Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

White Wolves

by Clark Howard

“For his lasting contribution to our craft,” the Short Mystery Fiction Society recently selected Clark Howard as the first winner of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement. Clark Howard’s honors in the field of the mystery story are many, but this award, which bears the name of his friend of thirty years, the late Ed Hoch, is (he told us) especially meaningful to him. The award will be presented at the Bouchercon Convention in Indianapolis in October.

Joe Kell was nervous, and he was sweating, sitting in front of the desk of Ben Axton, owner of Axton Hunting Expeditions, the largest big-game hunting firm in the Alaskan Interior.

Axton, a big bull of a man with a silver walrus moustache, got right to business as soon as Kell sat down. Rustling through some papers on his desk, he selected one and perused it. “Kell, I have a report on you here. I see that you’re still registered with the Department of Wildlife as a private game warden.”

“Yes, I am. Been licensed for twenty-two years,” Kell said. Although nervous, his voice was slow and even.

“You know why I sent for you?”

“Trespass problems, I reckon.”

“Not yet,” Axton said. “But I expect to have. Here, read this—” He handed a letter to Kell. It was an Inmate Release Notification form from the Anvil Mountain Correctional Center, advising that inmate Roy Sand was being released from custody on December third.

“That’s tomorrow,” Kell said, handing back the letter.

“Exactly.” Ben Axton leaned forward. “Let me tell you about Roy Sand. His family used to own a dairy farm down near Nulato. Father, uncle, older boy worked it. Father and uncle got killed in a car wreck, and the older boy, name of Roger, took over. Had his younger brother, this Roy, growing up to help him. Long story short, they couldn’t make a go of it, fell way behind in mortgage payments, and the bank here in Nome foreclosed on the property. Soon as that happened, I stepped in and bought the place. The land butted up to one of the boundaries of my private game reserve. It was a natural move for me.”

“I understand.”

“After the eviction, the older brother took his family — wife, two little girls, baby boy that was born retarded or something, I heard — and moved over to Kobuk, where he got a job working at another dairy farm. But the younger brother, Roy, went completely hog wild. Said that I’d stole their land, because I was on the board at the bank. He went out onto my reserve with a rifle and started killing mygame: four elk, four moose, six musk oxen. Skinned ‘em all and gave the meat and hides to a bunch of damned lazy Inuits outside town. The sheriff managed to stop him, but since as he was just a kid, just lost his home and all, the judge felt sorry for him and gave him three months in the county jail. Now I ask you, is that lenient or what?”

“That is sure enough lenient,” Kell agreed.

“Right.” Acton slammed a fist down on his desk. “Now, you’d think that time in jail would’ve taught the boy a lesson. But just as soon as he was released, he did the same damned thing all over again: got a rifle and this time he killed twenty-four of my game animals. Gave all the meat and hides to the Inuits, just like before. When he got caught this time, the judge gave him four years in Wildwood Reformatory. He served thirty months and they let him out on good behavior. Now you won’t believe this—”

“He came at you again,” Joe Kell said.

“Like a crazy man,” Ben Axton emphasized. “By then he was full-grown. He got himself a partner — some Inuit buck, we never did learn who — and they got an old pickup truck and started driving all over my game range, shooting everything in sight. The slaughter went on for a week. The Inuit community had enough meat for the whole damned winter. This time he sold the hides to a skins bootlegger down in Minto.”

“Sheriff catch him again?” Kell asked.

“Hell, no. The governor finally had to send some National Guardsmen in to catch him. The Inuit got away, but Roy Sand was tried and sentenced to seven years. He got sent up north to Anvil Mountain prison. Now, after he’s done four-and-a-half years, they’re turning him loose. Again.”

“And you think—”

“I don’t think nothing, Kell. I know!” Ben Axton clenched both fists on the desk. “That crazy son of a bitch is going after my game again just as sure as God made little green apples — and I want him stopped!” Calming down, Axton sat back and lowered his voice some. “I brought you up here because you’re the kind of man I need to stop him, Kell”

“What kind of man is that?” Joe Kell asked quietly.

Axton’s expression turned sly. “A man who knows the tundra and the wild like he knows his own face in a mirror, but who hasn’t had a decent job in three years. A man who’s had a problem with the bottle now and again. A man whose marriage might be on the rocks. A man who’s in debt up to his throat—”

“All right, I get the picture,” Kell raised a hand to stop Axton’s litany. “Appears you checked up on more than my private game-warden license. So just lay it out. What do you want me to do?”

“Catch him on my land,” Axton replied flatly. “With a rifle in his hands.”

“And?”

“Shoot him.”

“For how much?”

“Twenty thousand, cash. Half down.”

Pursing his lips, Kell reflected. He thought about his debts, increasing like flood water. He thought about Doris, his wife, whom he suspected was having an affair with someone. He thought about future game-warden jobs he might get with a good reference from Ben Axton of Axton Hunting Expeditions.

In the end, he did not have to think long.

“Deal,” he said, the word spoken like the crack of a judge’s gavel.

Roy Sand got out of his seat as the Northern Lights bus pulled into Kobuk. He took his paper-wrapped bundle of belongings from the overhead rack and was the first one off. Etta’s Cafe, on Yukon Street, served as the bus stop. Roy was relieved to see that there were no familiar faces in the booths lining the front windows. It was always embarrassing to him, seeing people again after just being let out of prison. Turning up the collar of his denim release jacket, he started quickly down Yukon Street toward a country road that led to where his brother Roger and his family lived. As he passed a boarded-up storefront, a voice spoke quietly to him from the doorway. “Hey, Roy, chimo—”

Turning, Roy saw the dark, smiling features of Tootega, an Inuit native with whom he had been friends since the reformatory. Tootega had pronounced the Inuit word chee-mo, and was moving his left hand in a circle over the heart area of his chest in greeting.

“Hey, Toot, chimo,” Roy said back, moving his own left hand in the same fashion. Stepping into the doorway, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his friend, the formality of a handshake or a hug unnecessary. “How’d you know I was getting back today?”

“Your brother’s wife told one of her Inuit friends, and she told me.” Glancing cautiously up and down the street, Tootega pulled an unlabeled pint bottle from his hip pocket and handed it to Roy. Unscrewing the cap, Roy took a quick swallow, shuddering as the raisin-colored homemade liquor seared a path to his stomach.

“Damn. That’s good hooch.”

“Ought to be. Made it myself.”

Roy handed the bottle back to his friend and watched as the Inuit took two long swallows straight. “They ever find out it was you with me on that week-long rampage out on Axton’s range?” he asked.

“No, man, they didn’t even look for me,” Tootega said. “It was you they wanted.”

“Well,” Roy said quietly, “they sure enough got me.”

“We’ll do better next time, man.”

“Won’t be no next time, Toot.” Roy looked down at his bulky prison-release shoes. “Since I was sixteen, I been locked up all but about two months. But this last stretch done it, Toot. I can’t take no more of the pen. Being in there is like being half dead. It ain’t worth it.” For the first time now, Roy noticed that his friend was wearing an unlined windbreaker and that the knees of his jeans were threadbare. Tootega clearly was down on his luck. But Roy could not allow that to change his mind. “I’m sorry, man. I guess you been counting on us getting some skins money.”

“Yeah, I have,” Tootega admitted. He forced a smile. “But, hey, don’t let it worry you. I’ll get along. It’s no big deal. Forget it.”

In the reformatory, they had been like brothers, but at that moment they could not let their eyes meet. The silence between them was like a scream without noise.

“Listen, I got to go, man. I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tootega said as Roy hurried away.

Joe Kell heard the phone at the other end of the line ring four times, then his wife, Doris, said, “Hello—”

“Hey, it’s me. I got a job, honey.”

There was a hollow silence on the long-distance line, as if there was a tunnel between them.

“Doris? You there, honey?”

“I’m here, Joe.” Her voice was flat, without feeling. “Where are you?”

“In a little motel in Farley, Alaska. I got a job, Doris.”

“Why’d you leave the rehab center, Joe?” she asked, ignoring news of the job.

“Because I was cured, honey,” he replied cheerfully. “No need to stay in rehab after I’m cured. I’m off the bottle, Doris. For good.”

“What kind of job have you got?” she asked at last.

“Range warden. For a big hunting-expedition company up in Nome. Some young kid been poaching game. I get twenty thousand soon’s I catch him.”

Catch him? It was a rogue thought in the back of his mind. That wasn’t what he’d been hired to do. Not just catch him.

Kell pushed the troublesome thought out of his mind, “Shouldn’t take me more’n a couple weeks, then I’m coming home. Sure be glad to get back to that Arizona sunshine. Hey, we’ll have us a high ol’ Christmas this year!”

“There’s lots of bills need paying first,” Doris said. “I’ve been paying some of them myself. I’ve got a job now, Joe.”

“A job?” Doris had never worked a day in her life. “Doing what? Where at?”

“Well, I’m working for Henry Edwards. In his office.”

Kell frowned. Henry Edwards was their insurance agent. A couple of times when he’d been at their trailer home, Joe had noticed him glancing furtively at his wife’s ample bosom.

“I had to do something, Joe,” Doris said defensively. “Creditors was coming around every day. Henry — Mr. Edwards — worked out a payment plan with all of them so they wouldn’t pester me anymore. And he gave me a job. He’s been very nice, very helpful.”

Bet he has, Kell thought.

“As for you being off the bottle, I’m happy for you, Joe. I just hope you stay off this time. But as for you coming home, I’ll be honest with you, Joe, I’d have to think about that. There’s lots of bad memories these past few years.”

“I see.” Kell felt his jaw tighten. “Well, where does that leave me, Doris?”

“You call me in a few days, Joe. Let me think on this. I really want us to be friends, no matter what.”

Those last words were like a kick in the stomach to him. “Okay, I’ll do that, Doris. I’ll call you from wherever I am in a few days.”

“All right then, Joe. Goodbye.”

After he hung up, Joe Kell thought it was a good thing there wasn’t a bottle handy.

Roy Sand was hiking along packed snow toward the ranch house his brother Roger rented when his two nieces came running out to meet him. Roy stared at them, happily incredulous. Emily was sixteen now, Edith fourteen. They had been just little kids when he was sent up the last time; now they were young girls, both obviously developing under the sweaters and jeans they wore.

“I can’t hardly believe you two,” Roy said as they kissed him, hugged him, and hung all over him. “You’re both so tall.” He hadn’t seen them in four years; Darlene, Roger’s wife, refused to let Roger take the girls to visit him in prison. “I won’t have my daughters being gawked at by a visiting room full of convicts,” she had declared.

On the way to the house, each of them clinging to one of his arms, the girls were full of questions.

“How was prison this time, Uncle Roy?”

“Not too bad,” he lied. “Guess I’m getting better at it.”

“Did you get thrown in the hole this time?”

“Once,” he admitted. “Fighting on the yard. Other guy started it.”

Darlene was waiting on the porch. She was heavier in the hips, had a double chin starting, and her eyes had not grown any softer. She did not smile. She never smiled at Roy.

“Hello, Roy.”

“Darlene.” Nodding, he awkwardly kissed her on the cheek, mostly for the benefit of his nieces. Looking past her shoulder, he saw in the doorway behind her his only nephew, Danny, who was ten and autistic. “Hey, pardner,” Roy said happily, stepping past the boy’s mother and sitting down on his heels in front of him. “You ‘member your Uncle Roy?”

The boy stared at him, wholly disinterested, then turned and walked away.

“He’s like that with most ever’body,” Darlene said.

Roy stood. “Where’s Rog?”

“Shutting up the milking sheds for the night.”

Roy turned to Emily. “Get my box of things, will you, honey?”

Danny was standing in front of the family’s J. C. Penney stereo, seemingly entranced by the music that was playing. “It’s the only thing in the world he cares about,” Darlene said. “He’ll stand for hours like that.”

“Before he discovered music,” Edith said, “the only fun he got out of life was beating his head against the wall.”

Darlene threw her younger daughter an irritated look. “There’s a school for autistic children in Anchorage now. It’s called the Markinson Institute. We took him down there last spring for what they call an evaluation. Did Roger tell you about it?”

“No.” Roger’s visits every month or so had been awkward at best. Roy and his older brother were eight years apart in age, and a million light years in disposition. Roger was even-tempered, Roy a hothead; Roger, with a family, had to look to the future, Roy could not forget the past; Roger followed every rule, every law, to the letter, but Roy had some dark inner compulsion to examine everything for fairness. The brothers loved each other, but no longer understood, or even tried to understand, what lay behind their differences.

“The Markinson Institute said Danny could be helped,” Darlene continued. Emily returned to the room with a large cardboard box. “Em, you explain it.”

“Danny has what they call ‘infantile autism,’” the older daughter told her uncle clinically.

“His sensory perception is distorted. That causes difficulties in his speech, learning, and behavior patterns. Markinson Institute employs a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a neurologist, a speech therapist, and a staff of trained behavioral counselors. It takes children from all over Alaska, even some from Canada, and teaches them on an individual basis how to utilize their distorted perceptions. With Danny, they would begin by teaching him music. The Markinson evaluation said that he could probably become an accomplished pianist in a matter of weeks.”

Roy stared incredulously at his niece, hardly believing the mature explanation that had come out of her. Darlene shrugged at his surprise. “They’ve moved her up two grades already. There’s a full scholarship at the University of Alaska waiting for her next fall. She’ll only be seventeen. Too young to be away from home—”

“Don’t start, Mother,” said Emily.

Roy studied Emily’s pretty young face for a moment, then shook his head in wonder. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, to himself. Looking over at Edith, he asked, “What about you, little bit? You brilliant too?”

The younger girl shook her head. “Nowheres near. I probably won’t never be nothing. Just a dairy farmer’s wife like Mama.”

“Thanks a heap,” Darlene said drily.

“Is Danny going to this Markinson place then?” asked Roy.

“Not just yet.” Darlene turned away, eyes sad.

“Anchorage is so far away,” Emily told him. “Danny would have to be a boarding student and just come home twice a month. It’s eight thousand dollars a year for room and board. Daddy’s putting a hundred dollars a month away for it. That’s the best he can do. We’ve got nine hundred saved so far.”

Roy and his niece locked eyes in a brief instant of mutual truth. Eighty months to pay for twelve? It was a futile effort and they both knew it. As if reading his mind, Emily said, “When I finish college, I intend to teach English lit. I’ll be able to help a lot.”

“Sure you will,” Roy said, thinking: Help how? Teachers didn’t make no goddamned money. Women working in the post office earned more. He smiled at this sincere, determined niece of his and lightly glided a knuckle over her cheek. “You’re gonna make a right pretty teacher,” he said with a wink.

Opening the box Emily had brought into the room, Roy removed a pair of well-broken-in black kid cowboy boots. Removing the prison-issue brogans, he slipped his feet into the soft leather uppers and felt his sole, arch, and heel mold perfectly, comfortably, to the hard leather bottoms. Working his ankles around a bit, he smiled and said, “That’s more like it.” He handed the prison shoes to Edith. “Throw these out, darlin’.” No one in the room questioned the discarding of the prison shoes — they all knew there were some things not fit for a man to wear.

Also from the box, Roy pulled an old sheepskin-lined caribou leather coat and a pair of butter-colored elk gloves, along with a battered grey Stetson hat that was broken front, back, and top.

“I’ll walk down to the milking shed, see if I can give Rog a hand,” he said. “See y’all later.”

Outside, Roy blinked back tears, thinking about little Danny.

Joe Kell stood next to a big GMC Savana van with its sliding side door open, doing the last of his packing before heading out the next morning onto Ben Axton’s game preserve to look for signs of trespassing. Kell was in Saltcoats now, having driven east from Farley. The van was a four-wheel-drive off-road vehicle with steel-belted ground-gripper snow tires and cranked-up heavy-duty shocks.

Already in the cargo space of the van was a two-seater Arctic Cat snowmobile with several haversacks lashed to it, one of which contained two extra fuel cylinders for the Cat. The others contained a one-person shelter tent, extra-insulated cold-weather sleeping bag, camping gear, cooking utensils, and four one-hundred-count boxes of rifle cartridges. Kell had bought everything except the van and snowmobile with part of the advance money Ben Axton had given him. The van and snowmobile had been loaned to him by Axton.

Prior to leaving, he had only two more things left to do. The first was to work out his surveillance route on the plat map of Axton’s range. The second was to call Doris again. Returning to his motel room, he moved his rifle and binoculars from the table to the bed, and on the table spread open the plat map. Covering the wilderness area between Buckland on the north and Koyuk on the south, Axton’s property was roughly eighty miles wide and forty miles deep. The map was color coded: light green for the domains of moose, dark green for elk, yellow for caribou, light blue for musk oxen, with random brown and gray dots for the nomadic wolf packs of those colors, and — in the far north of the reserve — numerous scatterings of white dots representing the large, elusive, and hated white wolves: hated because unlike their smaller, dingier-colored cousins, they were not averse to surrounding stables, barns, or corrals and attacking anything alive — including young children — to get a meal for the pack.

The way Kell had figured it, Roy Sand would go for the biggest game he could find nearest to Axton’s outer boundary lines. That meant moose and elk. So with a red felt-tip pen, he highlighted all the east-west secondary roads he would follow the next day. That done, he flipped open his cell phone and called Doris.

“Hey, honey, it’s me again,” he said cheerfully when she answered.

“Oh. Why, hello, Joe. What a surprise.”

Kell frowned. What a surprise? She had asked him to call her back.

“Is there something wrong, honey?”

“No, nothing’s wrong, Joe. You just caught me a little off guard, is all. Where are you now?”

“Saltcoats, on the edge of the reserve. I’ll be moving into the wild tomorrow.” He waited a long moment for Doris to carry the conversation forward, but she remained silent. Finally, perplexed, he asked, “Well, have you thought things over, honey?”

“To tell you the truth, Joe, I haven’t had time to give the matter much thought—”

Her usual brittle voice was a little too sweet, he decided. She was putting on an act for someone.

“He’s there with you, ain’t he, Doris?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“You know damned well what I mean. Henry Edwards. He’s there with you right now, ain’t he?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have company at the moment—”

“Do me a favor, Doris, tell me what time it is there. My watch has stopped.”

“It’s quarter of nine here in Arizona, Joe. But it’s two hours earlier there, isn’t it?”

“Goodbye, Doris,” he said, and snapped the cell phone shut.

For a moment he just stared at his watch, which had not stopped at all. It was seven-thirty there. Doris always kept the clock in their bedroom fifteen minutes fast.

Putting on his coat and Stetson, Kell left the room and walked down the street to a liquor store.

“Bottle of Jack Daniels,” he told the clerk.

The next day, Roy Sand went back into town in Kobuk and located Tootega in a run-down, makeshift Inuit saloon-pool hall.

“I changed my mind,” he said, taking his friend aside. “I’m ready to go after skins. Lots of skins. I need me about twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“For the little kid, right? Little Danny? To go to that school in Anchorage.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Everybody in Kobuk knows about it. The people around here tried to raise some money to help, but everybody’s so poor they couldn’t collect much.”

Touched, Roy swallowed and said, “That was nice. That they tried.” He looked away, momentarily embarrassed. “You think you can round us up some pack horses, rifles, and stuff?”

“Sure. On credit from some of the elders. You prob’ly wanna go after some big game stuff, huh? Elk, moose.”

“No,” Roy shook his head. “Axton will be expecting me to do that. I want to go after smaller skins. Ulva skins.” Ulva was Inuit for wolf.

“They don’t bring no good money, man. Lucky you get a hundred bucks a skin.”

“I mean white wolves, Toot. That trader down in Minto will pay five hundred for white ulva skins. I telephoned him this morning.”

“Man, we’d have to go way north for white ulva—”

“Yeah, up around the southern boundary of the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge, right where Axton’s land begins. White ulva will be running in packs of fifteen to twenty, prowling the small settlements between Buckland and Deering. We’ll have four hours of daylight every day. If we flush them out of the trees onto the tundra, we should be able to get forty, maybe fifty a day. In three days, we can make upwards of sixty grand.”

“If we can last three days. Axton’s got to know you’re out. He’s liable to have an army of range cops looking for you.”

“Sure, looking for me where there’s elk, moose, caribou. Not where there’s white ulva. We can do this, brother.” He fixed his friend in an unblinking stare. “You up for it?”

Tootega thought about it for a long moment, but finally smiled and rotated his left hand over his heart. “Chimo, brother.” Like the word aloha in Hawaii, chimo in Alaska had numerous meanings. In this case, the meaning was clear to Roy Sand.

It meant, Right on!

Five days later, Joe Kell was in a quandary.

Leaning against the front fender of the van, he studied the slate sky. Fresh snow was coming, and coming soon. So far he had driven a hundred and twenty miles along the southern and western boundaries of Ben Axton’s game reserve, without finding a single sign of trespassing. Not a pony track, sled track, footprint, tire track — nothing. And he had seen plenty of game — elk, moose, caribou — leisurely grazing in and out of the tree line next to the tundra. Peaceful, undisturbed game. Game that obviously had not seen or scented humans.

Yet in a cell-phone conversation with Axton, he had been told that Roy Sand was definitely out there somewhere.

“I’ve got an Inuit informant in Kobuk,” Axton declared. “He reported that Sand only stayed three nights there, then plain dropped out of sight, along with an Inuit buck named Tootega. And they had horses and rifles when they left. They’re out there, Kell. Find them, goddammit!”

From one of the haversacks next to the Arctic Cat in the back of the van, Kell took a thermos of coffee and drank a little of it. His back was hurting from all the driving. Doris had once been able to rub away his aches and pains with coconut lotion. But that was a long time ago—

Sighing wearily, he climbed into the van, adjusted his sore back against a pillow he’d taken from one of the motels, and drew the door shut with a slam. The slam drowned out a faint rifle crack that resounded in the thin air far off to the northeast. As Kell started the engine of the van, another shot was also stifled.

Kell drove off without hearing either of them.

Behind him, a series of rifle shots sounded without pause.

Roy Sand and Tootega had built a snow blind out on the white, hard-packed tundra that lay below the ridge line of trees at the northern edge of Ben Axton’s game reserve. From that blind, one of them would shoot the white wolves being driven out of the trees by the other on horseback. Roy was the better shot, Tootega the better horseman and “beater,” as the pack driver was called.

In their first two days out, they took seventy-one pelts. More than two-thirds were male, all between five and six feet in length, weighing more than a hundred pounds. The females were mostly around five feet and fifty pounds. The pups Roy did not shoot; they would return to the woods and be taken in by other packs.

The two men made their camp a thousand yards back in the trees. Tied there was the extra saddle pony and a pack horse. A tree-limb hutch just high enough to sit up in held their sleeping bags, food and water, ammunition, and skinning supplies. A clearing well away from where the horses were tethered was used for skinning. As it became saturated with wolf blood and innards, the stink of it, heavy and sour, was pervasive in the little camp. The two hunters kept mentholated salve in their nostrils around the clock.

The horses, rifles, and other equipment and supplies that they had were begged or borrowed from the Inuits by Tootega, who had promised to put twenty percent of his share from the sale of the pelts into the tribal fund to help the old and needy through the long, dark winter months. The meat from the wolves was not edible because of the carrion they ate, so Roy and Tootega simply piled the skinned carcasses fifty yards behind their camp, where they promptly froze. When the spring thaw came, they would provide a huge feast for the reserve’s other inhabitants.

Now, on their third day out, they had been at it for less than two hours and had already taken thirty-two pelts. Even though it was beginning to snow, they decided on one more shoot, then do the day’s skinning, and head back south the next morning toward Minto, where the skins trader had his warehouse.

So for one last time, Roy Sand assumed a prone position behind the snow blind, ammunition laid out in lines next to him, while Tootega rode his pony into the trees to drive one more pack onto the tundra.

Joe Kell was at the northern boundary of the Axton hunting reserve when he heard the first shot echo in the cold, thin air. He immediately stopped the van and rolled down his window. Almost at once, a second shot sounded, and a third, a fourth...

Quickly, Kell grabbed his binoculars, got out, and surveyed the tundra through twelve-power lenses. He saw nothing, but heard the distant shots continue. Fresh snow was falling now. Kell considered whether the packed, frozen ice of the tundra would support the van. Probably would. But the fresh snow now falling worried him. Wet snow on ice was risky for a heavy vehicle...

Best to use the Cat, he decided. Opening the rear cargo door, he slid the sturdy, lightweight, extruded-plastic snowmobile out and lowered first one end, then the other, to the ground. More rifle cracks resounded in the air. Somebody was sure enough taking game, but he couldn’t tell how far away...

Extra fuel, he thought, and dragged one of the haversacks out, stowing it in the rear seat of the Cat, along with two boxes of cartridges.

“Okay now,” he said aloud to himself, “let’s get this here show on the road.”

Settled in the front seat, his rifle and binoculars beside him, he fired up the Cat, turned it toward the sounds of gunfire, and started across the tundra.

Then a gnawing thought came to his mind again. What would he do when he caught Roy Sand?

The continuing snowfall caused Roy to cut short his final shoot.

On his knees, he had begun collecting his extra ammunition when Tootega rode up at a gallop and reined his pony to an abrupt halt.

“Roy! We’ve got company, man! Snowmobile, coming fast!”

Standing, Roy squinted off across the tundra. Neither of them could see the low-slung snowmobile itself, but the high spray of snow in its wake was clearly visible.

“Got to be the law, right?” Tootega said.

“Yeah, one kind or another. Security guards. Range cops.” He swung up behind Tootega on the pony. “Let’s get back to camp, man!”

Leaving the fresh kill out on the tundra, they rode swiftly back toward the tree line. At their camp, Roy saddled the second mount and tied on their sleeping bags and other gear, while Tootega quickly loaded their skinned, dried, and bundled pelts onto their pack horse. They led the pack horse half a mile into the woods and tethered it in a thicket safe from the snowfall.

“Leave the rifles and ammo too,” Roy said. “We don’t need to be caught with no guns.”

Riding back to the tundra edge, they could now see the snowmobile itself, coming fast a mile or so away.

“We’ll split up here,” Roy said. “You ride east, I’ll ride west. Whoever it is can’t follow both of us. Whichever one of us gets away comes back later for the pelts and takes them to Minto. If it’s me, I’ll get your share of the sale money to your mother. If it’s you, see that my share gets to the Martinson Institute in Anchorage in the name of Danny Sand. Deal?”

“Deal,” Tootega said.

They locked eyes for a fleeting moment, then both said, “Chimo!” and passed their left hands over their hearts.

At a gallop, they rode off in different directions.

Smart, Joe Kell thought as he observed the two mounted men separate and ride off.

The snow was falling more rapidly now, visibility diminishing by the minute — but not fast enough, Kell knew, to conceal horse tracks if someone was no more than half a mile or so behind. He would be able to follow those tracks easily enough.

But which set of tracks? he wondered.

Then he remembered his cell-phone conversation with Ben Axton. Roy Sand had left Kobuk with an Inuit partner. Raising the binoculars to his eyes, Kell moved them back and forth to study the two riders. The one heading east was reining his horse with one hand, trailing the other arm to his side and back, like most Inuits learned to ride. The rider heading west was hunched forward in the saddle with both elbows tucked to his sides and both hands on the reins, like most white cowboys.

Smiling tightly, Kell gently steered the Cat toward the rider heading west.

Looking up at the snow-filled sky, he judged that there was maybe ninety minutes of daylight left. With luck he would catch up with Roy Sand within an hour.

It took him just under an hour.

Roy was sitting on the side of a banked snowdrift when Kell came to a stop twenty feet away, the Cat beginning to sputter as its fuel cylinder ran dry. Roy’s horse was lying nearby, whinnying in pain, an edge of bone showing just behind the right rear fetlock. Kell stepped out of the snowmobile, rifle in hand, and moved cautiously toward the man and the horse. Roy held both hands up.

“I don’t have no gun. Horse slipped on an icy rock.”

Kell stepped over to the agonized animal and shot it once, cleanly, in the head. The shot seemed to echo forever. Then there was only silence, not even a wind sound, and the snow continued falling heavily.

“You the law?” Roy asked when Kell turned back to him.

“Close enough to it,” Kell replied. He jerked his head toward the Cat. Roy rose and walked to it, Kell just behind him with the rifle. Kell pulled a haversack out of the rear seat and set it on the ground. “Get a fuel cylinder out of there,” he said.

Kneeling, Roy opened the haversack, examined its contents, then looked dumbfoundedly up at Kell. Frowning, Kell checked inside the haversack himself. It contained a quart thermos, some disposable hand warmers, and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels. No fuel cylinders.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Kell muttered. Flipping open his cell phone, he tried half a dozen times to get a signal, all without success.

The two men looked at each other, then around at the rapidly drifting snow. It wasn’t necessary to speak; there was nothing to say. This was blizzard snow, pure and simple. Kell put the rifle in the front seat of the Cat and they both sat down in the snow and leaned back against it. Kell took the bottle out of the haversack and opened it. He wondered what Doris would think if she knew he had bought a bottle five days ago and not even opened it.

Opening it now, he took a long swallow, then passed the bottle to Roy.

“Know where we went wrong, you and me?” he asked rhetorically. “We should have gone into the goddamned insurance business.”

Roy stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever you say, mister.” He raised the bottle to his lips.

After a while, the snow was falling so heavily that the two men could not even see their own feet.

Copyright © 2009 by Clark Howard

The Jury Box

by Jon L. Breen

With due respect to the New York majors, the publishers whose offerings I anticipate most eagerly are located in Norfolk, Virginia (Crippen & Landru), Lyons, Colorado (Rue Morgue), Vancleave, Mississippi (Ramble House), and Eureka, California (Stark House). Latest from the latter is a threesome by paperback master Harry Whittington, To Find Cora/Like Mink for Murder/Body and Passion ($17.95), novels obscurely published in 1963, 1957, and 1952, respectively. The middle title, published in France as T’asdes Visions! and revised for the American sleaze market as Passion Hangover (Corinth, 1965; as by J.X. Williams), was molded into its current desleazed state by editor David Laurence Wilson. Noir elements are familiar (ex-con trying to go straight, naive nice girl and avaricious femme fatale, pressure to do one final job), but emotionally heightened narrative, quick pace, and surprising twists demonstrate how good even lesser Whittington could be. Wilson’s account of tracking down Whittington’s pseudonymous work is an enthralling nonfictional detective story.

**** Ed Gorman: The Midnight Room, Leisure, $7.99. In a small Midwestern city, widely admired Dr. Peter Olson loses more than his money in a home-invasion burglary: two DVDs reveal Olson’s secret life as rapist and killer of young women. Police seeking a third missing girl include detectives Michael Scanlon, his dissolute brother Steve, and Kim Pierce, who is currently dating the charming Dr. Olson. The novel is expertly written, rich in pointed social commentary, and brilliantly plotted — you’ll do well to guess any of the twists, including some visceral shocks. But as usual with Gorman, the key element is the deeply realized and painfully real characters, including an especially memorable villain — and not the one you think.

**** Hallie Ephron: Never Tell a Lie, Morrow, $24.99. Pregnant Ivy Rose’s happy life in suburban Massachusetts is threatened when another expectant mother, an acquaintance from high school days, turns up at her yard sale, is taken inside by Ivy’s husband David for a tour of the house, and disappears. Ephron’s first solo mystery, with the intricate structure of a Mary Higgins Clark novel and a more flavorful style, is a suspenseful and well-wrought example of the am-I-married-to-a-murderer subgenre that dates back at least as far as Francis Iles’s 1932 classic Before the Fact.

*** Dean Koontz: Relentless, Bantam, $27. Bestselling novelist Cullen Greenwich, menaced (not just in print) by an evil book critic, goes on the run with plucky wife, genius six-year-old son, and mysteriously gifted dog. Is this suspense, horror, satire, conspiracy thriller, science fiction, fantasy, spiritual allegory? Try all of the above. Over every top and off every wall, combining the sunniest of humor with the darkest and bloodiest of events, Koontz is sui gen-eris: no one else could have written this.

*** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop, Obsidian, $22.95. Obsessive compulsive Adrian Monk, laid off from his consultancy job with the San Francisco police, joins a P.I. firm. As in the TV series created by Andy Breckman, sharp character comedy combines with ingenious and fairly clued puzzle-spinning. The main problem concerns the arrest of Captain Stottlemeyer for murder; two of the secondary mysteries (“Mr. Monk and the Old Lesson” and “Mr. Monk and the Godfather”) could stand alone as short stories. Don’t miss Lt. Disher’s hilariously nonsensical variation on Sherlock Holmes’s “eliminate the impossible” dictum.

*** Anthony Boucher and Denis Green: The Casebook of Gregory Hood, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $20 trade paperback. The Holmes radio scripters also wrote its 1946 summer replacement, introducing San Francisco importer and gentleman sleuth Hood. Fourteen lively scripts, rich in detail of the period and locale and often including allusions to real-life Bay Area personalities, feature Boucher’s fair-play puzzle plotting. Joe R. Christopher’s introduction, notes, and episode checklist are models of thorough scholarship.

*** Parnell Hall: Dead Man’s Puzzle, Minotaur, $24.95. Like both Monk and Hood, Puzzle Lady Cora Felton inhabits a world where details are realistic, but the big picture is pleasantly fanciful. Three crosswords by Manny Nosowsky and a sudoku by Will Shortz are keys to the plot, and even if the cute-dialogue-as-page-filler gets a bit tiresome, the almost Queenian solution is ingenious.

** Denis Johnson: Nobody Move, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $23. Gambler Jimmy Luntz, on the run from loan sharks in Bakersfield, California, joins forces with Anita Desilvera, framed for embezzlement by her prosecutor husband and a corrupt judge. An exercise in sex and violence, flashy but lacking sympathetic characters or an engaging plot, merits grudging respect for crisp prose and punchy, darkly comic dialogue. Jacket-flap comparisons to Hammett and Chandler are way off the mark. (Also on CD, read by Will Patton [Macmillan Audio, $24.95]).

** John Shannon: Palos Verdes Blue, Pegasus, $25. The title refers to both an endangered California coastal butterfly species and the habitat-conscious missing teenager sought by unofficial private eye Jack Liffey. The much-praised Shannon writes well and has a good eye for Southern California social strata, but he represents much that is wrong with contemporary crime fiction: excessive back story, self-indulgent literary references, smugly pretentious dialogue, weak plot, and soap opera contrivances. Liffey’s sentimental determination to keep alive an animal in severe pain from cancer made me doubt his moral compass.

** Matthew Glass: Ultimatum, Atlantic Monthly, $24. This international relations thriller, totally undistinguished for prose, dialogue, and characterization, offers an involving story and plenty of wonky policy debate as the newly elected President (the year is 2032) tries to figure out how to reach an agreement with China and save the world from galloping climate change.

Finally, four juvenile novels, all directed at readers twelve and up:

*** Rachel Wright: You’ve Got Blackmail, Putnam, $16.99. Fourteen-year-old Lozzie Cracknell’s slangy and comical first-person narrative is distinctively British but also unmistakably contemporary teen, so the few unfamiliar terms shouldn’t discourage young American readers. School bullies, separated parents, and a blackmailing scheme that may involve Lozzie’s novelist English teacher figure in a fast-moving, highly enjoyable tale that is also a genuine detective story.

*** Brent Hartinger: Project Sweet Life, HarperTeen, $16.99. Tacoma 15-year-old Dave and his two best friends, ordered by their fathers to get summer jobs, explore ways to make the requisite cash without working, including solving a series of bank robberies and seeking a treasure hidden in the city’s underground tunnels. Some young readers will have fun shooting holes in this episodic comic novel’s preposterous plot, but expert telling and healthily moral message disarm criticism. One plot element, the history of Tacoma’s treatment of its Chinese population, is expanded upon in a concluding author’s note.

** Jennifer Sturman: And Then Every-thing Unraveled, Scholastic/Point, $16.99 16-year-old Delia Truesdale, sent from her Palo Alto home to Manhattan and the management of two aunts, refuses to believe her socially conscious mother was lost at sea. The first-person humor and romantic subplot may charm the target readership, but the mystery fizzles: psychic and off-stage detection are cop-outs, and the incomplete ending requires waiting for a sequel.

** Robert B. Parker: Chasing the Bear, Philomel, $14.99. How did Boston private eye Spenser’s western upbringing by a widowed father and two maternal uncles turn him into the literate and principled macho man we know so well? While young readers will enjoy the suspenseful river pursuit, it’s hard to imagine them relating to the framing device: present-day commentary on the action via the sleuth’s customary arch dialogue with Susan Silverman.

Copyright © 2009 by Jon L. Breen

The Candy-Factory Girls

by Tessa de Loo

Translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter

Called “one of Europe’s most accomplished novelists” by Kirkus Reviews, Dutch writer Tessa de Loo is a Soho Press author in the U.S., with two novels out so far in English: The Twins and A Bed in Heaven. She is also a superb short-story writer. In Holland, her stories have recently been reissued in a collection. The story we selected for translation for her EQMM debut is one of her most famous. It has previously been translated into a number of other languages, but never before English.

* * * *

“Who wants a piece?” Cora asks.

Her plump hand holds out the half-empty candy box, but as usual, no one pays any attention to it.

Trix wipes a stray strand of blond hair from the corner of her mouth, but it’s impossible to tell if it’s hers or his. Lien struggles to light a cigarette without success. Her hands tremble.

I just sit there, staring at them, vaguely expecting one of them to explain what’s just happened, to assign some responsibility for it. Is there some special word that labels the guilt we all feel, some legal designation?

“Well, I’ll eat them, then,” Cora says, and one after another, the bonbons disappear between her scarlet lips.

“Dammit,” says Lien, gazing at us meaningfully, each in turn, through the thick lenses of her glasses.

We laugh nervously.

Trix’s eyes shine, the palest blue I’ve ever seen them. “If they start asking questions,” she whispers, “I don’t know a thing about it.”

“None of us knows a thing about it.” Cora’s fingers fumble with a pink wrapper. “They can ask whatever they like.”

“We never even saw him.” Lien claws her heavy glasses from her doll’s nose, dramatically exposing her half-blind eyes. “Never,” she repeats with conviction. Then, as if her words have startled her, she strikes another match and touches the flame to her cigarette. This time it lights, and she coughs wildly, choking on the smoke as if she were a child experimenting with tobacco for the very first time. Tears spill from her eyes and run down her cheeks.

My thoughts tumble over each other feverishly, and although each of them is clear, its meaning obvious, together they cause me only confusion. Have we — although each of us has her own independent life from the moment we step down from this train, exhausted, at the end of the day, until the following morning when we drag our sleepy bodies back up the metal steps into our compartment — have we now somehow shackled ourselves together? Will the events of this morning rivet us to each other for all eternity? How can the warm sense of camaraderie which flows through me reconcile with the clammy conviction that I myself am responsible for what has happened?

We approach our destination. The sterile landscape of arrow-straight canals will soon give way to the crazy patchwork of gardens that announce our arrival in the city. Till now, I’ve always shivered at the thought of having to live on one of the farms that dot this geometric no man’s land. Not today, though: today the world has shrunk down to this one compartment and we four women who occupy it.

“Before morning, one of you will betray me,” says Trix, her voice hollow, and I imagine that the look she gives me is intended to remind me that I am, after all, the newcomer in this company.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Cora cries. “We’re all in the same boat.” Same as every morning, she stuffs her empty candy box into the trash can below the window and sighs, satisfied. She’s had her breakfast.

Cora, Trix, and Lien have been riding together in this compartment for years now, way at the back of the train, at the very tip of its tail. Our compartment sticks out past the far edge of the station’s roof when the train comes to a halt, as if it’s not really a part of the train, as if, should it disappear while underway, no one would even notice its absence. Each morning, the first of them to arrive at the station commandeers the compartment and holds it for the rest of us, chasing away any potential trespassers.

Although this daily journey is a long-standing habit for the rest of them, it’s less than a month since I first joined them. After they’d gotten to know me a little at work, they’d invited me to enter their sanctum, their Holy Compartment, as if it was specially reserved just for the candy-factory girls.

They bring to the compartment the ambiance, the intimacy, of a living room or a neighborhood café: Cora’s inevitable box of bonbons sits in the middle of the fold-down table by the window like a pot of coffee or a bottle of gin; Lien never stops knitting for a moment; Trix stretches her long, stockinged legs across the seat and pages through a fashion magazine or gossip rag. They share their innermost thoughts back and forth, give each other advice, each laughing the loudest at her own personal misery.

The news means less to them than the scenery that floats by outside the train’s window: World events unfold outside their ability to influence them, and although of course things are always changing, their own lives remain constant, and it’s pointless to pick apart situations you can’t do anything about.

The three older conductors who work this run call them “the girls.” Every day, Cora offers to share her candy with them, too, but, like us, they always refuse. Not without disgust, their eyes go back and forth between the box and Cora’s overblown figure, as if she is full to her fingertips with bonbons, as if it’s pure cherry liqueur that courses through her veins.

But let one of them have a cold or seem even mildly distracted by whatever, and they gladly let Cora mother them. If she makes a comment about their beer bellies, their encroaching baldness, their potency, their protestations are rote — no real offense taken.

Trix, the object of their eternal admiration, never hesitates to encourage it. The moment the door swings open, she poses for them coquettishly. The on-duty conductor’s gaze arrows straight to the alluring passenger, then, instantly ashamed, passes on to Cora, who returns it meekly.

They chatter with Lien about the weekend’s soccer scores, about skating, boxing, bike racing, depending on the season. She and her husband never miss a local sporting event, and, though her knitting needles never hesitate in their dance, she knows exactly what’s happening at every moment of every contest.

For the conductors, our compartment is an oasis of constancy in a train filled with an ever-changing population. In return, they forgive us girls our occasional trespasses — if, for example, one of us forgets to renew her monthly pass, they let it slide. Sometimes, they’ll even delay the train’s departure while Cora buys a cup of coffee from the station’s vending machine and waddles in her matronly way back to our oasis at the far end of the train.

Outside the glass panes of the garden door, the unnaturally large red tulips somehow seemed to accentuate the lecture my father was delivering. The three of us — my father, my mother, and I — sat around the oval dining table under the flyspecked shantung shade of the hanging light fixture.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said, his voice ominous.

I moved my foot beneath the table, felt it bump another foot, and pulled it back abruptly.

“I have to say, it’s impressive how thoroughly you’ve managed to waste every chance you’ve been given.”

My mother turned away.

“The only thing you seem to be able to do well is talk.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Apparently you got up in front of your class and delivered a poem. You had it pinned to your skirt, so all you had to do was glance down every once in a while to make sure you got the words right.”

I snuck a furtive glance at my skirt. It wasn’t the same one, but it was the same style: yards of fabric, with three petticoats under it. One by one, Ruud had slipped them off me. His eager fingers had clawed a hole in the light yellow one.

“And all the while some gang of dirt-bikers stood outside the classroom, staring in at you, hooting and hollering.”

Illuminated by bright sunlight that glittered off their handlebars and headlights, they made fun of the school and all the idiots who taught there. Right in front, leaning casually against his bike, was Ruud, dressed all in black. The only colors in the picture he presented were the blue of his squinting eyes and the red tip of the wooden match clenched between his teeth. Every so often, he languidly brushed back his Elvis-impersonator hair with the tips of his fingers.

As if in a trance, my voice rang out:

What would I do without you

But die and die again?

Who would there be to love for me

Without you?

Miss Kalmoes tapped nervously on the window and waved the bikers away. She was a powerless little mouse with her dun-colored suit and her salt-and-pepper permanent. The boys stared back at her curiously, as if she were an exotic monkey doing a crazy little dance. The classroom felt like a kennel must feel to the dogs when a new keeper comes in and rattles their cages. My classmates were practically barking. But under the teacher’s glare, I stubbornly continued with my recitation:

No matter how far, you are

My heart’s desire.

Like the summertime sun, you’re the one

Who fills me with fire.

“You don’t care about anything,” said my father, “except the opposite sex.”

“They never marry girls like you,” my mother added softly. “They chase after you, they use you up and throw you away and wind up with a decent girl instead.”

She looked pale, bloodless. There were dark circles under her eyes.

It must be awful, I thought, to have to spend your whole life with that man. I’m already sick of him.

“We’re at the end of our rope, your mother and I,” continued my father. He pulled the watch he’d gotten in honor of his twenty-fifth anniversary as a teacher out of the inside breast pocket of his jacket, glanced at it, and put it away again. It was his bridge night, so the inquisition couldn’t go on much longer.

“First we tried you in the regular high school, and when that didn’t work out, we thought, let’s put her into Home Ec classes, at least she’ll learn to cook and sew. But that’s just turned out to be a waste of time and money.”

A fly circled his head slowly, sluggish after spending the winter inside the house.

“You know,” he said, “your father is a socialist.” He waved the fly away from his face. “Freedom, equality, and brotherhood are all high on my list. But the masses have had all the culture siphoned out of them. When they don’t have to think, they’re in their element. And it’s sad, but you’ve joined that herd. I expected better things from my daughter, but you’ve decided otherwise. Well—” he cleared his throat — “go get a job. I don’t care what: cashier, maid, factory work, janitor, whatever.”

As if she had just heard my death sentence pronounced, my mother stared at me, her gaze heavy with pity and shame. She sat there stoically, her own daughter’s victim.

I can’t, I thought.

If only I already had a job, in a store or a factory, it couldn’t possibly be as boring as sitting in this room with my parents, bombarded by the terrible things they said about me, accusations I had no way to counter. Turning away from them didn’t help; there was no comfort anywhere else in the room. Everything just made me tired: the crocheted runner draped along the mantel, the sansevierias on the window sill, the portraits of dead relations everyone had hated on the walls, my father’s bulky armchair, with the worn stripe of fabric down the middle, that had long ago conformed itself to the shape of his body.

I am so tired of my father.

My sister and I always had to wait for him after school, while he placed his notebooks and textbooks in his briefcase with minute precision, stored his pen, eraser, and ruler in their special places, wiped the board clean, arranged the desks in orderly rows, picked wadded-up balls of paper from the floor and dropped them in the wastepaper basket, locked the schoolhouse door, chased away the kids who were hanging around the playground. After that, as we were about to cross the busy street in the shade of the tall chestnut trees, he would intone, with one hand tight on the back of my sister’s neck and the other tight on mine: “Look left, then right, then left again.” And then we would finally cross, our steps perfectly synchronized.

“La douce France,” he would say, peering at me over the top of my French reader, which he held open before him. “La douce Fraaaance.” Saliva would spray from his mouth and sting my face. “France is the cradle of Western European culture. She gave us famous philosophers, teachers, painters, authors, politicians. The French aren’t as crude as we Dutch. They prrrrrrrronounce their words like this.” He would trill the r like a songbird.

I had never been to France, and hoped I wouldn’t ever have to go there.

Except for Cora, we all worked in the licorice department, where Trix supervised the steady drip-drip-drip of the liquid licorice into the metal molds. Sometimes the flow was too fast, and the black goo spilled over the edges of the molds like molten lava, ran over the sides of the conveyor belt, and formed a glimmering black river beneath the machine. When that happened, Trix would shut down the line and call for a mechanic to set things right. Meanwhile, we had the chance to stretch our backs.

I was one of four women at the end of the line. Our task was to seal the cellophane bags of candy as they emerged from the previous step of the process. We cheered the occasional breakdowns, sometimes we prayed for them, just to get a momentary relief from the din that rattled our bodies and our souls.

Cora worked in bonbons. Every afternoon, she liberated a box for the next morning’s train ride. My eyes must have bugged out of my head the first time I saw her eating her daily “breakfast.” Her pudgy hands, rings on every finger, unwrapped one candy after another. “A body has to eat,” she said, absently smoothing out the wrinkles from a silver wrapper. “At home, I just can’t make myself eat a thing in the morning.”

She was so heavy she almost took up two seats. In her lavender dress with bright yellow buttons, she looked like a marvelous Easter egg. Above her head hung a photo of a slender woman in a white dress, leaning against an old-fashioned Dutch canal bridge.

“Why not?” I asked her.

“My husband,” said Cora. “He’s been sick for six or seven years. Parkinson’s, the doctors tell us. They could keep that little piece of information to themselves, in my opinion. What does my husband need with Mr. Parkinson’s disease?”

Her dark brown eyes glared at me indignantly, as if she’d heard the diagnosis only yesterday. I felt uncomfortable, as if it was partially my fault. The most serious illnesses could just suddenly be there, from one day to the next. Billions of bacteria and viruses lurking day and night, waiting for their chance to weasel into our bodies and begin their attack on the weakest parts of us. Even worse were the dangerous genetic elements, inheritances from our ancestors, already present inside us from the moment of our birth, quietly waiting for the right time to reveal themselves. Just thinking about it made me hot and sweaty with fear, feeling phantom pains in random places.

“He can’t control his muscles anymore,” said Cora. “I have to wash him every morning, get him dressed, help him downstairs, and feed him his oatmeal, half of which winds up dribbling back out of his mouth and onto his clothing.” She yawned widely. Her tongue was a pink animal, quivering in its den. “Now the children are out of the house, I wind up with this full-grown child to take care of.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw a cartoon image of a grotesque manly woman with a surly face, carrying her struggling husband under her arm as if he was a pile of kindling for the fireplace.

“Sometimes he announces that he’s going to go out for a bike ride,” said Cora, “but he’s already had three awful spills.”

“Let him ride his bike if he wants to,” murmured Trix. “Maybe next time he’ll keel over dead.” She gazed out the window dreamily. Streamers of mist drifted over the fields. When she closed her eyes, her long lashes almost touched her cheeks. “Then she’ll finally have some peace.”

Lien polished her glasses with a man’s checkered handkerchief. Her mousy eyes aimed at Cora, who shrugged her shoulders.

My first week on the job, I came home every evening dead tired. My limbs were leaden, my spine felt like I’d been tied to the mast of a sailing ship during a heavy storm.

At dinner, I couldn’t even sit up straight. My father criticized my table manners, and my mother seemed worried. I wondered whether she was afraid of a new battle breaking out or concerned about my health — and in my exhausted state, I figured it was probably whichever was the greater of two evils. When I finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. Images of the workday crawled through the labyrinth inside my skull, and a chorus of human voices tried in vain to drown out the echoes of pounding machinery and blaring music.

Mornings, on the train, if anything more tired than I’d been the previous evening, I couldn’t imagine how the others had been able to stand this for all these years. If this is my future, I thought, I’d rather be dead. But immediately my father’s voice began to protest inside my mind — not against the idea of my death, but against the possibility of my giving up the job. He challenged me with his beloved clichés: Work is honorable, the people have a right to work, workers of the world unite, idle hands are the devil’s playground, roll up your sleeves and get to work, many hands make light work. His voice was shrill, he laughed nastily and rolled his head crazily and cried: “We live to work! We live to work!”

Just like everyone who hates their job, I found Mondays the worst. The week was a mountain and I was Sisyphus, eternally rolling a boulder towards the top.

At first I thought it was that listless beginning-of-the-week feeling that kept Trix staring unpleasantly out the window when we came into the compartment, although the raindrops trickling down the glass clouded her view of the world outside. Like a dog shaking itself dry, Cora shook off her raincoat, spattering our faces. She took her place across from Trix, sighing deeply as her full weight landed on the seat. With a practiced hand, she opened her box of bonbons. Then at last she seemed to relax and become aware of her surroundings.

“Jesus,” she cried, startled by Trix’s appearance. “What happened to you?”

Trix shrugged. Their profiles — Cora’s with mouth open wide in surprise — appeared as shadows on the window.

“Who did that to you?” Cora demanded.

“Dolf,” Trix replied dully.

“Look at this,” said Cora. Her heavy body bent closer. With unusual tenderness, she cupped her hands around Trix’s face and turned it gently towards us.

“Oh my God,” said Lien.

For just a moment, in the dim light of the compartment, it seemed as if Trix’s left eye had been plucked out, leaving behind a dark crater that ran from her eyebrow halfway down her cheek. I wanted to run out of the compartment so I wouldn’t have to see it. Port-wine stains, harelips, spastics, hunchbacks, mongoloids, cripples — if I don’t look, they don’t exist. Motionless, I took in the left half of Trix’s face.

The skin was a dark purple. Her eyelid had swollen, practically obscuring the entire eye. I wondered if she could see out of it at all. A cut across her eyebrow was clotted with dried blood. It looked so bad it couldn’t possibly ever heal, like she’d spend the rest of her life with a face that was half angel, half leper. Her good eye, usually an intense blue, was now gray and expressionless.

“Why?” Cora asked.

“Because he’s a bastard.” Trix turned away and looked at the floor. It was very quiet in the compartment. The rain streamed down the outside of the window. My wet socks began to dry. They itched me, but I didn’t dare scratch.

“Does it hurt?” I heard myself ask, my voice hoarse.

“It hurts here,” said Trix, cupping a pathetic hand beneath her left breast and darting a quick glance at us with her one good eye.

“What happened?” asked Lien.

Trix sighed. “I knew I was going to have to explain. I wish I could just drop out of sight for a month. What can I say? It started Saturday night, at my brother’s wedding reception. Eppo Engelhardt, a friend from when I was a kid, he was there. I hadn’t seen him in years. Last time I saw him, he was a skinny little boy with zits — I remember I beat him up once, after school. He’s grown into a real man, though, with a bristly black beard, I could hardly believe my eyes. If he hadn’t been there, nothing would have happened. It’s so stuffy in here. Can I open a window?”

“It’s raining,” said Cora.

“We danced and laughed till we practically couldn’t stand up anymore. It was crazy—” her voice softened, and we had to lean forward to hear her — “but, just for a moment, I thought, this is what I live for, just to be able to enjoy a night like this once in a while.”

She fell silent.

“What can I say? It happened.”

“What happened?” Lien asked again.

Trix examined her fingernails. “The more fun I had, the more upset Dolf got. He was storming around with an evil look in his eye, like he wanted to mow everyone down with a machine gun. At eleven-thirty, he pulled me off the dance floor. He wanted to go home. ‘Go,’ I said, ‘I’ll be along later.’ But he didn’t want to leave by himself. ‘Then stay,’ I said. ‘My brother’s only getting married this one time.’ ‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘If that’s all you have to say for yourself,’ I said, and pulled my arm free and headed back to the dance floor. But he came after me and hissed, ‘You’re going home with me right now, or you’re gonna get it!’ That did it. I put my lips right up to his ear and whispered, ‘Piss off, Dolf, and leave me in peace.’ He turned away, furious. And then he was just gone. Excellent, I thought, that’s got rid of him.”

She rearranged herself in the seat, trying to find a comfortable position. “Has anyone got a cigarette?”

Lien scrabbled in her purse and handed over a whole pack, with the eager expression of a teenager shoving another coin in a jukebox to keep the music playing.

“I look pretty gorgeous, don’t I? Be honest: How bad is it?”

“It looks more like you’ve been in a car crash,” Cora lied.

“You think they’d believe me,” said Trix eagerly, “if I said I smashed my car?”

“Get back to the story,” Lien pled.

A bit less nervously, Trix went on: “I got home about three a.m. All the lights in the house were on. The only house on the block that wasn’t dark. That doesn’t mean anything, I told myself. But when I walked into the living room, I got the shock of my life. Have you ever seen a car crash, some poor soul dead on the ground, covered in blood? That was Dolf, spreadeagled on the couch, his clothes all red. Except when I got closer I realized that it wasn’t blood, it was rose petals, from the bouquet he gave me last week for our anniversary. He’d picked the roses apart, petal by petal, there must have been hundreds of them. He lay there leering at me. ‘Madam finally graces us with her presence,’ he said, ‘at three-thirty in the morning.’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘and madam is going straight to bed.’ ‘That’s what you think,’ he said, jumping to his feet, scattering the petals to the carpet. He grabbed my arm — his fingers felt like steel claws. ‘Now it’s my turn,’ he yelled. The veins on his forehead were swollen, his eyes were bloodshot and feverish, like the animals in the zoo, pacing back and forth in cages too small for them. I felt contempt for him, I wished I’d never met him. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said again. ‘No, you’re not.’ He was squeezing my arm so hard. ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said. ‘Now that he’s had his, it’s my turn.’ ‘Now that who’s had his what?’ I said. ‘You make me sick. You don’t even know Eppo.’ Well—” she shrugged indifferently — “that’s when it happened. What else can I say? You can see for yourselves.”

I didn’t want to see for myself, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Trix. Her smooth perfection had always seemed incorruptible. That the emotions contained within another being, balled together into an angry fist, could change all that and leave such horrifying evidence of its power was terrifying to me. And, meanwhile, the itching was driving me crazy. I realized that itching — when circumstances make it impossible for you to scratch — can be just as bad as pain.

“Did you faint?” asked Lien.

“Yes,” Trix said. “No. Well, sort of.” She hung her head. “I fell down. My ears were ringing. I only half realized that he was pushing my dress up around my waist. He held my wrists together above my head with one hand. I could hear him cursing. I thought it would never stop.”

“What a pig,” said Cora. “I wish I could get my hands on him.”

They say Cora once broke up a fight at the factory, banged two men’s heads together. She’s incredibly strong, they say. In a vision, I saw her as an omniscient goddess of revenge crushing Trix’s husband to her breast, a faint smile on her lips, a bonbon between her teeth.

It was almost impossible to breathe. There was condensation on the inside of the window. We were sitting in a steam cooker under high pressure.

“What are you going to do?” asked Lien.

Trix stared at the toe of her shoe with her one good eye. Her long hair spilled loose across her face.

“I can’t leave him,” she said. With trembling fingers, she shook another cigarette from the pack.

No one spoke. Lien pulled out her knitting. Cora helped herself to a bonbon. I finally scratched my leg.

We had reached the edge of the comprehensible and dashed against the contrariness that lives inside each of us and perhaps leads us each to our doom. We We had reached the edge of the comprehensible and dashed against the contrariness that lives inside each of us and perhaps leads us each to our doom. We acknowledged that reality in silence.

I knew exactly how it felt to be powerless. Whenever I sat behind Ruud on his dirt bike, I could sense the other girls’ eyes boring into my back. Before Ruud came along, they barely acknowledged my existence, but now they just had to know where I bought my skirts and my black ballet slippers, how I managed to keep my ponytail standing so tall. Even my bad report cards worked in my favor: They proved that I didn’t care about our parents’ world, a world where ambition, self-discipline, and appearances were all that mattered.

When Ruud took a corner at full speed, we came so close to the asphalt it was as if he wanted to polish the road surface with our bodies. I held my skirt down with one hand, clamped the other tightly around the front of his stiff leather jacket. We’d left the other kids behind on the square, beneath the blue-and-white signboard in front of Milano, the ice-cream parlor. They’d all scatter in different directions, now that Ruud was gone. They were nothing without him. His presence turned them into a group.

It was drizzling. The news that the frost had pulled back to northern Scandinavia had brightened up our dinner hour at home. “Anything can happen,” my father said. “I remember one year the canals were still frozen in March. King Winter has not yet been defeated.” He talked like that to the children at school, all that “King Winter” stuff.

Despite the light rain, the air was almost warm. I’d never been in this part of the city before. The rowhouses were all four or five stories high, set like two parallel walls with a narrow street between them. There was a café on every corner, people hanging around outside as if it were a summer evening. A little girl sat on an orange crate, sipping lemonade through a straw.

We stopped before the dimly lit window of a furniture store. Ruud set his dirt bike on its kickstand, fished a key from his pocket, and opened the door. We slipped inside, and he carefully locked up behind us. All around us in the gloomy half-light were couches, dressers, dining-room sets, all jumbled together. I wanted to ask what we were doing there, although I knew exactly what we were doing there. I just didn’t want to believe it. We moved to the back of the store, where rolls of carpet standing on their ends kept watch over bedroom sets that just hulked there waiting for someone to buy them and carry them away.

“Whose place is this?” I asked.

“My father’s,” said Ruud gruffly. He shrugged out of his leather jacket and tossed it on the nearest bed. In three steps, he was beside me. He stood there for a moment, motionless. Now he’s supposed to tell me he thinks I’m beautiful, I thought, and special, and all he can think about, that he’ll go crazy with desire if I don’t give myself to him right this second.

He leaned in to me and pressed his lips to my mouth. I was huddled against one of the rolls of carpeting, and it prickled my back. Must be coconut, I thought, only coconut matting prickles like that. My upper lip was snagged for a moment between his teeth and mine.

“Have you ever done it before?” asked Ruud.

I resisted the temptation to act all experienced and indifferent, as if I had a real past to be ashamed of. “No,” I said truthfully, annoyed that my voice sounded so shy and uncertain.

With a sweeping gesture, Ruud said, “Which of these lovely beds strikes your fancy?”

I looked around the showroom. The beds were monstrous, each with its matching night tables and gold-braided bedside lamps. They were like my parents’ bed, pompous and prudish at the same time. It disgusted me to think that I’d been conceived in their bed, that I’d originated from their bodies.

“Pick one out,” Ruud ordered. There was an undertone of insult in his voice.

As obediently as if I’d been hypnotized, I walked between the rows of four-posters, king-sized beds, and bunk beds, searching for the one in which I would have done to me what everyone always talks about without saying the actual words, that thing the girls in the group assumed I’d done long ago and about which my parents maintained a tight-lipped silence. At the end of a row, I discovered the most nauseating display of them all: golden posts at all four corners, topped with heavy finials and chubby little angels bedecked with garlands of carved wooden flowers.

“Ruud,” I cried, “I found one!”

He came towards me with a thick folded comforter.

“Now this,” I said, running a hand over an angel’s head, “is fantastic.”

I hoped he’d notice my sarcasm, but he just said, “Great!” and began to arrange the conforter on top of the satin spread that was already arranged there. The sacrificial cloth, I thought.

Why didn’t I just turn around and go, back between the rows of beds, the rolls of carpet, the kitchenettes, the bureaus, the sectional sofas? Why did I always let him make my decisions for me, from the very first moment I saw him? Was it his eyes, bluer than blue, that gazed over other people’s heads and saw far-off horizons they never noticed? Was it his dark blond hair, so perfectly combed? Was it his self-confidence?

He smoothed the wrinkles from the comforter and stood up straight. He laid his hands on my shoulders, looked meaningfully into my eyes, and pressed me slowly to the bed.

When I was about twelve, my mother’s oldest brother had innocently brainwashed me into a realm of erotic fantasy. Since then, I’d cherished the dream of the ideal, irresistible woman, a role I myself would sooner or later yearn to play.

“The most beautiful women of India,” said Uncle Harry, “came from Singaraja. Supple, enchanting, as perfect as a lotus blossom. They knew what a man wanted and deserved.”

I saw before me girls with waist-length blue-black hair, light brown skin, narrow hips, wreathed in sarongs and with garlands of flowers around their necks.

“Harry,” my father said, “I don’t doubt that the women of Singaraja were lovely creatures, but would you try to remember that we’re in Holland, with two impressionable young girls at the table?”

Uncle Harry laughed uproariously. My mother glanced nervously at my father, and then hid a giggle behind her hand.

“You know,” said Uncle Harry, “that girls their age—” he nodded towards Louise and me — “are already ripe? They already know how to get their hooks into a man.” He lowered his voice. “Your Dutch girls are artificially locked into childhood for much too long.”

My father, who wasn’t used to being lectured in his own house, haughtily suggested that it was time to change the subject.

Uncle Harry brought my mother fragrant soaps from faraway places, bottles of perfume, hand-painted fans, and exotic candies — all gifts which were over the top in my father’s eyes and, for that very reason, seemed incredibly wonderful to us. Anytime Louise and I asked him, Uncle Harry would gladly pull up his sweater to show us the scars on his back. The Japs had whipped him because he would imitate even the most feared of them behind their backs. We wished we were Uncle Harry’s kids and could go to India with him — at least if it really looked like the painting in his room promised: in the foreground, deep green oases surrounded by palm trees, in the background a towering mountain’s snowy peak bright against the pale blue sky. Why didn’t that snow melt, if it was really as hot as Uncle Harry claimed?

After Ruud tugged off my petticoats and skirt, unsnapped my garters, and stripped off my stockings, he turned his attention to the top half of my body. I’m an object, I thought. I just let him do whatever he wants. He untucked my blouse, and I raised my arms. As if it were perfectly normal, I gave myself over to the age-old tradition of the submissive woman. The only moment I was even involved was when I interrupted his fumbling with my bra to unhook it for him. These ridiculous details completely contradicted the dreams I’d built up and cherished over the years, dreams of an unbridled passion which would ultimately explode into dazzling fireworks, followed by an eternity of tender caresses, explorations of each other’s bodies, and finally a total melting together that would make the world disappear, at least for a while.

He tossed my bra aside as if he hated it. And then his cool hands finally slid across my skin. To my disappointment, I wasn’t the least excited. I just lay there, thinking clinically and rationally: What’s he going to do now? What’s his next move?

His hands moving quickly, expertly, he pulled off my panties. Then he sat up, took off his own clothes, and dropped them to the floor. For a moment, he stood beside the bed, looking down at me. And although I was surely as curious about his body as he was about mine, I immediately shut my eyes. How attractive could I possibly be? I wished I could see myself through his eyes. If only I could sink away through the bed, through the floor, through the depths of the city, straight down through the earth to the other side of the world to land on a quiet beach where everyone would just leave me in peace.

He slowly lowered himself onto me. And now I’m supposed to have these deep, intense emotions, I thought, aimed at this man who’s about to give me a brand-new experience that can never be undone. But the conscious, contemplative experience I’d dreamed of simply wasn’t there. It was as if I was being dissected by a razor-sharp blade. From the center of my body, a flaming gulf of pain spread through me in every direction, to the tips of my fingers, to my toes, to the roots of my hair. I screamed, but — as in a nightmare — made no sound. Again and again he thrust into me, as if he wanted to tear me apart, as if I would never be whole, never be myself again. With each rush of pain, I felt warmer, oceans of my life’s essence drained out of me and washed away in the dry bed.

His head rested on my shoulder; his hair smelled earthy, male, and consoled me in some incomprehensible way. I burrowed my face into him until he raised his head with a brief cry of surprise. From far off, I heard the wail of an ambulance. Suddenly, it seemed clear to me that I had been wounded and would have to be taken to the hospital, where an understanding surgeon would lovingly heal me, would restore my virginity and purity.

Ruud lay on top of me as if he was incapable of movement. He seemed to be getting heavier. I could barely breathe. Finally, he rolled over and lay with his back against me. He gazed up at the ceiling, then turned his face toward me to gauge my condition.

“How’d you like it?” he asked.

“It hurt,” I said.

“It’s supposed to hurt,” he told me with an abrupt laugh, almost proud of the pain he had brought me.

He lit a cigarette. I stole a glance at the glowing red point of light. It irritated me that he was able to switch from one form of enjoyment to another so effortlessly. Soon afterwards, I was quickly and efficiently driven home. The drizzle had turned into a driving rain. There’s no one I can tell about this, I thought, and I cried with my face pressed against his back. My tears mixed with the raindrops and fell onto the asphalt, marking the route from the furniture store to my parents’ house like a trail of breadcrumbs.

At the factory, every day was the same.

As quickly as a fire spreads, that’s how slowly the time passed. This was where we spent the largest part of our week — everything else, the outside world, was just window dressing. It was as if we labored in an enormous blacksmith shop deep in the heart of the earth, feverishly stoking the fires that kept the planet revolving, ignorant of what was happening up on the surface.

One afternoon, the boss bustled into our department with a man who looked American with his healthy appearance, his bebop hair, and an easy laugh that promised that anything was possible, no mountain too high, no problem that the human brain couldn’t solve, no battle that couldn’t be fought and won.

“We need a charming hostess,” said the boss, raising his voice to be heard above the hiss and rattle of the machinery, “who can demonstrate our product line to potential customers.”

They examined us closely. Our eyes remained shyly lowered, and the sealing of the little bags of candy proceeded without interruption.

What did they see, our jolly boss and his crewcut colleague, as they searched for their Chosen One?

They saw themselves reflected in Lien’s thick spectacles, they saw the permanented gray hairdos of the two other women, they saw me the way I’d been feeling since I’d spotted a girl with a tower of black hair sitting behind Ruud on his dirt bike with her arms clasped around him.

“No beauty queens here,” cried Lien snippily. “You want a beauty queen, try over there.” And she waved them over to Trix.

“They’re all the same,” Lien growled. “They want a Madonna for their kids and a Marilyn Monroe in bed. Look at this!” She pulled her hands from the line and, as the unsealed bags immediately began to pile up against each other, smoothed down her sweater. “You wouldn’t think I’ve had two children, would you?”

The handknitted yellow-and-black-striped sweater accented her little-girl breasts, then bunched up again the moment she stopped smoothing it.

“Paul’s the same as the rest of them,” she said. “That’s why I keep my eye on him.”

“You mean you don’t trust him?” I asked.

“What do you think?” She was indignant. “You think I like going to all those soccer games and boxing matches?”

The sun tries its hardest to break through the low-hanging mist. We are moving through the prettiest part of our route: the heath, dotted with fantastic pines and beeches that glimmer silvery white through the fog.

I would gladly step out into that mysterious world. In my poor, city-girl imagination, I envision the gradual clearing of the mist and reemergence of the sun. In my mind’s eye, I can see the forest animals awaken and stretch themselves lazily.

I can’t remember the last time I was in the woods. All I can recall is the city park, which has too little that’s natural and too much that’s man-made: gravel paths, mown grass, neatly planted flower beds, geometric streams littered with orange peels and decaying half-eaten sandwiches, patrolled by well-trained ducks and crawling with pensioners, actually nothing more than a graveyard except no headstones, the corpses out in the open, sitting on the green park benches, twittering, scattering crumbs to the birds.

Maybe none of us has gotten enough sleep over the weekend. Like overfed house cats on velvet cushions, we gaze drowsily out the window. Cora sucks on a bonbon for a long time, apparently not realizing what she’s doing.

When the compartment door is suddenly thrown open, we are shocked out of our lethargy. A young, gleamingly polished conductor — new to us but equipped with all the tools of his trade — steps into our car.

“All tickets, please,” he says, his voice stiff and formal.

He examines us impatiently from behind wire-rimmed eyeglasses, as if it surprises him that we’re not sitting on the edge of our seats with our tickets at the ready. As slowly as possible, searching distractedly in handbags and coat pockets, we locate and present our monthly passes. With the precision of a schoolmaster, he studies the small print on each pass.

“This is expired,” he says, and glares at me through the glittering lenses of his spectacles. “You should have renewed it this morning.”

“Oh,” I say, and my hands fly automatically to my cheeks, “I completely forgot.”

“Nothing to worry about,” says Cora good-naturedly. “It happens to all of us. You’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll need a round-trip ticket today,” says the conductor.

“What do you mean, a round-trip ticket?” asks Cora suspiciously.

“For today,” he says again. He’s irritated; this is taking too long. Cora stares at him, speechless. I flush with the realization that I have no money on me.

“You’re funny,” Cora laughs. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

With furrowed brow and unpleasantly tight lips, he looks her up and down. He seems to want to will her away, to wish he was looking at something else — his girlfriend, perhaps, who always has her ticket with her, who at this hour of the morning is still in her frilly pink bed, dreaming of him and of the everything-first-class trips they’ll someday take at someone else’s expense.

“We’ve been riding this route for years,” cries Cora, insulted. “The railroad’s made a fortune off of us, but you can’t excuse one honest mistake?”

The conductor pulls out his ticket book and begins to scribble.

Cora turns red. “What’s your problem? We were riding this train before you were born!”

He ignores her and tears a ticket from his pad. As he offers it to me, Cora’s pudgy hand snatches it from his fingers.

“Jesus!” She leans towards Trix. “Look at this: The bastard’s charging her a fine.”

And then, as I sit there like a fool with my empty wallet open in my hand, Cora gives him a withering look and takes action in the same cool and detached way a queen of the olden days whose patience had reached its limit would turn away from an accused subject and wave an imperious hand at her bailiff and order, “Lock him up!” or, “Off with his head!” and then instantly forget all about it and move on to other matters.

She stands up brusquely and — the yellow buttons on her purple dress jiggling with every movement — she gets right in his face and snatches his eyeglasses from his nose.

“No,” she says.

As if his very soul has been stolen from him, the conductor blinks helplessly and chews on his lower lip.

“Give those back,” he says hoarsely, and grabs for them, but Cora holds them high above her head and out of his reach. “Give me my glasses!”

Cora laughs at him, her sweetest laugh, little stars twinkling in her eyes.

Mama, mama, the bear is loose, I think. A strange and delectable excitement courses through me. I feel like something irreversible has been set in motion, and none of us will ever be the same again.

“You’ll get your glasses back when you rip up that ticket,” says Cora. “Not till then.”

He stares at her, confused by the sudden shift in power. He holds tightly to the leather pouch around his waist with one hand and to his cap with the other, as if to reassure himself of his position.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says sternly.

“Fine, then.” With a deep sigh, Cora hands the glasses to Trix, who is sitting in the corner by the window. As if they’ve talked it over at length and agreed how to play out the scene, Trix does exactly what Cora must want her to do: She opens the window and thrusts the eyeglasses outside into the misty air, her graceful posture emphasizing the soft curve of her waist and hip. With her lovely smile, she looks just like the women in the ads, leaning seductively against the hood of a Mercedes to lure businessmen into buying it.

“Don’t!” cries the conductor, panicked. “Give them back!”

“I’ve told you what we’re willing to trade for them,” Cora says calmly, as if she’s refusing to haggle with a merchant at the market.

Cornered, he looks around the compartment furiously and then fearfully at the window, where the expensive lenses precisely suited to the weakness of his eyes are in danger of being dropped and shattered.

“I’m going to report you at the next station,” he cries.

“Hear that, girls? He’s going to report us!”

With an ease as if she’s merely lifting it from a hat stand, Cora plucks the cap from his head and sets it jauntily atop her own dyed black hair. She turns her head and laughs at us over her shoulder. Without his cap, the conductor seems weak, fragile, his silken blond curls at the nape of his neck.

“You know you have beautiful blue eyes?” asks Cora.

He swallows with difficulty, as if he’s got a plum pit stuck in his throat, and grabs clumsily for his cap, but Cora is faster than he is and hands it off to Lien. “Don’t you think he has beautiful blue eyes?” One by one, we line up beside her and gaze at him with the same fanatical admiration we would give to a James Dean film, which makes him even more nervous. He obviously can’t stand the hysteria of women who would swarm past the security guards and bodyguards onto the stage to touch an Elvis Presley; he feels solidarity not with Elvis but with the rent-a-cops, the men in the caps and uniforms.

“Now give me your little pouch,” says Cora. He stares at her, astounded. No one has ever dared talk to him like this. Speechless, he shakes his head.

“Come on,” says Cora. “Otherwise, you know what’ll happen to your glasses.”

With supple movements of her wrist, Trix sways the spectacles back and forth in the mist.

Something has erupted in Cora, a power that is stronger than any possible opposition, like a river in monsoon season swelling beyond its banks and ripping trees out of the ground and washing them out to sea.

“Let’s go, sonny, give mamma your toy.”

Beaten, he unhooks the pouch from around his waist. Without even glancing at it, Cora passes it over to Lien, who stashes it in the corner behind her worn shopping bag, her knitting needles sticking up like the antennas on a portable radio.

“So,” says Cora, “have you changed your mind?”

They face each other expectantly, Cora a full head taller than he is. How did she get so tall, I think, and so strong?

At that moment, it seems that a peace treaty is in the offing, as if his next words will be: “You’re right, what am I so worried about? It doesn’t make any difference to me. Let’s just forget the whole thing.”

But suddenly he shoves Cora out of his way and lunges towards Trix, falling onto her with his full weight. His attention is riveted to his eyeglasses — his hands scrabble for them, and it’s a wonder that Trix doesn’t drop them out of pure shock.

Just for an instant, Cora seems to have been taken out of the game: She stands there, dazed, like a fat woman who’s lost her little dog. Oh my, he was just here a second ago!

But then she throws herself onto Trix’s attacker, grabs the collar of his conductor’s jacket, and yanks him off her. His eyes bug out and he growls, thirsty for blood. He’s like a dog, pulled off his worst enemy in the heat of the battle.

Trix brushes strands of hair off her face and smoothes her dress. She doesn’t seem the least bit disturbed. No, she’s like a young girl after making whoopee with her boyfriend, crawling out of the bushes with a flushed face and a sparkle in her eyes.

Outside the window, a UFO flies by: Lien has thrown the conductor’s cap from the compartment like a Frisbee.

His legs trapped, his arms flailing, the young man tries to free himself. Cora grabs his wrists and forces them behind his back.

“Get his legs,” she hisses. Trix and Lien each fasten onto a leg and force it down. My heart pounds in my throat. I have no experience of violence. At home, our disagreements are cool and dispassionate — our wars are always civil.

“Let’s take off that cute little jacket,” says Cora. Because each of us ought to have a hand in the taming of the beast, her eyes turn now to me. With trembling hands, I pull on the coarse fabric of the sleeve. It’s no easy task, relieving a struggling man of his jacket. If he would just play along, I think, it’d be so much easier. I can tell from Cora’s expression that it takes all of her strength to hold him down. He’s fighting to escape like a wounded tiger, and his eyes are filled with hate.

“Now the tie,” says Cora, calm as a surgeon asking a nurse for a scalpel. I bend over him obediently and we gaze straight into each other’s eyes. I have his necktie in one hand as if I’m about to strangle him.

What do I know about people? Nothing. There are a few, like my father, about whom I’ve been forced to think deeply. But I can see the fear in this man’s huge blue irises, darting this way and that like frightened fish in the deep blue sea. I think his fear runs even deeper than his hatred, which itself helps to keep him from drowning. An inappropriate wave of pity washes over me and confuses me. I quickly untie his tie.

“Well,” asks Cora, in a tone that says she no longer anticipates any response, “what do you say, boy?”

He says nothing. He just lies there, absolutely still. Is he plotting some unexpected move?

We watch him, waiting. And then his body tenses, and he swivels his head and spits right in Cora’s face.

Cora smiles, and wipes away the spittle with her purple sleeve. “Shirt,” she says.

My father has the exact same cufflinks. I fumble them loose. When I have the first sleeve halfway free, the conductor makes a sudden wrenching motion and the fabric rips, like a rabbit ripping its own skin as it struggles to release itself from a hunter’s trap. His chest is pale, his chest hair thin and blond.

I lean back.

“Pants.” Cora seems impatient. “We’ll show him he’s just an ordinary little boy, nothing special.”

“Take away a man’s uniform,” says Trix, “and there’s not much left.”

Uniforms. They’re so, so German. Marching around in perfectly synchronized columns, black leather boots stamping the ground, each with one hand angled skyward in a salute, chanting their battle hymns — I’ve seen it in so many films, read it in so many books, heard it from so many survivors who saw it in the flesh. What are wedoing? I think. It’s too late to stop, though — we’ve unleashed something that is stronger than ourselves.

As I undo his belt, I can see Ruud in the dim light of the furniture store, standing by the side of the bed, undoing his belt with self-assured movements, and I’m spread out on the soft bed filled with surprise and disgust at my blind obedience. It puzzles me: why do I keep on doing things I don’t want to do?

It’s not easy for Lien and Trix to get his glossy black shoes off him, but they manage. I almost have to rip off a leg to remove his trousers. Just like a boxer waits for his opponent to drop his guard so he can attack, the conductor picks his moment and lets fly with a well-aimed kick. Trix goes sprawling and clutches her face in both hands.

“You’re going to regret this,” he gasps.

Why her, I think. Why Trix — hasn’t she taken enough punishment already? But his bare foot hasn’t really done much damage, and she recovers quickly. Without any further interruption, I unpants him.

And that seems to break him. His upper body lies limp in Cora’s lap. They could pose for a deposition from the cross, with Cora as the grieving Mary and the conductor as the martyred Christ, except for the light-blue boxers he wears instead of a loincloth.

If I ever get married, I think, I’m going to buy boxers just like those for my husband.

Now what? Is there really any doubt? We exchange questioning glances across the conductor’s body.

“Let’s finish it,” says Trix. She shakes back her mane of hair from her eyes.

“Go ahead.” She nods at me.

I stand beside him. I’ve never seen anyone brought down so low.

He looks like we’re about to toss him out the window or, worse, as if he’d prefer that fate to the one we have planned for him.

What is it we want? Is it revenge, to completely debase him? Or do we simply need a new kind of excitement to get us out of our daily rut?

I can’t move. If only I was a mechanical toy with a key in my back, so they could wind me up and I could do what was expected of me. Three pairs of eyes urge me on, one pair begs for leniency. Is this now the touchstone of our friendship? Do I have to prove myself worthy of being “one of the girls”?

“I’ll do it,” says Trix.

She sits up. Ashamed and relieved, I move out of the way. Let her take over, it’s better that way, I can see it in the seductive smile that flickers across her lips.

In one last burst of anger, he roars, “Stay away from me! Goddammit, leave me alone!”

Then, reduced to desperation, he assumes a fetal position on the ground. I can feel his leg muscles straining. Trix resolutely grabs his boxers with both hands and pulls them down to his ankles.

He turns away, his humiliation complete. A shaft of sunlight breaks through the mist and illuminates the compartment, enveloping the conductor’s body in a warm glow.

We are silent, and the rattle of the train’s wheels over the rails seems to swell.

Cora, a peaceful matron, examines his naked body thoughtfully. All thoughts of vengeance seem to have left her. Her hold on his arms loosens, and he hangs against her like the prodigal son returned to his mother’s lap.

Lien strokes his leg absently, scrunching up her nose to reseat her glasses, an unconscious tic we’ve seen many times before.

Trix’s usually bored expression is gone, replaced by one of lively interest. She blushes with excitement, her nostrils flare, and her eyes gleam. I’ve never seen her so beautiful. She holds the light-blue boxers in her hand like a religious icon.

The sun is warm on my back. I feel the tension drain out of me, the way it feels after a heavy storm has passed. I wouldn’t mind if the train kept on forever.

As majestic as an ancient priestess, Trix leans over and kisses his chest. He shivers, the leg in my hand jumps as if it has a mind of its own. Slowly, carefully, Trix’s lips trace their way from his chest to his stomach, her long blond hair accompanying their descent. From his belly, she describes an arc along his hip to his thigh, tickling the fine hairs which catch the sunlight.

No one says a word. It is as if we are witnessing some secret ritual — and, wonder of wonders, his body reacts to her touch and salutes her. As if in a trance, Trix runs her lips along his thigh. A groan escapes him, accompanied by a violent shaking of his chest and shoulders, and the mood that has swept us all away is broken.

Trix sits up, and her lust gives way to astonishment as she sees him sobbing in Cora’s lap, trying to hide his face in the folds of her purple dress. Cora, the all-forgiving and understanding mother, strokes his hair tenderly. Dismayed by the effect of her caresses, Trix plucks nervously at the boxers she still clutches in her hand.

The train begins to slow.

I only know what’s been happening in our compartment. Of all the yawning and coughing, the silent glances and gossipy exchanges, the irritations and dreams in the rest of the train, I can only guess. In principle, the conductor is the only person aboard who remains completely neutral, as he makes his rounds from car to car.

Not this conductor, though. This one hasn’t finished his rounds. As we approach the station, he regains his awareness of his surroundings. Exhausted, he rises from the floor and, unsteady on his feet, slides open the compartment door.

“Wait,” says Cora, “your clothes.”

We gather his things together. He doesn’t seem to pay any attention. We no longer exist for him. He staggers out into the corridor, Cora tottering along behind him, us in her wake.

“Get dressed,” she says. “You can’t let them see you like this.”

We wrap his pants, socks, shirt, tie, glasses and leather pouch in his jacket, tie the sleeves together, and press the bundle into his arms. He gazes at us blankly, as if he’s just been handed an orphaned child in a blanket.

Thank goodness there’s no one else in the corridor. We hustle back into our compartment — this isn’t our stop. Our excited bodies huddle close against each other as we press our noses to the window and watch the conductor leave the train.

Quite a few passengers are waiting on the platform. They step aside for the naked traveler.

He strides forward through the crowd with the little bundle of clothing held to his chest, staring solemnly before him as if he is carrying his first-born son to the baptismal font.

Copyright © 2009 by Tessa de Loo

Translation Copyright © 2009 by Josh Pachter

Famous Last Words

by Doug Allyn

This month, between the same covers, we have EQMM’s two great multiple Readers Award winners: Clark Howard and Doug Allyn. There are some big differences between them: Clark Howard usually writes of prisoners, ex-cons, and others on the fringes of society; Doug Allyn more often focuses on men and women in a line of work, be it construction, the music business, medicine, or, as in this story, teaching. But they share an uncanny ability to make those characters come alive and to lace their stories with just the right amount of action and adventure.

* * * *

Ever wonder what you’d say? If you knew that the next words you spoke would be your very last?

Would you try to justify your life?

Would you say I love you? Or say a prayer?

Could you even assemble a coherent sentence?

I couldn’t. And I had my chance.

A golden autumn evening, dusk settling on our little college town like a flannel comforter. Linette had picked me up after my last class and we were stopped at a busy intersection, bickering cheerfully about whose turn it was to cook dinner, waiting for the light to change.

It suddenly dawned on me that the headlights in the rearview mirror were growing larger and brighter. Much too quickly.

The large truck coming up behind us wasn’t slowing down at all. Speeding up, if anything. I expected him to pull around us but he didn’t. Just kept coming, straight on. And then it was too late.

Sweet Jesus! He was going to hit us! And I turned to Linette, wide-eyed, and said... “What the hell?”

Famous last words.

Not very profound. But then, I’m not the one who died.

As Linette swiveled around to look, the truck slammed into us. Instantly smashing our world into a whirling, mind-shredding maelstrom of shrieking metal, exploding airbags, and howling rubber. Blasting my boxy little Toyota hybrid out into the flashing steel river of rush-hour traffic, triggering a horrendous chain-reaction accident. Panicked commuters slamming on their brakes, desperately cranking their wheels, swerving to avoid us.

And failing. My new Toyota Prius, with its state-of-the-art hybrid engine, rearview parking camera, and electric cup warmers, was banged around like a ping-pong ball, hammered by at least three other cars before being literally smashed in half by a flatbed truck hauling twenty tons of rolled steel.

Our gas tank ruptured and spewed. And my clever little car exploded like a napalm bomb.

I hope to God Linette was already dead before the flames reached her.

But I don’t know. And maybe that’s best.

I woke slowly in a world of white. White tiled walls and ceilings. Even my pain felt white. My memory, too. A white blank. Empty as an unwritten page.

All I could remember were my last words to Linette. “What the hell?”

“Professor Frazier?”

I swiveled my head slowly. A woman was standing beside my bed. Tall and lanky, sandy hair cropped short as a boy’s. Wearing a black suit and turtleneck. She was holding out an ID folder but I couldn’t focus on it.

“I’m Sergeant Shane Kovacs, Professor,” she said, slipping the badge back inside her jacket. “Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.” I coughed, dry-mouthed. “University?”

She nodded, scanning my face like a form she had to fill out. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Somebody... rear-ended us. A truck, I think.”

“What kind of a truck was it?”

“Never saw it clearly. Only the headlights. Not a car or a pickup truck. The lights were too high. That’s... really all I know.”

“What about before the accident? Did you have trouble with anyone? Cut somebody off, blow your horn, flip ‘em the finger? Anything at all?”

I stared at her, trying to make the words compute. “Road rage, you mean? No, there was nothing like that.”

“It doesn’t take much these days, Professor. If—”

“I teach History of Western Civilization at Hancock U., Sergeant. Linette’s a librarian. We don’t... squabble with strangers. Is she all right?”

Kovacs hesitated. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“What was your relationship with Miss Rogers?”

“We... live together,” I managed. “Two years now. Is she—?”

“I’m very sorry, Professor Frazier,” Kovacs said, looking away to avoid my eyes. “Linette Rogers didn’t make it. She was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“God,” somebody said quietly. Me, I suppose.

“Look, I’m sorry to have to push this, Professor Frazier, but a half-dozen other victims were seriously injured in that accident. One of them may not survive the night. Several witnesses saw a gravel truck plow into your Toyota without slowing, so if anything happened earlier that—”

“I told you, there was nothing! Why don’t you ask the guy who hit us?”

“We haven’t located him yet. After ramming into your car, the truck fled the scene. We found it abandoned a few hundred yards down the highway. It was stolen from a public-works site. Maybe a drunk, maybe a joyrider. So if you can think of anything at all that could have triggered this—”

“I have no idea, Sergeant, but it had nothing to do with us. Linette and I were going home for dinner, forgodsake, trying to decide between pasta or Chinese. That’s all I can tell you. End of story.”

But it wasn’t.

I checked myself out of the hospital at noon the following day. My left arm was in a sling, badly sprained, apparently when I was thrown from the car. I was bruised and battered, with a bandage covering an abrasion on my forehead. Beyond that, I was more or less intact. From what Sergeant Kovacs said, I was one of the lucky ones.

I didn’t feel lucky.

I didn’t feel anything. I’m a methodical sort, a scholar by trade and by nature. A bit of a plodder, I suppose. Linette used to tease me about being born with an old soul. Perhaps she was right.

I know students sometimes take my History of Western Civ class to catch up on their sleep. I’m not an inspired lecturer, or even very good at casual conversation.

But now I would have to say them. Famous last words. Linette’s eulogy. The final synopsis of her life. She had no family, so the responsibility would fall to me.

And I wasn’t up to it.

My idea of a fun Friday night is an easy chair by the fire with Xenophon’s Anabasis (circa 400 b.c.e.) and a snifter of Courvoisier.

Linette was the cheerful sparkplug that kept our relationship fresh and active. Drama Club, poetry nights at Barnes & Noble, faculty mixers. Most of our friends were really Linette’s friends. She reveled in people and talk and laughter. And I enjoyed them simply because she did.

But the truth is, I never needed the company of other people much. Linette was my only need. The warm sun at the center of my universe.

How could I hope to sum up her life, her very essence, with a few brief words in a funeral-home chapel? For people I scarcely knew.

It would have been a snap for Linette. She was a poet, a wizard with words. Her verses could flash past like quicksilver or whisper your deepest secrets aloud, in a crowded coffeehouse, soul to soul.

“Scratch a librarian, you’ll find a poet working a day job,” she’d say.

Which gave me an idea. Her poetry. Perhaps I could open her eulogy with one of her poems. Something light and airy and funny. A verse that would evoke her character more clearly than any clumsy words of mine.

I collected a handful of workbooks from her desk, carried them into my study, and began scanning through them, panning for a nugget.

I found a few appropriate verses in the first book but continued on, lost in her language. I had a prescription for painkillers from the hospital, but the relief I really needed was here, at my desk in this quiet room, surrounded by books, savoring the verses of the woman I loved. Hearing her voice echo in every line.

As the afternoon faded, I switched on the desk lamp but kept on reading. With a growing sense of unease that had nothing to do with the gathering dusk.

Halfway through the second workbook, I stopped. And carefully closed the book. Unable to read one more word. Shaken to my core.

I’d found more truth than I’d been looking for. A bitter reality, shimmering just beneath the surface of her poetry. Shrouded in metaphor and allusion. But real, nonetheless. Beyond any doubt.

Linette had been having an affair.

If I’d been shattered by the accident and her death, I was far beyond that now. The hardwood floors of our apartment seemed suddenly insubstantial, as though I might fall through them, tumbling down and down to the fiery core at the center of the earth. To burn.

And I wanted to. To vanish. Cease to be. Anything to ease the searing agony in my heart.

I must have switched off the lamp, because the room was dark when I heard the noise. Someone rapping at the front door. I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

The rapping grew more insistent and I heard someone calling my name. When the doorknob rattled, I thought they’d go away.

Until a woman in black eased open the door to my study.

“Professor Frazier? Are you all right?”

“No. Not even close, Sergeant Kovacs. How did you get in here?”

She shrugged, stepping into my room, glancing around. “Picked the lock. The security system in these apartments is lousy.”

“I’ll complain to the landlord. What do you want?”

“Why didn’t you answer my knock?”

“I don’t want company.”

“Sorry about that, but you’re not the only victim involved here. Like it or not, I have more questions and I need to show you something. Do you mind?”

Without waiting for a reply, she unsnapped a laptop computer, placed it on my desk, and switched it on. “We pulled this from a surveillance camera at the intersection. It covers the crossroads and the state highway east and west.” Grainy black-and-white images jumped across the screen, the movements herky-jerky from the stop-time photographs.

“I deleted the frames that showed what happened to your car, you wouldn’t want to see them... There. That’s the guy that hit you.” She pointed to a massive gravel truck lumbering east in the right-hand lane. Just before it faded off the screen, the truck jerked to a halt and the driver leapt out. Black T-shirt and jeans, baseball cap pulled low over his face. I leaned in, scanning the image intently.

“Do you recognize him?”

“His own mother couldn’t recognize him from this. Don’t you have anything clearer?”

“Afraid not. Big Brother’s watching, but only at busy intersections. Look again.”

She looped the images, rerunning them in step time, over and over. I stared at them till I thought my eyes would melt. “What’s that mark on his upper arm?”

“A tattoo, I think. Possibly a scar. Can’t see enough of it to tell. Why?”

For a moment, a faint flicker hovered around the outer edge of my memory...

Then vanished. “Sorry, Sergeant, I just can’t see his face clearly enough to identify him.”

“That’s because he never shows it. Notice how he raises his arm to shield his face as he exits the truck? Maybe that’s not a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe he’s familiar with the intersection. He could have covered his face to avoid the surveillance camera. Look, he creams your car, then abandons the truck roughly a quarter-mile down the road at the edge of camera range. And just disappears. No one reported seeing him walking or trying to hitch a ride after the accident.”

“Then where did he go?”

“We don’t know. It’s possible he had a vehicle parked further on, but nobody noticed one. I think it’s more likely that he ducked into the woods along the roadside. Twenty yards into the trees, a jogging path runs parallel to the highway for almost half a mile. A trail that circles directly back to the university campus.”

I was staring at her. “You don’t believe he’s a drunk or a joyrider, do you?”

“I don’t know what he is,” she said flatly. “I was hoping you might be able to help.”

“I don’t know either! I already told you that.”

“Okay then, let me tell you what we do know. For openers, nobody steals county gravel trucks. They have zero resale value, too easy to trace. Second, that truck is a serious piece of machinery, difficult to handle. But this driver plowed into you in heavy traffic, peeled off, then had to swerve twice to avoid other cars before bailing out. I doubt a drunk or a joyrider could manage all that. So I think it’s at least possible you were rammed deliberately. The question is, why would anyone do a thing like that to you?”

“They wouldn’t.”

“No? You haven’t flunked anybody lately? Maybe booted ‘em out of class?”

“I teach history, Sergeant. I have trouble enough generating curiosity, let alone violence.”

“History is violence, Professor, preserved in the amber of the written word.”

I stared at her, surprised. “That’s quite good, Sergeant. Sun Tzu, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea, I read a lot. So, no disgruntled students? Can you think of anyone else who’d want to harm you? Or Miss Rogers? Anyone at all?”

I hesitated, reading her face. A good face, actually, fine-boned, squared-off, and direct. Serious eyes, gray and unreadable as winter ice.

“I... think Linette may have been having an affair.”

“You just think so? Do you have any idea who the man is?”

“No. But you don’t seem very surprised, Sergeant. You already knew?”

Kovacs nodded. “A few of her friends hinted as much. They claimed not to know who the man was, either. I gather your girlfriend was... discreet about it. How did you find out?

“I just... she wrote about it in her poetry. But only in metaphor. She doesn’t mention his name. Calls him Apian.”

“Ape — what?”

“Apian.” I spelled it. “A bee. A busy man, I suppose, a take-charge type. My opposite.”

“Does that reference mean anything to you?”

“Not yet, but I’m only halfway through the notebooks. I doubt that it’s important anyway.”

“Right now, we have no idea what might be important,” she sighed, easing down in the chair beside my desk. “We’re just tugging at strings, hoping to God something will unravel.”

“I’d say you’re the one who’s unraveling, Sergeant. Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s already made.”

“What I really need is to zonk out for twenty minutes,” she said, massaging her eyes with her fingertips. “Haven’t been to bed since this thing happened.”

“You’re welcome to crash on my couch—”

“I appreciate the offer, but I haven’t time,” she said, taking a deep breath, pulling herself together. “The first forty-eight hours are critical. I have to get back on the street. Could you even hazard a guess at who this... Apian, might be?”

“No. I didn’t know he existed until a few hours ago. What does it matter? What difference does it make?”

“Violent crime usually involves one of the Big Three: love, drugs, or money. Nobody made any money on this deal and you don’t strike me as the drug-dealer type. Which leaves passion. Love, hate, jealousy, in one form or another.”

“I’m the wrong guy to ask about love. I clearly know very little about it.”

“We’re all amateurs in that game, Professor. I’ve been married twice. To cops, both times. Disasters, both times.”

“Sorry.”

“Why should you be sorry?”

“Because... you’re right. Love’s a marvelous thing when it works. It just doesn’t seem to work out very often.”

“If it did, we’d be bored out of our skulls and all the blues singers would starve,” Kovacs said wryly. “Let’s hope we both have better luck next time. I’ve gotta go.”

The runaway truck was replaying on her laptop again. I watched the driver dismount, concealing his face behind his forearm...

“That’s the second time you’ve done that,” Kovacs said quietly. “What do you see?”

“Nothing. I just... it’s nothing, Sergeant. I wish I could be of more help.”

“I’m the one who should apologize,” she said, snapping the laptop closed, “for barging in at a bad time. I’m sorry as hell for your loss, Professor Frazier. If you think of anything, or if you just need to blow off some steam, call me, okay? Day or night. I keep odd hours.”

And then she was gone. And I was alone. In my arid, empty Brave New World.

I’d never thought of death as a new beginning, but in a way, that’s exactly what it was.

My love, my old life, and most things I’d believed in were gone. Utterly destroyed. By twenty tons of steel and a few lines of poetry. Yet somehow I would still have to cope. To deal with the details of Linette’s death. Her funeral, her eulogy, a burial plot...

But above all, I needed an explanation. A way to make sense of what had happened to us. Some sort of logic. Cause and effect.

Had I failed her somehow? Caused her to stray? Had her affair brought on this tragedy? It seemed unlikely, but it was a place to start. And I’m a scholar, by nature and profession.

So I poured myself a stiff jolt of brandy and sat back down at my desk with Linette’s workbooks. To begin researching a new field of study. Well, new to me, anyway.

Actually, it’s one of the oldest subjects. The Architecture of Infidelity. 101.

Methodology and Procedures.

I opened the third notebook of verses. In it, Linette described her growing attraction, physical and spiritual, to her Apian. And her sadly reluctant withdrawal from her Lute Player. A reference to me, I suppose. I minored in medieval music at State.

Over the period of months spanned in the sonnets, she described the physical raptures of new love and... sweet Jesus. It was very difficult to focus on this. To remain objective.

As I read on, I kept having flashes of my love, naked and passionate, with another man...

Suddenly I lunged to my feet, gasping, gagging on a surge of acid bile in my throat. Swallowing hard, I managed to force it back down.

And then I forced myself back down, to take my seat in that chair again. And somehow go on. If I didn’t wade through this now, ugly and painful as it was, I knew I never would.

And I desperately needed to know. To understand where we’d gone wrong. How we’d gone wrong. And how much of it was my fault.

So I read on. Sipping brandy against the sting of Linette’s poetry. And gradually, the ache began to ease a bit as the affair ran its course. Her wondrous Apian slowly but surely showed himself to be less perfect than she’d believed in that first glow of infatuation. He was human after all.

And flawed. The self-confidence she’d admired so much proved to be simple arrogance. And his decisiveness left no room for dissent. He was more than strong, he was domineering.

Abruptly, her verses took on a darker tone. She met a Gray Lady. Who soon morphed into the Good Gray Wife.

Surprise, surprise. Linette’s Apian was married.

She must have been aware of it, but in the heat of passion she’d brushed it aside. Until she actually met his Good Gray Wife. And liked her. A lot. And the consequences of her betrayal truly began to register.

Then a second jolt. Her Apian was an even greater rogue than she’d thought. He was not only cheating on his wife, he was cheating on Linette as well, with a new lover. And she felt shattered and betrayed—

Closing the book, I massaged my eyes, feeling a pain in my chest so sharp I thought I might be dying. Aching for all that was lost. For Linette and our lost love. And for her pain. And my own.

It’s so unfair that love has such terrible power over us. To bathe our whole world in shimmering light, or plunge it into darkness. Why can’t things just... work the hell out? Lovers stay together—

Because we’d be bored out of our skulls, and all the blues singers would starve.

The thought jolted me like a slap in the face. I could almost hear Kovacs saying it. Joshing me out of a funk as Linette had done a thousand times before.

Women. Their hearts are terra incognita to me. I’ll never understand them at all. Nor will any other man.

So I took a ragged breath, and shook off my self-pity. I felt like a fighter who’s been decked in the eighth round and still has four to go, but I couldn’t quit now. I was nearing the end.

And so was the affair. As I paced the room, scanning the final verses, I realized that Linette’s infatuation with her Apian lover was finally over. She told him she wanted to break it off—

And he hit her!

Damn it! I remembered a bruise on her jaw only a week ago. She said she’d banged into a door at work and like an idiot I’d believed her — but there was more. After calling him the coward he was, she promised to warn his Good Gray Wife... And that was the final verse. I flipped through the rest of the pages, but they were blank. There were no more verses.

I closed the book slowly. Stunned. When Linette tried to break off the affair, her Apian reacted with violence. And then she’d threatened to tell his wife...

And now she was dead. And a lot of people were injured. All because of an affair that had gone terribly wrong?

I didn’t know that, not for sure. And it didn’t matter anyway because I still had no idea who the man was.

But maybe I could find out. I may not be a man of action, but scholars know how to study. And learn.

I didn’t need the verses now. I only needed to concentrate, to think through the situation clearly and objectively. About a woman I adored making love to another man.

It was even tougher than reading the verses.

Pacing my small office, I mulled through the minutiae of betrayal. Several verses had referred to making love in fading or waning light, so they’d probably met in the late afternoon. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Linette’s library shift ended at three-thirty. Two hours before my last class got out. She usually picked me up after... I swallowed. After whatever happened.

She was never late. Nor could I think of many unexplained absences. Which narrowed it down to those two hours, or less, if you counted driving time.

Our apartment was a thirty-minute commute from the campus library, so for the affair to work, they must have been meeting somewhere near the university. Or on it.

Which meant her Apian might well be one of my colleagues. Perhaps even a friend... and for a split second I glimpsed the film fragment of that tattoo again — Damn it! I’d seen it somewhere before. I knew it! But couldn’t place where... Forget it. It would come in its own time. Or not.

Concentrate.

Linette’s lover was probably someone I knew. Which was logical, if not much comfort. Picking up a class schedule from my desk, I scanned through the names and thumbnail photos.

Found myself imagining each of them with Linette... God. Couldn’t handle that. Pushing the images away, I chose a different approach.

I tried to recall any suspicious comments she’d made about my colleagues. It wasn’t difficult. I have an excellent memory, especially where Linette is concerned. But I couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary, and none of them seemed likely candidates anyway. Most of my colleagues are as bookish as I am.

But I wasn’t looking for a real person, was I? Apian would have to seem larger than life, somehow. An idealized figure. Heroic. And busy as a bee.

I quickly reduced the directory to a short list of active, energetic types, athletic coaches, administrators, board members. Then I scanned through their bios, looking for some connection—

And there it was.

A powerful, very busy man. A self-made man. Who’d worked his way through college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the U.S. Navy during Operation Desert Storm, Gulf War I.

In a construction battalion, or C.B. More commonly known as the Seabees. Where he drove heavy equipment.

The Seabee emblem was an angry bee toting a rivet gun.

A tattoo I’d seen on the muscular bicep of Dean John Mackey. Head of the university Humanities Department.

My boss.

God. How could Linette...? No! Don’t think about that. Focus. Concentrate on the problem at hand.

Dean Mackey was definitely a man I knew, though not very well. Senior administrators seldom mix with lowly profs. But I did know a thing or two about Big John.

We’d played in the same racquetball league last term. I’d even played against him a few times.

And he cheated. He’d deliberately block your path to the ball with a shoulder or even his racquet. Hell, he’d drive you through the wall rather than concede a point.

These were just friendly pickup games, no money, no prestige, not even any spectators. No reason at all to cheat. And yet Mackey did. Regularly. He just couldn’t bear to lose. At anything.

Big John’s bully-boy tactics were an open joke around the locker room. But no one ever called him on it. Petty or not, Mackey was still head of the department.

Which was the second thing I knew about him. His position was political, not academic. His appointment came after a substantial donation to the school by his wife, Doreen. A Dodge Motors heiress.

Dory Mackey was a few years older than John. A good, gray wife. But a proud, wealthy woman, who’d drop her husband like a hot rock if she learned he was cheating.

And Linette had promised to do exactly that. Break off the affair and warn his wife. John Mackey was a powerful man with an ego and temper to match. He would not be discarded. Nor threatened.

So he lashed out. First with his fists, and then...

Sweet Jesus. Big John had been at the wheel of that truck. I knew it now, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The question was, what could I do about it?

Linette was drawn to Mackey because she saw him as a man of action. And I’m not. She was quite right about that. The little I know about violence generally involves Goths or Tartars, dead a thousand years before I was born.

Now I had to deal with real violence. A brutal killing committed by a man of wealth and influence. Who might well be beyond the reach of the law.

I could almost picture his attorneys scanning Linette’s lyrics. And laughing. Her gossamer verses weren’t proof of anything, and John’s tattoo only confirmed his honorable military service.

If I accused the dean of the Humanities Department of murder on the strength of a few murky poems and a partial tattoo glimpsed on a grainy security-camera playback, I’d be fired and my claims would be dismissed as the ravings of a grief-stricken cuckold.

And yet...

I could not let this pass. God knows, without Linette, I had little enough to live for anyway. Somehow I would have to settle up with Mackey. Or die trying.

Famous last words.

The funeral-home chapel was filled to capacity, standing room only with a train of mourners spilling out onto the steps, a testament to Linette’s vivacious spirit, the joie de vivre she’d shared with so many.

I thought Sergeant Kovacs might be there, but didn’t see her. I did see the man who mattered most, though. Dean John Mackey made an entrance just before the service began, accompanied by his wealthy gray wife.

I half expected some sign of guilt or concern, but there was nothing. Mackey was the picture of solicitude, greeting my colleagues and Linette’s friends like a senior member of our bereaved family. Which he was, I suppose.

But seeing him there, with Linette’s broken body boxed in a coffin awaiting delivery to the flames, it was all I could do to keep from charging into the crowd to get my hands around his bull neck.

But I didn’t. I kept my peace and my place at the edge of the dais, greeting the mourners, accepting condolences, making appropriate responses.

“Thanks for coming, I know how much Linette would appreciate it,” blah, blah, and so on. All the proper platitudes.

And all the time, waiting.

Then suddenly, he was in front of me. Dean John Mackey. Burly and sure of himself in an impeccably tailored dark suit. Offering his sympathy like an old friend. Or trying to.

Without thinking, I locked onto his hand with more force than I knew I owned. And met his eyes. Then leaned in to whisper, “I know what you did, you sonofabitch. Linette kept a diary and your name’s on every page. Once she’s laid to rest, I’m taking it straight to the police. Brace yourself, Big John, Armageddon’s coming!”

Any doubts I had were erased by the mix of shock and murderous rage in his eyes. And he wasn’t the only one. At his shoulder, his wife had gone pale as a ghost. She’d overheard every word.

“John, what on earth—?”

“Shut up!” he snapped. Seizing her arm, he practically dragged Dory past the startled line of mourners and out of the chapel.

Leaving me to deal with the curious stares of the crowd. I didn’t care. Confronting Mackey had been my last duty to Linette. Only the final words remained now. Her eulogy.

I began with one of Linette’s verses, then went on, speaking from my heart. I shared my pain at her terrible loss, but shared my gratitude as well. That I had been lucky enough to know this marvelous woman at all, let alone share her love. Even for a little while.

It was probably the single best address I’ve ever given. And it wasn’t even necessary. When I finished, others rose to express their grief and mourn their fallen friend. Dozens of them. The ceremony continued long past its allotted hour. As powerful and moving a time as I’ve ever known.

But eventually, it drew to an end. The organist played “Amazing Grace,” and everyone sang. And that was it.

Perhaps I was supposed to thank people as they left, but I was too depleted to make nice. I slipped into the minister’s empty office instead, waiting for the chapel to clear out.

Then I sat silent in the chapel’s front row, watching as Linette’s coffin was lowered hydraulically from the dais to the crematorium below, and consigned to the flames.

She’d always been an ethereal spirit. Now she was free to soar at last. A glint of quicksilver across the sky.

And I was free as well. The bitterness over her betrayal was gone. Burned away. Only her memory remained. And the ache of her loss.

Dusk was falling as I finally trudged out to my rental car. Climbing in, I lowered the windows and sat quietly a moment, breathing in deep draughts of cool autumn air, trying to fill the hollow in my heart.

Time to go. Firing up the rental, I headed home to my apartment.

I didn’t make it. At an intersection, I was waiting for the light to change when a utility van suddenly roared out of a side street, screeching to a halt beside my sedan!

Its windows were down, and for a split second I stared into John Mackey’s wild eyes before he raised his shotgun to fire.

I only had a split second, but this time I knew exactly what to say.

“Gun!” I shouted, diving under the dash.

In the backseat, Kovacs threw her blanket aside, and came up with a pistol in her fist, blasting three quick rounds that blew out the van’s side window, ripping into Mackey’s shoulder.

His shotgun went off and something slammed into the side of my head...

For the second time that week, I woke in a hospital. Groggy and aching, but in less pain than before. I had no idea how long I’d been out, or what time it was.

Sergeant Shane Kovacs was slumped in the chair beside my bed, her chin resting on her palm. Sound asleep. I studied her face in the pale light. A good face. Not conventionally pretty, I suppose, but strong and honest. A bit careworn, I thought...

When I woke again, she was watching me.

“We can’t go on meeting like this,” she said, straightening in her chair. “How do you feel?”

“Awful. What happened?”

“Mackey’s shotgun blast shattered your windshield, some of the fragments gave you a pretty good whack in the head. You’ve been out cold for several hours.”

“What about Mackey?”

“His wounds aren’t serious, he’ll live to stand trial. One slug zipped through that Seabee tattoo he was so proud of. I’d call that poetic justice.”

“It all happened so fast. Weren’t you supposed to shout a warning? Stop or I’ll shoot? Something like that?”

“There was no time, his gun was up. Besides, you warned him at the funeral. He had plenty of time to change his mind. But he didn’t.” She leaned forward, intently. “And you knew he wouldn’t. That’s why you asked me to hide in your car. How did you know he’d come after you?”

“Linette described him perfectly, a man of action. When I threatened him, he turned violent, as he did before. Only this time, you were there to nail him.”

“And if I’d been too slow?”

“Even bookworms have to take occasional risks.”

“Well, thanks to you and Linette, Mackey will be arraigned for murder and attempted murder as soon as the hospital cuts him loose. And from the screaming match they had in the emergency room, I don’t think his wife will be bankrolling his defense.”

“He’s always claimed to be a self-made man. He certainly made this disaster on his own.”

“And what about you, Professor? What will you do?”

“I haven’t thought much about it. Take a few days off to pull myself together, I suppose. Then go back to teaching. I’m a scholar. A bit of a drudge, actually. Linette was right about that, too.”

“I’d better get back,” Kovacs said, rising to leave. “Can I offer you some friendly advice, Professor?”

“You saved my life, Sergeant Kovacs, offer away.”

“Fair enough. No disrespect intended, but for a perceptive woman, your girlfriend made some incredibly stupid moves. She idealized Mackey into some kind of conquering hero, and it cost her everything. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t idealize her memory into some kind of... Apian. She deserves better than that. And so do you.”

I stared at her, surprised. Meeting those intelligent gray eyes. “You’re pretty perceptive yourself, Sergeant. I’ll remember the advice. And you.”

“Sorry if I overstepped.”

“You didn’t. And I’m sorry too.”

“About what?”

“That we met in such terrible circumstances. Given the ways of the world, I probably won’t be seeing you again.”

She hesitated in the doorway, giving me an odd, unreadable look.

“Famous last words,” she said.

Copyright © 2009 by Doug Allyn

A Fellow of Infinite Jest

by Nina Mansfield

Department of First Stories

One of Nina Mansfield’s short stories was published last year online, in The Chick Lit Review, but this is her print fiction debut, and her first paid fiction publication. As a playwright, she has already been both produced and published. Her plays No Epilogue and Crash Bound were brought out by One Act Play Depot, and she is one of several winners of the Longwood University Ten-Minute Play Competition, for the recently produced Missed Exit.

* * * *

The smell of sawdust brought it all back. Paint-splattered jeans. Brushes soaking in turpentine. The ever-present power drill. “Walk purposefully holding one. People will just assume you’re busy.” That had been Harrison’s advice during strike. Five shows up. Five shows down. Summer stock in Vermont. I’d been twenty years old then. Summer apprentice. More like summer slave. Understudying Equity actors by night, hammering away at sets by day. I had wished that I could sew, and could join those spindly fingered girls in the costume shop to avoid inhaling paint fumes on a daily basis. My lungs had practically built their own set. Pneumonia the Musical. I drifted through those days in a sleep-deprived haze.

When that mousy, tired-looking girl — what was her name (Jenny? Ginny?) — went home with mono, they’d reassigned me to props. With Harrison. Harrison could make just about anything with a glue gun and a sheet of Styrofoam.

But that had been another decade. Fifteen years ago, to be exact. I half expected him to emerge from the prop closet, glue gun in hand. Overalls hiding his sweaty physique. Striped cap covering his receding hairline. Permanent five-o’clock shadow dotting his sturdy chin. But Harrison belonged to another lifetime. Harrison was dead.

“Can I help you?” I recognized the man-boy without knowing him. A gangly teen with safety goggles flipped up onto his forehead. Brown eyes with too-long lashes. Chin like a shoe horn. Tiniest bump in the bridge of his nose.

“Jaime sent me here for a master key. She can’t find...” I stopped. Was I being rude? “I’m sorry. I’m Sheila Brighton.”

“Oh yeah, the writer. You wrote... that book.” Clearly my fifteen minutes had come and gone.

“I’ll be staying at the Cottage this summer. Well, for a few weeks, anyway. In... I think Jaime called it the blue room. But she can’t find the key.”

“Jed Mann,” the teen responded. No wonder he looked like a ghost.

“Harrison’s...?” It had been ages since I’d spoken that name aloud. Harrison Mann. Was this his brother? No, too young.

“Son,” Jed filled in the gap. I hadn’t known. So Harrison had a son. I tried to keep the surprise from creeping into my face. “I lived with my mother back then. In Manchester.” How did Jed know when back then was?

He must have noticed my twisted eyebrows, my inability to speak. I looked around the shop. Plywood. Nails. Building accoutrements. To my relief, he spoke. “Jaime filled me in. You apprenticed up here that summer, right? Worked with my dad or something?”

“We worked on props. Your dad was really...” I hesitated. What did Jed know about his father? He couldn’t have been more than two years old back then. Again, my eyes moved around the shop. Sledgehammer. Axe. Building sets, then tearing them down. “He was a talented artist. Loved his work. Did they ever...”

“Find the body?” Jed asked. It wasn’t what I’d planned to say. I sucked in my breath. Waited. “My mom is still under the delusion that he’ll come back some day. Thinks he’s probably living the life in Rio with some underage hussy. Guess he had a thing for younger girls or something. Anyway, let’s get you into that blue room. Jaime must like you a lot. That’s definitely the sweetest room in the Cottage.” Jed snapped a large ring of keys off of his tool belt and led the way.

Jaime met us outside the Cottage, and led me up to the blue room, as Jed slinked back to the shop. The Cottage. I’d barely set foot in it back in the day. That’s where the real actors stayed — the professionals. Perhaps a visiting playwright. The apprentices were squeezed into a dilapidated ski shack on the outskirts of town.

“I see you made it. Drive up okay?” Jaime made her way up the winding wooden stairs to the blue room. Polished oak. They creaked with age.

“I left early. No traffic, if you can believe that. And once I got out of the city...”

“I’m so glad you could come up here.” Jaime fumbled with the key, hand shaking. Arthritis, and years of nightly wine. She was a silver-haired woman, probably close to seventy by now. Strong chins seemed to be bred in those Vermont hills, but her eyes were soft, her cheeks finely wrinkled. She looked prim, conservative, in her long denim skirt and pastel top. It was hard to believe she’d had a sordid past. An affair with Sir Laurence Olivier (or someone like that). An illegitimate child born backstage on the road, left on the doorstep of an orphanage. Those had been the rumors. But we knew her as artistic director extraordinaire. She’d taken an empty barn and turned it into an award-winning summer playhouse. Back then she’d been like a mother to me, to all of the apprentices. I almost felt guilty for not staying in touch. “I think you’ll get a lot of writing done.”

“I hope so. I’m still wondering...” I trailed off.

“Yes?” Jaime looked up at me, inquisitively. She seemed so much older, more tired. It had been fifteen years.

“How did you ever get in touch with me?” Her call had been more than unexpected. It shattered a certain silence that had crept over my life. I’d left more than Vermont behind that summer. I’d stopped acting. Decided to turn my attention to writing.

“Ginny Carson read a review of your book in the Times. A few phone calls was all it took to track you down.”

“Not Ginny—” So it was Ginny. “Ginny who went home with mono that summer?”

“Yes, that Ginny. She’s directing our outdoor Shakespeare this season. She had quite a smash off-Broadway last year, you know.”

“Did she?” I stayed away from the theater these days.

“It tickles me pink to see my apprentices hitting the big time. First Ginny, then you.”

“I would hardly say that I’ve hit the big time.”

“But of course you have.”

“Your invitation came at a good time for me. I’ve been working on my next novel. They say the second one is always more difficult to...”

Jaime cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Say nothing of it. I always said that our apprentices become part of the family, forever, for life.” And then she changed the subject. “The Mousetrap closes tonight. I’ve reserved a seat for you. It’s been sold out. They just love mysteries up here. And then we’re on to Shakespeare. They’ve built the stage, and the set is almost ready. You must have seen it on your drive in.”

“Oh, yes,” I lied. I hadn’t noticed. Too many other things on my mind.

“We’re doing Hamlet again. Haven’t done it in ages. I think the last time was, well, the summer you were up here. How long ago was that? They come from all over now. Free Shakespeare. Outdoors. You were our Ophelia, weren’t you?”

I set my bags down in the far corner of the blue room — which was indeed blue. Dusty blue walls. Blue floral bedspread. Blue curtains. Everything trimmed with lace. It was the only room on the top floor of the Cottage — thank God for central air conditioning.

“The understudy.”

“But you performed. And you were precious. Why did you stop acting?”

I shrugged. “The room is lovely.” I sat on the bed, attempting to end the conversation.

“I always said we are family here, that you’d keep coming back. Of course, it has been too long since you’ve been up here to see us. You’ll see some familiar faces at dinner tonight. You will join us at the Inn, won’t you?”

I nodded reluctantly. I’d have to eat eventually. And Jaime didn’t know. No one really knew what had happened that summer. I’d managed to convince myself that I’d forgotten.

A nap, a shower, a change of clothes. On my way to the Inn, I passed a group of grungy twenty-somethings. Apprentices. They looked so young. Had I really been like them? They were piling set pieces into the back of the pickup truck.

I heard one of them whine about a splinter. Another one complained about unfinished props.

“You just gonna use that skull from the prop room?”

“Yeah. It looks real enough.”

“Dude, I think it is real.”

“Alas, poor Yorick.” One of them began to spout Shakespeare — overacted, a farce. “I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

They had dark circles under their eyes and dirt beneath their fingernails to prove that they’d been slaving away for half the summer. One show up, one show down. And if they were lucky, an actor they were understudying would fall sick (which practically never happened).

The Inn hadn’t changed in fifteen years. The smell of pork loin and roast potatoes was permanently embedded in the wallpaper.

“Over here.” Jaime waved me over to her table. She wasn’t alone. “We saved you a spot.” And the introductions began. “You remember Gavin, of course.” My Laertes. “He’s playing Polonius this summer.”

“My darling Ophelia. I’ve been meaning to read your book. Really.”

“And do you remember Bristol Dell, our lighting designer? Weren’t you here that summer?”

“No, no, I wasn’t here that summer. That was the summer I worked at Williamstown. Missed all the excitement.” Bristol shook my hand.

“Sheila, I barely recognized you!” I didn’t recognize her at all, but I knew it was Ginny. Her faced had filled out, as had the rest of her. But her voice was still gratingly high. I had barely known her. She worked props with Harrison, and then got sick, and that was that. She would have been the last of our apprentice class I’d have pegged for success. Fifteen years, and she hugged me like I was her long-lost lover.

Menus were passed around. “Sheila’s seeing the show at eight.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Dara? I thought she was joining us,” asked Ginny, in between bites of butter-soaked bread.

Gavin coughed, looked down at his empty plate. “You sure about that?” he muttered. I could feel his eyes peer in my direction.

“Oh, you don’t think... no, that was so long ago.”

“All about Eve.” Jaime gave me a devilish grin.

“What?” I asked. “You don’t mean Dara Mills? She’s here?”

“You, the convenient understudy, while she’s off being questioned for the mysterious disappearance of Harrison Mann.”

“Please, Gavin. I hardly think she holds a grudge. Besides, she’s just busy memorizing her lines. All that TV work, she’s out of practice.” Ginny turned to me. “You remember Dara, of course.”

How could I forget? I’d shadowed her at countless rehearsals for two weeks straight.

Bristol set down his soda and spoke up. “Please, Ginny dearest. Fill me in. You forget, I wasn’t here that summer.”

As Ginny drew in a deep breath, Jaime lunged in. “Dara was our Ophelia that summer. But when Harrison disappeared, she practically had a breakdown. It was common knowledge that the two were screwing around.” She glanced over at me. I didn’t blink. “And then, of course, the police inquiry. The accusations. She never performed. Lucky for you, I guess?” Jaime winked at me. “The only understudy to perform in practically forty years.”

“I always thought it was Harrison’s wife who did it,” said Bristol. “I mean, I wasn’t here that summer — but every other summer — he did like the ladies. How did she put up with it? And why wasn’t she ever suspected?”

“Airtight alibi,” informed Gavin. “Besides, I’d prefer to think that Harrison is still alive. South of the border, living the kind of life we can only imagine. As for Dara, I never thought she’d step foot in Vermont again after that summer.”

“Jaime insisted that I cast her as Gertrude.” Ginny poured herself another glass of wine.

“I caught her in an episode of Law and Order. She just seemed so right. And from what I hear, her career seems to be taking flight.”

“Jaime wanted to get her up here again before she became too famous, isn’t that right,” Gavin chuckled.

A waiter approached us. We placed our orders. The conversation drifted from the personal to the utterly inane. Who was doing what regionally and in New York. Whose success was completely undeserved. Which artistic endeavors were so full of genius or so bizarre. I’d been out of the loop for so long that I simply smiled, nodded, slurped up my French onion soup. Another bottle of wine arrived. Bristol had his ginger ale refilled and Gavin made a toast. “To old friends and great success,” he said. We clinked our glasses.

“You know, Jaime had forgotten that I’d gone home sick that summer,” Ginny squeaked. “I remember at the time thinking I was burning a bridge — would never work in the theater again.”

“And what’s next for you?” Jaime stroked Ginny’s hair as if she were her own daughter. “Broadway, maybe?”

“Not yet.” Ginny peered bashfully down at her plate. “I’ll be directing another show in New York in the fall.”

“I hope you won’t forget about us up here?”

“Of course not.”

“Why did you leave us so suddenly that summer?” Gavin was beginning to slur his words. “Was it really mono, or something else?”

Ginny’s face turned blood red. Had she been one of Harrison’s amusements too?

Before she could answer, we were interrupted. “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” It was Jed. The dust on his overalls flickered in the candlelight. “I’m here to escort Miss Brighton to the theater.”

“Is it time already?” I asked, reaching for my wallet. “How much do I owe?”

“Dinner is on me tonight, Sheila.” Jaime smiled. “Go, go, you don’t want to be late.”

I said my goodbyes while they were contemplating dessert. It turned out that Jed hadn’t seen the show yet either — too busy building the props for Hamlet. “And these Agatha Christie plays, not my favorite,” he confessed. “The murders always seem so contrived.” He winked at me conspiratorially.

After the show, I retired to the blue room. Of course, I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open. Vermont could be dark in a way that New York City never could. What had I been thinking, coming up here? I’d put that summer far behind me, and then Jaime had to call. All those memories came flooding back. And yet, it was a relief in some ways, being back. There we all were, sitting, enjoying dinner. And none of them knew — they didn’t even suspect that Harrison had another lover that summer.

I thought about reading, or writing. But I was too tired for that kind of focus. Although it was just past midnight, I knew there would be people awake. The Mousetrap had just closed, which meant that strike was in full swing.

I tossed on the clothing I’d left lying on the floor and crept out of the room. It was one of those gigantic old houses in which you could feel solitude surrounded by people. At this point in the summer, I was quite sure that there was someone staying in every room. Gavin lived in town, but Ginny and Bristol were surely residing in the Cottage, along with the casts of The Mousetrap and Hamlet. Any overflow would have been lodged at the Inn. I didn’t want to wake any of them with my midnight prowling.

I strolled briskly over to the theater, which was lit up like a torch. The big barn doors were flung open, and apprentices scurried about like cockroaches, heaving slabs of wood into a large dumpster. The buzzing of drills and a power saw seeped from somewhere inside. We never played music. We’d been told it could be a safety hazard. We needed our eyes and our ears in case a wrench went tumbling from up above, or a set piece lost its balance.

I hovered like a ghost outside the barn doors. “You here to help?” asked Jed. He heaved a large board into the dumpster and jumped in after it, cracking down a pile of plywood. “Or are you here to catch a glimpse of our resident ghost?”

I blinked twice. “Ghost?”

“Comes out during strike. Starts moving drills to odd locations. Wasn’t Ole Spooky around in your day?”

“Sure.”

“Last year, he locked one of the apprentices in the prop closet. No one found her until the next morning. Seriously, if you want to help, for old time’s sake...”

“Just watching. Swore I’d never do another strike after that summer.”

“Why?” He looked up. Those eyes were too familiar to me.

I shrugged, nonresponsive, and watched him. He caught my stare. “What?”

“You just look a lot like your dad, that’s all.”

“That’s what they all tell me.”

A chubby girl with oily black hair and broomstick eyelashes poked her head out of the barn doors. She was clutching a revolver.

“Hey, Jed, where does this live?”

“Be careful with that, Stacey.” He tossed her his key ring. “Lock it in the prop closet.”

“Do me a favor and grab that axe.” I realized that he was talking to me. He pointed to a bench where one was resting. “Careful, it’s heavier than it looks.” I knew that. I remembered. I handed it to him, and he began to swing away inside the dumpster. It was too much for me. I turned and went back.

I tried to sleep in the next morning, but was woken up by stairs creaking, doors slamming, voices raised, and finally a knock at the door. It was Ginny. She eyed my pajamas and the sleep in my eyes with apprehension.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“What time is it?” There was no clock in the room.

“It’s just past ten. We’re trying to do a run on the outdoor stage before the final coat of paint goes on, and we can’t find Dara anywhere.”

“I haven’t seen Dara in fifteen years.”

“She’s always at rehearsal early, ready to go. Thought she might’ve gotten confused. Last few days it rained, and we rehearsed in the church basement over on Main Street. But I just checked over there and...”

A door slam cut her off. “Jaime. Jaime!” Jed yelled from below. “Call nine-one-one. Someone — help!”

Ginny and I scurried down the stairs, in time to catch Jed running off toward the pasture, back toward the Shakespeare stage. Ginny phoned 911 from her cell as we followed him. She lost reception twice before reaching them. She tried to explain our intended destination, which we assumed was the stage. Accidents were preventable in the theater, but not uncommon, especially when actors were hung over or still drunk from the night before. Twigs swung back and hit us in the face. Although the pasture was off a main road, the quickest route from the Cottage was a quarter-mile trek through the woods. The path had been beaten down by Jaime’s old pickup truck and countless pilgrimages by apprentices, hauling every manner of theatrical necessity.

But we never made it to the stage. We spotted Bristol and Jed standing frozen in the middle of the trail.

“It’s too late.” Bristol shook his head.

Ginny and I lowered our eyes to their feet.

I hadn’t seen Dara Mills in fifteen years. If the back of her head were intact, I might have said that she’d aged well. Her hand was clenched unnaturally around a revolver. It looked just like the one from The Mousetrap. Once again, Dara Mills would fail to take the stage in Hamlet.

“If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...” Bristol was busy peeling the label off a bottle of Amstel Light. He was referring to Dara’s apparent suicide.

I had managed to forgo what appeared to be the obligatory dinner at the Inn, having found some time amongst the madness to buy a few staples at the general store. But as I was finishing the last of my eating-merely-to-sustain-life buttered pasta, Bristol had waltzed in, half tipsy, begging for some company. Apparently, the sight of death kicked the wagon out from under him.

“But why?” I asked.

“Guilt, of course, for having murdered Harrison years ago.”

“Ludicrous!” Gavin had crept up beside us. “An actress would have done the deed center stage, not off in the woods.” He ordered himself a Killian’s Red and pulled up a stool. “I think that little apprentice did her in. What’s her name? Suzy? Stacey?”

“It’s Stacey. And please, that poor girl was hysterical. She worshiped the ground Dara walked on.” Bristol finally managed to pull the label off. He stuck it to his forehead for a moment, and then thought better of it. It was not the time for humor.

“And yet, rumor has it, she has each and every one of Gertrude’s lines down pat. Now, if they could squeeze that dumpling of a body into Dara’s costume...”

“You don’t really think...?” I asked. It was all too disturbing for me.

“Who else had a motive?” Gavin asked.

“Perhaps the theater ghost has inspired our Jeddy boy to avenge the death of his father?” Bristol winked at me. If the thought weren’t so morbid, I might have laughed. “He did find the body. There’s a sight I wish I had been spared.”

Everywhere I turned that night, Dara’s death dripped from lips. Was it suicide, or just some terrible accident with a prop? The Cottage, which had seemed tomblike the previous evening, was suddenly the place to be. The cast of Hamlet, a straggler from The Mousetrap, and half a dozen apprentices grew out of the walls, whispering, sipping wine, flipping through old magazines. Ginny sat cozied up to the chubby squirt I’d seen the night before.

“Come join us.” Ginny started to make room on the couch, but I sat myself on the stone hearth instead. “Stacey’s a nervous wreck about performing in two days.”

“You’ll be fine.” I offered one of those soothing half-smiles. “Just trust yourself.”

“I just can’t believe it...” I thought the little hobgoblin’s face was going to explode. But at that moment, Jaime entered with a tray of hot chocolate, extra marshmallows. The apprentices under twenty-one dove for mugs. The older ones stuck with wine.

Jaime’s presence served to change the conversation. She simply wouldn’t allow the morbid talk of death. I learned what I could when she left the room: The police were investigating; suicide had not yet been confirmed. Everyone was being interviewed; I should expect to be questioned soon. Apparently, fat little Gertrude had nearly broken down completely when they asked her why Dara might have done the deed. “I just can’t believe it,” she repeated, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if she was referring to Dara’s death or her chance to take the stage.

But then Jaime floated back into the room. Didn’t the apprentices have an early morning the next day — finishing touches on costumes. Props to move. Things would be more complicated now that the shortcut to the pasture was a crime scene; they’d have to drive around on the main road to the Shakespeare stage. The room began to clear, until it was just Ginny and me, and a bottle of wine that had just been opened. I helped myself to a glass. Ginny polished off the rest.

She too felt the need to speculate. If she hadn’t cast Dara in the part — if she hadn’t taken this directing job, but how could she say no to Jaime — if, if, if. The world was full of ifs, and by the time Ginny had gotten through all of them, she was slurring her words and could barely stand. I held her arm as she walked up the stairs. We reached her door, on the floor below mine, only to discover she’d misplaced her keys. “Probably at the theater. We could go get them.” But she was in no shape. So I led her up to the blue room and tucked her safely into my bed. Me — I spent the night in the main room, staring at the empty hearth until I drifted into unconsciousness.

Another dark night in Vermont, another groggy morning. I was up with the light, my back kinked up from the couch, my drool dotting the afghan that covered just the top part of my body. I crept up into my room. Ginny was just a lump under blue covers. I silently poked around in my bag until I’d pulled out fresh underwear and a sweatsuit. A good walk always did wonders for my writer’s block.

Morbid curiosity led me first to the path. The police had had the good sense to block the entrance with police tape. I didn’t defy the yellow mandate. Instead, I retraced my steps and headed down to the main road. There were hardly any cars. The ones that did drive by whizzed past as if they were the only cars for miles, ignoring posted speed limits, yellow lines, morning strollers. I eventually made my way to the pasture where the Shakespeare stage loomed in all its glory. They kept a trailer in back of it, locked with costumes, props. The stage was bare, and glistened with a hint of dew. It was the same stage that I had acted on fifteen years ago, with a few minor improvements. The wood might have been new, the colors more vibrant, but the shape the same.

Shakespeare’s words came flooding back to me, along with the lost emotions of the stage. Ophelia’s fear, her love, her madness, in waves, in bursts, as if they had been real. But hadn’t they? I had pulled her out of myself, and she was just as real as me. I stared out at the pasture. The audiences had been somewhat smaller fifteen years ago, if I were to believe Jaime, but still ample. Spread out on their blankets, bottles of wine, toddlers roaming. I spotted the crime-scene tape in the distance, marking the other end of the path. Gavin was right. An actress would have taken center stage.

I turned back, and nearly knocked into the props table, covered in brown paper, the outlines of the props all marked with masking tape. Various daggers and goblets, and of course, poor Yorick’s skull. Ah, how could one forget poor Yorick? The props would be back at the theater, or more likely locked up in the trailer in back of the stage at this point. In my day, a trunk on the stage was sufficient to keep them out of harm’s way. But times had changed.

Back at the Cottage, I found a few groggy actors up, brewing coffee, nursing hangovers with cold cereal and orange juice. We’d been introduced at some point, but I could not remember their names. “You open tomorrow?” I asked, just to be polite.

“Final dress this evening. Hopefully Bristol will fix those lighting cues that were still a mess yesterday. You’ll watch the run?” they asked hopefully.

I nodded. What else was I going to do? Actually write something? That seemed unlikely.

Ginny was still a rock, so I fumbled around for some more clothes, and snuck off to the shower — made it quick, in case others were waiting. I too helped myself to coffee, cereal — though I couldn’t wait to crawl into my own bed. My body had quickly staked claim to the blue room, and I felt displaced without it.

Hair wrapped up in a towel, wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt, I plopped myself back onto the couch. The afghan was still there, and for some reason I felt cold. Coffee, an old New Yorker. I lost myself in the pages until Jaime pulled me out.

“Sheila?”

“Don’t look so shocked. Writers can get up early too.”

“I’m just a bit of a mess, with Hamlet so close to opening. There’s some sort of problem with the programs, and they’re predicting rain for tomorrow night.” I thought it odd she didn’t mention Dara.

She’d always seemed so calm before the shows in my day — let others do the stressing for her. “I’m sure it will all work itself out,” I said. And then Bristol came bursting into the Cottage.

“Ginny promised to meet me down at the theater at eight-thirty.”

“She was pretty smashed last night.” I shook my head. “I’ll get her.”

“And tell her that Alice in costumes needs to see her, too,” he called after me as I made my way up the stairs. Something about wigs and humidity floated up as I stepped back into the blue room.

“Ginny, you up?” I whispered, seeing full well that she was where I’d left her. “Ginny... oh director dearest...”

I placed my hand on a lump that was too stiff to feel human. I pulled back the covers. A pearl-handled pistol clunked to the floor. Bristol would have to wait indefinitely. Ginny’s hangover was worse than predicted.

Another suicide — unlikely. Ginny had been shot in the back. As for the gun that was found at the scene: “Just a prop, like the last one,” I heard a young officer remark. It seemed that no one in the Cottage had heard the shot, all the way up on the top floor. And it would have been easy enough to muffle the sound with a pillow. I found myself back on the couch being questioned by a detective.

“But what was she doing in your bed?” she asked for the third time.

“We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I finally answered, hoping this would satisfy her, and told her again about Ginny’s lost keys, which someone had found on the kitchen floor, and returned to Jaime.

Yes, I was the only one who knew she was there. No, I did not know why anyone would want to harm Ginny.

“And you?”

“Me?”

“It was your room, your bed. Any reason why someone would want you dead?”

The thought should have occurred to me. There were reasons, none that I cared to share.

But the show must go on, as the old saying goes, rain or shine or death. Bristol would be left to his own devices to tweak those final lighting cues, and the question of wigs would never fully be resolved. The apprentices were atwitter with speculation and self-importance, as they too were being questioned. An actress, a director — who was next? Why on earth leave prop guns at the scene? And who would want to kill them? These were the questions I’d hear them whispering. Me — after having my belongings fully searched, I was allowed to relocate to the Inn. My room was sealed until further notice.

I slept for hours, and tried to write, but my words kept transforming into morbid rhymes, in iambic pentameter, of course. I hadn’t even glanced at my novel yet. I decided to waste more time by strolling back down to the pasture early for the dress rehearsal — buying a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar for dinner along the way. That had been a staple meal of mine that summer. There was something comforting in its unhealthy simplicity.

I stretched out straight on the grass — I hadn’t thought to bring a blanket — and stared up at the sky, eyes wide open, watching the clouds as the sky dimmed slightly. A small crowd began to gather: a few townies who, for whatever reason, preferred to watch a dress rehearsal. Most would come back during the next few nights for the real deal.

The play grew out of the pasture organically. No dimming of the houselights, just the setting sun. Cars still drove by on the main road — “backstage” — some bored tweens wandered away from Grandma, giggling, toward the porta-potties, which had already been set up along the side of the pasture. There were problems with the microphones, a missed exit, a dropped goblet. I kept my eyes open for the one prop that interested me, the one I had spent hours creating. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him.” Yes, it was the same skull, locked away in the prop cabinet all those years.

I stayed away from the pasture for the next few nights, but I heard the crowds, felt the swell of people wandering about town at night, eating dinner at the Inn. Not that the crowds for the other shows hadn’t made an impact, but the theater only seated 250 people. More than twice that flocked to the pasture each night.

From what I could gather, Hamlet was a success. Plump little Gertrude had stepped up to the plate, and Ginny’s job had, in truth, been done by that point. “Really, after opening, the director just gets in the way,” Gavin almost chuckled, and then stopped himself.

With the bustle of the show, it was easy to ignore the police presence. The questions — daily. I had been interviewed two more times. They had the sense that I was holding something back, but it wasn’t what they thought.

And then closing night rolled around. I decided I should see the show at least once. “You’ve been avoiding us,” Jaime had joked.

“No, just busy writing,” I lied.

The show was exquisite. It had truly come together since the dress rehearsal. Little Gertrude dazzled. Ophelia stunned. Gavin was quite convincing as Polonius. Hamlet’s need to avenge the death of his father crept over me. I glanced back at Jed, milling by the tech tent, which was set back toward the middle of the pasture. I’d heard from Gavin that the police were quite interested in him. He had access to the prop closet. He’d found Dara’s body. He’d had the key to the blue room. Had he been visited by Harrison’s ghost?

Before the final crowds had left the pasture, the apprentices pounced on the stage with their power drills. A dumpster was hauled up in back of the trailer. Within hours, the last trace of the stage would be gone, the props and costumes would all be safely stored away in the theater, and the apprentices would be tapping a keg and celebrating the end of their summer. The younger actors would join them. The older ones would have already phoned their agents and be looking ahead to their next gig: regional theater if they were lucky, word processing in a law firm if they were not.

I decided to wait at the theater. Eventually some apprentices would come carrying a trunk full of props. I would offer to help them with it, then slip Yorick’s skull into my canvas bag, and leave Vermont forever. I’d cover it with plaster, toss it into the East River. Out damn spot — my hands would finally be clean.

So I did just that. I waited. But as usual, strike took longer than expected. The trips back to the theater were fewer because the path was off limits. I retired to my room at the Inn and dozed off.

I woke just as the first hint of sunshine peeked through my window. I hopped out of bed, tossed on my clothes from the night before, and was at the theater before my mind was awake. The back door was locked, but someone had left the side door ajar; they usually did during the summer, since it was rare that the theater was empty. It was a place for lovers to sneak away in the middle of the night. That’s what Harrison and I had done. Rather, we didn’t sneak, we just stayed. Had he seduced me, or I him? His hands brushing against mine ever so slightly as we glued fake jewels onto a sword, or painted used books to look leather-bound. I was old enough to know better. So was he.

I’d heard rumors of a wife in Manchester, figured they were separated. I knew nothing of a child. And I presumed that Dara Mills was old news, until the night I’d found them shacked up on the Equity cot, making the beast with two backs. That was the weekend before Hamlet opened. The Agatha Christie play, it had been And Then There Were None that year, was closing the next night. And then, of course, there was strike. I was stuck in the theater with him, sorting through all those murder mystery play props — tumblers and prop guns and suitcases — and we still didn’t have Yorick’s skull for the Shakespeare, and I should have known it was just a summer fling.

The theater was dark. No lights. No life. The Mousetrap had been swept away without a trace, and the community troupe that used the barn during the year for their productions hadn’t moved back in yet. I made my way to the set shop. Someone had left a light on.

“I thought you’d come. I expected you sooner.”

Jaime sat on a stool, perched above the sawdust that was splayed across the work table. The skull sat delicately on her lap.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” She held it up.

I nodded.

“How did you know?” I managed to ask — my mouth dry, a choking feeling creeping across my neck.

“I didn’t. You’d think a mother would recognize her own son...” She held up the skull. “Funny, fifteen years ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me. And then Jed was sorting props in the spring, before our season started, and he said something about the jaw line. But even then, I refused to believe it.”

I didn’t say a word. Anything I said at that point would have been an admission of guilt.

“You didn’t know, of course, that Harrison was my son. No one did.” She was right about that. So the rumors were true — he’d been that backstage baby. “I always imagined that he’d turn out to be a great success. His talent was clear. He was bound to be a grand sensation — designing Broadway shows. He never had the chance.” She didn’t seem to be looking at me at all, but she was. “It wasn’t fair that his killer’s career should take off.”

Her phone call. Her timing. It made sense to me now.

“At first I suspected Ginny. She thought it was her directing skills that got her the job. She should have known better. I’d forgotten that she’d gone home sick. Mono my ass. I knew that Harrison had that effect on young girls. I thought, it must have been either her or Dara. It was easy enough to convince Ginny that Dara was the perfect Gertrude. Of course, then Ginny reminded me that you had taken her place that summer. I didn’t mean to kill her.”

“Of course not. But if you knew—”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything for sure. The police had suspected Dara, so I thought I’d start with her.”

I could picture her driving down the path in her pickup truck, holding a gun to Dara’s head. The gun found at the scene was just a prop...

Before I could finish my thought, Jaime continued: “She sputtered something about Harrison working on props that night. The terror in her eyes. If she hadn’t killed Harrison, then it must have been you. I knew for sure then that this didn’t just look like Harrison, it was Harrison.” She held up the skull in one hand, a pistol in the other. This gun was no prop.

“You don’t have to kill me, Jaime. You could call the police.” I tried to reason.

“And tell them what? That I’ve killed two innocent women attempting to avenge my son’s death? Besides, I plan to turn myself in when I’m done with you. I thought leaving props by the bodies would be a nice touch — a tribute to my son. Unfortunately, it’s cast suspicion on my grandson.”

Her eyes wandered for a moment. It was all the time I needed. My hands had found the axe. The same axe that I had used fifteen years ago — in a jealous rage. It had been so easy to dispose of the body. The dumpster from strike had been right outside. No one had noticed the splatters of blood I had missed. They mixed right in with the paint. And Harrison’s head had solved the one prop problem that he hadn’t been able to fix before his demise. Hours of boiling and scraping — bleach and steel wool — had transformed him into Yorick. It’s amazing what the sleep-deprived mind will concoct.

Jaime would prove to be trickier. The dumpster was out at the pasture, but her truck was nearby. Work gloves to keep the prints off. All the actors and designers would be sleeping off their hangovers. I had a few hours to clean up the mess I had made.

And then what? I could get myself to a nunnery. Drown myself in a river. Or return to the city and hope that ghosts were figments of Shakespeare’s imagination.

Copyright © 2009 by Nina Mansfield

The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold

by Lee Goldberg

Fans of the Monk TV series and followers of Lee Goldberg’s tie-in novels about the obsessive compulsive San Francisco P.I. are in for a treat. Mr. Goldberg’s winter 2009 book in the Monk series, Mr. Monk in Trouble, contains this stand-alone short story. It stars not TV’s Adrian Monk but an ancestor of his, Old West assayer Artemis Monk, who shares some of Adrian’s obsessions, but has to cope with them amid the filth of an 1855 mining town.

* * * *

Trouble, California, 1855

A dream killed my husband Hank Guthrie before his twenty-fifth year.

We’d been working this barren patch of dirt in Kansas, trying to make it into a farm and having no luck at it, when he read about all the gold that was sprinkled on the ground out west in California.

The newspapers said the riverbeds there were lined with gold and that anybody with two good arms, a shovel, and a tin pan could earn at least a hundred dollars a day without breaking a sweat. It sounded too good to be true, but that didn’t stop every poor farmer from catching gold fever anyway.

My Hank was one of them.

I tried to talk sense to him, but his mind was set on abandoning the farm, packing up what little we had, and heading to California.

I could hardly blame him for wanting to go.

When you’re killing yourself trying to grow a crop in a land as ornery, dry, and infertile as my old granny, you want to believe there’s an easier way.

I knew California couldn’t be the paradise of gold that the newspapers made it out to be, but I figured we couldn’t be any worse off than we already were. Besides, I was raised to obey my husband no matter how thickheaded, foolhardy, and stubborn he might be.

So in 1852 we teamed up with four other families and went west. Along the way, we lost nearly all of our cattle and had to toss our stove, our dishes, my momma’s candlesticks, and just about every possession we had to lighten our load. Those losses were nothing compared to the human toll. Half of our party died of cholera.

The way west was littered with valuables, graves, and animal carcasses from Kansas to California. More than once during those long, brutal months I wondered what wealth could await us that could match what we’d all lost.

I took it as a bad omen of what was to come. If that wasn’t enough of a sign, the first California mining camp we rolled into was named Trouble.

I’d have preferred to stop in a place called Opportunity, Happiness, or Serenity, but I suppose it could have been worse. The place could have been called Futility, Misery, or Death, all of which would have been a more accurate description of what awaited us.

It certainly wasn’t a pretty place. The main street was a mire of mud, sawdust, rocks, and horse droppings with an occasional wood plank or two flung atop it to make crossing less of a slog.

Everything looked like it was erected in a hurry by people with little regard for outward appearance, skill in construction, or any thought of permanence.

Most of the structures were one story, with log walls and sawed-timber storefronts with tall, flat cornices of varying heights. There was also a smattering of shacks, log cabins, and tents of all kinds, some crudely cobbled together out of boughs and old calico shirts. The hotel was a lopsided, two-story building with a sagging veranda. There was a wood-plank sidewalk on each side of the street and plenty of hitching posts.

I didn’t see a church, but that didn’t mean one of those tents didn’t contain a preacher or two. In my experience, preachers and gamblers always showed up where there was whiskey and money around.

The men on the street looked like they’d all just crawled out of their graves. They were covered in dirt. It was caked to their tattered wool shirts and patched britches, it dusted their mangy beards and ragged hats, and it clung to their hair, which was slicked back with wagon-wheel grease and caught everything.

If there were womenfolk around, they were either in hiding or hadn’t emerged from their graves yet. Seeing the menfolk, I couldn’t blame them for keeping out of sight.

The only evidence of prosperity that I could see was the existence of the camp itself, and as ugly as it was, it was a strong indicator. Trouble wouldn’t have been there at all, or expanding, if there wasn’t gold to support it.

Hank and I might have passed right through, and probably should have, but he couldn’t wait to stick his pan in a river. He found some flakes of gold in that first pan of gravel and was so excited about it that he staked himself a claim right away, convinced that we were sitting on our mother lode.

We weren’t.

When that patch didn’t pan out, we worked our way up and down that river, never straying far from Trouble, staking new claims, hoping we were just one pan away from striking it rich.

We didn’t know much about geology but we’d learned that gold was easiest to find in gravel bars where the river widened and bent or where it once did. Gold being heavier than other minerals, the flakes and nuggets would settle in, sometimes near the surface, and sometimes down deep.

The gold wasn’t hard to recognize. There was the color, of course, and the soft way it felt when you bit a nugget in your teeth — not that we found many nuggets.

The gold was there, that was for sure, but getting enough of it out of the ground to make a living was back-breaking, soul-bleeding work that was much harder than farming. But gold fever kept men like Hank going in a way that farming never could. There were too many people striking it rich all around us for him to ever stop believing that it could happen to him. The fever blinded him to the pain, futility, poverty, and hardship.

I didn’t have the fever. But I had a marriage and a man that I loved. Keeping them both healthy and strong was what kept me going.

We lived in a tent so we could move wherever the gold was. I kept house, cooked our meals, and sometimes patched and sewed up clothes for some of the other prospectors in exchange for necessities, while Hank worked our claim.

A man had to pan half an ounce to an ounce of gold a day, about sixteen dollars’ worth of color, if he wanted to survive and set a little aside for the lean days.

But we rarely panned more than six dollars a day worth of color, roughly six pinches of gold dust, and with molasses at one dollar a bottle and flour going for fifty cents a pound, we could barely keep ourselves fed.

Most of the time, our bag of flour was worth more than our pouch of gold.

I tried to convince Hank to give up on prospecting and try something else. We argued about it for most of that first year until I finally just gave up and resolved to do my best to support him, no matter how wrong-headed I thought he was. That was what I’d been taught a good wife was supposed to do.

Two years of panning in the cold river water, day in and day out, bowed Hank’s back and swelled his joints. It got so bad that he couldn’t stand and could barely breathe. And even then, with all those ailments, his biggest ache was the desire to pan for more gold.

They say it was rheumatic fever that killed him, but I know better.

It was the dream of gold that did him in.

His death left me alone, but not without assets. I had our claim, our tent, and his tools, but they weren’t worth a sack of potatoes. What I had that was worth something was my body.

Women were scarce in Trouble, so the instant Hank was buried, I became as rare and valuable a commodity in those parts as gold.

There were a couple of ways I could mine that value.

I could marry a wealthy man, of which there were few, most of whom were living in their San Francisco mansions while others toiled for them in the mines.

Or I could become involved with many less-prosperous men, of which there were multitudes, most of whom were willing to pay a pinch or two of gold to enjoy a woman’s affection for a short time.

Women who engaged in that sort of barter were called sporting women and lived in rooms behind the saloons. They were generally held in higher regard than such women back East, perhaps because the population in Trouble was made up mostly of lonely men in desperate need of their services. That might also explain why vices that weren’t tolerated back home were taken so casually in the mining camps, whether it was drinking, gambling, whoring, or murder.

A few of the sporting women did all right, made enough money to support themselves until they could find a man with plenty of gold, and low moral standards, to marry and move on. But it seemed to me that most of the women died young, taken by syphilis, abortions, or suicide by laudanum.

I tried to survive instead by sewing and laundering for the miners. But there weren’t many men willing to part with their hard-earned gold dust on something as frivolous as clean clothes that were just going to get dirty again the next day. They felt their gold was better spent on whiskey, food, and sporting women.

However, there was one peculiar and extraordinary man who valued cleanliness and order above all else.

I’m talking, of course, about Artemis Monk, Trouble’s only assayer.

I’ve heard it said that assaying — analyzing stones and such and determining the mineral content — is the third oldest profession, after doctors and sporting women.

Every prospector and miner came to Monk with their rocks so that he could determine how much gold was in them, the quality of the gold, and estimate the potential yield of their claims. That made him easily the second or third most important man in Trouble.

There was either something very unusual about the geology of Trouble, or unique to Monk’s calculations, because the various minerals in the samples he analyzed always showed up in even amounts. He attributed it to the “immutable balance of nature,” but if that was so, the rest of the world was unbalanced.

As odd as that was, the fact remained that Monk always turned out to be right in his estimates of the worth of a claim, and anybody who ever questioned his conclusions eventually found that out for themselves the hard way.

But even if you never had business with Monk, you certainly knew who he was. Monk stood out. He was the only clean-shaven man in the camp, his hair was neatly trimmed, and he bathed every day, which in itself was astonishing. He always wore the same thing — a derby hat with a domed crown and a flat, round brim, a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar, a sleeveless vest with four pockets and four buttons, wool pants, and fine black boots.

His clothes were always clean. I know, because I was the one who cleaned them, not that I ever found a speck of dirt or the tiniest stain on them. He brought me his clothes neatly folded. They looked as if they’d never been unfolded, much less worn, but I figured if he wanted me to wash clean clothes, so be it. I was in no position to turn down work.

Monk seemed very pleased with my laundering and came back to my tent by the river almost every morning. I never saw him on a horse or even near one. He seemed repulsed by the animals. He got where he was going on foot or by railroad.

One day when he showed up at my tent I was gone and my tent was empty, so he searched the town for me. He found me outside of one of the saloons with my trunk at my side.

I was trying to swallow down my misgivings and enter the sporting life. It must have been obvious to him what was going through my mind.

“You can’t do this,” he said.

“I don’t have any choice, Mr. Monk. It’s the only thing of value that I have to sell.”

“You are excellent at laundering,” he said. “Nobody here has ever done it better.”

“I can’t survive doing that.”

“But I need you,” Monk said.

“And I need food, a warm place to sleep, and a roof over my head.”

“Done,” he said.

I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll hire you,” Monk said. “You can live in the spare room in my office.”

I eyed him warily. “What do you expect in return, Mr. Monk?”

“Not what you are prepared to give in there, Mrs. Guthrie,” he said, tipping his head towards the saloon. “I need an assistant to keep my life clean and orderly. It’s becoming too much for me to handle alone and still do my work.”

We settled on a price, one that would sustain me and allow me to set a little aside so that I could someday return to Kansas.

He accepted my terms so quickly that I wondered if I’d set my price too low. But I was grateful for the opportunity and I moved in that day.

It was a purely chaste arrangement, though I’m sure nobody believed that.

I didn’t care what they thought. All that mattered to me was that I wouldn’t have to become a sporting woman, at least not yet.

I soon discovered that keeping his life clean and orderly involved far more than simple housekeeping and that his skills, and service to the community, extended beyond detecting minerals in rocks.

Artemis Monk solved crimes.

The commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.

It was usually the seller who did the pinching, and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.

Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.

The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.

But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.

Monk didn’t bother himself with those petty crimes, but he did catch plenty of the more ingenious thieves.

I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I’d seen him solve.

It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.

Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.

The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.

The cabin was divided into four equal sections — the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk’s room, and my room.

Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust-free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.

The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don’t pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into cupels, cooled and cleaned and chemicals added, he could separate the gold from everything else and tell you how rich or poor your claim was likely to be.

Monk was in his lab when a young prospector walked into the front office. I immediately stopped him at the door and led him back outside to the porch.

“I need to see Mr. Monk,” he said.

“You can’t come in here like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

I could tell he was a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, train, or trail and eager to make it rich in the gold country. He had the same feverish look in his eye that my Hank, and hundreds of other men, had. But it was more than that.

His wool shirt was still a recognizable shade of red, his trousers weren’t patched, but both were covered with dirt. He had the blistered hands and stumbling gait of someone unaccustomed to working with a shovel and pick, or the long hours squatting in the cold river, swishing gravel around in a pan. He was thin from lack of good food and possibly a touch of land scurvy too. His whiskers were mangy but not yet obscuring his youthful features, and his hair was long but not yet wild and matted.

“You’re too dirty,” I said. “Mr. Monk only allows people inside who are freshly washed and dressed in their clean Sunday best.”

“This ain’t no church, and I don’t want to marry him. I just want him to look at my rocks.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Nate Klebbin,” he said.

“You can give me your samples, Mr. Klebbin, and I will take them in to Mr. Monk. You may wait here on the porch if you like,” I said, motioning to the guest bench. “Or I can fetch you in the saloon when Mr. Monk is finished.”

“I’ll wait here.” He handed me his sack of rocks and took a seat on the bench.

I went inside and carried the sack to Monk, who greeted me at the doorway of his laboratory.

“You have a new client,” I said.

“I know,” Monk said. “I could smell him from a hundred yards away.”

“You say that about everybody except me.”

“Because nobody except you in this town bathes and wears fresh clothes each day,” Monk said. “And many of them regularly sit astride filthy beasts.”

“You mean horses.”

“That’s what I said.” Monk took the bag from me and retreated to his laboratory, closing the door behind him.

“I’d ride a horse if I could afford one,” I said.

Monk never rode horses and believed they should be prohibited from the streets. If he had his way, everybody would have to hitch up their horses in a corral outside of town and clean up after them.

He emerged again a few hours later, a bewildered look on his face.

“Is there an animal being slaughtered on our front porch?”

Monk was referring to Nate Klebbin, who’d fallen asleep the instant after he sat down on the bench and had been snoring loudly ever since.

“That’s the fellow who brought in the sample for you,” I said. “He’s sleeping on the porch.”

“It sounds like he’s being murdered, and yet it smells like he died two weeks ago.”

“I’m sure he’ll be flattered to hear that,” I said.

Monk opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, where Klebbin was snoring away. “Mr. Klebbin?”

The man was too deep asleep to be stirred by the mere mention of his name. So Monk reached back into the cabin, grabbed the broom, and poked Klebbin in the side with the handle.

Klebbin jerked awake. “What are you poking me for?”

“I’m Artemis Monk, the assayer. I’ve finished studying your sample.”

Klebbin sat up straight, his eyes flashing with excitement. “Did you find color?”

“I did,” Monk said.

“A lot of it?”

“Enough to indicate the possibility of much more to be had with hard labor,” Monk said.

“Yee-haw!” Klebbin said.

“I wouldn’t yee or haw just yet,” Monk said. “Where is your claim?”

Klebbin reached into his shirt for a folded sheet of sweat-stained paper, which he held out to Monk. “It’s right here.”

Monk took a step back as if he was being offered a dead rat. “I mean, where is your parcel located?”

“In a gulch west of Juniper Creek,” Klebbin said. “I bought it from Clem Janklow. You know him?”

Monk knew Clem, and so did everybody else in town. Clem was a prospector who scraped by but never struck it rich and what gold he did find he quickly spent at the saloon. He was always broke and perpetually drunk and relieved his prodigious bladder wherever, and whenever, the urge struck him.

This, of course, disgusted and infuriated Monk, who demanded that Sheriff Wheeler lock Clem up or throw him out of town. But Wheeler was reluctant to do either.

“If I lock him up, then he’ll just piss all over my jail,” Wheeler said. “And if I drove out everybody who pisses in the street, the town would be deserted. Besides, Clem can’t help it. He’s got a kidney ailment.”

“The ailment is whiskey,” Monk said.

But Clem claimed it was more than that, but that he couldn’t afford the medicine that would lessen his need for alcohol and relieve his kidney problem. Monk talked to Dr. Sloan, who confirmed Clem’s account and recommended an elixir known as Greeley’s Cure, which was used to treat syphilis, alcoholism, opium addiction, and digestive troubles.

So Monk made a deal with Clem. He’d pay for the medicine himself if Clem agreed to stay out of the saloon and not to relieve himself on the streets.

Since then, Clem hadn’t relieved himself once in public and stayed away from the saloon. The bottles of Greeley’s Cure cost Monk several dollars a day, but he figured it was a small price to pay to save a man’s life and keep the community clean.

Now Monk’s face was turning beet red with anger.

“Why did Clem sell you his claim if it was still producing gold, Mr. Klebbin?”

“Clem told me he’s too sick and feeble to work it anymore but it ain’t played out yet,” Klebbin said. “He’s got some kind of kidney problem from too much rot-gut whiskey. It’s got so bad, he’s pissing day and night all over the place out there. You wouldn’t believe the stink, but I don’t mind if there’s gold.”

Monk shivered. “You’ve been swindled, Mr. Klebbin, and so have I.”

“But you found gold in them rocks, didn’t you?” Klebbin said.

“Indeed I did,” Monk said. “Stay here while I get the sheriff.”

Monk marched away and I hurried after him to Main Street. He kept his head down, watching the planks as he stepped on them.

“I don’t understand the trouble, Mr. Monk. Everything Clem told Mr. Klebbin is true.”

“That’s what makes it so infuriating,” Monk said. “The audacity of the crime.”

Monk stopped and pointed to a warped plank. I bent down and marked a big “X” on it with a piece of chalk so that the wood could be replaced later. I carried the chalk with me at all times for exactly that purpose.

He took another step and pointed to another plank. This one was cracked.

“I thought you were in a hurry,” I said.

“I am,” Monk said. “But I’m not going to kill myself getting there.”

“You can’t die from stepping on a warped board,” I said.

“You can trip and break your neck. Or you could get a splinter in your toe that becomes infected. Next thing you know, Dr. Sloan is chopping off your leg to prevent gangrene, but he’s too late. You’re already dead.”

I marked the plank and we were hurrying along again when a man rode in, dismounted, and hitched his horse to the post a few yards ahead of us.

He was a cowhand, not a prospector. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, a calico shirt, a beaten-down charro jacket adorned with silver-threaded brocade, and a pair of chaps. His boots were muddy and his clothes were dusty and stained with splotches of tar.

The cowboy spit some tobacco into the street and stepped up to the sidewalk in front of the saloon, slapping dust off of himself with his hat.

“You can sweep that right up again with that hat of yours,” Monk said. “We like to keep our town clean.”

The cowboy turned to look at Monk. “What did you say to me?”

“And when you’re done sweeping up your dust, you can pick up that disgusting gob of tobacco you left in our street.”

The cowboy smiled, flashing his yellow teeth, and scratched at some welts on his chest. There was a murderous glint in his eyes. But he was wearing a gun belt and Monk was not, which may have been the only thing that saved Monk from getting gunned down.

“I’m walking into that saloon and having myself a drink, mister. Maybe you and the pretty lady would like to join me.”

“Not with those muddy boots on you’re not,” Monk said. “People eat and drink in there. Why don’t you take them off and leave them by the door?”

“I got to get me some of whatever you’ve been drinking,” the cowboy laughed and went inside.

Monk was about to go in after him when the horse passed gas and let loose some droppings. He screamed and ran back the way we’d come, careful to step on the same boards that he had before.

I caught up with Monk around the corner on Second Street, out of sight of the horse and the droppings. He was breathing with a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

“How are we going to get to the sheriff now?” he said.

“Easy,” I said. “We walk down the sidewalk to his office.”

“We can’t with that in the street.”

“Unless you walk right behind that horse, there’s no danger of stepping in the droppings.”

“It’s still there,” Monk said. “You can see it and you can smell it.”

“So close your eyes and plug your nose.”

“I’ll die of asphyxiation,” Monk said. “If my skin doesn’t rot off first.”

“Why would your skin rot off?”

“Did you see what’s in the street?” Monk said. “What I need is my own telegraph, in my cabin, connected directly to the sheriff’s office.”

“I’m sure he’d love that,” I said. “But since it may take some time to build a telegraph line, I’d better go fetch Sheriff Wheeler myself.”

I started back towards Main Street but, as it turned out, I didn’t have to go far. The sheriff was riding by on horseback with his deputy, Parley Weaver. I ran into the street and flagged him down.

The sheriff drew up beside me. He had a bountiful moustache that looked like he’d skinned a raccoon and hung the pelt from his nose. I’d heard he’d been a gunfighter before he settled in Trouble in search of a peaceable life. Most sheriffs had the same story.

Deputy Weaver was reed thin and lazy, but moved as fast as a jack rabbit when food, drink, or the attentions of a sporting woman were involved.

“What’s the problem, Mrs. Guthrie?” Wheeler asked me.

“It’s Mr. Monk, Sheriff,” I said.

“You need to arrest Clem Janklow,” Monk yelled from where he stood, a safe distance away from the sheriff, Deputy Weaver, and their horses.

Wheeler groaned. “I got bigger problems than Clem’s pissing, Monk. There’s been a murder. Somebody killed Bart Spicer and stole his poke.”

“Did it happen at his mine?” Monk asked.

“As a matter of fact, it did,” the sheriff said. “I’m on my way out there now.”

“Why are you going there when the murderer is right here in town?”

The sheriff raised his eyebrows. “He is?”

“He’s having a drink in Bogg’s Saloon,” Monk said. “Now can we please go find Clem Janklow?”

The sheriff and his deputy looked perplexed, and I suppose that I did, too. Wheeler asked the question the three of us were thinking.

“How can you be sure that Spicer’s killer is sitting in Bogg’s Saloon when you didn’t even know that Spicer was dead until I told you?”

“Was Spicer killed with a mine timber?” Monk asked impatiently.

“Someone dropped a timber on his head while he was sleeping,” Deputy Weaver said. “How’d you know that? Did somebody tell you?”

“The murderer did,” Monk said.

“He was bragging about what he done?” Weaver asked.

“He didn’t say a word about it,” Monk said. “He didn’t have to. He was wearing his confession.”

“What’s this feller’s name?” Wheeler asked.

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “He just rode into town and messed the whole place up.”

Wheeler groaned. “How did he do that?”

“He spit tobacco in the street, brushed dirt onto the sidewalk, walked into the saloon with muddy boots, and his horse did the rest.”

“Because of that, you think he’s also got to be a murderer,” Wheeler said.

“I can prove it,” Monk said.

If it had been anybody else but Artemis Monk who’d said that, the sheriff would have ignored him and rode on to Spicer’s mine. But Monk wasn’t anybody else.

The sheriff turned to his deputy. “Go over to Bogg’s and invite the cowboy to join us.”

Weaver rode away. Sheriff Wheeler got off his horse and tied him to a hitching post.

“We’re wasting time, Sheriff,” Monk said. “Clem might be getting away.”

“He’s not going anywhere, Monk. And even if he was, he wouldn’t be hard to track,” Wheeler said, then turned to me. “How are you, Mrs. Guthrie?”

“I’m getting along fine, Sheriff.”

“Monk hasn’t driven you crazy yet?”

“No, sir,” I said, mindful of who paid my wages and gave me room and board.

“It’s early yet,” the sheriff said just as Weaver approached with the cowpoke at his side.

“This here’s Bud Lolly,” Weaver said.

Lolly smiled when he saw Monk and me. “You again? Is there a law in this town against spitting?”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it,” Monk said.

“Believe me, he is,” the sheriff said. “But we do have a law here against murder.”

“I ain’t killed nobody,” Lolly said.

Monk took a handkerchief from his pocket, squatted down, and removed some mud from Lolly’s boot. We all stared at him as he did it.

“You want to shine my boots, mister, I’ll be glad to take ‘em off for you,” Lolly said.

“This dirt is from Bart Spicer’s property,” Monk said. “I recognize the hue, which is indicative of the unusually high silica content.”

“I ain’t never heard of no Bart Spicer,” Lolly said. “And even if I did, you can’t know where I’ve been from the mud on my boot.”

“Actually, he can,” I said. “Mr. Monk is the town assayer. He knows his dirt.”

“The geology and metallurgical content of every piece of property is unique, and so is the gold that comes out of it,” Monk said. “This mud definitely came from Bart’s claim. I can match it to the sample I kept of Bart’s rocks. I’m sure if I saw the gold dust in your poke, I’d recognize the color of that, too.”

“That don’t prove nothing,” Lolly said. “I might have walked across his land without even knowing it. And there’s lots of gold dust being passed around in these parts. I got no idea where my gold was before it ended up in my pouch.”

“He’s got a point,” Wheeler said. “I can’t hang a man because he’s got mud on his boots and gold in his poke.”

Monk looked Lolly in the eye. “Do you swear that you’ve never been in Bart Spicer’s mine?”

“I’ve never been in nobody’s mine,” Lolly said. “I’m a cowhand, not a gold digger. I earn an honest wage.”

“That’s not what your clothes say.”

“What are you talking about?” Lolly said.

“Mines are held up with bracing timbers that are covered in bark and splinters. They’re prickly as a cactus and coated with coal tar,” Monk said. “So if you’ve never been in a mine, or picked up a bracing timber, maybe you could tell us how you got those splinters in your chest and that tar on your shirt?”

He couldn’t. Lolly hesitated for a moment, then went for his gun. But he wasn’t as fast as Wheeler, who had his gun out and aimed before Lolly’s hand even reached his holster.

“Go ahead, Lolly, it’ll save the town the trouble of hanging you,” Wheeler said.

Lolly raised his hands and glared hatefully at Monk. “I should’ve followed my gut and killed you when we met. But I don’t shoot unarmed men.”

“You just smash in their skulls while they’re sleeping and steal their gold,” I said. “That’s much more noble.”

“Parley, take Lolly back to the office and lock him up,” the sheriff said.

Deputy Weaver took Lolly’s gun and aimed it at him. “Let’s go. You walk in front of me. No funny stuff or I’ll shoot you full of holes.”

“What about the mess his horse made in the street?” Monk asked the sheriff.

“Parley,” Wheeler said, getting his deputy’s attention. “Have Lolly pick up his horse’s droppings on the way.”

“Yes, sir,” Weaver said. “Where are you gonna be, Sheriff?”

Wheeler glanced at Monk. “Hot on the trail of that rascal Clem Janklow.”

We found Clem Janklow a few minutes later sitting on a bench outside of the general store, surrounded by bags of supplies. His bloodshot eyes peeked out from a face full of mangy whiskers and wild hair and he reeked from days of sweating in the hot sun in clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, if not months. The once-red wool shirt had faded to a ghastly purple and was caked in a fine layer of dirt. His ragged pants hung from his shoulders from frayed suspenders, the leggings tucked into his mud-caked boots.

He was slurping up sardines from a tin, with his fingers, bits of fish sticking to his prickly beard. When miners struck it rich, they were quick to spend the gold on canned oysters, olives, turtle soup, and other delicacies and, thus fortified, move on to champagne, whiskey, and sporting girls.

“You’re under arrest, Clem,” Monk said.

“You can’t arrest anybody, Monk,” the sheriff said. “That’s my job.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Clem said. “I’m a law-abiding citizen.”

“You swindled me out of a hundred dollars, and I don’t know how much you took from Nate Klebbin.”

“I’ve never taken a plug nickel from you, Mr. Monk, and I sold my claim to Klebbin fair and square.”

“Did you see Dr. Sloan for another dose of Greeley’s Bichloride Tonic Cure while you were in town today?” Monk asked.

“I don’t need it no more,” Clem said. “I’m feeling much better and I thank you dearly for it, Mr. Monk.”

“Because without me you couldn’t have pulled off your fraud,” Monk said. “You relieved yourself all over town, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stand it and that Dr. Sloan would prescribe Greeley’s Cure for you.”

“It cures your taste for whiskey and calms your kidneys, that’s why the doc said I had to have it,” Clem said. “But I couldn’t afford my own salvation, which is why I’m indebted to you for your kindness.”

The sheriff sighed. “If there’s a crime here, Monk, I don’t see it.”

“Do you know what Greeley’s Bichloride Tonic Cure is made of, Sheriff?” Monk asked.

“Nope,” Wheeler said.

I didn’t, either.

“It’s a mix of sodium chloride, glycerin, strychnine, cinchona, and gold chloride, among other things,” Monk said. “The tonic, paired with injections, is commonly used in the treatment of various addictions. You have to drink a dram of it every two hours for a month.”

“I don’t see your point,” Wheeler said.

I didn’t, either.

“The gold in the tonic and the injections passes right through your body,” Monk said. “Clem’s been out there relieving himself all over his property for weeks, infusing it with gold, so he could sell it to the first greenhorn who came along. And he forced me into bankrolling his crime.”

“How did he force you into it?” Wheeler asked.

“If I didn’t pay for his medicine, he’d continue his drinking and indiscriminate urinating,” Monk said. “He knew I couldn’t take that. But it was all a clever scheme to sell his nearly worthless claim.”

Now that Monk had explained it, I saw the past events in an entirely different light and knew that he was absolutely right.

Clem licked his oily fingers. “I had no idea my pissing was salting my claim and you can’t prove that isn’t so.”

“He’s convinced me,” Wheeler said. “You’re going to return the supplies you haven’t already consumed and give Mr. Klebbin all of his money back and let him keep your claim for nothing if he wants it. And then you’re going to repay Monk by getting the hell out of town and never coming back. Because if I see your face in Trouble again, I’ll put a bullet in it.”

“You can’t do that,” Clem said.

“I’m the law,” Wheeler said. “Maybe you’ve been too drunk to notice, but we don’t have any judges or courts here. So if I was you, Clem, I’d skedaddle before I change my mind and decide to shoot you right now.”

Clem gathered up his bags and shuffled back into the general store without another word.

Wheeler turned to Monk. “Satisfied?”

“This all could have been avoided if we had a law against relieving yourself in public,” Monk said. “And spitting.”

“What does spitting have to do with it?”

“That’s how it all starts,” Monk said. “You get away with that and, before you know it, you’re letting go of your sphincters willy-nilly, robbing trains, and killing old ladies.”

“I see,” Wheeler said. “So if we outlawed spitting, we could eventually put an end to all the indecent and criminal behavior in the West.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Monk said. “What have we got to lose by trying?”

“I’d lose plenty,” Wheeler said. “I’d be out of a job.”

“So you’re arguing that we should allow crime to continue so you can earn a living?”

“Not all of it. Maybe just spitting.” Wheeler winked at me and walked away.

Monk sighed wearily. “I’m going to spend the rest of the day washing my hands. While I do that, you can rent two rooms for us at the hotel.”

“What for?”

“Because after I burn down my cabin we’re going to need a place to live while the new one is being built.”

“Mr. Monk, be reasonable,” I said. “You can’t burn down your home just because you brought in some rocks that were pissed on.”

Monk stared at me. “Can you think of a better reason?”

Copyright © 2009 by Lee Goldberg. Copyright © 2009 Monk © USA Cable Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.

Homework

by Phil Lovesey

The son of award-winning crime writer and EQMM Readers Award winner Peter Lovesey, Phil Lovesey had several stories published in EQMM before turning to novel-length fiction and then taking a hiatus from fiction writing altogether for five years to teach in a large secondary school. He returns to our pages with a story that makes use of his teaching experience in a most creative way. Readers interested in his novels should look for The Screaming Tree, Death Duties, Ploughing Potter’s Field, and When the Ashes Burn.

English homework.

Judy Harris — Year 10.

In your opinion, is Hamlet merely faking his madness, or is he really insane?

This term we have been studying Hamlet, a play written ages ago by William Shakespeare. It’s quite good, though the words are all strange for modern people to really understand. There’s lots of stuff that is really, really old, that Sir needed to try and explain to us before it made any sense, not that most of the class seemed bothered, goofing around as usual.

Most of us thought that the film was better than the book, but that Mel Gibson bloke still used all the old words, so that when there wasn’t much going on except him talking, I noticed quite a few of the class were either mucking about or texting. I even told Sir about this after one lesson, but all he did was sort of smile at me, then tell me that Shakespeare wasn’t for everyone, and maybe it was better for me if the class didn’t think I was telling tales, which seemed quite harsh, as I was only trying to help him.

The story of Hamlet sort of goes like this: There’s this prince (Hamlet) who lives in another country a long time ago. His dad dies, and his mum marries Hamlet’s uncle, so Hamlet doesn’t get to become the king. He gets real mad about this, and reckons his mum’s a bit of a whore for marrying his uncle, especially when the ghost of his dad comes back and tells Hamlet that the pair of them were an item before he died, and that his brother even dripped poison into his ear and murdered him, just so he could get off with Hamlet’s mum and become king.

This was quite a spooky bit in the film, the ghost thing, and most of the class were watching, except Cheryl Bassington, who was still texting her boyfriend under the desk. He’s an apprentice plumber who lives down our road, and I often see him pick her up on his crappy little motorbike thing. She says they’ve done it lots of times, which I think is really lame at her age, as I reckon you should save yourself for someone who really loves you.

Hamlet has a woman who loves him. Her name’s Ophelia, and she sort of hangs around the palace, pining for him. It’s that Helena Bonham Carter in the film, and all the lads in the class were right crude about her in her nightie. Steve Norris made a sort of “joke” about boning-Bonham-Carter which even Sir sniggered at, but I just thought it was sick. I think Ophelia’s really sad, because she really does love Hamlet, and when he starts acting a bit mental, she gets really upset. He even tells her that he never loved her, and that she should go away and become a nun. Even Polonius (her own dad) uses Ophelia to test if Hamlet really is mad, which seems, well, odd — but then Polonius gets stabbed behind a curtain anyway, which serves him right for being such a bad dad in the first place.

My Dad wouldn’t ever do such a thing to me, regardless of what the papers said about him at the time of the robbery.

It seems that in Hamlet, everyone’s only after power, and that they’re prepared to do anything to get it, even if it means killing their family, marrying incestuously, using their kids, or faking madness that really hurts people. I think that’s very bad of all of them. Ophelia is so cut up about Hamlet being horrible to her that she goes and drowns herself, and even Hamlet doesn’t seem that bothered. Neither did the boys in the class, who asked for that bit to be shown again, as they reckoned you could see Helena Bonham Carter’s tits through the wet nightie. Thank goodness that someone tells Ophelia’s brother what a schemer Hamlet is, so that he comes back really angry and tries to kill Hamlet in a duel.

We all thought that the ending was right crap, because nearly everyone dies. Hamlet, his uncle, his mum, Ophelia’s brother; they all end up dead in this big hall, either poisoned or stabbed with poison-tipped swords. Dave Coles reckoned that the Macbeth we did for SATS in Year 9 was better because there were real nude women to perv over, and hangings and beheadings and stuff. When I told him I’d hated that film, loads of people laughed at me, and I felt right stupid, especially as Sir didn’t tell them off for being so cruel.

Maybe that was when I decided to do what I’ve done to you, Sir. Maybe that was the moment that it all made a sort of sense. Like I’ve written, maybe some people simply want power, and don’t care about other people’s feelings. Like you, then. Just two terms in the school, obviously wanting to be the trendy young teacher, joining in with them, laughing at me, not stopping it like other teachers would have done. Perhaps it was just another tiny, all too quickly forgotten moment for you, but believe me, Sir, it went well deep with me. Well deep.

That night, I told my mum about what had happened in your class, how you’d let them laugh at me. She was cooking — well, I say cooking, putting a ready-meal in the microwave for Uncle Tony for his tea, more like. Because she has to have it on the table for him when he gets in, or there’s trouble. He rings on his mobile from The Wellington Arms, tells her to have it ready in five minutes, then suddenly she’s all action, heaves herself up from the sofa and sends me up to my room as she gets it done.

Once, his meal wasn’t ready. I heard the result. Lots of shouting, then a scream. Mum’s scream. Then what sounded like moaning. I didn’t come down until the door slammed half an hour later, and I saw Uncle Tony walking away from the house from my bedroom window. Mum wouldn’t look at me, sort of flinched when I tried to put my arm round her. She was trying to stick a torn-up photograph of her and Dad back together, but her hands were shaking too much, and she was trying not to cry. I asked if I could help. It was a nice photo — her and Dad on honeymoon in Greece, both of them looking right young and happy on a beach in front of all these white hotels. She swore at me and told me to get back upstairs to my room.

Hamlet used to love his dad as well. Then he went away to some college somewhere, and when he came back his dad was dead, and his uncle had married his mum. The problem is that his dad is now a ghost, and tells him that he was murdered, so that makes Hamlet really angry. He also doesn’t know if it’s just his mind being tricky with him, so he decides to set a trap to see if his uncle is really guilty or not. Hamlet gets these actors to do a play which is sort of like his uncle killing his dad, and watches his uncle’s reaction. He wants to “prick his conscience.”

Dave Coles went “wheeey!” when Mel Gibson said the word “prick” — which everyone but me thought was real funny. I thought it was a good plan of Hamlet’s. He wasn’t saying “prick” like a penis; he was saying it like a needle, pricking his uncle’s brain to see if he was guilty. I think I’m cleverer than most of them in the class because I read more and understand these things, know that words can have more than just the obvious meaning. I think it’s because I’m not allowed to use the computer at home (Uncle Tony’s on it most of the time he’s in), so I don’t have any MSN or anything. Or a mobile phone. Just books, really. A bit of telly sometimes, downstairs, when Mum’s finished watching the soaps. But mostly I’m in my room, thinking and reading.

I write to Dad a lot. Tell him about school. Mum says I can’t talk about some of the stuff that goes on in the house, as it would only upset him. She says that even though Uncle Tony isn’t my real uncle, he’s doing us a massive favour by staying with us when Dad’s away. They used to be good mates, Dad and Uncle Tony, working at the warehouse together, going down to the pub, but when it all went wrong, and the police came for Dad, they sort of fell out.

What’s really great is that Dad’s letters are getting longer each time he writes back to me. Just a page in the beginning, now it’s often three or four. His spelling’s really coming on too, because of all the classes he’s been taking. He’s been well behaved, so they’ve allowed him more time to study. He says he’s taking his GCSEs too! Strange, isn’t it, Sir? There I am, in your class, studying Hamlet for my English GCSE Shakespeare coursework, and my dad’s doing exactly the same thing. At thirty-eight, too. He reckons once he’s done his English, Maths, and Science, he’ll do loads more subjects after that. He says one bloke further down the wing he knows has got nineteen GCSEs! See, Sir? They tell you all this stuff about people in prison being right thick and scummy, but there’s some of them really trying to improve themselves. Dad’s got another two years left, so I reckon he’ll have more qualifications than me when he gets out. How weird will that be?

In Dad’s last letter, he talked about Uncle Tony, and said that even though they weren’t best friends anymore, it was good that he had agreed to lodge at our house, and help pay the rent and stuff. He said it was the least Uncle Tony could do, because really, he owed Dad big time. He also said that the years would fly by, and when he finally got released, he’d got a surprise that would keep me, Mum, and him happy for years. When I showed Mum the letter, she screwed it up and chucked it away, said my dad was talking nonsense, told me never to mention it again. I’m not sure, but I think it was to do with the robbery at the warehouse. Thing is, although the police had CCTV film of Dad loading stuff into a van when he shouldn’t have been, the actual stuff was never found. The local newspaper said it was worth over a 100,000 pounds — though you can’t believe everything they say, can you, Sir?

Dad doesn’t like me to visit, see him where he is, so every other Saturday, when Mum and Uncle Tony go to Norwich, I go to the reference library in town. It’s nice there, warm. I don’t use the Internet stuff. I prefer to look through the books and old newspapers they have on this stuff called microfilm. Honestly, Sir, it’s amazing. Thousands and thousands of newspapers from all over the place going back years and years. All catalogued to make searches easier. People think that the Internet is the way to find out stuff, but I reckon searching through old newspapers in the reference library is better. There’s loads of interesting stuff in those papers, articles people can’t be bothered to upload onto the Web, because I guess it would simply take too long. Can be frustrating, though, and you have to have a little bit of luck and patience.

Yeah, luck. I guess that’s how I managed to find you, Sir. Luck and patience. And, of course, a really good reason. And you made sure you gave me plenty of those, didn’t you, Sir? Calling me a sneak, not helping me when the others laughed at me. I began to wonder why you did that. Why you wouldn’t help me. And then I noticed, figured out why. Just one of those chance things that no one else saw, but I did.

It was a Wednesday, the last lesson before lunch, and we were all in your classroom as Mel Gibson was waffling on about whether or not to kill himself (To be, or not to be; remember, Sir, you made us watch the bloody thing ten times that lesson?), and true to form, I could see Cheryl Bassington texting away in the darkness on her mobile under the desk. Except it wasn’t her plumber boyfriend she was texting, was it, Sir? Because when she pressed Send, the next thing that happened was you got your phone out from your jacket and read the screen as discreetly as possible. I saw you, Sir. Watched it happen. You, Sir. Someone who should be trusted to educate us; getting secret texts from a fifteen-year-old girl. Well, naturally, my conscience was “pricked,” as Shakespeare might have said...

I began wondering what Hamlet would do in my situation. You know, needing to find stuff out, but not wanting to be caught doing it. So I did what he did — pretended to be a loony for a bit. That lunchtime, I went and sat right next to Cheryl Bassington and started eating a bit weirdly, mixing my pudding into my pizza and making stupid noises and giggling. Very Hamlet, Sir, you’d have been proud. Anyway, I could see my plan was working, and that Cheryl and her mates couldn’t wait to get up and leave. The next bit was so easy — just as they were going and calling me all sorts of names, I suddenly leant over and clung on to Cheryl, slipping a hand into her coat pocket and grabbing the mobile as she yelped and tried to hit me to get away. Mr. Price came over and began shouting at us to behave, but Cheryl and her mates just swore at him and ran off. He asked me if I was all right, and I said I was fine. Next, I went straight to the toilet block, locked myself in, and went through the phone.

They’re really quite easy to figure out, these mobile things. There’s a kind of main menu with all sorts of helpful symbols to direct you to all the stuff stored on it. I found myself looking at Cheryl’s pictures first, and let me tell you, Sir, there’s some right rude stuff on there. Not just bits of the plumber, either, but stuff of you, as well. And not like shots taken in class when you weren’t watching, but photos of you smiling right at the camera, in bed, with her... Well, you were there, you know the rest...

I couldn’t believe how bloody stupid you’d been, what a crazy risk you were taking. If Cheryl showed any of this stuff to the wrong person — you’d be out of a job, wouldn’t you, Sir? They’d probably stick you in prison, too, wouldn’t they? And my dad tells me what they do to people like you in prison, Sir. Really horrible things that even the wardens (he calls them “screws”) turn a blind eye to. Really, really stupid of you, Sir.

Next, I went into the text menu, and found loads and loads. From you, to her; from her back to you. Some of them went back as far as six weeks, which, considering you’ve only been teaching here for just over two terms, kind of makes you a very fast worker, I guess. They have names for people like you, Sir.

Anyway, the most recent series of texts between the two of you were about meeting up on Saturday night. At the usual place, apparently, wherever that was. You suggested half-eight, and Cheryl had simply replied with one of those really lame smiley-face things. Sad. And sick.

But seeing as no one had complained, no rumours had started, I had to assume that no one else knew about you and her. Except me, of course. Which really made me think about things for a while.

Strange life you’ve led, Sir. Like I say, the reference library comes up with all sorts of stuff. One of the main reasons I went there was to find out more about what had happened to my dad. It even made one or two of the national papers, because I guess it was what those newspaper people refer to as a “slow news week.” Seems one of the main things about it was the fact that the police reckoned Dad had to have had someone helping him that night. There were two CCTV cameras that covered the warehouse, but only one was trained where it was supposed to be, on the loading yard. The other one was pointing across the road at (and here I’m going to use a quotation, just like you told me to) “the entrance to a nearby youth club, where a group of underage girls could be seen to be drinking and cavorting with young lads.”

See what I’m saying, Sir? If someone had been helping Dad (and he’s never admitted as much, even to me) then the camera wasn’t pointing the right way to catch them. It was watching young girls instead. Maybe it was looking for trouble from them, but then again, you know better than that, don’t you, Sir? For guess what I found when I researched our town’s CCTV company a little further? That’s right, a picture of you, stood with the two other operators on the launch of the company five years ago. You — unmistakably. Your name on the caption thing, everything. A big photo of all three of you, smiling in front of loads of little television screens, the article telling people how you could remotely direct and move all these little cameras around the town to catch criminals and keep us safer. Sort of like you playing Big Brother, wasn’t it, Sir? Only, not the crappy programme on the telly — the book by George Orwell. Like I say — I read a lot, I really do.

And once I found out about your “preferences” from Cheryl’s mobile, things started to drop into place. I began piecing it together as I sat in those toilets on that Wednesday lunchtime. Just under a year, you’ve been teaching. Eighteen months my Dad’s been inside. According to the papers, at Dad’s trial, the CCTV company admitted they’d received a resignation from one of their operators for “failing to comply with company policy whilst monitoring the immediate area around the warehouse.” That was you, wasn’t it, Sir?

I reckoned you left the job, took a quick teacher-training course somewhere, then got the job here. But, like I say, it was only a theory. I could have been wildly wrong. So I decided to do what Hamlet does, and devise a test (another conscience-pricker) to see if I was right. Here’s what I did...

First, I texted you back on Cheryl’s phone. You remember that one, Sir? The one where she asked to meet you that very night, at The Wellington Arms? That was me, not her. But less than a minute later, the phone buzzed in my hands with your reply, something about having to be really careful, it was quite a public place.

And I was giggling now, as I replied, insisting we must meet, that I was worried, had something to tell you that I might need to see a doctor about. I remember having to stop myself from laughing when I pressed Send.

Next, I deleted the messages and dropped the phone down the toilet. Now, even if Cheryl and her mates did find it, the thing wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be able to secretly text her before the meeting in The Wellington. You were most likely going to show up, and she had no idea about it. Quite a scheme, eh? I think even Hamlet would have been proud of me, don’t you, Sir?

It’s a good play, Hamlet, and has often been interpreted in many different ways. It seems to me that the central question — does he fake his madness to get revenge on those who’ve betrayed him? — is almost impossible to answer. Perhaps Shakespeare was trying to say that all revenge is a form of madness, as it can consume our minds if we’re not careful.

I think Dad’s the sanest man I know. Yes, he did a stupid thing and got caught, and now he’s being punished for it. But he’s never talked of revenge — even though I reckon he’d probably want to get that CCTV operator who spent too long looking at young girls getting drunk, rather than catching Dad’s accomplice on the night of the robbery. The police never found any fingerprints or anything, but the fact is that Dad couldn’t have done it on his own. Someone else must have helped him, been inside the warehouse, handing him the boxes of stuff to load into the van, just out of shot of the properly sighted camera. But when the police went through the tapes, Dad was the only person on them. Doesn’t seem very fair, does it, Sir? My Dad in prison, and the other man going free because you didn’t do your job properly?

Chances are, Sir, you never made the connection between me and Dad. Judy Harris, I mean, it’s not as if it’s a very uncommon surname, is it? Sort of invisible to you, aren’t I? The swotty kid who complains about the others, tells tales on them; the easy one to ridicule. The plain one, the one that doesn’t wear makeup, giggle at you as you pass by in the corridor. Just invisible old Judy Harris, gives in her work on time, does all the homework, tries her best. Strange how life can turn out, isn’t it, Sir?

Back to my conscience-pricker. Having arranged for you to be in the Wellington, I decided that Mum and Uncle Tony needed a little more culture in their lives. I went to the shopping precinct on the way home, bought myself a copy of the Hamlet DVD, told them both that after tea, I thought it would be a really nice idea if we all sat down and watched it together. Well, of course, Uncle Tony — already a little drunk at this point — raised a few objections, said he didn’t mind watching Mel Gibson stuff, Mad Max and the like, but he was buggered if he was going to sit down and watch a “load of Shakespeare shit all night.” (See, another quotation, that’s two so far; doing right well, aren’t I, Sir?)

Anyway, I made a bit of a fuss, and eventually Mum decided to smooth things over and asked Uncle Tony really nicely if he’d do this one thing. I said it’d make us all feel more like a proper family, and Uncle Tony sort of made a throaty noise, shrugged, and gave way, saying he’d give it half an hour, and if it was bollocks, then he’d leave it.

So, Sir, just after half-seven that night, I put Hamlet on our DVD player. Imagine that — a bit of real culture in our grotty house. Amazing, eh? And then I did what Hamlet does, watched my mother and my uncle real close as the story unravelled...

It didn’t take long, say twenty minutes at the most, and that’s even with all the old language to cope with. Mum and Uncle Tony soon got the gist of it — the betrayal of Hamlet’s father — and began sort of shifting uncomfortably and giving these sideways looks at each other. Honestly, Sir, it worked a treat.

Uncle Tony started coming out with all this stuff about Mel Gibson going “poofy,” and that he was much better in Braveheart and the Lethal Weapon films. I just knew he was begging for an excuse to leave what was becoming more and more embarrassing for him. So at that point I decided to tell him about you, Sir. Not the Cheryl Bassington stuff, or even the way you were so mean to me; no, instead I told him about the other stuff.

Yeah, I know, I lied. But just a white one, really. And Hamlet himself does that, doesn’t he, when he tells poor Ophelia that he doesn’t really love her anymore? I told Uncle Tony that when I was in town buying the DVD a strange bloke had come up to me asking me my name and where I lived, and when I told him, he asked me if Tony Watts lived with us. When I said he did, the man told me he wanted to speak to him about “the favour” he’d done my Uncle Tony with the security cameras, and that as far as he was concerned he thought that Tony Watts owed him, big-style, and that he’d be waiting in the Wellington at 8:30 to “sort it all out.”

Well, my Uncle Tony being the sort of bloke he is, you don’t have to try too hard to imagine his reaction. He was well angry, and began swearing and cursing, telling me I should have told him much earlier, asking for a description of you, then grabbing his coat and storming off, slamming the front door behind him so loudly that the walls shook. Mum looked right ashen, turned the DVD off, and told me to get straight upstairs to my room, that she thought I’d caused enough upset for one night. Uncle Tony didn’t come home that night.

That was two weeks ago, and you’ve been off school ever since, haven’t you, Sir? At Thursday morning’s full-school assembly, the Head told us that you’d been attacked the previous night, and were staying away to recover. Two broken ribs and a fractured jaw, the local paper said, with a couple of witnesses saying you’d been beaten up by a Tony Watts (unemployed) in the car park of The Wellington Arms. Police, apparently, are still trying to find a motive, but I’m sure with a little “help” they’ll have a clearer picture of why he did that cruel thing to you.

Uncle Tony’s on remand, as we can’t afford the bail, so he’ll be inside till the court case, which should be really interesting. The police have already interviewed my mum about Uncle Tony, but they haven’t got to me yet. I’m not sure whether to tell them what I know, or to keep quiet about it. I’ll write to Dad and ask him what he thinks I should do.

Our substitute teacher isn’t very good, but she’s told us to finish these assignments and the school will send them to you to mark while you recover. I’m sure that when you read this, Sir, you’ll realise why you were attacked that night, together with how much I know about you that you’d rather other people didn’t.

In conclusion, I say that whether Hamlet was faking his madness is irrelevant. How sane are any of us, anyway? And isn’t the very idea of faking madness a bit mad in the first place? Maybe you should know, Sir, the amount of faking you’ve done in the last few years.

I look forward to receiving my A for this essay. After all, I really did my homework on you.

Copyright © 2009 by Phil Lovesey

Whammer Jammer

by Mark Arsenault

Mark Arsenault has been making his living as a reporter since 1989, currently with The Providence Journal. He has also found time to write some attention-getting novels — four to date: Spiked, Speak Ill of the Living, Gravewriter, and the just published Loot the Moon (St. Martin’s Press), the second in a series that began with Gravewriter. All of his novels have met with critical acclaim, and he’s a past nominee for a Shamus Award.

* * * *

July 20, 1973

Boston Garden arena, Boston, Massachusetts

Skating five hard crossover steps through the turn, I closed in on The Pack, a rolling gangfight of baggy tights, knee socks, and flying elbows on roller skates. The crowd rose in a blur when I shot down the next straightaway. Greasy faces shining in the stifling heat; their screams so loud I could barely hear my wheels on the oval. The fans hated me because I was the villain. They loved me because I was a star.

I caught up to the slowest zipperhead skating at the back of the pack. He was a lumbering white kid trying to pull off a soul patch and an Afro. I jabbed a knuckle into his kidneys. He grunted and clutched his back. I slid around him and rammed a wholly unnecessary elbow to his breastbone. His eyes slammed shut and he went down like he’d forgotten we were on wheels. The crowd moaned ohhhh!

Any cheese-weasel can skate for the Roller Rumble, but the stars were obliged to offer something more. Be the fastest. Hit the hardest. Something. A big chest was something, but that was the gals.

Me? I was the dirtiest skater on the tour. The one they called The Rat.

The opposing team’s captain, Charlie Hyre, glanced back at the commotion on the track. His rusty muttonchops were matted with sweat. “Jammer!” he screamed to his squad.

That’s right, Scooby, here comes the jammer.

Each Roller Rumble team had four blockers, one pivot man, and one jammer circling the oval track. Only we jammers scored any points. We scored by passing skaters on the other team. Sounds easy, but try skating through a bloc of antisocial 200-pounders who will employ every variety of felonious assault to put you off your wheels.

The pack rolled into the next turn.

My team, the Eastern Atoms, wore alien-green jerseys and tights, which made us look like bad-tempered, unripe bananas. My blockers bashed shoulders with Hyre’s squad, trying to clear a lane for me to pass. My thighs were smoking, but this was the last jam of the period and I let it fly, weaving past the red shirts and piling up points.

The Garden had no air conditioning, and the inside felt like a rainforest. The arena was the color of dried mustard, the crusty stuff under the cap, the color a cigarette will stain your fingernails. Blue smoke floated in the lights. The fans beyond the rail were close enough to sweat on. But the upper deck was mostly empty. What’s with the empty seats? I thought. We sold out this dump in ‘71. Back then, when Roller Rumble was at its peak, we outdrew Elvis in this building.

The trip back to Boston was a homecoming for me. I glanced up toward my old season-ticket chair. That old cheap seat. Up so high the concessionaires sold oxygen. The chair probably still had the wad of Bazooka Joe I stuck there the night Cousy and Russell won their first Celtics banner, back in ‘57. Yup. Game seven, overtime. Had tears in my eyes. I was in that same seat three years later when candidate JFK delivered his last homily before the vote.

I ask you to join us in all the tomorrows yet to come...

Had tears in my eyes that night, too. But that was a different me. That was Robert B. Culligan, Jr., the engineering student. Can’t say I miss him, because I barely remember the dude.

“Screw yooooou, Robbie!” a fan sang to me through the din. “Robbie the Rat!”

Wham!

I hip-checked a red-shirted blocker into the rail and zoomed past him for the score. Just Charlie Hyre left ahead. He skated hard, to make me work for it. I linked hands with my pivot man; he reared back and slingshot me forward. I chased after Charlie. In the turn, he drifted high up the bank and I thought I had him, but that was what he wanted me to think. As I approached, he swerved sharply and stabbed an elbow in my ribs. I grabbed him. We clung together, rolling on, whacking each other. The crowd begged him to floor me.

“Y’hear that Bruce Lee died today?” Charlie grunted, as he yanked my jersey and tried to throw me off the track.

“Say what?”

“In Hong Kong.”

“Get the hell outta here.”

“Just up and died.”

The women’s squad lined the rails, waiting to skate the second period. I didn’t see Tammy, but I figured she was watching me loving it up with Charlie Hyre and I felt self-conscious.

Enough chitchat. I lifted my right skate and jammed it into Charlie’s ankle, like kick-starting a Harley. He cried out, staggered, and tumbled down ahead of me. I calmly hop-stepped over him.

The fans gasped ooh! as if they had each been poked with a stick.

A whistle ended the jam. I whipped off my helmet and coasted a victory lap, panting in the humidity, feeling sweat run down my neck and enjoying the boos that rained down from the crowd. I hoped to hell Charlie was kidding about Bruce Lee. Just up and died? Like Mr. Bojangles’ dog?

The women took the track for their warmups, and the crowd howled in appreciation. Each Roller Rumble team had a men’s squad and a women’s squad, which skated alternating periods. The fans adored the girls. Something about those young bunnies banging into each other...

That was when a tremendous scream slashed a dark, jagged gash through the arena.

From the tunnel ran “Lil’ Baby” Barbara Fleet, a backup jammer on our women’s squad. She was in street clothes, sporting a cast on her wrist from a pileup last week at a skate in Bangor. How could a woman five-foot-nothing make such a huge scream? She must have had four-foot lungs.

I met her eyes and I could tell this wasn’t about Bruce Lee.

“It’s Tammy!” she cried, and then fell to her knees. Adulthood seemed to melt off her in an instant. She was a lost child.

I raced down the tunnel on my skates, hopping electrical cables, shoving people out of my way. A small crowd had gathered at the door to Tammy’s dressing room. I forced my way through. The first thing I noticed was clothing strewn around: socks, tights, underwear, Tammy’s green Number 34 game jersey.

Then I saw her.

The toughest female skater in Roller Rumble — “Crashin’” Tammy Glassen — lay naked on a tan sofa. Her head and one arm dangled limp off the edge. A thin red wound, like a ribbon of blood, circled her throat. She was dead; nothing could have been more obvious. And even in death she drew my eyes all over her... long, powerful legs that could crack a man’s pelvis, bedroom eyes blazing from beneath a Cleopatra hairdo... I looked away and squashed an urge unfit for print.

Marty Papadakis, owner and manager of Roller Rumble, knelt at Tammy’s side, gingerly probing her wrist for a pulse. The smoldering Camel between his lips had an inch of ash at the tip.

“Mr. P?” somebody asked.

Papadakis pulled his hand away, passed a palm over his flaking bald scalp, and stared at the floor, without words for the first time anybody could remember.

In the hallway, Charlie Hyre was screaming. “Don’t you tell me not to go in there! That’s my wife’s dressing room!” He bulled his way in and gasped. The sight put him straight to the floor like an ice axe between the eyeballs.

That was when my brain unfroze from the shock, and I felt a tingle of dread for what was about to come. For the top female star of the Roller Rumble didn’t just up and die. Somebody had strangled her.

The first detective was a bony black guy with a neatly trimmed Fu Manchu. He was too tiny to beat up a horse jockey. His partner was a six-foot-six Irishman squeezed into a plaid blazer that was probably a 54 Long.

My interview was two hours after the body had been discovered, which had given the police plenty of time to pull papers on everybody. Their obvious contempt for me baked off them like heat waves rising from the Mass Pike on an August afternoon.

I asked them, “Which one of you is the brains and which is the muscle?”

Their brows wrinkled at what was an insult to the both of them. The little dude handled the introductions. “I’m Detective Sergeant Andrews. This is Detective Nangle.”

There were three chairs and a metal desk in this tiny office somewhere below the Garden’s parquet floor. The cops stood, so I stood. Nangle had to duck below a ventilation tube.

“I see you’re back home this weekend, eh, Mr. Culligan?” said Andrews. He picked a sheet of paper off the desk.

“Grew up in Dorchester,” I confessed. “Had season tickets to everything in this dump.”

“Then you moved to state housing at Concord in ‘sixty-six, as a guest of the taxpayers. Looks like you stayed three years.”

“Paroled a year early.”

“Grand larceny, auto,” Andrews confided to Nangle, as if Nangle didn’t already know. “Led police on a hundred-mile-per-hour chase over the Longfellow Bridge.”

“Never topped eighty,” I corrected. “The Chevy I boosted had a bad cylinder. People don’t take care of their vehicles.”

“Arrested for battery. Couple of drug busts. Vagrancy.” His eyebrow rose. “Assault on a police officer?”

I shrugged. “Spitting counts, apparently.”

“Whew,” Andrews said dramatically, as if my meager criminal record was so long he was exhausted from reading it. “So how’d you end up performing in the Roller Rumble?”

I reviewed the question in my mind for possible traps. Seeing none, I gave the truth. “Mr. Papadakis advertised for ‘skaters with attitude’ for his traveling exhibition. I got attitude, man. I figured I could fake the skating.”

“The victim was a big star in this show, yes?”

A clicking noise from inside the ventilation tube interrupted us. Nangle banged a fist on the tube and the noise scurried away. “Damn Boston Garden rats,” he said.

I answered, “Yeah, she was Crashin’ Tammy Glassen, Roller Rumble’s biggest draw. Bigger than me. Tammy flung the sharpest elbow on the team. It was her signature move. We called it the Whammer Jammer, because when she hit the other team’s jammer they went down hard. Tammy was our ace in the competition with Texas RollerGlam, that new all-bimbo league that’s been cutting into our action and taking our fans.”

Andrews grinned from the side of his mouth. “And she was sexy, was she?”

“Tammy? She could bust up a marriage with one sly look from sixty yards. Everybody loved her. Men, women — everybody.”

“Did you?”

“We worked together. Traveled together. That’s all.”

“Rumor is you were sleeping with her.”

I threw back my head and laughed. “That’s too stupid for words, man. She was married to Charlie Hyre. He’s captain of the Shockers.”

“We know who he is.” Andrews looked to Nangle and then flicked his thumb toward me. The big cop suddenly snatched my wrist, whipped my arm behind my back, and bent me facedown over the desk.

“Not cool!” I shouted. “Just maintain, man. Ow! Main... tain!”

He fished my wallet from my pocket, flipped it onto the desk, and then let me go. Andrews pulled a twenty from my billfold.

“I better get a receipt for that cash,” I warned.

“Crisp bill,” he said. “You see, Tammy Glassen cashed her check at the bank this morning. Eighty bucks. Got four brand-new twenties, in sequence. But we only found sixty dollars in the purse in her dressing room.” He opened a notebook. “I wrote down the serial numbers of the other bills... well, golly — this twenty from your wallet is part of the series.”

He let the accusation hang there.

Nangle pushed me down into a chair and stood over me. They were using all the cop props except the spotlight in my face.

“You guys hear Bruce Lee died?” I asked.

“This morning, yeah. Weird,” said Andrews.

“I loved that guy,” Nangle moaned. His big fists opened and closed.

We all frowned and shook our heads over the inexplicable loss. Such are the whims of the universe.

“All right, Scooby,” I said, “it’s like this...”

Tammy rolled to her feet and left me naked but for my tube socks on the swampy tan sofa in her dressing room.

“One more time for the road,” I pleaded. Drops of sweat ran down my chest. “Just gimme five minutes to recover.”

“You ain’t got five minutes, Robbie,” she scolded, in what was left of a Louisiana accent bastardized by cross-country living. “You’re skating first period. You wanna explain to my husband why you were tardy for the opening jam?”

I watched her unpack her uniform, socks, and skates and lay them neatly on a chair. “When I get out of the shower, you’ll be gone and I’ll have five minutes to myself,” she said.

“See you tomorrow?”

Her lips pressed tight. “See you when I see you,” she answered. “Vamoose.”

She shut the bathroom door behind her. I heard the shower running.

Reluctantly, I dressed and pocketed my wallet and watch. From my knees, I looked under the couch to be sure I hadn’t dropped anything for Charlie Hyre to find in his wife’s dressing room. Hmmm. Tammy had tucked her purse under the sofa. It was open and I could see the green.

The water was still running. The bathroom door was closed. I pulled out her bag and helped myself to twenty dollars, pretending in my mind that she was paying me for sex. So I had earned it, kinda.

That was when I noticed an airline ticket in her bag. First class to Austin. What the hell? Leaving Logan Airport Saturday afternoon... but we had another game to skate in Boston on Saturday night...

I put the purse back where I had found it and slipped out, wondering if I had seen the last of Crashin’ Tammy Glassen. As it turned out, I had.

The cops made a lot of notes during my story, but didn’t say much. “I left her alive,” I told them plainly, in case they were thicker than they looked. “Then I went back to the bus to dress for the game. I skated the first period, and then Lil’ Baby found Tammy dead.”

“Put it together for us, Robbie,” Andrews urged. “What happened?”

I looked at them like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Dudes! She was bookin’ it to Austin and leaving Charlie Hyre. If I’m proof of anything, it’s that her marriage was sham-city. Charlie couldn’t stand to let her go. He sneaked into her room after I left and he killed her. Dig? You cats should talk to Charlie.”

“We’re going to talk to everybody,” Andrews promised. “Go straight to your hotel tonight. Don’t make it tough for us if we need to find you.”

“Right on, Scooby,” I said. Then, leaning closer, I asked in a low voice, “Uh... can we keep this thing with me and Tammy, you know, between us? People might get the wrong idea.”

The cops exchanged a glance that made my stomach roll. Andrews assured me, “I don’t think anybody’s going to get the wrong idea, Mr. Culligan.”

The “hotel” was a two-story drive-up out near Franklin Park. The two skate teams and the support staff headed there on the Roller Rumble tour bus, which was weighted down with about three tons of suspicion. Everybody knew that Tammy’s killer was probably on that bus. Nobody spoke. At least nobody spoke to me. We saw the new Hancock Tower, which had begun spitting its windows to the sidewalk on windy days. The locals had taken to calling it the Plywood Palace. At the moment, I was ready to forgive the building for a few imperfections.

The motel bartender who served me nine whiskeys understood my need to watch Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury on the television. I couldn’t believe they were both gone. Tammy and Bruce. Bruce and Tammy. Flush with the deep insight liquor provides after midnight, I wondered if their deaths were somehow connected. Hmmm... Jealousy boiled up from my gut. That kung fu S.O.B. better not have been sleeping with her...

I was not of the law and justice orientation, so I didn’t care what the detectives did in their investigation, so long as they kept my name out of it. I was the type who sighed and moved on whenever life swung the elbow of destiny in my eye. And that was what I had to do...

“What’s crackin’, Rat?” came a voice from behind.

I slowly spun on the barstool.

There stood Charlie Hyre, looking awful. Unshaven, ungroomed. Eyes red from tears and drink. Denim bell-bottoms two inches too short. White shoes, black socks. Mercy!

The silent pause that followed felt like that dreadful moment at a large wake, when you finally make it to the front of the line, and you instantly forget that profound thing you had been planning to say. My brain offered up something stupid. “I got two bucks in quarters,” I blurted. “Wanna play some Pong?”

He belted me in the mouth. I flew off the stool and crumpled to the floor.

“I’m looking forward to skating against you tomorrow,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Peace out, Rat!” Then he stomped away.

My face was numb. I tasted blood. Guess he’d found out about Tammy and me. That was when I realized those cops couldn’t keep a secret.

And that wasn’t even the worst part of my night.

The bartender gave me ice in a rag for my lip, and then shoved me outdoors before anyone else kicked my can in his establishment. I leaned on a wall and followed it toward my room. I recalled it was Room 11, on the first floor, with a lovely view of the parking lot. The ground looked smooth and level, but in my drunkenness I stumbled over invisible things in my path. Then the keyhole wouldn’t hold still and I had a hell of a time. I don’t remember how long I fiddled with the key, but I remember hearing roller skates across the asphalt.

I turned to see a silhouette glide through the darkness. Much too small to be Charlie Hyre, thank God. I shaded my eyes from the light above the door and squinted into the night.

Bang! A spurt of flame. The light fixture over my head shattered. Shards of glass fell on my skin. I mistakenly thought I was shot. I moaned and grabbed my heart and fell. Because that’s what shot people do. The sound of the skates rolled on and vanished into the city’s nocturnal growl.

The next morning was even worse. Those cops really couldn’t keep a secret.

From the front page of the Boston Herald-American:

ROLLER DEATH SHOCKER!

Strangler Slays Sultry Skating Starlet

Robbie Culligan Admits Sex Triangle, Denies Murder

Is Robbie the “Killer Rat”?

Sex triangle? Yech. Was that supposed to imply Tammy, Charlie, and me at the same time?

I sat at the back of the bus on the ride back to the Garden. Nobody would sit within ten seats. People avoided me like a garden of radioactive poison ivy.

A would-be lynch mob had gathered outside the arena. They curled their lips, bared teeth at the bus, and screamed:

“We loved her, you MURDERER!”

“You WON’T get away with it, Robbie!”

“POISON the Rat!”

A beer bottle exploded against the bus just above my window. I sank in my seat.

The line for Roller Rumble tickets ran down Causeway Street and wrapped around the building.

The crowd inside the Garden was equally blood-parched. They jeered me mercilessly, threatened my life, roared with primitive pleasure whenever somebody put me down. My own blockers were complicit. They allowed Charlie Hyre’s thugs clear shots at me throughout the jam. Near the end of the period, Charlie personally forearmed me in the turn, and drove me up and over the rail. I flew into a trio of wooden folding chairs, which clattered and snapped shut around me like giant mousetraps.

Lying on my back, I stared up at the solution — what I should have figured out after the murder. Spectators had stuffed the Garden to the beams. The overflow stood in the aisles just to cheer for my injuries.

I still had some nettlesome questions about Bruce Lee.

But I knew who killed Tammy.

Marty Papadakis sat alone in a dimly lit conference room beneath the Garden. He chain-smoked Camels while a rattling 8mm film machine projected silent images of Crashin’ Tammy Glassen’s greatest hits.

I stood in the doorway for a few minutes and watched Tammy smash people on the screen. She would wait until an opponent had come up just behind her, and then unleash her Whammer Jammer elbow. Devastating.

I missed her. And I would have done anything to save her life... But that was in the past and ashes cannot be unsmoked.

I said, “She was something else, wasn’t she?”

Marty whirled around and dropped his cigarette in his lap. “Cripes, Robbie, you startled me. Jeepers creepers, I burned my crotch. This is new polyester, Mr. Culligan.”

I took a seat beside him. “Mind if I watch with you?”

“Yes, I do mind.”

“My blockers tried to get me killed today.”

“What did you expect? They were all in love with Tammy. Uh, the door is over there, by the way. Use it.”

“Just because I was sleeping with her doesn’t mean I killed her.”

He snorted with bitter laughter. “You don’t know anything. Tammy was sleeping with half the team. You’re the only jelly-brain who admitted it to the police. Hell, she was even shagging Lil’ Baby.”

I was dumbfounded. Tammy and Lil’ Baby Barbara Fleet? I thought back to the small-framed skater who had taken a shot at me. “That explains a lot,” I said, more to myself than to Marty.

“Now do you mind, Mr. Culligan?” he said with impatience. “I’m trying to say goodbye to Tammy in my own way.”

I changed the subject. “Quite a crowd in the Garden tonight.”

The corners of his lips turned up and he brightened. “Biggest gate of the year.”

“Tammy’s murder has been good for your business.”

The eyes narrowed. “What are you implying? You’re the chief suspect...”

Oh, that burned me...

I jumped up and swatted his ribcage with the palm of my hand. Just a slap. Not hard enough to injure him. But Marty gasped and twisted in pain.

I yanked up his shirt. The huge bruise on his ribcage was the color of a cold plum. It looked about a day old.

Grabbing his collar, I snarled in his face: “You sneaked up behind Tammy yesterday, and you choked her dead!”

“Not me,” he pleaded, weakly.

“The proof is on your ribs, Marty. At her last breath, Tammy hit you with the Whammer Jammer. Hurts, don’t it?” I pressed my fingers on the wound to make him squirm. “Tammy wasn’t jetting off to Austin just to get away from her husband. She was running away from you. She was leaving Roller Rumble to join Texas RollerGlam.”

He gaped at me in fear and wonder.

“Losing your most popular skater to a rival league would have finished you. So you stopped her. And I’m getting the rap.”

His eyes were huge and round. I cocked my fist to strike his ribs, and he surrendered. “Enough, Robbie!” he begged. “I couldn’t have known the police would blame you in the press. Nobody else was supposed to be involved. Just an unsolved crime to create an atmosphere of danger, a hint of the unspeakable to revive a fading business.” He looked me square in the eye and said, with no irony, “It wasn’t a murder, it was a sales promotion.”

I let him go and sat back down. Neither of us said anything for a minute. The movie ended and the loose film flapped around the projector.

“The police leaked the story because they don’t have enough evidence to charge me,” I said. “Though I’ll always be a murderer in the eyes of the public.”

“I’m sorry, Robbie.”

“Did you see that crowd, Marty? They bought up every ticket to cheer against Robbie the Killer Rat.” I sighed for innocence lost, and then moved on. “I’m gonna be bigger than Bruce Lee, and from now on, Scooby, you’ll be working for me.”

© 2009 by Mark Arsenault. Black Mask Magazine title, logo and mask device copyright 2009 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission

Rearrangements

by Marjorie Eccles

Marjorie Eccles began her writing career with short stories for magazines in the U.K., and the short story continues to be her first love. She has had a number of them in EQMM over the years and is a winner of a short story Agatha Award. In 1988, her first crime novel appeared in the U.S. The book featured her series character Superintendent Gil Mayo. More than a dozen books in the Mayo series have followed, and the author also writes non-series novels, such as 2009’s Broken Music, which was released in the U.K. in August.

* * * *

She was still in good nick; she didn’t need anyone to tell her that, and it wasn’t just luck, either. She’d always looked after herself — she kept to a strict diet, had regular workouts at the gym, and went swimming twice a week. She had her hair expensively styled and the new two-tone highlights Carl had given her last week had given it a youthful bounce and shine. Regular facials and manicures were part of her routine. She was high-maintenance, but she was worth it. All her friends told her she didn’t look her age, and she agreed with them.

All the same...

On her fortieth birthday — or maybe her forty-fourth, or even — fifth — two things happened to Lynda Morrison that were to change her life.

The first was the arrival of a letter. (No cards, because she’d never told anyone the date of her birthday, much less admitted to how many she’d already had, even to those who might have their suspicions.) The letter was from her estranged husband, with not so much as a mention that it was her birthday but, arriving as it had on The Day, was a nastily calculated reminder that he, at least, knew that it was another milestone.

Ivan Morrison was a doctor, rich over and above the salary he earned as a consultant with the NHS and the fees he also collected in his private practice. So that the separation allowance Lynda received from him was sufficient to keep her in comparative luxury, enabling her to dress in the softest cashmere, silk, and fine linen, to devote attention to herself, and even to invest in some good jewellery from time to time. Not to mention having tenure of this spacious serviced apartment he allowed her, in such a highly prestigious block of London flats, just around the corner from Harrods. Over the matter of their separation she had, if one were truthful, taken him to the cleaners, against which he’d had no redress, knowing what she knew about certain indiscretions he got up to on the side. It had forced him to be very generous, over the years, in the matter of the monetary increases she had demanded, due to the rising cost of living, of course. She had no compunction about this; for what he had done, she deserved everything she could wring out of him. In actual fact, separation had so far suited both of them. It had been managed in a discreet and civilised manner, without the messy publicity of a divorce, which he certainly did not need. For several years, Lynda had lived in pampered ease and comfort, and had seen no reason why this state of affairs shouldn’t continue.

But what Ivan said in this letter — and especially coming as it did on this significant birthday — completely threw her. She read it with increasing disbelief and fury. He spoke of his approaching retirement (he was older than she was — of course) and Tamsin’s wish to move to Marbella, or Majorca. In view of this, and of the rising maintenance costs, her flat was an encumbrance he could do without. In short, he intended to sell it. Fighting off the panic, Lynda scrunched up the letter and threw it across the room in a rage. How couldshe possibly move? What would she do without her bridge cronies, her nearness to Harrods and Harvey Nicks, the little restaurants, the flower shops — all the amenities of Knightsbridge that made up her pleasant life here?

He would of course, Ivan had gone on to say smoothly, provide her with other accommodation. Having once worked in an estate agent’s office, Tamsin knew someone who could help in that direction. I’ll bet she does, Lynda thought savagely. She could just imagine the sort of cheap flat that would be found for her, in some dismal corner of Earl’s Court, no doubt — or even worse, a semidetached out in the sticks! Why, she raged, should this — this Tamsin — this floozy, nothing more than a common tart, young enough to be his daughter — why should she dictate the course of the life of a woman whom she had never even met? She would see them both in hell, first.

The second momentous happening of the day, not, perhaps, entirely unconnected with the first, and the hateful name of Tamsin which had haunted her like ear-music all day, was that as she prepared for bed that night, Lynda steeled herself to take a good, long, honest, and overdue look at herself in the full-length mirror. Fortieth — or perhaps forty-fifth — birthdays were said to be a time for reassessment and she wanted to be prepared for the battle which was to come, for battle there would be. This Tamsin might be nothing more than a common little office scrubber, but she had youth on her side.

Lynda’s lifestyle guru was right: honesty was a girl’s best friend. Ruthless honesty. Taking a deep breath as she critically examined herself from top to toe, she began to wonder, for the first time, if that multi-layered hairstyle wasn’t perhaps a little too long, too youthful. Maybe she should aim for sophisticated maturity. Looking even closer, she acknowledged that she had — oh horrors! — the faint beginnings of a double chin, that the “laughter lines” at her eye corners were — well, crow’s-feet. Plunging even deeper into the dark well of truth, it had to be admitted that the interesting shadows under her eyes were fast becoming, let’s face it, bags. That terrifying piece she’d read in the paper a few weeks ago, about the possibility of face transplants, didn’t seem quite such a horror story now as it had then. She would willingly consider the possibility, given the chance.

There was more. Even with the help of the beautifully cut designer clothes which she spent a fortune on, she couldn’t completely hide the love handles on her thighs. (Love-handles, that was a laugh! she thought bitterly.) Her breasts were firm no longer, and it required a determined effort and magic knickers to keep those tummy muscles pulled in.

Knowing she wouldn’t sleep that night anyway, she thought, what the hell, and made herself a pot of black coffee. She needed to think. Where was that magazine she’d bought after seeing it when she was having her hair done at Carl’s? Finding it at last, she flicked through until she came to the article she remembered reading.

Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam, FRCS (Plast), was middle-aged and wore a pink shirt under his impeccably tailored charcoal-grey suit. He was plump and fair-haired, though balding, a man with light eyelashes and soft white hands with a sprinkling of freckles on the back of them, like mouldy cheese. These cool hands with their beautifully manicured nails slightly repelled her when they lifted her chin to the light, turned her face this way and that, scrutinised her hairline, but his immediate understanding of her position enabled her to repress a shudder. He could indeed sympathise with why she wanted these slight adjustments made, he assured her, a beautiful woman was right to wish to keep her looks as long as she could; indeed, in some cases, a little help was a necessity. Was Mrs. Parker, perhaps, an actress, a film star? No? He had thought at first her face was familiar. She saw his eyes flicker, and for a moment, she could have sworn... But she must have been mistaken. He shrugged, and merely added that she was entitled to keep her self-respect, her pride in her pretty face, whatever her reasons. A face which would be even more beautiful when he had finished with it. Perhaps just a tuck here and there to begin with?

No, Lynda (Mrs. Parker for the time being) had thought it all through and wanted more than a nip and tuck. She wanted the works. The sky was the limit. Her face first, and then she’d turn her attention to a remake of her body, she told him. Very well. He murmured about facial peels, dermal fillers, brow lifts, watching for adverse reactions. There were none. She was not afraid, not even apprehensive, being no stranger to Botox injections and having had all her teeth capped. What he proposed would involve a little more discomfort than that, perhaps, but afterwards... Ivan and his Tamsin, look out! With newfound confidence, she would show them who could strike the best bargain.

She arranged to go away for a month. She would see Ivan, she wrote to him, when she returned. It would do him no harm to wait.

She lay on the trolley in the operating theatre, warm and relaxed, drowsy from her pre-med injection. She could hear the murmur of the nurses’ conversation around her and tried to understand what they were talking about, but their voices seemed to come from a long way off and she soon lost the thread... something about Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam and a sudden, unfortunate attack of flu...

“No operation today, then, after all?” She thought she had asked the question, and maybe she had, except that no one answered sensibly; she couldn’t make any sense of what they were saying through the cotton-wool mists in her brain. It didn’t seem to matter. She felt deliciously sleepy and heavy. A masked face loomed over her, an injection by the anaesthetist into the back of her hand, and she knew no more.

The replacement surgeon who had stepped in to cover Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam’s list was always popular with the theatre staff. He joked with the sister while scrubbing up and congratulated the anaesthetist on his golf handicap. It was known that he liked to work to music and “Clair de Lune” played softly as he approached the first patient, Mrs. Parker.

For a moment, when he bent over her, Ivan thought he was hallucinating. And the next instant, with a shock that actually made his heart skip a beat, he remembered that cocktail party... Harvey-Pilbeam squinting down the cleavage of the delectable Tamsin, and then winking one of those pale-lashed eyelids at Morrison, and giving him an old-fashioned look. Ivan had shrugged it off, putting it down to H-p’s jealousy, and thought nothing of it, until now. But — could he possibly have been remembering what Lynda, to whom he had been introduced, briefly, some years ago, looked like? And comparing her with this patient of his, this Mrs. Parker? She did indeed bear a resemblance to Lynda. Except that it was more than a resemblance. Mrs. Parker was Lynda. Ivan’s wife.

No, of course Harvey-Pilbeam could not have engineered this eventuality, ethical questions apart. It was nothing more than Fate, beautiful Fate, intervening by giving Harvey-Pilbeam a bad dose of flu. And going further by nudging his efficient secretary to take upon herself the decision, on his behalf, to request that Mr. Morrison might be willing to take over the list in the emergency, thus delivering to him the patient on the operating table. Ivan felt dizzy for a moment, his hand trembled. Tamsin had read his horoscope that morning and told him Scorpio was in the ascendant and for once it seemed the mumbo-jumbo she believed in might have some semblance of credibility.

He looked down at the helpless, unconscious woman who was still his wife, changed as she was. She had been beautiful once, before the determination for revenge had soured and aged her and shaped her mouth into a permanently discontented droop. Before the light in her lovely hazel eyes had turned into an avaricious gleam, and her hands had become claws ready to tear to pieces every kind impulse he had ever had. So utterly unlike his warm, generous, and life-enhancing Tamsin.

So, he thought, picking up the scalpel. To work. For a moment he paused, almost overcome by a juvenile desire to let his hand slip “accidentally” during the operation. But the temptation was momentary. What was he thinking of? Killing her in front of an operating theatre full of witnesses?

No, that was not the way. Not a gargoyle, either — he was not about to give her grounds to sue him, another opportunity to bleed him dry. Just a little rearrangement of the face in a way that wouldn’t leave any room for real complaint of negligence or anything like that, but wouldn’t please her at all. Something that Mrs. Parker would have to live with for the rest of her life. A not-so-subtle reminder that her time of playing fast and loose with him had come to an end. An end to her blackmail.

He took exquisite pleasure in dwelling on what she would feel when she woke up and learned the name of the surgeon who had replaced Mr. Harvey-Pilbeam. His hands were quite steady as he made the first incision.

Copyright © 2009 by Marjorie Eccles

Who Killed Frankie Almond?

by Michael Z. Lewin

Michael Z. Lewin is well known for his P.I. novels and stories (which include the Albert Samson and the Lunghi family series, both of which have appeared in EQMM) and for his police procedurals (the best-known starring Lt. Leroy Powder). So what a surprise it was to receive from him this classical drawing room whodunit. We think he’s done it splendidly, but if you’re craving more of the old Mike Lewin, you won’t want to miss his latest book, Oh Joe, a thriller set in his hometown of Indianapolis.

* * * *

“Red wine or white, Mr. Brett?” Grimm, the butler, showed Brett Kingsley a tray bear-ing several ceramic wine goblets.

“I’ll have white, please, Grimm.” But before reaching for a goblet, Kingsley looked around the room. With a practiced toss of the head he shifted a thatch of golden hair that hung over the left of his bright blue eyes. A moment later the hair fell back to where it had started. “This is an amazing apartment, isn’t it?”

“Have you not been here before, sir?” Grimm knew full well that Kingsley had been in the penthouse several times during his brief period as Ms. Victoria’s lover. But perhaps Victoria had made the young actor use the servants’ entrance. Victoria Nation planned her life meticulously, ran it to a strict timetable, and had a firm idea of what was what.

“I never got to appreciate the fabulous views,” Brett said, gesturing to the living room’s outlook over the Hudson River. “It is only New Jersey, but from this distance it looks wild and inviting.”

“Indeed, Mr. Brett,” Grimm said.

“And I’ve certainly never been here on a momentous occasion like this one. I’m so glad that Victoria’s been able to let bygones be bygones. I was worried there for a while.”

You are the one who got ditched, Grimm thought, recognizing that Kingsley was implying a different story. Victoria had confided her disappointment that the gorgeous young actor had turned out to be neither sophisticated nor a quick learner. “I daresay he’d be better if I scripted it for him,” she’d said, “but who has the time? He is history, Grimm. Life is too short.”

However, Grimm said only, “Ms. Victoria has never been one to let her personal life get in the way of business decisions.”

“She’s a special woman.”

“That she is.” Grimm offered Kingsley the tray.

“Hey, these are funny-looking wineglasses,” Brett said as he took one. He rotated it in his hand. Each goblet bore a pottery face. The eye and hair colors were similar to his own, but there was little definition in the features.

“If you would prefer to imbibe from a different vessel, I can find you an alternative, Mr. Brett.”

“No, no. I was just saying.” Kingsley took a sip. “Nothing funny about that.”

“Ms. Victoria wants you all to have the best,” Grimm said. Then he turned to another guest who had joined them. “Wine, Ms. Lorelei?”

Lorelei Penfold had certainly been in Victoria’s living room before, if not for a meeting with such serious implications. Small and dark, Lorelei was a writer of television scripts, although she hoped that the night would leave her in charge of a team of lesser writers who would do the actual work of putting words onto pages. “I really shouldn’t do anything to fuddle my mind, Grimm,” she said.

“No, Ms. Lorelei?”

“But I’m going to.” Lorelei was known for intuitive scripts backed by meticulous research. “Or am I? Yes, I am. It’s not like I’m going to have to make any decisions tonight. That’s all being done for us elsewhere. So, by God, I will have a glass, of the red, thank you.”

And, by God, she took a goblet.

Brett used the moment to tap Grimm on the shoulder. “Hey, Grimm, when is Victoria intending to grace us with her presence? Considering that it’s her shindig, I expected her to be here once the guests began to arrive.”

“The mistress will be with us as soon as she can, Mr. Brett.” With the slightest of bows Grimm left the actor and the writer alone.

“Do you think she is his mistress?” Brett asked Lorelei as Grimm moved out of hearing.

“Who? The butler?” Lorelei studied Grimm’s back.

“Victoria has... Well, she has a great appetite for life.”

Lorelei turned back to Brett and raised her eyebrows. Her expression said, Well, you ought to know if anyone does.

“Oh, stop it,” he said with an embarrassed laugh, and he changed the subject. “Victoria found him in a cardboard box, you know.”

“She what?”

“He was begging on the street when she spotted him.” Brett mimicked Victoria as he said, “ ‘I saw in an instant that, scrubbed up, he would be exactly what I require a butler to look like. And then, when I heard him speak and he turned out to be English, well, what choice did I have but to acquire him? But don’t tell anybody he was a beggar. He’s such a sensitive soul.’ So here he is, Victoria’s secret.”

“If there’s one thing to be said about Victoria Nation,” Lorelei said, “it’s that she knows how to get what she wants.” Lorelei drank deeply from her wine.

“Grimm is good-looking, in a fatherly kind of way,” Brett said.

“And she sure likes them good-looking,” Lorelei said, the drink affecting her already. “As you should know.”

“Does everybody know she and I were together?” Brett was suddenly flustered at the thought that the manner of the relationship’s end might also be common gossip.

“Of course we do, Brett. This is television.”

After taking a breath to calm himself, he said, “Well, that’s all in the past now.”

“And,” Lorelei said, “Victoria is with Andrew these days, isn’t she?”

“Andrew?” Brett was surprised. “You mean Andrew Stark? But he’s... forty if he’s a day.”

“Only a twenty-five-year-old could say something like that.”

“Oh, sorry, Lorelei, I didn’t mean that forty is old. Well, not old old.”

“Old but not old old? I’m not sure I understand the distinction. Perhaps I’ll research it. But age aside, you do have to agree that Andrew is good-looking.”

“Do I?”

“Oh yes.” Lorelei felt a bit of a flush and fanned herself with a hand. “And he has such a melodic laugh. Plus those ‘I can make your bells ring’ eyes.”

“He does?”

“Oh yes.”

“And what kind of eyes do I have?”

“Why Brett, I never thought you’d ask.”

“What? Oh. Me. Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean—”

Lorelei laughed at the consternation she had caused the young actor. Her own laugh was harsh and not melodic at all. But then she was not an actor, she was a writer. And writers’ lives are harsh.

Brett only got his composure back when he noticed another woman enter the room and head their way. “Oh, here’s Nancy.”

“Where?” Lorelei said. She turned to look. “I do not socialize with Nancy Oliver.”

“What?” Brett was puzzled.

“I think my language was plain, Brett. I do not socialize with that woman.”

“But if Frankie Almond goes to series...”

“I will work with Nancy, but I will not socialize with her.” Lorelei downed her drink. “Where did Grimm get to? Ah.” She pivoted on the balls of her feet, for she was athletic, and she left Brett to Nancy’s tender mercies.

“Was it something I said?” Nancy said as she arrived.

“I don’t know,” Brett said. “Was it?”

Nancy looked dismissively after Lorelei as the little writer beat a retreat. Nancy Oliver, a director, would supervise the direction of all the individual episodes of Frankie Almond, if the series was picked up by the network.

The reason for the dinner party was to mark that success or failure. In the afternoon Victoria had been learning the network’s final decision. And the guests included all the people at the very heart of the project — actor, writer, and director of the pilot episode that had been so well received. These people, along with Victoria, the producer, had the most to gain from the future of Frankie Almond, Private Eye, if there was to be a future for him.

“Why won’t Lorelei socialize with you?” Brett asked.

Nancy tossed her red hair and fixed Brett with her green eyes. “Well, my little sugar plum, I’d guess that it’s because Lorelei is a sexless, repellent little slug. But you’ll socialize with me, won’t you, darling?” Nancy stepped closer to him.

“Hey, hey, keep your hands to yourself.” But more quietly Brett added, “People might see.”

“I’m a director, darling,” Nancy said. “We’re positively expected to grope our actors. Especially the cute ones.”

“But I don’t want to upset Victoria by rubbing her nose in it. Not if Frankie Almond is going to series. I couldn’t afford to be dumped from it.”

“That’s not going to happen, schnookums.”

“But until we’re sure... It wouldn’t be the first pilot that went to series with a different lead actor. And when I broke up with her, I told her it was because I needed time on my own.”

“Darling Brett, you’re so innocent,” Nancy said. “I told Victoria about us days ago.”

“You what?”

“She’d have done the same thing if she’d taken away my lovely lover.”

Dramatically, Brett clutched his head in his hands. Victoria had dumped him but it was at about the same time that Nancy had approached him. “Am I nothing more than a trophy for you, Nancy? Are you doing nothing more with me than score points off Victoria? I couldn’t bear that. Because I love you. I do. It’s the real thing, and for me it’s forever.”

“Of course it is, darling. Me too. Now, tell me, have you found out anything? From Grimm, perhaps?”

“Nobody knows. We’re all waiting for Victoria.”

“I’ll bet my mascara that woman was nothing but an office temp called Vicki where she came from — complete with the little circle dotting her i. But because she has that English accent and knows the difference between a two-shot and a crossfade, all the network people think she’s God’s gift.”

“The TV movies she did were very successful.”

“Well, I’m not saying that she doesn’t have a knack for hiring people whose work makes her look good.” Nancy held a hand up, miming a mirror. “And my direction can make just about anybody look good, don’t you think?”

“I just hope the network people think she’s got whatever knack they want,” Brett said. “Frankie Almond would be perfect for me just now.”

“Well, Cuddles, I daresay we could all use a top-ten show to beef up our résumés.”

“Not to mention our bank accounts.”

Nancy sighed deeply. “Oh, you’re not going to turn out to be one of those pretty boys who thinks with his checkbook, are you?”

But before Brett could answer, Grimm appeared. “Wine, Ms. Nancy?”

“What are these funny wineglasses, Grimm?”

“Ms. Victoria’s sister in Yorkshire runs a pottery and Ms. Victoria commissioned a special set of goblets for tonight’s event.”

“What’s this face on the side? A gargoyle?”

“I believe the significance is meant to be a little closer to home, Ms. Nancy.”

“Whatever. But I do prefer to see what I’m drinking, through glass. After all, wine comes in bottles. The people who make it ought to know.”

“Are you requesting to drink from the bottle, Ms. Nancy?”

“Please don’t be a smartass, Grimm.”

“Of course not, Ms. Nancy.” Grimm bowed in deference.

“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just edgy. Victoria probably knew about Frankie Almond last week. It would be just like her to keep us all waiting, and guessing, for dramatic effect.”

“Her business is drama, Ms. Nancy,” Grimm said.

“Well, it’s mine too. That doesn’t mean I can’t separate what’s on screen from what’s off.”

“I’m sure Ms. Victoria will let everyone know as soon as she can, Ms. Nancy.”

“I’m glad you’re sure.”

But while this exchange was taking place, Brett’s attention was elsewhere. A new guest had entered the room by a door leading from the interior of the penthouse. Brett took Nancy’s elbow and whispered, “If you really believe that Victoria already knows, maybe Andrew will know, too. They’re together now, you know.”

The new arrival was Andrew Stark, the old old actor of perhaps forty and Victoria Nation’s current squeeze. He approached Brett and Nancy, although he was probably attracted more by Grimm’s drinks tray than the company.

Once Nancy was sure that Andrew was within hearing distance she said, “You know, Grimm, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that Victoria was making us wait on purpose. Everyone knows that she has a terrible sadistic side.”

But Grimm knew that Nancy’s remark was not, in fact, addressed to him.

So did Andrew. “Oh, very nice, Nancy,” Andrew said. “And you’re one to talk.”

“Do tell us, Andrew. What are you doing here tonight? Playing the part of the empress’s consort? Because if she’d had you serving the drinks as well, she could have gotten away with paying only one salary instead of two. And aren’t producers meant to have a grasp of basic economics?”

“You make a rattlesnake seem like a teddy bear,” Andrew said.

“And you’re sweet, too,” Nancy said. “But, compliments aside, you are about the last person I expected to see at the Fate of Frankie Almond event.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Andrew said, fixing Nancy with a hostile stare.

“I do so wish I could say it was a pleasant surprise to see your fading features. Mind you, I could say it if someone was paying my rent and buying my clothes. One can say so many unlikely things when you’re being paid. But being an actor, you know that perfectly well.”

“There’s a window over there, Nancy. Maybe it opens.”

“And charming with it. But I shall leave you with Brett. You boys have so much in common. You could swap notes. On technique, perhaps.” Nancy left the men together to study the sunset over the Hudson.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” Andrew said, “who’s the most viperous slut of all?”

“Stop,” Brett said. “Stop it. I don’t think that’s what she’s like. Not really. I know there’s a bit of a hard veneer, but—”

“Hello? Were you here just now or not?” Andrew shook his head. “Was I imagining her part in that conversation? Pure poison.”

“She just gets started and can’t help the way it comes out.”

Andrew stared at him.

“And she is a wonderful director.”

Andrew sucked his lips before saying, “She certainly manages to make you look good, I’ll say that for her.”

Brett was uncomfortable, so he fell back on the most reliable method of changing subjects, asking the person you’re with to talk about himself. “I haven’t seen you around for a while — not that I catch everything that’s going on out there. Have you been working?”

“Nothing to sink my fangs into.” The fangs remark was a reference to Andrew’s earliest and, to date, biggest success in a vampire series. But it was before Brett’s time and the younger man didn’t respond. Andrew said, “I’ve been working, but just bits and pieces. Small parts, a little understudying, some kids’ magic shows, and I do some dubbing now and then. Whatever I can find to keep the wolf from the door. And in between I do some writing.”

“In our business it is important to stay positive till our luck changes.”

“I’d say it’s important for us to make our own luck.”

Which provided Brett a good segue to say, “They... they tell me you’re with Victoria now.”

“In the sense that she finds half an hour for me now and again. Forty-five minutes on a good day — whatever seems to suit her schedule best. Sound familiar?”

Too familiar for Brett to remember calmly, because when he and Victoria were together he’d been sure she was the one. But he’d been less experienced then and less mature. He said, “I’m sure she’ll make more time for you when all this Frankie Almond stuff settles down.”

“Think so?”

“She must love your voice. And your eyes.”

Andrew gave Brett a puzzled look.

Moving rapidly on, Brett said, “So, has she said anything to you about whether Frankie Almond is going to be picked up?”

“Not a whisper. Nor a murmur. Not even a whit or a tittle.”

Worth a try, Brett thought. Then, impulsively, he leaned forward to make a confidential comment, man-to-man. “She didn’t just get us all here in order to leave us fretting all evening, did she? Maybe planning to show up in a few hours, after we’re all nervous wrecks? Because that strikes me as just the kind of thing that would appeal to her so-called sense of humor. As you’ll find out. If you haven’t already.”

“I... have learned quite a bit about what amuses Victoria.” Andrew was not smiling.

The men locked eyes. Sympathy passed between them. But only a jot, because at that moment the front door of the penthouse burst open. Victoria Nation swept in.

She was a sight to behold, grand in her manner, glamorous in gold garments, and looking half her chronological age, at least from a distance. How did she do it?

“Sorry! So sorry I’m late, boys and girls. But there was a most frightful last-minute holdup at the network about location budgets. Where would we all be without e-mail and the cell phone, I ask you? But you don’t want to hear about my little problems, I’m sure. You’re all dying to know about the future of Frankie Almond, Private Eye.”

As Brett, Lorelei, Nancy, and Andrew moved closer to hear what she had to say there was a sudden silence in the room. Only Grimm hung back.

Victoria smiled, looking from one to another. She basked in the rapt attention. Finally it was Lorelei, the writer, whose patience ran out. “So, is it going to series or not? Stop teasing us.”

Victoria laughed. “Outspoken as ever, Lorelei. Well, I saw the network president this afternoon...” She paused again, to recreate the suspense. “I met him, and... he is mine! The answer is affirmative. We are going to series.”

“Yes!” Brett shouted.

Andrew was more muted as he muttered, “Well, well.”

Lorelei smiled and nodded and made a fist.

Nancy applauded. Quietly she said, “Well done, Vicki.”

“So let the celebration dinner commence,” Victoria said. “Grimm?”

Grimm rang a chime. “Assembled writer, director, producer, actor, and friend of Frankie Almond, pray be seated for dinner.”

As people began to move, Victoria called, “Please note, no ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ but then this is television.” She laughed loudly. Her laugh, if not melodic, was direct and to the point. “Come along into the dining room. If the news had been bad, I’d have sent out for a Dominos, but since it’s good, we’ll all have a jolly theme meal to celebrate the fame, fortune, and fabulous future of Frankie Almond, Private Eye.”

As soon as Victoria’s guests were in the dining room they could smell the food being prepared by caterers in the connecting kitchen. Grimm was heard over all of them. “Find your place cards and take your seats.”

Lorelei was first. “Where...? Oh, I’ve found me.”

Andrew, however, grumbled. “Place cards when there are only five of us?”

Nancy had a theory and she happily whispered it to Brett. “It’s the only way Victoria can be sure to have the men on either side of her. Don’t be fooled if she starts playing footsie with you, sweetie. She’ll be doing the same with Andrew on the other side. Ah, here’s me.” And she took her place next to Lorelei. And true enough, the two women faced Victoria directly with the men’s seats either side of her.

But Andrew was still not impressed by the place cards. “Well, to hell with this. I’ll sit wherever I damn please.” With a rebellious expression he took the seat designated for Brett, between Victoria and Nancy. “When is the next time I’ll have the chance to sit between a top TV producer and a top TV director?”

But Brett was not pleased. This way he wouldn’t be next to Nancy. “Andrew, that’s my seat.”

“Oooo,” Andrew said, “is big bad Bwett gonna cwy? Because he ought to remember, Frankie Almond would never cwy big bad pwivate eye tears. Take a hike, Brett. For once I’m having what I want.”

On the small screen Brett might have dragged Andrew aside and knocked him out with one punch, but in real life, with no lines to read and no stunt coordinator, all he could do was say, “Oh well.” He sat in the seat that had been designated for Andrew, between Victoria and Lorelei.

Victoria herself seemed not to notice. She was excited. “Now that Frankie Almond has been signed and sealed for prime time, I wanted to mark the occasion with something special. So I declare this theme dinner open. First, please take a look at the wine goblets by your plates. My sister made them from the finest Yorkshire clay. And do you see the face? Recognize Brett — or rather, Frankie? Isn’t that sweet? But before we all raise our goblets, I call on Nancy to remind us how she came up with the original idea for Frankie Almond, Private Eye.”

“Original?” Andrew muttered, but if anyone heard him there was no reaction.

Nancy said, “Well, Frankie... What can I say? He just came to me out of the blue one day.”

But before she could recall the day, or the blue, Andrew interrupted. “Ain’t that the truth.”

This time Nancy was unwilling to let the grumbling from the man on her right continue. “Excuse me, Victoria,” she said, “but just what is your good-looking, if slightly shop-soiled, friend doing at a Frankie Almond event? It’s your party, of course, but although we’ve never even been properly introduced he keeps talking to me. Do you think he might be making a pass? And if so, don’t you think you should pack him off somewhere? Perhaps let Grimm teach him what is appropriate behavior and what isn’t?”

Victoria was not pleased with Andrew or the interruption. “Andrew, please. Contain yourself.”

“Sorry, Vic,” Andrew said. His tone was humble, but he didn’t make eye contact.

Nancy resumed. “Frankie Almond... Well, in truth Frankie was a reaction to the current fad for novelty. Everywhere you look somebody is touting yet another new exotic detective. There are children detectives, ghost detectives, ancient Romans, monks, and Martians all solving murders these days. I even think there are plans for a dog as TV sleuth — and not a cartoon. So I thought, what on earth is wrong with a good old-fashioned private eye? And that’s how Frankie Almond was born.”

Lorelei, who wrote the script for the pilot, chimed in. “I think of Frankie as the archetype of private detection. He’s elegant, and classic. He’s intelligent, handsome, witty, sexy, wealthy.”

Victoria smiled and nodded. “Lorelei, you’ve put Almond in a nutshell.”

Nancy, who directed the pilot, continued. “And, Victoria, by casting Brett in the title role, I think you’ve given Frankie Almond the perfect physical embodiment.”

“Aw shucks,” Brett said, in mock modesty, “you’re just trying to make me blush.”

“Wait till I get you alone.” Nancy laughed, pretending she wasn’t serious.

But Victoria said, “Children, children, control yourselves. Which, in fact, brings up a serious point that does need to be addressed.”

The others were surprised by the notion that they’d have to consider something serious. They fell silent.

Victoria continued, “With success comes responsibility. Especially since Frankie will be in prime time. It is now incumbent on us all to avoid scandal of any kind. At least until the second series.”

“What sort of scandal did you have in mind, sweetie?” Lorelei asked in a tone of voice that encouraged each of the guests to think of something he or she had never tried but might fancy.

“All I mean is that you must lock the doors before and do up your buttons after. Don’t buy anything illegal or immoral — let a friend do it for you. No insider dealing with the money you’re about to earn. And don’t say anything to anyone in the media if you don’t want to see it in headlines. Basic privacy and no arrests. I trust that’s not too much to hope for.”

Positive sounds from around the table were encouraging.

“Good,” Victoria said. “We understand each other. So, please, everyone, raise the smallest of my sister’s ‘Frankie face’ goblets. You’ll find it to the right of your plate, just north of the forks. Grimm took the liberty of pouring you each a small celebratory libation. I now wish to propose a toast.”

Lorelei asked, “Is that going to be an almond toast?”

“Great minds, Lorelei. As it happens, the liqueur in question is an almond cordial. So raise your goblets. I give you Frankie Almond, Private Eye.”

Everybody echoed, “Frankie Almond, Private Eye,” and drank.

Then Andrew coughed.

Nancy said, “Wow, is this stuff disgusting, or what?”

“Just don’t tell Entertainment Tonight,” Victoria said cheerily.

“If it meant success for the series,” Brett said, “I’d happily drink it every day.”

But Andrew’s problem was not just that some of the unusual liqueur had gone down the wrong way. He continued to cough, and choke, and then he began to thrash.

Nancy, next to him, at first assumed this was some kind of attention-seeking maneuver but after looking more carefully at his face even she was concerned. “Andrew? Are you all right?”

But Nancy’s concern didn’t result in a cure. Andrew choked again and, perhaps responding to her voice, he sprawled over Nancy, her place setting, the whole shebang.

“Get off me,” Nancy said. “I mean it. Get off. Stop messing.”

Andrew did get off. He rolled onto the floor.

From her position across the table Lorelei said, “It looks like he had a fit.”

Brett, next to Lorelei, was concerned for Nancy. “Are you all right?”

Nancy was fine and said so, but Lorelei stood up to see where Andrew was lying. “He’s gone limp.”

Victoria intervened. “Grimm,” she said, “please see to Andrew.”

“Yes, Ms. Victoria.” Grimm moved to where Andrew lay sprawled on the dining room carpet and knelt. After a few moments of examination he rose. He shook his head.

“Grimm?” Victoria said, anxiety in her voice.

“Ms. Victoria, I regret to inform you that the gentleman is dead.”

There were gasps from around the table.

Victoria said, “Dead? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Ms. Victoria. I worked for three years in an abattoir. I know dead when I see it.”

“Has he... had a heart attack?”

“Of that I cannot be certain, Ms. Victoria.”

“Well,” Victoria said, “that’s quite put me off my food. I must say, we don’t get many people dying between the apéritif and the hors d’oeuvres where I come from, but this is New York, I suppose.”

Lorelei was shocked. “Victoria! How can you be so heartless? And him your boyfriend.”

“Hardly a boy,” Victoria said. “And this is still a special night, once-in-a-lifetime for us all. Frankie is still going to series, and I can hardly expect my guests to dig into their tucker with a corpse lying on the floor. Grimm, remove Andrew, please. Take him to the living room.”

“Yes, Ms. Victoria.”

As the other guests watched in stunned disbelief, Grimm took Andrew’s feet and dragged his body toward the door.

Finally it was Lorelei who asked, “Is that something he ought to be doing? I mean, shouldn’t we be leaving the evidence alone?”

Victoria asked, “What do you mean, evidence?”

“Well, Andrew seemed healthy a couple of minutes ago. There’s going to have to be an autopsy, and the police will need to be involved.”

“I’d really rather not,” Victoria said.

Nancy was less certain about police involvement. “At least don’t you think that maybe Grimm should call a doctor?”

“Grimm will do everything that’s required.”

And by that time Grimm had dragged Andrew’s remains through to the living room. A few moments later he returned, closing the door behind him. “Ms. Victoria?”

“Yes, Grimm?”

“I have laid the corpus by the white leather couch, but I have the sad obligation to inform you that it is my belief that the gentleman was poisoned.”

Now, Victoria was aghast. “Poisoned? But Grimm, that would mean that one of us murdered him.”

“Exactly so, Ms. Victoria,” Grimm said.

As the first shock of Grimm’s news sank in, the people around the table tried to reconstruct what had happened. As members of the Frankie Almond, Private Eye production team, they even felt that they had qualifications for the job, of a sort.

Nancy, the director, spoke first. “Grimm, what on earth leads you to believe that Andrew was poisoned?”

“Because, Ms. Nancy, the gentleman collapsed so rapidly and his skin was very pink as I laid him out on the hall floor.”

“So what? My mother died of a heart attack while she was jogging in the park and she was pink as a pig.”

But Lorelei, the writer, had taken the next step. “Cyanide.”

“I beg your pardon,” Nancy said.

“I think Grimm is suggesting that Andrew was killed with cyanide.”

“Exactly so, Ms. Lorelei.”

Lorelei knew about cyanide. “Cyanide is extremely toxic and it’s also widely available because it’s used in a lot of common products. Many of them can easily be administered orally. What happens is that the victim’s stomach acid acts to release hydrogen cyanide gas. That causes immediate unconsciousness. Death follows within a minute, a few minutes at most.”

“How the hell do you know all this?” Nancy asked, for everyone.

“Cya-Nora,” Lorelei said.

“Say what?”

“Early photographers used potassium cyanide in their processing. I used it as a poison in my play about Nora North, the suffragette photographer-detective, when she went to Japan. Hence, the title, Cya-Nora.”

But Brett recalled something. “I thought you could smell cyanide.”

“You can,” Lorelei said. “But it smells of almonds. And what have we all been drinking?”

Victoria said, “My special almond cordial. Oh dear.”

“Which would mask the cyanide smell completely,” Lorelei concluded.

“But Grimm,” Brett said, “are you saying that one of us poisoned Andrew with cyanide?”

“That would appear to be a reasonable conjecture, Mr. Brett.”

As a ripple ran round the table, Brett said, “But who...? Why...?”

“I may be able to be of further assistance, sir,” Grimm said. “Ms. Victoria, if I may?”

“You carry on, Grimm,” Victoria said.

“When I laid the gentleman’s remains on the carpet, I chanced to discover an audio cassette tape in the breast pocket of his jacket.”

“Do they still make those?” Nancy said.

“The cassette in question bears a label which reads, ‘To be played if I am dead.’” Grimm held up the cassette and showed everyone the label.

This news was a further shock for the already shocked company.

Grimm said, “If I might have permission to utilize your mini-stack, Ms. Victoria?”

“Any time, Grimm.”

Grimm inserted the cassette tape into a small sound system on a buffet at the side of the dining room and pressed play. Soon Andrew’s mellifluous voice was heard clearly throughout the room. “My name is Andrew Stark. If anything bad has happened to me tonight, then it wasn’t from natural causes. I just had a checkup and I’m in perfect health — a fine specimen of manhood. So if there’s no knife in my back or bullet hole between my eyes, then I must have been poisoned...”

A murmur went around the room.

“When Victoria invited me to this Frankie Almond dinner I accepted immediately. Why? Not just because I adore Victoria’s incomparable company...”

“He was such a sweet boy,” Victoria said.

“... but because it seemed the ideal opportunity to confront Nancy Oliver in person.”

“What?” Victoria said. She looked at Grimm.

“Because it was Nancy who stole my idea for Frankie Almond.”

There were intakes of breath all around the table.

The tape continued, “I never mentioned it to Victoria, but I’ve known Nancy for a long time. Then, a few years ago, I had a supporting role in a play she directed off-Broadway. One morning, over croissants, I told her all about my blockbuster idea for a ‘classic’ private eye.”

Nancy said sharply, “That’s a lie.”

“The only difference,” Andrew’s voice continued, “between my idea and what has become Frankie Almond is that I thought the detective should be my age and have some experience of the world. And I called him Charlie Cashew.”

Victoria said, “This is not at all what I expected.”

“What I didn’t know then,” Andrew’s voice said, “is that Nancy steals things. Usually it’s just people. For instance, she bragged one time how she stole Lorelei’s husband. Even now Lorelei doesn’t talk with Nancy except about work. And more recently Nancy stole Brett away from you, Victoria. At least that’s her version. I don’t care about all that, but what I do care about is that she stole my idea — my idea — for the TV series that’s going to make you all rich.”

Nancy could stand it no longer. “It’s all lies,” she said. “He thinks he can say anything just because he’s dead.”

But Brett and Lorelei shushed her, wanting to hear the remainder of the recording.

“When Victoria showed me the complete guest list,” Andrew said, “I had second thoughts about using this dinner to confront Nancy. Because, the truth is, I’ve had problems of one kind or another with each of you.”

Having expected more dirt about Nancy, Brett, Lorelei, and Victoria all looked at one another.

“For instance,” Andrew continued, “I met Lorelei Penfold years ago, when I was in her TV play about dairy farming, Creme de Passion.”

“I know what’s coming,” Lorelei said, “but—”

“Lorelei became obsessed with me.”

“It’s not true!”

“She followed me everywhere, morning, noon, and night. Eventually I had to get a court order to keep her away. This is the first time in years that we’ve been in the same room.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Lorelei protested.

“And as for Brett Kingsley,” Andrew said.

“I wrote all about it in my play, Innocent Error,” Lorelei said.

“When Brett was in high school he got involved with my little cousin, Audrey, and her mother. It ended in an appalling orgy of sex, drugs, and stomach pumps. Brett is always nice as pie to me face-to-face, but now that he’s about to be the star of a prime-time program... Well, I know so many things he would not want splashed around the tabloids.”

“Nice as pie,” Brett said. “He said it himself.”

“And you, Vic,” Andrew said. “Well, let’s talk about your background, shall we? And your little sister, whose identity you stole to pass yourself off as a university graduate. Good thing she’s content to stay away and play with clay, isn’t it?”

Victoria’s jaw dropped. For once nothing came out of her mouth.

Andrew’s tape continued, “If you’re listening to this, then something awful’s happened. I can only hope that those of you who are innocent will get together to discover who is guilty.”

After several seconds of silence, Grimm turned the machine off. “That’s the end.”

Victoria shook her head, breathing heavily. “This is not at all what I intended for tonight. I am so sorry, everybody. This was supposed to be a party. A celebration.”

“Funny thing, though,” Lorelei said.

“What?”

“That Nancy lied about knowing him.”

“No, I didn’t,” Nancy said sharply.

“Yes, you did. When you complained to Victoria because he was interrupting your version of the idea for Frankie Almond. And maybe now we understand all that a bit better.” Lorelei glared at the woman next to her.

“I just said nobody introduced us,” Nancy said. “And it’s not like I was obsessed with him to the point that required a restraining order.”

But the confrontation was truncated when Victoria sighed and nearly tumbled from her chair.

Grimm was by her side in a flash. “Ms. Victoria, are you all right?”

“It’s... it’s not what I expected.”

“Can you continue?”

“For the moment. I guess. Yes.”

Lorelei said, “Did Nancy steal Andrew’s original idea for Frankie Almond, Victoria? If she did, her position would be a lot more secure if Andrew were out of the way permanently.”

“Wait a minute,” Brett said.

“What?”

“I may not be a real detective, but there’s an obvious question that needs to be asked here. How was the poison administered?”

Eyes turned to the scriptwriter. Lorelei said, “In the almond cordial, presumably.”

“And who poured the almond cordial?”

“It was waiting for us,” Nancy said.

“Exactly,” Brett said, in his Frankie Almond voice. “Grimm?”

Grimm did not respond to the implied accusation immediately.

Victoria said, “Please answer the man, Grimm.”

“I did indeed pour the drinks, Mr. Brett.”

Brett said, “Hey, hey, wait. We’ve forgotten one other thing. And it’s important.”

Voices asked, “What?”

But before Brett could say anything more, Grimm interrupted. “No need to continue, sir.”

“Grimm?” Brett said.

“I confess, Mr. Brett. I confess to the crime. I did it. It’s a fair cop, guv. I poisoned the gentleman.”

“But... but why would you do such a thing, Grimm?” Lorelei asked.

“Yes, why?” Nancy asked.

Despite the confession, Brett insisted on making his point. “There are two things we have all forgotten.”

“What, Brett?” Lorelei asked.

“First,” Brett said, “Andrew was sitting in the seat I was supposed to have. So if the drink there was poisoned, then I would have been the intended victim.”

“Oh my,” Lorelei said.

“Yet it was Andrew who had made the cassette.”

People looked at the sound system.

“The second thing we’ve forgotten,” Brett said, “is that Victoria likes to play jokes.”

“Jokes?”

“I see!” Nancy said with the triumph of discovery. “All this has been a game. You told us at the start that this would be a theme dinner, didn’t you, Victoria?”

After a moment, Victoria said, “I too confess.”

Nancy said, “Andrew dies — which is why he was invited to the party. And the butler did it. Oh, that’s cute, and very classic. Good deduction, Brett. You shall be rewarded...”

“Thank you,” Brett said.

“However,” Victoria said, “I do apologize for that wretched tape. Andrew made it this afternoon, unsupervised, while I was at the network. Believe me, the script I wrote for him was very different. And much funnier.”

“Andrew didn’t sound like he was trying to be funny.”

“He’s been a very naughty boy. I shall have to punish him severely.”

“I daresay he’ll like that,” Nancy said.

“Although,” Victoria said with a smile, “I must say, my money was on Lorelei to solve the case, what with her plotting skills. But I guess you got too involved in the tape, didn’t you?”

“What he said was serious and unpleasant,” Lorelei said.

At this moment, Grimm coughed. Stagily. “Ms. Victoria?”

“Yes, Grimm?”

“Don’t I get to say why I did it?”

“Ah, the motive,” Nancy said.

“Come on,” Brett said, “tell us, Grimm. Why did you poison Andrew? Was it because he’s a tattoo on the armpit of life?”

“I poisoned him out of jealousy, Mr. Brett. You see, I am hopelessly in love with Ms. Victoria, and I cannot bear to share her with any other man.”

“I’ll bet that was in the original script, Victoria,” Nancy said.

“It certainly was,” Victoria agreed, and laughed. Everyone joined in.

Except Lorelei.

“Well, excuse me for living,” Lorelei said, “but I don’t think this whole thing is funny at all. I thought Andrew was really dead, and dead or not, I do not like personal and private and painful episodes from my life being used for entertainment.”

“I repeat,” Victoria said, “what Andrew said on the tape was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. I’m sorry if you’re upset, but there’s not much I can do about it now.”

“Lorelei,” Nancy said, “along with the research you do, sensitivity has always been one of your strongest points as a scriptwriter. Unfortunately, sensitivity doesn’t always smooth one’s way through real life.”

“Don’t you patronize me, Nancy Oliver.”

“I was trying to be nice,” Nancy protested. “Jeez.”

“Oh, get Lorelei a fresh drink, please, Grimm,” Victoria said. “In fact, crack open the Champagne. It’s time we all started our serious celebrating.”

With a nod, Grimm went to the Champagne bucket. As he did so, Brett said, “You don’t have some other joke in store for us, do you, Victoria? Nobody’s going to get kidnapped, are they? No bomb in the bombe surprise?”

“No more games, Brett, I promise.”

“And no more of that disgusting almond cordial, either, I hope,” Nancy said.

“No.”

There was a bang, but it was neither a bomb nor a gun. The cork had flown from the Champagne bottle, injuring no one. Grimm began his rounds at the table, pouring the sparkling liquid into yet more of the special goblets with Brett’s face that had been set out for each guest.

“We’re watching you, Grimm,” Brett said.

“Very wise, sir,” Grimm said as he went to Lorelei’s place. “Ms. Lorelei?”

“Yes, all right. I shouldn’t, but perhaps I shall. I suppose we need to look forward, not back. So, yes, by God, I shall.”

“Very good, Ms.,” Grimm said.

“And perhaps you should pour some for yourself, too, Grimm, and then taste it before we have any.”

“A most excellent suggestion, if I may say so, Ms. Lorelei.” Grimm filled her goblet.

“Thank you, Grimm.”

He continued around the table.

“Thanks, Grimm,” Nancy said.

“I’ve been looking forward to this not just all day, but all my life,” Victoria said. “A prime-time television series. Something very special. A real opportunity.”

“Thank you, Grimm,” Brett said. “It looks great.”

Victoria added, “Use Andrew’s goblet for your Champagne, Grimm. I had intended to invite him back for the meal, but in view of his behavior he can damn well stay in the living room. Naughty boys don’t deserve Champagne. And need I tell you? This is the real stuff. Vintage. French. The whole nine yards.”

Grimm poured for himself. “Ms. Victoria.” He lifted Andrew’s goblet to her. He gestured to the others. “Facilitators of Frankie.”

Victoria lifted her goblet. “And now, may I once again propose a toast? To you all. To us all. Nancy Oliver, director — and creator — of this fine series. Lorelei Penfold, writer of the best damned scripts you’d ever want to see. Brett Kingsley, the perfect embodiment of the classic private eye. And not forgetting myself, the series producer. She who put this whole thing together. I give you Frankie Almond.”

They all lifted their goblets to Frankie Almond.

But before anyone drank Brett interrupted. “Hey, hey. Grimm first.”

“Sir,” Grimm said with a bow. After sniffing the bouquet, he drank. “Most efficacious. Although to be absolutely certain of your collective safety I’d best take some more.”

“Frankie Almond,” was the toast, repeated by them all. They all drank. The Champagne was, indeed, top drawer. There were several sounds of approval.

But not from Nancy. She coughed. “Victoria, I thought you said no more tricks.”

“There are no more—”

But Nancy coughed again. “I think almond champagne counts as a trick.” She coughed again. “And one in very poor taste.”

“Nancy?” Brett said. “Nancy?”

Lorelei said, “Are you all right?”

“No,” Nancy gasped. “No... Not...” And before them all she thrashed about and then tipped her chair over backwards.

There was a silence in the room. It was broken only when Victoria said, “Ah. Ah. I get it. It’s a joke.”

“What?” voices asked.

“Nancy is exacting her revenge. She was taken in by Andrew’s performance, so now we get this. Very funny, Nancy. Very dramatic, which is no more than we’d expect from you. But I hope you haven’t broken the chair, because it cost a fortune and you’ll bloody well pay for it if you have.”

Again there was silence. No one moved. Including Nancy.

“Enough’s enough,” Victoria said. “Come back to life and let’s get dinner started. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m famished.”

Brett, across from Nancy’s place, stood and said, “Nancy?”

Lorelei, next to her, said, “She’s not moving.”

Victoria said, “Grimm?”

Grimm, who had been standing behind Andrew’s empty chair, crouched down where Nancy lay. He felt for a pulse and then turned to his employer. “It’s no joke, Ms. Victoria. Ms. Nancy is dead.”

“Nancy! Nancy!” Brett cried. He rushed around the table.

“Try mouth-to-mouth, Grimm,” Victoria said.

“I’ll do it,” Brett said and he knelt by Nancy’s body. “Give me some room.”

“That might not be such a good idea, Brett,” Lorelei said. “If hydrogen cyanide gas from her stomach—”

“What does it matter if it saves her life?”

“There’s no point, Mr. Brett,” Grimm said. “Ms. Nancy is gone.”

Brett was distraught. Nancy was the love of his life. He was sure this time. He turned to Victoria. “Is this some twisted joke-on-a-joke gone wrong, Victoria? Something you and Nancy hatched up together?” His tears followed as Victoria’s face made it clear that nothing like this was ever in her plans.

Grimm put his arm around the young actor’s shoulders. “The lady is beyond our help, sir.”

“Oh God! Nancy!” Brett was in despair.

“This is awful,” Victoria said.

“Yes, awful,” Lorelei agreed. She shook her head, visibly moved by events.

“Our series director murdered at a company dinner?” Victoria said. “The scandal will kill Frankie Almond stone dead.”

Lorelei was shocked. “Are you really thinking about a silly television series at a time like this? Are you really so hard?”

“What would be hard,” Victoria said, “is for a wonderful opportunity to be killed just because one of you wanted to settle a petty grievance.”

But Brett was having none of it. “What do you mean, one of us? You’re the one who was jealous of Nancy because I fell out of love with you and in love with her. You are entirely capable of setting this whole thing up as an elaborate cover.”

“Me risk Frankie Almond for a man? A man?” Victoria could hardly believe what she was being accused of. “Give me strength. Men — especially young and silly ones — are sixpence a dozen, sweetie. That’s a dime to you. My relationship with Andrew proves that.”

Brett had nothing to say, but Lorelei asked, “Where is Andrew?”

“Yes, Grimm,” Victoria said, “where is the little rat?”

“Waiting in the living room to be called back in, I presume, Ms. Victoria. Excuse me, but shall I call the police now?”

“The police? Oh Lord, do we have to? Can’t we just agree, say, that she killed herself by accident?”

“It can hardly be an accident when Ms. Nancy is exhibiting all the signs of cyanide poisoning, Ms. Victoria.”

“How do you know about these things, Grimm?” Brett asked. In his Frankie Almond voice.

For once Grimm was flustered. “I... From no particular source, Mr. Brett. Life experience.”

“I’m not sure I believe you, Grimm.”

“Sorry to hear that, Mr. Brett.”

The two men stared at each other until Victoria interrupted. “Oh for God’s sake, can’t we in this room agree a strategy that will protect Frankie Almond, Private Eye?”

Lorelei couldn’t believe that Victoria was continuing to think of the program. “How can you be so unfeeling?”

“Oh, save the fake compassion for your scripts, Lorelei,” Victoria said. “Nancy did steal your husband from you. Which you never forgave her for.”

Now Lorelei was flustered. “Yes, well...”

“And it still upsets you, for some unfathomable reason. Not that I ever met the man in question but what was the problem? Men come, men go. Or is it that you haven’t been able to get yourself another one? Because to be obsessed with someone as shallow and untalented as Andrew shows that there’s something seriously wrong with you.”

“That was all a misunderstanding.”

“Nancy taking your husband wasn’t.”

“He would have come back to me. Eventually.”

“The way I heard the story was that he croaked in flagrante from a heart attack. If anyone here hated Nancy, it was you.”

“But not enough to murder her.” Lorelei was almost in tears.

Brett was not convinced. “Yet you do know all about cyanide. And if you hated her so much, why keep working with her? Was it in order to have access until you got your chance?”

Victoria was struck by this notion. “Your scripts prove you’re capable of planning something that complicated and weird.”

“That is a horrible thing to suggest,” Lorelei said.

“Well, someone murdered my Nancy,” Brett said. “That’s a fact.”

Lorelei turned to Brett. “You’re so busy accusing everybody else, but what about you?”

“Why would I murder Nancy? I loved her.”

“But did she love you?” Lorelei said. “Maybe you realized that she was only with you in order to get one over on Victoria. You know how they like to score off of each other, and neither of them has the slightest record of taking men seriously.”

Brett was upset now. Was it because doubt had been cast upon Nancy’s feelings for him, or because Lorelei was on the track of truth? She was famous for the emotional perceptiveness in her scripts.

“Look at their histories,” Lorelei said. “You’d have to doubt that either Nancy or Victoria was capable of forming a serious long-term relationship.”

“Get me a bowl, please, Grimm,” Victoria said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Grimm turned to his mistress to assess whether her request was a serious one.

In turn, eyes fell upon him. Lorelei said, “And what about Grimm?”

“Ms. Lorelei?”

“You poured Nancy’s Champagne.”

“I did indeed, Ms. Lorelei.”

Brett frowned. “Are we certain that’s what killed her?”

“She complained of the almond taste,” Lorelei said. “My Champagne didn’t taste of almonds. Did yours?”

“No.” Brett looked around the table.

“It was an excellent vintage bubbly,” Victoria said. “As befitted the occasion until one of you ruined it. You had some too, Grimm.”

“My Champagne was entirely devoid of almond taste, Ms. Victoria. But there is a more direct test.”

“What are you doing, Grimm?” Victoria asked.

But it was clear what Grimm was doing. He had knelt by Nancy’s goblet on the floor. “I intend to assess whether there is an almond odor in the Champagne residue, Ms. Victoria.”

“Mind the fingerprints,” Lorelei said.

“I shall take care.” He lifted the goblet by the edge of its base and sniffed. “Blimey, if I may say so. It reeks of bitter almonds.” He put the goblet down and looked around the room. “Anyone care to confirm?” There were no takers.

“So she was poisoned with cyanide,” Victoria said. “Right before our eyes. Oh dear. Oh my. I’m feeling faint.”

Grimm rushed to her side. “Ms. Victoria, are you all right?”

“Maybe he does love her,” Brett said to Lorelei.

But the situation with Grimm and Victoria was not allowed to develop further because Andrew entered the room. “What the hell’s taking so long?” he asked. “I know I threw you a few curves with the tape, but I’m starving to death out here.”

“It’s all gone terribly wrong,” Victoria said. Her head rested on Grimm’s chest.

“Hey, what’s the matter, babe?” Andrew said. “Look out, Grimm.” Andrew moved to Victoria’s side and took over the job of supporting her. “What’s up? Eat something that didn’t agree with you?”

Brett said, “Grimm, shouldn’t you call the police?”

“I agree completely, sir,” Grimm said. He took out his cell and dialed 911.

“Hey,” Andrew said, “what’s going on?”

“Police, please,” Grimm said.

“The police?” Andrew said. “Victoria, what’s happening? You can’t have me arrested. Every word I said on that tape was the truth.”

“I wish to report a murder,” Grimm said into the telephone and he gave the address. “The main entrance is under the green awning. Ask the doorman for the penthouse of Victoria Nation. He’ll direct you. We’ll also need an ambulance. Heathcoat Grimm. Same address.”

Andrew was beside himself. “What murder? What’s he talking about? I’m alive, you can all see that. It was a joke. Ha. Ha.”

“Thank you,” Grimm said. He ended the call.

“How long will they be?” Victoria asked.

“Only a few minutes, I’m sure, Ms. Victoria.”

“What is going on?” Andrew insisted.

“It’s Nancy,” Victoria said.

“Oh.” He looked around. “Where is she?”

“If you care to look on the other side of the table.”

Now that his attention had been directed, he saw her. “Oh!”

“She was poisoned, Andrew,” Lorelei said.

“What?”

“With cyanide. In her Champagne.”

“But, how could that be? How do you get cyanide into a Champagne bottle?”

“It was not in the bottle, sir,” Grimm said. “A compound of cyanide must have been put into Ms. Nancy’s Champagne goblet.”

“Good God,” Andrew said. “She wasn’t my favorite person, for reasons you know, but I’d never wish her...” He seemed visibly to wilt.

Brett said, “Victoria, I’ve been thinking. Who laid the table?”

“Grimm did. Why?”

But Grimm anticipated why Brett had asked the question. “I most certainly did not introduce a toxin into any of the drinking vessels.”

“But it was you who put out the place cards with our names on them, wasn’t it?” Lorelei said. “And wasn’t the idea of place cards so that you would know exactly who would be sitting where?”

There was a moment in which Grimm was silent, but Victoria said, “As a matter of fact, Lorelei, I put the place cards out myself. I thought it would be amusing if Brett were to sit between me and Nancy. But it was never important.”

“And you decided I would have to sit next to Nancy? Even though you know I hated her?” Lorelei said.

Victoria shrugged.

“When did you decide on the seating?”

“This morning. Before I left to meet with the network. I had high hopes for the meeting, and if we were celebrating, I wanted to be sure we did it in style. But I tell you now, Lorelei, Grimm was in the room when I was doing the cards and he’d have seen if I fiddled with any of the goblets.”

“I most certainly did not observe Ms. Victoria handling any of the ceramic-ware,” Grimm said, “if that is your implication, Ms. Lorelei.”

“Unless you two concocted this together,” Lorelei said.

“But,” Brett said, “people didn’t sit where they were supposed to. How could they be sure Nancy would sit where her card was? My card was on Nancy’s right, but Andrew insisted on sitting there instead of me.”

“Why did you do that, Andrew?” Lorelei asked.

“What I said at the time. When else will I get the chance to sit between a top director and a top producer?” Andrew said. “Besides, Brett sitting between Victoria and Nancy seemed, well, tasteless.”

“Where does an over-the-hill, no-talent Lothario like you get off calling me tasteless?” Victoria asked. Of all the accusations that had been directed at her during the evening, this one made her angry.

But Brett had another point. “Did you know that we would be drinking from opaque pottery instead of conventional glasses tonight, Lorelei?”

“Not until I got here and Grimm started serving drinks in those goblets with your face on them,” Lorelei said.

“Neither did I. So neither of us could have planned to kill Nancy, or anyone, by putting something in a glass and waiting for Champagne to be poured on it.”

“Well, I had nothing to do with the drinks, or setting the table,” Andrew said. “That was all down to Victoria and Grimm.”

“Just a damn minute here,” Victoria said. “If I were going to kill someone I wouldn’t use some piddly little poison. I may be English, but I learned how to fire a shotgun even before I learned how to fire an actor.”

Brett said, “Grimm?”

“Sir?”

“We know very little about you.”

With eyes on him, Grimm only said, “Yes, sir.”

“Except that something in your background left you down and out.”

Grimm was silent, but anger showed in his eyes.

But before Brett could frame another question, Lorelei said, “Wait, wait. Victoria, was Andrew around while this dinner was being planned?”

Victoria scowled at her soon-to-be-former paramour. “Yes, of course he was. He was part of the show.”

“So he could have known about the goblets. You got them from your sister in England, you said. That must have been arranged long ago.”

“I ordered them when the pilot got such good numbers. They were delivered last week.”

“I knew about all kinds of things, as my tape proves all too clearly,” Andrew said. “That doesn’t mean I murdered anybody. By putting poison in a goblet while I was in the living room? Come on.”

Brett said, “Grimm, I have a question.”

“Mr. Brett?”

“Where exactly on a table is glassware — or goblet-ware — placed? Is it to the right of the dinner plate or to the left?”

“To the right, Mr. Brett.”

“To the right,” Brett said, in his best Frankie Almond voice. “Now I was supposed to sit on Nancy’s right, but Andrew insisted on taking my place.”

“I explained that,” Andrew said.

But a moment of silence was only broken when Victoria said, “Andrew!”

“Victoria?”

“Grimm, grab the little swine.”

“What the—” Andrew said as Grimm rapidly and, it must be said, easily restrained the not-so-young actor. “Let me go, Grimm. What is this about? Why are you doing this?”

“Because of you,” Victoria said, “Frankie Almond is dead.”

“Me? But I just played the part of the dinner guest, the way you wrote it. Well, pretty much.”

“Frankie is dead because Nancy is dead and you killed her.”

“That’s ridiculous. I wasn’t even in the room when it happened.”

Brett looked puzzled. He even said, “That’s true.”

But Victoria was not to be derailed. “Lorelei, Brett, Grimm, do you remember how Andrew ‘died’?”

“How?” Lorelei asked. “What do you mean?”

“Do you remember what happened physically when he went through his little death act?”

“Well,” Lorelei said, “he coughed several times and then he had a sort of fit, and then he sprawled over Nancy.”

“Who was on his left,” Victoria said. “And, as he draped himself over poor Nancy, what would naturally happen to his right hand? Visualize it.”

“It would pass over the area of Nancy’s wine goblet!” Lorelei said. “I see it. I see what you mean. And he could easily have dropped something in.”

“And before dinner,” Brett said, “he told me that one of the things he’s been doing is some children’s magic shows. That could perfectly well mean he’s used to doing sleight-of-hand...”

Everyone in the room looked at Andrew. Grimm’s grip tightened.

There was a long silence.

“All right,” Andrew said at last. “Yes. I did it.”

“Oh, Andrew,” Lorelei said.

“Good God,” Brett said.

Victoria just stared.

Grimm’s grasp tightened even more.

“Dropping the cyanide in Nancy’s goblet was child’s play. But she deserved it. She stole my idea. My idea. It would have been the making of me. It would have turned my life around, at last. But no, while you were all partying and planning how you would be spending your Frankie Almond money, I was still living hand-to-mouth, having to cuddle up to old women...”

“How dare you!” Victoria said.

“Having to hire myself out for party tricks. When instead it should have been me, me, playing my own role. Charlie Cashew, Private Eye. Brilliant. Sexy. Witty. Handsome. And rich.”

The apartment doorbell rang.

“That will be the police, I believe, Ms. Victoria,” Grimm said.

Copyright © 2009 by Michael Z. Lewin

Content

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

White Wolves by Clark Howard

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

The Candy-Factory Girls by Tessa de Loo

Famous Last Words by Doug Allyn

A Fellow of Infinite Jest by Nina Mansfield

The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold by Lee Goldberg

Homework by Phil Lovesey

Whammer Jammer by Mark Arsenault

Rearrangements by Marjorie Eccles

Who Killed Frankie Almond? by Michael Z. Lewin