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EQMM, July 2012
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Mystery/Crime

Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com

Copyright ©2012 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover photo by Bert Hardy / Getty Images

CONTENTS

Fiction: HIS DAUGHTER'S ISLAND by Brendan DuBois

Fiction: DEATH IN THE TIME MACHINE by Barbara Nadel

Fiction: FIVE STARS by Mike Baron

Passport to Crime: THE MAN WITH THE FACE OF CLAY by Paul Halter

Fiction: ACTING ON A TIP by Barbara Arno Modrack

Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Steve Steinbock

Fiction: DIAGNOSIS DEATH by N. J. Cooper

Fiction: WHAT THE BUTLER SAW by Judith Cutler

Department of First Stories: THE MALIBU WALTZ by Grant O'Neill

Fiction: CRUEL COAST by Scott Mackay

Fiction: SHAME THE DEVIL by James T. Shannon

Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill Crider

Fiction: DROWNED IN A SEA OF DREAMS by Donald Olson

* * * *

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Fiction: HIS DAUGHTER'S ISLAND
by Brendan DuBois

* * * *

* * * *

Art by Mark Evans

Recognized as one of the mystery field's best short-story writers, with short-fiction Shamus and Barry awards to his credit and three short-story Edgar nominations, Brendan DuBois also shines at novel length. The latest novel in his Lewis Cole series, Deadly Cove (St. Martin's Press/July 2011), was described by Publisher's Weekly as “suspenseful, satisfying,” with “well-drawn and sympathetic characters” and a “cliffhanger ending."

On a warm day in June, Zach Ford went out on a twenty-foot pontoon boat on Lake Piscassic in Maine, with his best friend Rafer Carlton at the helm, heading for the island where his daughter had been killed. The island was easy to find: It was the biggest one on the lake, boasting a bright white mansion that looked like a Hollywood set had been dropped down from the sky. Zach was sitting next to Rafer, who maneuvered the pontoon boat closer to the island.

“You sure you want to get this close?” Rafer asked, sitting in the helmsman's chair. There was a steering wheel before him, set into an instrument panel, and at his right, the throttle for the sixty-horsepower Mercury Bigfoot engine. A green canvas canopy overhead provided both shade and shelter.

“I do,” Zach replied. “I'll let you know if we get too close.”

Rafer, who wore an old Red Sox ball cap and a striped rugby shirt and khaki pants, gave him a look. The two of them had become friends in high school. Rafer had been a star football player who liked to work with tools; Zach had been on the debate team and had been good with numbers. Rafer had taken math tutoring from Zach, which allowed him to keep his player's eligibility, and Rafer had defended Zach whenever the bored bullies in gym class or the cafeteria decided to have fun with him.

Now Rafer ran an auto-repair shop in the nearby town of Milton, while Zach had a one-man accounting and tax firm. There were just a few other boats out on the lake, and as the island and its mansion grew larger in view, Rafer said, “We close enough?”

“Not nearly enough,” Zach said. He felt his chest grow slow and heavy as they got closer to where his daughter Carol had drawn her last breath. The white mansion was two stories tall, with a wraparound deck and large, floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a green lawn that ran down from the mansion to a sandy beach, and next to the beach were three boathouses, their doors closed. A dock extended from each boathouse. The beach was cluttered with lawn chairs, umbrellas, and other toys for kids and adults.

Large pine trees grew at either side of the mansion, and the way the house was placed meant everyone approaching this end of the lake had to gaze upon it, like it was some sort of temple of worship, Zach thought.

Rafer slowed the motor to a steady purr. “Well, there it be,” he announced. “The retirement home of one Malcolm Preston, brother of the current governor of Massachusetts, financial genius, cutthroat businessman, and otherwise rich miserable bastard.”

“And father of a killer,” Zach slowly said.

A pause from Rafer. “Yeah. The father of a killer.”

With the engine slowed, the pontoon boat wallowed some in the gentle waves. It had two pontoons with a deck built over it, with cushioned seats and railings. It wasn't fancy and didn't move fast, but it was a good boat for those who liked to take a gentle run out on the lake and anchor in an isolated cove for a day of fishing or swimming.

Rafer said, “The way I hear it, when Preston was having this place built, he demanded a sandy beach. Well, you know, there ain't no sand on these islands. Just rocks and pines. But Preston got his way, like he usually does. Actually had beach sand shipped over on the lake. And you know there's no barges around. Nope, the contractors got pontoon boats, just like this one, and shipped the sand over one boatload at a time. Heard it cost almost as much to ship that sand as to build the foundation.”

Zach looked at the large house, saw its attraction for his seventeen-year-old daughter. Why not? Summer was starting, college was beckoning in the fall, and when the richest boy in the area throws a party . . . well, who could blame her? So she and some friends boated out here during Memorial Day weekend, to a place where there would be adults and chaperones and definitely no drinking, don't you worry, Daddy, and so he didn't worry, until that six a.m. phone call on Monday had shattered everything . . .

“Closer,” Zach said. “Let's get in closer.”

Rafer said nothing, just eased up the throttle at his side. Zach was seeing the island through his daughter's eyes, his sweet girl who had done well with her single dad—her mother taken away by breast cancer five years earlier—and who had worked at a number of part-time jobs over the years to sock away what she could for tuition. Not that Carol was perfect—please, some of her moods could cause the sky to rain in a desert—but he knew how fortunate he had been to have such a loving, studious, and cautious daughter.

But this island . . . it was enticing, it was exciting, it was different. It promised a world beyond the Milton Pizza Pub, a world that didn't involve trading clothes among cousins, a world that didn't mean hesitating to open one's monthly cell-phone bill to see how high the texting charges were.

Nope, this place offered wealth, excitement, and no worries . . . and coming to this place had killed her.

“The closest dock,” Zach said. “Take the boat in. I want to see something.”

“Zach . . .”

“The closest dock, or I'll swim in,” Zach said. “And then afterwards I'll be dripping water all over your nice boat.”

Rafer said, “Don't mind getting the damn boat wet. That's what it's designed for. I just don't want to see you with a bullet in your head.”

“You won't.”

“How come you're so confident?”

“Trade secret,” Zach said.

Another boost of the boat's throttle and they approached the nearest dock. There was a swinging doorway on the port side of the Bennington, and Rafer steered the boat so the dock would be on that side. Zach then tossed over three white plastic fenders so the dock wouldn't scratch the side of the boat.

“You figuring on tying us off?” Rafer asked.

“Just being neighborly,” Zach said. “Why the hell not?”

Rafer put the engine in neutral. The pontoon boat glided in and then Rafer gave the throttle a burst of power in reverse, dropping the boat's speed to a crawl, as Zach stepped out of the boat, the port line and stern line in hand. He went to the cleats on the dock and quickly tied off the boat, stood up, and waited.

From the docks, a crushed stone walkway led up the smooth lawns to the mansion. There were other outbuildings as well: small cottages, toolsheds, places where sporting gear and paddles and lifejackets were stored, and—

Two men strode briskly down the walkway, radios in their hands. Both wore khaki slacks, boat shoes, and tight black T-shirts. Each of them also wore reflective sunglasses and with their short dark hair, they looked like brothers. The nearest one came up to Zach and said, “Can we help you, sir?”

“I'd like to see Malcolm Preston, please,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice was.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I don't. But you can tell him Zach Ford is here to see him.”

“He can't be disturbed,” the same security guard said.

“How about his son, Thomas? Is he available?”

“Sir, really, you should—”

Zach heard his voice get a bit higher. “But of course Thomas isn't here. Thomas is in Europe, so he can't answer for what he did here, what he did to my girl, what—”

The near guard stepped closer. “Sir, I'm really going to have to ask you to leave. This is private property. You're trespassing.”

Zach's hands felt cold. “So what are you going to do if I don't leave? Toss me in the lake? Throw me in the cellar? Get me drunk and give me pills to kill me like my little girl?”

The other guard said, “Sir, please leave. Or we'll call the police.”

He laughed. “There's one police chief and three officers in town. You really think they'll drop everything to come out on a boat to arrest me? Do you?”

The men stayed quiet. Zach looked at them both and said, “My mistake. The chief would do that. The chief would do that because—”

A soft touch to his shoulder, Rafer's voice nearby. “Zach . . . c'mon, let's get out of here.”

Zach turned away from the men, bent over to undo the bow and stern lines, wanting to make sure neither of them could see the tears in his eyes. Back on the boat, Rafer started up the engine.

* * * *

A half-hour later, they were moored in a quiet cove that didn't have a view of the island or its huge house. Rafer had brought chicken and cheese sandwiches from the Milton Cove Deli, homemade potato chips, and bottles of Sam Adams beer. When they were finished and working on their second bottles, Rafer leaned back and said, “You know . . . I don't remember much about the English courses we took in high school, but one thing did stick in my mind.”

“And what's that, besides Miss Trenton's impressive bosom?”

Rafer balanced a bottle on his chest. “Something that supposedly happened between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Miss Trenton, she said it was probably made up, but it was still a good story. Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, ‘The rich are different from you and me.’ And Hemingway said, ‘Yeah, they got more money.'”

Despite everything, Zach smiled at his old friend. “Yeah, they do. Among other things.”

Rafer took a healthy swallow and said, “Look, Zach . . . I know it's tough . . . no, forget that, I don't know squat. Not even married, so I don't know what it's like to have a kid or lose a kid . . . but Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different, and Malcolm Preston is just the latest one to fit the bill. We both know what happened to poor Carol. That bastard's son got her liquored up, gave her a date-rape drug or some equally nasty crap, and she died out here, without a hospital or ambulance nearby. But we also know what else happened, don't we?”

Zach spent a moment tearing at the wet label on his bottle. He didn't need reminding from Rafer, because he knew exactly what Rafer meant. There was a delay in reporting Carol's death. Malcolm's boy Thomas was hustled off the island, and then sent out to Europe on a private jet, for an unexpected summer semester abroad. Milton Police Chief Hal Diamond conducted a preliminary investigation, and he and the local district attorney ruled the death accidental. The fact that one of Malcolm's companies had earlier donated new police cruisers to the underfunded police department, or that Malcolm's brother, the influential governor of Massachusetts, had come up to Maine to help the district attorney set up a steering committee for an eventual Congressional run . . . well, none of that got mentioned in the local newspaper. Which happened to be owned by a media subsidiary controlled by one Malcolm Preston.

“Yeah, I also know what else happened,” Zach said. “And I'm not going to stand for it.”

Rafer stared at him without sympathy. “So what are you going to do? You saw the security. You were on that dock maybe thirty, sixty seconds before those two goons rolled in. And forget about approaching Preston when he's on shore. He's not the kind of guy you'll see raising a pint at the Flying Loon Bar and Grill.”

Zach said carefully, “So I give up, then? Not seek justice for Carol?”

“No, don't give up,” Rafer replied. “But think about what you mean when you say justice. Blowing off Preston's head with a rifle some sunny day? Gee, how long before the cops figure out a likely suspect. Or hire someone to do it for you? Lord knows there's enough nitwits back in the woods who'd do it for chump change, but when I say nitwits, I really mean it. Knuckleheads would probably end up shooting each other, or going right to the Maine State Police.”

“I could go to Europe.”

Rafer scratched at his chin. “Farthest you've been from here has been catching a Red Sox game in Boston. And sure, you could sue the bastard, but he has enough blue-blood law firms on hand that it wouldn't bother him a bit . . . they'd tie you up in so many knots, my friend . . . and of course, that means you'd have to find a lawyer suicidal enough to go after Malcolm Preston and his clan. You know how the law works. It's on Preston's side. Not yours. Not mine.”

Zach worked on the soggy label some more. “I'm not giving up.”

Rafer said, “I know you're not. But you've got to do it smart. That's all I'm saying.”

Zach brought the beer bottle up, stopped, and then gently lowered it. “Another thing about Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Remember that book?”

“Please,” Rafer said. “One literary accomplishment per semester, that's my rule, and remembering the Fitzgerald and Hemingway quotes took care of that.”

“In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald said something about Tom and Daisy, the two main characters. That they were rich, they were careless, and that they would break things and people, and then retreat back into their home, to let others clean up their messes.”

Zach turned, looked out to a spit of land that hid the island. “This . . . this mess, Preston isn't going to walk away from. . . . There will be justice. And I will do it right.”

* * * *

The next day Zach drove to the state's largest city, Portland, where he spent three hours at the main city library looking at newspaper files and magazine articles about Malcolm Preston. He glanced quickly over stories about his three marriages, his business triumphs, and his famous brother, and his hands clenched into fists when he spotted an article showing young Thomas Preston with his dad at a charity golf event.

Eventually he found and lingered over an article published in Yankee magazine, a story—complete with photographs—about Preston's island mansion on Lake Piscassic. The place had six bedrooms, two massive living rooms, an elaborate kitchen inside and an outdoor kitchen for barbecues on the rear deck. Besides the boathouses for three high-powered speedboats, there was also a helicopter landing pad in the rear yard.

One quote from Preston stood out: “After years of traveling the globe, doing hundreds of business deals, I finally have what I've always wanted. A refuge, a place to call home, a place to relax and forget the troubles of the outside world. God willing, this perfect island is where I'm going to retire and spend the rest of my life.”

When he was done with that article, Zach spent another half-hour leafing through some books in the legal section of the library, and then drove back home.

* * * *

At lunchtime the next day, Zach waited for his secretary to leave before he departed as well. It was another warm June day, but it felt cold to him as he walked along the sidewalk in the small downtown of Milton. Most people he passed knew him, and offered quiet hellos or nods, but no one stopped to speak to him. It was as if his connection to bad happenings—especially those related to such a powerful man as Malcolm Preston—made them shy away.

At the Milton town hall, he went up the granite steps and into the cool interior, to the town clerk's window. The town clerk was an older woman, Sandy Sanborn, who wore cat-framed eyeglasses with a chain about her neck, and who always had two or three pens stuck in the back of her graying hair, which she wore in a thick bun.

Zach said, “Afternoon, Sandy.”

She smiled. “Hey, Zach. What can I do for you today? Too early to pay your property taxes, isn't it?”

“There's never a good time for that,” Zach said, as he placed his hands on the cool counter. “I was hoping you could give me a copy of the town laws.”

“Town ordinances? Is that what you're looking for? Civil or criminal?”

“Both, if you can.”

“Sure, hold on.”

She slid off her stool, went into the rear of her cluttered office, and came back with two thick photocopied pamphlets. She slid them over. “Usually cost five bucks apiece . . . but it's on the town this time, okay?”

He picked them up. “Thanks, Sandy.”

“Sure . . . and Zach?”

“Yes?”

“Still sorry to hear what happened to your little girl . . .”

He nodded, couldn't say a word, and left.

* * * *

At Ford Financial Planning, Zach closed the door to his office and slowly went through the ordinances, taking notes here and there. Along the way he also made two phone calls. He knew it sounded odd for those who didn't know his kind of work, but he loved being an accountant, a tax preparer, because it all made sense. Oh, there were challenges, but when you came right down to it, it was all just numbers. And numbers always made sense. Two plus two always equaled four, no matter if the person doing the counting was rich, poor, smart, or semiliterate.

He looked down at the ordinances. Here, in the laws of his town and his state, there was always room for deceit, for lies, for coverups.

* * * *

At five o'clock, there was a gentle tapping at his door, and his sole employee, Beth Guthrie, came in. She was a single mother of two children, attractive with long brown hair, and she was sharp in keeping Zach on schedule. She wore a simple light yellow dress, belted at the waist.

“Zach?” she said. “Closing time . . . and you should head out too.”

“Good idea,” he said, opening up the center desk drawer. “But can you give me a minute first?”

She looked puzzled, sitting down across from him. “What's up, Zach?”

He handed over a business card. “Peter Rogan runs a tax and financial firm over in Townsend. He's agreed to take over all my clients for the rest of the year.”

“Zach . . .”

He opened his checkbook, quickly scribbled her name and a series of numbers, signed it, and passed the check over. “There. Your pay for the rest of the year. Ford Financial Planning is taking the rest of the year off, Beth. I may or may not reopen next January. I'd love to have you come back . . . but feel free to seek other employment in the meantime. And I'd be happy to give you a great recommendation.”

Beth stared at the check for a moment, lifted her head. Her eyes were moist. “What are you going to do?”

“What I have to do,” Zach said.

* * * *

The next day was a long slog of going to various stores in the area, from small hardware stores to a Walmart superstore. He had made a list and followed it to the letter, and at the end of the long day, at dusk, he drove down a bumpy dirt road to an isolated cottage on the lake. It was small, with four rooms and a roof with some missing shingles, and there was a note on the door.

* * * *

Zach—

As promised, my cousin's cottage for the summer. Not sure what you're up

to, but call if you need anything else.

—Rafer

P.S. Please try not to sink her. She's my best girl.

* * * *

Zach looked over at the small dock, and at the pontoon boat moored there that belonged to his best friend.

“I'll see what I can do,” he said.

* * * *

It was one more day of work before he was ready, early on the Saturday morning of the Fourth of July weekend, the busiest weekend of the summer. He undid the lines to the pontoon boat, gently shoved her out onto the lake, and started the engine, keeping the throttle low. The air was cool and the lake water was smooth as he motored to the south, heading for the island. In the far coves the morning mist still drifted, and he eyed the mansion as he approached the island. It was 5:30 a.m. He couldn't see anyone moving about. Funny thing, for himself and Rafer and others in town, the lake had always been here. A place to fish and swim every now and then, but nothing like it was to the rich folks who could afford to spend the whole summer here, playing day after day. What a life.

He slowed the motor, then placed it in neutral, and went to the stern, where he tossed over the anchor. The boat drifted some and then came to a halt, slowly circled about on the anchor line.

Zach's heart pounded. Now was the time. It had been one thing to plan, to prepare, to imagine what to do . . . but now it was go time. Two choices. Either do it . . . or motor back to the cottage, unload the boat, and skulk away, and let Malcolm Preston and his absent son get away with it.

That was no choice at all.

Forward there were zippered black duffel bags and cardboard boxes. He unpacked the necessary equipment, set it up, and held it secure with bungee cords.

On the island, the large house brooded, seemingly staring at him. He stared right back. Reached down, flipped a couple of switches.

In a matter of seconds, ear-splitting music boomed across the water to the mansion, a recording of Jimi Hendrix's “Star Spangled Banner,” from the 1969 Woodstock music festival. Zach took out some foam earplugs, inserted them into his ears, and sat in the comfortable helmsman's chair of the boat and waited.

He didn't have to wait long. Doors flew open up at the mansion and people streamed out, some barely dressed, others with hastily thrown on robes or towels wrapped around them. They pointed, they seemed to shout at him, and they extended their hands to him, middle fingers raised up.

Zack turned the volume up louder.

Segued into Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.

* * * *

About fifteen minutes later, an aluminum skiff motored out, with two men inside, the same security guards from the other day. They got up to the side of the pontoon boat and as a courtesy, he turned off the music.

There were threats, there were demands, there were more threats, and when they had finished, he offered them a smile. He handed over a sheaf of papers, with portions highlighted in bright yellow.

“Gentlemen, if you read these papers, or have your boss read them, you'll note that I'm breaking no laws,” Zach explained. “I'm moored more than fifty feet away from shore, I'm not trespassing, and I'm not damaging Mr. Preston's property. And all relevant noise ordinances—both local and state—reference one property owner disturbing another property owner. As you can plainly see, I'm not a property owner. I'm on a boat. So feel free to contact the police. They can't charge me with a damn thing.”

More threats, more demands; as they kept on yelling at him, he turned the music back on.

The sweet music of “I Am the Captain of the Pinafore” boomed against the mansion and the beach.

* * * *

As the day went on, he juggled his music offerings. Barry Manilow. Judas Priest. Ozzy Osbourne. The opera Carmen. Tibetan prayer chants. Australian aboriginal music. Bagpipe music from the 42nd Black Watch Highlanders. And in a deeply sadistic move that almost made him hesitate, the complete works of Yoko Ono.

As the day progressed, he ate two chocolate doughnuts and drank coffee from a Thermos bottle. With the foam earplugs in, and with the large speakers aimed at the island and mansion, he found the noise tolerable. The day got warmer and he stretched out his legs and reached into a cardboard box where he had stored a number of books, including Samuel Eliot Morison's fifteen-volume History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II.

* * * *

He had lunch—a ham and cheese sandwich—and for dinner, he set up a barbecue grill on the bow of the boat, grilled up a nice New York strip steak and a baked potato. There was a portable chemical toilet at the stern that he used twice, and a couple of times—just to jazz things up—he switched off the music, once for ten minutes, and another time, for about an hour. And then he started blasting again.

People would come out on the lawn, or the wraparound porch, and stare and point and make threatening gestures. And once—using a pair of binoculars—he saw the man himself, Malcolm Preston, staring at him. A woman standing next to him seemed to be yelling at him, but Preston just continued looking Zach's way.

And just for that, he played Yoko Ono again.

* * * *

Night fell. The music continued. He yawned a few times, decided it was time to add to the mix. At the stern and bow, he set up metal tripods and large portable batteries, and with two more flicks of switches, two powerful spotlights—each shooting out 10,000 candlepower of light—spread across the lawn and the windows of the mansion.

He yawned again. It had been a fair day, and he had made good progress in volume one of Morison's famed history.

* * * *

They came for him at about two in the morning, in a canoe, paddling softly. The two guys from the morning, and Zach was fortunate that they came when they did. Earlier he had set the spotlights on a random timer, so they would switch on and off at different times—ensuring a wonderful and unexpected light show for the mansion's residents—and during one of the “on” times, the canoe was there.

Zach got up and from one of the black duffel bags, brought up a Remington 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. He worked the pump-action once to make an impressive sound, and looked over the boat's railing at his visitors.

They gazed up at him, paddles in midair, dripping water. Zach said, “You come any closer, you come back again, you do anything I think is threatening, I'll shoot you both. And don't think I'm joking. I'm sure your boss has told you why I'm here. And think about this. If I do shoot you both, I don't think your boss has the means to bribe twelve jurors. Most people around here would be on my side. So I would walk free, while you'd be taking up space at some Massachusetts cemetery. So get the hell out.”

The paddles lowered, went back in the water, and the canoe went back to the island.

Zach escorted them out with some Ron Zombie.

* * * *

At midmorning the next day, as the church bells and cannon fire of the “1812 Overture” roared across the tiny cove, Zach spotted some men coming down one of the gravel walkways, heading to one of the three boathouses. They quickly disappeared from view and he waited, and the sliding door at the end of the boathouse rolled up. There was a small burst of blue smoke, and a motorboat idled its way out, swiveled, and then started coming his way. It moved slowly and gracefully, and Zach noted the polished woodwork and smooth hull that marked a very old Chris-Craft motorboat, probably from the 1930s or ‘40s.

At the stern of the craft, sitting by himself, was Malcolm Preston.

Zach switched off the sound system, and in the sudden silence, he said to himself, “The emperor approaches. . . .”

The boat came up on the port side of the pontoon boat, beside the small entry gate. The engine of the Chris-Craft burbled down its power and three white fenders were placed over the side. Malcolm Preston stood up and called out, “Permission to come aboard?”

“Certainly,” Zach said, and he opened up the gate as the other driver expertly nudged the Chris-Craft up against the pontoon boat. With one firm leap, Preston came aboard and stood in front of Zach. He was lean, muscled, and tanned. He wore designer jeans, a tight light green polo shirt, and topsider shoes with no socks. His brown hair—flecked with gray—was cut short and well, and his pale blue eyes were sharp.

“Looks like we have a situation here,” he said.

“Guess you could say that.”

Preston said, “This is a special time of year. Each Fourth of July, I invite my family, friends, and some coworkers to spend the long weekend here. I promise them barbecues, breakfasts, boating, fishing, and a chance to relax. But you know what kind of weekend they're having, don't you?”

“Each Fourth of July, my daughter Carol and I would go to the volunteer fire department chicken bake, then catch the fireworks at the town common. Bet you know what kind of weekend I'm having too.”

“I know,” Preston said. “So how can I make you leave?”

Zach said sharply, “You can't make me do a damn thing.”

Preston paused, and said, “Good point. What could I do to encourage you to depart?”

“You really want to know?”

“I do.”

“Bring your son Thomas back from Europe. Go before the police chief and the district attorney. Have him confess what he did to my daughter.”

“What happened to your daughter was an accident,” Preston said.

“Two of Carol's best friends were there. They told me what happened. They told me that Thomas got her drunk. One saw him slip her a pill, wrapped in a bit of cheese, like she was some animal at the vet's. It wasn't an accident.”

Preston said carefully, “That's not what the girls told the police.”

“You're absolutely right,” Zach said. “And I'm sure they changed their stories for a price.”

Preston folded his arms. “Thomas isn't coming back. So that's off the table, Mr. Ford. Is there anything else I can offer you?”

“What do you have in mind?”

Preston said, “You know who I am. You know what kind of monetary resources are available to me. I can make it simple or complex. Simple would be to provide you with a lifetime annuity, completely legal and guaranteed, for an amount that we both find is appropriate.”

“And what would complex be?”

“Complex would be for some of my companies in this state to hire your firm for their financial needs. You could become very well-off in a very short amount of time.”

The pontoon boat gently rocked. The engine of the Chris-Craft still gurgled along. The two bodyguards looked over, their faces expressionless. Zach said, “You really are a piece of work, aren't you? More money than the entire population of the town of Milton combined. Never have to worry about bills, about doctors, about having enough money to buy Christmas gifts, or pay to have your driveway plowed, or to keep the heat on in January. A man so wealthy you should be going to church every day to give thanks for being one of the fortunate few . . . and what are you? A slug, with the morals of a slug, who thinks anything and everything is for sale, has a price tag.”

Preston's face colored. “I'd like to reach an arrangement. I'm not here to be insulted.”

“You heard what I want. Nothing else will do. And if you think you can sue me, go ahead. I'll be out here on this boat and knowing how slow the law works, this lake will be frozen over before anything gets to court. Think you can get the state laws changed? That'll take months. And to get the local laws amended . . . good luck with that. The town council takes the summer off.”

Preston said, “Then it's going to be a long summer, isn't it?”

“Only thing you've said that makes any sense at all,” Zach said.

With a brief nod, Preston got back on the Chris-Craft, and as they motored back toward the house, he blasted them with the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

* * * *

And a long summer it was. The music continued and sometimes, to break up the monotony, he would play books on tape—though they were actually books on CDs. He broadcasted a lot of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle to his captive audience. Other days or nights, when the radio signals were strong enough, he played talk radio, making it a point to find the most off-the-wall, argumentative, and ignorant talk show hosts on air to share with Malcolm Preston and his friends and family.

Some days it was hot and steamy, and he would go for swims around the pontoon boat. Other days it would rain—and a few times, there were huge thunderstorms that roared through—drenching everything out in the open. But he kept going.

Occasionally, boats would come by to look at him, and most often, the occupants yelled at him, or gave him the finger, or, if they traveled close enough, tossed beer bottles. A few times, though, the occupants asked him why he was doing what he was doing, and when he explained it, they expressed sympathy and motored away.

Only once—during a Friday in late July—was he overly concerned, and that was when a white Boston Whaler operated by a Maine Warden motored by. He switched off the music and politely showed the armed officer his boat registration, his fire extinguisher, and the required number of flotation devices. As the officer left, he smiled and said, “I never said this, but good luck, Mr. Ford. Good luck.”

Every now and then, Rafer would show up, bringing fresh fruits or vegetables and sometimes steamed lobster and corn on the cob. Occasionally, Zach motored into the Lake Piscassic Marina to fuel up the boat and stock up on supplies, or went back to Rafer's cousin's cottage for a shower and long snooze, and at those times, Rafer would help clean up the boat and keep watch, so the boat wouldn't have an “accident” while moored. One Tuesday in August, the music was off and they were both drinking cold bottles of Sam Adams, when Rafer said, “You holding up okay?”

“So far so good,” Zach said. “Not sure if my ears are ever going to be the same . . . and when I'm through here, I swear I'm going for a hike in the middle of the White Mountains and hear nothing but the birds and bees.”

“Fair enough,” Rafer said.

Zach pointed at the mansion with his beer bottle. “You hear anything from the enemy camp?”

“More than you can imagine,” Rafer said. “Word is that Mr. Preston is holding tight, but his lovely wife isn't. She loves this island, and hates you and what you're doing. So she wants hubby to bring back the son and do what you want.”

“For real? She wants to give up her son?”

Rafer laughed. “Thomas is the son of wife number one. She's wife number three. She doesn't care about her stepson. She wants her lake paradise back.”

“And how do you know this?”

Rafer gestured to the island with his beer bottle. “You think the folks over there wash dishes? Or change bedding? Or vacuum the rugs? The hell they do. They hire some gals from Milton, and when they're working, they're invisible. So they see and hear things. And that's what they see and hear.”

“Thanks for the good news,” Zach said.

Rafer eyed him over his beer bottle. “How long can you do this?”

“Until the ice comes,” he said. “Or he breaks.”

“Might be a long time.”

“For Carol, I don't care.”

* * * *

He read a lot more, swam around the boat, and got better ear protection as the summer went on. At night sometimes, in his dreams, Carol would come to him. It wasn't spooky or strange or upsetting . . . it was reassuring. She would just be there, in little snippets of time, of memory, and no matter the weather, the hot sun, the driving rain, the taunts from the other boaters, he would always wake up, knowing he was doing right.

And one night, she saved him.

* * * *

The dream was like before, of Carol in their living room, doing her homework and looking up and smiling, and he woke up smiling too, and then raised his head. Something was wrong. The music was off, but there was . . . a hissing noise. Gurgling. Bubbling. Was the boat sinking? His first impulse was to stand up and turn on the lights, but no . . . take it easy. He rolled off one of the long padded seats and got on the carpeted floor. He moved to the bow, raised his head. A nearly full moon was up, illuminating the lake. There. A disturbance in the water.

He found the boat hook. He stood up, thrust the long hook into the water, twisted it about, felt it snag something. He yanked up with both hands, and a man broke the surface, wearing a wetsuit, mask, and air tank. He tugged and tugged, until a hose snapped free, releasing a burst of air. The man flopped on his side and started swimming away. Zach felt like grabbing at him again with the boat hook, or getting the shotgun, or cutting the anchor line free and starting up the motor and running him down.

He took a breath. Flicked on the lights. Turned on the sound system again, and Celine Dion woke up the cove.

* * * *

As August came to an end, Rafer came by for another visit, motoring up in a small aluminum skiff. There were no bags of groceries, no bottles of beer, nothing save a newspaper, The Milton Transcript. Rafer silently passed the newspaper over and Zach read the front-page story, of a cottage along the shore and a business in town that had suddenly and mysteriously burnt to the ground. Zach gave him the newspaper back.

“Guess someone's playing for keeps,” Zach said.

“I'd say you're right about that.”

Zach said, “And so am I.”

* * * *

The week before the long Labor Day weekend, Zach took some time off. Sleeping at a motel, relaxing, and resting up. And when the weekend came, with boats visiting the island, two helicopters coming by, he kept it up, playing the music, the other sounds—he now included speeches from presidents, from Carter to Reagan to Bush, father and son—and keeping the lights on, all night long. People on the island kept watch on him, and with his binoculars, he saw Malcolm Preston twice on the front deck. And both times, a young woman was next to him, yelling at him, poking at his shoulder.

Then the summer was over, and autumn began.

* * * *

On a crisp fall morning, the door to one of the boathouses slid up, and the Chris-Craft came out, clumsily piloted by Malcolm Preston. Zach turned down some Mozart. Preston came up to the pontoon boat, his face red, and after about ten minutes of threats and obscenities, Zach said, “Is that it?”

Preston seemed to take a deep breath and said, “You think you've won? Do you? Do you think you've won?”

Zach said, “I'm still here, so I'd say I'm winning.”

“You . . . peasant. That's what you are. A peasant. You think I'm going to let this go? Do you?” Another torrent of obscenities, and when there was a pause, Preston said, “Well?”

Zach reached over to the volume knob. “Give my best to your wife, will you?”

* * * *

A week later, he gassed up at the marina and bought that day's newspaper. As the boat was fueled, he leafed through the pages, until something caught his eye. He read the story three more times, and then went back to the island. And there on the side lawn was a metal sign from a local realtor. FOR SALE.

He turned the boat around and went to one of the empty docks, and expertly moored the boat. He spent awhile walking around the empty grounds, knowing this place was now his daughter's island. Zach then stretched out on the soft grass and fell asleep.

* * * *

The sound of an approaching motor woke him up. He got up and went down to the dock, and Rafer was there. Rafer moored his skiff and came up, grinning. “Got here as quick as I could.”

“Good to see you.”

Zach stood on the dock with his friend, looking about the hardwood trees in the distance, their leaves finally changing color. It was a pretty sight.

Rafer said, “You won.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

Rafer said, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Zach passed over the newspaper he had just bought at the marina. Rafer looked it over and then read out loud, “ ‘Mr. Preston said that he expects his island home to sell soon, and he plans to use the proceeds to assist in the building of a new home in Aspen.'”

Rafer lowered the newspaper. Zach turned to him and for the first time in a very long time, smiled.

“You know, I've never been to Colorado,” Zach said.

Copyright © 2012 by Brendan DuBois

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: DEATH IN THE TIME MACHINE
by Barbara Nadel

-Barbara Nadel's stories for EQMM cover a lot of ground, geographically, in subject matter, and in time. She is best known for her Silver Dagger Award-winning series about Istanbul policeman cetin Ikmen, which is thirteen novels strong and includes a 2008 story for EQMM. Her current story for us spans the period from World War I through the latter part of the 20th century; something this winner of an award from Jury Magazine for historical fiction handles easily. Readers won't want to miss her latest Ikmen novel, Dead of Night.

My grandfather said he found the body in the backyard on the Wednesday night when he went to the outside toilet. It was by the fence in the old pen where the chickens used to live. But because my grandparents didn't have a telephone, my father didn't get to know about it until he went round with their shopping the following Saturday. My grandparents never went out.

This all happened over forty years ago, but I can still remember that day very well. We drove over in Dad's latest acquisition from his dodgy brother-in-law, Brian, a 1950 Vauxhall Victor. Grandma and Granddad lived almost opposite Upton Park, West Ham United's home ground. So the streets were full of football fans all dressed in the teams’ colours of claret and blue. We'd picked up the shopping at the grocers near our own house in East Ham and just had to stop at a hardware shop on the Barking Road to pick up some gas mantles. Although this was 1967, my grandparents, unlike most people even in the impoverished East End of London, didn't have electricity. Year after year they hung on to the gas lamps that had been in their house on Green Street since they'd first moved in back in the nineteen aughts. Every so often these lamps needed the mantles, the bit that contains the gas and converts it into an incandescent light, replaced. And so we stopped at the one hardware shop that still sold the things, bought the mantles, and then, inevitably, my father's car broke down.

I was only six years old and short for my age but I had to drag my share of bags down the Barking Road, into Green Street, and up my grandparents’ garden path. My father, furious about “bloody Brian and his bleeding old wrecks,” carried everything else, a limp roll-up cigarette hanging from his lips as he muttered his anger. When we got to the house, which was a battered Edwardian terrace with an overgrown front garden, Dad was further infuriated by the fact that someone had broken the door knocker. “Sodding hell!” he exploded. And then he looked up at the window that was above the door and yelled out, “Mo! Mo, you up there? Get down here and open this door, for Christ's sake!”

Grandma and Granddad didn't rent the whole house. They'd always been too poor for that. They lived downstairs while upstairs was occupied by a man with a wooden leg called Mo. Unlike my grandparents, Mo did go out from time to time and it was nearly always he who answered the door. But Mo liked a drink and sometimes he would range about his flat in a drunken stupor, falling over and breaking things. When he left the building he could get into fights; he'd broken parts of the front door down in the past and the poor old knocker was always fair game. Eventually Mo, red-eyed and, as he put it, “as stiff as a board” with arthritis, came down the stairs and opened up.

My grandfather was in the hall with a shovel in his hand. The coal cellar was underneath the stairs and he'd left what they called the parlour to go and get some coal.

“Hello,” he said. “Cold out, is it?”

My father ignored him and said, “Car's buggered. Me and kiddo had to walk from the hardware shop.”

Granddad began to shovel coal, when Mo, halfway up the stairs, called down, “Here, George, tell them about the murder.”

“The murder?”

My father's already white face blanched. My grandfather looked away.

“Some bloke. In the backyard,” Mo said to my father. “Your dad found him. Dead.”

Whether my grandfather would ever have told my father about the body in the yard had Mo not said what he did is something I still ponder occasionally, even now. From what I remember of that day and others that later proved significant afterwards, I think that he probably wouldn't.

All he said as he shovelled coal was, “Your mother didn't want you bothered with it.”

“Bothered with it!”

Dad went out of the hall, into the parlour and through to the scullery where my grandmother was washing up dishes. I followed, fascinated, as I always was, by the way in which the passage from the dingy hall into the darkness of the parlour plunged one into a world of browns and blacks. No outside sounds of football revelry or chatter of local shoppers entered here. Only the crackle of coal as it burnt inside the range, the hiss of the gas lamps, and, sometimes, the whistle of steam as it escaped from the big metal kettle.

My father talked to a small, thin woman in a long black dress. My grandmother was in her late seventies then, the same sort of age that my own mother, who favours jeans and T-shirts, is now. I had only once seen my grandmother's hair not piled up on top of her head. One morning we turned up early and she had just got out of bed. Her hair, which was as grey as an afternoon in November, reached all the way down to her feet. But this time it was in a bun and, as usual, held up with pins made of silver and onyx and jet. She spoke to my father in low, angry tones, the long silver chains around her neck and wrists jangling as she did so.

I was looking at the many framed photographs of my ancestors that sat on the mantelpiece above the range when my grandfather came in and said, “You all right, are you, my love?”

One of the photos had been laid down on its face. I said, “Granddad, one of the pictures is down.”

He looked up and frowned. My grandfather was a big man. Tall and broad and completely different in build from my skinny father. A dock worker by trade, he was also a veteran of the First World War, a conflict that I knew even then haunted him always. He opened the door of the range and threw the coal on with the shovel. He stood up with difficulty and then looked at the mantelpiece and said, “Your grandmother was cleaning. It must've fallen down.” He ruffled my long, mousy hair with his coaly fingers and then stood the picture up again. I knew it well. It was a portrait of his brother, Harold. He had died long, long ago during a battle called the Battle of Mons. Uncle Harold had been my grandfather's only male sibling and his memory was sacred not just because of who he had been but also because he had died so young and in service to his country. This portrait, of a young, thin, and unsmiling man who was really little more than a boy, sat alongside others depicting my grandfather's many sisters, his parents, and my grandmother's mother and her three brothers, David, John, and Patrick. In between all of these photographs were scattered plaster images of the Virgin Mary, the suffering Christ, and the saints. This proximity to the divine told us all, had we not already known it, that everyone depicted had sadly passed away.

I sat down to wait for the cup of tea and plate of bread and jam that always accompanied any visit to the grandparents’ house. My grandfather put the kettle on the range and then, although I do remember wanting to ask him about what Mo had said about the dead body in the yard, I know that I didn't do so. My father and grandmother went out into the yard, which was not what usually happened, because neither of them had gone out there to go to the toilet. My grandfather just smiled and I asked if I could please play with my Box of Things. The Box of Things was in fact an old carpetbag. It contained all sorts of “treasures” that were played with by my grandparents’ many grandchildren. We all loved it. There were wooden camels which had once belonged to my Great Uncle Sidney who had been in the army in Palestine, shells from a beach somewhere in the west country, model cats made out of Bakelite, old bits of broken costume jewellery, a tiny New Testament, dolls and small religious statues, and two photograph albums. These two brown, heavily stuffed books were my favourites. Full of small black-and-white photographs, some dating back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. They showed me my forebears in funny clothes and doing things like picking hops in Kent that I had never seen and would never do. Involved in the Box, I recall nothing more from that day except a snatch of conversation between my parents when I got home.

My mother said to my dad, “So do the police know who he is, this man your father found?”

“No,” my dad replied. “No one seems to know anything about him.”

* * * *

The following Saturday my father and I made our usual trip to see my grandparents in West Ham. This time we didn't go in the car because the police had apparently taken it off my father and were currently looking for my Uncle Brian. Although he had promised never, ever to sell or give my father any dodgy goods ever, Uncle Brian just hadn't been able to resist the Vauxhall Victor.

We arrived in the afternoon, which, in November, meant that it was dark, and as we walked into the parlour the gas lamps hissed and hummed in time to the boiling kettle. I smiled at my granddad, who was in his usual position, in his chair by the side of the range. He and my grandmother were not, however, alone. Sitting on the far side of the large dining table that was wedged into the square bay window was a policeman. He looked to be about my dad's age and he was in uniform, his helmet placed before him on the table. The adults began to talk and I remember my grandmother, who was sitting next to the policeman, asked, “So, he doesn't have any family, then? Not come forward to claim his body?”

“No,” the policeman answered. “No, nothing.”

Then I said, “Is this about the man who was murdered in the backyard?”

No one spoke at first. They all looked at me and then it was the policeman who began to smile. “Well,” he said as he bent down in order to speak to me across the table, “what do you know about . . .”

“It was our neighbour, Mo, who said the word ‘murder,’ “ my grandmother said grumpily. “He's a cripple and a drunk, and he dramatises everything. She heard him and picked up on it.”

“Oh, I know old Mo,” the policeman said and then he looked at me again. “The poor man in your gran's yard just died, sweetheart,” he said. “No one killed him.”

“It was his time. God took him,” my grandmother added.

“Sod God,” my grandfather, who had absolutely no time for religion, muttered over by the fire.

“Can I have my Box, please?” I asked then. Kids move on very quickly, and I was already bored by the notion of murder, by God, and by my grandfather's routine blasphemy.

* * * *

My father went and got the Box and when he returned I spread all of the treasures out across the table and then began looking through the photo albums. The adults talked and I clearly remember my grandmother going on about a possible funeral or cremation. Not that that was anything unusual. Funerals and how ornate or religiously observant they were formed frequent topics of her conversation. Of course, what I didn't know then was that all of the ceremonies she spoke about had taken place in the 1950s at the very latest. My grandparents did not, after all, go out.

When I opened up my albums I was sitting beside my father with my grandmother and the policeman sitting across the table opposite. I knew that after a little while my grandmother was watching me more intently than usual, but I just smiled at her and then went back to what I was doing. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever about what I was looking at in the album when my grandmother ripped it and the other book away from me and put them back in the old carpetbag. I do remember that I started to cry but that the look on my grandmother's face was such that I felt compelled to swallow my tears and hold my peace. She looked fierce; she could do that, like an old, old toothless cheetah.

No one asked my grandmother why some of my treasures had been suddenly denied to me. But I do remember my father looking angry and I can recall how he very obviously picked up the carpetbag and then began to flick through the album himself. Sitting next to me, he knew exactly what I had been looking at when my grandmother had ripped the album from my hands. By this time the policeman was getting up to leave and so all of us got up from the table and bade him very politely goodbye. Once he had gone, my grandfather, who was about as good with authority as he was with God, muttered, “Fascist!” and then promptly went to sleep in his chair.

I think I was given my albums back then. I really don't know. I do recall a feeling of discomfort afterwards, however, although at the time I didn't know why. Things were never quite right between my grandparents and my father from then on. My grandmother and my father talked frequently alone and in furious whispers.

* * * *

My grandfather died in 1970 at the age of 83 and my grandmother five years later at 85. The contents of the flat were distributed between my father and his two brothers, with Dad inheriting most of the photographs. Until I was well into my twenties I would, from time to time, take out the old albums and the photographs that had once stood on the mantelpiece and look at them. But when I moved away to Yorkshire, in 1985, I forgot about the photographs and, to a large extent, about my grandparents too. Only when my father and his brothers got together to reminisce, if I was around at the time, did I think of them and smile.

Dad and my uncles Geoff and Eric always referred to the old house in West Ham as the Time Machine. My grandparents had chosen to stop their personal clock around about 1929 when my father had been born, or so my Uncle Eric always said.

“Even in the Blitz Mother always wore long skirts and put her hair up like old Queen Mary,” he said at one reunion back in the 1980s. “Frightened of electricity they were, the both of them, frightened rigid.”

Not that their eccentric lifestyle stopped with lack of electricity. They had no bathroom and were accustomed to washing daily in the kitchen sink. When a proper hot soak was needed they brought in the old tin bath which hung on the side of the wooden shed that was the outside toilet. God knows how many kettles they had to boil on the old range to get enough water to bathe in. They didn't have a washing machine, had no television or transistor radio, and their bedstead was made of brass, which was very unfashionable back in the 1960s. Now that bed, not to mention the big black range in the parlour, would send the type of middle-class people my grandparents never met into raptures.

It was generally agreed amongst my relatives that my grandparents’ strange aversion to change and modernity had a lot to do with the First World War. Granddad in particular had come from a fairly easygoing working-class family who actively embraced new innovations. But he'd had a bad time in the trenches. He had been gassed, wounded, and had returned to London and his wife with a profoundly pessimistic take on life. Why my grandmother had seemed to follow him along this course was not known, expect perhaps that women did always do what their men told them to back in those days. But both my uncles, Geoff and Eric, were born during the 1914-18 conflict, presumably conceived when Granddad was at home on leave.

That said, along with Uncle Geoff, it was my belief that the death of Granddad's brother, Harold, possibly held the key. Blown up at the Battle of Mons, he had only been seventeen at the time. They'd been in the same battalion and Granddad always said that he'd seen Harold die. One minute he'd been by his side and the next he'd disappeared into a great ball of fire and metal and ash. There hadn't been a single trace left of him to bury, Granddad had said. Not a trace. How a person could get over such a thing was inconceivable to me. In the light of that, it was no wonder that he had been so very weird.

Life moved on and the family photographs entered what would probably, under normal circumstances, have been their final resting place in a box in my parents’ attic. I had two children by this time and my many cousins had reproduced also. It was the generation before ours that was diminishing. Both my father's brothers died in the mid 1980s and their wives followed on after them, one just before and one just after the year 2000. My sons were taking their A levels when I was called by my mother to say I had to return to London immediately.

“Your dad was taken bad two days ago,” she said. She didn't cry or even sound that much upset. “He's in hospital. The doctor, whoever he is, says he's got lung cancer.”

I drove from Wakefield to London in four straight hours and when I got to my parents’ house, my mother was still calmly in shock. “They say he's going to die,” she said. “How can that be?”

We didn't say anything at all about my father's lifetime smoking habit. We just sat in silence in my mum's living room and lit up cigarettes of our own. Suddenly, or so it seemed to me, I had blinked just once and my childhood and my youth had disappeared into a hole in the ground.

* * * *

My father was conscious. Hooked up to machines and drips, he looked small and was yellow and the sight of him made me choke with a mixture of utter grief and total horror. Because he was on the Intensive Therapy ward I had to wear a plastic apron and gloves whenever I was near him. As I put the gloves on, I began to cry. Unfortunately Dad saw me, but he smiled anyway and said, “Got a fag, have you, kiddo?”

He hadn't called me that since I was a child. It took me back to Uncle Brian (long dead himself by then) and his stolen cars, to England winning the World Cup in 1966, to West Ham and Mum's miniskirts, and to Grandma and Granddad and the Time Machine. But then that, of course, was his intention. He and I, we had to go back there, because back there was something my father felt I needed to know.

“The doctors say I'm going to snuff it,” he said as I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then sat down beside his bed.

I didn't even try to contradict him. My father had always been a pragmatic man. To tell him he was going to be “fine” would have insulted him.

“So now I've got to tell you something,” he continued. He wasn't gasping for breath as I had imagined that he would. But then Mum had said the doctors had told her that lung cancer didn't always do that to people, at least not until the very end.

“Do you remember when your granddad found that dead body in their backyard?” Dad asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. In the old chicken coop. The police never identified him, did they?”

Sometime after the policeman had visited the house when Dad and I had been there, another officer had turned up and told them that the unknown man had been buried in a pauper's grave.

“No, they didn't,” Dad said.

“I expect they would have done these days,” I said. “What with DNA and everything.”

“It's possible,” Dad said. And then he took one of my weird purple-gloved hands in one of his equally weird yellow mitts and he smiled. “But I know who he was,” he said.

“You?”

“Because your grandma told me,” he replied. “It was a long time afterwards. Your granddad was dead. But I knew she'd known something, without knowing quite what, for years.” He coughed. “Do you remember when that copper came round the house and your grandma took those old photo albums off you?”

That had always been indelibly printed on my memory, mainly because Grandma had never done that before or after that occasion. Also, it was in the wake of that incident that things between Grandma and Dad appeared to me to cool.

“She did that,” Dad said, “because as you turned the page there was a picture of the man who'd died in the yard staring up at her. An old picture, admittedly, but she was frightened that that copper would recognise the corpse from it and start asking questions.”

Shocked, firstly to see my always so vital father in such a state, I was now almost beyond further reaction. I said nothing.

“I never made the exact connection at the time. Not surprising, given what it was,” Dad said. “But that said, I had a bad feeling about it all from then on and one day when Grandma was in one of her moods to talk, I asked her about it. She said she'd tell me provided I never told Geoff or Eric and as long as I promised never to breathe a word to the police.”

“The police?”

Dad smiled again. He had such a big smile for a very thin man. “Don't worry, kiddo,” he said. “You can tell them if you want to. I won't hold you to anything. Everyone's dead now anyway. I'm almost dead. . . .”

I began to cry then and for a while we had to break off because Mum came in and talked to Dad about how well their garden was doing and other stuff to “take his mind off it all.” But then she left—she couldn't bear more than a few minutes by his side, it was all far too distressing for her to take—and Dad continued his story.

“Your granddad was a regular soldier when the First World War started,” he said. “He was in his late twenties and had just got married. He had, as you know, a lot of sisters, and a brother who was very much younger than he was.”

“Uncle Harold.”

“Harold was seventeen. Sweet, he was, loved by everyone. Your granddad had a notion that the war was going to be long and vicious and bloody and he told his brother to keep as far away from recruiting officers and the like as he could. But of course he didn't listen. Thought himself patriotic, like most lads then. So not only did Harold join up, he went into the selfsame regiment as your granddad.”

“Yes, but what . . .”

“It'll all become clear,” Dad said and then he coughed and coughed until his face changed colour and, although one of the nurses told him it might be better if I left for a while, he clung onto me and wouldn't let go. He had, he said, to get out what he needed to say no matter what.

As soon as he could speak easily again, he said, “On the twenty-third of August, nineteen fourteen, your granddad's regiment, the Middlesex, went into battle at Mons. They fought, and many of them died, and your granddad was wounded in the leg and was briefly shipped back home to recover. He got a lot of sympathy because of his wound and of course because his brother Harold had been killed. Or so everyone thought.”

I frowned. Uncle Harold's heroic and untimely death had always been a cornerstone of our family's mythology.

“Uncle Harold deserted,” my father said simply.

I was stunned. Even though the legend of Uncle Harold was no longer at the forefront of my thoughts, it was something I had been brought up with, like a half-resented, half-loved religion.

“I was just as shocked as you are,” Dad said. He took my hand again.

“Did they shoot him?” I asked. Deserters were routinely shot during the First World War. Some of them were tortured too. Granddad used to mutter about “lads left tied naked in full sun to gun carriages,” men slowly dehydrating and going mad.

My father shook his head. “No. Harold got away,” he said. “He was a young silly kid, but your grandfather was a man and he made sure that Harold got out of there.”

“How?” Fields of battle were chaotic, yes, but even so I knew enough stories about officers shooting men who ran “the wrong way” to know how hard such an endeavour would be.

“Harold was terrified,” Dad said. “Sick all the time. Your granddad had to be behind him just to get him into the line. All he wanted to do was get out of there. The plan was simple and it could very easily have failed. In fact, I think that your granddad did probably think that it had failed. Once on the field, Harold dropped to the ground as if he was shot. And there he stayed until our boys had passed him by. Your granddad behaved as if his brother had died and when the day was over, there was indeed no sign of him.”

“But if he did survive,” I said, “why didn't he visit his family? Where did he go? Did Granddad not try to contact him?”

“Granddad wouldn't have contacted him,” Dad said with a smile. “That wasn't his job. His role, as you youngsters have it these days, was to make sure that no one ever knew the truth. You have to remember, kiddo, that deserters were regarded as scum even by their families back in the First World War. Granddad wanted to save his silly little brother's life, but he couldn't tell anybody about it. That was the deal. If Harold got caught, then George, his brother, knew nothing about his desertion. If he didn't get caught, then he just disappeared. He was ‘dead’ and that was the end of it. And as the years passed, even if Granddad had wanted to tell his family, he couldn't have done so. Harold was awarded medals posthumously, he has a grave somewhere in one of the war cemeteries over on the continent. He'd become a dead man, and until that night back in November nineteen sixty-seven, he'd stayed a dead man.”

Harold had come back? I began to feel chilly. I rubbed my arms with my strange purple hands and watched as Dad smiled up at me again.

“Do you remember Mo who used to live upstairs to Grandma and Granddad?” he said.

“Yes.” Mo had been funny to a kid like me, always staggering about all the time and, occasionally, swearing.

“Mo went down the pub and left the front door open,” Dad said. “Your grandma was doing the dishes in the scullery when this bloke walked into the parlour. She didn't know who he was at first, couldn't see his face. There was just a silence. Your granddad didn't speak and neither did the other man. According to her, when she did go into the parlour, they were both just standing there, looking at each other. Harold, she said, was faced away from her. But she saw the expression on your granddad's face and so she walked around so that she could see the man. She got a right shock.”

“Did she?” Grandma couldn't have seen Harold since he was not much more than a child over fifty years before.

“Your granddad went berserk.” Dad coughed. “Said that Harold had broken their pact. Told him to bugger off to where he'd come from and never come back. All, apparently, Harold kept on saying was that he was lonely, that he couldn't do it anymore, that he wanted to be part of something again. Granddad hit him. He took the coal shovel in his hand and he hit his brother over the head with it. He did it just as Mo was walking through the parlour door as drunk as a sack. Harold had left it open when he walked back into your grandparents’ lives.”

Bile from my already grieving stomach rose up into my throat. “Granddad killed him.”

“He didn't mean to. He was angry.”

“And Mo saw him do it?”

Mo had used the word “murder” to describe what had happened that night. I had never known why until that point. I had never even questioned it. Mo had been a drunk. He'd eventually died in a pub brawl in 1969, a year before my granddad's death.

“Mo helped your granddad drag the body out to the yard,” Dad said.

“But how did Mo never tell anyone? How . . .”

“He told us, inadvertently,” Dad said. “But he never told the coppers. Your grandparents had the tenancy of that house. If they'd've had to go, then the landlord would have chucked Mo out too. He didn't want them carted off to prison. It was really an accident.”

“Granddad killed Harold!”

“He didn't mean to.”

“Yes, but he did it anyway!”

“Love,” my dad said. “He turned up out of the blue. It was a shock, it . . . The cause of the ‘unknown man's’ death according to the coppers was a heart attack. He had a coronary and he hit his head on the side of the old chicken coop as he fell. That's what they said.”

“Yes, but he didn't . . .”

“He did die of a heart attack,” Dad said. “I asked and that was what I was told. The blow to the head wasn't fatal.”

“So he had a weak heart anyway,” I said. “Doesn't make what Granddad did right.”

“No. No, it doesn't.”

My father didn't know where Harold had been or what he had done in the long years that had followed the First World War. Maybe he hadn't done anything much for fear of being discovered? Or perhaps he'd had a family who had left him or died and that was why he had turned up, lonely and weary, at my grandparents’ place on that ill-fated November evening? I realised then, as I realise now, that I would never, ever know.

Two days after my father told me about Harold, he slipped into a coma and died. Family and friends came from far and wide to attend his funeral, and I often visit his grave up at the East London Cemetery. But about Harold I have remained silent. What good would upsetting what remains of the family about such a thing be now? Feelings still run high about the First World War, even though modern opinions about desertion are more enlightened than they were at the time. I did do one thing, however. And shudder as I do when I write of it, I am glad that I did do it.

I didn't find my Uncle Harold's grave, but I did find a record of the death of the unknown man in my grandparents’ yard for November 1967. It is the police doctor's estimate of Harold's age that haunts me. 17. Seventeen. Write it twice, in numbers and letters, it doesn't get any better. And how can that be?

Harold, I estimated, had to have been seventy in 1967. So whoever my grandfather killed, it can't have been Harold. And yet my grandmother said that it had been. And indeed, why and for what reason would my gentle grandfather have attacked and killed a perfect stranger? I've spent sleepless nights wondering whether the man who entered my grandparents’ house that night was Harold's son, his grandson, or just someone who happened, for whatever reason, to look like him. My grandmother was, after all, frightened enough to not want the policeman who visited them to see any of Harold's photographs, either in the albums or on the mantelpiece. But in spite of all that, was it just a case of mistaken identity? If it was, however, why did “Harold” say to Granddad that he was lonely, that he “couldn't do it anymore"?

Logically the man who walked into my grandparents’ house that night in November 1967 cannot have been my Great-Uncle Harold. It was his son, his grandson, a look-alike, someone completely different. A burglar that my grandparents, for some reason, projected Harold's image onto. Maybe there was a resemblance of some sort there. But there is something else it could have been too. Against all logic, Harold did come back and he did enter that house in West Ham with the full intention of breaking the pact with his brother, maybe because his heart was weak and he knew that he was close to death. But as he entered that strange, ossified place, something happened. By magic, by the action of the place we all laughingly called the Time Machine, by some trick of biology or act of God, Harold became the boy he had been when he disappeared again. Alone and desperate, this “ghost” appealed to my grandfather for help and this time he denied him. Harold “died” again and lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the East London Cemetery where all my family lie.

But my grandfather said that he found a body in the backyard down by the chicken coop when he went out to the toilet one cold evening in November 1967. And maybe if that didn't actually happen, that was what was meant to happen and possibly I will just have to content myself with that. And, of course, with a load of black-and-white photographs that now live in boxes in my attic in Yorkshire.

Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Nadel

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: FIVE STARS
by Mike Baron

If you're a reader of comic books, you may already know Mike Baron's work. He broke into the field with Nexus, the groundbreaking science-fiction title he co-created with illustrator Steve Rude. He's won two Eisners and an Inkpot for his work on Nexus, which is now published in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as well as English. His debut story for EQMM is something very different from what he does in the comics genre, but we think you'll like it!

Bill Scald stared at his computer screen trying to think of a synonym for “piquant.” Some clueless bottom-feeder had written to point out that he'd used the word twice in his last review. Well, whose fault was that? His or the copyeditor's? Scald typed “thesaurus.com.”

“Hey Bill,” Sarah Sorenson, the fashion editor, said to him over the cubicle wall. “Nazz wants to see you.”

“Thank you, dear,” Scald said, automatically shutting down and locking his computer. Internecine warfare was constant and ferocious at Metro Plus, the premier magazine in the premier city in the premier country in the world, if one discounted the recent Liberty Index issued by an international consortium of nonprofits dedicated to world government.

Scald rose, straightened his gray silk jacket, and headed toward the plush offices of editor and publisher Nasmir Hamadi, aka “The Nazz,” a Lebanese Christian who'd purchased the rag out from under Leslie Brahmin for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.

Scald paused at the men's room, where he washed his hands and straightened his bow tie. Scald was a tall, middle-aged man with a luxurious head of silver hair and a colonial moustache who cultivated a genteel bohemian persona in manners, word, and look. He kept a black-and-white photo of Cary Grant from His Girl Friday over his desk.

As Metro Plus's restaurant reviewer, Scald had the power to make or break any of the twenty thousand restaurants in New York. Two hundred new restaurants had opened within the last twelve months, down from a high of 250 only because of the recession. Within his own little circle, Scald was a titan. He had been Metro Plus's restaurant critic for fifteen years. More than one eating establishment had been badly burned by his “scalding” review.

As Scald smoothed his hair, his nemesis, the oleaginous Joe Duva, entered. Duva was what the stars of Jersey Shore would look like if they lived that long. Duva flashed his perfect white choppers at Scald, removed a comb from his hip pocket, and swept through his long brown hair. He seemed to be perpetually auditioning for the road company of Grease.

“Bill! How's it hangin'? You know about our special restaurant insert, right? I'm countin’ on you, babe.”

Scald shuddered. “Yes, well, best of luck with that.” Duva actually expected Scald to write a feature, “The Ten Best Restaurants in Manhattan.” Scald was tempted to write: McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Baskin-Robbins, Dunkin’ Donuts, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes, Atomic Wings, and Subway.

“Nazz is lookin’ for ya,” the intolerable Duva said, admiring himself in the mirror.

“I'm on my way.”

Swiping a paper towel with which to grip the lavatory door handle, Scald couldn't escape fast enough. He walked through the renovated loft with its fifteen-foot ceilings and exposed duct work, framed cover art, and hardwood floors toward The Nazz's office at the front of the building overlooking 42nd Street. The door was open.

The Nazz, a fireplug of a man with a mop of blue-black hair, looked up from his desk. “Bill! Close the door. Have a seat. Got a job for you.”

Scald closed the pebbled-glass door and sat on the brown leather sofa with its front legs on the Persian rug that reached across the floor to Nazz's nineteenth-century Queen Anne desk. Between them, a free-form maple coffee table supported all the dailies, weeklies, and monthlies churned out by a sedulous and frantic media. Mags and rags completely covered the table. Behind the editor, a bay window looked out on the theater district five floors below.

The sofa creaked as Scald sat. The Nazz folded his hands and grinned at Scald like an excited schoolboy who knows the answer. “Guess what?”

Oh God, Scald thought. “What?”

“Great new restaurant in town.”

“I'll be the judge of that. What is it and where is it?”

“Gargano's in the Village.”

Scald grimaced. “I can't do that. That's a mob joint!”

The Nazz's smile did not waver. “Nonsense. There is no mob. Ask the Justice Department. Ask the Italian-American Civil Rights League.”

Scald leaned over the pile of newspapers, picked up the Post, and held it toward The Nazz.

“MOB BOSS SHOT 5 TIMES IN FACE, DUMPED AT LANDFILL: Lucci Was Target of Fed Probe.”

“The Post is desperate,” The Nazz said. “They'll do anything to boost circulation.”

Scald folded his arms across his chest. “What if the food's bad? Do you really want to piss off the mellina crime Family?”

Sweat appeared on The Nazz's forehead like pop rivets. “There's no connection between the Mellina crime family and Gargano's.”

“Islam means peace,” Scald snorted. “The stimulus worked.”

“Look, Bill, this is an assignment, okay? I want you to do this. I'm ordering you to do this. What makes you think it's a mob joint?”

“I have friends in the industry, Nasmir. The Mellinas open up a new restaurant every couple of years to launder money. They don't care what the food's like. What's going on?”

The Nazz rose to a towering five-six and placed his meaty hands palm down on the desk. “Now look, Bill, I'm not asking you to give them a puff piece, I'm just asking you to do your job. I expect copy on my desk Monday morning, okay?”

Sighing, Scald heaved himself to his feet. “As you wish, my sultan.”

“Take a friend,” The Nazz said to Scald's back. “Have fun.”

Scald headed back toward his cubicle, a Level-3 headache gestating behind his left eye. He preferred to find his own restaurants without the assistance of the ad department. Like a dog sensing a treat, Duva appeared waving a sheet of paper. “Just sold a quarter-page to Gargano's!” he declared with the alacrity of a prime minister announcing armistice.

Scald ducked into his cubicle and busied himself with copy paper hoping Duva would pass by. No such luck. The guido stuck his head in the cubicle.

“Wouldn't hurt if you'd write a review, broheim.”

As if Duva hadn't arranged the entire sordid scenario.

“Mm-hmmm,” Scald said. Go away.

Duva mercifully withdrew, firing his Carpathian shot. “Countin’ on you, broheim!”

Broheim.

At least Duva hadn't called him pally.

Scald decided to go on and get it over with. It was Tuesday and Gargano's was unlikely to be “mobbed.” He could slip in and out before anyone was the wiser. Scald hated any kind of confrontation. The Nazz's suggestion that he take a guest was wise. Not only would The Nazz pay for it, it might be smart to have a witness on hand in the unlikely event Gargano's recognized him.

Scald had striven for anonymity over the years, shunning photos and using his limited thespian skills to change his appearance from time to time. Long-time staffers bet on when the next change would occur and what it would be.

No one knew he was bald. He'd started balding in college and had promptly been dubbed “Bald Scald,” a sobriquet he hated and left behind in the small Iowa town from whence he sprang.

As he walked toward his co-op on West 26th, Scald riffled through his mental Rolodex of possible dining partners. There was Joy, of course. She'd been his escort to innumerable dreary functions such as exhibit openings and movie-star sit-downs and he rewarded her by taking her to the finest restaurants in town. Scald and opportunity only knocked once. Even if he loved a place, Scald never returned. There was simply too much turnover, new places clamoring for his attention.

Joy was a shouter. She'd yell things like, “Well, that was delicious!” Or, “This salmon tastes like bull testicles!” He'd stopped taking her because she was giving the game away. He could only imagine what she was like in bed.

There was Scald's sister Edna. And there was Edna's son Dyson, a cage fighter. Dyson was a human pit bull with shaved skull, tribal tats, and the flat eyes of a shark. Dyson's favorite cuisine was buffalo wings, but he might be just the ticket to stave off Mellina muscle. Dyson was too stupid to know fear.

Dodging bicycle couriers and dog shit, Scald arrived home. Bastienne the Cajun doorman held the door for him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Scald.”

“Bastienne.”

Scald used his key to open the mailbox in the foyer. Stuffed, as usual, with invitations, credit-card offers, and magazines such as Modern Food, Wine Country, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Entertainment Weekly.

Scald walked up the age-stained stairs to the third floor, inhaling deeply of the tobacco-soaked ambience. He unlocked the door to his unit and let himself in. A marmalade tabby began twining between his legs, purring like a generator. Scald crouched to scratch the cat behind the ears.

“What's up, Mr. Schermerhorn? Anything happen while I was out?”

The cat meowed loudly.

Scald went into his parquet-floored kitchen, iron pots hanging from an iron rail, and fixed himself a very dry martini with Boodles gin. He took it into the living room, sprawled on the purple velvet sofa, and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed his sister Edna.

“Hellooooo?” she sang.

“Edna my dear, it's Bill.”

“How are you? It's been ages. I really should have you over to dinner.”

Scald's stomach rumbled in protest. “That would be delightful. The reason I'm calling, I'm trying to reach Dyson.”

“Oh, he's right here. Dyyyyson!”

Scald heard furniture scraping. A moment later the lunk came on the line. “Whassup, Uncle Bill? Where's it at?”

“Right here, Dyson. The reason I called, I wonder if you'd accompany me to a restaurant that I have to review. Do you have dinner plans?”

“I was gonna do a protein shake. I got a fight coming up.”

“Yes, well, wouldn't you rather dine on fine Italian cuisine? You have to keep up your strength.”

Dyson, who worked as a personal trainer at McCarthy's Gym, gave it five seconds. “All right, what the hell. But why me? I ain't got no food chops.”

“And that's precisely the reason I want you to accompany me, Nephew. I need a fresh point of view, someone who hasn't been tainted by preconceived notions from watching nasty food dictators on television.”

Dyson agreed to meet Scald at the restaurant at seven. Scald caught a taxi and gave the Jamaican driver the address. Gargano's was on Bleecker Street, between an electronics wholesaler and a haberdashery. Dyson was waiting beneath the striped awning, to the obvious discomfort of the maitre d', who glowered at him from the safety of the restaurant. Dyson wore blue jeans and a TapouT hoodie with the hood up.

Scald got out of the cab and paid the driver. “Nephew!”

Dyson sidled up, a mesomorph among mesomorphs. Dyson was six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. A shaved skull shaped like a Howitzer shell presided over tiny, deep-set eyes that twinkled with amusement. His shirt did little to conceal the elaborate tattoos that went to his wrists.

“How the hell are ya, Unk?” Dyson demanded, enclosing Scald in a bear hug. “Figured I might as well carb up since I'm running tomorrow.”

“Excellent. Shall we?”

The maitre d’ became all smiles as he held the door. “Welcome, Mr. Scald, welcome!”

Shit! Scald thought. How did they know? He peered at the tall, thin specimen with slicked-back black hair and a hairline moustache. “Have we met?”

“I saw you once on the Food Channel.”

Scald recalled giving a reporterette an interview at the International Grape Festival but had deemed his appearance too obscure to threaten his anonymity. Like hell.

“Please don't tell anyone, Luigi,” Scald said, reading the man's brass nameplate. “No fuss. I'm just another diner. It is of the utmost importance that you treat me just like any other customer or the review's no good, you see?”

Luigi nodded enthusiastically. “I understand. I have a private table for you gentlemen in the back. No one will bother you.”

Luigi led the way through the dark room, which was done up in industrial chic with faux zebrawood floor, a curving bar, exposed duct work, and tiny streamlined chrome lamps that hung from the ceiling in long lines. Garish splashes of color hung on the wall in simple black frames. At least Gargano's avoided the usual pictures of St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum, and Naples.

Luigi led them up three shallow steps to an elevated deck with three tables and two black leather corner booths. They sidled into one of the booths, from which they had a view of the main floor and the entrance. Luigi handed them heavy red-leather menus on rough-surfaced ecru paper with gilt edges and a gold tassel. To mark one's place.

Luigi clasped his hands and beamed like an indulgent parent. “Michelle will be your server tonight. The wine steward will be right up.”

Luigi withdrew. Dyson struggled to read the flowing script of the menu in the dim light. “Gee, this place is friggin’ hoity-toity, ain't it?”

“Nothing but the best, nephew.” Scald reviewed the appetizers. The usual sampling of oysters, calamari, grilled scallops, and shrimp cocktail. He had just turned the heavy page to entrees when the wine steward, a wizened homunculus in a black tux, white shirt, and red bow tie, appeared, plucked the red leather-bound wine journal from its perch among the condiments, and handed it to Scald.

“Gentlemen, tonight we are debuting a very subtle cabernet from the Verdi vineyards in Napa. We also have a droll and nutty merlot from Capretti in Capua.”

“What you got on tap?” Dyson said.

“Beck's, St. Pauli Girl, Peroni, and Birra Moretti.”

“Jeez,” Dyson said, frowning. “Don'tcha got, like, Bud Lite or anything like that?”

“I'm sorry, sir, we don't carry any domestic brews. May I recommend the Peroni? It's a full-flavored lager I'm sure you'll enjoy.”

“Aw, what the hell.”

“Is that a yes, sir?”

“Sure. What the hell, I'll try the guinea beer.”

Scald blanched. This would be a good test of the staff's professionalism. Scald looked up. On the main floor near the front, Luigi was talking to a hulking gentleman in a dark blue three-piece suit with light-blue pinstripes, a black shirt, and ivory tie. The man turned toward the back of the restaurant and stared.

Terrific. Now everybody knew. Now they would get the special treatment. Scald hated this corruption of the process. He fantasized ventilating Duva with a shish-kebab skewer. The food would be adequate, he would suck it in and write a blandly approving review and move on. Worse things could happen.

“I'll have a glass of the merlot,” Scald said.

Michelle was a long-stemmed rose with swinging chestnut hair, model's cheekbones, and ruby-red lips. She headed their way like a DreamWorks CGI effect.

“Shut your mouth, Dyson,” Scald whispered. “You're drooling.”

Dyson used the white linen napkin to tidy up.

Michelle deployed a dazzling smile. “Good evening, gentlemen. My name is Michelle and I'll be your waiter tonight. May I tell you about our specials?”

“By all means,” Scald said. Although he had no use for pretty women, he had no objection to them either.

“Chilean sea bass with mango chutney served on a bed of wild rice. That's twenty-nine ninety-nine. Elk medallions in a reduced raspberry sauce with fresh asparagus. That's thirty-two fifty. And finally, my favorite, grilled wild salmon with collard greens and a selection of beans in a light cream sauce, for thirty-two fifty. Do you gentlemen need a few minutes to come to a decision?”

Dyson seemed to be in a trance staring at the waitress.

“Yes, give us a few,” Scald said. “In the meantime, would you bring me a bowl of the seafood bouillabaisse and my young friend here will have the grilled scallop appetizer.”

“Certainly, gentlemen. I'll put those right in.” She twirled and strode off without setting pen to paper.

“Holy shit, Unk!” Dyson enthused. “I'd sure like to take her order!”

“Please don't say anything to her. It might affect the service.”

Dyson made a zipping gesture over his lips. “My lips are sealed, Unk.” He buried his head in the menu. “Don't they got no sandwiches?”

The wine steward returned with their drinks. He poured Dyson's Peroni expertly into the glass, whipped out a corkscrew, and opened the wine with an economical twisting motion and handed the cork to Scald. Scald passed the cork beneath his nose and nodded. The sommelier decanted a half-inch of dark red into a glass and handed it to the critic.

Scald looked at Dyson over the rim of his glass. “The five esses—see, smell, sip, savor, and swallow.” He ran that puppy under his nose. He sipped like a cat. He savored the wine. He swallowed and nodded, setting his glass on the white linen tablecloth. The wine steward filled the glass and placed the bottle on a cork base on the table.

Well, the wine wasn't bad. In fact, it was a very cunning little merlot. What in Dante's Inferno did elk have to do with Italian cuisine? There were no elk in Europe. Dyson drained off half his beer, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and beamed. Dyson did a double-take toward the front. Scald followed his nephew's gaze.

The very large gentleman in the three-piece suit, black shirt, and white tie advanced, surprisingly graceful for such a large man. He glided up to the table and clasped his hands behind his back. He had full, smooth cheeks, a rosebud mouth, and steely gray hair that kinked back in waves.

“Mr. Scald,” he said in a Mike Tyson voice. “I'm Archie Mellina. Welcome to Gargano's. I named this place after my mother's paternal grandfather. That man could cook.” Mellina held his fingers to his mouth, kissed, and let fly. Poof!

“I'm the owner of this humble establishment. If there's anything I can do to make your stay more pleasant, please don't hesitate to ask.” Mellina turned to Dyson and stuck out a large pink hand adorned with several gold rings.

“Archie Mellina.”

Dyson set down his beer and took the hand. Their hands trembled with grippiness. Their knuckles turned white. They let go at once, grinning. “Dyson Hoskins, how ya doin'?”

Scald cleared his throat. “Mr. Mellina, I wish you hadn't introduced yourself. I do everything in my power to insure that my restaurant reviews are fair and impartial and that obviously depends on your treating me like any other customer.”

Mellina held his palms out, fingers up. “Absolutely. No one has said a word to the wait staff. You're right. I shouldn't have introduced myself. Please forget this encounter ever took place.”

“'Eyyyy,” Dyson said. “Fuggedaboudit!” He barked like a dog.

Mellina raised his eyebrows. “Gentlemen.” He withdrew as silently as he had come. Scald sank a little further in his seat.

Michelle returned with the appetizers. She placed the scallops in front of the gobstruck Dyson and a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse in front of Scald, as well as a tureenlike spoon. “Gentlemen, have you made up your minds?”

“How ‘bout your phone number, snooks?” Dyson said.

Michelle favored him with a dazzling smile. “My police-officer boyfriend might object.”

“'Eyyyyy,” Dyson intoned. “I was just kiddin'. Fuggedaboudit!”

“Ouch!” Dyson exclaimed as Scald kicked him.

“I'll have the sea bass,” Scald said. Dyson ordered the elk medallions. Michelle smilingly withdrew.

“What'd you kick me for?”

“I told you not to come on to the waitress. It could affect service!”

“I was just kidding,” Dyson pouted, reaching for a scallop.

Scald applied the same principles to the bouillabaisse as he did to wine. See, smell, sip, and savor. And swallow. One must not forget to swallow. Tooling up the very generous spoon, which he liked, Scald inhaled the essence of a simple Italian dish that had become a symbol of Italian cuisine. Flakes of succulent white fish floated on the root beer-colored surface.

Scald decanted the spoon into his mouth. A hard object nearly broke a tooth. Scald froze, feeling the metallic shape resting against his bottom palate. It was smooth with a curving surface. Using a napkin to shield his actions, he leaned into the darkness and removed a brass cylinder. He brought it close to his eye. Written in curving letters on the base was “9mm Luger.”

Scald was dumbfounded. What was a bullet casing doing in his soup? How slipshod was a kitchen that allowed such things? How was it even possible? He realized how.

Dyson was so heavily invested in his scallops he didn't notice until he looked up. “What's wrong, Unk? You look like you swallowed a mouse,” he barked.

“Nothing, dear boy. Nothing at all. How're the scallops?”

“Excellent.”

Scald wasn't listening. Cupping the casing in his hand, he whipped out his BlackBerry and did a LexisNexis search on the Lucci rubout. The Daily Post had the details: five 9mm slugs removed from Lucci's skull. Scald felt empowered. He'd resented the assignment to begin with. He now had license to let loose in a manner he hadn't done since he'd been editor of The Dartmouth lo those many years ago and had inveighed against faculty, deans, policies, and curriculum in a manner most harsh.

Scald rubbed his hands at Michelle's approach, hoping his meal would be awful. There was nothing as liberating as writing a scathing review.

Michelle set down the elk medallions and the Chilean sea bass. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Michelle, my dear,” Scald said, reaching into his vest pocket. “I found this in the bouillabaisse. Would you be so kind as to call your boyfriend the policeman?”

Michelle stared dumbfounded at Scald's cupped hand. Her mouth formed a perfect “O.” She covered it with her hand. “I'm so sorry, sir. I'll notify the manager right away.”

“Don't do that. Call your boyfriend. Get him down here.”

“I don't know if he can come—he might be on duty.”

“Try. And if he can't make it, call some other cops.”

Dyson watched, contentedly chewing elk. Michelle hurried away.

“Whatcha got, Unk?”

Holding his hand below the table, Scald showed the cartridge casing to his nephew. Dyson reached for it but Scald quickly closed his hand and withdrew.

“You found that in your soup?”

Scald nodded, eyeing his dish. Unfortunately, it smelled divine. Slipping the cylinder back into his vest pocket, Scald took up the fork. It was the best sea bass he'd ever tasted, flavored with a hint of coriander and cilantro.

“How's the elk?” Scald said between mouthfuls.

Dyson could only nod and chew. He made the “perfect” sign with thumb and index finger. Scald looked down on the main floor. Michelle huddled with Mellina, who nodded in understanding.

Shit.

Scald reached for his BlackBerry. Problem. Should he dial 911? It wasn't exactly an emergency. The proper thing to do would be to notify the police through non-urgent channels. He didn't even know what precinct they were in. He dialed “0.”

“Hello and thank you for calling Trans-Global Communications. Please listen carefully to the following options as our menus have changed. Si se habla Español, empuja uno ahora.”

Scald looked up. Mellina loomed. Next to him stood a tall waiter in white jacket, face pockmarked like the moon, staring at Scald from beneath a unibrow that stretched from cauliflower ear to cauliflower ear.

Mellina held out his hand. “Give me the casing.”

Dyson watched with interest, stuffing his mouth with potato.

Scald shrugged. “What casing?”

“Don't play around with me, Mr. Scald,” Mellina said softly in his high-pitched voice. “You're not leaving this restaurant until you hand it over.”

“Aren't you concerned with what I might write?”

“You're not going to write anything with a dislocated shoulder,” said the unibrow.

Dyson's fork, on its way to his gaping maw, stopped in midair. “Are you threatening my uncle?”

Mellina slowly shifted his gaze to Dyson, as if spotting steak sauce on the carpet. It shifted back to Scald. “Nobody has to know about this. Your meal is on the house. Forget about the review. I'll give you five thousand dollars for that cartridge right here, right now.”

Scald sat up straight and crossed his arms over his chest. “Dyson, we may require your assistance.”

“You got it, Unk.”

Dyson demonstrated why Sherdog had ranked him among the top twenty light heavyweights. He wasted no time. It looked as if Dyson were shunting himself under the table like a child after dinner. His right leg shot out, the heel connecting solidly on the waiter's knee. There was a cracking sound like a breadstick and the pockmarked waiter fell to the ground screaming and clutching his knee.

Like some sinister Whac-A-Mole, Dyson popped back up from beneath the table, stepped on the seat, sprang once on the table, and flew through the air, planting his fork, whose grip he had never relinquished, in the side of Mellina's tree-trunk neck.

Mellina staggered back with a disbelieving expression, reached for the fork, and yanked it out. Blood followed.

“HEY, RUBE!” bellowed the maitre d', watching with keen interest from the top of the stairs. “THE BOSS IS IN TROUBLE!” Two waiters on the main floor deposited their trays on the nearest empty tables and ran for the stairs. A Chinese chef wearing a toque and carrying a cleaver rushed from the kitchen.

Dyson kicked Mellina in the balls and the big man doubled over. Dyson pumped a fist in the air. “I live for this shit!” Dyson leaped over the writhing waiter and rushed to the head of the stairs as the maitre d’ judiciously withdrew. First up was one of the waiters, a pretty boy with long brown hair in a pompadour clutching a set of tongs.

Dyson caught him with a spinning round kick that lifted the waiter into the air and deposited him at the foot of the stairs as the second waiter and the chef approached. The second waiter pulled his pal to one side. The chef pointed up the steps at Dyson with his left hand and flipped the cleaver with his right. It sailed end over end, right over Dyson's ducked head.

“Come on, Unk! Let's blow this popsicle stand!”

Scald used this diversion to dip his mitt into a créme brulée on the dessert tray, crude, but odds were they wouldn't be serving for the rest of the evening.

The thugs were wary. Mellina and the pockmarked waiter were hors de combat. Customers on the main floor hurriedly decamped, save for an elderly couple in a banquette who calmly ate spaghetti while watching the floor show.

The two waiters and the cook arrayed themselves in a semicircle at the bottom of the stairs. Dyson reached over the handrail, seized a heavy china dinner plate, and sailed it Frisbee-like at the chef, who goggled in disbelief and so forgot to duck. The plate made a G-flat as it struck the cook between the eyes and shattered. The cook sat down hard on his ass.

The waiter rushed. Dyson faked a punch and went low, sweeping the waiter off his feet, shoving him toward the front of the restaurant, and throwing him at a vacated table. Fruit cart! The waiter upended the table, sending lobster, salad, and linguine flying.

Scald made a beeline for the door. At the last minute the maitre d’ blocked his way, wearing a set of brass knuckles. “No you don't, Mr. Scald.”

Where was Dyson? His nephew altercated with the kitchen crew.

Smacking the brass knucks into a palm, the grinning maitre d’ said, “Give me the cartridge.”

Scald whipped off his rug and threw it in the maitre d's face. The maitre d’ staggered back, groping futilely, smacked into the plate-glass front door, and broke through in a shower of shattered shards.

A police car whooped. Lights went on in the street directly in front of Gargano's as the cop shop did a U-ey, pulling up in front of the shattered front door.

Scald followed his nephew like a Miata following a snowplow. As Scald stepped over the door frame into the street, Dyson said over his shoulder, “Holy shit, Unk. I didn't know you were a skinhead! Ahmina buy you a tat!”

Scald pulled out his ostrich-skin wallet and laid a Benjamin on the greeter's station. “For the meal.” He heard the sound of boots on wood, the tinkle of breaking glass from somewhere in the kitchen.

Two cops pushed by them and went through the door. Another cruiser pulled up behind them.

Scald approached one of the new arrivals, a cocoa-colored bear-shaped man wearing rectangular glasses. “Officer, I'm Bill Scald, restaurant reviewer for Metro Plus."

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I found this in my bouillabaisse.” Scald dipped into his vest pocket and proffered the 9mm casing.

“You what?” the cop said.

“I nearly lost a tooth on it. It was in the seafood chowder.”

The cop held out his mitt. “May I?”

Scald deposited the shell in the cop's cupped hand. “I will be happy to testify as to how that casing came into my possession.”

“I'm gonna need an ambulance,” yelled a cop from the deck. “Fred, you wanna come up here, you ain't gonna believe this.”

The cop turned to Scald. “Wait here.” He headed up the stairs. Scald followed.

On the raised deck a skinny cop stood next to the fallen waiter, who moaned and clutched his knee. “It's Numbnutz Farina.”

Fred did a double take. “Numbnutz! We been lookin’ all over for ya! Where ya been?”

“Right here,” Numbnutz moaned. “Can I get an ice pack? That son of a bitch broke my knee.”

Fred rounded on Scald. “I thought I told you to stay downstairs.”

“Officer, before I became restaurant reviewer I held the city desk at the old Telegraph. I was a crime reporter for twelve years and I can still turn a nice phrase. What did you say your name was?”

Fred dipped into a pocket and smiled. “Okay, wise guy, here's my card. Question is, how did the casing get in the chowder?”

“I have a theory about that,” Scald said.

Fred held up his hand. “I got the same theory.”

The police declared the restaurant a crime scene. Of those who had not fled, four were illegals with lengthy criminal records. Only the elderly couple emerged untainted, with warm memories to share with their grandchildren.

Archie Mellina flew the coop. In the kitchen, ultraviolet revealed enough blood to drench a Roman spa. The restaurant closed its doors that night. When the police finally let Scald and Dyson go, Scald headed straight home to write his review.

The new Metro Plus hit the street three days later. Scald had three bylines.

“HOW I SOLVED THE LUCCI KILLING,” by Bill Scald, exclusive to MetroPlus.

“WHY I FLIPPED MY WIG,” by Bill Scald, exclusive to Metro Plus.

“GARGANO'S STANDS TALL, FALLS FAST,” by food reporter Bill Scald, exclusive to Metro Plus.

“First, the good news. Gargano's in the Village is—was one of the premier Italian eateries in the city, with a seafood bouillabaisse that is literally to die for. . . .”

Copyright © 2012 by Mike Baron

[Back to Table of Contents]

Passport to Crime: THE MAN WITH THE FACE OF CLAY
by Paul Halter

* * * *

* * * *

Paul Halter's stories featuring his celebrated character Dr. Twist have appeared several times in EQMM, and now his prize-winning Twist novel The Fourth Door is available in English on Amazon and for Kindle. The Halter novels The Lord of Misrule and The Seven Wonders of Crime, featuring hisother detective, the Edwardian Owen Burns, are also available in English on Amazon. Burns, who believes murder to be an art form, stars in this story.

Translated from the French by John Pugmire

The ease with which Owen Burns solved even the most complex puzzles was a source of irritation to many, not least to myself, Achilles Stock, his most loyal friend. He made no effort to hide his superiority complex: his certainty that he was the most accomplished detective of his generation. With his affected style, the haughty tilt of his head, his caustic humour, not to mention his considerable height and girth, one could readily form the impression that no problem was too difficult for him. Which is why I had been secretly hoping for a stunning setback in one of his investigations and now, on the afternoon of a singularly depressing winter day in 1912, I was reasonably hopeful. Having got wind of a quite extraordinary business, I had taken the step of inviting one of the principal witnesses to visit Burns in his St. James's Square flat and we were now awaiting her arrival. My initiative seemed to have unsettled him. With his hands behind his back, he paced back and forth across the drawing room, stopping occasionally in front of the window, as if to contemplate the rain which had been falling since morning.

“You seem on edge, old boy,” I observed languidly from the depth of my armchair, my nose buried in the day's newspaper. “Could the rain be affecting you?”

“Yes,” he grumbled, after a moment's thought. “It's behaving too timidly. I want it to rain cats and dogs, to inundate the streets with vengeful floods, and to wash away all the sins of this decadent world.”

“In short, you're hoping for a deluge?”

“You've found the mot juste, for once.”

“Your prayers may soon be answered. I believe a deluge plays an important part in the tale our witness has to tell. She should be here any minute.”

Shooting me a withering glance, Owen replied tartly: “Frankly, Achilles, you could have asked me first, or at least warned me earlier. You knew perfectly well that we had a very busy day, and may I remind you that we have tickets for tonight's performance of The Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, which is one of my favourites, as you well know.”

“What's the matter? You'll solve the puzzle in ten minutes, with your customary flair. Adding half an hour for telling the story and twenty minutes for the social niceties, the whole business won't take more than an hour. That leaves plenty of time for dinner and the grandiose flights of Richard Wagner. And, what's more, I thought you'd be pleased. The weird kind of puzzles you crave don't come along very often, so I thought this was a godsend.”

“I suppose so,” he conceded grudgingly. “By the way, what's this woman's name?”

“Miss White.”

“Miss White,” he repeated thoughtfully. “That doesn't ring a bell, but it does make me think about Snow White. Is she young and pretty?”

“I haven't met her, so I don't know. But she's definitely under twenty-five. I heard of her story from a friend of her father, who's one of my best customers.”

“Ah! Just as I thought!” exclaimed Owen, throwing his arms in the air. “Commerce rears its ugly head. Is your Wedgwood porcelain business in such dire straits that you have to satisfy your customers’ every whim?”

“No!” I replied indignantly. “It's going incredibly well, in fact, so much—”

“I hope she's pretty,” Owen went on. “You know I can't stand ugliness, particularly in women.”

He stopped suddenly, his face pressed against the misted windowpane.

“That must be she. I can see a delicious white umbrella on the doorstep.”

He nodded his head with satisfaction when the doorbell rang, and left hurriedly. A few moments later, he returned in the company of the visitor. Judging by his gallant manner and the exaggerated courtesy he showed while relieving her of her coat and umbrella, she met with his approval. A trimly fitting bolero and skirt accentuated her slender waist. Luxuriant auburn curls graced the curve of her neck. Her embroidered white blouse emphasised her freshness, and rosy cheeks contrasted with innocent blue eyes. One of those naive beauties in whose hands my friend inevitably turned to putty.

“Miss White,” he said with great formality, “allow me to present my old friend Achilles Stock, who became aware of your predicament, and to whom I owe the pleasure of this meeting.”

She turned to me and nodded her head in acknowledgement.

“Papa told me it's thanks to you that I am here. A thousand thanks, sir, for your noble gesture, particularly since you don't even know me.”

“It's nothing, my dear Miss White. The fact is, my friend would never have forgiven me for withholding such a delectable mystery.”

The young woman turned to Owen and considered him with respectful admiration.

“Papa told me about you as well, sir. It appears you have helped Scotland Yard on many an occasion.”

Owen raised a hand in false modesty.

“I may have been able to make a humble contribution to justice—”

“And always successfully!”

“My motto is ‘simplicity is everything.’ It's been the secret of my success. Having said that, my logical gifts, keen though they may be, cannot alone explain my victories. I have auxiliaries as precious as they are gracious.”

Smiling, he pointed to the nine statuettes of Greek divinities which graced the mantelpiece. Miss White looked at him in utter bewilderment.

“Those are the nine Muses of Antiquity,” he explained. “The famous muses of inspiration.”

“Oh, I see,” said the young woman, nodding her head vigorously. “The statues help you think. But I'm afraid they won't be able to help you much in this case. It's a frightening business, totally incomprehensible. And anyway, the culprit isn't human.”

Owen Burns frowned.

“What do you mean?”

Miss White's big blue eyes, riveted to Owen's, filled with tears. She swallowed hard.

“Well,” she said, “its face, for example. It isn't human.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes, it's frightful and horrible.”

So saying, she buried her face in her hands and her body shook with sobs.

Taking her by the hand, Owen sat her down in an armchair.

“My dear Miss White, do not fret so. I shall have solved your problem before you leave here. My goodness! How cold your hands are. Would you care for a cup of tea? It'll do you a world of good.”

After she nodded her assent, Owen turned to me and said:

“Achilles, would you be good enough to take care of that while I comfort our friend?”

When I returned with the teapot, I had no greater desire at that moment but to see him fall flat on his face. Although I was consumed with curiosity about the case, my fervent wish was that he would fail to solve it. He had taken advantage of my absence to play the white knight coming to the aid of the damsel in distress, and the colour had returned to the young woman's cheeks. After a few sips of tea, she began her story.

“About two years ago, I was engaged as a maid in the service of Sir Jeremy Cavendish. I sometimes took over duties from the old cook, who was frequently sick. The trouble started with the return of Sir Jeremy, three months ago. He had been away for more than a year with his younger brother on a dig in Iraq. Archaeology was Sir Jeremy's passion. The recent discoveries by a certain Smithson regarding the Deluge intrigued him greatly. Yes, that Deluge: the Great Flood of the Bible. But it appears that people were writing about it even before then, in ancient Persian texts.”

“Mesopotamian, actually,” said Owen, coughing discreetly.

“Exactly. Mesopotamian. According to this Smithson, who had read about it on clay tablets covered with signs like nail heads—”

“That would be cuneiform. . . .”

“Yes, that's it. I don't know why, but I always forget the word. Well, those old texts apparently confirmed the existence of a great cataclysm just like the one in Genesis. Anyway, there was a big row about the discovery, and Sir Jeremy decided to conduct his own research so as to be clear in his own mind. He had the time and the money. So for a year I was in the company of Chloe Cavendish, his wife, who was young and pretty and patiently awaiting his return. She had just turned twenty-two and Sir Jeremy was twice her age, but he was an energetic man who loved action and adventure, and they seemed to make a well-matched couple—although Chloe did prefer the creature comforts of the Cavendish estate to exotic expeditions in the Middle East.

“Nimroud, Mosul, Baghdad . . . all those exotic names. Chloe spoke to me about them each time she got a letter. Then, as I said, in the autumn Sir Jeremy came back. He had changed a lot. Not physically: He was still an attractive man. But he had become cautious and wary, and constantly on the lookout, as if he were being hunted. I didn't know the results of his research, because he'd been very guarded about it. All I knew was that William Cavendish, his brother, had had an accident. Then, during the month of October, Sir Jeremy fell victim to a whole series of accidents. Luckily, he himself remained unharmed.

“It started with a fire in the garden shelter, a small wooden construction at the bottom of the garden, where he sometimes took a nap. He was sleeping there when it caught fire, and was awakened by the heat of the flames. He managed to escape unscathed. But why had the shelter caught fire? It was a mystery. The following week, he almost fell under the wheels of a cart as he was walking with Chloe by the side of a road. He hadn't seen anyone, and he hadn't stumbled, but he'd had the distinct impression of having been pushed by an invisible force. And a few days later, while visiting the local zoo with Chloe, he had come within a whisker of being bitten by a cobra which had escaped from a cage which had been mysteriously left open.

“I thought there had been far too many accidents in the brief time since his return. Strange things must have happened during the time of the excavations in Iraq. But I didn't dare raise the subject, because Chloe and her husband were so obviously worried themselves. Then, one day, I read an article in the newspaper about the master's research activities in the Middle East. All kinds of suspicion surrounded the work he did there.

“The entire Iraq excavation site had caught fire in the middle of the night, destroying almost everything. It was a terrible tragedy: Aside from the material loss, two native workers had been killed. The local authorities had accused Sir Jeremy of deliberately starting the fire in order to mask the disappearance of certain important discoveries which he wanted to keep for himself and which he had hidden away beforehand. In his defence, it was stressed that the charges were unproven and could well have been trumped up by the authorities, who seldom missed an opportunity to undermine the British administration. The political climate may also explain the curse put upon Sir Jeremy by an ancient Iraqi on the day of his departure: He predicted that he would suffer for his blasphemous acts and would be cursed by Ishtar, one of the goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia.

“You can imagine what I was thinking! An old beggar puts a curse on Sir Jeremy and straightaway he becomes the victim of a string of accidents as mysterious as they are deadly.

“One evening, as I was cleaning Sir Jeremy's study, I happened to notice, over his shoulder, a folder marked ‘DELUGE’ in capital letters.

“He noticed the direction of my gaze and smiled:

“'Yes, Miss White. An explosive dossier, one which could well cause another cataclysm.'

“That evening, in confidence, he told me a lot about Mesopotamia, whose vital importance as an ancient civilisation was only recently becoming clear. He told me the story of Gilgamesh, mankind's first hero, who lived long before the celebrated Ulysses. Gilgamesh knew the story of the Great Flood. Was that the same deluge the Bible talks about? Was the holy book inspired by the Gilgamesh epic? All very sensitive questions with great consequences, he said, as much for the religious community as the scientific. I listened carefully, without understanding all he was saying, but I remember him specifically talking about the ancient civilization's gods, nightmarish figures, as I could see for myself: Right there on the table were a winged lion and another creature just as disturbing.

“'Do you realize, Miss White, that the Mesopotamians believed we were all made from clay? Take a small piece, mould it into shape, breathe the holy spirit into it, and you have one more man on earth!'

“He was smiling as he said it. I pointed to the winged lion:

“'If that's the result, I'd say it needs more work.'

“He looked at me as if he was amused.

“'Does that creature frighten you?'

“'Yes, a little, I must admit. Because I can imagine it much bigger and more crudely shaped, made of mud or clay.'

“'And flying,’ he said, teasing me.

“'Obviously, because it's got wings.'

“'A flying creature, made of mud . . . Strange, I never thought of it like that,’ he said thoughtfully.

“After he said that I left. He seemed amused by my remarks, as if they had taken his mind off his worries. Nevertheless, my instincts warned me that something bad was going to happen and, unfortunately, I was right.

“It came down in buckets that evening. I thought about the flower beds at the back of the house that old George the gardener had prepared in the last few days. All that rain would transform them into quagmires. There would be mud everywhere, including the house. In other words, more work for me.

“It was just after nine o'clock when it happened. Chloe had just gone to bed, but Sir Jeremy was still at work in his study on the ground floor overlooking the flower beds. Suddenly, the front doorbell rang. As I went to open it, I was wondering who it could be at that time of night and in that kind of weather.

“There was a man standing on the doorstep with rain streaming off him. His coat collar was turned up and the brim of his hat was pulled down over his eyes. In a curiously deep voice, he asked to see Sir Jeremy. When I asked if he was expected, he responded with a grunt. I was surprised and asked him to wait outside. I had a premonition that if I let him in, something bad would happen.

“When I informed Sir Jeremy of the visitor, he asked me rather curtly if I was in the habit of leaving guests out in the rain. I took it in my stride, because I knew he could sometimes be grumpy when he was sorting out his notes. I showed the strange visitor into the room. I still had not seen his face. But just as Sir Jeremy was closing the door and the man was turning to take off his hat, I got a glimpse of his features. I almost fainted.”

At this point in her account, Miss White swallowed hard and paused. From her wide-eyed stare and the pale colour of her skin, it was obvious that she was haunted by the memory.

“I had never seen anything quite so horrible in my whole life,” she continued. “The features were coarse, brownish and shapeless, as if the face were made of clay. An inhuman mud creature, which could freeze the blood with a single glance—I had seen its bulging eyes. I was so worried for Sir Jeremy that I stayed behind to look through the keyhole. But they had moved to a far corner of the room and were talking in low voices. I couldn't hear what they were saying, and so I went into the drawing room.

“I heard voices raised and, after a quarter of an hour, I decided to go and have a look. But the visitor was already on his way out along the corridor to the front door and I only got a glimpse of him before he slammed it and left.

“I felt I should talk to Sir Jeremy so as to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, but the memory of his earlier angry tone dissuaded me. And anyway, I told myself, it was his business, not mine. I could hear his footsteps in the study, pacing up and down. Comforted by the sound, I went to bed; it was nearly eleven o'clock and the rain had stopped.

“I would never see my master alive again.

“Early the next day I was abruptly awakened by the sound of an explosion. After a few moments of stunned silence—I thought I might have dreamt it—I went downstairs. At the end of the corridor I observed Chloe in her nightdress pounding on the door of the study and calling her husband's name in vain. She claimed that he had not come upstairs that night, which was not unusual as he would often stay up late when he was immersed in one of his projects. But she had not been able to find him anywhere else in the house and the door to the study was locked on the inside.

“At this juncture Old George arrived. Apprised of the situation, he bent down to peer through the keyhole, then suggested opening the door with a master key until he realised the door was bolted, not locked. The only thing to do, then, was to break the door down. Despite his advancing years, old George was still up to the task and, after three attempts, the door yielded.

“The three of us found the master of the house in the far corner of the room, slumped over his desk, with the French window which overlooked the rear of the property slightly ajar. There was a revolver in his hand. His head rested at an angle on the leather blotting-pad, where a dark stain was spreading. A rivulet of blood dribbled from a black hole in his temple. The winged plaster lion contemplated him with a frozen grimace. There was a strong smell of powder in the room. Chloe screamed. Old George caught her as she was about to faint and placed her gently in the only armchair. As he left to call the police, he asked me to look after our mistress, adding that a glass of brandy would do her no harm. Chloe, meanwhile, had brought out a handkerchief and was trying hard not to cry. I followed the advice of Old George and went off to find some brandy. I helped myself as well for, after all that had happened, I felt very weak.

“The police arrived quite quickly: three officers, a doctor, and Inspector Charles, who knew the Cavendish family personally. He was in his fifties, tall and well built, with a considerable presence, and very methodical in his investigations. He didn't talk much while he was working, but around noon he communicated his preliminary findings. Before that, he had interrogated me, but it was obvious that he didn't attach much importance to my testimony about the strange visitor the night before, attributing it, no doubt, to the effect of shock.

“'Sir Jeremy killed himself, there's no doubt about it,’ he announced confidently. ‘Everything points to that conclusion: the position of the body, the head wound, and his hand on the revolver which, by the way, is his—'

“'No, it was murder, committed by that strange visitor who came last night.'

“The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. I saw the consternation on the faces of Chloe and old George. But the policeman didn't take offence; he even said he understood my point of view. Then, quite calmly, he demonstrated the absurdity of my remark.

“'Please understand, Miss White, that in the case of violent death, we in the police always assume the worst case: that is to say, murder. So I took great care not to rule out that possibility. But let's look at the facts. At half-past seven, there was an explosion. Everyone rushed to the study, only to find the door bolted on the inside. You broke down the door and you found the body of Sir Jeremy. All three witnesses testify to that. The furniture in the room—a sideboard, a table, a chair, and an armchair—preclude any possibility of a hiding place. In any case, all three of you were ready to swear there was nobody else in the room when you broke in. So where did the murderer go? Apart from the door, there is only one other possible exit: the French window, which you found ajar. Up to that point, the hypothesis of a murder is still valid . . . but then things get complicated.

“'I suppose you've already looked outside. Within a radius of ten yards, there is nothing but mud. The flower beds were carefully raked over the previous day, and are only now starting to dry after the deluge. It's very heavy soil, rich in clay and heavily waterlogged, which would preserve the footprints of anyone who walked over it for a very long time. And yet there's nothing! No trace around the French window and no trace anywhere else. Nobody has walked there since last night. Since eleven o'clock last night, to be precise, because that's when it stopped raining. If Sir Jeremy was murdered, it could only have been by someone or something with wings!'

“Mud . . . winged creature. I thought I was dreaming. I thought about the creature I had imagined as I looked at the statue of the winged lion.

“Inspector Charles had been very confident as he summed up the situation, but then one of his officers sidled up to him hesitantly, looking very serious.

“'I'm afraid Sir Jeremy didn't kill himself, sir,’ he announced. ‘In fact, he couldn't have done it.'

“'What's that you say, Evans?’ exclaimed Inspector Charles, sharply.

“'The revolver was the murder weapon, but there are absolutely no prints of any kind on it. The gun was simply slipped under his hand to make believe it was a suicide.'

“From that moment on, the investigation changed course and Inspector Charles lost his air of infallibility. He began to listen attentively to what I had told him.

“'A man with a face of clay?’ he said, in astonishment. ‘But that's impossible. It's pure fantasy, the stuff you get in books.'

“'I don't know if it was really clay, but it's the first thing that came into my head after my conversation with Sir Jeremy. In any case, it wasn't a human face, and I'm prepared to swear that under oath.'

“'And Sir Jeremy received this person?'

“'Yes, but they ended up quarrelling. Afterwards, I saw the individual leaving. Quite suddenly. He slammed the door.'

“'If that person is the murderer, he must have come back this morning to commit the crime, because the medical examiner has confirmed that the time of death corresponds to the time of the explosion, in other words around seven-thirty.'

“Inspector Charles rubbed his chin and continued:

“'The two men argue, one of them leaves in anger, then returns later for revenge. So far, so good. But after that, we run into a brick wall. How did he carry out the crime? How did he cross a field of mud without leaving a single footprint?'

“'It's certainly strange, the more so because Sir Jeremy and I were talking about such a creature. A flying creature made of clay!'

“When he left, the inspector seemed on the verge of an apoplectic fit. And his condition didn't improve when he learnt of the curse put upon Sir Jeremy at the moment of his departure from the Middle East, and the mysterious events which had followed.

“He didn't fare any better in his interview with Chloe. Apparently, before each accident a short message had been found, written clumsily on a piece of cardboard. The first time, before the fire, Sir Jeremy had read a few words saying the sun was all-powerful and should not be denied. Just before he was almost run over, he received a message about a ‘celestial bull’ who attacked sinners in order to punish them. And before the cobra attack in the zoo, it was the ‘serpent goddess’ who was going to ensure justice took place. As the investigation proceeded, the feeling that Sir Jeremy had unleashed a terrible curse by stirring the desert sands took root. But who had sent the messages? Who had killed him? A man, or a clay monster from the past?

“And on top of all those questions there is the mystery of Sir Jeremy's research. Did he discover something new about the Deluge? Everything seems to confirm it: Ten days after the murder, the police found a large leather bag at the bottom of a pond not far from the Cavendish property. It contained the remains of a series of clay tablets that had been covered at one time in that mysterious nail-head writing . . . excuse me, I mean cuneiform. Unfortunately, after so long in the water, nothing much was left.”

Miss White ended her account with a deep sigh. In the ensuing silence, they could hear the pitter-patter of the rain on the windowpane.

“And so the mystery of the Deluge has been washed away,” observed Owen, staring out of the window.

“Yes. Well, almost. For there is one person who could still shed light on the matter: brother William, who was with Sir Jeremy in Iraq. Unfortunately, he still hasn't been found, despite all police efforts. Then there's other news, not as bad as what's already happened, but bad enough. Sir Jeremy spent a great deal of his fortune on his archaeological digs, and even went into debt to continue funding them. Once all his creditors have been paid off, there'll be practically nothing left for his widow. Fortunately, he took out a large insurance policy on his life. Chloe is so distraught by what's happened that she doesn't even seem to understand the situation. So there you have it: Three weeks have gone by since the murder, and the investigation has yielded nothing.”

Just as she uttered those words, Miss White started to sneeze. She took an embroidered handkerchief out of her bag. She added, in a voice which could scarcely contain her emotion:

“You have to agree it's not a run-of-the-mill business.”

“To say the least,” I replied. “I don't think I've ever heard a more baffling tale. A murderer with a face of clay, a hideous flying creature, and an ancient curse. I don't see how all that can be unravelled over a cup of tea, do you, Owen?”

Having wandered over to the mantelpiece, my friend was lost in the contemplation of his muses.

“I know Inspector Charles personally,” he responded thoughtfully. “He's not the brightest star in the firmament, but he's dogged and meticulous. I have full confidence in him. I'm sure he'll sort it all out very soon.”

I found my friend's blithe assurance somewhat irritating.

“But Owen, what's your own view?”

Without answering me, he turned to the pretty visitor.

“Your story is indeed remarkable, my dear young lady. You have been very precise about the details. However, I would like to ask you a couple of additional questions.”

“Please feel free to do so.”

“You lived with Chloe Cavendish for over a year, rather like two friends, given your ages. So, if she'd had a crush on someone, you'd have known about it.”

Miss White's pale face turned crimson.

“Well, I don't think she had a lover, if that's your question. But she did renew acquaintance with an old childhood friend, a well-known jockey, who had come back to live in the village. They went on the occasional horse ride together, but apart from that—”

“Where are you going with this line of questioning, Owen?” I asked brusquely.

“I'm merely applying the old adage ‘In all matters criminal cherchez la femme.'”

“Well, for my part, given the circumstances, I would say cherchez l'homme.”

“You're referring to Sir Jeremy's younger brother, no doubt.”

“Quite. His disappearance amounts to a confession. He's obviously mixed up in it.”

“You're right on that last point, Achilles. The discovery of the bag in the pond corroborates the theory of contraband antique tablets, and the two brothers were undoubtedly complicit. The Iraqi authorities were right to have suspected them of starting the fire to cover their theft. So, according to you, who would the murderer be?”

Owen having posed the question with a note of irony, I was suspicious and took my time answering.

“If he didn't do it himself, he may have been the sleeping partner.”

“In that case, who did the dirty work? The mysterious man with the clay face who upset Miss White so much?”

“I've had nightmares every day since, Mr. Burns,” said the young woman in a strangled voice. “That hideous face and that monstrous winged lion.”

“A winged lion straight out of antiquity,” observed Owen with a sphinxlike smile. “Isn't that convenient. It would explain everything: the curse of the old Iraqi, the absence of footprints in the muddy flower beds. Is that your theory, Achilles?”

“I—I don't know what to think, Owen. It's all beyond our understanding.”

“So, you haven't grasped it?”

“Grasped what?”

“Why, the identity of the mysterious visitor.”

Taken aback, I mumbled:

“I suppose someone must have made themselves a clay mask.”

“Achilles, you disappoint me,” sighed my friend. “For a moment, you were burning, so to speak. . . . Don't you see, the visitor was none other than brother William!”

Turning to Miss White, he added:

“A monstrous figure of clay? I don't doubt the sincerity of your testimony, but your comparison was misleading. However, you can be excused for having been influenced by the atmosphere of the surroundings and the mythological anecdotes of your employer. On the other hand, my friend here should have realised straightaway that the description befits a face damaged by fire, the fire set by the two brothers to destroy their dig. No doubt permanently disfigured, William was the victim of his own malfeasance. The precise details may never be known, but I imagine he visited the Cavendish residence that night to announce that the stolen tablets had just been delivered by the smuggling ring they had hired. Then they got into an argument about something or other. It's quite likely that William reproached his brother for paying too high a price for the contraband: After all, he'd lost his face because of it. I'll wager also that, in his anger, after having left the premises, he threw the tablets into the nearby pond. Don't ask me where he is at this precise moment; I have no idea. I wouldn't be surprised if he's gone abroad.”

After a brief silence, Miss White sneezed once again. Then she nodded her head.

“I should have thought of that, it's the likeliest explanation.”

“But then, who killed Sir Jeremy Cavendish?”

“Haven't you even the faintest idea?” replied Owen, mockingly. “After all, the list of suspects isn't very long.”

“Hmm . . . let me see. If I apply your usual rule of thumb, it has to be the least likely person. In which case, it can only be the gardener. Yes, Old George, betrayed by his roots: the name George meaning ‘earthworker’ in Greek. Roots which go down into the clay soil of the flower beds, which were his daily work. He must have known of a way to cross over mud without leaving prints. And he could well know how to fire a gun, which is more than you can say for a creature from antiquity.”

Owen chuckled.

“Good Heavens, Achilles, how did you arrive at such an arcane and preposterous solution? You've really made everything unnecessarily complicated. The truth is simple. So simple it can be explained in a single word.”

“In a word,” I huffed, incredulous. “The whole impossible murder explained away in a single word?”

“Absolutely. And I must confess that it was our ravishing visitor that gave us the clue several times.”

“Me?” gasped Miss White, stupefied. “How did I do that?”

Owen pointed to the statuettes on the mantelpiece.

“Yes, you inspired me, my dear. In that respect you deserve to take your place among my muses, whose grace you share, if I may be permitted to say so. The grace with which you discreetly pulled a handkerchief out of your bag. Could you repeat the gesture? It might inspire my friend.”

When the young woman, still bewildered, had obliged, Owen took the small white square between his fingers.

“The word is ‘handkerchief,’ Achilles. A simple handkerchief, similar to the one Chloe used to wipe her tears when she found herself alone for a few moments beside her husband's body. You, Miss White, had gone to fetch her some brandy.”

“And you want us to believe she murdered her husband?” I retorted. “That she performed a diabolical stratagem with a small square of cotton?”

“Chloe Cavendish didn't murder anyone, Achilles—although she certainly intended to do so—but someone else beat her to it.”

Turning to Miss White, he continued:

“I'm quite prepared to believe there was nothing more than camaraderie between Chloe and her childhood friend. Did she decide to kill her husband because she dreamt of perfect love with the jockey? Or to get her hands on the large insurance that he had bought after squandering his fortune? Perhaps both. In any case, she put aside whatever she had originally planned once she heard about the curse of the ancient Iraqi, which she was sure she could exploit. So she sent the strange messages and arranged for the three ‘accidents,’ which were easy for her to do, as she was constantly in his company. What could be more simple than pushing him in the back, opening a cage, or striking a match? Three messages, then, to reinforce the idea of a curse up until the final ‘accident,’ namely the murder she had prepared but could not now carry out. It was too much! It was as if destiny was thumbing its nose at her.”

“Someone got there first? But who?”

Owen shrugged his shoulders, as if it were self-evident.

“Why, her husband, of course. In fact, Jeremy Cavendish did indeed commit suicide, just as everyone thought at the outset. He was obviously unnerved by the threats and the incidents, but most of all he was overcome by remorse. Once he was alone after his brother had left, he must have started to brood over the deadly consequences of the fire he had started: two innocent victims burnt alive and his younger brother, who would never forgive him, disfigured for life.

“As soon as she saw his body, Chloe realised that her husband had done her a very bad turn. By killing himself, he had ruined her plans. She could no longer get rid of him and pass it off as an accident. As everyone knows, suicide would automatically invalidate the insurance policy. When she pulled out her handkerchief to mop her tears, it was no doubt because she was about to say goodbye to all that money. But then she had a flash of inspiration: She got up, handkerchief at the ready, wiped her husband's revolver clean of prints, and put it carefully back under his hand. The job was done. It would be proved that her husband hadn't held the gun, and therefore he had been killed by someone entering by the open French window. That was before the absence of any prints on the flower bed gave the crime its supernatural overtones.”

After a brief pause, Owen turned to me and added, laconically:

“You see, Achilles, one can indeed perform miracles with a small piece of cloth. As I've always said: Simplicity is everything.”

Copyright © 2012 by Paul Halter; translation Copyright © 2012 by John Pugmire

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: ACTING ON A TIP
by Barbara Arno Modrack

* * * *

Art by Jason C. Eckhardt

* * * *

Barbara Arno Modrack is the editor of two weekly newspapers, The Grand Ledge Independent and the Delta-Waverly Community News, in the Lansing, Michigan area. Her short fiction has appeared in Seventeen, Sassy, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. She tells EQMM that her debut tale for us “began as a story about journalism from the point of view of a former reporter living in a town where a big story takes place. By the time I finished, I realized I'd written a mystery, my first.” And a welcome addition to the genre it is!

It was just before the opening of deer season when the murders happened. Marty had been sober for just six months.

He heard it on the radio during the night, coming in faint and scratchy like it had been beamed from outer space as a message directly to him. In his half-sleep state he reached out to catch it like the tail end of a falling star. His sobriety was still so new that the days were horrendous bone-jarring agony. But his nights were wondrous and weightless, when he would sleep dreamlessly for three hours, awaken, reach for his bedside radio, and listen to the night talkers for an hour or so before drifting off again into a smooth, creamy slumber. No longer was his liver forcing booze through the purifier like a train on the track with whistles blowing every couple of miles. He awoke rested and refreshed and longing for a cup of coffee with whiskey added.

This night, just as he was submerging back under the waves of sleep, he heard the newscaster describe the incidents: three dead in separate homes, one town. Killer or killers unknown and at large. The name of the town was announced. It was his town, the northern summer-city where he and Jenny had moved to live year round when Marty was broomed out of his thirty-five-year career as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. Because it was the middle of the night, the information announced by the sleepy DJ was horribly sketchy. But Marty was instantly awake, reaching in the air with his fingers outstretched as if there were a keyboard in front of him. He felt he was already typing out the words.

Hundreds of times over the years a story had appeared like this in its amniotic phase and the thrill of it never dulled for him. Even on vacation sometimes he had been called from the Detroit office to pitch in on something major that had happened in the north. A small-plane crash into Little Traverse Bay came to mind. He'd jumped right in, making inroads with the local sheriff and state police to fill in the story. He returned back to the family at the cottage where their vacation activities were uninterrupted. He would pull a beer out of the refrigerator and go down to join them at the campfire on the beach. The kids would yell, “Poor Daddy! He had to go to work on his vacation!”

But he never minded. It combined everything he loved: news at its breaking point, northern Michigan in the summer, and his family.

He pushed back the covers to get his cell phone off the dresser. Jenny was on nights at the hospital so there was no one to disturb when he flicked on the light. Marty would be able to turn around some high-quality coverage of this aberration of three killed in one town in one night. It was unheard of in this quiet northern city. Casually, as though he really couldn't care less, he would offer it to the Free Press and his name would once again be on a story of major importance. His hand holding the phone was trembling and he clutched hard for a second to make it stop. He imagined himself holding a glass wet and sweaty with ice and whiskey, golden brown and glistening like a jewel.

He dialed the number of his former editor at the Free Press. He got voicemail, of course. It was 3:50 a.m. Damn, he thought. He knew someone must be there, but everyone had their own number at their own desk. There was no main number anymore, so if you didn't know who you were calling, you couldn't reach a person. It was hard to calculate how much information had been missed that way. Phones would ring at empty desks. When he was still at the paper he had to force himself not to rush over and answer them. But that wasn't done anymore. A phone would ring, it would go to voicemail. It was a cost savings somehow.

Marty tried to stay collected. Ed would be in first thing, for sure. He'd had the 5 a.m. shift for forty years and never missed a day. He would listen to Marty's voicemail message and call him back. He would want Marty on the case. Marty showered with the curtain only partly drawn to be sure to hear the phone.

When the first buyout offer had come and gone at the newspaper, Marty had not given it a passing thought, even though it was suggested that those who stayed could be in jeopardy down the line. Then cuts came and he survived and he held on to the job he'd had since he was twenty-two and felt he'd won the lottery to have a job that fascinated him and provided a living on which he could raise a family and still smoke and drink. Smoking was phased out of the newsroom in the eighties, into the break room at first and finally out onto the loading dock. Over the years, he found his smoking buddies came less from the newsroom and increasingly from the departments he knew nothing about: advertising, accounting, circulation, maintenance. Without extraordinary difficulty, Marty had been able to quit a few years ago.

And the after-work bar crowd changed too. He remembered a day in his first weeks at the paper, walking across the street to the old saloon called The Press Room, pumped up from weaving the hard-fought facts into a story destined for page one in the next day's paper. He was greeted there like a conquering hero. He didn't leave until he was soundly drunk. Everyone was there at some point during the evening: the editors, the editors’ secretaries, the police, a firefighter or two. It was the most wonderful experience he had ever had, and he continued the pattern for years on end: reporting, writing, and after work was done, drinking. He couldn't remember when the drinking attached itself to the whole process as if it were part of it, but it happened early and was long-lasting.

One day at the bar after work he looked around and realized he was the only reporter there. Pressmen were there. Ad-sales reps were there. Circulation was there. But the newsroom had grown serious and businesslike. The younger reporters came to work in ties and even suits. They went straight home after work or off to class to finish their masters'. So after that Marty shifted his drinking to home, where it was harder to stop and easier to start. And before long it was starting at breakfast, a habit he thought was invisible and his alone. He was ready to turn down the next buyout offer when Ed called him in and told him to take it.

Then began more changes than Marty had expected. Jenny laid it out for him. They would sell the house and move Up North to the family cottage she had just inherited. Ryan, their youngest, would complete his senior year in high school there. Jenny would refresh her nursing license and become the breadwinner. And if they did all that and Marty quit drinking, they could do it together and Jenny would not leave him. He was numbed by the shock of being presented those choices and he did the only thing he could think to do and accepted them.

Marty toweled off and checked the phone. No missed call. The pitch black of the night was still holding off the dawn, which was coming so late these days it seemed like it would never get there. Marty looked out the window toward the lake, where the slap of the waves was so insistent he thought at times he would go mad.

When Marty and Jenny were dating he had thought the view from the cottage and the lull of the surf from Little Traverse Bay were wonderful. They would drive for three hours after work to have just a weekend there, often with Jen's family or with another couple or sometimes alone. They drank cases of beer or endless bottles of wine and body-surfed in the lake or lay all day in an inner tube undulating with the waves. It was a wonderful area of cherry orchards and roadside pie stands. When the kids were small, they made sandcastles and had bonfires at night and made card houses on rainy days, and in the back of his mind he always knew it was possible that one day the cottage would be theirs. He loved the old place with the stone fireplace and pine walls and creaky old floors, corner shelves cluttered with Petoskey stones the kids had found at the beach and scraps of birch bark and pine cones and clamshells, all discovered like treasure. He barely dared hope that he would actually ever own it and that he and Jen would spend their retirement summers there.

Yet when Jen's mom died and very shortly afterward her dad, and the cottage was theirs, he felt so different about it he couldn't believe it. It was like being dropped off in the middle of a desert. He could not breathe there. The summer was over, fall was fading away, and the winter loomed like a grizzly bear on haunches. Already the wind off the lake rattled the windows and puffed at the drapes.

From his son's room he heard the muffled alarm on Ryan's phone, a funny Flintstone yabba-dabba-do ringtone. Ryan was the last of their three kids at home and Marty and Jen had both been afraid pulling him along Up North to finish high school in the much smaller and rural district would be a risk. But he surprised them by thriving and making friends. Instead of being treated like an outsider, Ryan was welcomed like a movie star and included in everything. He adapted brilliantly to the change in culture and never complained that there was nothing to do or that the closest movie multiplex was forty-five minutes out of town. Ryan explained to Marty that November fifteenth was a blessed day to his friends, the opening of firearms deer season, and suggested hopefully that they might take up hunting this year.

“Everyone goes,” Ryan explained. “Even the girls. There's one girl here, Allie, she's so crazy about hunting she wears camos starting in October. She's got this thing for Brad Wilson on my team and she leaves, like, a map to her deer blind on his locker and stuff. Can we go, Dad? You used to hunt, didn't you? When you were young?”

Marty said he would think about it, though he didn't envision it would ever happen. He'd been on hunting trips with friends before and found them to be little more than a chance to drink in the woods. One or two guys would actually be into it, the hunting part, and for the rest of them it was a getaway. He'd never acquired any skills at it and disliked the thought of ever touching a loaded gun.

The high school in this town was small enough that Ryan could actually play football, which was marvelous to watch. Marty sat in the bleachers through the crisp autumn nights, pungent with burning leaves, and watched his son with astonishment. Athletic but small, at his school in the city downstate Ryan had played JV and mostly sat on the bench at that, but here he played varsity and ran the ball so brilliantly that Marty nearly had to pinch himself he felt so happy. Then he would remember they would be going out for pizza afterward, or a hamburger, and there would be no beer, which seemed like finishing a race and hitting a brick wall. Marty wondered how long the surprise would last each time he remembered he could never drink again.

“It's five-thirty,” Marty said in the doorway of Ryan's room.

Ryan lifted his head and reached under the covers for his phone. The light of it glimmered like Tinker Bell as he checked for messages.

“Dad, I don't think there's school today,” he said. “Did you hear about the murders?”

Marty was always shocked by the fast-moving chain of information among kids by texting. He'd tried to figure out how to do it but could somehow not grasp the code of getting the letters to make the message.

“Why would that cancel schools?” he said.

“They were all teachers,” Ryan said and buried his head back in the pillows, almost instantly back to sleep.

Marty felt as though an electric current were running through him. He looked down at his own phone. Still no return call from Ed. He called again and the phone was answered, but not by Ed.

"Free Press news room, this is Kelly Mundy.”

Who the hell was that? Marty wondered. Why was someone new there when they'd been chipping away at the old staff for years?

“Is Ed there?” Marty said.

“Ed's on medical leave,” Kelly Mundy said. “I'm sitting at his desk while he's gone.”

“Ed's sick? What's wrong?”

“I'm sorry, I can't tell you. Privacy laws, you know.”

“Yeah, sure. Privacy,” Marty said. “This is Marty Phillips. I worked for Ed for like a million years. I don't know you. Are you new?”

“A couple of months.” She sounded about nineteen. Why the hell did she get to sit at Ed's desk? “What can I do for you, Marty, at such an early hour of the morning?”

“Is Jack Wilson there? Or Stephanie Anderson?” He named two other editors he knew well.

“I'm afraid it's just me at this hour.”

“Okay,” Marty said. “Look, I got shoved out with the last buyout and I live Up North now. Did you hear about the murders here? Three people in separate houses. I was calling Ed to see if he wanted me to go over to the state police and see what I could find out for you.”

“I saw it on the wires,” Kelly said. “We'll be taking what AP can send us.” That wasn't the way it used to be, Marty thought to himself. In years past the Free Press would have wanted a staffer on this, absolutely.

“Yeah, well, I think I could get something to you sooner.”

“No doubt,” Kelly said. “But I don't have any authorization to pay freelance.”

“I don't care about pay,” Marty said.

“I can't ask you to do anything for free. It's a violation of wage and hour rules.”

“Of course it is,” Marty said. “Look, this story is enormous. Everybody killed, they were teachers at the high school.”

“Really? That's not on the wire yet.”

“I know it isn't, because this is just a tiny town and they don't know the half of it yet. I haven't even left my house and I know more than they do. When is Jack in?”

“Probably about ten.”

Marty asked for Jack's direct line and said he would call back later.

Part of the move Up North included selling their house in the suburbs, which by a miracle they were able to do without losing all of the equity they'd built up in twenty years, and selling both of the cars to buy one used Subaru. The arrangement was that Marty would drive Ryan to the high school and then pick up Jenny from the hospital, after which she would disappear into a deep sleep until sometime in the afternoon. While Jenny was sleeping, Marty was expected to go look for a job, any kind of job. Packing groceries would be okay, just to keep himself busy and bring in some amount of cash. Or he could sit down at the computer and write his novel. Or ease into the crawl space and wrap insulation around pipes. So far there was no novel and no job. Most of the insulation, unused, remained piled up in the garage. Errands seemed to devour the days. Picking up groceries. Doing the wash. Or now and then he drove into town to an AA meeting, but he found himself unable to actually go in.

He was just leaving for the hospital when Jenny called.

“I can't leave,” she said. “There's an emergency. Everyone has to stay over.”

“Sure, I should have known,” Marty said.

“Is it on the news?”

“A little,” Marty said. “I'm trying to get in touch with the newsroom and get on the story.”

There was a silence on the phone and then Marty thought he heard a very faint output of breath, or maybe the call was dropped.

“Jen?” he said.

“I'm here,” she said. “How many does the news say?”

“Three.”

“Well, it's four now. They just brought in Mr. Johnson.” That was Ryan's calculus teacher.

“Are you shitting me?”

“He was moving his garbage cans out to the road. They were all shot from a distance in their driveways or on their front porches. Two last night, after they came home from conferences, one in the middle of the night when Ms. McIntosh was letting her dog out. And now Mr. Johnson dragging his cans to the road.”

It was a sniper sharpshooter. Marty closed his eyes and searched in his brain for where there might be one single hidden bottle of wine in the cottage. Over the years they'd brought so many in, you'd think there must have been one that had been forgotten, hidden in a closet or an old trunk, or on the top shelf of the old cabinets that reached to the ceiling. When they first moved in, it had motivated him to squeeze into the crawl space for the insulation job, thinking maybe one of his kids had stashed something there to try to drink covertly. He found one empty beer bottle, a Schlitz, too old to have been from his kids’ era, and the bottom of a woman's two-piece bathing suit he estimated to be from the 1960s. But no hidden booze of any kind. It wasn't surprising. Marty had never been one to lose track of what he had and he couldn't understand people with big wine collections. Why have so much more wine than you would ever drink? Or why not drink what you had? It made no sense.

“I don't know how long I will have to stay,” Jenny said. “Can you bring me my phone charger? I'm down to two bars.”

Marty said he would. Doing those small things for Jen actually delighted him. Since their lives had changed so radically he found he could hardly ever do anything for her. He did any small thing she asked with very little thanks. And if he initiated it—having something ready to eat when she woke up in the afternoon; folding laundry; putting a small bouquet of wildflowers from the yard on the counter—he got no response at all from her. She was in a permanent mood these days, serious and hell-bent on getting to work, then getting her sleep, worrying about winter coming and how the cottage would hold up for year-round living. Her parents had installed central heating just before they each got sick and it had never been tried. Long gone were the days when Marty and Jen could sit together on the couch and have a glass of wine and talk about everything, working things out. She'd stopped drinking years before but so quietly that Marty had not noticed.

When he got to the hospital, one TV news truck was already there, a local one, uploading its live-cam apparatus toward the heavens. It was a lucky day for one of those reporters. The location was so remote it would take awhile before a larger operation would be able to show up, and the national news was likely to take the local feed. He spotted a young girl with big hair who looked about sixteen staring as if in shock at her notebook. The technicians moved as normal, as if it were any old city council meeting, slow and steady, connecting wires. While he was watching, Jen appeared at the car window on the passenger side. She had to knock to get his attention. He unlocked the door but she gestured for him to just roll down the window.

“I have to run,” she said, taking the phone charger he handed her. “Everyone is in a state of panic. They don't know if someone else will be coming or what.”

“I called in,” Marty said. “Ed's on medical leave for something but Jack will be in around ten.”

“Marty,” Jen said.

“What?”

“You don't work there anymore.”

“I know, but . . .” he said. He gestured to the television truck.

“But nothing. You don't work there and they don't want you to work there.”

“What the hell?” he said. Did she have to put it that way? What was up with that?

“And Ed had a heart attack. At his desk. I got an e-mail from his wife.”

Marty stared at her. That might have been something he'd wanted to know. He couldn't envision why she hadn't told him.

“Where's Ryan?” Jenny asked.

“Home sleeping,” Marty said. “No school.”

“Thank God. I heard sometime during the night they were going to hold school just to see who didn't show up. Stupid idea.”

“They think he's a student?” Marty said.

“They think he's a she,” Jenny said. “I heard the troopers talking. They found a shell casing in the woods outside Ms. McIntosh's house. Next to a tube of Victoria's Secret lip gloss. Okay, I gotta go. I'll call you later. And you need to go home to be with Ryan.” She turned and actually trotted back to the Emergency Room entrance, her plum-colored hospital scrubs fluttering around her legs beneath her coat. She stopped to show her ID to the state trooper and the two of them spoke for a second, casually, and Marty could see Jenny laughing. He was surprised to realize how long it was since he had seen her laugh.

He thought they used to laugh a lot. But looking back through the most recent years he found it was a blur and maybe there had not been much laughter. He'd felt at the time he was keeping it all together. It was just a little innocent drinking. It took the edge off. It entertained him. It was his private business, he thought. There were many ways to be able to drink and still participate in life. A shot in his coffee in the morning. A bottle in his dresser he could take a pull on as he was getting dressed. A drink at lunch, which didn't seem unreasonable. And a few drinks in the evening. Well, a few that anyone saw. There were always trips back and forth to the bedroom during the evening for an extra boost from the hidden bottle until the night dissolved into paralysis in his chair in front of the TV. Sometimes he awoke in the night and went upstairs to bed. Sometimes he just stayed where he was and awoke dry-mouthed and feeling like death until he could start again.

Marty tried to live with the truth of what Jen had said about the Free Press. He didn't work there anymore. They didn't want him to work there anymore. He'd had a wonderful career full of many exciting, gritty crimes and scandals, though in the last years he'd been pulled off the police beat and shuffled off to a suburb. It was just a reorganization, he'd been told. They wanted to up the caliber of the suburban reporting and they needed a pro like him. That's what they said. But the city council meetings bored him to distraction. And the stories that emerged were even worse: zoning quarrels, DPS labor disputes, road-construction updates. It got so that he was turning in four or five paragraphs every few days, all unmemorable, all buried somewhere in the back pages where he rarely ever even saw them. And then there was the custom invitation to take the buyout. A strong suggestion to take it, the kind that sounded like there was no choice at all.

He checked the time and tried to figure out if he was going to call Jack at ten and make another pitch to cover the story, or if he was going to lose his nerve. The action of the news cameras and the police in the hospital parking lot was hypnotic and he wanted to stay. He could just go right up to one of the troopers and chat and learn more about what had happened. He knew how to do that and he was good at it. But he knew he needed to turn the Subaru around and head back down the charming bayside highway that connected the cottage to town. It was close to a twenty-minute drive. It was emerging in his mind that there was someone on the loose killing people somewhat randomly and that he needed to check on Ryan.

He pressed the quick-dial button on his phone for his son. With school canceled for the day maybe the two of them would come back into town later for a burger at a little bar downtown, the U and I Lounge, where he'd gotten into the habit of stopping in during the endless hours of the day. The first day he walked in he knew the bartender by type: the kind who would remember what you had the last time and would make it for you before you even sat down. Marty met his eyes and held out his hand. He told him his name and said, “Do everyone a favor and don't serve me. Ever.”

The bartender nodded seriously. “No matter how much you beg and plead,” he said. And then he served him the most delicious Virgin Mary he'd ever tasted, so that when Marty raised it to his lips he nearly spit, so sure was he that there was booze in it.

The bartender laughed. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I'd never do that to you.”

Marty had been longing to enter that welcoming and cozy place and have a tonic and lime and see what the latest scuttlebutt was on the killings and get a grip on his courage to call the paper again without sounding like he was desperate. Ryan bleeped in on the line. “I'm on another call, Dad. I'll call you right back,” and Marty was actually relieved to hear his son's voice. The radio was now reporting a few updates: At least two of the dead were teachers at the high school, they said. School in the district was closed. They were still reporting only three killed.

When he got home Ryan was on the computer. He turned around briefly but was busy typing.

“Dad, you are not going to freaking believe this.”

It was possible for Marty to see his son and barely recognize him. The youngest of three boys, Ryan had brought up the rear like a little tow-headed caboose, barely a fully formed person while the other two boys emerged into adolescence and young adulthood. It was during the heaviest of the drinking years that Ryan became a teenager and now he was almost eighteen as if by magic.

The killings had sparked a mass of Facebook chats and texts. One of Ryan's classmates, a boy with statistical skills, had compiled a complete list of each dead teacher's class lists through the day. Then he cross-checked to see which students were common in the classes, looking for a pattern, to see if any of the students had been in all of the classes.

Most were academic-subject teachers: Calculus, English, and Spanish. But Ms. McIntosh taught Metal Arts, an elective. Ryan showed Marty the lists.

“That's amazing,” Marty said. “You guys put that information together already?”

“It's easy, Dad,” Ryan said.

“Does anyone make it onto all of the lists?”

“One,” Ryan said. “Brad Wilson.” From the football team. “Not that many kids who take Advanced Calculus also take Metal Arts.”

The kids had been freaking out about it, Ryan said. Brad had been complaining for a couple of weeks that opening day of deer season fell on a school day and he would have to wait until the weekend to go out hunting.

The waves crashed. The clock ticked. Then for possibly the first time since he'd stopped drinking Marty was grateful for the strength of not having a hangover. He had the clear head of a sober person. The two of them looked at each other.

“Does he have any other teachers?” Marty said.

“He didn't do it, Dad. He was down at Central yesterday with his parents looking at the campus. They stayed overnight.”

“He must have another teacher.”

“I guess,” Ryan said. “I'll check.” Ryan typed a message. He turned to Marty. “Mr. Monroe. Civics.”

Marty dialed Jenny at the hospital and thankfully she answered.

“Tell the closest state trooper you see to look out for Mr. Monroe, the Civics teacher. He could be next.”

“Why, Marty? How do you know?”

“The kids found a pattern. I'll call nine-one-one but they're in a state of panic and might not pay attention to me. I think you've got better access.”

“Okay,” Jenny said.

When he clicked the phone closed he looked over at Ryan, who had stopped typing and was staring at him.

“You're awesome, Dad,” he said, and Marty could see in his youngest son's eyes the honest expression of a true believer. Marty had been younger than Ryan was now the first time he got drunk. He remembered it distinctly for the wonderful way it smoothed out his teenage awkwardness and made anything seem possible. Now Marty was alarmed at the thought of Ryan experimenting with booze. There was no sign that it had happened already, but there was no reason to think it wouldn't happen eventually, if not soon. And for possibly the first time, Marty was awash with guilt at the example he'd set. Marty had never hidden his so-called social drinking. It was hard to imagine Ryan had failed to notice it had gone further, though right at this moment, together in the drafty cottage on the cusp of this local crisis, Marty could see nothing in his son's face that told him he'd been scarred by the past years. He just saw his son's bright enthusiasm for what life might hold. He saw Ryan's admiration for Marty taking charge at this moment. It was more than Marty felt he deserved.

Through the window he could see a police helicopter over the bay heading toward town. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the clarity of his sight. He could see it was inappropriate to have been drunk at work. It was silly to think no one knew. Looking ahead, the winter would come and they would be reduced to living practically in one room, around the fireplace. He could see that it was possible that he and Jenny would not last through the strain of it. She would blame him and he would not be able to defend himself in any way.

During the afternoon, Marty and Ryan found some ground beef in the refrigerator and made a pot of chili from the directions on the package of the spice mix. They ate it with crackers and grated cheese and watched the news, where much of the story was now complete. It was on the local news; it was on the national news. The enormity of it had been recognized. Acting on a tip, troopers had discovered a teenage girl, a junior at the high school, asleep in a pickup truck parked across the street from teacher George Monroe's house, waiting for him to come outside to pick up the newspaper in the driveway. But after Mr. Johnson was shot all teachers were warned to stay inside. The girl was Allie Lampinen. She had a high-powered deer rifle across her lap. She was wearing hunting camos.

“Is that his girlfriend?” Marty asked.

“Oh my God, that girl's a freak,” Ryan said. “She's Brad's stalker, the one I told you about. She probably wanted to kill all his teachers to give him, like, a little sign, like, ‘Hi! How do you like me now? You get the day off school like you wanted.'”

Jenny called and said she had the okay to leave but a coworker would give her a ride. The weather over the bay was grey and heavy by the time she walked in to see the two of them on the couch in front of the TV, empty chili bowls on the coffee table. As if just noticing the mess, Ryan jumped up and carried the bowls into the kitchen.

“Want some chili, Mom?” he said.

“That sounds awesome,” Jenny said. She hung up her coat and disappeared into the bedroom, emerging in pajama pants and a T-shirt. She took the bowl of chili Ryan handed her with actual enthusiasm, the first Marty had seen from her in months and months. She ate like she was truly hungry and then put the bowl down and sighed with satisfaction.

“That was good, you boys,” she said. Marty grabbed onto the fact he'd been included in the compliment. He took it as a thank-you.

They switched back and forth between the news channels for the latest updates, catching sight of Allie in handcuffs being led into the jail. She was vaguely pretty and wore a look of annoyance. Ryan checked for updates on the news Web sites on his laptop. Before long, Jen was asleep where she sat on the couch between them. Out the window the day had turned fully into night. The waves crashed against the shore and Marty felt lulled and hopeful for the other things yet to be solved.

Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Arno Modrack

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Reviews: THE JURY BOX
by Steve Steinbock

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* * * *

The Jury Box is crowded, but your foreman isn't complaining. This month I had the chance to discover some new authors and reacquaint myself with some old friends. Please be sure to read to the end where I share a number of new books and reprints by regular EQMM contributors.

**** Ben Coes: Coup D'etat, St. Martin's, $24.99. While former Delta Force operative Dewey Andreas, living in Australia, tries to put his past behind him, his old enemies are orch-estrating a war between Pakistan and India that will likely lead the U.S. and China into a world war. The best strategy for averting the war is to send Andreas into the region to unseat a radical Islamist head-of-state. Coup D'etat is a tightly told, well-researched thriller with a quietly engaging hero.

**** John Connolly: Burning Soul, Atria Books, $26.00. In his tenth book-length appearance, private investigator Charlie Parker is still uneasy receiving cryptic tips from his dead daughter. This time, Parker is called upon to help Randall Haight, who as a boy took part in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. Thirty years later, with Haight living in a quiet Maine village, another fourteen-year-old girl is missing, and someone is sending Haight threatening messages. The Boston underworld, local cops, and Parker and his crew collide in an adventure that is at once tender and breathtakingly chilling.

**** Kate Flora: Redemption, Five Star, $25.95. Detective Joe Burgess's plans for a picnic with his girlfriend are put on hold when two boys spot a body off the pier in Portland, Maine. The case takes a sharp personal turn when the body turns out to be that of an old high-school and Vietnam War friend who has fallen on hard times. With its authentically masculine voice, the Joe Burgess series (of which Redemption is the third) has a distinctly different flavor from Flora's Thea Kozak novels. But it still showcases Flora's ability to tell a profoundly sensitive story and her eye for complex family dynamics.

**** Elizabeth Zelvin, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, Five Star, $25.95. Psychotherapist Zelvin is another female writer who has mastered the male voice in a series that doesn't shy away from serious interpersonal issues. Narrator Bruce Kohler is enjoying a carefree summer in the Hamptons with a group of his fellow recovering alcoholics when the tide washes up the body of one of their housemates, a beautiful and provocative investigative journalist. Zelvin, who weaves a classical cozy plot into a contemporary setting, has a natural ear for efficiently melodic prose, something that readers have seen in her previous Bruce Kohler novels and short stories, as well as in her historical mystery stories and poetry.

*** Vilmos Kondor: Budapest Noir, Harper, $13.99. Set in Hungary on the eve of World War II, Budapest Noir is the first of four novels, and the only one thus far to be published in English, featuring crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. When the body of a beautiful girl is found in Budapest's red-light district, nothing in her purse besides a Hebrew prayer book, Gordon draws a connection to some pornographic photographs he'd seen in a police inspector's drawer. His dogged desire to solve the murder lands him in the midst of a clash of local, global, and family politics.

* * * *

Several exciting critical/biographical works have come across my desk. Volume two of John Curran's award- winning analysis of Agatha Christie's secret notebooks, Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Her Notebooks (Harper, $25.99) spans the Grand Dame's entire career and includes a lost early Miss Marple short story, “The Case of the Caretaker's Wife.” Agatha Christie: An Autobiog-raphy (Harper, $29.99) is a newly reissued edition of Christie's 1977 autobiography with an enclosed audio CD containing Christie's voice recordings. Of particular interest is Joseph Goodrich's Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen 1947-1950 (Perfect Crime Books, $14.95), which contains correspondence between Ellery Queen creators Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee written during the period when they produced arguably their best works, including Ten Day's Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, and The Origin of Evil. The letters, with Goodrich's commentary, provide insight into the creative process behind the novels, as well as the complex relationship between the novelists. My only regret is that, at 140 pages, this book ends far too quickly.

Magic and detective fiction are a natural pairing. Mystery writer and former EQMM managing editor Clayton Rawson was an accomplished and well-known magician. John Dickson Carr was a lover of magic, as are Daniel Stashower and William Link. Now Las Vegas stage magician Mac King has teamed up with R.G. Wyatt (Richard Prosch) to conjure up Magic in a Minute Mysteries, available only as an ebook for Kindle and Nook (Lohman Hills Creative, $4.99). Fully illustrated by Bill King, this ten- chapter novel is suitable for readers grades five through eight. In it, a magician named Mac King and his pet monkey team up with a pair of young human sidekicks to solve a series of mysteries and scams. In the process, Mac teaches an entertaining array of magical stunts. The writing is funny, the illustrations are engaging. More information can be found at www.magici naminutemysteries.com.

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Many of the authors familiar to EQMM and AHMM readers have been productive of late. Last fall Overlook Press published EQMM Readers Award winner Dave Zeltserman's A Killer's Essence (Overlook Press, $23.95). Gary Alexander's Interlock (Five Star, $25.95) features the Pacific Northwest comedian Buster Hightower. Family Way by Michael Z. Lewin (Five Star, $25.95) is Lewin's third book to feature the Bath-based Lunghi family and their family-owned detective agency. Another UK-based author who —like Lewin—takes his humor seriously is Simon Brett, whose twelfth Fethering mystery, Bones Under the Beach Hut (Five Star, $25.95) brings a summer of murder to the fictional south-coast village, and his Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess (Felony and Mayhem, $14.95) is the second outing for his mismatched brother-sister crime-solving team.

During its first go-around in 1997, Kenneth (K.j.a.) Wishnia's debut novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for two awards, the Edgar and the Anthony, and made Booklist's Best First Mysteries of the Year, but didn't receive the commercial success it deserved. PM Press has released a new edition with an introduction by Barbara D'Amato ($17.95). Another mainstay of EQMM, biographer and short-story writer Francis M. Nevins, saw two of his Milo Turner caper novels, The 120 Hour Clock (Perfect Crime Books, $8.00) and The Ninety Million Dollar Mouse (Perfect Crime Books, $8.00) republished. Despite being printed in painfully small type, these novels are a witty treat. Nevins is also the editor of Love and Night (Perfect Crime Books, $12.00), which collects fifteen early and largely unknown short stories by Cornell Woolrich.

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock

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Fiction: DIAGNOSIS DEATH
by N. J. Cooper

Natasha Cooper worked in publishing before beginning to write fiction full time, and had several historical novels published under another name before turning to crime fiction. Her latest novel, as N.J. Cooper, is Face of the Devil (S&S/July 2011). The Literary Review said of the book, “well-described setting . . . and Cooper's sensitive understanding of human behaviour lend conviction to an intriguing, enjoyable puzzle."

“If there's anything you've always wanted to do, I'd do it now,” the oncologist said in her efficient, friendly voice.

“How long?” I asked, as though asking about the arrival of a plumber.

“Weeks. At most.”

I wasn't ill enough for news like this. It wasn't even as if there'd been any lump for me to feel; just the tiniest breathlessness.

Outside, a taxi driver answered my wave, jerking to a halt by the pavement. I leaned into the open window and asked him to take my briefcase to the office.

He nodded and grumbled off towards Oxford Circus, while I walked up Harley Street to the crossroads. Turning right, I made my way between the high cream buildings until the view dwindled and reddened and turned into the semi-squalour of Goodge Street. Another crossroads took me into the mews and the cobbled street outside my old studio.

Some stubbornness had made me hang on to it and believe that I would paint again. I still had the key on my key ring.

The once-familiar smell of paint, dust, turps, size, and canvas ripped off my shell, and my knees gave way. Tears covered my cheeks, hot and wet and salty. I didn't howl. I'd long since lost the ability to make a fuss anyone else might hear, but this was private. I wasn't mourning my imminent death; only the long-ago loss of the one kind of life I'd wanted.

Having qualified as a lawyer to please my parents and worked for five long dull years, I'd risked all my savings to take a sabbatical to see if I could paint, in spite of all their doubts. Amazingly my first big canvas had excited a young dealer, who had sold it for more money than I'd earned in all those years. I'd bought the freehold of the studio then, believing everything he told me: “You'll be a real star, Margot; you've really got it, Margot. Paint as much as you can. I can sell it all.”

He'd made me accept, after all and in spite of everything, that I was worth something. Me. Myself.

And then he'd found someone he liked better and taken it all away, forcing me back to the law. Nothing that had happened since—none of the success, the partnership, the money—had helped.

“If there's anything you've always wanted to do, now's the time,” I repeated to myself as I locked the studio.

The ironmongers round the corner still sold kitchen equipment. I chose a thin, flexible fileting knife.

As I walked to the bus stop, I felt my hips loosening, and my knees too, until I began to walk with something of the old swing. Soon the bus was snaking its way towards Knightsbridge. I left it at the stop outside Harvey Nicks and found another freedom in kicking off my painful, expensive shoes. A little rain had made the pavement sticky. How fabulous to enjoy feeling your feet sticky and unconfined.

A left turn brought me to his gallery and the latest masterpiece by my old rival. I pushed open the heavy glass door and walked fast past the receptionist to get to his private lair. He was there, as I'd always seen him, sitting at his desk, frowning. This time his target was a laptop. In the old days it would have been glossy prints of some poor sap's cherished work he was about to rip apart.

He looked up and the frown tightened for a second, then cleared.

“Margot,” he said in the smug voice that had always set my teeth on edge. “Margot Anderson. Goodness me. They told me you'd done well, and I can see it's true. Great suit. MaxMara?”

I couldn't speak, which would have surprised my partners.

“I did you a favour, you know,” he said, betraying the first hint of conscience.

“You destroyed me.”

“You always were a drama queen,” he said, but he couldn't stop me now.

I held up my hand, palm inwards, and ticked off his sins finger by finger: “You deliberately sabotaged that last exhibition and made sure my failure was so total, so public, that I would never sell another canvas to anyone who mattered.”

He examined his nails, stretching out his fingers like a woman with a new manicure. “Face facts, Margot,” he said, twisting his features into something that was supposed to be a cheery grin. “You've done far better as a lawyer than you ever would as a second-rate painter.” He sounded so reasonable that I had to tighten my hand on my fileting knife to remind myself why I'd come.

“You bastard! All those ‘You're near genius, Margot darling; you and I can really go places’ were so much hogwash, I suppose.”

He shrugged again and looked at the ugly great signet ring on his little finger, twisting it, stroking the soft metal.

“I needed a woman painter and you were the best I could get at the time. Your bad luck I found someone better so soon. Hadn't you better answer that phone? Big international lawyer like you can't leave her clients waiting.”

I kept my eyes on him as I put the phone on his desk, slid the fileting knife out of my bag, and stuck it between his ribs, just where his cheating heart lay beating. He looked surprised and grunted. There wasn't much blood. I picked up the phone.

“Margot Anderson.”

“Oh, Ms. Anderson,” came a young female voice. “I've got Doctor Fleming for you.”

“Margot?” Her voice was sharper now. “Margot, it's good news. The hospital screwed up. There's a patient called Margit Andreson, and someone muddled her notes with yours. You have no tumour, only a minor chest infection, easily cleared with a course of antibiotics. The rest is . . . a mistake. Margot?”

He still looked surprised, with the narrow knife sticking out of his chest. And I felt wonderful.

There'd be plenty of time to paint now.

Copyright © 2012 by N.J. Cooper

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Fiction: WHAT THE BUTLER SAW
by Judith Cutler

Several of Judith Cutler's recent stories for EQMM have been historicals, and it's an area of the genre in which she excels at both novel and short-story length. Her Tobias Campion series includes two novels, The Keeper of Secrets and Shadow of the Past, as well as the stories that have appeared in this magazine. The Midlands-born author also contributes entries in her Lina Townend antiques dealer series to EQMM, and the latest book featuring that character is Guilt Trip (Severn House/May, 2012).

Exeter, 1814

There are those winter days when everything is grey, day emerging imperceptibly from night and returning again, and so still that not even the air seems to move. The birds, if they fly at all, do so soundlessly, invisibly, and the smoke from the hundred Jacobean chimneys atop the roof merges seamlessly with the sky. On such days you expect voices indoors to be quiet, demeanour gentle.

But it was on exactly such a day that Lady Westgate declared that her priceless diamonds had been stolen, and that she knew exactly who had taken them and how.

Her Ladyship, a lady the shady side of thirty and, to my mind, probably no great beauty even in her prime, was a guest of my employers, the duke and duchess of Teignbridge, here at their country residence, Teignbridge Hall. That in itself should have guaranteed suitably dignified behaviour. However, once she had recovered from an attack of strong hysterics, perhaps understandable given the value of the article that had disappeared, she became decidedly belligerent. It was to be expected, then, that Lord Teignbridge, raising a bored eyebrow, declared that since I had appointed the member of staff she alleged was responsible, it was I who would deal with the matter.

Almost as an afterthought, he murmured, “Tell you what, Dawson, you might care to invite that parish constable—what's his name? Voke?—to confer with you.”

Then he retired to his private library, where he would seek his carpet slippers, and open Homer, ever his refuge in times of stress.

Lady Teignbridge, summoned from her boudoir where she was dressing for a day in the hunting field, could scarcely have found the problem less interesting, though she said all that was correct. Without prompting, she corroborated His Lordship's advice, and set forth to the stables, cursing the delay, not quite under her breath.

Thwarted, Lady Westgate turned her invective on me. Fortunately, after so many years in service, I was able, despite an onslaught worthy of a fishwife, to maintain an expression of perfect propriety.

When she paused for breath, I bowed.

“Would you permit me, My Lady, and Mr. Voke, the constable, to see the apartment from which the item was taken?”

“Item? You call a diamond tiara, set with rubies and sapphires, an item?”

I could have called it a vulgar monstrosity, but naturally confined myself to a bow that she took for an apology.

* * * *

Mrs. Lacock, the housekeeper, had put Lady Westgate in the Yellow Bedroom, in the new wing, with its fine views over the park. There was, of course, an art to placing guests—I believe we had some twenty with us this October—in appropriate chambers. Some married couples were delighted to have adjacent rooms, linked by a dressing room, but I fear that they were in the minority. What reasons husbands and wives had for being separated from their spouses might well be a subject for gossip in the lower orders, but it is said that while a member of the nobility is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a good butler is born with a brass padlock to his lips. Silver bends, of course, but do not underestimate the strength of a butler's discretion.

In fact, the only way that Her Ladyship could have slept close to Lord Westgate was to have joined him in Vienna, where he ran a gaming hell, fleecing any young man foolish enough to try his luck there. Officially, of course, he was a brave officer in India; thus Lady Westgate was able to play the grieving wife, though rumour had it that the only passionate feeling they shared was one of mutual loathing.

For some reason she had not brought her own maid, which I found surprising in one so particular about her hair and person. I will not mention the brightly coloured tiara, which she wore, quite inappositely, one feels, at the impromptu and supposedly informal assemblies that Her Grace requested us to put on every few days for her guests and a few neighbouring families. Instead, Lady Westgate relied on Izzie Fielding, a girl from our household.

Izzie was a local village child, with a sweet Devon complexion and golden curls the severe cap of her uniform could scarcely confine. Mrs. Lacock had been training her up in the hope that she might one day have just such an opportunity. Once a girl became a lady's maid, her future was assured, provided that she was honest and as capable as a butler of keeping mum. Despite being able to read and write, and sewing as good a seam as you'd see, Izzie had had to wait a long time for this chance, and had so far—to judge by Lady Westgate's appearance—done as well as Mrs. Lacock had hoped.

“She has even read aloud to Her Ladyship—only a novel, I fear, but that was Her Ladyship's taste, not Izzie's,” Mrs. Lacock told me, as proud as if Izzie were her own daughter. “I shall be sorry to lose such a good worker, but if Lady Westgate wanted a permanent abigail then I should have no hesitation in recommending her—and in advising her family to permit her to leave Teignbridge.”

But Izzie was the one whom Lady Westgate held responsible for the theft of her diamonds. I could not believe it—did not wish to believe it. A girl of scarce fifteen, capable of such sinfulness.

I had to remind myself that being accused is far from being condemned. For Izzie's sake, and, of course, for the honour of our establishment, Voke and I must be meticulous in our investigations.

Voke, summoned from goodness knows what parochial transgression, was red in the face with his exertions as he joined us in the superbly carved entrance hall. Although the wood was old, there was only one piece of damage, where a chance Civil War cannonball had removed the top of a newel post. A splinter had caught and killed one of the family dogs, now immortalised in marble, but that was the only injury. The family portraits gazed down, the Lely eyebrows lifted in surprise that such a low form of life as Jedediah Voke should be standing beneath them. He might have stepped straight from a comedy by the Bard, his red face, sleepy eyes and slow delivery giving the impression that he was naught but a yokel. Therein lay his strength as an investigator. No one suspected how shrewd he might be. Put him, however, in an old-fashioned powdered wig and a well-cut coat and, now deeming him to be a magistrate, you would be struck by the intelligence of his brow.

But today's stained breeches and disreputable hat convinced Lady Westgate that she was speaking to a complete hayseed.

“It is quite plain,” she declared, speaking loudly as if to penetrate a dim intelligence, “that the depraved girl told her beau where it was and bade him break in through the window. Oh, he would use a ladder, of course!” she said impatiently, as if we might have imagined a strapping lad flying up to her first-floor room. “You can see where the glass is broken. Indeed,” she said, addressing me directly, “it is high time that you sent for a glazier to repair it before I veritably catch my death.”

“And where did you leave them there jewels?” Jedediah enquired.

She managed a haughty gesture to indicate where on her dressing table she had left her tiara, before she retired to the daybed, sighing at intervals and making much use of her vinaigrette.

Jedediah joined me at the window, which was indeed broken, though there was very little glass in evidence. It would have been a simple matter to slip an arm through the smashed pane, and to open the catch and thus the window. It was but a small step from there to the dressing table and, the tiara secured, back again.

“No one has touched this here glass, my lady?”

“What a stupid question! Who would do it but that maid? And I have demanded that she be confined until you arrest her and drag her away. Indeed, I cannot conceive why you are wasting all this time.”

“What I cannot see is why she should involve another miscreant,” Jedediah said slowly. “Would you not have expected her simply to pocket the jewels and escape from the Hall as fast as her little legs would carry her?”

It might have been one of the curtains that spoke, for all the notice Her Ladyship took of him.

Promising to send the estate handyman to repair the window, I ushered Mr. Voke from the room, his nose almost touching his knees as he made his bow. We headed for the back stairs, never used by the family or their guests.

“I'd like to take a look at the flower bed below her ladyship's window before we speak to young Izzie,” Jedediah mused. “And we need to find out who this young man of hers might be.”

“As to that, I believe young Matthew Veale is known to be sweeter on her than on all the other young maidens that set their caps at him. But whether she reciprocates is quite another matter,” I added. “She's as lively a lass as you'd wish to have in the servants’ hall, singing sweetly when asked, and never too uppity to read aloud a message for someone who doesn't know their letters. Or to write one in return. But for all that, she knows her place. Mrs. Lacock has never had call to speak firmly to her.”

* * * *

Matthew Veale was working in the kitchen garden, defying any weeds to try to spend the winter there. He was a tall, strong young man, as befitted his calling. There was no doubt in my mind that he could have carried the heavy ladder needed to reach Lady Westgate's window. Indeed, he could have carried it in one hand, her ladyship herself in the other. I was about to call him over, but Jedediah held up a thick finger in warning.

“If someone has propped up a ladder, it will have left marks in the soil beneath, will it not, Mr. Dawson?”

As one, we bent, more stiffly than either of us would have cared to admit, to peruse any silent message left by the intruder. There were no ladder marks, nothing, in fact, except a quantity of broken glass—far more than on the floor of the Yellow Room. But neither did it appear that the bed had recently been dug over to hide any traces.

It was time to summon Matthew Veale, who tugged his forelock respectfully and waited politely for us to speak. However, Mr. Voke's question clearly disconcerted him.

“When did you last dig this bed, Matthew?”

“Why, that'd be about four weeks since, sir. Is there something amiss with it?”

“Nothing at all. But there is something amiss in the house, Matthew, as you might have heard.”

There was no doubt that under his deep tan, he paled, then flushed. But he said nothing.

“It is alleged, Matthew, that a theft has taken place. And that it has been perpetrated by none other than sweet little Izzie Fielding. Can you believe it? A poor child like that like to swing!”

He swallowed so hard it must have given him pain. “And what does Izzie say?” he asked at last.

“Nothing. Locked up, she sits and sobs.” Voke was not telling the strict truth. We had not questioned the girl yet, had we? “But I cannot believe she would have undertaken such a heinous crime on her own, can you?”

Matthew breathed deeply but said nothing.

“Very well, Matthew,” I said, “His Lordship is paying you to work, not stand about gossiping. Off you go now.”

As we watched his retreating back, Voke voiced my thoughts. “He knows something, that young man. But the devil knows what.”

* * * *

Mr. Voke's declaration that Izzie Fielding was sitting and sobbing was not far from the truth, after all. However, she was not being kept as anything like a prisoner, even if she felt she was. She was in the still rooms with Mrs. Lacock, counting the bottles and jars of preserves for the winter, Mrs. Lacock keeping up a stream of gentle conversation as if Izzie were merely suffering from an affair of the heart and needing to be diverted. Indeed, when Mr. Voke and I appeared, Mrs. Lacock invited us all into her own sitting room and sat down beside her, holding the girl's hand as we prepared to question her.

“Let me put a straight question to you, young Izzie,” Jedediah began, sitting opposite her with a smile more like that of an indulgent uncle than of a skilled inquisitor. “Did you steal Lady Westgate's jewels?” Receiving a decided negative, he continued, “Did you help someone else to steal them? You know that I shall have to search your things, do you not? Aye, and search the rest of the Hall, attic to cellar—the duke and duchess's honour as hosts is at stake.”

She nodded her head dumbly, lips parted, eyes awash between their swollen lids.

“Is there anything you would like to tell us, anything at all, Izzie, before we begin our search? Because it would be better for you if you spoke before we found anything that might incriminate you.”

* * * *

We did not expect to find anything in the bare little room Izzie shared with five other girls. Each girl had a cupboard for her few items of clothing; none owned much else. And yet, they were fortunate compared with their sisters back home, who led harder lives than they, with few clothes, less food, and precious little hope of improving themselves. We searched all the cupboards, just to make sure, and turned the mattress on each narrow bed.

“What we should be doing is searching Lady Westgate's room,” I muttered, unaccountably angry.

“Indeed we should—and we shall. But I fancy we should lure Her Ladyship away first. And that is a matter for Their Graces. And recollect that it may be, if our enquiries amongst the servants prove fruitless, we shall have to question all their other guests too. That will cause some fireworks, I'll be bound.”

I bowed. “I will speak to His Grace now.”

“Meanwhile, I will hunt for the dratted gems. I'll start in the attics. Though I expect to find nothing but the dust of ages and broken chairs from Good Queen Bess's days.”

* * * *

Mr. Voke's face was grim when I met him next, and he patted his pocket significantly. I believe he put out his hand to steady me, but I took a deep breath and nodded sadly. That a girl we had known for all these years had betrayed our trust!

“You have proof, then?”

“Proof that the tiara—what an ugly thing it is!—was not in Her Ladyship's room. But no proof who put it in that hideous great flower vase—”

I permitted myself a dry smile. “I fear there are many up there that might fit that description, Mr. Voke.”

“The silver gilt thing that sits in the middle of a dinner table—that one. Anyway, there's no proof how it got there, none at all. And it is with that in mind, Mr. Dawson, that I propose to continue with our mooted search of Her Ladyship's room. Pray lead the way.”

No one could have found anything to criticise about the way Izzie had maintained the room. Everything was as immaculate as if she had expected Mrs. Lacock's eagle eye to check her work at any second. All Her Ladyship's other jewellery was in the appropriate compartment of the travelling strongbox, all the shoes carefully stuffed with tissue, all the clean linen beautifully folded.

Mr. Voke no doubt found everything he inspected equally faultless. He moved about his side of the room sighing sadly. Until he let out a triumphant yell, hastily suppressed. He had in his hand a day dress, which had been stuffed under the bed. The embroidered flounce round the hem was filthy.

“Has she been wading through mud?” I asked.

“Possibly. And then something else has stuck to the damp fabric. Dust, Mr. Dawson, dust. I wonder what has happened to the shoes she must have worn. And her pelisse. They must be found, Mr. Dawson, found at once.”

* * * *

Well used to the vagaries of the nobility, all the indoor staff dropped what they were doing and hustled about in search of the missing attire. Of the tiara nothing was said. But in the middle of the bustle, a loud rap at the kitchen door announced the arrival of Matthew Veale.

“I've come to confess, Mr. Dawson. “'Twas I who stole her ladyship's diamonds. I and I alone.”

“You had best give them to me then,” said Mr. Voke, those sleepy eyes very alert.

“Alas, I cannot, sir. Overcome with guilt at my terrible deed, I threw them into the lake, sir.” The words came out so stiff and pat I was sure he had been rehearsing them.

“You had better show me where, so that the lake can be dragged,” Voke said sternly. “A pretty necklace like that must be found.”

“Indeed, sir, I was in such a state I cannot rightly tell where I was when I threw it. And it was a great strong throw, sir, right into the middle. So now you'd best take me off to the gaol, sir, and let me be hanged the next assizes.”

“Very well. Bind his wrists, if you please, Mr. Dawson, and lock him in the brewhouse till we have a moment to spare. Now we can release young Izzie.”

* * * *

There was, as I am sure Mr. Voke was aware, a convenient window in the brewhouse through which it would be possible to have a conversation, if not an intimate one. He bade Mrs. Lacock bring him a tankard of her best home-brewed and retired round the corner, out of sight of the house. Normally he would have indulged himself with his pipe, but, though clearly tempted, he stowed it carefully away. He pressed the side of his nose with a huge finger, winked, and left me to respond to the various demands of the guests as best I could with no staff to assist me.

By now, gossip had flown throughout the building, as I was aware, padding silently back and forth with wine for this lady, a set of working candles for another. Possibly it was only because most of the menfolk were still on the hunting field that I had few direct interrogations. But I had my answer ready in any case: that I understood that an incident had occurred, but that an individual had confessed and was even now under lock and key, ready to be despatched to Exeter Gaol.

* * * *

“A most touching scene you missed there, Mr. Dawson,” Jedediah Voke declared as he returned to my room ready for a nuncheon we both deserved. “As I suspected, young Izzie could not bear to think that Matthew was to be hanged without bidding him farewell. But she's a wise young lady, and demanded to hear the truth of what he had done. Of course, in response to her tender questions, he admitted he had only confessed to save her. Quite indignant she got then. What was he thinking of? Imagining that she had taken the trumpery stuff indeed! As if she would. In any case, she told him, the tiara was nothing but paste.” On any other occasion I might have laughed at his mimicry of the two young people. He concluded, “But where it was neither of them knew, that was clear.”

“So if they did not take it and hide it, who did?”

“Think of those dirty flounces, Mr. Dawson. And of the equally dirty shoes and pelisse which were found in the stoke hole. But somehow we have to bring the lady into the open.”

“I think you might leave that to me, Mr. Voke,” I declared.

* * * *

“The epergne, Dawson? What on earth for?”

Lord Teignbridge was clearly not happy to have his studies interrupted. He pointed impatiently at a small space on his desk for the branch of candles I had brought with me.

“It would add a touch of dignity to the dinner table, Your Grace. We do have four and twenty couples sitting down tonight, and it would honour the occasion,” I added vaguely.

“Go and leave me in peace. You know the duchess handles anything like that.”

As far as I knew, the duchess was in her hip bath in front of her bedroom fire, hoping to ease some of the day's aches and pains, so I could scarcely discuss the matter of table decoration with her. In any case, she was as little concerned with such matters as her noble lord. So I did what I always did: I made all the preparations I thought appropriate.

Alas, try how I might, I could not see how I could introduce Mr. Voke as a guest. However, a man of his build would look well in the family livery, particularly as the powdered wig would so improve his visage. And I would station him where he could observe every one of Lady Westgate's movements, down to the tiniest change in her facial expression.

* * * *

We were to be disappointed. Though Jedediah swore that she had paled as she saw the epergne, she managed to behave in a perfectly ladylike way for the duration of the repast, apart, that is, from an arrant flirtation with one of her fellow guests that made his young wife's eyes fill with tears. Shaking our heads as we supervised the removal of the last port glass, we admitted that we might have been mistaken. I bade two of the strongest footmen carry the epergne back to the strongroom adjacent to my pantry, where it should rest overnight with the rest of the silver and gold plate. It must be thoroughly cleaned before I had it returned to the attic, I called out, loud enough, I made sure, for the guests in the withdrawing room to hear.

“Have you fixed that strongroom lock yet, sir?” Voke, in his footman guise, demanded, possibly over-egging the pudding.

But he had started so I must finish. “Another job for tomorrow,” I said.

* * * *

“I have never in my whole life heard anything so outrageous!” His Grace declared.

“Outrageous!” his wife repeated.

They were both seated in his private library. I had summoned them—separately—with the discretion, I hoped, born of long years of practice, while their guests were playing at cards or, in the case of Lady Westgate, going down the line in an elaborate country dance. Now Mr. Voke and I stood before them, very much as if we were on trial ourselves.

“I think you had better explain,” His Grace said more temperately, as I filled his glass with his favourite brandy. “You say that young Izzie is completely innocent, and that young gardener—who, I understand, has made a full confession—is also free from guilt. How can that be?”

Voke spoke first. “It was Mr. Dawson who first drew my attention to an inconsistency in Lady Westgate's story. She claimed that two people had been in league, and try as we might we could not make sense of that. She showed us the glass from the broken window, as if that were sufficient evidence. But the window had been, in our opinion, broken from the inside, not the outside.”

“So young Lizzie or whatever her name is could have broken it and thrown it out to her lover.”

“Indeed. But he—Matthew, the gardener—was under the impression that it was not a tiara but a necklace that had been stolen, and it was only when he learned that Izzie had been arrested that he blurted out his confession. It was clear he had no idea exactly what was going on. Yet Mr. Dawson and I formed a very strong opinion that he was troubled by something. As yet we have been unable to discover exactly what. We hope that you will question him, Your Grace. He will not offer a lie to you, not even a white lie.”

“Very well. Have him present himself tomorrow morning, before breakfast—ten o'clock, sharp.”

“With respect, Your Grace,” I interrupted, “there is a very strong reason why he should be questioned tonight.”

“Have you been at the port, Dawson? No, that's not your way, is it? Very well. I shall do as you say. But if there's nothing in it, why, bless my soul, you shall look for another position come Lady Day.”

I was relieved to see the duchess shake her head firmly, covering her face with her fan to hide a smile. “Bring Matthew here,” she said, as sternly as she could.

“Your Grace.” I took the liberty of returning her smile. We both knew how essential I was to the duke's well-being, having been with him almost as long as his valet.

Round-eyed, scared, but with an impressively courageous bearing, Matthew bowed low, but raised his eyes to the duke's.

“Why did you lie to Mr. Dawson, young man? He tells me that you couldn't possibly have stolen Her Ladyship's geegaw.”

“Nor did I, sir. Nor Miss Izzie neither.”

“We know that, too. She is your sweetheart, is she?”

“She wouldn't look twice at such as me, Your Grace. Which is why I found it so strange that—that another lady should.” He flushed scarlet. “And even stranger when she . . . persisted . . . in her . . . very particular . . . attentions even when I told her that my heart belonged to another.”

“You actually mentioned Izzie's name?” I asked.

Matthew hung his head. “I do believe I might have done, sir. So when she said those terrible things about Izzie, I was fair dumbstruck. I thought if I said I'd thrown the thing in the lake—”

“Quite so. Very well, young man, I believe you. You may go.”

Her Grace said, “Matthew, you and Izzie are far too young to think about marriage, but if you wish to walk out with each other—on your half-days off, that is—I shall have no objection.”

I swear he would have kissed her feet, had it been seemly. As it was, he bowed so low I was afraid that he would topple over, and almost galloped from the room.

“Now what do you propose to do?” the duke asked.

“Mr. Voke and I have set a little trap.”

“This I must see.” The duchess pulled herself to her feet. “Come on, show me.”

“You will recall I placed the silver-gilt epergne on the table tonight, My Lady?”

“Hideous thing. His Grace's mother gave it to us for a wedding present. I thought it was safely stowed in one of the attics.”

“So it was. And in it we found the missing tiara. We expect the person who put it there to try to retrieve it tonight. I could not help but feel it appropriate, Your Grace, to ask Matthew to be one of those standing guard in the strong-room itself.”

* * * *

And so Lady Westgate found herself at last in the strong arms of the young man she had wished to make her inamorato, but in circumstances very far from those she had planned. We had had to wait till nearly three for her to creep down the back stairs to seek out the strongroom, which was not, of course, locked. We heard, from my darkened room, the sharp intake of her breath as she saw it. Then she plunged her hand within. When she withdrew it, however, she held not the tiara, but a cloth soaked with reddle, that would leave a red stain for many a day, designed as it was to mark sheep. There was no denying this evidence.

Her Ladyship whooped as she emerged—she might even have cried, “Tally ho!” Matthew pinioned the miscreant, and Voke formally arrested her.

She was not sent to the assizes, of course, because as a peeress she was entitled to be tried in the House of Lords. In any case, as His Grace pointed out, a clever lawyer would argue that she could not steal her own property. So what was to be done? She could not get away with such a vicious act, occasioned by nothing so much as having her adulterous advances rejected. What form could justice take?

In the first place, both slandered young people were given a sum of money sufficient, when the time came, for them to set up home—whether with each other, as Mrs. Lacock still doubted, or with another. Lest it give them ideas of an over-youthful marriage, Lady Teignbridge pocketed the purseful of guineas and locked it in Lord Teignbridge's desk. As a kindness to the woman I simply could not understand, Lady Teignbridge promised that she would not breathe a word of what had happened to the other guests. Of course, as I observed to Mrs. Lacock and to Izzie herself, both keen correspondents with other servants all over the country, the promise did not apply to them.

Naturally, her hands being inexplicably red, Lady Westgate found it necessary to quit the place where she had hoped to settle for an inexpensive winter, but she found, quite unaccountably, all society's doors shut tight against her. Justice, Mr. Voke and I agreed, was done the day she was forced to set forth for Vienna and that gaming hell.

Copyright © 2012 by Judith Cutler

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department of First Stories: THE MALIBU WALTZ
by Grant O'Neill

* * * *

* * * *

Grant O'Neill is the pseudonym of Don Ray Aldridge, a songwriter who began working in the music industry at the age of nineteen, writing his first two songs with the Reverend Johnny Otis. Subsequently he worked in a wide variety of industries including aerospace engineering and real estate, and spent many years as an editor and publisher. A collection of Chandler stories he read in 2009 inspired him to try writing crime fiction.

I had scheduled a luncheon for twelve-thirty to juice some venture capital on a three-million-dollar foreclosure I'd been looking at in the Hollywood Hills. We agreed to meet at L'Auberge Agadir, one of those hot little numbers that spring up on Melrose Avenue from time to time, hit with the showbiz set, and have the lifespan of a tsetse fly. I was a few minutes early, but the waiter put me in a dark, pillowed corner in front and issued the wine list.

The theme was French-Moroccan. Two spacious rooms and a smaller bar area divided by Moorish arches. There were North African tapestries and scimitars on the walls, potted palms in the corners, and an abundance of terra cotta everywhere else.

The room filled rapidly with movie types over from Paramount with starlets on their arms and cosmetic surgeons with their latest Hooters creations on theirs. Fez-becapped French-Moroccan waiters straight out of Actors Equity scurried under the smoky lighting with towels on their arms and the overpriced menu in their heads.

That's when I saw Eden Folet for the first time, seating a second act of industry types. She had on a slinky white sheath accessorized with an ocean-sapphire necklace that matched her deep blue eyes, and tall ankle-strap heels that flexed the muscles in her calves like she was going somewhere in a hurry.

Somehow I'd missed her when I came in. Her eyes latched onto me for a second as she led them into the back, almost as though she recognized me, which unfortunately wasn't out of the question.

When it became apparent that my appointment was a no-show I ordered the salade nicoise and sipped the Pinot.

“Your friend hung you up.” Her voice had the smooth emollient texture of imported brandy. “How's the wine?”

I sat my salad fork down and leaned back in my chair. Eden Folet was standing across the table, framed in the sharp, smoky archway with a sympathetic smile. Her eyes were the deepest blue I'd ever seen, and they had room for an idea or two between them. Her ash-blond hair had white highlights that only come from a lot of play in the Southern California sun.

“It's being temperamental,” I said. “I think it needs a beautiful woman to coax it along.”

A slow smile tugged the corners of her lips and she finally let it go. “Oh,” she said with sudden effervescent laughter in her voice, “that was pretty good.”

“No, that was corny,” I said, revealing a telltale grin of my own. “But I don't know anything about wine and I had to take the shot.”

Eden caught the waiter's eye and dazzled me again with her straight, wide smile. I stood up and scooted out a chair and seated her. The waiter rushed in with a glass and turned it up, then cleared the second place setting. Her skirt hem rose as she crossed a pair of lightly tanned legs that made the fast calves even faster. Then she proceeded to knock off my wheels, fencing with me for a half-hour in flirtatious banter.

Eden Folet was alive and her vitality made me alive. I was sixteen-in-the-backseat-of-a-'64-Malibu alive.

I drank too much.

* * * *

I became a regular after that, dropping in a few times a week, always to find Eden anxious to see me. I knew from the beginning that she had someone, whether a boyfriend or a husband I wasn't sure, but I did know she wasn't happy with him.

In the following weeks I stepped up my visits and Eden even set times, albeit always casually, that I could come when she wasn't so busy. The restaurant closed every day during the week between two and five o'clock so the kitchen staff could prepare for the dinner rush and Eden could ready the bar for happy hour. I would skip lunches and take off early on those days, but she always managed to draw up just short of a real date.

* * * *

It came to a head one afternoon when everyone except the chef back in the kitchen had gone. Eden disappeared into the back and changed the music; it was an old George Michael tune, “Careless Whisper.” Her high heels dangled from her fingertips when she returned.

“Do you dance, Nick?”

“I do, yes.”

Eden sat her heels on the table next to her and held out her arms. I slid from the barstool and met her in the archway between the dusky barroom and the dining room and took her in my arms.

“I hardly ever dance anymore,” she said, laying her head against my shoulder. Her hair smelled of something musky and wild.

“You need a man who dances,” I whispered.

Eden didn't reply but snuggled my chest and swayed in my arms right up to the sultry sax solo. I pulled back and took her thin hard waist in my hands. I thought I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes but then I felt her release, give herself over to it.

I walked her back a step further into the shadows and kissed her softly, and then much deeper. Eden responded hungrily at first but suddenly pulled away.

“Dump him,” I said, gripping her waist tightly. “If you can't, I'll take care of him for you.” I drew her in roughly and kissed her hard, long.

Eden's breath burned into my neck when we parted.

“Nick, I can't,” she breathed. “Not yet. I can't tell you why now—”

I started to interrupt, but Eden pressed her fingertips to my lips and looked at me. I saw fear in her promising blue eyes, a solitary tear tracing down her cheek. “We were married nine months ago,” she said. “I'm surprised you didn't read about it. I want out, but we have to wait.”

I didn't understand that but said, “Nonsense. I'm a wealthy man, Eden—I can get you clear of him.” I felt my temper heating up. “Leave the sonofab—”

The fear in Eden's eyes melted away, replaced by the longing she must have seen in mine, as she silenced me with a soft kiss. I wanted this woman and, I'll admit it, I was willing to kill anyone who stood in my way to have her.

Eden broke the kiss. “Trust me this much, Nick,” she said, her lips so close I could taste the sweetness of her breath. “We will be—”

She was interrupted by a light, irritated tapping sound on the window in the restaurant. Eden bolted stiff, almost as if someone had slapped her. We drew back into the shadow and she peeked around the arch that concealed us.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “Fast, Nick—back to the bar.” I started to object but the panic on her face left no room for argument. Eden looked over her shoulder quickly as she moved. “Trust me, darling. I'll explain everything later.”

She pushed me toward the bar and trotted to her high heels sitting on the table. Curiosity took over and I hiked onto my stool and watched through the arch into the dining room.

Eden slipped into the shoes and clattered to the front. When she keyed the door Emerson Haddock walked in.

Los Angeles City Councilman Emerson Haddock.

* * * *

“Emerson!” exclaimed Eden, her panic somehow wrestled under control. “Sweetheart, why didn't you phone? I would have had Luc Pierre whip up a late lunch.” The councilman leaned to kiss her and Eden returned the affection. They kissed on the cheeks.

Behind Haddock was a woman, a beautiful blonde about the same height, weight, and age as Eden and with a shorter crop of almost identical dusty blond hair. She nailed me to the bar with a stare that dug deep and a smile that ran thrifty.

“And where did you find Ridley?” Eden chided Haddock. “Ridley, darling, come over here.” Ridley did and they embraced and air-kissed.

Anger vied with wilting despondency as I watched the three of them greeting. Haddock glanced at me and just as quickly dismissed my presence. Not a hint of jealousy or even curiosity in his face. He was tall, slender, silver-gray, a John Forsythe knockoff.

“I dropped by Ridley's on the way over,” he said, looking around and giving a preoccupied nod to Ridley. “The AIDS auction looks promising.”

“I put him to work,” said Ridley, playing to me at the corner of one eye as I leaned in the archway. “Tomorrow night's closing in and I've been positively busting my ass to get ready.” Her slightly patrician accent was as husky as a Schubert cello.

Eden remembered me and said, “Emerson, you must meet Nick Tranor.” She turned to me as I stepped into the room. “Nick is in real estate in Beverly Hills.”

I walked to the councilman and extended my hand. Haddock received it weakly and we shook.

“Mortgage investments, isn't that right, Nick?” added Eden. “He made a tempting offer on the restaurant but I, of course, refused.”

“That's right,” I responded. “Not real estate—real estate investments. This is a sweet location.”

Haddock lifted his nose, gave me a smog-brown stare, and jutted his chin slightly. “How nice for you . . . did you say Tranor? I'm afraid it's not for sale, at any price.”

Emerson Haddock was pretentious. He was so pretentious it broke the word for me.

“I'm the Ridley the cat dragged in,” inserted Ridley. “Ridley Notions,” she said, holding out her hand palm down and giving me a dangerous smile.

I took it. “Nice to meet you, Ridley.” And it was.

“There will be a dearth of heterosexual men at the benefit, Nick,” Ridley said with that stilted economical smile still in place. “You must come.”

“Ridley, quit it!” scolded Eden. “How do you know he's—”

“No, no,” I chortled, throwing up my hands. “I'm guilty as charged.”

“The other option would have been a disastrous waste,” said Ridley. “Me, I'm as bisexual as an earthworm.”

“Ignore her, Nick,” said Eden, slapping Ridley's hand playfully. “Everybody sit—I'll get wine and see what Luc Pierre has in the kitchen.” She scooted back a chair and motioned.

I played along with it. I seated myself and had a glass of wine and swapped quips with the wry Ridley. I let myself put up with the councilman and realized I had misjudged the wealthy, powerful, Honorable Emerson Haddock. He wasn't pretentious—he was an insufferable prick. I found my exit and left without a scene. He wouldn't believe in a lifetime someone like me could walk away with his woman.

I wasn't sure of it at the moment myself.

* * * *

I was partly steamed, partly heartbroken, and all humiliated, but I attended the art benefit the next evening anyway. I didn't know why and by the time it was over I had plenty of cause to regret I had, but Ridley had taken a liking to me, and maybe just a little I wanted to light a fire under Eden Folet.

The benefit was for AIDS research and took place in a cozy little gallery on San Vicente in Santa Monica. Ridley's place. The room was an inverted T with a lobby in front where wine and hors d'oeuvres were being served.

The gallery was stark white and the displays stood out against the walls. The pieces were so-so, the wine was good, and the Hollywood theme brought in a cortege of traffic with red ribbons on their chests and bosoms. There were a lot of pieces donated by celebrities. There was a Red Skelton clown and several dozen original photos signed by the photographers of famous actors present and past, other overvalued art. I bought a black-and-white of Marilyn Monroe barefoot and laughing a haunting laugh.

Ridley was right, I was in the minority of straight males.

Well, there was, perhaps, Emerson Haddock.

Eden brushed my hand softly with hers as she showed me the Marilyn photograph but I recoiled enough to tell her thanks but no thanks. Playing it out.

I hadn't quite reached my Porsche in the dark parking lot when two beer trucks in complementing body shirts hit me and ran their wheels up my ass. I took a shot high in the solar plexus that knocked the wind out, and then a blast to the head sent a light show through my brain.

“Leave it alone, Jack,” said one shadow. “Next time it's ICU.”

* * * *

I came to with a killer headache, something sticky running down the back of my neck, and an a cappella chorus of oohs and aahs harmonizing in B-flat.

I sat up and made an attempt to get to my feet. I knew it was like riding a bicycle, once you learn it you never forget, and I had done it before so on the second try I almost got it right.

I heard a familiar but alarmed wail. “Oh, my goodness, Nick!” Eden scuffed pavement getting to me and dropped to her knees next to me on the cold asphalt. “Nick, what happened?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I heard another familiar approaching voice exclaim. “Ridley, do you have your phone?” shouted Emerson Haddock, now standing over his wife's shoulder. “My God, call nine-one-one . . . the police!”

“I have them on the line now,” said Ridley stepping around Haddock and kneeling on my other side. Ridley shot a look at Eden and gently took my head from her hands and moved it into her lap. She raised her phone again.

“Jesus, no,” I said. “Leave the police out.” My eyes found Emerson Haddock standing in a soft halo of lamplight, and I knew. “I'm okay . . . I'll be all right.” I started to rise but looked up again instead.

Haddock gazed down on me with both hands stuffed in his pockets and something that in the sparse lighting of the parking lot reminded me of a smile. It wasn't a smile and it wasn't not a smile. It was the kind of look you could guess at and have a fifty-fifty chance of getting right.

* * * *

The police did come. Two Santa Monica prowlers and an LAPD lookie-loo out of West Los Angeles. Emerson gave a statement to the one reporter who showed up from KABC News.

“My dear friend Nick Tranor was assaulted by thugs tonight,” issued Emerson. “I can only say that I'm glad he wasn't seriously injured and that this didn't happen within the confines of Los Angeles. I expected Santa Monica to be safer, I really did.”

After the EMTs were finished, the reporter approached me for a statement. I glanced at Haddock and said, “What he said.”

Ridley Notions was devastated that the assault happened in her parking lot, and when I declined Emerson's insistence that he deliver me home in his limo for the third time, she asked if I would drive her out to Malibu.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” I said.

* * * *

The brisk June evening was everything the travel brochures say Southern California is 365 days a year. Ridley and I swung off the California Incline onto Pacific Coast Highway in my new Porsche Targa and I accelerated to 75 mph. The tide was in, the full summer moon dumped beams onto the inky Pacific like molten white gold, and the smell of dead kelp, washed ashore in the briny spume, wafted on the breeze as I pressed down on the throttle. Funny—the smell of death, yet as pleasant as a bouquet of roses.

Ridley rummaged through my discs and found Norah Jones.

“This okay with you, Brown Eyes?” she said, holding out the CD. Her boyish blond hair glistened white in the moonlight and ruffled perfectly, as it was designed to do, in the stream blowing over our heads.

“That's fine.”

I was still steaming from the humiliation of the day before and now the beating I was sure Emerson Haddock had hired out in the parking lot. I was trying hard to disguise it, but it no doubt showed through. I turned on a smile and glanced at her.

“Yes, that one's perfect,” I said as she slipped Come Away with Me into the deck.

“You'll be fine, Brown Eyes,” said Ridley as the music began. “The bruises will heal.”

I suspected Ridley was speaking of something more than the bump on my head.

* * * *

Her place was a pyloned bungalow off Malibu Road, right on the beach. It was probably built during the 1940s but had undergone recent remodeling. There was a Jacuzzi under the house and a good stretch of shared beach. We entered from the leeward side and it opened to a wide living room with a sliding glass front onto the ocean. I imagined but couldn't see a deck. When Ridley flicked the lights we could see our reflection in the glass against the black abyss beyond. The room was casually but expensively furnished. There were paintings and pencil sketches tastefully distributed in every nook and cranny and what looked like red porcelain Asian vases on each side of the low rattan furniture in the center of the room.

I liked it and I liked Ridley.

“You can find what you drink behind that cupboard in the corner,” she called, hustling into another room. “I'll be out in a flash.”

I went to a caned teak cabinet behind the crescent-shaped bar and pulled back the doors. I found a bottle of Chivas and poured a drink. There was ice in a mini fridge under the bar.

“You drinking?”

“One of whatever you're having.”

Ridley reemerged through the soft arch wearing a cropped white tank top and frayed low-slung Levis. She was barefoot. She reached for the dimmer and lowered the lights to a comfortable level and joined me at the bar where she picked up a remote and turned on music.

Steely Dan, Aja.

Her sparing smile was in place and she turned to the floral-patterned sofa and lowered onto it, patting the cushion next to her. I sat down.

“I'm not sure I should do this,” said Ridley, reaching to a small ebony box on the cocktail table in front of us. “You being a cop and all.” She retrieved a long, thin cigarette.

“I'm not a cop anymore.” I watched her swirl the end of the joint in her scotch like someone would a fine cigar in brandy. “Not in a long time now.”

* * * *

I had been a patrol officer in the West Valley three years earlier, when I put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson slug in one of the mayor's favorite patrons, a strip-bar owner named Felix Salazar. I was off duty at the time but in uniform, and the greaseball pulled a gun on me. Long story short, I was not where I was supposed to be. The rumor floated I was banging Salazar's woman, and that was that. The media labeled it “The Jilted Lover Shooting.” Salazar died.

It rocked the LAPD and the mayor's office. But the shooting was ruled clean and the mayor didn't want to answer the obvious questions about his relationship with a known drug dealer and God knows what else, so he called in favors and managed to bury most of it. I was the second casualty.

The rumor was true.

And, as with all rumors, this one had a shelf life and Ridley had heard it. I didn't give her my side; I really didn't have a side that would sell.

The flame danced on the dry end for a long second, putting out a sweet pungent aroma as Ridley toked it between her full red lips. She handed it to me.

“I knew you were a hot rod,” Ridley said, exhaling.

I smiled and took an educated hit.

“Not so much anymore,” I said. “But I can still be a bad boy once in a while.”

Steely Dan was playing “Home at Last.” I didn't quite feel at home but did feel better, comfortable with this stunningly attractive woman. Maybe it was because of the rejection I was feeling over Eden, or anger because I was sure Emerson Haddock had set his dogs on me, but I wanted Ridley Notions.

“Something's going on in that pretty head of hers,” said Ridley, as though she'd read my thoughts. “I can't say she's in love with you, but something.” Ridley picked up her drink and held it to her chin a moment. “Emerson has her nailed down tight, though.”

I didn't respond, just took another hit when she passed it.

“You know something, Brown Eyes?” Ridley finally said. “The minute I asked you to bring me home tonight you knew what this would be.” Her green eyes were as luminescent as a pair of Tiffany plates.

“And what is that?” I said, looking into my glass with a small self-conscious grin.

“You want me to help you with Eden, but that's not why you're here. You are here to have your blues bonked away.” I spontaneously shook my head, although it was true. “Oh yes. I don't care what reason you use to justify it.” There was daring coquettishness in her sabulous voice. “Maybe you're pissed, maybe you're just bummed—but you want it. Right now you need to forget about Eden and you know I can make that happen. Our little secret.”

I raised my eyes. I waved the joint away when she extended it. Ridley's eyes smiled the practiced naughty smile of a woman who'd learned it all and learned it early.

I plucked the joint from her fingers and tossed it into the brass tray on the table.

“Our little secret,” I said.

* * * *

I took her right there on the floor sofa and again in the bedroom and again on the beach in the first whimpering gray light of dawn. Ridley Notions and I spent three and a half hours in straight-up, no-bullshit, pissed-off sex.

Afterwards, she pointed out Haddock's summer condo, three doors south of hers. The lights were off, as they would be, but she assured me Eden wasn't there anyway. “I'm going to help you with her, Brown Eyes,” Ridley said on the billowy sand in front of her house. “Emerson's an asshole and Eden made a mistake.” She turned to me with that playful, worldly grin. “Who knows, maybe I can talk you both into sharing.”

Before I left, Ridley made me promise to come again the following Saturday to an afternoon beach party, her “beach-ball soiree,” she called it. Eden would be there and Ridley thought some good business connections, as well. Maybe I knew then how it would end up; maybe I had willed it in my heart from the moment I kissed Eden Folet.

* * * *

The Porsche raced through the turns into the low foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains like a cat let out of her cage, as I drove western Sunset Boulevard back to Beverly Hills. My mind raced just as rapidly. The early morning air had the flavor of pine and sage and faintly of the sea below, as the cerulean waters of the Pacific diminished to a thin blue line and finally disappeared behind the mountain in my rearview mirror.

I had known dangerous love before. I had murdered Felix Salazar for his wife. Yes, Salazar had a gun, but he wasn't pointing it at me, and, as Internal Affairs correctly suspected but could not prove, I hadn't given him the option of putting it down.

Now I was in love with another powerful man's wife and I knew it couldn't end well. But I also knew I had to have Eden Folet, even if it destroyed me.

* * * *

Saturday came fast. I hadn't been back to the restaurant. I'm not Brad Pitt, but I have never made a fool out of myself over a woman and I wasn't going to make Eden the first. If Eden wanted me it would have to be on my terms.

I arrived a little after three o'clock on a bright blue Malibu afternoon to the carefree clamor of frolicking young people in skimpy bathing suits hurling Frisbees across the sand and chugging beers like soft drinks. Women younger and older than Eden and Ridley but every bit as toned stretched and leaped for high serves across the beach-volleyball net, and young men sprawled on blankets, ogling and making crude remarks to them.

“Brown Eyes!” shouted Ridley from across the blinding sand. She spiked the ball over the net and came running toward me in a red floral side-tie bikini that she would have filled out well had there been material to fill. “You did come,” she said, gulping for breath. “I was afraid I'd run you off.” Her skin was light coffee brown and shiny from oil.

“Nuh-uh.” I stooped slightly for a peck on the cheek. “I'm a closet masochist but I'm coming out.”

Ridley grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the bungalow. “I must get you something to drink,” she said, scowling at my T-shirt, Levis, and Adidas. “You're overdressed.”

“That's all right.” I fell in beside her as she set out. “Three of your volleyball teammates undressed me when I walked in.”

Ridley spun and kicked sand on me.

Tall, sinuous Ridley led me across the beach from the net, roping us around the bungalow and passing the Jacuzzi beneath the house's stilted undercarriage, where two young women and a man of fifty or so splashed in the spewing jets, howling and shrieking. Ridley latched onto my hand behind her again and hopped onto the stairs to the white cedar deck. At the top we entered through the sliding glass front. More strangers sprinkled the living room, the men in trunks and shorts, the women dressed much as the others on the beach, in bright skimpy bikinis, some with sari waist wraps. Ridley introduced me to Mac and Devon and Lloyd and Tremaine and Justin and Jerome—a lovely couple—then trotted me to the bar.

We crashed on the low sofa sipping our drinks and talking, playing catch-up, she asking about my head, I inquiring after Eden.

It was then I knew something was up. Ridley suddenly took my hand and tugged me across her artsy Eurasian living room, through a white swinging door into the kitchen. It was state-of-the-art and had large restaurant-style stainless-steel appliances like on the Food Network, and a wide butcher-block island in the center with an array of kitchenware surrounding it on an overhead rack. The counter nearest the door had bar liquors lined three deep and the rest supported the catered fare for the party.

A good-looking, well-built man had his elbows hitched on the counter's edge and one leg crossed over the other, obviously posed for our entrance. He was gay and he was butch, no question about either.

He had on a hot-pink straw cowboy hat parked back over a shock of jet-black hair, a canary-yellow T-shirt cropped across his washboard midriff, denim short-shorts he'd hacked off too high for public display, and a pair of blood-red cowboy boots. His biceps, pecs, and delts walked around under the tee.

Ridley said, “Nick, this is Terry Hensley,” and reached out to take the man's hand. “Terry is Eden's best friend and confidant.” Terry stepped out and Ridley glanced at me.

I extended my hand. Terry turned his palm down much the way Ridley had the day I met her, taking only my fingertips, as delicately as touching a sprig of Spanish moss.

“I have to ask, Ridley,” Terry said, fluttering his long jet lashes sidelong at her, but looking adoringly at me. “For me?”

Ridley smirked coyly. “He's taken, sweetie boy.”

Ridley's eyes flicked to me. “Terry's messing with you,” she said. “Eden wants to see you before the party goes full swing.”

I smiled and inspected my Adidas.

“Come with me, honeybunches,” called Terry, flagging his hand over his bare cheeks from behind and walking toward the back door.

Leaving the house with Terry and having half the crew on the beach see me leaving with Terry made me feel gay enough to skip to his dingy blue Mazda Miata parked on the street, but I resisted.

Terry fired her up and sputtered onto Webb Way and back up PCH for a short stretch, where he wrenched a hard right onto a road I recognized. My fingers tightened on the armrest when I realized he was taking me to Emerson Haddock's beach house.

Terry glanced at me, bouncing over a speed bump into the compound. “Not to worry, sweetie,” he said, “Eden's alone. Emerson's at City Hall—called out an hour ago.”

But I did worry. I had expected Eden and I would meet in a dark bar over in Trancas, or at worst, in the Blue Lounge at Moonshadows up on PCH. I didn't like it but I wanted to see her, and as we neared the house I realized just how very badly I wanted to see her.

“Here we are, pally,” Terry said, inching over another speed bump and into a slot. “You take it from here.” I turned and stared at him blankly. “I'll be back in thirty—don't be late.”

I flipped the door handle and felt Terry's hand lock onto my wrist. It was a strong grip.

I looked back.

“Take it easy with Eden,” he said in a flat, unaffected voice. “Cuz she's a peach, a real peach, and that bastard is mean.” His face had set up like quick concrete and proffered an unspoken threat. “And if I thought—”

I quickly and firmly covered the hand on my wrist with mine and drove my thumb between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers in one move. I pressed down hard and broke his hand free, sending a sharp tremor into the boy's upper lip. I got out and started for the house.

* * * *

It was a large condo not unlike one I'd sold a few months back not far from here. Built in the prosaic architectural style of most Southern California weekend homes, with a russet barrel-tile roof, Spanish-Mediterranean windows, and a plaster finish slapped on for a rustic effect. The Pacific view was worth a couple million, the mountain view maybe half that, and the home in any other market would fetch maybe three hundred grand.

Eden was bending over a pair of scuba tanks, holding a large commercial air compressor hose to one, as I ascended the last of two right-angled flights of red brick steps to the deck. The late sun was splashing out its last brilliant rays of the day onto the deep blue Pacific behind her. Her soft blond hair feathered her face in the easy breeze. She didn't see me at first but looked up when I strayed into her peripheral vision.

We both stood frozen in the moment. Her rich café au lait skin glistened. Her stark sapphire eyes held me like a vise. Her pouty lips quivered slightly, as though she had caught a sudden chill.

“I thought you wouldn't come,” she finally said. “I thought I'd . . .”

She had on flared khaki short shorts, a denim workshirt tied tightly at her midriff, and wore a pair of scuffed men's-style work boots. I smiled and thought of the old Snap-On Tool pinup calendars of the past. All she needed was a tool belt.

I still didn't speak but moved with determined steps to her, taking the hose in my hand and throwing it aside and scooping her into my arms. “Never again,” I said. “He goes today, or I do.” I buried my tongue deep in her mouth. Eden met it with hers and hungrily searched my mouth, biting and nibbling my lips, her long fingernails cutting like razor blades into my back.

“Never again,” Eden gasped. “My God, how I love you, Nick.”

* * * *

We lay there on the warm hardwood deck in the rummage of garments we'd shed, taking in quick but lengthening breaths.

“He'll be there tonight,” she finally said. “It's not a good time—”

“Bullshit,” I snapped. “There'll never be a good time, but it will be tonight nevertheless.”

Eden reached for my arm. “Darling, please. Tomorrow morning, I promise, but don't ruin Ridley's party, she has clients in.”

I rolled my head and met her eyes.

“Just for tonight, sweetheart,” she whispered. “I swear.”

I chewed the corner of my lower lip for a moment, took in some air and released it long and slow. “Tomorrow—not a day more, Eden. I mean it. And so help me, if that pompous bastard even looks crossways at me tonight, I'll kick his ass. He put those Gold's Gym faggots on me the other night—”

“Oh, Nick, surely he didn't!”

“Not a doubt in my mind. Or Ridley's, for that matter.”

Eden's eyes widened and drifted skyward in thought. I could tell the truth had dawned on her. “I'll stay away from you tonight, we can meet at the store tomorrow morning. Eleven.”

I pulled to my elbows and kissed her deeply.

That was my last chance to walk away, though I didn't give it a thought at the time.

* * * *

The full moon had risen over Malibu Colony, spilling its white light on the placid Pacific. I propped my elbows on the deck railing. Maurice White's husky baritone alternated Philip Bailey's tenor through the doors behind me, as half-naked couples—boy-boy, girl-boy, girl-girl, and two or three combinations I couldn't calculate—nuzzled and swayed slowly to Earth, Wind & Fire's mellow R&B rhythm.

I doused my smoke and turned around, hung my elbows back on the rail. I was drinking too much. Everyone was drinking too much. The parties in Malibu may begin as soirées but after eleven o'clock they're bashes, just like the ones in Tarzana. Lights were dimming and clothes were loosening. The mean drunk—every party has one—had already let his temper flare like a sunburnt rattlesnake before Ridley hooked his ear and threw him out.

Emerson Haddock stood chatting casually in the living room with a movie producer who lived a few doors down, and Eden and Ridley had vanished into a back room with a klatch of other women.

Haddock was a California boy in the extreme, with his highly cultivated tan—too much tan for a man who didn't work or apparently even play outdoors. The scuba gear had belonged to Eden. The outdoors for Emerson was something one experiences from a chaise lounge with an extra-dry martini. His black cigar lisped a twirl of steel-blue rebar from between his fingers as he impressed the producer with something clever enough to chuckle about.

Suddenly someone screeched and a pride of guests spilled out onto the deck. Someone else shouted that the grunion were making a run on the beach. A few vaulted the deck rail, others hopped down the steps onto the light-dappled sand, and the rest crowded in on me to see onto the beach. Haddock and the producer trailed the others down the stairs with their cocktails.

I was hunched on the rail watching as a dozen or more naked-to-the-waist partygoers skipped into the foam swinging little plastic pails and squealing, grabbing frantically at wriggling fish, when I felt a tug on my arm. It was Ridley.

“With me,” she said. “Quick, Nicky. Let's go.”

I chased Ridley around to the far side of the deck, away from where Haddock and the producer supervised the grunion run. Eden stood in the moonlight with a martini glass sparkling in her hand.

“Eden's nuts,” Ridley said to me. Then, scowling at Eden, said, “You two don't be long. I'll keep an eye out front.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw Ridley disappear around the edge of the house.

“Eden couldn't do it all night,” I heard Eden say. I looked back around. She had an evocative smile on her face, the same smile I'd seen the day we met. “Eden had to hold you.”

I sat my beer on the edge of the cedar rail and walked to her. Eden sat her glass next to it and wrapped her arms around my waist, burying her head in my chest.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” I whispered. The fragrance of her hair was like God had created the sea just for her. “We can be in Florida tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, baby,” she said breathily. “I do love you so. . . . You will take me away, won't you? Far from him?”

There is a thrill like none other I've known. It's the rapture of a reckless stolen moment when the seconds are ticking away and the exhilaration is plaited as tightly in the risk as it is in the romance.

It was a foolish moment.

“What is this?” I heard Emerson Haddock bellow from behind me.

Eden broke free and stepped back and I'll never forget the look on her face, although I didn't think of it at the time. Her eyes romped like a jubilant puppy.

I turned around and Haddock braced his legs apart, stopping about ten feet from us.

“I'm taking her away,” I said coolly.

“You're . . .” He stared into my eyes blankly. “With him, Eden?” he said, still looking at me. “He's a killer . . . . a disgraced policeman running a two-bit real-estate swindle. The authorities are an inch off his heels as I speak.”

Furor rose in my chest, my lip twitched at the corner, my muscles tensed in my midsection. I did want him dead.

Emerson's chin made an arrogant jut forward and that wicked twist I'd seen the night he sicced his boys on me worked on his mouth.

He started to speak again. “I've notified—”

I brought it in from the hip, throwing all the power my two-hundred-pound frame could muster into the punch. It launched him five feet back into the railing where he flounced liked a Raggedy Ann and sank to the planking. I heard screams in front and behind me but I was already on the councilman.

I remember yelling something about teaching him to do his dirty work himself and hurling merciless blows into his face and body. I remember strong arms scrabbling at my shoulders and neck and me shaking them away while I continued to pummel Haddock. I remember the sharp metallic taste of hatred on my tongue.

I remember Ridley helping me to my feet and telling me to go to the beach to cool off while she took care of it.

The next thing I remember is being wanted for the murder of Los Angeles City Councilman Emerson Haddock.

* * * *

The Times headline read HAS ‘JILTED LOVER’ COP KILLED AGAIN? in boldfaced type. I was flopped on a sagging twin bed inside a room at the X Motel on the outskirts of Lancaster, California, a windblown tract of sand and Joshua trees about sixty-five miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The story went on to give the details of my altercation with Haddock at Ridley's party and my alleged involvement with Eden Folet, Haddock's bride of only nine months. Then it said Haddock was found later that night on his deck in a grizzly scene, brutally murdered.

Eden had been unavailable for comment at press time and Ridley had slammed the door on a clutch of television reporters. The story showed a photo of me in LAPD blues.

* * * *

I had walked the beach for an hour and returned to the party, where several of the guests treated me like a hero and the movie producer avoided me like I wanted to renegotiate my contract. Ridley was a little high, but she made me a drink and pulled me onto the sofa, telling me Eden would be back after getting Haddock settled. She seemed to think there wouldn't be police. Haddock would be up for reelection soon and wouldn't want that kind of press. We agreed it was best I go home and wait for her call.

I showered and went to bed when I arrived at my home on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills, at around two-thirty.

I awakened around four in the morning with the sweats and an odd sensation pressing into my chest.

I poured a drink at my living room bar, idly flipped on the set, sat down on the sofa, kept it muted. The news had a full-screen picture of Emerson Haddock staring out from behind the reporter.

I hit the sound and knew I was in trouble.

I flicked the remote and surfed through until I landed on Harvey Levin standing in front of the Haddock condo in Malibu. A handyman was speaking, saying he witnessed the scene just before the police arrived, and that he had been summoned by Ms. Folet from the guesthouse next-door, where he had been living for two months.

“I ain't never seen anything. . . .” The handyman winced. “There was this hose, one a them air-compressor jobs like at the gas pumps. . . . It was stuffed where the sun don't shine, if you get that—air runnin’ full blast.”

When questioned further, the man said Haddock's face was black and blue and swollen and his head in a pool of blood. The implication, said the investigative reporter, was that Haddock had been knocked unconscious and sodomized with the air hose, literally blowing his intestines apart.

I clicked off the television.

After Ridley's guests had broken off the fight I trundled onto the beach but I had seen Haddock standing to his feet as I stumbled down the steps. He was bloodied but fine, a far cry from anything approaching dead, anyway. I had probably broken his nose and blackened his eyes but had not done any severer damage. I was certain of that.

Eden had been filling scuba tanks that afternoon when I met her at the house. My fingerprints and DNA would be all over the place.

I ran like hell.

* * * *

I've heard it said that you don't do time, it does you. That is certainly the case on the Row at Quentin. Death Row is like working worry beads with a gun against your head. Worrying is the fun part.

Terry Hensley, the butch boy toy who took me to Eden on that final day, was found murdered in Elysian Park the week before my trial, and thus was unable to testify as to why my fingerprints and DNA were found on Emerson Haddock's compressor and deck. The authorities said Hensley had been working a glory hole in the men's room there. They never turned up his killer and it wasn't until later I figured out that Eden and Ridley must have recruited Terry to murder Haddock.

On June ‘6, 2008, Ridley Notions married Eden Folet in a formal two-ring ceremony at a small Unitarian church in the Hollywood Hills. Luc Pierre the chef gave Eden away. When Haddock's will was read, Eden was the sole heir to his thirty-million-dollar fortune.

Copyright © 2012 by Grant O'Neill

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: CRUEL COAST
by Scott Mackay

Scott Mackay has had more than fifty stories published in magazines such as EQMM, AHMM, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He's a winner of the Arthur Ellis, Canada's premier crime-fiction award, as well as the Okanagan Award for literary short fiction. He's authored some dozen science-fiction and mystery novels. The latest,The Miser of Cherry Hill (Severn House), stars Dr. Deacon, the protagonist of his 2011 EQMM story “The Girl With the Golden Hair."

The Village Swarts,

Cape Colony,

Southern Africa, 1806

Mrs. Page was shocked to see me again after so many years. She sat on a garden bench outside the widow Doorenspleet's farmhouse, seven years older, a scrape on her forehead, a bandage on her hand, her locks now devoid of the fussy ringlets I remembered so well from our courtship days. So astonished was she to see me again that she stared as if I were a carriage-and-six thundering straight at her.

As she struggled to recover herself, she said, “I of course heard of your civil advancement in Swellendam, Commissioner Rivers, but never expected to find you here, on this cruel coast. What tricks fate will sometimes play.”

I regarded her evenly. “I must confess, I had some warning you'd been a passenger aboard the Ancaster.”

She arched her pretty brow. “A ship's manifest was recovered, then?”

“Not a manifest, madam, but your old music book, Un Concert de Famille, the volume I gave you for your twenty-first birthday.” An ungenerous tone crept into my voice. “Do you remember the pencil inscription I made on the title page?” I shook my head with elaborate self-effacement. “How silly of me to make such a solemn profession of love, especially when you turned out to be so inconstant.”

She glanced away, disconcerted by my accusation, not responding to the charge but instead focusing on the unexpected marine salvage of her music album. “We had so many lovely hours playing from that book. I'm surprised it didn't deteriorate in the seawater.” She paused. “I suppose the governor sent you to investigate the wreck, Commissioner?”

“He did.”

She clasped her hands together. “Then have you heard any word of my husband? I've been ever so anxious.”

I adopted my official tone. “I'm afraid I have some bad news on that score, Mrs. Page. I regret to report that your husband did not survive. He came ashore without breath, and without life. My deepest sympathies for your loss. Villagers in Swarts recovered his body this morning.”

She took this upsetting intelligence with a lifting of her hands to her mouth. I gave her a few moments, then delivered the rest of the unhappy details.

“Madam, it is also my grim duty to inform you that my constable in Swarts has determined that your husband's death was suspiciously different from the deaths of the thirty-nine other deceased passengers. And so, as well as investigating the wreck, I've been commissioned by Governor Baird to deliver a full accounting of your husband's troubling demise.”

Color climbed to her face. She leaned forward, her spine straightening, the corners of her lips pulling back, her doll-like blue eyes growing wide with incomprehension. “I fail to understand, Commissioner.” Her voice shook as she struggled for control. “Did the sea not claim him like so many others? Was he not drowned and washed upon the shore?”

“Madam, though he was, as you say, washed upon the shore, both my constable and the doctor in Swarts have determined that he was not drowned, but died while still aboard the Ancaster. They've concluded it wasn't the sea that killed him but something of a more sinister nature. The doctor checked his lungs and found no seawater, so he couldn't have drowned. And because of the singular manner of your husband's arrival upon the shore, my constable suspects not a watery death but one more likely caused by foul play.”

This brought several seconds of fretful silence. “And, pray tell, Commissioner, in what manner did my husband arrive?”

I gave her the last sorrowful fact. “Madam, he arrived in a box.”

She paused, her eyes widening. “A box?”

“The postmaster's mailbox, to be precise. The doctor in Swarts tells me he was dismembered with his own surgical saw so that he would fit, this after he was dispatched with one of the ship's fire axes. It grieves me deeply to bring you such news, madam.”

Her color turned from its previous rosy shade to the paler hues associated with the wild mushrooms we used to hunt together in the forests fringing Table Mountain all those years ago, when she had purportedly been in love with me.

In a stiff tone, I said, “Madam, I'll fetch water.”

* * * *

I retreated to the farmhouse.

The widow Doorenspleet, a stout, sturdy farm woman of sixty, submerged the dipper into the water pail for me. I brought the dipper back to Mrs. Page.

She continued to struggle with the tragic news. For several minutes I said nothing, delaying the questions I had to ask and the inquiries I had to make.

When she was at last ready to drink, I handed the dipper to her and she took small, distracted sips. I told her I had to pose some questions to her, ones that might upset her, but which, as the king's representative in the District of Swellendam, I was duty-bound to ask.

“Of course, Commissioner.” She returned the dipper to me. “This is all so distressing. I feared he was dead, but not dead in this particularly upsetting manner.”

I put the dipper on the bench. I studied her. I could hardly believe I was sitting next to her again. Did she have any idea of just how much I had once loved her, and how dashed I had been when she had thrown me over for Sergeant Mason? I suppressed these thoughts and feelings, and struggled to maintain my official tone.

“Can you tell me the last time you saw Dr. Page?”

She cast an anxious glance toward the hawthorn hedge where, behind the leaves, I made out the azure sea. “The night of the storm. He'd gone to sick bay to see to our patients.” She elaborated. “Our patients are of a special order, Commissioner. We were transporting four of them, each with various mental maladies.”

“And Molly Morris among them?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You've learned she was saved?”

“I have.” Yes, that was better. Stay on track and forget what happened between us seven years ago. “My constable in Swarts tells me she's staying here at Doorenspleet Farm with you. I'm so happy she survived.”

Anne Page nodded, but now seemed distracted, and even disturbed. “Of the four, Molly is perhaps our most difficult patient.” She looked at me with sudden urgency. “She's a violent patient, Commissioner Rivers. So violent, we could no longer handle her at our hospital in Mauritius. And that's why, along with the other three, we were transporting her.”

“And where, precisely, were you taking her?”

“To Bethlem Royal Hospital in London.”

“Bedlam?”

“Just so. My husband has had to use a firm hand with Molly on several occasions, Commissioner Rivers, and I'm afraid Molly has come to resent it.” Her voice took on a more pronounced tremor. “And in light of the way you tell me my husband has died, I feel I should point out that there has been a recent escalation in Molly's resentment toward the doctor. Molly often hit the doctor, and the doctor had to respond with his cane. In fact, I should tell you that there occurred two particularly regrettable exchanges in the hours before the storm. During the first, I was next-door in our stateroom. I went to assist.” She touched the scrape on her forehead. “I received this injury when Molly pushed me against one of the ship's supporting timbers.” She motioned at the hawthorn hedge where, through a gap, I spied a large woman pacing back and forth. “There she is now.”

I looked. Molly Morris wore a bonnet and a striped frock that looked borrowed from the widow Doorenspleet, was in her late thirties, stocky, broad-shouldered, with tiny, close-set eyes, a head that was disproportionately small to her large body, and expansive, mannish hands.

Mrs. Page said, “She means to be gentle, Commissioner, but sometimes she simply can't control her temper.”

“And so you and your husband regained control of her during the first encounter?”

“Yes.”

“And then there was a second incident?”

“Closer to the time of the storm. The doctor had been playing cards with officers from the King's Eighty-Seventh Royal Regiment of Sappers and Miners. I was in our stateroom. The doctor had told me previously that after the card game, he would check on Molly again. I'm not sure what happened, but in light of what you've told me, I can't help thinking Molly might have killed him. She's certainly large enough to wield the fire axe.”

“Has Molly told you anything?”

“Only that she argued with the doctor the second time.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“What about this card game? You say your husband was playing with some officers from the King's Eighty-Seventh.”

“Yes.”

“I heard that one of those officers survived. Corporal Edward Ridgway.”

A smile came to her face. “I was so happy to learn that he was saved. The rector says he's at Dundas Farm recovering from a broken leg.”

“You don't suppose he was playing cards with your husband on the night of the sinking? He could be a witness.”

“As I say, I was in our stateroom.”

“When your husband came to check on Molly the second time, did you hear any disturbance from sick bay?”

She shook her head. “By that time, the gale was rising. All I heard was the wind.”

“And did you grow concerned when your husband didn't return after a reasonable time?”

She nodded. “I went to look for him. I was surprised to find sailors climbing the ratlines and unfurling the sails. The wind was rising. They told me the captain was concerned that the Ancaster was drifting too close to the reef, that he wanted to make headway into deeper water before we ran aground. We'd been stuck there a week waiting for a weather change to take us west. While the sailors were up on the ratlines, the wind grew ten times stronger. The captain rang the alarm. The first big wave struck. The ship was thrown upon the reef and I heard a crack below. I saw Sergeant Dobbie, another of the officers from the regiment, lowering the port-side lifeboat, and thought my husband might be with him, but he wasn't.” She paused. “Tell me, Commissioner, is there any sign of Sergeant Dobbie? When the rector informed me of Corporal Ridgway's survival, he had no news of the sergeant.”

I shook my head. “Alas, Mrs. Page, the search for Sergeant Dobbie continues. Did you find the doctor anywhere about the deck?”

“No.”

“Nor in sick bay?”

“No.”

“Was Molly in sick bay?”

“Yes.”

I jotted this in my notebook. “Did you see any evidence of a crime in sick bay?”

“The whole was flooded with seawater from the large waves by then.” She shook her head, tears coming to her eyes. “Then we suffered another great knock against the reef. I was thrown to my knees. Corporal Ridgway, who by that time was lowering the other boat, saw my distress and came to assist me. He locked his arm around me and removed me to the second boat. I begged him to help find my husband, but he said the ship was going to capsize any minute.” She took out a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes, shook her head, and wept. “Little did we know that half of us would be drowned.”

* * * *

Molly Morris, perhaps drawn by the sound of Mrs. Page's weeping, emerged from behind the hawthorn hedge.

“It looks like Molly is concerned about you,” I said.

Mrs. Page looked up from her weeping. “Yes. She dotes on me.”

“Could you call her over, please?”

“Of course, Commissioner.”

Mrs. Page called Molly and she approached us, head bowed.

“Molly, this is Commissioner Rivers. He's come to ask about the wreck.” With a catch in her voice, she said, “And he also has some questions about my husband. It appears Dr. Page might have met his end before the Ancaster sank. The constable in Swarts is suggesting foul play. What that means, Molly, is that someone might have killed the doctor.” Mrs. Page's voice took on an accusatory tone. “And as you were the last to see him, and as earlier in the day you attacked the doctor not once but twice, we believe you have some explaining to do.”

The poor simpleton wouldn't look up. “Ma'am, I didn't lay a finger on Dr. Page that second time. All we did was argue.”

“Are you sure, Molly? Lying's not going to help.”

“Ma'am, nobody hit anybody that second time. All I did was ask him for me opium because me head was hurting again. That first time, when you was there, he didn't give it to me, did he? The second time, he gave it to me and I settled right down.”

I stepped forward. “Molly, do you and Dr. Page fight often?”

“Only when me temper gets the better of me, sir.”

“And were you fighting that second time he came to see you?”

“No, sir. Only the first time. And only because he wouldn't give me my opium.”

I tried a different approach. “Do you know where Dr. Page keeps his surgical saw, Molly?”

The woman's face filled with fear. “Course I do, sir. We're all afraid of it.”

I pressed the point. “Do you remember having the saw in your hands on the night of the storm?”

Molly thought about this. “I don't remember much of anything after the doctor gave me my opium. I go all rubbery and stop thinking when I have me opium.”

I paused to think. Perhaps in an opium-induced fog she had killed the doctor? “Do you remember putting him in the postmaster's mailbox?”

Her brow rose in shock. “Sir, we're forbidden to go anywhere near that mailbox. The doctor said he'd cane us if we did.”

I glanced at Mrs. Page. “The postmaster's mailbox was in sick bay?”

She nodded. “The Ancaster is of the barque class, Commissioner, and so quite small. Sick bay did double-duty for many things.”

I turned to Molly. “Molly, a grave capital offense has been committed, and it's my responsibility as the king's representative in Swellendam to get to the bottom of it. I want you to search your memory carefully. If after a day you have some recollection of how the doctor met his end, please send for me.” I glanced at Mrs. Page, then back at Molly, deciding that it was perhaps time to conclude my visit at Doorenspleet farm. “I'm staying at the inn. God is watching you, Molly, and a confession from you now might make His judgment more merciful when it comes time for your last reckoning with St. Peter.”

* * * *

As Mrs. Page was unable to determine whether Corporal Edward Ridgway had been at the card game, I had no choice but to get on my horse and ride to Dundas Farm to question the man.

On the way, I tried to quell my unruly feelings for Anne Page. But as much as I tried, I kept recalling how she had thrown me over for Sergeant Mason; how, near the end, whenever I came to visit, the servants always insisted she was out, even though I could hear her playing the pianoforte in the music room; and I would never forget how I had caught Sergeant Mason kissing her under the acacia boughs in her father's garden the day before she finally told me I couldn't visit her anymore, that she was going to marry Sergeant Mason, and it wouldn't be proper.

Much to my consternation, Corporal Ridgway turned out to be a tall, handsome officer of the Sergeant Mason mold. He had a lean face, sandy hair, and eyes the color of the sea. His broken leg, raised on a few pillows, was taped in a splint.

The first words out of his mouth, spoken in an urgent tone, were, “Is Mrs. Page safe?”

With this, I couldn't help but regard him with some suspicion. “She is safe, Corporal, though naturally shaken.”

He sank with relief to his bed. Why the huge concern? I had to take note. How well did they know each other? Was this another soldier Anne had fallen in with? Or was my old heartache tormenting me with cruel imaginings again?

“I'm so relieved,” said the corporal. “And by the way, what of Sergeant Dobbie? I saw him lower the other boat.”

“Alas, the other boat has not been recovered. A half-dozen fishermen are at sea right now looking for it.”

The corporal's brow settled. “Then may God have mercy upon his soul.”

I proceeded to outline for him how I was not only investigating the wreck, but also the unnatural demise of Dr. Page.

He surveyed me the way he might an opponent on the battlefield, wary, and with a degree of belligerence. “And you're sure the doctor was murdered?” His lips tightened and he looked out the window, where an old gray nag nibbled grass in the yard below. “I believe the victims came ashore in pieces, all torn up by the reef. Was not the doctor in like condition?”

I tapped my notebook. “We have irrefutable evidence, Corporal, that he was murdered.” I raised my chin. “I understand you might have been with him the night he was killed, and that you were perhaps one of his companions in the card game.”

The corporal composed himself and gave the matter some thought.

By and by, he said, “Yes, I was at the card table that night, Commissioner. And some of the other fellows from the regiment were there as well. We were all bored. The wind hadn't changed for a week. We were stranded, windless, by that infernal reef.”

“And that was the last time you saw Dr. Page? At the card game?”

“Yes.”

“And did there seem to be anything troubling him?”

“As a matter of fact, there was an unpleasant row between the doctor and Sergeant Dobbie. The row continued outside afterward. All quite suspicious, now that you tell me of his murder.”

“And what was the row about?”

The corporal shrugged. “I'm afraid the doctor lost a considerable sum to Sergeant Dobbie, nearly twenty pounds. The doctor didn't take to it kindly because Dobbie has a notorious reputation as a cheat. He asked for his money back. The sergeant took exception and refused. The doctor left, telling us he wasn't a man to play with cheats. After that, Dobbie sat brooding for a long time, drinking dram after dram, getting drunker and drunker. He finally got up and said he had to put the doctor to rights, that he didn't appreciate having his good name smeared. Not that Dick Dobbie was in a blind rage, mind. No, he was frightfully controlled. But I've seen him put a man to rights when he's controlled, and it's never a pretty sight.”

I jotted this down. “And that's the last time you saw the sergeant?”

“No, I saw him later, when he was lowering the other boat.”

“And the doctor was nowhere in sight?”

“Quite vanished.”

As I rode back to Swarts at sunset, I understood that over and above Molly Morris I now had a second suspect, Sergeant Richard Dobbie, of the King's 87th Royal Regiment of Sappers and Miners. After all, the sergeant had gone to set the doctor to rights, not in a blind rage, mind, but in a frightfully controlled and unpretty manner.

Yet I couldn't help thinking how easily Mrs. Page had blamed Molly, and how quickly Corporal Ridgway had pointed his finger at Sergeant Dobbie. I also continued to puzzle over—and be suspicious of—the corporal's urgent concern for Mrs. Page, how he had asked me about her safety immediately upon my arrival at Dundas Farm. It made me wonder once again if Mrs. Page had thrown her lot in with another solider. And it was all I could do to stop my hands from shaking.

* * * *

My suspicions about Mrs. Page and the corporal found substance in a most unusual manner the next day.

A large packet of letters came ashore in an oilskin sack, perhaps the exact letters ejected from the postmaster's mailbox to make room for Dr. Page.

Of these, one in particular implicated the pair, written by Mrs. Page to her sister, Elizabeth, addressed to her sister's home in India, a missive due for the return ship in Cape Town before the Ancaster set sail up the west coast of Africa for Britain. I shook my head with some melancholy. Elizabeth in India, Anne in Mauritius, and myself in Swellendam—how the old Cape Town crowd had sadly scattered.

I broke the letter's seal and read.

After some run-of-the-mill news about Anne's various daily concerns in Port Louis, I came to a most disturbing passage.

“I must confess, dear sister, I have formed a passionate attachment to Corporal Edward Ridgway of the King's 87th Royal Regiment.” My hands tightened around the correspondence. I tried to push my own feelings aside and take a dispassionate view, but further along I read, “The love I feel for Corporal Ridgway is like the love I felt for Sergeant Mason, but much stronger. If only there was some way Eddie and I could remove the impediment of my husband. Not that I would ever dream of such a thing, as Dr. Page was my pillar and support when he tried to save Sergeant Mason during the cholera outbreak. But I see now that I was perhaps a fool to fall in love with him solely because of his efforts to nurse the man I really loved back to health. How I fancied the doctor a hero as he fought valiantly to rescue Sergeant Mason from the disease. And how foolishly I surrendered my hand to him after he had failed. Now I'm stuck with him and feel toward him the way I felt toward poor old Harry Rivers. Do you remember Harry Rivers, Beth? He was much like a barnacle, wasn't he, clinging and clinging, and entirely obtuse about the way I wanted him to leave me be. I fear I now regard the good doctor the same way. I would rather he just disappear into these sea mists we've been having.”

I couldn't restrain my anger. Or my alarm. Seven years ago, I had been under the impression Anne had held me in some affection. Now I was a barnacle? Now I was poor old Harry Rivers, clinging and clinging, when at one time I was sure I had been the man she would someday marry? Yes, Sergeant Mason had at last won that particular race, and tragic that the cholera should take him one short year into his marriage, but had I not even been a contender? Had she truly wanted me to leave her be, when we had spent so many happy hours at the pianoforte together?

I looked at her handwriting and remembered all the brooding I had done in the last seven years, all the second-guessing, the torturous questions I had asked myself in the middle of the night, wondering if I had done something wrong, or whether it had just been plain cruelty on her part. I had made myself sick with it. Still did. And for what? So that she could characterize me in this letter to her sister as a troublesome cirriped that wouldn't let go?

I shook my head and took the letter into evidence.

Despite the personal pain this correspondence caused, I had to put all the old Cape Town feelings aside. I had to be the ever-objective Commissioner Rivers and see this letter for what it really was: further proof that over and above my two existing suspects I now had to count Anne Page and Corporal Ridgway as my third party of ne'er-do-wells.

* * * *

I received word an hour later that Sergeant Richard Dobbie, the officer who had allegedly set the doctor to rights, had been saved and, along with two other survivors, Timothy and Isobel Collis, children, was now returned to shore and receiving care and rest at a church in Pearly Beach, a village ten miles up the coast.

I arrived hot and dusty a few hours later, surrendered my horse to the stableman, and proceeded to the church.

The local rector showed me to a makeshift hospital in the church cellar, where I found my three survivors.

Timothy and Isobel Collis, eight and six, played with seashells. Sergeant Dobbie was asleep, looking badly exhausted.

Leaving Dobbie to rest for the time being, I started with the children.

I learned they didn't know much about Dr. Page. But much to my surprise, Timothy, the eight-year-old, gave me an entirely different characterization of Sergeant Dobbie than Corporal Ridgway had. To Timothy, Dobbie wasn't the controlled, homicidal, cheating soldier who had gone to set the doctor to rights, but perhaps the true hero of the Ancaster marine tragedy.

“He spotted my sister and me clinging to a spar, sir. The current pushed him toward us. He leaned out and pulled us in. Then the same current pushed us out to sea. There was nine of us altogether, seven children, one old lady, and Sergeant Dobbie. Sergeant Dobbie rowed all night and finally brought us to an island. The fisherman found us on the island.”

“And where are the other survivors now?”

“On farms, sir. The sergeant saved us all.”

Dobbie woke an hour later.

He looked genuinely alarmed and saddened to hear of Dr. Page's murder. “It's a terrible shame, sir. Not a kinder soul one could find.”

“You were at the card game?”

“I was, sir.”

“And is it true the doctor accused you of cheating, and that you went to set him to rights after he had left the table?”

Dobbie's eyes widened and he said, “Who told you that?”

“Corporal Ridgway. He as good as accused you of murdering the doctor. He says you followed him onto the deck, and that you were going to set him to rights, and that's the last anybody saw of him.”

Despite his debilitated condition, Dobbie rose on his elbows, and in a voice thick with indignation said, “Corporal Ridgway is a liar, sir. It was Corporal Ridgway himself who went after the doctor.”

This, then, sounded more like the truth. “You saw the corporal go after Page?”

“I did, sir. And he was in a drunken rage. The fellows and me decided something had to be done about it before he hurt the doctor. Especially because it wasn't just the cards he was mad about. So I went to put a stop to it.”

My brow rose. “Something else was bothering the corporal besides the cards?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Page. They were an item. Everybody on board knew except for the poor old doctor.” I had to struggle to maintain my composure. The sergeant continued, “The corporal confided to me that he was scheming to take Mrs. Page away from the doctor, and that the doctor was making it deucedly difficult for him, and that he was planning to do something about it before the Ancaster docked in Southampton. He told me Mrs. Page was unhappy in her marriage and just wanted to get out of it any way she could.” Dobbie eased back onto his cot, a look of puzzlement coming to his eyes. “Strange, but I don't entirely understand what I saw when I finally found the corporal. Certainly he was nowhere near the doctor, so I'm not about to accuse him of murder, the way he has with me. But I did see something odd.”

“And what did you see, Sergeant?”

Dobbie's left shoulder twitched in a perplexed shrug. “The corporal was on the quarterdeck emptying packets of mail from the postmaster's mailbox into the bay. I says to him, ‘Eddie, what in the name of Creation do you think you're doing?’ And he says back to me, ‘Dick, if you value your hide, you won't say a word of this to anybody.’ So I ask him, ‘But Eddie, why are you throwing the king's mail overboard?’ Then he says some words I daren't repeat in front of these youngsters.” Dobbie shook his head. “I have no idea why he was throwing the mail away, sir, but if you can't catch him on the doctor's murder, you can at least clap him in irons for tampering with His Majesty's post.”

* * * *

The next day, I found Anne sitting with the elderly Mrs. Doorenspleet in the parlor at Doorenspleet Farm. The ladies were tatting lace. The only way I could control myself was to adopt the dour veneer of a bureaucrat, and to clamp down on the bitterness that was threatening to unseat me. I was here to solve a murder, not settle a score.

As the servant finished presenting me and retreated to the kitchen, Mrs. Page put her lace down, rose, and gave me a bow, inclining her head from the neck, sketching a curtsey with her skirt.

“Commissioner Rivers.” She lifted her head, her eyes apprehensive. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I gave her a bow, holding my three-cornered hat under my arm, fighting to keep my emotions in check. “How do you do, Mrs. Page?” I turned to Mrs. Doorenspleet. “Madam, forgive me, but may I have a word alone with Mrs. Page?”

The old farm widow, detecting my seriousness, gave me a nod, and rose from her chair. “Of course, Commissioner.” She gathered up her lace and left the room.

Once she was gone, I motioned at the divan. “Please, Mrs. Page. Sit. I fear you're not fully recovered. Your complexion has grown pale.”

She stared at me, then took her seat. “Commissioner Rivers, whatever is the matter?”

I looked at her, saddened that I should still be so captivated by her. “Mrs. Page, some disturbing evidence connected to your husband's murder has come to light.” She looked pretty in the sea light coming through the window. How could someone so enchanting be so cruel? “I'm afraid it implicates Corporal Ridgway.” I took a seat on the upholstered bench across from her. “And you.”

Her shoulders rose. She looked to one side, where on a mahogany shelf sat a collection of ceramic figurines, mostly dogs, a few horses, and one fisherman. She grew even paler.

She turned back to me, her clear blue eyes now fretful. “I have no idea what evidence you mean, Commissioner.”

I shook my head. “To begin with, I found your letter to Elizabeth in a packet of mail that came ashore with the wreckage. You make explicit in that letter your romantic interest in Corporal Ridgway, and also reveal your wish to see your husband gone. ‘Vanished into the sea mists,’ I believe were your exact words.” I shook my head. “In my official capacity as the king's representative, and in light of what's happened to your husband, I view this letter with grave concern.”

For several seconds, she said nothing. Then she mounted a weak defense. “My letter was meant for a private audience of one, Commissioner Rivers. Surely it would be wrong to interpret it in an official capacity.”

I sighed. “Even without the letter, Anne, I'm afraid you and the corporal remain under serious suspicion.”

She blinked twice. “I hardly see how.”

I took a deep breath, feeling once again the old humiliation, from when she had turned me away from her door that last time. I put my hat on the table, and sat back.

“Put simply, Mrs. Page, Sergeant Dobbie has survived. He's convalescing in a church ten miles up the coast, and I've had an opportunity to talk to him. He's proved a most useful witness. He says he saw the corporal throwing mail overboard from the postmaster's mailbox on the night of the murder. He also tells me that you and the corporal became amorously involved on the ship, and that the corporal had plans for nullifying your husband as an impediment to your union before the Ancaster docked in Southampton. Furthermore, the sergeant informs me the corporal chased your husband from the card table after the game, and pursued him with the full intent of harming him.” I leaned forward. “Taking these factors into account, I believe your only option left, Anne, is to confess.” I shrugged. “I'm hoping you'll tell me Ridgway acted alone.”

Her hands came together, and her eyes grew marblelike in their stillness. A few moments later, the corners of her lips pulled back, and distress suffused her pretty features. Her shoulders sank and she shook her head.

“You may understand why I was hesitant to tell you anything at first.”

It didn't take me long to surmise what she was getting at. “Because of Sergeant Mason?”

She looked away. “I was cruel to you. I admit it. I led you on, and that was wrong of me. I should have considered your feelings more thoroughly. But you played the pianoforte so well.” I could hardly believe it. She had kept me around only because I played the pianoforte? “I know how badly used you must have felt, and so I wasn't sure that if I told you the truth about my husband you wouldn't somehow use it as a way to punish me for sending you away so callously once I accepted Sergeant Mason's hand.”

I stared, then admonished her in my official capacity. “Just give up the corporal, Anne, that's all I ask. I know he must have acted alone.”

After another few seconds, she rose and went to the fireplace. “I must revise my story, then, Commissioner.” She glanced at me, her eyes glistening with intensifying apprehension. “I misrepresented events at first, but only because I was so frightened of how, when we first met, you so pointedly told me how you had recovered my music album, Un Concert de Famille, and reminded me—again pointedly—of the sad inscription you had made in it.”

I was stunned. My penciled inscription—a proclamation of my profoundest love—was sad to her now? Send me to Bedlam and throw away the key! “Anne, as long as you didn't have anything to do with the murder itself, I'll show mercy.”

She wrung her hands. “As God is my witness, Harry, I never raised a hand against my husband.” She paused to get her thoughts in order. “I'd gone to bed. My husband was playing cards with the officers—this much is true.” She looked away. “Perhaps I tried to implicate Molly as the culprit. I did this only because I love the corporal dearly, and was afraid of losing him if he got caught. And so I rashly blamed our patient, hoping to divert you.”

Maintaining my official role became more difficult than ever as she professed her love for the corporal. In a dry and unpleasant voice, I asked, “So how exactly must you revise your story, then, Anne? And where precisely does it diverge from your original one?”

She gave me a worried look. “It diverges where my husband went to check on Molly that second time. Afterward, I heard Corporal Ridgway come along the deck. He and my husband got into a fight. This was a half-hour before the storm struck. They were fighting about the card game. And me. I heard them from our stateroom. It was late. The conflict escalated. I finally heard my husband call for help. A moment later, everything went quiet. I put on my dressing gown and went outside. When I got there . . .” Her voice grew tremulous, and her eyes moistened. “When I got there, I discovered my husband dead from an axe blow to the head.”

Mrs. Page now cast a glance out the window to the sea. For the longest time she wouldn't move her eyes away, seemed entranced by the deep blue pan of the bay, the same bay that had brought tragedy to so many a short number of nights ago.

She finally turned to me. “What I'm trying to tell you, Harry, is that I arrived after the deed was done. I swear I did.” Her eyes gained the focus of twin storm lamps. “Eddie was the one who swung the axe, not me. Eddie was the one who killed him. I had nothing to do with it. Surely you can protect me under those circumstances. Oh, please, Harry, if our time together in Cape Town means anything to you, I beg you, spare me, for I'm innocent in the whole matter.”

But I couldn't help thinking how easily she was now throwing over Corporal Ridgway—as easily as she had thrown me over seven years ago. “What did you do once you found your husband dead?”

Blundering, with no real comprehension of the law, she said, “Corporal Ridgway asked me to help him.”

“And did you?” I raised my finger. “Take care here, Anne. Additional dissimulations will make matters worse.”

She nodded innocently. “I won't lie to you, Harry.” Apparently, she had forgotten how she had lied to me about Sergeant Mason. “I helped Eddie drag Charles to the nearest scupper so his blood would drain overboard. Then I covered him with some spare rigging so no one would see him, and Eddie told me to leave. He didn't want me to have anything else to do with it. He wanted to spare me. He loves me, you see. And I love him.”

I tried to stay on track, but with the utterance of these last words I lost all rein over my jealousy. Only with the greatest effort was I able to ask one last germane question. “Why the postmaster's mailbox, Anne? Why not just throw him overboard?”

She looked back to the bay, and in a softer voice said, “Because Eddie was nervous about disposing of him so close to Swarts. We were barely a mile out. Had Eddie dumped Charles by the reef, the doctor might have drifted to shore, and we would have been discovered. So Eddie decided to wait. The ship's barometer was falling and he said we were due for a change in the weather soon. With fresh wind we would be on our way into deeper water, and we could dispose of him then. Little did we know that within the hour a storm would sink the Ancaster.”

I took a few moments.

From an absolute moral standpoint, I should have shown clemency. She was a silly love-dazzled young woman who had come under the sway of a scoundrel. I should have granted her God's great mercy. And maybe if I had never met Anne Page in Cape Town seven years ago, I would have been a more merciful man. But my bitterness had festered, had become all-encompassing, and I convinced myself on the technicality, the unmitigated fact that she had participated, had moved her husband and covered him with some spare rigging. Since such was the case, I judged that the Crown must have its vengeance. The Crown, I decided, would teach her a lesson once and for all.

* * * *

In the village square, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans met, I saw two gallows rising into the air. From these, my dear Anne and the wretched Ridgway twisted gently in a salty offshore breeze.

A cape griffon, a local species of vulture, landed on Mrs. Page's gallows.

“Ho, there!” I clapped my hands. “Off with you!”

The bird lumbered into the sky, losing a black feather in its ascent. I watched it retreat until it was a speck.

Then I rubbed my fingers over Anne's music book, Un Concert de Famille. I opened the book to a selection called “Dance of the Wood Nymphs,” where I saw in faint pencil Anne's precious marginalia, notes to herself on how the piece should be played. I studied one comment in particular, “Harry adores these eight bars.” I hummed them. In that music I recalled all the sweetness of my time with her. It brought to mind her father's music room in the Pampoenkraal District of Cape Town: the caged canaries in the corner, the walnut box-grand pianoforte with the faded ivory keys, and the smell of Anne's rosewater-scented hair under my nose as I turned pages for her.

I closed her music book and held it close to my breast.

I felt as if I were holding Anne, and that I was now going to hold her forever.

Love was so blissful when possession was complete. And it was especially so when it was made irrevocable by death.

I looked out at the sea, my indifferent accomplice.

I gave it a nod of gratitude for finally bringing Anne home to me.

At sunset, I had some farmers take Mrs. Page down.

I decreed to these same farmers that Ridgway should hang for another three days, and that no one was to keep the griffons away from him.

Copyright © 2012 by Scott Mackay

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: SHAME THE DEVIL
by James T. Shannon

* * * *

Art by Laurie Harden

* * * *

A winner of the Al Blanchard Award from the New England Mystery Writers (for a story that featured the same series character as this tale, Sergeant Gilbert Souza), James. T. Shannon makes his EQMM debut this month. Previously, his fiction has appeared in AHMM and the mystery anthology Still Waters. The Massachusetts author's byline can also be found on pieces for Mad Magazine, TV Guide, Scholastic, and essays for the Sunday supplements to The Providence Journal and The Boston Herald.

Someone had left a Boston paper on the diner counter so I slid it over and began turning pages. And there was his face, staring out at me.

“The coffee okay, Sergeant Souza?” Kate, the weekend waitress I'd once helped with an overenthusiastic customer, must have heard my sharp intake of breath.

“Coffee's fine, Kate. Fine.” I was still a little unnerved, even though the headline assured me I was looking at a picture of a dead man. Long-Buried Fall River Body Identified. It was Deme, all right. I didn't need the name Demetrio Cabral captioned below the picture to know that. Same wild hair. Same crazy Charles Manson eyes. Same long scar on his left cheek, a ragged zigzag from his hairline to the corner of his pinched and angry lips. Deme Cabral. The Deme could have been a nickname for Demetrio, but everyone who knew him meant it as a shortened form of the Portuguese word demente. And that means just what you think it does.

I'd heard about some contractors finding a body awhile ago in a heavily wooded area near the state forest. They'd been digging a foundation for a new house in a clearing and had to stop when the backhoe bucket came up with a skull. After a more cautious police department exhumation of the rest of the skeleton, initial reports estimated the body had been buried about twelve years. Cause of death, though still not determined, had centered on what appeared to be a bullet hole in the front of the skull. Yep, that'll do it every time.

I had only paid attention to the stories when they first found the body because, though I live in Putnam, a Boston suburb, Fall River's my hometown. I knew the area they were describing. Also, there was a professional side to my curiosity since I'm a police detective on the Putnam force.

I knew Deme Cabral had disappeared about a dozen years ago, but when I first heard about the unidentified body, I never connected it to him. I'd always figured Deme as the kind of guy who might bury a few bodies out there in the woods but not become one of them.

“Someone you know, Sergeant?” Kate was hesitant as she rested the coffeepot on the counter and leaned over to look at the picture upside-down.

“Yeah, I knew him . . . not a friend,” I added as I noticed her hesitance shift to concern.

“Oh, okay. Here, let me refresh that.”

As she poured the coffee, she turned her head to get a better look. “Eeew, not a face I'd like to see coming in the door.”

“No, and you wouldn't want to meet the guy behind it either.”

It was a mug shot from when Deme got sent to Cedar Junction, the state's pleasantly named maximum-security prison.

“That's a nasty scar he's got there,” Kate said. “You know how he got it?”

I shrugged, and she nodded as if agreeing that there were so many possible ways a guy who looked like that could get a scar that looked like that. As she moved on down the counter, my conscience reminded me that the nuns who had taught me in grammar school would have been disappointed with me. They'd have told me to declare that shrug at my next confession. It was a kind of lie. But it's been years since I've been to confession. And listening to lies is what I do on the job every day.

But sure, I knew exactly how Deme had gotten that scar. How couldn't I? I was the one who had given it to him.

* * * *

I waited all day for the telephone call but it never came. If Boston had given the story this much press, I knew the local Fall River media must have been all over it. That night I called my parents, and they confirmed my suspicions about the coverage. We talked about Deme for a while, and I sort of lied again by implying I'd hardly known him. They never mentioned the scar, but then they never knew how he got it.

But I still didn't get the call I'd been expecting, not even the next morning. So I made the call myself that afternoon.

“Hey, Flora, how you doin'?”

“Good, Gilbert, good.” My cousin sounded cautious, yet not really surprised that I'd called her, though she's always the one to call me.

“You hear about Deme?”

There was a pause, a sigh.

“Sure, Gilbert. It's been on all the TV stations and newspapers.”

She may have thought about pretending she hadn't heard about it, but Flora's the most honest person I've ever known. When we were teens I used to kiddingly call her “Shame the Devil.” A nun we'd each had a couple of years apart at Our Lady of Fatima's elementary school endlessly reminded her students to: “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

“Henry around?” I asked. Her husband, Henry Oliveira.

“No . . . uh, he's on a job. You want to talk to him?”

Henry and I don't talk much and when we do, it tends to get monosyllabic. Henry's kind of old-school. Especially, I've long suspected, in the way he treats his wife.

“No, I wanted to talk to you. I've got a couple of hours free this afternoon. Okay if I come down?”

“'Course, Gilbert. You know you're always welcome here. You comin’ down to see your folks too?”

She was really asking if I was just casually stopping to see her on the way to my parents’ house.

“No, not today.” I was tempted to lie, but not to her.

I can pretty much drive the fifty-some miles down to Fall River on mental cruise control. My parents, grandparents, and a host of other family members live down there, most of them almost feudally in the triple-deckers surrounding Our Lady of Fatima, the oldest Portuguese church in the city. Flora lives in the parish, with Henry and the seven kids they've had in the less than thirteen years they've been married. Every time Flora's been ready to go back to work, she's had another kid instead. And she's only moved about twelve feet—straight up—from the apartment she was raised in. She and Henry have the second floor. Her parents, my aunt and uncle, still live on the first.

I've been on the police force in Putnam for a few years now, been a detective for the last four. Have yet to clear my Glock from my holster for anything more than cleaning or qualifying at the range. But I was almost killed in a fight when I was seventeen. And it all began because of a conversation I'd had with Flora when she was still living with her parents in that first-floor apartment. That was sixteen years ago. She was fifteen and had been dating Deme Cabral for about two months. While he'd been patient, he wanted her to . . . “y'know,” as my cousin would—and did—put it. With Flora, “y'know” could have meant third or even second base. But from her flushed cheeks and panicky look, Deme was obviously swinging for the fences. And he interpreted her “No” to mean “Try harder.”

He also thought she meant “Try harder” a week later when, because of his insistence that they begin having sex, she broke up with him. So he hung around outside her family's tenement, following her every time she left. Not subtly following her either, but two or three feet behind, talking all the way. “I can't even tell you some of the stuff he's been saying, Gilbert.” Her face had flushed just mentioning it.

Deme's talk escalated to his physically stopping her on the street, gripping her by the arms so tightly she had bruises. She showed me the dark marks when she asked me, her older cousin, to speak to him.

Sure, no problem, I'd told her. And I didn't think it would be. I found her stalker as he was crossing the empty summer pavement of Our Lady of Fatima's schoolyard. I was his age but taller and a good twenty pounds heavier. And I'd been in a couple of fights. But I didn't want one. Not with him. Too wiry. Too crazy. Also, I figured I could easily intimidate him into backing away from Flora. Sure, I could intimidate him. About as much as I could intimidate a wolverine. He knew I was Flora's cousin, so he knew why I was looking for him. All I did was lean toward him, about to make my first—and only—point by saying “Flora . . . when he leaped at my throat and grabbed me with both hands. I fell back onto the asphalt, and he was all over me. He was, literally, trying to strangle me. I punched him as hard as I could from that position, knocking him off. Just long enough to catch my breath when I heard a nasty, metallic snick. I froze, realizing what that sound was. And Deme came leaping again with a switchblade in his hand, four or five inches of sharp, steel blade aimed at my throat. He was a lefty, something I probably should have checked first if I thought I might have to fight him. But in a way I was lucky, because I'm right-handed and, when I grabbed his wrist with my right hand, I was able to stop him.

Still, I was panicking. His eyes were feverish, feral. If my right hand weakened, there was no doubt how badly this was all going to end. When I tried rolling him off, that only brought the blade closer to my face. In desperation, I kneed him in the groin. He “oofed” in quick pain, but his doubling over brought that damned blade still closer to my face again. I managed to shift my foot up between us, and I pushed up and away. Hard. Next thing I knew, there was blood all over my chest, and when I looked for the source, I saw half of Deme's face sliced open like a cantaloupe. He must have seen the shock in my eyes because he dropped the knife, slapped a hand against the side of his face, and when he drew it away, looked down at it now covered with his blood. He howled, howled like an angry dog, leaped up, and raced away, his hand held to the side of his face. I could see the blood bubbling between his fingers just before he turned at the schoolyard gate and raced down the street.

I lay there in shock for a while, trying to get my breath back and my mind straight. When I sat up, I took the knife, just in case he came back, and pressed the tip against the asphalt until the bloody blade clicked into the handle. A hell of a future policeman, leaving my fingerprints all over the weapon. But though I knew about prints, I wasn't really thinking about that. I was thinking he had tried to kill me, no two ways about it. That crazy bastard had tried to kill me! When I got out to the street I couldn't see him, and I didn't bother following the trail of blood spots.

I took off my bloody T-shirt, wrapped it in a ball, and tossed it into a dumpster in the alley alongside Cardoza's Market. Threw the switchblade in after it. Not fifty yards from the schoolyard. Again, I would not have made a very successful perp.

Both my parents were at work, so when I got to our second-floor apartment, I washed the rest of the blood off my hands, face, and neck. Then I put on a new shirt and sat near a window, peeking out, waiting for a police car to come screeching, lights and siren on, down the street. Or Deme, with his face sliced open and a shotgun in his hands.

My mom's parents lived a block away. My grandfather, my Portuguese vova, had his own shotgun, an old Remington 32 over and under, and I was tempted to see if I could get my hands on it for self-defense. But at this time of day my grandmother, my vova, was bound to be home. I could slip a fish past a starving cat easier than I could slide any story by her, especially one that would end up with my getting that gun. On the other hand, if I told her what Deme had been trying to force Flora, another of her grandchildren, to do, she'd probably grab that shotgun herself and come running over. Most likely ready to aim it low, at the part of Deme's anatomy that was the source of all the trouble in the first place.

But he didn't show up. I faked sick the next day so I wouldn't have to leave the house to go to my summer job. Faked it the day after that too. But neither Deme nor the police ever came for me. I had called Flora when I first got home after the fight and told her what had happened, downplaying how badly Deme had been cut. I guess I'd been downplaying it in my own mind too. But the papers didn't carry anything about his injury. And television had no reports of a Fall River homicide victim. So far, so good. On the third night, a Saturday just before dark, I left the house and walked by Cardoza's Market. I'd been worrying about that evidence for three days and was planning to bury it in the park. No one around so I slipped into the alley, hoisted myself up, and checked out the dumpster. Empty. It took me a few seconds to realize that this was good. It meant the evidence was already deeply buried in the city dump. His word against mine now. And he was demente. No contest.

Still, by Sunday I felt I had to talk to him about it, find out where we stood. When his mother answered the phone, she told me Demetrio was staying with an uncle in New Bedford. She didn't seem upset—I couldn't imagine what kind of story he'd told her about the cut—and she didn't react when I told her my name. She just said she wasn't sure when he'd be back and did I want the uncle's number. I wrote it down but never used it. A little later Flora called to tell me the neighborhood grapevine had heard about the fight. So someone would let me know when he got back. And I was sure there'd be a lot of teenagers there to watch the rematch.

But Deme was gone that whole summer, and I was off to start college before he came back. Flora wrote to tell me about his return with the scar. Apparently, he'd spent his time in New Bedford working on his uncle's fishing boat. She said he'd called her, but just to apologize for bothering her. He told her to let me know there were no hard feelings.

No hard feelings? I always thought those were the only kind of feelings he ever had . . . well, other than the horny ones he had for my cousin.

Five months later, he almost killed a guy in New Bedford. Wound up with that mug shot and four years at Cedar Junction.

* * * *

Now, sixteen years after the schoolyard fight, twelve years after Deme's body was buried in the woods, my cousin smiled as she opened the door. She still looked in good shape for a woman with seven kids. One of them, four-year-old Theresa, was staring at a cartoon on the big flat-screen in the living room.

“Joseph's taking his afternoon nap,” Flora said, as if to explain why the apartment was so unusually quiet. Oh, right, the older five were all in kindergarten or the early grades over at Our Lady of Fatima.

We sat at the kitchen table over cups of coffee, the baby monitor's white noise at Flora's elbow. She had taken a long time preparing the coffee to go with the queijadas de nata, the small Portuguese cream tarts she had arranged on a plate. She was trying to wait me out, hoping I'd tire of the sound of the monitor or the cartoon cat chasing the cartoon mouse out on the screen in the living room. But I'm used to waiting for someone to tell me what I want to hear, and the silence got to her first.

“So, was there something special you wanted to talk to me about, Gilbert?”

“Deme,” I said.

“What about him?” No anger but no surprise either.

“Did he ever bother you? I mean after that time when I had a fight with him?”

“Bother me? No, he never did. Not again.”

“But did you ever see him again?”

“See him? How could I not see him, Gilbert? When he first came back, he was still living in the neighborhood. ‘Course I saw him sometimes. Then he was away in jail for a while.”

“I'm not playing word games, Flo. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, and I told you. He never bothered me again. Not after you had that fight. Why do you want to know?”

“Because of where they found the body.”

She looked confused. “What about that? Wasn't it somewhere in those woods over near the reservation?”

“Yes. But back in high school a buddy of mine used to go out there hunting rabbits and squirrels with some of his friends. I went with them once. First time I ever fired a gun.”

She nodded, waiting.

“Flo, one of the guys that came with us, one of the guys who used to go out there hunting all the time, often alone, was Henry.”

I was watching carefully for her reaction. She was surprised, yes. But not shocked. No, not even close.

“Deme never bothered me again, Gilbert. Like I told you.”

Meaning Henry had no motive.

“When did you start dating Henry? Your senior year, right?”

“Yes, I was seventeen.”

And married him right after she graduated from high school. First kid ten months later. About twelve years ago.

“Did he know about Deme?”

“'Course he did, Gilbert. He knew why I broke up with Deme too. Knew right from the beginning that I wasn't that kind of girl.”

“Deme never threatened you again? Not when he got out of jail?”

“No. He never did. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Until I believe you.

I sensed she was telling me the truth, but somehow I knew she also wasn't. Unlike my shrug to Kate the waitress, Flora seemed to be working on what the nuns called a sin of omission rather than commission. Something she wasn't telling me. Four-year-old Theresa, out in the living room, could have spotted it on her face. She kept looking away from me, checking the living room, picking at the edges of her queijada without eating any, and staring at the baby monitor as if willing Joseph to wake up and get her away from me.

“What is it, Flo? What're you not telling me? I can see how upset you are. Just tell me.”

“Tell you what, Gilbert? I'm upset? Whatta you think? Comin’ over here and practically accusing my husband of murder? What the hell do you expect from me?”

“The truth, for beginners.”

“You want the truth? Deme was bad, rotten to the core. You told me yourself he tried to kill you. He served time for trying to kill somebody else. But I never wanted him dead. I never, never wanted him dead! And he never threatened me. That's the truth.”

Yes, it was. But not all of it.

“Y'know, Shame the Devil, I've never known you to tell a lie.”

She didn't smile at the name. “Well, that just shows you're not as smart as you think you are.”

Okay, I couldn't blame her for being angry. And I'd seen her temper before. But now it seemed to be mixed with something else. Regret, maybe? Something like that. But when she spoke again, her voice was almost pleading.

“Isn't there some kind of law that a woman's not allowed to testify against her husband?”

“Not quite. The law says a married person can't be forced to testify against a spouse. But you can speak out of your own free will. What did Deme say the last time he spoke to you?”

She sighed, looked at the monitor again, where Joseph—too late—was making waking-up sounds. When she looked back at me, there was a kind of surrender in her eyes. “I may have told Henry that Deme threatened me. Because I was in my last trimester, it was also a threat to our unborn child. You know, I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just telling you that's what I may have told my husband. Thinking he may have been able to scare Deme off once and for all. Maybe, Gilbert, just maybe. I'm not saying that's what I said.”

“So, when Deme disappeared, you figured that's what happened. Hypothetically, of course.”

“Hypothetically, that would be what I thought. Knowing how dangerous Deme could be, considering what he tried to do to you and then did to that other guy in New Bedford. Hypothetically, I would have warned Henry about that.”

Okay, I'd found what I'd been looking for. Now what? I had no jurisdiction down here. I had no facts. Still, I should contact someone involved in the investigation. Tell them what I knew.

“You gonna talk to somebody about this, Gilbert?”

I guess Flora's face wasn't the only one easy to read.

“I don't know.”

That was true. I couldn't blame Henry for seeing the threat to his wife and unborn child as a very real and imminent one. He also might have wound up shooting Deme in self-defense. There wasn't even any proof that he'd done it. It had happened so long ago there was no way to pinpoint the time of the killing, so alibis were out of the question. No way Henry would have kept the weapon. No word that a bullet had been recovered anyway. So I really had nothing. Nothing but a certainty that Henry had killed him . . . and my duty.

I was about to explain this to my cousin when she said, “You know, Henry never really liked you too much.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But he never really knew you the way I did. You were always like the big brother I never had. Whenever I was in trouble, even as a kid, I turned to you. And you never let me down.”

I smiled, shrugged it off. When she was little, it made me feel good. Later, it just became a kind of duty. But it was easy to see why she hadn't turned to me when Deme came threatening her. Henry was her husband. It was his wife and child in danger. Hell, I wasn't even a policeman at the time.

“And Deme really hated you for that scar you gave him. He told me once he wasn't gonna do anything to make the scar look better until he'd evened the score.”

“I always thought he'd try.”

“He even had a picture of you, you know. The one the paper carried when you graduated college.”

Flora had given me a graduation gift, The Complete Sherlock Holmes. She knew I'd gone to college because my parents wanted me to. But she also knew all I wanted was to be a policeman. Two months later I was the godfather at the baptism of Dorothy, her first child and named after our grandmother.

“Y'know, Gilbert, you said a little while ago that I can't tell a lie. Well, I told a big one once. Told it to my husband, the man I took a holy vow to honor.”

On the monitor Joseph's early attempts for attention had turned into crying when his mother hadn't hurried in to get him. She sighed. I saw tears glistening in her eyes.

“What, Flo?”

She shook her head impatiently, muttered, “You just don't get it,” as she rose and turned toward the baby's room.

She had lied to Henry. Had to be about her virginity, though her loss of it before marriage seemed hard to believe. But what other kind of lie would bother her that much? Flora? Still, in my years with the force, even in a small town like Putnam, I'd been surprised many times by who was capable of doing what.

Her eyes were still damp when she came back out with the baby.

“He's hungry, Gilbert. I'm gonna go in the living room for a while, if that's okay.”

Meaning away from me. To nurse.

“Sure, I was just leaving anyway. Thanks for the coffee and queijada.” I kissed her on the cheek, patted the baby on the head, called goodbye to Theresa, who lifted her hand but never took her eyes off the television.

“I'm sorry,” Flora said.

I nodded, but since I wasn't sure what she was sorry about, I just waved it off, said, “I'll call you before . . . if I come to any decision about this.”

“He had a gun.”

“Henry?”

“No . . . well, sure, Henry's got guns. He's always had guns. He still goes hunting. But Deme, he showed me a gun . . . maybe.”

“When he hypothetically threatened you.”

“Hypothetically.”

No smile as she turned and walked toward the living room, cradling Joseph.

* * * *

I was driving, still trying to sort this out. It was like one of those fractured sentences that you had to put the words in the right order to make sense. No, it was more like a fractured paragraph, and I was playing with Flora's statements. I was halfway up Route 24 when a variation of her sentences suddenly fell into a focus that made a different kind of sense. But not one I wanted to consider.

I pulled off to a rest stop and called Flo's number.

“Yes?” She sounded tired.

“It's me, Flo.”

“Yes.” Maybe some resignation sneaking into that one syllable. I could hear cartoon noises in the background, baby cooing up close. At least someone in that apartment seemed alert and happy.

“There were a couple of things you said I've been wondering about.”

She waited so I went ahead. “When you said Deme showed you a gun, was that the time you told Henry he had threatened you?”

“Yes. I told you that.”

“Right, but you also told me he had shown you a graduation picture of me. That must have been about the same time, no?”

“Uh . . . I'm not sure. It was awhile ago.”

And her reminder that Henry never liked me. A hell of a thing to say to someone who'd be seeing him at family occasions for years to come. It wasn't like her at all.

“Okay, thanks, Flo. You were right. The whole thing was a long time ago. Maybe it's best if I just forget about it.”

“That's your call to make, Gilbert.”

Yes, it was. Neither of us spoke as we both waited for my answer. My college graduation picture had been in the paper two months before I went to little Dorothy's baptism. And Deme had told Flora he'd get his revenge on me when he showed her the picture, so it was after he'd been released from Cedar Junction. Twelve years ago. Deme had a gun. I didn't. But Henry did, and he knew how to use one. So I knew now what big lie she had told her husband. Maybe she thought Henry would only frighten Deme away. Maybe she prayed he would. There was a good chance that, if Henry got the drop on Deme and confronted him with the threat Flora had told him of, even crazy Demetrio would know enough to tell the truth—that I was the one he was after. Flora could have foreseen that likely turn in the confrontation. And she knew Henry might not be all that upset that I was the target. But she also knew one other thing . . . he would never believe Deme.

“Hey, Flo,” I said, surprised by the gravelly emotion that had crept into my voice, “Uh, I think I finally figured out what really happened. And all I'm gonna say about this is thanks, Shame the Devil. Thank you more than you can ever know.”

She was sniffing as she said, “You're welcome, Gilbert.”

I clicked off the phone. How about that? She had wanted me to know. Even gave me her motive: I was the big brother she'd never had. And for her, blood was thicker than water. Thicker than truth, too. She'd probably been confessing that one big lie to a priest every Saturday afternoon in one of Our Lady of Fatima's confessionals. But once the body had been found, and the uncertain fear she'd been hiding all this time was realized, she wanted me to know why she'd done it. And had left it for me to decide what to do about it.

I sat back and took a couple of deep breaths before pulling out into traffic. I was imagining what that final scene must have been like. Henry would be slowly squeezing the trigger. Deme, not completely believing what was happening, couldn't really make sense of the last words he'd ever hear, Henry answering his protests about his intended target by saying something like, “Flora never lies.”

Copyright © 2012 by James T. Shannon

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Reviews: BLOG BYTES
by Bill Crider

* * * *

* * * *

I know that some readers of this column are fans of Old Time Radio, but not everyone's aware that after the end of that era, CBS produced 1,399 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which “was meant to appeal to an audience that remembered when radio drama was a popular form of family entertainment. Riding on the wave of nostalgia fever, the radio show attracted many younger listeners who would stay up late, hidden under their covers, to hear the program on their bedroom radio. . . .” If you remember those shows and would like to hear them again, or if you'd like to hear them for the first time, they're all available for free. You can listen on your computer, or you can download the shows and listen on the go. In addition, the site (www.cbsrmt.com/) has links that will give you the names of all the actors who worked on the series, a list of the adaptations, an episode guide, a list of all the writers, and even links to a lot of other places where you can hear old radio shows. In other words, you might want to set aside plenty of time before you start to investigate this site.

While you're listening to old radio shows, you'll have your hands free, so you can do a little cooking. And what better place to find recipes than in The Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen (www.mysteryloverskitchen.com/)? Nine mystery writers tell you how to whip up cheese-and-bacon quiche, low-calorie chocolate cupcakes, spinach dip, chicken curry, and other tasty treats. If you're not hungry when you start reading this blog, you soon will be. The authors also plug their books and offer commentary on the recipes, so there's lots of non-culinary fun to be had, too.

Those who like to read traditional mysteries (as who doesn't?) and everyone else will enjoy Traditional Mysteries (traditionalmysteries. blogspot.com/), where William I. Lengeman III, focuses his “attention on the more traditional flavors of mystery fiction and film, with occasional side jaunts to explore anything else in the genre that looks interesting.” Recently he's reviewed Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley and Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout, as well as an Asylum Films release that might be the worst Sherlock Holmes movie ever made and in which we discover that Holmes's first name is “Robert.” Not to mention a few other things that Lengeman says he won't mention, although he does. Well worth your time.

Copyright © 2012 by Bill Crider

Bill Crider's latest novel is The Wild Hog Murders, published by St. Martin's Press.

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Fiction: DROWNED IN A SEA OF DREAMS
by Donald Olson

Toward the end of 2011, EQMM received a letter from longtime EQMM writer Donald Olson's agent, telling us that this great contributor and friend to the magazine had died. Donald Olson was almost exclusively a short-story writer. He had several novels published in the 1970s, but for most of his writing life he concentrated on the short form, writing elegantly and poignantly of the gentler side of the world of crime. We hope some of his ‘00-plus published stories will someday be collected; it would be a shame if they were lost to future generations. There aren't many writers today who can do the twist-in-the-tail story as well as he did. We were fortunate in having one last Olson story on hand. We hope you'll enjoy it.

Florence had fibbed about her age, as about everything else, when she talked to Professor Merryman on the phone in response to his help-wanted ad: Temporary position as cook-nanny available to qualified person. It was sheer madness, of course, and she hadn't dreamed she'd actually get the job; however, you're going crazy anyhow, what have you got to lose. Go for it, girl.

Though it was unlikely the other lies would be detected—she could cook and she knew enough about children to fake the nanny role—her artless use of makeup failed to hide the fact that she was pushing seventy. Oh yes, pushing it to the brink. Yet who was it who said attitude is the best disguise of age? She must not wince at the occasional arthritic twinge, must remember not to shuffle but to walk with a sprightly step and to create the image of a woman who had all the confidence of youth. It pleased her that she already felt younger, or was it only the excitement of being away from Wildwood?

As arranged, Professor Merryman was at the bus station to meet her, a plump, amiable-looking man of about thirty-five.

He extended a chubby, pale hand to greet her. “Miss Haynes, I believe?”

“Professor Merryman?”

Florence noticed at once that he had peculiarly dark lips, almost as if they were as nicotine-stained as his fingers. Dark eyes, too, but with a twinkle, betraying, to Florence's relief, no sign of dismay or disappointment.

“No luggage?” he inquired.

She indicated the spacious tote bag. “I travel light.”

“Allow me.” He reached for the bag and led her to the Volkswagon van. Once out of town, he drove with reckless disregard and as he drove he smoked a cigarette in the same careless manner.

“You'll like young Myron. Precocious lad. Quite exceptional for a twelve-year-old. In all my years at Hillcrest I've never encountered a more gifted adolescent. As I explained on the phone, Myron's parents are abroad. As a friend of the family's I offered to take the lad under my wing for the spring break. Unfortunately, I myself don't get a break and couldn't very well leave him on his own up here in the wilds. My country retreat is quite secluded. No phone, no radio or TV, only the rudest of amenities. Of course, I shall pop down twice a week and for the weekends. All you need to do is feed the boy, keep the place tidy, simply be there, if you see what I mean.”

Presently they arrived at a stone farmhouse pleasingly situated on a wooded hillside overlooking a broad trout stream with no other habitations in sight.

“I trust you won't mind being alone for one night,” Professor Merryman remarked as they got out of the car. “You won't be frightened, will you?”

The solitary house and all that open space inspired an emotion quite the opposite of fear. And to be there alone, if only for one night, what bliss after Wildwood! Florence's delighted response seemed to please Professor Merryman. “It appears I couldn't have chosen a more suitable applicant. Now I shall just get you settled in and then I must scoot back to Hillcrest. You can expect us around lunchtime tomorrow.”

Once alone, Florence's explorations led her to assume that Professor Merryman rarely visited his rural retreat. There was a well-stocked larder and the other bare necessities of life, but not a single visible fingerprint disturbed the layers of dust wherever Florence looked. She set about tidying the house, fixing herself a light supper, and then retired to bed with one of the less scholarly of the few books she found on a shelf in the living room.

* * * *

“Do you play chess?”

Florence shook her head. “Checkers I could manage.” They often played checkers at Wildwood.

“Perhaps you could teach her,” suggested a beaming Professor Merryman.

Myron regarded Florence with a politely dubious frown. “We shall see.”

Myron was a weedy, undersized boy with a perfectly round head atop a pale neck of swanlike appearance. From under wispy, evenly trimmed blond bangs, his big brown eyes viewed the world with an inherently disdainful look of reproach. Florence found him infinitely more disconcerting than she did Professor Merryman.

“I shall try to be a very good nanny,” she promised, and then added, misreading the boy's blank look: “You do know what a nanny is.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong,” Myron replied with a deadly sweetness. “A hollow-horned ruminant of the female gender?” And in reply to her blank look: “A goat.”

“Oh, my. Maybe you'd better not call me Nanny Flo. And I don't like the name of Auntie Flo.”

“Nor do I. As you are not my aunt, it would be inappropriate. Florence should suffice nicely. Parlez vous Francais?"

Professor Merryman sputtered a protest but Myron cut him off. “I merely thought I might practice my French for want of some less frivolous diversion. Do you speak French, Florence?”

“No chess, no French. I fear I shall be a disappointment to you, my dear.”

“Only if you can't cook.”

“That I can do. So if you'll excuse me, I'll see what I can rustle up for lunch. If you're going out to play I'll call you when it's ready.”

“The only thing I play is the piano. As there is none available, I shall retire to my room and read.”

As the door closed behind him Florence smiled somewhat uncertainly at Professor Merryman. “You did say the boy is only twelve?”

“In years. But well advanced, if you see what I mean.”

“Indeed I do. A joy to teach, I would imagine.”

Professor Merryman seemed for a moment to lose some of his bounce. “By and large, yes. By and large.”

* * * *

If Myron treated her with the droll condescension of an adult for a hopelessly backward child, Florence soon learned to accept the indignity with forbearance. Better Myron's casual disregard of her presence than to be constantly pestered by the tiresome demands of a more ordinary youngster. He spent most of his time in his room with a book or occupied with his own thoughts on a rustic bench, put there, perhaps, for the convenience of anglers, on a rock shelf projecting over the trout stream.

It was now the third day and the sight of that solitary waiflike figure brooding beside the water moved the essentially kind-hearted Florence to join him on the rock platform where, for a while, they both peered silently into the stream, so clear one could watch the smooth brown trout moving like bright shadows below the surface.

“Don't you like to fish?” Florence asked him. “I noticed plenty of gear in the shed. Most boys love to fish.”

A shrug of the narrow shoulders dismissed the activities of most boys as beneath contempt. “I've always considered the sport of fishing to be a pointless exercise, unless one is adrift at sea or marooned on a desert island.”

Florence inhaled the pure country air and gazed rapturously upon the smoky blue hills rising beyond endless ranks of pine and hemlock. “What a splendid site for a house. I do envy Professor Merryman.”

“Merry loathes the place,” said Myron in the same scornful tone that deplored the joys of fishing. “Merry is an urban animal. Solitude bores him.” He turned to examine Florence's face with a look of indifferent curiosity. “Don't you have a house of your own?”

Florence sighed. “I did have. Lovely house it was, with a garden and friendly neighbors.”

“So where do you live now?”

“A room. I have a room. It's not easy to get used to living in a single room when you've had a lovely big house. I suppose you live in a big house when you're not in school.”

“Bigger all the time,” Myron replied. “Some people prefer to expand their houses rather than their minds. My parents and I occupy the same residence but live in different worlds. To whom you're born is a genetic accident. Where you're born is a geographical accident.”

Florence tried not to smile. “If I had my choice I'd stay here the rest of my life.”

On the rare occasions when Myron looked directly into her eyes, Florence noticed that his were ever so slightly crossed. “You really mean that?” he asked.

“I really do.”

“Perhaps that might be arranged,” said Myron. It pleased Florence that he was capable of teasing.

“I'm afraid my position is only temporary. But I shall dream about this place. I've always been a dreamer. My mother used to scold me about it. ‘Missy,’ she'd say, ‘if you don't learn to keep your feet on the ground you'll end up drowning in a sea of dreams.'”

At this they both looked down into the water, deep enough at that spot for swimming. Impulsively, hoping it might encourage Myron to do the same, Florence pulled off her shoes and dangled her bare feet in the cold water. With a squeal of pleasure, she looked around only to find that Myron had vanished.

* * * *

It was late on the afternoon of the fifth day that Florence first became aware of a subtle, indefinable wrongness about the situation in which she had so rashly involved herself. From the moment of Professor Merryman's arrival, the atmosphere seemed to change, to become charged with a peculiar mixture of smoldering excitement and constraint. At the dinner table the man's conversation seemed to strike a false note, as if he were doing his utmost to create an air of normalcy with a stream of banter which flowed as smoothly as the trout stream while not quite concealing an undercurrent alive with darting activity. One might almost have suspected him to be in a state of mild intoxication, the effect of which provoked from Myron repeated glances of sly, reproachful amusement. It was as if the pair of them shared a secret from which Florence was excluded.

And then later, as she was in the kitchen doing the washing up, she heard Professor Merryman's voice raised in a tone of wheedling expostulation. Curious, Florence moved to the door, which was slightly ajar. Only when she heard Myron's voice, precisely enunciating each syllable in a quietly pacifying tone, did she realize they were speaking in French. Boldly, she pushed the door open and walked in on them.

Abruptly, they went silent, Myron's angelic features palely composed, a deep flush darkening the professor's plump cheeks.

“A trifling argument over the subjunctive,” explained Merryman with a faint titter. “Our lad is an accomplished linguist, but he still has trouble with the subjunctive.”

“Merry, I suggest you be a good fellow and finish what you started,” said Myron, “or it'll be dark before you get back to Hillcrest.”

“I was just about to take Myron's picture,” said Professor Merryman, reaching for a Polaroid camera on the table. “To send to his folks, you know. I promised.”

Myron picked up the copy of The Wall Street Journal Merryman had brought with him into the house, sat down on the sofa, and held the paper as if he were reading it.

“Oh, that should tickle them,” said Florence. “Their little boy pretending to read The Wall Street Journal."

“It happens to be my favorite newspaper,” replied Myron coolly.

“He's not joking,” said the professor.

The salubrious effect of the country air had made it unnecessary for Florence to resort to her sleeping pills to ensure a good night's rest—the first unmedicated slumber she had enjoyed since moving to Wildwood. Tonight, however, uneasiness threatened to keep her awake, although she could not pinpoint what it was that troubled her mind. If she'd heard Myron and the professor conversing in French it was clearly to keep her in the dark. Hadn't Myron made a point of discovering if she understood French?

With the arrival of dawn, Florence was inclined to dismiss these night thoughts as the product of an overheated imagination, yet as time went on that suspicion of wrongness persisted.

* * * *

The next two days passed slowly, Florence noticing that Myron seemed more withdrawn and preoccupied than usual.

“Feeling a mite bored, dear?” Florence inquired. “Anxious to get back to school and your classmates?”

Myron regarded her with a bland half-smile, an arrogant tilt to the head which was like a pale flower on a reedlike stem. “Frankly, I find the prospect less than enthralling.”

“A bright lad like you? I'm sure Professor Merryman wouldn't be pleased to hear such talk.”

“Merry? We're of the same mind where school is concerned.”

When Professor Merryman arrived late the following day, he made no effort to hide his excitement. Taking Florence aside, he laid a spongy hand on her arm and announced a change of plans. “I've been granted a brief holiday for myself before school reconvenes and I thought I might take our lad on a little excursion. Needless to say, you shall be amply compensated for any inconvenience.”

“Don't give it a thought, sir,” replied Florence with more relief than she dared express.

By now she realized that the bliss of those first few days in the country had been as self-deceiving as the fugitive raptures of a dream and she was already feeling more than a trace of guilt at the rashness of her behavior. Guilt, but not regret. If nothing else, the escapade had restored her confidence in her ability to make her own decisions—and her own mistakes.

That night sleep eluded her, but rather than take a pill she decided a breath of fresh air might make her drowsy; with this thought in mind she slipped out of her room after midnight, crept silently down the stairs, and was crossing the hall when she noticed a light beneath the living-room door and heard the murmur of voices. Stealthily, she advanced to the door and put her ear to the crack.

“Squeamish, Merry?” she heard Myron say. “She said herself she'd like never to leave this place.”

“But if someone should make inquiries—”

“Like who? She told you she couldn't provide references, that she was absolutely alone in the world and would never return to wherever she came from. It'll be easy. She can't swim. One tap with a rock while she's sitting on the bench and, plop, she's in the water. An aged Ophelia.”

“The thought of murder—”

“Was your idea, Merry, old man. All because you thought I needed a babysitter.”

“You know I couldn't leave you here alone.”

“Then now isn't the time to lose your nerve, or risk losing everything. No villa in the south of France. No trips to Morocco and the Greek islands. And no more career, needless to remind you.”

“All right, all right. I suppose we've no choice.”

“Mother and Daddy will be glad to accept your invitation to take me to Europe. Anything to get me off their hands. And we'll never come back. Never.”

“Well, at least not until the money runs out, dear boy. Faking your kidnapping was a brilliant idea.”

“And didn't I tell you they would do exactly what the ‘kidnappers’ demanded? Not tell the police, and allow you to collect the ‘ransom money.’ I know the poor dears so well. That satchel full of dreams in the woodshed will make us kings of our own destiny!”

Moments later, back in her room, Florence sat on the edge of the bed compulsively twisting and untwisting a fine linen handkerchief, the only visible sign of extreme inner perturbation. Only gradually, as panic receded and her natural common sense took charge of her thoughts, did she begin to consider a possible alternative to instant flight.

While the two conspirators slept, Florence rose early to prepare a breakfast more fit for kings than murderers: fresh juice, hot coffee, scrambled eggs and sausages, toast and marmalade.

When Professor Merryman and his pupil appeared, Florence greeted their approval with a modest smile. “As long as we're leaving, I thought I might as well empty the larder.”

“Splendid, dear Florence,” agreed the professor. “And afterward, we shall all spend a jolly day together before it's time to push off.”

It soon became clear, however, once man and boy had greedily filled their bellies, that neither felt inclined to exercise his body, a consuming listlessness appearing to overcome them soon after leaving the table. Each professed no other desire but to return to his bed, where both were soon deep in a comalike slumber.

Florence monitored their condition with a genuine anxiety; undeserving creatures that they were, still she had no wish to be the instrument of their deaths, and it had been chancy, deciding how many of her potent sleeping pills with which to dope their food and beverages. Only when she felt confident neither was on the verge of expiring did she prepare for flight.

Florence prided herself now upon the inspired lies she'd told the beastly Merryman when applying for the job. He knew nothing about her real life, nor even her real last name or where she'd come from. Oh, what an adventure! And it wasn't over yet, no, not by a long shot.

Carrying her own bag in one hand and that “satchel of dreams” she'd retrieved from the woodshed in the other, she trudged along the dirt road in the late summer heat, soon so exhausted she gratefully accepted a lift from a young woman in a pickup truck who felt obliged to scold Florence: “Don't you know there are all sorts of bad people roaming around the countryside? Anything could happen to you.”

“Tell me about it,” said Florence drily.

She rather enjoyed the ensuing bus ride to Endfield, catnapping for much of the trip. She was debating whether to stop for a cup of tea before hiring a taxi to take her out to Wildwood when she was accosted on the sidewalk by two husky policemen.

“Ma'am,” said one of them, “might your name be Florence Marie Crosscutt?”

“So what if it is?” she retorted smartly.

The younger officer grinned. “Told you it was her, Pete. Ma'am, what are you doing wandering around by yourself? Don't you know folks have been worried sick about you? Making off like that without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“I'm not exactly a prisoner, young man.”

“Well, you just hop in the car and we'll have you back where you belong, all safe and snug. Here, let me help with your bags.”

Florence was prepared to adopt a more chastened attitude by the time her niece Joan and Joan's husband Arthur arrived at the Wildwood Care Facility.

“You're a wicked, wicked lady, Auntie Flo,” Joan scolded. “Walking off without a nod to anyone. For all we knew you might have been lying dead in a ditch.”

“Wicked? Look who's talking. Who was it sweet-talked me into putting my lovely house in your name—temporarily, so you said—then sold it out from under me to finance some harebrained scheme of Arthur's and dumped me in a nursing home?”

Joan exchanged a tight-lipped glance with the silent Arthur. “We did you a favor, you ought to be grateful.”

More than you'll ever know, thought Florence, thinking of all that money in the satchel. Although what to do about that she hadn't even begun to decide.

Joan insisted on knowing where Florence had been in her absence. Florence touched her forehead with a tremulous hand. “You know, I've clean forgotten. You know how it is with us oldsters. Over the hill? Around the bend? I guess that's all I can tell you about where I've been. Over the hill and around the bend.”

Copyright © 2012 with the permission of the Estate of Donald Olson.

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