Ruth Porges glanced at her wrist-watch again, hesitated for a moment and told herself that she was a complete fool to allow the stone to interest her.
Oh, well—why not? It would take her only a second or two to bend and overturn it.
When she started to lift it she discovered that it was even heavier than it looked, but she didn't let that discourage her. She tugged and the end she was gripping came completely loose and the rest of the stone began to rise also.
She toppled it with a single, vigorous heave, exposing the hard-packed earth underneath—an oblong of earth about two feet in length and twelve or fifteen inches wide.
She stared down at it, a cold chill coursing up her spine and all the blood draining from her face. The gun was half-buried in the earth, but its outlines were distinctly visible, as if it had been quite deeply buried at first, but had arisen to the surface of the earth when the ground about it had been shaken by the steam shovel, precisely as a corpse will arise to the surface of a lake when a dynamite blast has been set off in close proximity to it.
Closely packed as the earth was, it took her only a moment to work the gun free from its clinging overlay of earth and small pebbles. Her lips were shaking now and she could scarcely breathe, but she continued to dig and wrench at the weapon with her fingers until the butt was firmly in her clasp and the long black metal barrel, capped with a bulky-looking silencer, was pointing directly toward the slope.
If the killer had materialized before her at that moment at the base of the slope, ghostly and threatening, she would have screamed in terror and fired and fired again, not caring at all that deep in her mind another voice, also her own, would be screaming at her that it was only a specter and that she was completely alone.
She had seen the gun before—it had been shown to her with pride. And she had seen and talked with the killer, and even allowed the killer to compliment her on her hair-do, and drop a dime in a jukebox and say to her: "Just listen. Isn't that quite a song? Not the sort of song you'd expect to come out of a jukebox, is it?"
She had seen the gun before and she had talked to Lathrup's slayer, not once, but many times.
She knew exactly who the killer was. Knew, too, that that cunning, fiendish individual was still at large. But when you met and talked with a monster, a fiend—how could you know, if you had no warning, no reason to suspect the truth?