course, we weren’t looking for anything of the kind.”
“Did you see anything of the plate-slide for the camera?”
“No, we didn’t notice that. Fyffe kept most of his materials in the other room of the ranger cabin.”
“But if he’d been using the flash-pan and plate-slide at the time he was shot, he’d hardly have taken them back there, would he?”