Avada Kedavra and ways to kill wizards

[marian_chen]

No: HPFGUIDX 31338

Hi everyone, this is my first post. I feel a little uncomfortable being 
on probation, so I'd like to get out of it as soon as possible.

I was looking through the archives and also at the Lexicon (which I 
fear is impeding my ability to do work on my thesis!) and I was curious 
about the distributional qualities of spells. Is it necessary to do one 
Avada Kedavra (or Crucio, or whatnot) per person? Or can you hit a 
couple of people sitting next to each other if you have really good 
aim? In GoF, there's a description of curses ricocheting off Riddle's 
father's gravestone, which leads me to believe that as long as a curse 
happens to touch more than one person, maybe you can kill both of them. 
Any thoughts? I couldn't find anything on this in the archives, but I 
also didn't go all the way through them. 

There is a point to this, though. I was just reading the new, revised 
lexicon page about the timeline of James and Lily's death, and I was 
wondering if the "missing" spell - the one that rebounded onto 
Voldemort - might just simply be the one that hit Lily. I unfortunately 
don't have PoA in front of me, so I don't know if Lily was holding 
Harry in her arms (but I think JKR implies this because she says that 
Lily's sacrifice is in Harry's skin, which I interpret as meaning that 
she was holding him when she died). But could it be that the AK that 
Voldemort cast on Lily hit her but rebounded off Harry? This seems to 
me to be a simple way to account for a missing spell when the wands 
cast Priori Incantatem. Of course, as often pointed out, there are 
other spells missing, so it may not mean anything.

Just curious, this isn't a particularly deep post. I was just wondering 
of Occam's razor would apply here. I hope that someone with the books 
can read between the lines and tell me if I'm off-base here.

thanks,
Marian