Free Blunt Darts by Jeremiah Healy

tougher ground.
    “What can you tell me about Telford Kinnington, the judge’s brother?”
    Miss Pitts gave a bittersweet smile. “Ah, Telford Kinnington. He was three years younger than Willard, and enough unlike him to have been bought from the Gypsies. The judge, who went to public school here, too, was a plodder. Everything seemed to come easily to Telford, though. A gifted student, a fine athlete at Harvard, and a true patriot, Mr. Cuddy. Telford didn’t just talk about this country, he died fighting for it. Only a few months after he’d been home on leave, too. In fact, I still have the newspaper account of his last battle. Just a minute.”
    Miss Pitts bustled over to a stuffed, floor-to-ceiling case and levered out a scrapbook. I feared a lengthy, unproductive tangent coming on. I thought about telling her to forget it but decided I was talking to her on borrowed time as it was.
    “Let … me … see,” she said, turning pages with agonizing slowness. “Yes. Yes, here it is.” Miss Pitts passed me the open volume.
    There were two accounts, one from the Banner, a local paper, and one from the Boston Globe. Both were dated April 11, 1969. According to the local paper, Captain Telford Kinnington had led his company in a counterattack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force that was engaging a separate sector of the position. Telford and nearly a quarter of his company (about 40 of 160) were killed or wounded, but the VC had been annihilated. The medal he’d received, however, was, in my experience, not a very substantial award for a heroic charge.
    The Globe article implied between the lines that Telford Kinnington’s action had been unnecessary and reckless. It also indicated that he’d entered the service as a second lieutenant five years earlier and had only recently been promoted to captain—a long time to wait for his second bar in those casualty-ridden late sixties. I noted the part of the war zone involved and remembered that I knew someone from Military Intelligence who’d served there after I’d come home.
    I then swung the conversation as delicately as I could back to the judge’s late wife. Miss Pitts was reluctant at first, but once I emphasized the importance of my knowing Stephen’s earlier life, our hostess lapsed into the nearly universal enthusiasm with which people discuss those who appear big but turn out to be little.
    “Diane Kinnington was a terror, Mr. Cuddy, a demon from hell. The judge met her when he was in law school. At first she was an enchanting girl, and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was born, she began acting … well, strangely. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. The woman walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. Diane began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and, despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver’s, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then, one September night, something happened. I’ve never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born to her a few hours later, two months premature.”
    “Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?”
    She frowned. “Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn’t be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family’s doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. Doc Ketchum wouldn’t talk about it, and he died a few months later. The Kinnington house servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on Diane and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was involved.”
    “How did Mrs. Kinnington get to the hospital?”
    “Her