“Then you looked in before midnight. I got into my room at midnight, or just ten or fifteen minutes after.”
“I looked at the clock. It was thirty-five minutes past twelve.”
“You read it wrong. It was thirty-five minutes past eleven, and you thought it was thirty-five minutes past twelve. You didn’t have your glasses on, did you?”
Mrs. Gentrie said, “I didn’t have my glasses on, but I didn’t make a mistake in the time. I’m certain I didn’t. And everybody else says that was when the shot was fired.”
“What do you mean, everybody else?”
“Well, the other people in the house, all of them.”
Junior said, “Well, if you ask me, that fellow Steele is a phoney. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw a loaded truck. Look at the way he’s always hanging around Rebecca, helping her with her crossword puzzles, stringing her along. What’s he really want, anyway? He isn’t supposed to be one of the family. He’s supposed to have a room rented, and that’s all. You know as well as I do Aunt Rebecca’s full of prunes, and she keeps her tongue rattling against the roof of her mouth all the time. It’s impossible to have any secrets around her. She spills everything she knows.”
“Junior, that’s not a nice way to talk about your Aunt Rebecca.”
Junior went on hotly, “The other night I was looking for my dictionary and couldn’t find it, and came downstairs to see if she had it, and she was telling him a whole lot of stuff about me. She hasn’t any right to do that.”
“You’re altogether too sensitive,” Mrs. Gentrie said. “She probably wasn’t talking about you at all.”