Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

The Richard Parker Coincidence

by Nancy Pickard

Nancy Pickard’s recent EQMM stories are making a splash! “There Is No Crime on Easter Island” (9-10/’05) is currently nominated for three awards for best short story: the Macavity, from Mystery Readers International; Deadly Pleasures magazine’s Barry Award; and the Bouchercon Convention’s Anthony Award. “The Book of Truth” (9-10/’06) will appear in a best-of-the-year anthology.

* * * *

Lenore Lowery heard her husband let out a whoop of joy. Before she could even put her finger in her book and turn around to see what Charles was so excited about, she felt his presence behind her.

A heavy magazine landed with a plop on top of the novel in her lap.

“Charles! You could have made me lose my place.”

“I’ve found it, Lenore!”

“Found what?”

“Our place. Our boat. I can retire, and we can sail away, and you can read all the time for the rest of your life. It’s the perfect boat for us.”

“No boat is perfect for me,” she snapped, “and any boat will do for you. And which of these boats are you talking about, anyway?”

“Look at them!”

She felt him bend down over the back of the armchair she was sitting in, felt his face beside hers, smelled liver and onions on his breath, saw and felt the forefinger he jabbed into the pages of boat photos in the magazine on her lap. They had been married for five years, he a literature professor with a passion for Edgar Allan Poe and a dream of sailing around the world, and she his former student. The deep voice that still could thrill her when he read poetry to her now spoke enthusiastically at her shoulder, releasing another repellent cloud of liver and onions. She had never dreamed that her romantic professor could ever like something so icky and prosaic as that, much less want her to cook it for him once a week.

“Just look at the pictures, Lenore. You’ll recognize it the moment you spot it, as I did.”

Reluctantly, she perused the pages, knowing he wouldn’t give up until she found “it,” whatever it was—

Her heart sank.

“This one,” she said, putting her own right forefinger onto a particular black-and-white picture of a cabin cruiser. When Charles used the word “sail,” it was only in the generic sense of moving across water. In fact, he was a “stinkpot” sailor, a devotee of engines and speed, the bigger and faster, the better.

“It’s this one, isn’t it, Charles?”

It wasn’t the configuration or appointments of the boat in question that gave her the clue. It wasn’t that the boat for sale was a thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser with a raised aft deck that allowed it a full master stateroom below decks. It wasn’t that it had a galley-down layout with wraparound salon windows and “excellent storage.” It wasn’t the GM6-71N diesel engines that let it cruise at sixteen to seventeen knots and reach a top speed of around twenty knots. It wasn’t the breathtaking price that was about equal to half of what they would get if they sold their home to buy this boat.

It was the name of this particular boat.

“The Nevermore,” she said, reading the word across the back of it, pronouncing it in a dirgelike tone that was appropriate to a certain poem by Edgar Allan Poe. To the original owners of this boat that name might have symbolized no more working for a living, or no more house payments, or who knew what? But to Charles Lowery it could only conjure up “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem, about a monstrous bird who kept yapping, Nevermore, nevermore, neverdamnmore.

“Yes!” Charles said, behind her. “We have to have it.”

“Just like you had to have me?”

“Lenore! I didn’t marry you for your name, for heaven’s sake.”

Another of Poe’s poems was called “Lenore,” about a woman who also made an appearance in “The Raven.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t not marry me for it, either,” she grumbled.

“Whatever that means. Lenore, look at this beauty! We can be totally self-sufficient on it for weeks at a time. We can go anywhere we want to go. The South Seas. The Mediterranean. The Caribbean!”

“Anywhere you want to go, you mean. It makes me seasick just to look at it.”

“You know what motion sickness signifies psychologically, don’t you? The fear of losing control. You need to let go! There are some things you can’t control, my dear, no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it all fits together,” he claimed, sounding happy about it. “It’s fate, and you can’t fight fate, Lenore. Just ask Edgar Allan Poe.”

“He’s dead.”

“Once I get you out on our boat, floating peacefully for days on end, reading all the novels you’ve ever wanted to read, you’ll relax and thank me.”

“I can read all the books I want to right here in this chair, Charles. This chair doesn’t get rained on. This chair doesn’t leave me sunburned and throwing up. This chair doesn’t rock back and forth.”

She pushed herself up out of the chair in question, making her husband rear back to avoid knocking heads with her. The boating magazine fell to the carpet.

“Hey,” he objected. “You’ve made me lose my place.”

“Your place is exactly right,” Lenore said heatedly, turning around to glare at him. “This is all about you and what you want, and anything I want be damned. Talk about control freaks!” She started to stomp out of their living room.

“Where are you going?” he called after her.

“To my book club! If it’s liver and onions, it must be Thursday.”

“Oh, right. What bit of fluff are you reading this month?”

She whirled around and stuck the book out — in lieu of hurling it at him — so he could see the jacket.

“Life of Pi? Why are you reading a math book?”

It wasn’t a book about mathematics. It was a beautifully written, wildly imaginative, smart novel that also just happened to be at the top of the bestseller lists, not that he would ever know that, since he never recognized the worth of any novel written after nineteen hundred. “Because I’ve always been able to tell when things add up,” Lenore shot back at him as she departed the room. To herself, she added, “And when they don’t.”

The women at the book club that night all professed to love Life of Pi, which was a fantastical story about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Lenore laughed out loud the first time somebody said the name aloud. “It’s such a funny name for a tiger,” she said.

A few of the other women also laughed and shook their heads, sharing her puzzled amusement, but she noticed that others seemed to be looking at her... or at one another... with odd expressions, as if she had said something surprising or, worse, stupid. “What?” Lenore said, looking at the night’s discussion leader. They all sat on couches or chairs their hostess had pulled into a circle in her living room. The women’s laps held plates full of homemade molasses cookies and lemon-raspberry cake. Cups of coffee or tea sat on tables in front of them or beside them.

Each woman had a copy of the same book tucked nearby for ready reference.

“What did I say?” Lenore asked, her heart already beating faster.

The discussion leader smiled in the kind of pleased, condescending way that Lenore associated with people who worked at the university with Charles. “Why, Lenore! You mean to say your own husband is one of the world’s experts on Edgar Allan Poe and you don’t know that spooky story?”

With a sinking feeling, Lenore realized she had stepped in it again. It was one of those moments when she revealed her total ignorance and lack of interest in the passion that had made her husband better known than tenure ever would. It didn’t help that he had left his first wife, whom most of these women had known, to marry his undergraduate student, Lenore. The first wife shared his passion for Poe — or pretended to, Lenore thought — even going so far as to fashion a Poe costume for the great man to wear when he lectured on the greater man. Lectures and conventions still took Charles out of town many nights and weekends a year, though his second wife never accompanied him unless she just couldn’t think up a good enough excuse to avoid it. Sometimes Lenore wished Edgar Allan Poe were still alive so she could personally strangle him. Maybe she’d let a raven peck his eyes out.

“Which one?” she countered.

“Which one?” the discussion leader asked, with excessive politeness.

“Which spooky story?”

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know anything about Poe. She knew all about the raven and Lenore poems, after all, enough to know that Charles had taken “Nevermore” as a sign that they should buy the boat with that name. Charles was big on “signs.” When the “signs” were right, he did things; when they weren’t, he refused to do whatever it was they mysteriously portended. At first, that trait of Charles’s had seemed romantic to Lenore, especially when it pointed him toward her. Anymore, though, when it more often pointed him away from anything she wanted to do, it drove her crazy. “Your behavior is a sign of lunacy,” she liked to tell him. The other thing she knew about Poe was that if he was known for anything — besides being a hopeless addict and drunk — he was known for writing spooky stories. Attempting to wipe the smug smiles off certain faces, she said, “ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’? ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’? ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”

There, she thought, that ought to show them.

“Oh, it’s not only a story he wrote,” the discussion leader said, in a way that made Lenore flush with instant humiliation. “It’s the story of something spooky that really happened in regard to Poe. And,” she added with a mischievous smile for the others in the room who were in the know, “to the real Richard Parker. You should ask Charles about it.”

“Why don’t you just tell all of us who aren’t familiar with it,” Lenore said, with a smile so gracious it made her jaws ache.

“All right.” The discussion leader matched her smile for smile. “I will. As you no doubt know...” There was a slight pause. “...Poe wrote only one novel in his lifetime. It is called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and it’s about four men who get marooned at sea. Three of them survive by killing and eating the other one. The name of the one they eat is... Richard Parker.”

She dropped it dramatically, as if they’d all gasp, but Lenore didn’t quite get it.

“That’s where the author of this book...” She held up her copy of Life of Pi. “...got his name for the tiger? Because he was a man-eater?”

The discussion leader’s laugh was a delighted trill that sent a vicious electrical charge through Lenore’s stomach, which was already upset from the liver and onions. “Oh, that’s only half of the story! That’s not even the spookiest part, Lenore. Almost fifty years later... this is true!.. four men got marooned at sea and three of them survived by eating the fourth one, and his name was... Richard Parker!”

“No!” somebody else exclaimed. “That didn’t really happen!”

Lenore was pleased that someone else was willing to look dumb.

“Oh yes, it did,” the discussion leader said. “You can check the newspapers of the day. It caused quite a stir on its own, but you can imagine the excitement when somebody made the connection between the real-life event and Poe’s novel from fifty years earlier. And ever since then, there have been reports of strange and terrible things happening to anybody with the name Richard Parker. For instance...” She checked her notes. Their discussion leaders were expected to research the books and authors they discussed. “There was another ship that went down, in eighteen forty-six. There were deaths and cannibalism aboard, and one of the victims was a man named Richard Parker.”

This time, several women did gasp.

“Well, that settles it,” Lenore said.

“Settles what?” one of the university women said.

“Settles an argument that I’m having with Charles! He wants to buy a boat and retire on it and sail around the world, and I don’t want to.”

Too late, she realized she had stepped in it yet again. From the looks on several faces she could see that she had once again proved herself to be an insufficient spouse for the great Poe expert: Not only was she ignorant of his field of expertise, but she was also so selfish that she wouldn’t let him take his dream retirement. She knew what they were thinking: His first wife would never have been so mean.

For just an instant, Lenore got a glimpse of herself that made her wonder if she might actually be as selfish as other people thought she was. She quickly sloughed off that thought, however. She wasn’t the selfish one, he was! Maybe she had stopped supporting his obsessions, but hadn’t he done the same to her interests? Once he had waxed enthusiastic about the possibility that she might one day teach at the university, but where was all that cheerleading now?

Lenore sulked silently for the rest of the evening, even though she really loved the book they were discussing. She wasn’t a dunce, she told herself. If they hadn’t squashed her, she could have talked about it as brilliantly as any of them were doing all around her now.

Just as he often did, Edgar Allan Poe had managed to step into her life and mess it up.

As she sat barely listening to the lively discussion of Life of Pi by Yann Martel, she thought about her own existence, which had somehow mysteriously turned into keeping house for Charles. She vowed to herself that was going to end; she would go back to class, she would finish her dissertation. Well, start it, at least. But to do any of that, she was going to have to keep Charles off that boat. And that meant she was going to have to be more subtle, subtle enough so that when her husband changed his mind about his retirement, everybody would believe it was entirely his decision and that she had not stood in his way at all.

“What are you doing up there, Lenore?”

She whirled around, after quickly pushing back into the bookshelf a copy of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “Oh! You startled me, Charles.” She was up on a library ladder and she held out her right hand so he could guide her back down to the carpet where he stood staring at her.

“Not as much as you startled me by looking at my Poe books.”

His tone was wryly amused, but also a little sad, she thought.

“Oh, Charles.” Upon reaching the floor, Lenore wrapped her arms around him and gave her husband the warmest hug he had received from her in a long while. “I’m an idiot, and I’m so sorry.” She pulled away just enough to be able to look into his face. “I resist everything you love to do. I make fun of things that are important to you. I don’t know why I do it, but I have realized I do, and I’m not going to do that anymore. I love you. I want to share your interests. I want to enjoy Poe as much as you do.”

His face was softening, his eyes were damp as he gazed into her own.

Lenore gave him a loving, apologetic smile. “And if other people can take Dramamine, or wear a patch for seasickness, then so can I.”

“Lenore...!”

She placed a finger gently against his lips.

“Shh. Don’t say anything. Just try to forgive me.”

He pulled her tightly to him, but she forced herself back away from him again so that she could look up sincerely into his face one more time. “I looked at that magazine again, Charles. It’s a beautiful boat. I think we ought to go look at it as soon as possible, before somebody else beats us to it.”

He stroked her hair, then cupped her face with his hands. “Lenore, you don’t really think I married you because you have the name of Poe’s romantic heroine, do you? She was doomed, after all, and dead! I married you because I fell in love with you. Your name was just the sign — in neon — that you were truly the right woman for me, like seeing the Nevermore tells me it’s the right boat for us. Your name only told me that we are destined to be together. It didn’t make me fall in love with you. I was so in love with you, I would have married you no matter what your name was. You do know that?”

“Of course I do, darling.”

“I can’t tell you how much this means to me, Lenore. Just to see you in here, showing an interest in my books! And you know what? Our first trip on the boat, we could sail to that Poe conference in the Bahamas.”

Lenore ducked her head into his chest again and muttered, “Nevermore.”

“What, sweetheart?”

“The name of our new boat, dearest. The Nevermore.”

On their way out to inspect the boat two days later, they hit every red light between their home and the yacht club where the Nevermore was docked.

“You’re sure this isn’t a sign, Charles,” Lenore gently teased him, “that we should stop and think about this before we make such a big investment?”

He smiled over at her, looking happier than she had seen him look in months.

“Not on your life,” he said, just as a light turned green. “It’s a sign that nothing can stop us now.”

“You even wore the correct shoes, Lenore!”

Standing beside her on the dock, with the Nevermore rocking gently in front of them, Charles smiled down at her feet in pleased approval. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d even know not to wear hard soles on a boat.” His words took on a teasing tone. “Are you sure it’s not just an accident that you have on those tennis shoes?”

“Right,” she said, teasing him back. “You know how many pairs of sneakers I keep in my closet.” The answer to that was none. “It was strictly an accident that I went out this morning and shopped until I found these.”

They both stared down at the cute little navy-blue canvas-backed shoes with the rubber soles. She’d been reading up about more than Poe. She’d also boned up about life at sea, learning, among other things, that it was considered the height of vulgarity to endanger precious wooden boat decks with shoes that might mar them, not to mention the fact that it was dangerous to wear slippery footwear on wet, rocking decks. Lenore intended to wear her new blue tennies, with their grip soles, to the next meeting of the book club, so they’d ask her where and why she got them and she would get a chance to tell the story of the marvelous sacrifice she was willing to make for love.

Charles inhaled deeply.

“Don’t you just love the scent of salt air, Lenore?”

She eyed a dead fish carcass that was floating at the waterline and bumping up against the side of “their” boat.

“Refreshing,” she said, with a finger under her nose.

“Did you take your Dramamine?”

She eyed the constantly moving boat. “I took two.”

As if escorting his queen onto her yacht, Charles offered his hand to help her cross from dock to deck without falling into the water.

“Cute little kitchen,” Lenore said, looking around it.

“On a boat it’s called a galley,” the sales agent told her.

“I knew that,” Lenore said, and smiled so charmingly that both he and her husband smiled back at her.

“Do you think you could cook in here?” Charles asked her.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “It’s got everything. A stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, even a garbage disposal and a trash compactor.” Leonore picked up a roundish purple and white object from a woven basket on the counter and began to toss it lightly from her left hand to her right hand and back again. “Just like home.”

“What’s that?” the sales agent asked, nodding his head at her “ball.”

“This?” Lenore stopped tossing it and held it up for the men to see more clearly. “It’s a turnip. Haven’t you ever seen a turnip before?”

The agent laughed. “I guess not.”

But Charles didn’t laugh.

Lenore saw that he was staring at the turnip with his mouth slightly open, as if he could take a bite of it.

“Is something the matter, Charles?”

He briefly hesitated, but then smiled — not at her, but at the vegetable. “Why, no. Definitely not.”

She gently placed the turnip back into the basket. “All signs still ‘go,’ darling?”

“They certainly are.”

“Do you want to see the cabins?” the agent asked them.

“We do,” Lenore said, with a happy lilt in her voice.

They moved into the master stateroom, where Charles and Lenore tested the built-in double bed by sitting on either side of it. At Lenore’s suggestion, the sales agent had withdrawn discreetly to allow them some time alone together in the cabin where they might soon be sleeping while at sea.

“Look at this, Charles,” she said, picking up a paperback book that sat on top of the bedside table on her side. “You said I could read to my heart’s content if we lived on a boat. I guess somebody else likes to read novels, too.”

He held out his hand to take the little book that she handed him.

She saw him read its title and heard his slight intake of breath when he saw it was Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Ignoring that, Lenore picked up a second book on the bedside table and said, “I’ve never heard of either of these authors, have you?” She handed him the second one. “How would you pronounce that name anyway? Mig-Non?”

“Mignon Eberhart,” her husband said, pronouncing it “Minyon.”

He drew out the word as if it held some secret meaning for him.

“Never heard of her,” Lenore said briskly. “What’s the name of it? Fair Warning? Maybe I’ll get to read a whole lot of things I’ve never heard of before, starting with Edgar Allan, of course.”

“Poe, yes!” Suddenly Charles threw the books down and flung himself off the bed. Looking excited, he turned toward his wife. “You feel it, too! Oh my God, Lenore! This really is fate. This is unbelievable. The portents couldn’t be clearer if somebody had painted a sign to this boat that said ‘Buy Me.’” When he saw that she looked uncomprehending, he said, “Sweetheart, have I ever told you about the only novel that Edgar ever wrote?” Seeming to assume that either he hadn’t or she wouldn’t remember, he said, “It was called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym, Lenore! Just like the title of that book.”

Together they stared at Miss Pym Disposes.

“Really? That’s a bit of a coincidence, I guess.”

“Coincidence nothing, it’s a sign, and it’s not even the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“This other book?” He picked up the one by the author with the difficult first name. “By Mignon Eberhart? Lenore, Poe’s novel was about a ship that sank and three of the survivors ate the fourth one. Almost fifty years later a real ship sank and three marooned survivors ate the fourth. The name of Poe’s fictional victim was Richard Parker and that was also the name of the real man who got eaten!”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And you’ll never guess, but the name of that real ship was... the Mignonette!”

“Charles, stop. I already told you I’m ready and willing to buy this boat with you. You don’t have to make up stories about signs to convince me.”

“I’m not making anything up. It’s all true. Lenore, this boat is meant for us.”

“You’re really not making these things up?”

Solemnly, he shook his head.

“Well, this is amazing,” she said, getting up slowly from the bed. “And I think you’re right. Maybe I’m not the great believer in signs that you are, but even I have to admit that this is just too much of a coincidence for it to mean anything else.”

Her husband let out a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad you see it that way, too.”

Lenore walked around the bed until she could embrace him. “Of course I do. You always tell me to pay attention to meaningful coincidences, and these are just too obvious to ignore.”

“Shall we go find the agent and put in an offer?”

Lenore grinned at him. “Let’s do it!”

“And, Lenore?”

“Yes?”

“I haven’t even told you the funniest coincidence. When the Mignonette sank, the only food they had to eat was... a turnip.”

Lenore’s eyes widened in astonishment.

“A turnip!” she said, as if she had just fallen off the back of a truck full of them.

On their way out of the galley she said, “Before we make our offer, let’s take one more look around our boat, Charles.”

They ran their hands over the lovely teak wood of the cabinets.

Lenore ran the water in the double sink in the galley while Charles sat in the captain’s chair and turned the wheel back and forth. They opened the cabinets and marveled at the tidy display of canned goods they saw. Laughing, Lenore walked over to the refrigerator, where a white board was attached to the door, with an erasable writing marker tied to it. She picked up the marker and said playfully, “Let’s make our first grocery list for the boat, Charles.”

Playing along, he walked over to her and looked at the scribbling that was already on the board. The current owners appeared to have jotted down some of their recent boat expenses, complete with costs of each item.

“Eighteen dollars and thirty-eight cents for a sirloin steak?” Lenore said. “Good grief, where do they shop for groceries, Neiman Marcus?”

She turned, laughing, to face Charles.

“Charles?”

He was staring at the numbers written on the little board, his face gone white.

“Charles, what’s wrong?”

Stiffly, as if he had suddenly turned into a robot, her husband lifted his right arm and pointed his forefinger. “Eighteen thirty-eight,” he said.

“Yes. I know, it’s a lot for a steak.”

He lowered his finger to the next item. “Eighteen eighty-four.”

“Even more for the second steak.”

“No.” Looking sad and worried, he gazed into her eyes. “Lenore, we can’t buy this boat. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if we should be thinking of going to sea at all.”

“What?”

“These dates, Lenore...”

“Dates? They’re prices of meat, Charles.”

“Not to me, they’re not, they’re dates. Eighteen thirty-eight was the date of the publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Eighteen eighty-four was the date when the book came true.”

“Oh my God, Charles.” Lenore’s hands went to her lips to cover her gasp.

She turned and stared up at him, wide-eyed. “You don’t think... you don’t think it could happen to us, do you?”

“I think the universe is trying to tell us something.” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her around until she was facing the outer door. “It’s too much. It’s too many coincidences about something too awful to contemplate. The names of those books, the turnip, those seemed benign, but this feels... malevolent, Lenore. This is a warning. And think of all those stoplights!”

“But you said—”

“I was fooling myself about their meaning, Lenore. Red means stop in any language, and certainly in the language of symbols and signs. They were already trying to tell me something and I wasn’t listening. My God, I could have endangered both of our lives. I should have stopped before we even got here.”

He was half shoving her, half pulling her off the boat and back up onto the deck outside.

“No!” Charles shouted at the sales agent when the man stepped toward them smiling. The smile faded fast. “We don’t want it!”

Almost before she knew what had happened, Lenore found herself back on dry, steady land again, with her new blue tennis shoes planted on terra firma. She thought about letting disappointed tears well up in her eyes, but decided not to push her luck. She slipped her hands inside of Charles’s hands, looked up at him, and said, “I want what you want, and if you think this boat is bad luck for us, well, I trust your instincts. And I know that you and I will be happy together anywhere we are, even back in our own home.”

Charles leaned over and gratefully, lovingly kissed her lips.

“Thank you,” he said. “For saying yes. And thank you for saying no.”

They walked arm-in-arm back to where his car waited in the parking lot.

“I’ve got a class to teach,” he said. “I’ll take you home first.”

“No, you won’t; that’s completely out of your way and you don’t have enough time to do it, anyway. I’ll just take a cab.” She had a bookstore in mind where she wanted to make a stop and pick up a copy of the book for next month’s meeting.

Charles waited with her for the taxi to arrive, and then he ushered her into its backseat.

“I guess it wasn’t meant to be, darling,” she told him.

“No, one must never argue with fate,” he said, and then kissed her.

Well, she had argued with fate and she had won, Lenore thought, feeling triumphant as she leaned back against the taxi’s seat. There would be no boat in her future, thank God. No vomiting over railings, no peeling, sunburned skin, no weathering of storms out in the open sea. She could curl up at home studying and reading, and live contentedly for all the years of Charles’s retirement, while he puttered about at his Poe nonsense.

When the taxi driver peeled away from the dock fast, jerking her from one side of the cab to the other, she had a moment of doubt about his skill as a driver, but it was quickly forgotten as they sped away and she began to reminisce about the delicious... and only... hour she had spent on a boat with her husband. It was not, however, the only hour she had ever spent on a boat. On that boat. Just that morning, she had made a preview inspection, telling the sales agent that she knew just the right things to scatter about the cabin to convince her husband to purchase this boat that he so dearly wanted to buy.

And so she had dropped a turnip here, placed a couple of paperbacks there, all based on her study of the Poe story and her forays into old bookshops and other stores. Why, Charles hadn’t even noticed some of the best “signs” she’d left for him... a painting of Nantucket, and the souvenirs from England and Australia, which had been the destinations of the real ship that went down.

She did think that the turnip was her most inspired “sign.”

Knowing Charles, she had suspected there would come a tipping point at which too many signs began to mean bad news instead of good, especially considering that the stories they pointed to were so tragic and grim. She had no way of knowing it would be the telltale dates that did it, the ones she had cleverly — if she did think so herself — camouflaged as grocery prices. She just knew it would be one of them, once they all piled up on him. It had never been a completely sure thing, her plan.

But it had worked, oh my, had it ever worked well.

Alone in the backseat, imagining many years of sprawling on her sofa at home, reading and analyzing delicious popular novels, Lenore Lowery smiled. The cabdriver, seeing her smile in his rearview mirror and taking it as meant for himself, grinned back at her.

At the moment of taking his eyes off the road, his hands jerked the wheel.

In the instant after that, when he turned around to speak to her, she opened her mouth to shout, “Look where you’re driving!” But between the time she started to yell and the time when he looked back at the road, a second car had pulled out of a side street in front of her taxi and smashed through the door where she sat.

Horrified, she had only a split second to flash on Charles’s familiar warning against tampering with fate.

Red lights! her brain screamed. They warned you to STOP!

As the impact hurled her across the backseat, her terrified brain registered the last thing she ever saw. On the back of the seat, right in front of her frightened eyes, was the driver’s ID card with his name spelled out in bold black letters: Richard Parker.

Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard

Dead Even

by Clark Howard

A multiple EQMM Readers Award winner whose stories are almost always non-series, hardboiled crime tales rather than mysteries, Clark Howard took a different turn when he created P.I. Lon Bradford. Not only was Bradford Mr. Howard’s first fictional P.I. (in a long career), but with this second story we’ll call him a series character — and one who solves mysteries to boot!

* * * *

Memphis private detective Lon Bradford was sitting in his cubbyhole office, feet up on his secondhand roll-top desk, reading the early edition of the Commercial Appeal, when Elmo Keel, the area’s letter carrier, knocked and walked in with the morning mail.

“ ’Morning, Brad,” said Keel. “Any good news about this weather?”

“ ’Morning, Elmo. Not much. Hot and humid today, hot and humid tonight, hot and humid again tomorrow. Hot and humid forever, I reckon.”

“Well, hell, I guess that’s the price we pay for living in this paradise on the ol’ Mississippi River.” He handed Brad several pieces of mail. “Lots of folks ain’t lucky enough to live on the ol’ muddy Miss and have catfish for supper ever’ evening.”

“You make a good point, Elmo. A steady supply of catfish makes up for a lot of shortcomings in the weather.”

When Elmo left, Brad started slitting open his mail with a switchblade he’d taken off a drunken black man he arrested for disorderly conduct years earlier when he was sheriff in Kennant County, some fifty miles north. Being a Thursday morning, the mail was scant, but Brad was pleased to find a check from Goldsmith’s Department Store for services having to do with an employee in the shoe department who was knocking down on the register. Fellow had a clever way of doing it: Instead of ringing up $10.05 for a pair of $9.95 shoes and the dime sales tax, he’d simply push down the 5-cent key and ring up a nickel. If anybody said anything about it, he’d just say he probably didn’t push down the $10 key hard enough, and he’d correct it by ringing up the ten dollars — which made the cash drawer contents match the white roll of paper in the register that recorded all the sales. But if nobody noticed, then the cash drawer would have an overage of ten bucks — and sometime before closing, the salesman would palm a ten-dollar bill for himself.

That was the kind of work Lon Bradford did: dishonest employees, surveillance, insurance-fraud cases, some divorce work, a little missing-persons stuff, background checks for the West Tennessee Banking Association’s bonding company, and so on. Nothing heavy. A few years back, he’d become involved in a murder case up in Kennant County, as a favor for an old judge who’d been a mentor of his — but that had been an exception. Brad had ended up helping a convicted murderer get out of prison, which had cost him not only the old judge’s friendship, but the good graces of nearly everyone else in Kennant County. He had never gone back.

One of the pieces of mail Brad opened that morning had a return address for the county jail in Temple, Mississippi, the county seat of Yoakum County. From the envelope, Brad removed a single sheet of lined notebook paper. In neatly printed, penciled letters, it read:

Dear Mr. Bradford,

My name is Edward Bliss and I am currently on trial for murder here in Yoakum County, Miss.

I am innocent of this crime, but the evidence is such that I am certain to be convicted.

To prove my sincerity in this matter, I hereby confess to you that I am guilty of a killing that took place there in Memphis some years ago. I was acquitted of that crime, even though I was guilty. However, I am not guilty of this one, and I need someone to help me prove it before it is too late and I end up in the Miss. electric chair.

I read about you in True Detective magazine, about how you helped a man named Billy Clyde get out of prison after being convicted of murder. I need somebody to help me the same way. I have $1,600 in a savings account in the Farmer’s Union Bank of Temple and I will pay all of it to you if you will help me.

Yours sincerely,

Edward Bliss

This, Brad thought, had to be the damnedest letter he had ever seen. Man says he was acquitted of a killing he did, now might be found guilty of one he didn’t do.

Staring down at his desk, Brad concentrated hard and tried to recall the Edward Bliss murder trial there in Memphis. He pulled up a vague memory of it from back when he’d been so deeply involved in doing what he could to help unjustly convicted murderer Billy Clyde get his sentence commuted to time served. Because Brad himself had been the one to track down Clyde, who was accused of murdering a young Kennant County girl, and had brought him back to Tennessee from Claypool, Texas, he had felt responsible for the disabled World War Two veteran not receiving what Brad considered adequate legal representation at his trial. Little wonder with what was on his mind at that time that he hadn’t paid too much attention to a local murder trial of someone named Edward Bliss.

Best to know who I’m dealing with here, the detective thought, before I decide what to do about this letter.

Taking his feet off the desk, Brad unfolded his lanky frame, took his blue seersucker coat off a hook, locked up his office, and walked down two flights of shiny-worn wooden stairs to the muggy Memphis street outside.

At the Shelby County Library a few blocks away, Brad filled out a form for the reference librarian to look up the murder trial of Edward Bliss. Ten minutes later, the librarian, a spidery little old Southern lady, led him into a musty back room filled with shelves of newspaper-size, leather-bound volumes of past Memphis Commercial Appeals. Pointing to one of the volumes, she declared in what was almost a challenge, “You’ll have to get it down your own self. I cain’t lift these heavy archive books anymore. You can put it on that table there.” She indicated an ancient but obviously sturdy maple reading table. “What you want starts in the October tenth issue. Put it back up on the shelf when you’re finished. Don’t leave it for me to do.”

“Yes, ma’am, I certainly will,” Brad promised. “And thank you kindly for your assistance. You’ve been most helpful. And gracious.”

The spidery little woman grunted audibly and left the room.

Lon Bradford sat down to read.

Edward Bliss had been charged in the homicide of a man named Roy Rayfus, who was married to a woman named Bonnie Lee Rayfus. Bonnie was a manicurist in the barbershop of the Peabody Hotel, where her husband worked as the night desk clerk.

Edward Bliss was a traveling salesman for the Bishop Flower Bulb and Seed Company (“Bishop Bulbs Bloom Best”), out of St. Louis, Missouri. His territory covered a quad-state area whose boundaries were Nashville, Tennessee, on the northeast, Birmingham, Alabama, on the southeast, Little Rock, Arkansas, on the southwest, and Springfield, Missouri, on the northwest. Memphis was about square in the middle of his territory.

Whenever Edward Bliss was in Memphis, where his sales calls usually required four or five days, he stayed at the Peabody Hotel. There he had his hair trimmed in the Peabody barbershop, and had his nails done while he was in the barber chair by the Peabody manicurist, Bonnie Lee Rayfus. Bonnie Lee always wore a starched white blouse-and-skirt set and was in the habit of leaving an extra button undone at the top of her blouse, to encourage tips and other attention. The extra undone button provided Edward Bliss, from his vantage point in the elevated barber chair, with a stellar view of the cleavage between Bonnie’s buoyant breasts, divided yet held together by a gossamer brassiere that featured a small embroidered pink rose where the two cups joined. At some point in time, Edward Bliss began getting a trim and manicure on a daily basis.

The affair between the two, according to court testimony, began during Bonnie’s dinner break (dinner in the South being at midday, with supper being the evening meal). Edward would return to his hotel room and Bonnie would meet him there. Bonnie’s candid testimony at the trial was that their sexual encounters, while not quite on the level of a rapturous experience, were not far from it. Never in her life, she admitted, had she met a man who knew how to do so many things with a woman’s overly abundant breasts. He even named them: Sally and Mabel.

Edward, a bachelor who had always enjoyed playing the field, found himself so smitten with Bonnie Lee Rayfus that he not only began increasing his sales calls in Memphis (in order to extend his stay there), but also ordered a number of lurid, explicit sex manuals from an address in Tijuana, Mexico, just in case there might be some erotic practice (or position) he had overlooked with his — as he now thought of her — “Hot-to-Trot” Bonnie.

On the witness stand, Edward could not recall exactly when he decided that he wanted Bonnie as a life’s companion, and that she must divorce Roy Rayfus. Bonnie, busy enjoying her daily pleasure with all the zest of the healthy young nymphomaniac she was, had not seen that coming. In no way was she interested in divorcing the night desk clerk of one of the South’s premier hotels in order to marry a... a... flower bulb salesman, for Lord’s sake! It wasn’t as if Edward was the first hotel guest she had spent her noon dinner hour with, nor would he likely be the last. In the most solemn and sincere tone she could marshal, she explained to Edward that since she was a saved lifetime member of the Holy Christian Baptist Evangelical Blood of the Lamb Church, and had sworn to cleave to Roy Rayfus until death did them part, divorce was out of the question.

Edward would testify that he was stunned by Bonnie’s position, but that he would never, could never, had never, ever considered murdering Roy Rayfus in order to make Bonnie Lee a widow. Oh, he loved her, was head-over-heels crazy about her, would have done anything for her — anything short of murder, that is. And he swore, under oath, before God and a jury of twelve good Tennessee men, that he knew absolutely nothing about the incident in which Roy Rayfus left his job at midnight one Tuesday and was on the way to his car in the Peabody parking garage when a person or persons unknown had stepped out of the shadows and plunged what the Shelby County coroner had determined to be an ice pick five times into the man’s chest.

Bonnie could not have done it; her alibi was solid: She had, at the time of the killing, been having sexual intercourse on the floor of the projection booth of the Strand Theater. The projectionist had confirmed it; he recalled being between reels of a Tyrone Power movie at the time.

Had it not been for Bonnie Lee’s proclivity for dropping her step-ins at the least encouragement, had she been a poor, grieving widow woman who’d lost the only man she ever loved, the jury might have treated Edward Bliss substantially harsher than it did. But under the circumstances, and considering that the murder weapon had never been found, he was declared not guilty.

After the trial, with her late husband’s insurance money, Bonnie had opened her own manicure and beauty parlor across the street from the Peabody. She called the place Sally and Mabel’s, but would never say why.

Edward Bliss, having been terminated from his job with Bishop Flower Bulb and Seed, simply dropped out of sight.

Two mornings after reading about the Memphis trial, Lon Bradford found himself in Mississippi, driving along Route 51 toward Yoakum County, 150-odd miles south of Memphis. He had not yet sorted out in his mind just why he was driving down there. There was, of course, the sixteen hundred dollars that Edward Bliss had in the Farmers Union Bank of Temple, the Yoakum County town where he was on trial. And there was the sheer pleasure Brad got from taking his 1949 Studebaker Champion coupe out on the highway. The Studebaker was the first brand-new car that Brad had ever owned, and he treated it like a baby. It had wraparound front and rear bumpers, twin spotlights, whitewall tires, a radio, and an electric clock. Its color was bright yellow, and it caught admiring glances everywhere it was driven. Mostly, that was just in Memphis, because Brad seldom had an excuse to leave town. Except on Sunday afternoons, when he would take the car out of a garage he rented near the residential hotel where he lived and drive across the four-lane bridge over the Mississippi River to West Memphis, Arkansas, and back again several times just so people could see him in his bright yellow car. The bridge had opened in 1949, the same year Brad had bought the Studebaker, so he felt the two of them, the car and the bridge, were somehow related.

The real reason, he finally decided, that he was driving south through the rolling hills — interspersed with flat stretches of cotton, rice, and corn fields — of central Mississippi was because of his curiosity about Edward Bliss. What, he wondered, would make a man think that confessing to an earlier murder, which he had committed but of which he had been acquitted, could help get him acquitted of a current murder, of which he said he was innocent? Was it possible that Bliss was innocent of the current charge, and had some way of proving it?

I guess I’ll soon find out, he thought later in the day when he passed a highway sign that read:

WELCOME

TO

YOAKUM COUNTY

BUTTERBEAN

CAPITAL OF

AMERICA

The Yoakum County Jail, in the town of Temple, was constructed of quarry rock and had been built in 1863 by Union prisoners of war being held in the nearby Panther Swamp Prison Stockade. Under the rules of armed conflict agreed to by the Union and the Confederacy, prisoners of war were not legally required to perform such labor, but in this case, those that did received an extra ration of supper every day they worked — so the Yoakum County jail got built.

The Yoakum County sheriff, a rail-thin, hawk-faced man wearing both a belt and suspenders, eyed Brad suspiciously. “You say my prisoner sent you a letter askin’ you to come see him?”

“Yes, that’s right, Sheriff.”

“Got the letter with you?”

Hardly able to show the accused man’s confessional letter to the sheriff, Brad replied, “No, I left it with my lawyer back in Memphis. In case I ran into any trouble down here, he could use it to get a federal court order allowing me to see Mr. Bliss.”

“Well, ain’t you a clever one, now,” the sheriff said. He took a ring of keys from a wall peg. “But I ain’t gonna give you no trouble, Mr. Private Detective. No reason to. See, the trial ended yesterday. Jury’s deliberatin’ right now. Your Mr. Bliss is gonna be found guilty, and he’ll be sentenced to the chair, and a week from now he’ll be on his way to the Parchman state pen. Ask me, he’s lucky; he’d a’done this killing eight, nine years ago, he’d a’been hanged for it. Served him right, too, sticking an ice pick in a nice feller like Mr. Lyle King.”

An ice pick, Brad thought. Well, well.

The sheriff led Brad to the rear of the jail, where ten quarry-stone cells stood in a row. In the first cell were two drunk black men sleeping off their binge. The next eight cells were unoccupied. In number ten was Edward Bliss. Putting a wooden stool halfway between that cell and the wall it faced, he told Brad, “Set here. No closer. Understand?”

“I understand, Sheriff. Thank you kindly.”

Grunting audibly, like the spidery little librarian had back in Memphis, the sheriff returned to his office, but left the connecting door open so he could watch Brad.

Edward Bliss was one of those square-jawed, clean-cut, handsome types, with slicked-back straight black hair; the kind of man women were prone to swoon over. He was dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt with the collar open and a print necktie with the knot pulled down a couple of inches. Sitting on the cell bunk, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, holding a stringy, roll-your-own cigarette in one hand, he looked glumly out at Brad.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, more wearily than challenging.

“Name’s Lon Bradford, from up in Memphis. You wrote me a letter.”

The expression on the prisoner’s face changed at once to surprise, then immediately to joy. He leaped up to the bars.

“Yeah! Yeah, I did! Damn! I wasn’t sure you’d come!” He clapped his hands in excitement. “Brother, am I happy to see you!”

“Don’t be too happy just yet,” Brad said. “Let’s see first if there’s any way I can help you.”

Bliss snatched a checkbook from his back pocket. “I told you about the sixteen hundred dollars, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you told me. Write me a check for a hundred; that’ll cover my time and expenses coming down here—”

“No, listen, Mr. Bradford, you can have it all—”

“I don’t want it all, Bliss. If I can do anything for you, we can discuss an additional fee then.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” Bliss took the stub of a pencil from his shirt pocket and wrote the check. He started to pass it through the bars but Brad held up a hand to stop him. “Just slide it across the floor,” he said. Bliss did so, and Brad sat on the stool and picked it up. Then he leaned forward, arms on knees, as Bliss had been sitting in his cell. “Tell me what you’ve got to say.”

Kneeling to put himself at the same level with Brad, Bliss said, “Well, you already know about that mess back in Memphis, right?”

“I know what was reported in the papers.”

“Yeah, well, it was all true, except for my testimony where I said I hadn’t done it. That was a lie. I killed Bonnie Lee’s husband. I mean, I was so crazy in love with that woman that I’d convinced myself that I just had to have her. I knew she’d never leave him; she’d made that clear to me. But I was sure that if he was out of the picture, she’d turn to me. She’d be mine.”

Bliss paused to take a deep breath, then went on.

“I bought an ice pick at a little country store over in Arkansas after I finished my sales calls in Little Rock and was on my way to Memphis. At that point, I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. But after I got back there, back to the Peabody Hotel, and got a manicure, and Bonnie came up to my room, and after we — I mean, after she — after I — well, I just knew then that I could go through with it. I would go through with it, I had to.”

Bliss shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

“I knew her husband quit at midnight. I waited in the hotel parking garage for him, behind his car. When he walked up, I stuck him five times in the chest, real quick, in and out — five times—”

“What did you do with the ice pick?”

“Drove it into a tree in the park down by the waterfront, all the way in, then broke the handle off and threw it as far as I could out into the river.”

“How’d you come to be a suspect in the murder? The newspaper stories weren’t clear about that.”

“Bonnie Lee,” he replied, as if her name left a bad taste in his mouth. “The little slut told the police all about me when they grilled her.”

Standing up, Brad put one foot on the stool and leaned on his knee. “All right, go on.”

Bliss also stood up. “Well, after I was acquitted, Bonnie Lee, she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Told me to keep away from her or she’d have me put in jail. So I left Memphis. Lost my job, of course. Knocked around Little Rock, Birmingham, places I knew pretty well from my old sales route. Worked at whatever job I could get: dishwasher, truck-dock worker, even tried picking cotton; nearly wrecked my back at that. Then one day when I was in Vicksburg, I heard about this feller Lyle King, up here in Temple. Rich feller, cotton trader. He’d just built hisself a big new mansion and was looking for a gardener to landscape the place. Wanted lots of different varieties of flowers, shrubs, ground covering, like that. Since I had all that experience selling flower bulbs and seed for the Bishop Comp’ny, I went up to Temple and applied for the job. Mr. King, he liked the fact that I knew so much about bulbs and seed and such, knew when to plant them, how to cultivate them and such, and he gave me the job. I been working out at his place ever since.” Bliss raised his chin proudly. “I turned out to be a real good landscape gardener. I discovered I had a real talent for the work. Mr. King and me, we hit it off swell. He was real proud of the place, used to give me bonuses all the time—”

“Okay, Bliss, you’ve got a green thumb,” Brad said drily. “Get to the important stuff.”

The prisoner stared off into space for a moment, then said quietly, “It wasn’t long after I started there that Mr. King’s wife, Diane, and I noticed each other. You know what I mean? Really noticed. She was one of those good-looking wealthy women who’s left alone too much of the time. They didn’t have any kids, and Mr. King, he was away a lot, being a cotton broker, traveling all over the South appraising and buying standing crops. The only time he was really around the place was on weekends, and then he seemed to pay more attention to the ground and landscaping than he did to his wife.” Bliss shrugged. “After a while, Diane came to rely more and more on me for companionship during the week. She used to invite me up for a light dinner on the patio around noontime, maybe a cool drink after work, sometimes into the mansion for a quiet supper. Got to where I was spending more time with her than her husband was.” Another shrug before the obvious. “Eventually we started an affair. The woman came to be crazy about me.”

“You saying she was in love with you?” Brad asked.

“Yeah. She said she never knew what real sex was until I came along. She started talking about leaving King; she wanted us to run away together.”

“How’d you feel about that?”

“I liked the idea,” Bliss replied candidly. “But I wanted her to divorce him first. I mean, hell, why just run off and leave all that alimony behind?”

“Real sentimental, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a question and Bliss knew it. He half smiled.

“Just being practical.”

“Well, things seemed to have worked out in one respect,” Brad said. “Sheriff told me you killed King. So now he’s out of the way and I presume his wife got a lot more than just alimony. Only problem is, she’s out there with all the money and you’re in here rolling your own cigarettes. And facing the hot seat.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t do it!” Bliss declared angrily.

“Who did, then?”

“Had to have been Diane. Wasn’t nobody else in the picture. She must have figured that if she sued for divorce, he would countersue, name me, and then she’d get nothing. If she got nothing, she wouldn’t get me, because I wasn’t about to run off with her unless she had some dough.”

“You and her plan the thing together?” Brad asked bluntly.

“No! I didn’t have nothing to do with it!”

“You telling me it was all her? Her idea, her plan, her killing?”

“Like I said, had to have been. Look here, at my trial, Diane testified that her husband was supposed to have been in Copiah County buying cotton, and stayed there overnight. That wasn’t true; he had left there around six o’clock to drive back home. Hell, it idn’t but about a hunnerd miles down there; no reason for him not to come back home, him driving a brand-new Cadillac Sedan DeVille with one of them V-8 engines in it.

“Anyway, Diane’s story was that he had not come home. Next morning, she had their cook serve her breakfast on the east patio, which was her favorite side of the mansion; I had ringed the whole patio with yellow roses, which was also her favorite. So she testified that she was having breakfast, looking across the east grounds of the estate, when she noticed a lot of activity among some blackbirds down there where the boundary hedge separates the property from the road. She was curious, she said, so she walked across the lawn to see what the birds was so excited about. She claimed she found her husband’s body just beyond the hedge, in a gully by the side of the road. He’d been stabbed in the chest.”

“Oh?” Brad’s eyebrows went up innocently. “Stabbed with what?”

Bliss looked down at the jail floor. “Coroner said it was probably an ice pick.”

“Surprise, surprise,” said Brad.

“Yeah. The story made the papers in Jackson, Tupelo, Oxford, all over, saying I was among the people being questioned. Couple days later, some smart-ass reporter on the Commercial Appeal up in Memphis tipped the law down here about my old trial up there. I got locked up down here real quick and charged with the killings.”

“I see. Now you’re trying to tell me the victim’s wife did it. With an ice pick. Did she know about the case up in Memphis?”

Bliss shook his head. “No.”

Brad stared starkly at him. “Then this has to be one hell of a great big coincidence, wouldn’t you say so, Bliss?”

The prisoner sighed heavily. “I guess so,” he said wearily. Then his square jaw clenched. “But — I — did — not — do — it!”

“All right, then,” Brad said patiently. “Tell me what you think happened.”

Bliss drew a deep breath. “I think King did come home that night. I think maybe he was out walking the grounds of the estate; they was all well lighted, and I mean, he was a real nut about those grounds; used to walk around admiring the flowerbeds, the hedges, the fruit trees, the lawn. I think he might have been down by that hedge and Diane got him with an ice pick.”

“What about the servants, wouldn’t they have known it if he had come home?”

Bliss shook his head. “They only had two: a cook and a housekeeper. Colored women, sisters; they mostly kept to the other side of the mansion, where the kitchen and linen pantry was at, and they always went home when they finished cleaning up after supper. King could’ve come home late without either one of them knowing it.”

“What about his Cadillac?”

“It was parked uptown at his office. Not unusual; he frequently parked it there and walked to and from the office and the mansion; it was only about half a mile. He probably stopped in his office for something when he got back from Copiah County, then just walked on home from there.”

Brad fell silent for several long moments, lips pursed reflectively, eyes fixed on Edward Bliss. Finally, he asked quietly, “What is it you think I can do for you?”

“I don’t know, just investigate what I’ve told you. Everybody down here is so goddamned sure that the killer had to be me, nobody did any real looking anywhere else. I’d be setting here with nobody in the world to help me if I hadn’t come across that story about you in that ratty old magazine. Look, maybe if you talk to Diane, you can trick her into telling you something. Maybe if you look at the police reports, the autopsy report, check out his car if you can, look at where they found the body — you know, see if there’s anything that points to Diane or anybody else.” He looked pleadingly at Lon Bradford. “You can at least try, Mr. Bradford, to keep an innocent man from going to the electric chair.”

Brad took his foot off the stool and stood up. “All right, I’ll check around, see what I can find. But not for the reason you just gave. Because you and I both know that you’re not an innocent man, Bliss. You haven’t been since Memphis.”

Brad left the jail and crossed the town square to the Farmers Bank of Temple, where he cashed the check Bliss had given him. Then he stood out on the street for a few minutes, having a look around. Temple wasn’t much different from the little town of Lamont, Tennessee, where Brad himself had once been a county sheriff. Temple looked like a nice little town. A county courthouse occupied the center of the square, in front of which stood a statue of Confederate Colonel Travis Temple, the local hero. It was surrounded on four sides by a bank, dry goods store, five-and-dime, drugstore, picture show, and numerous other small businesses that make up a small town in the South. Across the way was a two-story red-brick building with an aged wooden sign across the front that read: TEMPLE TIMES — SERVING YOAKUM COUNTY SINCE 1895.

Crossing to the courthouse, and noticing the absence of a building directory when he got there, Brad roamed the corridors until he found a door with a sign that read: COUNTY CORONER. Inside, he smiled pleasantly at a young woman behind the counter.

“I’d like to get a copy of the autopsy findings on the death of Lyle King, please.”

The clerk frowned, but said, “Yes, sir, fill this out, please,” and gave Brad a single-sheet form and a pencil. As he proceeded to fill out the form, she left the counter and went to an office near the center of the room. Presently, a small, dapper man in starched shirt and bow tie, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, came up to the counter with the clerk. He waited until Brad had completed the form, then took it from him and carefully perused it.

“Mr. Bradford, you neglected to fill in the line where it asks: Reason for Requesting Report.”

“It wasn’t neglect,” Brad replied affably. “I purposely left the line blank, since I am under the impression that legally it isn’t required for a person to give a reason to acquire a public record. Am I correct in that, sir?”

The little man’s lips tightened and he flushed slightly. “The information is for our own internal statistics,” he said primly.

“I see. Well, then.” Brad retrieved the form, wrote “Curiosity” on the line in question, and returned it.

The little man flushed even more and handed the form to his clerk. “There is a one-dollar fee,” he said, and walked back to his office, where he immediately picked up the telephone.

The little man was still talking on the telephone moments later when the clerk gave Brad a carbon copy of the report and wrote him a receipt for the one-dollar fee.

Leaving the courthouse, Brad returned to his shiny yellow Studebaker Champion and drove half a mile back out of town to an establishment he had passed on the way in: TEMPLE MOTOR COURT, which in addition to its name on the sign also offered CLEAN ROOMS with CEILING FANS and FREE ICE, along with the assurance that it was OWNER-OPERATED.

Checking in with his grip satchel, Brad was given Room Eight (out of a line of twelve), which had a key attached to an inconveniently large metal disk. Inside, Brad found that the room was, indeed, spotlessly clean, had a ceiling fan with a pull chain and a wooden ice bucket on the dresser. After hanging up his extra clothes and setting a flask of factory-made rye whiskey on the nightstand next to the bed, Brad took the ice bucket down to the office, where the owner-operator politely filled it with ice chipped from a twenty-pound block.

Back in Room Eight, Brad removed his seersucker coat and his shoes, loosened his necktie, made himself comfortable sitting up on the bed, poured himself a long drink of rye over ice, and proceeded to read the Yoakum County coroner’s report on the death of Lyle King.

The deceased subject was described as an adult male of forty-six years, five feet eleven inches in height, one hundred seventy pounds in weight, and was minus his appendix but had all other internal organs intact. A minor benign tumor had been found on the liver. The stomach contained no undigested food.

The cause of death was determined to have been a single puncture wound to the aorta. The wound was approximately five inches deep and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, indicating that it had been made by an ice pick or similar instrument, possibly surgical in nature. There was no other damage to the body except a small bruise to the right temple which might or might not have been sustained prior to death.

At death, the victim had been wearing a summer-weight tan business suit, white shirt, brown-and-yellow-striped necktie, brown leather belt with a brass initialed buckle, white undershirt and shorts, tan over-the-calf socks, and brown leather shoes. The suit coat, shirt, and undershirt all bore common puncture holes similar in size and location to the death wound.

Examination of the outer apparel produced nine separate minute samples of miscellaneous lint and one half-inch length of tan thread. The victim’s trousers and coat pockets had been examined and found to contain specimens of lint, fuzz, paper waste, tobacco shreds, and minute quantities of dirt. The soles of the victim’s shoes were scraped and the resultant residue analyzed as common street and ground dirt with no unique qualities. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails produced minute particles of dirt, traces of hair oil, some slight rubber-cement residue, a particle of dried table mustard, and several minuscule grains of sugar.

Not exactly an exciting coroner’s report, Brad thought. Putting the pages aside, he sipped his drink, staring at nothing. One thing, however, did bother him: that single stab wound. In the Memphis crime, to which Edward Bliss had admitted his guilt, there had been five stab wounds. Why, he wondered, would Bliss stab Roy Rayfus five times, and Lyle King only once? It made no sense. Unless—

Maybe — just maybe — Bliss was telling the truth.

In his mind, Brad reviewed the jailhouse visit with Bliss. He realized that Bliss was a very desperate man — and desperate men were liable to say anything to anybody if there was even a remote chance of getting help. So Brad felt it was natural to be sceptical of the accused man’s story. Yet now, he realized in retrospect, there had been something about him, something about his eyes, his voice, that Brad could not but feel was sincere. Genuine.

On a hunch, Brad sat up, put on his shoes, slipped the knot of his necktie back up, and picked up his coat. From a little tin, he fingered out four Sen-Sen tablets and popped them into his mouth to cover his whiskey breath.

Then he left the room and drove back uptown.

The Yoakum County Library, one block off the town square, was a neat, white-columned little building set back off the street in its own little tree-lined park. As soon as Brad entered, he became aware that it looked and smelled just like the Memphis library, in fact, just like every library he could remember ever having been in: quiet, well-arranged, orderly, yet somehow musty and not quite part of the outside world. There was a plain but pretty woman behind the main desk; in her late thirties, she looked as if she had been there all her life. When she looked up at Brad, it was with raised eyebrows.

“May I help you?”

“Do you keep back issues of the Temple Times?” Brad asked.

“Yes, we do.” Her voice was deeper, huskier, than Brad expected, and the sound of it somehow seemed to change her appearance. “Which date are you interested in?”

“I want to read up on the Lyle King murder and the current trial of his accused killer,” Brad told her.

“I see. Wouldn’t you prefer to go through the Jackson Bugle? That’s a daily paper in the state capital. I think you’d find much more comprehensive coverage there. Our Temple Times is just a weekly. Most of its coverage has been of a summary nature.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Brad said. “A good overall wrap-up of the main facts.”

“All right, then.” She rose and said, “Follow me, please.”

The woman led him past the main book stacks to a set of stairs going down to a basement. “We keep our newspaper archives down here,” she explained. “It’s much cooler and there’s less humidity in the summer. The newsprint they use nowadays doesn’t hold up well over time. Our library journals tell us that they’re working on some method of photographing newspaper pages and running the film through some sort of machine for viewing. That would be a great improvement.” She took Brad downstairs into an appreciably cooler room where there were large bound volumes nearly identical to the ones in the Memphis library.

“Are you a writer of some kind, Mr. — uh—?”

“Lon Bradford. No, I’m a private detective, from Memphis.”

“Oh. Goodness. Well—” She smiled a tentative smile. “I’ve never met a private detective before.” She drew out a chair for him. “You can use this table here. By the way, I’m Hannah Greer, the county librarian.” She pulled out one volume for him, handling its weight easily. “I’ll be right upstairs if you need anything.”

“Thank you — uh — is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“It’s Miss. And you’re welcome.”

Brad watched her leave. Not a bad-looking woman, he thought. Hanging his seersucker coat on the back of a chair, he sat down and opened the big bound volume to see exactly how the murder case of Lyle King had come about.

Brad’s research took less than an hour. As Hannah Greer had pointed out, the weekly Temple Times stories, from the time Diane King had discovered her husband’s body, up to and including the arrest of Edward Bliss, his arraignment, and trial coverage through the preceding Friday, had been set forth in a reportorial synopsis that read like a textbook. Everything they told him pretty much validated details he had been told by Edward Bliss, or had learned from the coroner’s report. There was some supplemental information having to do with the first police responders, crime-scene investigators sent up from Jackson, elementary detective work done, a review of Lyle King’s personal and business history in Yoakum County, interviews with people who had known him, his high-society marriage to Jackson debutante Diane Jean Halton, and other items that Brad classified as more or less insignificant.

When he finished reading the stories, Brad returned the big volume to its proper place, retrieved his coat, and headed for the stairs. On the way, he noticed and stopped to look through the open door of a second room, which was furnished with a couch and club chair, end tables, a small refrigerator, coffee table, and radio. In one corner was a worktable with a paper cutter, glue pot, two small vises, scissors, a wooden ruler, and a few other miscellaneous items. In another corner was a book lift to hold stacks of books to be hoisted upstairs via an electric pulley. Between the two corners was a small desk with a chair. On the desk was what looked like a few invoices and a small stack of book-return cards.

“That’s my little study and workroom, Mr. Bradford.”

Brad whirled around at the sound of Hannah Greer’s voice. He had not heard her come back downstairs, and she startled him.

“It isn’t much,” she continued, “but it’s a quiet place to work after hours. I do all the bookbinding and repairs myself. It saves on the library budget, which is inadequate to say the least. What I save allows me to purchase a few extra books.”

“I apologize for being nosy,” Brad said contritely. “Part of my nature.”

“No apology necessary,” she said, smiling. “I came down to tell you that someone who was checking out a book just told me that there’s been a verdict in the King murder trial. Edward Bliss has been found guilty. In the first degree. He’ll be sentenced tomorrow. To the electric chair, I imagine.”

The news was no surprise to Brad. The only effect it had on him was to tighten the time constraint in which he had to work. He and Hannah Greer locked eyes briefly, as if each wanted to say something more to the other. But neither of them spoke. The moment became somehow uneasy, so they both turned toward the stairs. Brad found himself liking the way she walked up the stairs in front of him. Her legs looked strong, her hips solid and moving just the right distance from side to side with each step. Brad felt a stirring inside him that he had not experienced in a long time.

Back upstairs, Brad thanked the librarian for her help. Hannah Greer returned to her desk as Brad walked toward the door. Before leaving, he looked back. She was watching him. They both smiled slightly. Both of them knew why.

At ten the next morning, Brad rang the doorbell at the King mansion. Diane King herself answered the door. She was a tall, regal woman with perfectly coiffed maize-blond hair and a splendid figure, wearing one of the new pant suits that had recently come into vogue for women.

“Come in, Mr. Bradford,” she said easily. “We’ll talk on the patio. There’s coffee.”

Brad followed her through a richly furnished dining room to a patio laid in deep red Haitian root stone, ringed by a wall of yellow roses.

The east patio, Edward Bliss had said, her favorite side of the mansion... yellow roses... also her favorite...

“Mr. Bradford,” Diane King said as she poured coffee from a silver pot, “the only reason I consented to see you when you telephoned was because you said you had seen Edward and he told you that he believes I murdered my husband. If he told you that much, I’m certain he must have told you a great deal more. Such as the fact that he and I were lovers. Which is true. But I assure you, I had nothing to do with Lyle’s death. My late husband and I had an understanding: He went his way, I went mine.” As she spoke, Brad saw that there was a frankness in her eyes.

“Did your husband know about you and Bliss?” he asked.

Diane King shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Possibly. No, probably.” She smiled tolerantly. “We didn’t discuss our affairs; we weren’t that decadent. But we were usually aware of what the other was doing, at least distantly.”

“Was your husband having an affair with someone at the time he was murdered?”

“Probably. Most likely several someones. He was a ladies’ man.” She smiled again, in amusement this time. “I used to find all those silly little telltale signs that wives notice: makeup smudges on his shirt collar, perfume scents on his shirt and coat. Often it was jasmine fragrance. Jasmine is a cheap, dime-store perfume. Something I never use, of course.”

“Do you know who his most recent mistresses were?”

“No. I never really cared to know.” She sipped her coffee, then said, “Shall we get to the main point of your visit? Not that I have to, but how can I convince you that I did not murder my husband?”

Brad studied her for a long moment, studied the frankness in her eyes. “Just tell me you didn’t,” he finally said.

“All right. I didn’t. Anything else?”

“Why do you suppose Bliss thinks you did?”

Again the amused smile. “Edward is the sort of man who thinks women would kill for him. He was always quite impressed with himself.”

“You must have been impressed, too. He was your lover.”

“One of my lovers, Mr. Bradford,” she said without the slightest unease. She wet her lips. “Just one of them. And not even the best. Just the most convenient.”

Brad sat back and wryly digested that. “I see. You didn’t want to run away with him, then?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Or sue your husband for divorce?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did you ever tell Bliss you wanted to do either? Or lead him to believe you would?”

“Never.”

Brad shook his head. Bliss, you lying bastard.

“Who do you think killed your husband, Mrs. King?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Frankly, I didn’t at first think that Edward had done it. Then, when that story about the Memphis killing came up, I didn’t know what to believe.”

“Did that change your mind about the possibility that Bliss might have done it?”

“Well, it certainly gave me pause for thought. But I’m still not sure. I don’t want to think that Edward did it, but it’s difficult for me to draw any other conclusion.”

“What about the mistresses?”

Diane King shook her head. “If I know Lyle, they were just women he toyed with for his own amusement. He had this need for women he could dominate. He couldn’t dominate me, you see. He had to have women he could impress. But I can’t believe there would have been any emotional involvement with any of them of the sort that would lead to violence. Besides, Lyle was killed here on the estate. What would one of his mistresses have been doing here?”

“What about business associates? Did he have any business enemies?”

Again she shook her head. “On the contrary, he was extremely well liked, very popular. Honest as the day is long, in business, anyway. He was a community figure — served on the school board, the road commission, the city council.”

No wonder Bliss was arrested and now convicted so quickly, Brad thought. He finished his coffee and rose. “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. King.” He was about to offer condolences for her loss, but decided that would have been somewhat inappropriate.

“Not at all,” she replied graciously. “I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m totally without conscience. I do regret that Lyle is dead, and I do regret that Edward is in so much trouble. But there’s nothing I can do about either of them, is there?” She smiled, a rather nice smile this time. “And life does go on.”

“It does that, Mrs. King,” Lon Bradford agreed.

This woman, he decided after he left, would not kill for any man.

It was almost noon when Brad got back to town. He went directly to the library. A young library assistant at the desk told him that Miss Greer was downstairs in her workroom. Brad went down and tapped on the open door. Hannah looked up from her desk.

“Oh, hello. Come in. What can I do for the famous private detective today?”

“Famous, I’m not,” Brad said. “But hungry I am. May I take you to dinner?”

She gave him that tentative smile of hers. “I hadn’t really planned to take a break today,” she said, and continued checking invoices and receipts, initialing them, spiking them on an old-fashioned spindle. “I’m afraid I’ve let my paperwork pile up—”

Brad glanced around the little workroom she had fashioned for herself, the little sanctuary from, he guessed, the lonely nights that were the curse of a small-town unmarried woman probably pushing forty. He stepped behind her chair and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Please,” he said. “Look, I just spent some time with Diane King and I need to work her out of my mind with someone like you.”

Hannah paused in her work. “What does that mean, ‘someone like me’?”

“Someone appealing. And decent.”

She looked up over her shoulder at him, an odd, almost puzzled expression on her face. “All right.” She put one more piece of paper on the spindle and stood up. “I know a nice little place out of town, on the river.”

They drove several miles to a little cafe built partly on pilings out over the Yazoo River, and ordered fried catfish sandwiches and a pitcher of iced sun tea. Their table was next to an open wall, and the river slapped lightly against the pilings under them. In a nearby moss tree growing out of the water, a bluejay quarreled noisily and chased some wrens from their limb.

“How long have you been the county librarian?” Brad asked.

“About a hundred years,” Hannah replied wryly. “Seems like, anyway.”

“You must love it.”

“Must I?”

“Do I detect some dissatisfaction with life, Miss Greer?”

Hannah shrugged. “I suppose it’s just life’s rut. That limbo state of mind that most people sooner or later fall into. It’s that state where our lives aren’t good enough for us to be really happy, but not bad enough for us to make a drastic change. It’s a neutral existence where most days are like most other days. There’s no excitement, no challenge, nothing to make your blood rush. It’s a life where you never sweat. You perspire, of course, but you don’t sweat.” Pausing, she looked down at the table for a moment, as if embarrassed. Then, to cover it, she asked, “What did you think of Diane King?”

Brad looked out at the greenish river water. “Shallow. Unhappy. A little lost, maybe. But she didn’t kill her husband.”

Hannah frowned. “Did you think that she had?”

“Edward Bliss says she did.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I wasn’t sure. I had to find out.”

Their food came and they began to eat. Hannah studied Lon Bradford.

“You analyzed Diane King a moment ago,” she said. “Analyze me now.”

“Analyze you?”

“Yes. You’ve already said that I was appealing. And decent. What else have you surmised, Mr. Private Detective?”

“Well, let’s see,” Brad said thoughtfully. “You’re probably a Temple town girl who went to the nearest college you could find, got your degree, then came back home to eventually run the local library. Your parents are probably dead, and I’d guess you live in the same house where you were born. You’ve never married, live alone, probably have two or three cats, and...” His words trailed off.

“Go on,” she said evenly, “finish it.”

Brad remained silent.

“And I’m going to become the town spinster, right? I’m already a dried-up, nearly forty-year-old virgin, is that what you think?” A low fire began to show in her eyes. “Is it?”

Brad looked at her bare arms, at a bed of freckles just below her throat, at the full lower lip that sometimes gave her an artificial pout. He did not answer her.

“Well, let’s see whether we’re right or wrong, shall we? Let’s see just how good a detective you are. Cocktails and supper tonight, at my house. Two hundred South Elm. As soon as it gets dark.” Her words were clearly provocative. And her already throaty voice had become huskier. Brad felt his spine grow warm.

“All right,” he agreed. “Cocktails and supper tonight. Your house. When it gets dark.”

They finished lunch. Brad walked close to her on the way out. He caught a trace of fragrance from her.

“I like your perfume,” he said.

“It isn’t perfume, it’s bath oil, but it lingers. It’s my favorite — jasmine.”

The warmth Brad felt in his spine suddenly turned cold.

Later that afternoon, Brad walked over to the courthouse and sat down on one of several very old public benches that were placed every few yards along the sidewalk that surrounded the building. Slouching down, hands shoved into his pockets, he stared out at nothing and thought about Hannah Greer. Hannah, with her sensuous arms and dusty freckles and almost raspy voice, who had stirred up old feelings in him: warm, liquid feelings, the kind he had frequently known as a much younger man, but had experienced less and less often as he matured and learned more about the underbelly of the world and those who peopled it.

Letting his chin slump down to his chest, Brad mused about how unpredictable life was. He had come to Yoakum County simply out of curiosity about the unusual letter he had received from Edward Bliss. Now he was about to become involved with a lady librarian. And there was no doubt in his mind that there would be an involvement. No doubt in hers, either, he was just as certain about that. When their eyes met over the table in that catfish cafe, they had communicated more in a split instant than some couples do in a lifetime. One fleeting moment and they had registered an intimacy of each other that cried out for fulfillment. A fulfillment that would be consummated that night in her home, her bed, her body.

And the fact that she used jasmine bath oil was nothing more than a coincidence.

Had to be.

After sitting on the bench for an hour, he went back to his room at the motor court to shower and clean up.

And wait until dark.

At ten the next morning, Lon Bradford managed to sit up on the side of his motor-court bed. Eyes red and swollen, his head had a giant pulse in it, and his body felt as if an elevator had dropped on it. He was sure he would never be able to get into a kneeling position again.

It was the absinthe, he remembered. Hannah had prepared it using an absinthe spoon, which was slotted and fit over the top of her crystal absinthe tumblers. Already in the tumblers was a quantity of the green herbal liqueur made from anise, fennel, hyssop, angelica, and the sometimes, in too much quantity, deadly wormwood. It was powerful stuff — “One hundred thirty-six proof,” Hannah had said, smiling. “Think you can handle that, Mr. Bradford?”

“Call me Brad,” he replied. “And I can handle anything that pours.”

He had watched as she put a cube of sugar onto the slotted spoon and slowly dribbled ice water over it until it dissolved and turned the absinthe into a milky greenish-white color.

“This is called louche,” she had told him. “It means ‘clouding.’ First we cloud the absinthe, then we drink the absinthe to cloud our minds.”

Hannah had served ordinary gin martinis before supper, then a 1939 St. Emilion Bordeaux with the succulent baby back ribs, white corn, and fried okra she had prepared for their meal. Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, hand-churned in a wooden bucket, topped with homemade peach preserves from a Mason jar. It was the best meal Brad had eaten since his own grandmother had died.

It was after supper that the absinthe was brought out.

All during the evening, Hannah had been wearing a flowing Oriental gown of some kind, exotically flowered in greens, golds, and reds. It was obvious when she moved that there was nothing underneath. And during the entire evening, she was barefooted. “I love the feeling of these old wooden floors,” she said. “The soles of my feet are very sensitive.”

Slowly working his way to the bathroom, Brad ran a tub of hot water and soaked in it until he felt the stiffness melting out of his bones. While he soaked, he recalled Hannah Greer’s bedroom. It was a vision in snowy white: walls, cornices, shades, drapes, lamps, even the hardwood floors, which were birch, were all pristine white. Her twelve-foot-square canopied Elizabethan bed had a carved headboard and posts which were all white, inlaid with small white tiles, hung with yards of unseamed white silk. The sheets were fine Egyptian cotton, the feather mattress tight cotton twill, the feather pillows — four of them — silk cased, all in white — everything white. It was like a dream...

Hannah’s body, writhing, twisting, seeming to flow fluidly from position to position, under him, above him, all over him, those marvelous arms of hers entwining him...

All that had seemed like a dream, too. But it wasn’t.

When Brad had convinced himself that he could stand upright, he groped around for his toothbrush and powder, used them for what seemed like a long time, then managed to hold his bone-handled straight razor steady enough to shave, cutting himself only three times in the process, sticking little dabs of toilet paper on each cut to stanch the blood.

He vigorously rubbed Vitalis into his hair, overcoming an insane temptation to taste it.

As he came out of the bathroom, he realized that he was beginning to feel good, trim and lean, back in control of his body. Resisting another “hair of the dog” temptation, he ignored the flask of whiskey in his grip satchel, threw yesterday’s clothes on top of it, dressed in fresh garments, gave his shoes a couple of licks with the motor-court towel, and left the room to check out.

Feeling better every minute, he drove his yellow Studebaker Champion up to the jail and went in to see Edward Bliss.

“Did you find out anything?” Bliss asked eagerly when Brad sat down on the stool outside his cell.

“Yes, I did,” the detective said crisply. “But before I tell you anything, I want answers to a couple of questions. Do you have a wife anywhere? Kids anywhere?”

“No,” Bliss replied, puzzled.

“How about elderly parents that could use some support?”

“No, my folks are dead—”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“Well, I got one sister, Ella Mae, but I ain’t seen her in ten years. She lives up north somewheres — Chicago, Detroit — I’m not sure where.” He looked away, self-consciously. “I don’t have nothing to do with her. She married a Nigra.”

“So there’s nobody you need to help with the fifteen hundred dollars you’ve got left in the bank here?”

“No, nobody. What the hell is this all about, anyway? You going to tell me what you found out or aren’t you?”

“I am. First, write me a check for that fifteen hundred.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

Bliss wrote the check and slid it across the floor, where Brad retrieved it.

“All right,” Brad said. “I found out you’ve been telling me the truth. You didn’t kill Lyle King.”

“I knew it!” Bliss declared triumphantly. “I knew you’d find that out!” He slammed one fist into the palm of his other hand. “It was Diane, wasn’t it?”

“No, Diane didn’t do it, either.”

The prisoner’s exuberance dissolved into a frown. “Well, who the hell did do it, then?”

“I’m not sure,” Brad said.

“Not sure? How the hell is that going to get me out of here?”

“I’m afraid it isn’t.”

“Wait just a minute, now,” Bliss said, suddenly nervous. “They’re getting ready to send me up to death row at Parchman. I’m facing the goddamn electric chair! For something I didn’t do!”

“Well,” Brad said easily, “look at it this way, Bliss. Tell yourself that you’ll be going to the chair for that killing up in Memphis. Tell yourself you’re getting what’s coming to you for murdering that poor Peabody Hotel desk clerk who was unlucky enough to be married to that little slut wife of his you were having so much fun with on the side. You’re actually coming out even, Bliss.”

Edward Bliss stared at Lon Bradford through the cell bars with a vacant expression. “Coming out even?”

“Yeah, Bliss. Dead even.” Brad folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. “Goodbye, Bliss.”

After cashing the check and pocketing fifteen brand-new hundred-dollar bills, Brad drove over to the library. He again found Hannah Greer in her workroom. She looked up and smiled as he came in.

“Good morning, Brad,” she said cheerfully.

“Good morning.”

Hannah stretched luxuriously. “Do you feel as wonderful as I do?”

“I feel pretty good,” Brad admitted.

“Shall we make plans for tonight?”

“No, I won’t be here tonight. I’m going back to Memphis.”

Hannah frowned. “I... don’t understand—”

Brad rubbed his fingers around the glue pot on her worktable, and they picked up dried particles of rubber cement. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails... some slight rubber-cement residue...

He touched a small indented blemish in one corner of the table. Other damage to the body... bruise to the right temple...

Moving around the table, he caught some of the fragrance of Hannah Greer’s still-fresh bath oil. A scent on his shirt and coat... jasmine...

Turning to Hannah’s desk, Brad picked up her old-fashioned spindle with its ice-pick point. “Why did you kill him, Hannah?” he asked quietly.

Hannah Greer sighed a helpless little sigh and shook her head. “I don’t know. He was standing there, getting ready to leave as he had so many countless times before. He had a little smirk on his face that he always seemed to have after he had — used me. That little smirk had always bothered me, but on that particular night he had talked about a mulatto girl he’d bedded down in Copiah County that same morning, bragging that she’d been a virgin, just thirteen years old—” Hannah shook her head again, searching for something that she seemed not to be able to locate in her mind. “I don’t know, I just picked up the spindle and stabbed it all the way into his chest. He started to fall, then he hit his head on the table and kind of staggered back. He actually sat down right in the book lift over there.” She giggled nervously, self-consciously. “I used the lift to move him upstairs. Then I rolled him onto a library cart and pushed him to the back door, where I park my car. I drove him out to his estate and dropped him there.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“That was as good as any place, I reckon,” Brad said softly. He put the spindle back on her desk.

Hannah’s eyes got teary and she came over to the desk. “I had no idea about that gardener and what happened up in Memphis. It’s been very heavy on my mind.”

“Don’t let it be. Edward Bliss is right where he belongs, you can believe that.”

“Do you have to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Will you take me with you? Please.”

“No. You have to stay here, Hannah. This is where you belong. You have to stay here and live with what you’ve done.”

Hannah moved around the desk. As she did, she picked up the spindle. Brad tensed slightly at the sight of it in her hand. Seeing his reaction, she quickly put it back down. Brad relaxed. Reaching out, he took both her hands in his.

“Know what you ought to do? Go see Diane King. Tell her what you did, and why. I think you two might get along very well, considering the bad experience you’ve both had with men. Invite her to supper. Break out the absinthe. Could be the best thing that ever happened to both of you.”

Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly on the lips.

“Goodbye, Hannah Greer.”

She brushed her tears away. “Goodbye, Mr. Private Detective.”

Minutes later, Brad was in his beloved yellow Studebaker Champion, back on Highway 51, driving north toward the Tennessee state line, and on to Memphis.

Copyright © 2006 Clark Howard

Murder at the Butt End of Nowhere

by Meredith Anthony

Meredith Anthony, a humorist whose articles have appeared in MAD magazine and Hysteria, is co-author of the humor book 101 Reasons Why We’re Doomed. Her well-trained satirical eye comes into play in this (her first) venture into fiction writing. Ms. Anthony lives in New York City with her husband, who is also a writer. She has recently completed a novel which she describes as a thriller.

* * * *

Hunched and ugly, the little coal town squatted sullenly in the weak morning sun like a frog on a urinal, contemplating its few dreary options. In this part of the Appalachian foot-hills, the Rust Belt had just about rusted through.

Nevertheless, Helen Goode slept soundly, secure in her place in the world. She was the queen of her town and she slept the dreamless sleep of the righteous or the sociopathic.

Her husband, Chief of Police Beauregarde Goode, plump and arrogant, woke up pleased with himself. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he scratched himself vigorously. In his uniquely high-pitched, wheedling voice he asked his wife to make him pancakes. “I believe,” he intoned slowly in the untraceable accent that was built up in layers from his Appalachian childhood and his wartime service in the Marines Corps, “I believe that a substantial breakfast is necessary to begin a productive and successful day.” The self-satisfied delivery was attributable to his many years of being the most important man in a small town.

“Get away, Beau,” his wife muttered, not unkindly, but trying without hope to ignore his mosquito whine for a few more minutes of slumber.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out into several high-pitched syllables, “we could always start the day in another fashion.” His wheedling falsetto was equal parts Mike Tyson and Divine. He knew he wasn’t going to get any sex, not on a weekday morning, but he liked to tease his wife. “You’re going to be late anyway, so what’s a few more minutes?”

Helen’s eyes flew open. “Goddamn it, Beau. I’m going to quit my job. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. I hate it.”

Beau ignored the long morning litany of her complaints. She had always hated waking up. By the time he came out of the bathroom and patted her behind with an affectionate murmur of, “precious thing,” she already had on queen-size pantyhose and an industrial-strength brassiere and was heading past him for the bathroom to remove a nightmarish effluvia from her teeth.

“I’m just going in long enough to quit,” she gargled, her mouth full of Crest. The blue foam made her look like a cartoon mad dog and her hair stuck up in unlikely peaks from yesterday’s hairspray. At fifty, her torso thickened from too much fatty food and too little exercise, her skin coarse, her hair damaged from years of bad red dye, Helen was still one of those inexplicably compelling women who make a certain kind of man breathless and sweaty-palmed with lust. Every time — and there had been three — every time she divorced a husband, her driveway immediately filled up with the Chevys and Fords of hopeful suitors.

Beau Goode, her fourth true love, was one of those men who found her irresistible. “You go right in there and quit, pumpkin. You’ll have more time to play with me.”

He leaned into the bathroom and tweaked what he thought was her nipple, but was actually a small air pocket in the pointed business end of the big, stiff bra. She hadn’t adjusted her large, blue-veined breasts yet. But she appreciated the thought and squealed with feigned pleasure.

“Get away from me, you crazy old bastard.” She swatted his hand, spraying blue flecks on the bathroom mirror.

“Now don’t you go looking for me today, sugar. I’ve got to go over to the state capital to talk to the judge about changing the venue on that three-time B&E artist we got locked up. I want very badly for them to try him right here.”

Helen was shimmying into a tight red wool skirt and he stopped to admire her efforts on his way to the kitchen. “Goddammit, Beau. I’m going to be late.”

She grabbed a silk-blend blouse with an op-art print that could stimulate an epileptic into a full-blown seizure. It had a collar that tied into a bow. She fished high heels out of the welter of shoes in the bottom of the closet, finding two navy-and-white spectators that matched on the third try. She tugged them on, ran a brush through the worst of her hair, swiped on bright, orangey-red color from a lipstick that had been tortured into concavity from heavy-handed use. She grabbed the jacket that matched the skirt from the closet, sending the hanger crashing to the floor.

“What do you care if you’re late?” Beau said slyly. “You’re just going in long enough to quit.”

Cursing and snarling, Helen Goode drove the thirty congested, potholed miles to her job. She exited the highway, throwing a last vile oath at the rushing traffic, and swooped into the parking lot, sliding expertly into a space near the door. As she braked, she bumped the handicapped sign. The uniformed guard, a slightly spastic young man adorned with virulent acne, gave her a tentative wave as she slammed the car door. She gave him a dazzling smile as she breezed past, late as usual. He blushed hotly, causing his pustules to flare to cherry color. He was deeply in love with her.

Inside, Helen was greeted warmly by several men and women who had all been at their jobs for half an hour. Strangely, no one glanced pointedly at the wall clock, tapped their wrist watch accusingly, or shook their heads with an ironic smile. Helen could do no wrong at her workplace; she was universally and inexplicably adored by men and women, old and young, from the management to the janitors, the engineers to the typists. Everyone she passed expressed various heartfelt versions of how good it was to see her.

By the time she reached her office, her anger had eased considerably. Her fat, homely secretary, Carole, struggled to her feet and poured the first of many mugs of bad coffee. Handing Helen the World’s Best Boss mug filled with a scalding brew of burned coffee, artificial sweetener, and petrochemical cream, Carole began her ritualized morning offering of compliments, information, and lies.

“Carole, stop pouring warm syrup all over me,” Helen purred, an honest appraisal that neither stemmed the tide of warm syrup nor inhibited its soothing effect.

Helen began to genuinely relax under the ministrations of her assistant, a cunning, ambitious, manipulative woman who would stab her mother in the heart if it would lead to advancement, but who wisely saw that her own career was tied inexorably to Helen’s. Carole had pushed her boss relentlessly up the corporate ladder, each time climbing to the next vacated rung. Now Helen was a vice-president and Carole had the title of associate vice-president. Helen liked Carole. Carole was smart, funny, and devoted. Helen had always chosen perfect protégés. They worked like sled dogs for her and she saw to it that they were rewarded. Carole was one of the best. She could curse like a sailor and lie like a priest and as long as her career progressed, she was perfectly reliable.

Forgetting, as she did every morning, her plan to quit immediately upon arriving at work, Helen got busy.

Helen worked the way she performed sexual acts — reluctantly, only after much preliminary bitching, and with astonishing expertise. Her superiors, a dimwitted crew of Caucasian men, most of whom were smitten with her anyway, put up with her irreverent attitude, her constant complaining, her chronic lateness, and a host of other employee no-nos because she was smart, talented, hard-working, imaginative, and attentive to details. She was much too good for their pathetic little company and they knew it. They tolerated her parking in the handicapped spot, smoking in her office, and taking massively long lunch hours. They allowed her to hire crazed sycophants as assistants. She worked hard all morning.

Just before noon, Carole appeared in Helen’s doorway. She had an unreadable expression on her face. “There’s a Mr. Wilson here to see you,” she announced in a bland voice but with a nearly imperceptible hesitation that put Helen on alert. Carole, who knew nearly everything about Helen’s professional life, didn’t know what to make of this visitor.

Helen was intrigued, but perplexed. “Who?” She sped through her considerable mental Rolodex for Wilsons.

“Mr. Louis Wilson,” Carole clarified carefully, waiting for an indication that she should deny the visitor admission altogether. “He says it’s personal.” Her look expressed her scepticism.

Helen suddenly made the connection. “Oh, Louie.” She was up and past Carole in a flash. “Louie, come in. Nice to see you. What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

She escorted the small, ageing black gentleman into her office, past the baffled Carole. She gave Carole a smile and a wink, to show her that this was unexpected but okay. Carole could live with that for the time being. Helen gently but firmly closed the door.

She gestured Louie to a seat. Louie Wilson was a wizened, old-fashioned man — the type who always wore a fedora outdoors and took it off inside and in the presence of a lady. He had worked for Beau since Beau’s first appointment as police chief and had spent the better part of his adult life in the station house. Beau had had his choice, according to the measly budget provided by the county clerks, of a paralegal or an assistant, but not both. A paralegal could write reports, keep track of evidence, and generally assist with the professional nature of Beau’s job. An assistant was a go-fer with a title. An assistant would pick up your dry cleaning, shop for your wife’s anniversary present, and take your car in to the shop. Beau unhesitatingly chose the assistant. He reasoned that he’d gone to college and could write his own reports. He’d rather have somebody get his shirts from the laundry. He hired Louie Wilson. Louie Wilson was more a wife to Beau than Helen was, when it came right down to it. Outside of conversation and sex, Louie was a damn good wife and both Beau and Helen knew it.

Louie knew how much he was valued and appreciated. Louie Wilson was devoted to Beau. In fact, there was only one person on earth who had more of Louie’s loyalty than Beau Goode. And that was Helen. Helen had discovered Louie, nurtured him, and fostered his fine qualities. She had recommended him for the job and seen to it that Beau hired him. Louie knew everything there was to know about both Helen and Beau, and they both trusted him implicitly. He had keys to their house, both their cars, and their safe-deposit box. He knew their birthdays and their passwords at the bank. He knew what prescription drugs they took and which heartburn medicine they preferred. None of the three of them had ever regretted the arrangement for a single minute.

Louie sat where Helen indicated and looked nervous. “What’s going on, Louie? What is it?” Helen asked. She kept her tone light, but she was slightly worried. Louie had never come to Helen’s office before.

“Helen,” Louie began haltingly, “there’s something I think you better know.” He seemed to gather strength and she waited quietly. “I think Beau’s having an affair with Emily Watson.”

Helen gasped a little air and then broke out with a belly laugh that scooted her rolling office chair back a foot. “Emily Watson? Little Emily Watson? Louie, that’s ridiculous. Have you plum lost your mind?”

“No, ma’am. I wouldn’t come here if I wasn’t pretty sure. And I’m not the only one thinks so, either. There’s talk.”

This gave Helen pause and she took a minute to regroup. “But Louie, you must be wrong. Emily Watson works for Beau.” As if no man had ever slept with one of his own office staff. She felt silly the minute she said it. “And anyway, she’s a pathetic little thing, always coming to Beau for advice and encouragement. She’s thinking of going back to school and trying to get a degree as a paralegal. Beau’s been trying to help her. There’s nothing to it. Trust me. I know Beau.”

But Louie stood his ground and shook his head stubbornly. “I know about all that, Helen. That’s what I said at first. But sometimes, after work, after they’ve both left, people been seeing the chief’s big old yellow Buick parked near Emily Watson’s house. Up on Wheeling. By the Greek deli.”

Helen took this in. If a small, dark seed of doubt was planted it wouldn’t do to have Louie Wilson see it. She stood up and came around the desk. “Louie, you just put it right out of your mind. Beau’s no saint, but I don’t leave him any energy for catting around. Hear me?” She gave him one of her most dazzling smiles and he rose, clutching his hat to his chest.

“Yes, ma’am. I thought you should know about the talk, is all.”

“Louie, you know I always want to know about the talk. I want to know every damn thing there is to know. Don’t worry about that.” Helen meant it. She had no intention of scaring off a good source of information, even if it wasn’t always correct. “And I thank you for it.” She gave him a warm hug to show there weren’t any hard feelings. Louie still looked worried, but he nodded his agreement. “Now, what say we go out to Piggy’s and have some pulled-pork sandwiches? What do you say? It’s right around the corner.”

Louie demurred as she knew he would. Helen opened the door and hugged him again so Carole could see. “Next time, we go to Piggy’s. Right, Louie? Promise?”

Back in her office, Helen mulled it over for about thirty seconds. She decided that, one, Louie was probably wrong; two, there was nothing she could do about it anyway; and three, she didn’t want to risk making a fuss to find out. For a moment, she was overwhelmed with an unaccustomed wave of pure love for her husband. Helen was not a sentimental woman and rarely gave way to emotional transports. Her level of affection was usually tempered by her moods, her hormonal state, her socioeconomic needs, and her blood-sugar level.

Helen made the decision to put the whole mess out of her mind. Which didn’t mean she would forget about it.

In small towns in this state, police chiefs were frequently the highest-ranking officials and de facto kings of the area. Although they were supposed to be apolitical, among other things they were usually the heads of their party and generally held the power and patronage that made them kings of their feudal realms.

Beau held his scepter lightly. He wielded his power always with the good of his community in view, even if he skirted the law to accomplish it. In return, his town gave him its affection with unabashed enthusiasm. There was no diner, bar, or Legion hall in the town or even the entire county, however remote and down at the heel, where he could go unnoticed or pay for a drink. “Evening, Chief,” some grease-smeared gas jockey or fertilizer-redolent farmer would murmur as soon as he walked in the door. “Buy you a drink?”

Beau walked through the door often. A gregarious man by nature, with big appetites for food, beer, and praise, he made it a policy to keep in touch with all the outlying areas of his domain, using invitations to a constant stream of parties, anniversaries, birthdays, christenings, funerals, and weddings to shape his social life. Helen, a full and willing partner in this lifestyle, never walked into a room she didn’t own within five minutes. Her nature gave her what his position gave him, an unassailable sense of entitlement and a conviction of her own worth.

On Friday night, having groused through a half-hour of getting dressed and made-up, having bitched from the house to the car, having griped through most of the twenty-minute drive, Helen finally settled down. Impatient in many of life’s situations, Beau always found Helen worth the wait.

Helen was quiet all the way up the gravel walk to the surprisingly modern multilevel house on a wooded hill in the south of the county. At the door, Helen straightened her back, took a calming breath, and knocked.

The door swung open and Helen strode through with her dazzling smile, her gaze sweeping the room for dignitaries and interesting gossip.

“Congressman,” she smiled, wiggling out of the smelly embrace of the crusty old lecher who had been elected more times than she could count, despite an official censure for misuse of federal money. “Where you been, you old rattlesnake? We never see you anymore.”

The people’s representative simpered and smirked, keeping one liver-spotted hand on Helen’s waist. “I can’t see enough of you, Helen, my angel,” he leered with meaning. Helen instinctively covered her considerable cleavage. The congressman had a full complement of hands and no part of a woman’s anatomy was safe while one of them was unoccupied. She leaned in to give him a buss on the cheek. As she moved on, his eager old claw descended smoothly to cup her butt.

In the meantime, their hostess swooped on Helen, simultaneously removing the congressman’s hand from her friend’s derriere with a practiced gesture and putting a protective arm around her, kissing her and steering her toward the bar set up at the end of the long room.

“Thanks, Samantha,” Helen said. “I’d have fingerprints on my ass if I talked to that old goat another minute.”

“Thank God you’re here,” Sam whispered. “Veda Macavoy brought her New York cousin and he’s flirting with everyone — female and male.”

“I’ve got to meet this guy,” Helen purred enthusiastically. “I’m a complete fag hag. I love them. I do.”

She didn’t look back at Beau. She didn’t need to. She knew he was sweet-talking the congressman about local issues that could profit from attention at the national level. She also knew without looking that some helpful soul had already put a cold beer bottle into Beau’s pudgy hand. She and Beau had a rule about parties. They ignored each other, worked the room in their own way and at their own pace, then reconnoitered at the end and told each other everything. They had developed this technique early in Beau’s tenure as chief and it stuck. They were able to cover twice the ground, shake twice the hands, and get twice the gossip as they would if they stuck together like an ordinary couple. Say what you want, Beau and Helen were never ordinary.

Helen had worked her way through a dozen people, two daiquiris, three dirty stories and one interesting-if-true secret when her radar issued a quiet warning. She smiled at the woman who was boring her to sobs with a real-time description of her husband’s prostate surgery and turned slightly to put her drink down on a table, catching a glimpse of Beau giving Emily Watson a big hug and a wet, smacking kiss right on her mean little mouth, the bitch.

Beau was surrounded by his usual troop of fans, all of them soaking up Beau’s wisdom, fetching him beers, and laughing at his jokes, even when they didn’t understand them. One of the throng was the state highway commissioner and Helen knew Beau was using the opportunity to advance his plan to get new signage on the three exits that led to town. Although he was forbidden to play politics, Beau took every opportunity to upgrade the town’s image. He had been instrumental in several recent efforts, most notably in bringing in a new light-manufacturing plant that would employ several hundred. Most of the town didn’t even know that Beau labored tirelessly and successfully on their behalf.

To Helen’s practiced eye, Beau was just giving Emily the usual warm greeting, always reciprocated by slavish adoration. She didn’t detect anything in Beau’s big wet kiss or Emily’s bearing that would signal any guilty complicity.

Still nodding at the prostate horror story, Helen let herself watch Beau for just a second longer. He glanced up across the room and caught her and winked. Helen reddened slightly under her pancake foundation. Beau bent his head back to Emily Watson, who was on tiptoe whispering something to him. It could be anything, and Helen turned her attention back to the medical nightmare.

“And the doctor said he never saw anything like it. Hard as a walnut. Don’t that beat all, Helen? Hard as a walnut.”

Helen was expressing her amazement when she saw Beau, just for a second, put his hand on Emily Watson’s bony butt. Or did he?

Helen was at home Monday evening, waiting for Beau, when one of Beau’s officers came to the door.

“Is the chief here, Miz Goode?” he asked, hat in hand.

“Nope, I’m waiting on him now,” she said, standing aside so that he could come in. He shuffled back and forth in the doorway, wrinkled his forehead in thought, shrugged, and turned to go.

Helen reached out and took hold of his arm. “Come on in, now,” she said with a smile. She knew Beau’s boys were scared of her, particularly without Beau around. “Now what’s this all about?”

Ten minutes later she was driving on South Main heading toward Wheeling. She didn’t even remember getting into the car or starting the motor. Emily Watson was dead. Found beaten to death in her own house, although Beau’s boy said it looked like she was killed elsewhere and hauled home after.

And where was Beau anyway? Helen shook angry tears out of her eyes, trying not to think what she was thinking. Beau did it. She knew it in her heart but she pushed the thought back down. Helen’s heart was pounding like a rabbit. She stepped on the gas.

She was two blocks up Wheeling when she hit the brakes hard enough to snap her head forward, her pillowy bosom air-bagging into the steering wheel. She sat perfectly still as her body from head to toe turned dead cold then fiery hot. Up ahead, near the Greek deli, was Beau’s unmistakable big yellow Buick. Just where Louie said it would be.

Short of breath, Helen barely registered the timid honk from the car behind her. She drove forward and pulled over next to a fireplug. She turned off the key and shut her eyes. The evidence was irrefutable. There was no earthly reason for Beau to be in this neighborhood at this time of day. She remembered that he had mentioned that morning that he might be late. Another trip to the state capital, he’d said.

Helen leaned forward, resting her head against the steering wheel. She swallowed bile. Her eyes were hot. She began to shake all over. Beau had gone and killed Emily Watson. Beau. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t take it in. Her Beau. Ruining her life. Their lives. And for that filthy skank Emily Watson.

Her eyes flew open. She stared for a long minute at the dirty yellow steering wheel on which her head was resting, grimy for the most part. Shiny where the fingers gripped it. Yellow? Her head popped up. She was in Beau’s big yellow Buick. He had taken her car to the capital and was going to drive it back and give it to Louie to take in for inspection. He’d told her so this morning.

The heat, the cold, the shaking all instantly ceased. Helen’s head cleared and she started the engine and drove slowly past the parked yellow Buick toward the cluster of police cars up ahead. What were the odds? Poor little Emily Watson probably did have a gentleman caller with execrable taste in automobiles and a murderous bad temper, but it wasn’t Beau Goode.

And there was Beau up ahead, getting out of her car, holding his jacket. His boys must have found him. She pulled over quickly, the fender scraping the curb. She flung open the door.

Beau heard the metal grate on the concrete and turned as she hurled herself toward him. He was startled and seemed to try to ward her off, but she hit him like a train and flung her arms around him.

“Damn, precious thing,” Beau drawled, unwrapping her arms gently, peering into her face, streaked with mascara and pancake. “What’s all this, then?”

“Beau, I just love you to death, is all,” she panted, overcome by emotion, having lost him and got him back all in the space of a ten-block drive. She tried again to gather him close, but he held her at arm’s length.

“Well, I love you, too, precious, but I’ve got work to do. You go on home now. Hear?”

Helen nodded, her breathing slowing, her equanimity restored. Beginning to wonder what Beau’s boys must think of her grabbing at the chief in front of them. For what?

“Sure, darlin’,” she said lightly, a little loud for the benefit of the boys who were waiting on Beau. “See you later, then.”

Beau nodded, pulling on his jacket.

She threw them all a jaunty wave and piloted the big old car out around the cruisers. She was at the end of the block when she noticed that her fingers were sticky and had left wet marks where she held the wheel.

She pulled up at the stop sign under a streetlight and put the car in park. She peered at her hands. Red blotches. What had she gotten into that was red? The only thing she’d touched lately was when she’d hugged Beau.

Her stomach turned, gorge rising. She swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. Beau.

Somebody behind her tapped his horn. Helen carefully put the big yellow Buick into gear. The gritty little coal town jumped and whispered around her as she powered the big car back toward home.

Copyright © 2006 Meredith Anthony

A Convergence of Clerics

by Edward D. Hoch

Returning this issue after an eight-year interval is Hoch series character Susan Holt, department-store executive cum amateur sleuth. This episode finds her on a cruise ship overseeing her company’s new onboard store. When a customer is found dead, it’s up to Susan and an old friend in ship security to solve the crime.

* * * *

The first thing that struck her as odd was the number of Catholic priests who seemed to have booked passage on the maiden transatlantic voyage of the Dawn Neptune, one of the largest and most luxurious cruise ships afloat. Susan Holt stood on the upper deck watching them board and realized there must be fifty or more of them.

Of course, for a ship carrying twenty-five hundred passengers, that wasn’t a large percentage, but it was still worth noting for Susan. She was on board as director of promotions for Manhattan’s largest and most prestigious department store, and her job was to gauge public reaction to the opening of the very first Mayfield’s branch on a cruise ship.

She was one of those who’d pushed for the seagoing store at board meetings a year or more ago, when the ship was still being built. “Where else can you find a captive audience this large, in one place for seven days, or fourteen days if they do the round trip? Every one of those twenty-five hundred people is going to walk past our shop a couple of times a day, and chances are every one of them will come in to look around at least once during the voyage.”

The shops were arranged around an atrium three stories high that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in New York’s newest luxury hotel. The space allotted to Mayfield’s shop, some two thousand square feet, was almost as large as the ship’s casino. Following the customary life-jacket drill upon sailing, Susan was standing outside the shop, admiring the look of the place, when Sid Cromwell, the ship’s security officer, came along behind her. “Thinking of buying something?”

“Hi, Sid. It’s impressive, isn’t it?” She’d known Sid when he worked security at Mayfield’s years ago.

“This your first store on a cruise ship?”

“The first, but maybe not the last. What are all the priests doing on board?”

“We’re sailing to Italy, remember? There’s a big papal conference scheduled for next week and we offered discounts to any clergy attending it. We have fifty-six, I believe. They were hoping for more, but even with the discounts I guess it’s cheaper to fly.”

They were departing from New York and sailing across the Atlantic with stops at the Azores and Gibraltar before going on to Naples and then to Greece. The cruise line had chartered buses to take the clergymen from Naples to Rome, about a three-hour trip. “You taking the round trip with us?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Flying home from Italy. Just wanted to see how the shop managed on its maiden voyage and how we can improve it next time.”

She left him and entered the shop. Lisa Mandrake, the manager, was ringing up a sale. “That your first one?” Susan asked as the customer departed with a familiar Mayfield’s shopping bag on her arm.

Lisa was younger than Susan, a chipper girl in her twenties who’d come to New York to be an actress and ended up at Mayfield’s. She was a good choice to manage their first floating store. “Third so far, and we’re barely out of port.” She was all smiles, as were her two assistants.

“I’ll check with you periodically, to get a fix on what’s selling best.”

One of the priests had entered while they talked and he interrupted to ask if they had any men’s sport shirts. “Right over here, Father,” Lisa directed him.

He glanced at Susan, somewhat embarrassed, apparently feeling an explanation was called for. “I knew we’d be wearing our black suits and collars in Rome. It didn’t occur to me that my fellow clergymen would wear more casual attire aboard ship.”

Susan thought she should introduce herself. “I’m Susan Holt, Mayfield’s director of promotions. This is our first shipboard shop and we’re interested in customer reactions.”

He beamed at her, looking younger than he probably was. “Father John Ullman from Omaha. This is a first for me, too, my first cruise. So far I’m enjoying it immensely.” She guessed him to be in his mid thirties, with a friendly, youthful face and dark hair showing the first strands of gray at the temples.

“Is this your first trip to Rome?”

“I flew over for the Holy Year Jubilee in 2000, and I’ve wanted to go back ever since. It’s a wonderful city, especially for Catholics.”

Lisa helped him pick out a dark blue sport shirt with a pattern of small, subtle palm trees and he left quite pleased. “We should run a special on sportswear for priests,” she said with a chuckle.

An older priest came in, introducing himself as Father Broderick. He already had a sport shirt, but was looking for some socks. “Any color but black,” he told Lisa. “I think I’m the eldest in our flock and I don’t want to look it.”

Susan chatted with him for a few minutes and then went off.

She was at the first seating for dinner, and she joined more than a thousand other passengers in a huge dining room that ran the width of the ship. Sid Cromwell had been assigned to the same table, and he arranged to sit next to her. “So what have you been doing with your life, Susan? Are you still living with Russell?”

“Not for nearly eight years. You’re really behind the times, Sid. I’m a full-time career woman now, in charge of Mayfield promotions.”

He reached over and tucked in a loose strand of her hair. “You must do something besides work all the time.”

“Sure. I lie awake nights thinking of more work I can take on.”

“You won’t have much to do on this crossing, just check in at the shop a couple of times a day. We could relax and enjoy ourselves.”

“Aren’t you working security?”

“I get time off. Are you sharing a cabin with someone?”

She shook her head. “All to myself. It’s one of the perks of the job.”

“Suppose I come by your stateroom tonight around ten when I’m off duty. We could go up to the Crow’s Nest on the top deck for a nightcap.”

She considered the offer. “Ring my room when you’re off. If I’m free I’ll meet you up there. I’m in 556.”

Father Ullman wasn’t the only priest who’d come aboard the Dawn Neptune without casual clothes. After dinner Susan saw a second one, about the same age as Father Ullman but with thinner hair and more of a paunch. She approached him as he was leaving the dining room. “Pardon me, Father.”

He turned toward her with a smile. “Yes, my dear?”

“I’m Susan Holt from the Mayfield’s shop here on board. We’ve had some priests stop in to look over our sport shirts. I thought I’d mention it in case you wanted to be a bit more casual on shipboard.”

“Well, thank you, young lady. I’m Father Dempsey from Little Rock. I might take you up on that suggestion.”

“You’ve got quite a group going to Rome.”

“This is just a small contingent. We have another couple hundred flying over. I preferred this more leisurely method of travel, even if it is more expensive.”

“The Dawn Neptune is quite a ship,” Susan said.

“That it is! I already had the tour of the ship’s bridge and met the captain.”

“Captain Mason. We had some meetings with him last month about opening our shop. You’ll see him again at tomorrow night’s dinner. It’s more of a dress-up affair and he’ll be greeting everyone at the door. They’ll even take your picture with him, if you like. That’s the way these things usually work.”

Father Dempsey smiled at her. “This isn’t your first cruise.”

“I’ve been on a couple for pleasure, but this is a working one. I have to write a report on Mayfield’s first shipboard shop.”

They chatted awhile longer and then Father Dempsey went off with one of the other priests who wore a sport shirt with his black trousers. Susan checked in at the Mayfield’s shop and found that business was still brisk. Lisa Mandrake was waiting on customers while one of her assistants was restocking the selection of bathing suits. There’d already been a crowd at the ship’s pool.

She was back in her stateroom well before ten and when Sid Cromwell phoned about that drink she was more than willing to join him. The Crow’s Nest was on the very top passenger deck, just below the ship’s bridge. It afforded a spectacular forward view of the ship’s progress. Even at night there was often something to see. “Look there!” Sid said while they waited for their drinks. “That’s lightning.”

It was indeed, and for the next twenty minutes, over their drinks, they were treated to a rare view of a thunderstorm at sea, growing constantly closer until it veered off to the south and out of sight. “You don’t see those every day,” Susan commented.

“I arranged it just for your first night,” Sid told her with a grin.

“How about you? Are you keeping busy on security matters?”

“Not yet. That usually comes around the third or fourth day, when the close environment of the ship starts fraying nerves and causing altercations. Of course, this is the Dawn Neptune’s first transatlantic voyage and things might be different.”

“What about robberies?”

“Ships usually have them, but no more so than a big Manhattan hotel. I know your Mayfield’s shop has closed-circuit TV to discourage shoplifters.”

Susan nodded. “I suspect shoplifting might be less of a problem on cruise ships. All they could do with their loot would be to take it back to their stateroom where a search might uncover it. And just about everyone shares a cabin with a friend or relative who might become suspicious.”

Cromwell nodded. “I have my own room in the crew quarters on the lower deck, but it’s pretty small. Yours is probably larger.”

“Umm,” Susan replied, sipping her drink. She wasn’t about to invite Sid Cromwell to her room for any reason. He was a casual acquaintance, a nice guy but nothing more. She wondered if agreeing to this drink had been a mistake.

At that moment the beeper on his belt came to life. He glanced at the text message and stood up. “They need me for something. Sorry to cut this short. I was enjoying it.”

“Another time,” she said with a smile.

In the morning, on her way down to breakfast, Susan stopped to check on the shop. Lisa Mandrake and the other girls were already there, an hour before opening, restocking the shelves and changing the displays around. It was Lisa who said, “Did you hear the news? One of the priests got killed last night!”

“What?”

“Yes. The priest he was sharing the room with found his body.”

“Are you saying someone killed him? Murdered him?”

“That’s what I hear.”

Susan hurried down to breakfast, hoping to learn more. Across the room Sid Cromwell was deep in conversation with Captain Mason and two other ship’s officers. When he left them, she caught up with him as he headed for the door. “What’s this I hear about a priest being killed?”

“Hi, Susan. It’s true. That was the page that interrupted our drink last night. His cabin mate came back to their room around ten-thirty and found him stabbed to death on the bed. This is a terrible thing for the cruise line. They’re trying to hush it up, but the word is spreading fast.”

He kept walking as he spoke and she hurried to keep up with him. “Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

“I guess I am, for the moment. Crimes on the high seas fall under admiralty law. If we were in port, the local police would be summoned, but for the moment it’s up to me to investigate and take statements. Since the victim is an American citizen, we’ve notified the FBI. They’ll have an agent meet the ship in the Azores, but that’s still two days away.” He was walking a few steps ahead of her but suddenly he stopped. “Come to think of it, maybe you should have a look at the stateroom. The body’s been removed.”

“Why should I—?”

“You may have met him. We found a Mayfield’s bag in the room. Looks like he was one of your customers.”

Susan felt a chill run through her. “What was his name?”

Cromwell consulted his notepad. “Father John Ullman, from Omaha.”

She nodded. “I was there yesterday when he came in for a sport shirt.”

“Come along. Maybe when you see his things you’ll remember something about him that could help us.”

The staterooms for the priests had been grouped more or less together in the 600 numbers. She remembered Father Ullman saying he was in 675. When they reached it, another man wearing black pants and a sport shirt was standing outside.

“Are you finished with the room now?” he asked. “I spent the rest of the night sleeping on deck.”

“Sorry, Father. Susan, this is Father Stillwell. He found the body.”

She introduced herself and asked, “Did you share the room with Father Ullman?”

“That’s right. We just met yesterday. I have a parish in Spokane.”

Sid Cromwell unlocked the stateroom door. “I had the room dusted for fingerprints, but I expect the FBI will want to check it over in the Azores. I’ll arrange another room for you, Father.”

“I hope so,” he muttered. “I don’t think I’d want to sleep in there.”

“What did you do when you found him?” Susan asked.

“I... I phoned for help and gave him the last rites. It was terrible. I’d only known him a few hours, but it was terrible.”

“Don’t touch anything,” the security man cautioned. “Susan, that’s your store bag in the corner, isn’t it?”

It was indeed the very bag Lisa Mandrake had used for the sport shirt he bought. Susan could see a splatter of dried blood half obscuring the Mayfield’s name. “Was he wearing our shirt when he died?” she asked.

Cromwell shook his head. “Just an undershirt and pants.”

“So his visitor was probably male. A priest would have slipped on a proper shirt to receive a female guest.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He’d donned a pair of latex gloves and was carefully opening the dresser drawers. The roommate, Father Stillwell, was standing in the doorway, afraid to come all the way in. Sid Cromwell lifted a large manilla envelope from one of the drawers and asked, “Is this yours, Father?”

“No. It must have been his.”

He opened it and slid out a thick sheaf of paper. After a moment’s inspection he closed the envelope. “I’d better take this with me,” he said.

They left the room and Sid locked the door, placing a seal over the slot for the key card. “When this is over I still owe you a drink,” he told Susan.

She dined that night with Lisa Mandrake from the shop, who was assigned to a nearby table and easily made the switch. The conversation was about the murder, as it was throughout the ship. No announcement had been made, but the word had traveled fast. “They say the FBI will be coming aboard at the Azores,” Lisa told Susan.

“I understand that’s routine on the high seas when an American citizen is involved. You know, he was one of your customers — the young priest who bought a sport shirt yesterday.”

“Yes, his roommate, Father Stillwell, told me. He was just wandering around without a room, but I guess they found one for him.”

“Have any of the other priests stopped in?”

“None that I recognized. We’re attracting a lot of women, though.”

Susan let her gaze travel across the large dining room. Since dress was more formal tonight, she spotted the tables of priests quite easily. They’d all worn their black suits and clerical collars for their photographs with Captain Mason. Between courses, Susan went over to see how Father Stillwell was doing.

“Did they find another stateroom for you?” she asked.

“They have me right up next to Captain Mason,” he said with a smile. “He’ll have me steering the ship next.”

She glanced around for anyone else she knew. “I don’t see Father Dempsey.”

“His stomach was a bit off. He said it was nothing serious.”

Sid Cromwell saw her standing by the priests’ table and came over to her. “Could I see you after dinner? Up in the Crow’s Nest?”

“Sure.”

She assumed he was going to buy her that drink, but when she joined him at the table an hour later he had something else in mind. “Captain Mason is concerned about this killing, especially since the victim was a priest on his way to Rome. He says it’s terrible publicity and bad luck for something like this to happen on a ship’s maiden voyage. To him it’s like the Titanic sinking. He says if we don’t have the killer in a cell by the time we hit the Azores it might mean his job. And by implication it might mean my job, too.”

“In a cell?”

“We’ve got an actual cell, with bars, down below in case it’s needed. Most big cruise ships have them these days.” He took a sip of his drink. “I remembered when I worked security for Mayfield’s you were involved in some crime investigations. You were quite successful in solving a few puzzles.”

“That was years ago, Sid. Believe me, my job as director of store promotions has nothing to do with solving crimes.”

“This job means a lot to me, Susan. If you could help out—”

She sighed. “What can I do?”

For the first time she noticed the large manilla envelope on the seat next to him. It looked like the one he’d found in the dead man’s drawer. He opened it and said, “Look at these.”

There were several dozen copies of a one-page form giving details of some sort of investment opportunity for clergymen, aimed at supplying extra income for their retirement years. At the bottom were spaces for a signature, address, phone number, and social-security number. “Interesting,” Susan commented, glancing through the stack of identical forms. “I’ll bet you counted them.”

He nodded. “Fifty-five. Father Ullman had fifty-five fellow priests on the voyage.”

“You suspect this is some sort of swindle?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But a priest swindling fellow priests?” Susan protested.

“Who’s to say he was a real priest? I’ve sent a message to the Omaha archdiocese to check up on him.”

“I can talk to some of the others,” she volunteered, “to see if he approached any of them. But it was the first day of the voyage and there are no completed forms in here.”

“See what you can find out. We’ll be in the Azores by Thursday morning and I need to have something before that.”

After breakfast on a sunny Wednesday Susan walked past the photo gallery where passengers could purchase pictures of themselves with Captain Mason, then sought out the company of the priests. They were easy to spot beside the pool on the upper deck because Father Dempsey was with them in his usual black suit and Roman collar. “Are you feeling better?” Susan asked him.

“Fine. I wasn’t really sick, just a brief bit of diarrhea. I’ll have to eat twice as much at dinner tonight.”

She settled down in the deck chair next to him. “I thought you’d be in the pool with the rest of the clergy.”

He chuckled at that. “Dear lady, no one would want to see this paunch in bathing trunks.”

Father Stillwell, the victim’s roommate, came out of the pool with dripping hair and walked over to join them. “Any news on the killing yet?”

Susan shook her head. “Nothing I’ve heard.”

“I just thought of something,” he said. “You know that shirt he bought at your shop? When he tried it on it was a bit snug and he phoned the shop to see if they had a larger size.”

“Oh?”

“I think the woman there was going to drop it off at our stateroom and pick up the other one. I remember thinking Mayfield’s was very accommodating to do that.”

“We like to be accommodating,” Susan murmured, wondering if she was missing something here.

She left them at the pool and took the elevator down to the atrium floors. Lisa Mandrake was bagging a customer’s purchase and returning her credit card as Susan entered. When she’d finished, Susan motioned toward the small stockroom at the back of the store. “Could I see you for a minute, Lisa?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

She closed the door so the other clerks wouldn’t overhear their conversation. “Did you go to Father Ullman’s cabin Monday night?”

Lisa avoided her gaze. “He needed a larger size shirt and I took it to him after we closed. Nothing wrong with that.”

“What was wrong was your not mentioning it. What time was this?”

“I closed the shop at ten and went to his room then. But I didn’t even go inside. I think he had someone with him.”

“Perhaps the killer. You should have told Sid Cromwell about it. His roommate found Ullman’s body around ten-thirty. You were probably the last person to see him alive.”

“Except the killer,” she corrected. “You certainly can’t think that I had anything to do with his death.”

“It would have looked better if you’d revealed this at the beginning. You’re sure you weren’t in his room? I don’t want Sid thinking he tried to molest you and you stabbed him.”

“My God, Susan! The man was a priest! I know you read about those things sometimes, but Father Ullman was just a young innocent guy. He didn’t try to molest me and I didn’t stab him!”

“All right, keep your voice down. I believe you.”

They exited the stockroom and Lisa returned to waiting on customers. Susan took the escalator down to the lobby floor, searching for Sid Cromwell, who was nowhere in sight. She asked at the desk for the security office and was directed down the corridor, where she found him at his desk. “I was going to come looking for you,” he told her. “Here’s a reply from my query to the Omaha archdiocese.”

She took it and read quickly: Rev. John Ullman, 34, native of Little Rock, AR; ordained 1999, served in St. Michael’s and Sacred Heart parishes in Omaha. Intelligent; highly regarded. A photograph had been faxed along with the message and it clearly showed the dead man.

“Well, there’s no doubt it’s him,” Susan admitted. “So much for that theory.”

“I also checked that manilla envelope for fingerprints. There were none. I wore gloves when I handled it, and apparently it had been wiped clean before that.”

She thought about it. “Well, what do we have? A possible scheme to swindle priests out of their money. The only evidence is that envelope of forms. Maybe it didn’t belong to the victim. Maybe it belonged to Father Stillwell, his roommate. Naturally when you asked him, he would have denied any knowledge of it.”

“I’m going to hold a meeting of all the priests on board. It’s probably something I should have done yesterday. This individual questioning is getting us nowhere.”

“Some of them are on the upper deck right now. They could probably spread the word to the others.”

Sid got to his feet. “Let’s go see if we can get them all together this afternoon. The captain really wants us to have something for the FBI tomorrow.”

It wasn’t hard to do. Most of the clergymen were in the pool or the gym, while others were playing shuffleboard or Ping-Pong. Susan found Father Dempsey on the putting green. “They have everything here,” he said. “I may skip Rome and stay on for the return trip.”

“The Pope wouldn’t approve of that,” she said.

“No, I suppose he wouldn’t.”

“The ship’s security officer has asked me to gather all the clergy together at two this afternoon.”

“It’s about Father Ullman, of course.”

Susan nodded. “We’re meeting in the small auditorium, where you all say Mass in the mornings.”

“I’ll be there.”

Next she sought out Father Broderick, the senior priest on board. She found him at a more sedate bingo game on a lower deck. “You’re not wearing your colored socks, Father,” she said.

He shook his head sadly. “It’s not a time for frivolity after what happened to Father Ullman. I’ll be saying Mass for him in the morning.”

“Mr. Cromwell, the ship’s security officer, wants all the clergy assembled where you have Mass. Be there at two this afternoon. We’re trying to determine if anyone might have seen Father Ullman speaking with other passengers.”

“A good idea. I’ll tell the others when I see them.”

Then Susan hurried through the atrium to Mayfield’s. She spoke to Lisa and arranged for her to be at the meeting, too. Time was running out. The FBI would be taking over in another twenty-four hours. She spoke to Sid again just before the meeting with the clergy began, then stood in the back of the small auditorium with Lisa while the priests filed in.

“Fifty-five,” she said, doing a quick count. “The word got around to everyone.”

Sid Cromwell opened the meeting with a few words about the killing and his investigation so far. “An FBI agent will be coming aboard tomorrow in the Azores, but I hope to have everything cleared up by then. We’re investigating two possible motives for Father Ullman’s murder. One involves the possibility that someone was trying to swindle the clergy with a questionable retirement scheme. Have any of you been approached while you were on board?”

The priests glanced around at each other, shaking their heads. Father Broderick stood up so he could see them all, but no one raised his hand to offer any information. “How about Monday night?” Sid continued. “Did you see anyone with Father Ullman, especially around nine or ten o’clock?”

Only his roommate, Father Stillwell, raised his hand. “I ate with him and we stopped at the bar for a bit of sherry. That was the last I saw of him.”

Susan knew Sid had heard all that before. There was nothing new to be had from these priests. “All right,” he said grimly. “I want to move on to the second possibility. I have information that Father Ullman purchased a sport shirt at the Mayfield’s shop shortly after we sailed on Monday afternoon. He needed a larger size, and the shop’s manager brought him one when she closed up at ten o’clock. There’s a possibility that something happened between them in the cabin and Lisa Mandrake stabbed—”

“No!” Lisa shouted, springing away from Susan’s side. “You’re not pinning this on me! He had a visitor with him when I brought the shirt and I know who it was!”

“Then please tell me,” Cromwell said, “and we can put an end to this business.”

“I’ll tell the FBI tomorrow, and no one else.”

“Miss Mandrake, I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.”

She ignored him and started out of the room. “Hold her!” Sid yelled.

Susan grabbed her arm and pulled her around. Lisa aimed a punch at her but missed. She was in tears, half hysterical now, and Susan held her until Sid reached them with a pair of handcuffs.

“I’ll have to hold you, Miss Mandrake,” he said. “Maybe a night in our cell will shake some sense into you.”

Susan accompanied Sid and Lisa to the cell on the lower deck. “I’d better tell the other clerks they’ll have to cover your shift,” she told the girl. “I’ll be back to see you later.”

Father Broderick was waiting near the shop when Susan returned. “Do you think she did it?” he asked. “We don’t need any sort of scandal before we see the Pope.”

“We should know tomorrow when the federal agent comes on board. If she has anything to say, she’ll say it to him.”

The lower deck where the ship’s holding cell was located was a dreary place, lit only by dim ceiling bulbs along the corridor. Past midnight there was no one on duty and the prisoner was left alone on the cell’s single cot, up against the white bars that made up two of the cell’s four walls. Susan had visited Lisa earlier, but now, in the post-midnight hours, all was quiet.

It was sometime after one when the elevator down the corridor descended to that level and the doors glided open silently. The visitor moved softly, barely breathing, until he reached the cell with its dimly seen shape wrapped in blankets on the cot. For a moment he merely stared at the shape, then he took out a five-inch knife that flicked open at the touch of a button. He reached through the bars and drove it into the blanketed shape, once, twice—

Suddenly the corridor was bright as day, and Sid Cromwell dove across the room at the intruder. They rolled over on the floor and Sid knocked the knife free. “I’ve got him,” he said.

Susan and Lisa came out of the storeroom where they’d been hiding. “You can be thankful you weren’t under those blankets,” Susan told the girl.

Sid snapped the cuffs on Father Dempsey and raised the stout man to his feet. “I’ll clear those life jackets off the cot and you can take their place till morning.”

“Not a shred of evidence,” Susan said a little later, “but it worked.”

“You suspected it was Dempsey. How’d you know?” Sid Cromwell was sitting with Susan and Lisa in his office, drinking coffee till five o’clock, when he knew the captain would be up and eager to hear the good news.

She laughed. “I should say it was a woman’s intuition. The only priest who insisted on wearing his black suit and collar all the time was the one who wasn’t a priest at all. But there were a few facts, too. There were no fingerprints on that envelope containing the clergy retirement forms. That told me two things — that the forms were important enough for the killer to have wiped his prints off the envelope before abandoning it, and that they belonged to neither the dead man nor his roommate. Certainly Father Stillwell’s prints on an envelope in their drawer wouldn’t have been suspicious. No, the killer came on board to swindle the priests, posing as a priest himself. It was his bad luck to start with Father Ullman.”

“Why was that?” Lisa wondered.

“Because the fax Sid showed me about Ullman said he was originally from Little Rock, the same city Dempsey claimed to be from. Somewhere during their conversation Ullman tripped him up and realized he wasn’t from Little Rock, maybe wasn’t a priest at all. That was when Dempsey killed him. He had to abandon his con scheme after that, of course, so he left those forms in Ullman’s room rather than be caught with them. It might have been better to throw them overboard, but at that point he was afraid even to leave the cabin with them. He had to be very careful after that. He even faked an illness to avoid being photographed with Captain Mason and having his picture on file. That was how I knew he couldn’t risk letting Lisa talk to the FBI after what she said this afternoon. He was there when she brought the shirt to Ullman’s room, and maybe she’d caught a glimpse of him.”

“You thought up this whole scheme to force his hand?” Sid marveled. “How did you know she could bring it off?”

Susan smiled and hugged Lisa Mandrake. “I remembered she came to New York to be an actress. This afternoon was her first starring role.”

Copyright © 2006 Edward D. Hoch

The Perfect Beach

by Jeff Williamson

“This story has been floating around in my mind for close to thirty years, ever since I vacationed in Martinique,” Jeff Williamson told EQMM. “All the physical details — the scenery, the water, the reef, the Atlantic — are as accurate as my memory can make them.” A New York ad man, he has a keen eye for his surroundings!

* * * *

The beach was a perfect half-moon, lined with perfectly spaced palm trees, encircling a bay of perfect blue. Behind the beach, on three low hills, was the town, a jumble of perfect white buildings with tin roofs. And behind the town, a half-dozen miles distant, was the perfect green mountain that formed the spine of the island.

When Geri had first come upon the town, driving down the winding road that led over the mountains from the other side of the island, her reaction had been delight, quickly followed by suspicion and disbelief. In the three days she had been touring the island, following the road that wound up from the capital along the leeward coast, she had passed through many picturesque towns. But none of them had had a decent beach. One was thin and rocky. Another was spoiled by a giant cement dock for a tin-roofed factory that had appeared to have gone out of use. And three other otherwise acceptable beaches were fouled by the presence of large pipes that discharged raw sewage directly into the gentle waves that slid up onto the black, volcanic sand. The crabs that scuttled in between waves to feast on the ordure certainly appreciated it, and the island children that splashed fifty yards away didn’t seem to mind, but there was no way she could conceive of even taking a stroll along such water, much less going in. “It is a problem,” agreed a moustachioed official at one of the local post offices, where she had stopped to mail a postcard. “But you know, no one comes to this coast for the beaches. For the beaches you want the south coast. That’s where the Club Med is.”

Geri wrinkled her nose — the slim, vaguely aristocratic nose that had always seemed a little out of place in the placid oval of her face. She did want beaches. That was why she had come to the Caribbean. But she most definitely did not want Club Med. The organized activities, the enforced conviviality, the tanned, athletic, oppressively upbeat GOs — it was all so mindless and herdlike, and disturbingly like the small-town society she had fled eleven years ago when she had moved to New York.

There was an open-air market at the T intersection of the road from the mountains and the road along the coast. Geri stopped the car there and called out to a woman carrying a net marketing sack filled with green oranges:

“On peut nager la bas?”

The woman tilted her head and looked puzzled. Geri repeated the question. “One can swim, there, in the bay?”

The woman shrugged. “If you like.”

“There is no garbage in the water?”

“Garbage?” Again, the puzzled look.

Geri hesitated, partly out of concern for offending the woman, in whose town she was, after all, nothing but an intruder, and partly because of the slight difficulty of articulating her question in French.

“I’ve been touring the island,” she said. “Some of the other towns, the sewers are right in the middle of the beach.”

“What are you asking?” said the woman, sounding slightly impatient.

“Do you” — Geri felt her ears heating up with embarrassment over the directness and strangeness of the question — “is there a sewer here on the beach?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The beach is clean,” she said coldly. “Cleaner than anything you’ll find in England.”

Geri let out a nervous laugh. “I’m not English. I’m American.”

“That explains a lot.”

The woman turned and walked away, leaving Geri feeling as if she had been hit in the stomach. She was so flustered that she pulled out right in front of a truck coming down the coast road from the north. With a blast on its air horn, the truck swerved just in time to miss Geri’s left front fender. In the process it hit one of the poles supporting the canvas canopy over the market. The canopy swayed and collapsed. There were screams and yells and the driver of the truck, a whippet-muscled man in a sleeveless T-shirt, jumped out of the cab, ran over to Geri’s car window, and began shouting at her.

A trio of vendors from the market joined in the truckdriver’s denunciation. And in front of Geri, regarding her through the windshield with a look of open contempt, was the woman who’d taken offense about her question regarding the beach.

“Je suis désolée,” said Geri. “Je suis désolée.”

And she began to cry.

Either because of her tears or the realization that no real damage had been done, the crowd’s anger dissipated quickly. Several vendors set about re-erecting the canopy, lashing the cracked pole back together with fishing line. Penitent after his outburst, the truckdriver produced a bottle of rum and a plastic tumbler, into which he poured several fingers and offered it to her “to soothe the nerves.” Under the circumstances, Geri felt it was impossible to refuse. With trembling hands she downed it like medicine, feeling it burn all the way down her throat. The truckdriver nodded approvingly, then proceeded to knock back a glass of his own.

“I should not have lost my temper before. I would like to apologize.” He extended his hand.

Geri took it, finding it firm and strong, although hardly bigger than her own hand. The truckdriver, she realized, was actually a rather small man, an inch or two shorter than herself.

“It’s past lunchtime,” said the truckdriver. “Would you like to eat? The food is not bad at a hotel down the road.”

She looked at him. Was he trying to pick her up? He wasn’t bad-looking — early thirties, maybe, fine-boned, light-skinned — but a truckdriver, in a sleeveless T-shirt...

She would not mind a little fling during the vacation. In fact, in planning the trip she had half-imagined that her solo expedition up the coast, away from the tourist hotels and the pier where the cruise ships docked, might lead to just such an adventure. It might be exactly what she needed to get her past the strange, stale little dead end she had wandered into — career-wise, relationship-wise, everything-wise. It had all been fairly vague, in her musings, how the affair would develop or what the man would look like, but one thing was certain: It involved neither a car accident nor a truckdriver.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, “but I have to be getting on.”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Where are you going?”

“Oh,” she said vaguely, “that way.” She pointed south in the direction of the road that led along the beach.

“You have a long drive?”

His questions, and her responses, were trapping her. In spite of everything, she was still hoping to stay in this town. Now, to maintain the integrity of the story she had told to avoid his invitation, she was committing herself to moving on.

“Not all that far. But I do have to get going.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Have a nice stay.”

As she drove off, he smiled and waved.

She smiled back, working hard to make it appear sincere.

The road paralleled the beach. She drove it slowly, aching to pull over and walk barefoot across the powdery sand to the water. Up ahead on the right was a bright-blue building with yellow trim. A sign outside said: “Hotel-Restaurant de l’Anse.” As she approached, she was engulfed in a delicious spicy, lemony smell of cooking. A tree-shaded outdoor dining terrace was next to the hotel. They were doing a good lunch business. A perfect beach, a perfect hotel, and she was moving on. She banged the steering wheel in frustration.

A mile later, looking back from a hill at the perfect town and bay, she turned back.

Her truckdriver was seated, eating a salad, when she appeared in the entrance to the dining terrace. He saw her, smiled broadly, and motioned her over to his table. There were a dozen other diners, all islanders, predominantly men. She was conscious of their eyes upon her as she made her way across the cement floor.

“What happened?” he asked. “Another accident?”

She laughed — he really did have an appealing droll side. “No. I smelled the cooking when I drove past and I could not get it out of my mind.”

“You made it back just in time. Bébé stops serving at two.”

“Bébé?”

“The owner.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the back of the terrace.

There, at a large round table in the corner, sat a massive fat man with a huge moon face. His eyes, in contrast to his chocolatey skin, were a startling bright blue. It was clear how he had gotten the nickname: His limbs and body and head were eerily proportionate to that of a baby, albeit one blown up to three hundred pounds.

“Wine?” asked the truckdriver.

“Why not?”

The truckdriver flagged the waiter. Soon there was another salad and two steaming bowls of bouillabaisse before them. The stew was delicious, thick and spicy and lemony. The cold wine tasted marvelous with it. She drank one glass quickly, then another. He told her that he was from a town just outside the island capital, that he had worked for the trucking company for three years, and before that he had driven a taxi.

Not too much more was said, but it was okay, and not in the least awkward. She felt relaxed, loose, the first time she had felt that way all vacation. She called for another carafe of wine. The stew made her thirsty, made her sweat. The truckdriver was sweating, too. There were beads of perspiration above his upper lip. It was a finely shaped upper lip, she noticed, with the little divot under the nose very sharply defined. She allowed herself to imaging running her fingertips over that divot to brush the moisture away.

She smiled at him. He smiled back. Emboldened, she asked:

“Is it decent, this hotel?”

“One would imagine. Bébé is serious about what he does.”

“Serious is good, then?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Well, at work, it’s good to be serious. One should do things properly, with care.”

“As opposed to on vacation?”

“Yes.”

“When one should be improper, and not careful.” She smiled lazily and allowed her eyes to meet his. He could not fail to understand the innuendo. He smiled back.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to see if they have a room.”

They did have a room, a big one, in the front on the second floor, with painted wooden walls, showing slivers of daylight between the slats. Floor-to-ceiling windows — the louvered shutters drawn against the midday sun. A high, soft double bed, a sink in one corner, an inexpensive armoire in the other. The armoire had a mirrored front. She sat on the bed and saw that the mirror reflected her image. How French to have the mirror directed at the bed, she thought. She lay down, stretching out on her side, looking over her shoulder at the reflected hourglass of her waist and hips. She imagined the slim, muscled body of the truckdriver standing over her. Her heart raced deliciously. She was about to have an adventure. A little French island adventure.

Flushed and even more tipsy than before she had left, she returned to the table.

“Do you know what I haven’t asked you?” she said, giggling.

“What?”

“Your name.”

“Etienne Dalhousie.”

“Etienne Dalhousie.” She repeated the name, turning the syllables over in her mouth, tasting their lightness, their Frenchness.

“And your name?” he asked.

“Geri Kronhardt.”

“Geri. Is that not a male name?”

She shook her head. “Different spelling. It’s short for GeriAnn.”

“GeriAnn. That is pretty.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. She had never liked her name. It was so corn-fed, so everything she had wanted to escape when she had left Indiana. It was a name for women who married their high-school sweethearts and had children and put on impossible amounts of weight.

“Etienne Dalhousie,” she enthused, slurring the words just slightly, perhaps even charmingly, “now that’s a name!”

He laughed. “If you say so.”

“I do. In the United States it would be the name of—” She groped for something appropriate — “of an art gallery owner!”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the United States we name our truckdrivers Tony or Joe or Sam.”

“There are names for people in certain occupations?”

She laughed. “No, no, no! It just works out that way. You see, to Americans, Etienne is a very sophisticated name. It’s not the sort of name you would expect to find on someone who drives a truck.”

Etienne Dalhousie’s face stiffened.

She was drunk enough to be puzzled at his reaction. What was the problem? It seemed an ordinary enough observation...

And then she realized what she had said.

Her cheeks burning, she stammered, “I mean, it’s not a question of the value of one—” She groped for the word for “occupation,” but in the embarrassment of the moment, her French was abandoning her.

Etienne Dalhousie looked at her, his wide-set brown eyes flat and cool and appraising.

“I have to be going,” he said finally. “My wife’s sister is coming over for dinner and we’re going to take the kids to the carnival. I hope you enjoy your vacation.”

Humiliated, she took refuge in the room she had just rented — not even bothering to bring up her bags, just hurrying up the stairs and locking the door behind her and lying down on the bed. Through the louvered shutters she could heard the people talking on the dining terrace. She closed her eyes, but she had drunk too much, and the room seemed to turn; to avoid being sick she had to open them again. After a time, she fell asleep.

She awoke with a headache, drenched in her own perspiration. She staggered over to the window and pulled open the shutters, drinking in the ocean-scented air that puffed through. The sun was at a slant now, its light pink against the dozen or so puffy clouds that had appeared over the bay. If anything, the scene was more exquisite than ever. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to simply look at it any longer. She had to go in. She had to throw herself in that beautiful blue cleansing water.

She rushed out of the room and down the wooden stairs to the lobby. The clerk nodded to her as she walked past. When she got to her car she realized she had left it unlocked. Her luggage had been stolen.

The clerk was terribly sorry — shocked, actually. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But what was one to do, except report the theft to the police?

“I know how y’all feel,” said a voice behind her.

Geri turned and found herself facing a deeply tanned young man wearing a bathing suit and a cut-off football jersey that said in big block letters: “Prop. LSU Athletic Department.”

The young man smiled amiably. “When I got ripped off in Ocho Rios they cleaned me out good. Luggage, passport, traveler’s checks — the works. Only thing I had left was my spear-fishing stuff. ‘Course, spear fishing’s why I’m here. If y’all need clothes, I got a few things. Prob’ly fit you. Girl they belonged to was about your size. We kinda went our separate ways.”

He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Mike.”

She hesitated. “Justine,” she said.

“Enchanté, y’all.” He grinned.

His last name was Godchaux — “Godshaw,” he pronounced it. He was island-hopping his way down to South America. He was starting work as an oil-company geologist in Baton Rouge in May, his first job out of college. He told her this on the way up the stairs to his room, which, like hers, was on the second floor but in the back.

“How about you?” he asked, fitting the big, rusted skeleton key to the door.

“Me?”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a publicist at Bertram.”

“Bertram?”

“The publishing house?” Unintentionally, her answer came out with a sharp upward inflection, as if she could not conceive of anyone not being familiar with such a well-known name.

“Oh well, I’m not much of a reader, I guess. Y’all prob’ly from New York, then.”

“Yes,” she muttered, feeling a little shamed by the humility of his response.

He opened the door. His room was considerably smaller than hers. It was dim and stuffy. Leaning against one wall was an enormous frame backpack. He knelt down and unzipped a pouch near the bottom and pulled out a small packet of clothing. On the outside, folded so the logo was visible, was another LSU sweatshirt. Unwrapping it on the bed, he spread out the contents: a pair of denim cutoffs, bleached and frayed. A lime-green tube top. A white cotton sundress. Three bikini panties. And a navy-blue maillot swimsuit, the stretchy kind competitive swimmers wear.

“I really don’t think I could—”

“Y’all might as well use ‘em.”

Eyeing the clothes, she attempted an appreciative smile, which came out tight and condescending. To wear a sweatshirt identical to his... well, that felt uncomfortably like the first step toward a relationship that she definitely did not want to encourage. The cutoffs looked like they’d be tight in the hips, a struggle to zip up. The tube top was certainly not her style. The thought of putting on someone else’s underwear was vaguely nauseating. And the sundress was far too cutesy. The swimsuit might be okay, if it fit. She should never have allowed him to talk her into coming up and taking a look.

And yet, she wanted desperately to swim. To throw herself into the perfect blue water of the bay. To wash away the defeats and frustrations of the day.

Suddenly, spasmodically, she gathered up the clothes spread over the bed. “Thanks,” she said, retreating immediately toward the door.

He shrugged and smiled. “Hey, no problem. Y’know, if y’all can stand getting up early tomorrow morning, we’re going out past the reef for a little fishing. Bébé’s always got extra room on the boat.”

“Thanks again, but I don’t know the first thing about spear fishing.”

“You don’t have to fish. You can just paddle around. It’s pretty.”

She forced a smile. “Thanks.”

“Well, hey, if you change your mind, let me know tonight. I’ll be around the hotel somewhere.”

Geri felt the eyes of the desk clerk on her as she came down the stairs to the lobby wearing the swimsuit and carrying a white, slightly threadbare hotel towel that was too small to wrap around her waist.

“Mademoiselle—”

She raised a hand, not wanting to discuss the theft further. “I’ll be back in a while. We can talk then.”

She scuttled across the road, the asphalt burning hot under her bare feet, and onto the powdery soft sand of the beach. It was empty, even now in the late afternoon when the sun-wary generally ventured out, and as she looked down the curving scimitar of sand and the perfectly tilted palms she wondered why. But rather than dwell on it, she dropped her towel and strode directly into the water.

It was warm and clear and the sand beneath it was as white as the beach. It looked clean, beautifully clean, in fact, and alive with small schools of tiny bright fish that darted away from her footfalls. The fish were perfectly visible, for there were no waves, nothing more than ripplets. A half-mile distant was the reason why: The feathery line of surf where the big swells of the open Atlantic crashed against the barrier reef.

Her heart lifting, she began to splash ahead, running now, running as fast as she could, ready to throw herself into the water, ready to swim as long and hard as she could, as far as the barrier reef, if necessary, if that was what it would take to work the awful, airless, self-conscious paralysis out of her life.

But then there was a strange thing. She ran fifty feet and the water deepened only slightly, up to the middle of her calf. Another fifty feet and it was up to her knee. Another fifty feet and it was actually shallower. And around her she began to see patches of sea plants, dark brown against the white sand bottom. She found herself in a shallow sand-bottomed channel through what was now an expanse of sea vegetation.

Perspiring heavily, with the heat of the sun reflecting off the water rising up thickly around her, she made her way down the channel. It began to deepen and she felt a wild sense of relief. Then, without warning, the channel ended and her left foot fell in the midst of the slithery, clinging bottom grass. Shuddering with disgust, she pulled her foot out and staggered back. She laced her fingers together for an eyeshade and looked around her.

She was maybe two hundred yards from the shore and the perfect crescent of the beach, and the tilting perfectly spaced palm trees, and the perfect white jumble of the town with the emerald mountain rising behind. In the other direction, five or six hundred yards away, was the reef, the surf just barely audible now, a sandpapery rasping sound. She was all alone in the midst of the perfect turquoise bay.

All alone because everybody but her knew it was unswimmable.

She began to laugh and, letting her legs give way, sat down with a splash in the shallow water. Sat like a child with her bottom on the sand and her legs crooked in front of her. Laughing, then crying, hanging her head down and watching through blurry eyes as the tears dripped into the warm, clear water.

Skipping dinner, she went out on the narrow wood veranda outside her room and tried to write postcards.

Dear Gang, Scribbling at you from a beautiful turquoise hotel on a beautiful turquoise bay. Unswimmable, but beautiful. Had a near car wreck, luggage was stolen, but lunch was good. Tomorrow I move on, in search of love, adventure, and a decent beach! Missing you all but not missing work...

Keep it light and tight, that was the trick. But somehow, when she was done, she had trouble making herself sign it. “Dear Gang” — as if she were writing a houseful of sorority sisters instead of the three women, one of whom she disliked intensely. “Missing you” — in truth, she did not miss them at all, not even Beth, with whom she had once been friends. The only verity in what she had written was about work. After eleven years in publishing, she was at a small, stale dead end: in a marketing group for a house that hadn’t had a hit in years.

Dear Verna, Traveling again, this time in the Caribbean...

Verna was the only one of her three sisters she kept in touch with. She lived in Columbus, Ohio, in a condominium she shared with her companion, Darlene. For years, her literal and her sister’s figurative distance from the mainstream Midwest had united them, but of late Geri had felt the bond dissolving as Verna and Darlene made plans to adopt a child and settled into a relationship and a lifestyle that, the issue of sexual orientation aside, was more stiflingly conventional than that of their own parents.

“Traveling again, this time in the Caribbean” — and the time before in the Yucatan, and the time before in Prague, and the time before in Spain, and the time before she was not sure, either Peru or Argentina. Traveling again...

She set the pen down and looked out over the bay, black now, the distant breakers invisible, the water indistinguishable from the sky except for the stars, thick and bright and unbearably distant. Feeling her eyes grow wet — would she never stop crying this day? — she fled the room. On the way down the stairs, she ran into Mike Godchaux.

“You coming with us tomorrow?” he asked.

His breath was sweetish. She realized he’d been drinking. “I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

He looked her up and down, very slowly, very frankly. “You look like you’re a good swimmer. Good shoulders. Strong legs. If you can swim, you can come.”

She felt herself flush. “I don’t know—”

“What, are you gonna spend the day wading in that damn puddle out there? All by yourself? What kinda vacation is that?”

She stiffened. “Thank you for the invitation,” she said, coolly. She turned away and added, “And thank you for the clothes.”

“ ‘Thank you for the invitation,’ ” he mimicked, holding his chin up high, “ ‘And thank you for the clothes.’ ”

Her head snapped back. “What did you say?”

A slow, satisfied smile spread across his face. “I knew there was a human being in there.”

She glared at him, furious, but unable to think of anything to say. Finally, she turned and walked down the remainder of the stairs.

“We watched you, y’know,” he called out after her as she crossed the lobby floor. “Bébé and me. Couldn’t figure out why you didn’t ask us why nobody was out in the water. Then we laid bets about how far you’d walk before you gave up. Gerard said a hundred meters. I said, hell no, she’s good for a lot more.”

She stopped just short of the door, unable to let the remark pass unchallenged.

“What makes you think you know the first thing about me?”

“What makes you think I don’t?” He smiled lazily.

“We haven’t exchanged more than two dozen words.”

“Oh, I think I’d put the count consider’bly higher.” His smile widened. “An’ climbin’ even as we speak.”

“You go to hell!”

She walked south along the shore road, following the same route she’d driven earlier in the day in her car before reaching the top of the point and turning back. Feeling trapped again, trapped by her own angry exit into a route she had no interest in taking. She clenched her teeth and balled up her fists like a little girl, then she was crying again, and thinking about fragile, stiff things: the yellowing bonsai in the window on the airshaft of her walk-up back in New York; her mother’s ormolu music box, and the sad, tinkly Chopin nocturne it played. Then the notes of the nocturne seemed to fall apart and become random and atonal and she realized she was hearing the squeak of bats, swooping in the blackness around her. She brought up her arms around her face and ran.

She went a little mad that night — that was what you would call it, she supposed with an odd sense of self-distance. She went back to the hotel but she never went to bed; instead she sat out on the veranda under the cold starlight, drifting in and out of sleep, struggling each time she awoke with the sensation that she was falling through space at an enormous speed, a sensation so vivid that she kept looking up at the Big Dipper, certain that its bright stars must have come closer, perhaps even close enough to resolve into suns, orbited by frozen, lifeless planets.

Sometime later, she had no real idea how long, she heard voices, indistinguishable, and then a laugh which she recognized as Mike Godchaux’s. The night had taken away her anger toward him, and the bay, perfect again in the morning light, beckoned once more.

“Wait!” she cried out from the veranda. “I’m coming along.”

The boat, a long, brightly painted dugout canoe, slid effortlessly across the shallow waters that she had waded in the day before. In the stern, Mike guided their progress, gripping the handle of a small outboard, following the bright sand channels through the dark masses of seaweed. At the last minute, Bébé had backed out, needing to prepare the hotel for a small busload of tourists unexpectedly coming in from the capital. Mike had smeared zinc oxide on his nose and every time she looked back he grinned broadly at her, his teeth the exact bright white shade of the sun protectant.

He looked a little like Tom Cruise, she decided — when the actor had been younger, of course.

As the reef neared, and the sound of the surf grew louder and resolved from a constant, low rumble to distinctly separate booms, Geri began to grow nervous.

“Is there a passage through the reef?”

Mike, grinning like a Cheshire cat, shook his head. “You wait for the swell,” he explained. “Just before it hits, you gun it. You’ve got a good three or four feet of water over the coral if you time it right.”

She nodded and bit her lip.

“Don’t worry. I’ve made this trip a dozen times.”

The reef was less than a hundred yards away now. The big, dark-blue rollers from the open Atlantic pounded the coral, shooting spray dozens of feet up into the air. Mike, from the stern, motioned for her to hold on to the gunwales of the boat. She gripped the worn wood convulsively, regretting that she had agreed to come along.

A wave loomed, blotting out part of the sky, and smashed before them, drenching Geri’s heated skin with spray. The boat slowed, almost stopped, then surged ahead directly into the next building wave. The bow pitched at a frightening angle, and Geri felt herself lifted upward, upward, so steeply she clutched the gunwales as tight as she could for fear of being thrown backward. Then, miraculously, they were on top of the wave and the deep blue Atlantic was spread out before her, all the way to the distant horizon, open water all the way to Africa, and then they were roller-coastering down so fast that Geri’s stomach got the fluttery elevator feeling. She shuddered with relief. They had made it past the reef.

When they had gone far enough that the sound of the surf was only a murmur, Mike threw a rusted, bowl-shaped anchor overboard. He handed Geri a pair of blue fins and a mask with a snorkel.

“You’re a good swimmer, right?”

“Pretty good,” she said, cautiously.

“You ever snorkel before?”

“Once.”

“Well, it’s great here. Whole mess of fish, especially by the reef. We jump in here then swim back.”

“By the reef?” There was no way she was going back anywhere near there.

“It’s calmer under water. If you’re a decent swimmer, you’ll be okay.”

“No, thanks. I’ll just stay here.”

“But you came all the way out—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll be fine here.”

She watched him swim off. The boat rode higher, felt more skittish on the deep ocean swells with him gone. It rose and fell a good twelve feet with each wave. The water was a dazzling deep blue. In the troughs, the water obliterated half the sky. At the crests, the town, the beach, and the emerald mountain were arrayed in the distance more perfectly than ever. Geri took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh salt air. She felt herself loosening up. She felt less afraid. The roller-coaster ride was actually quite exhilarating. At the crest of one particularly big wave, she actually rose up a little way in the boat, still holding on to the gunwales, and let out a little yip of excitement. This was more like it. This was more of what she had gone on vacation for.

Unfortunately, after a few minutes of riding the swells, she began to get seasick. She was on the verge of vomiting when she remembered hearing somewhere that if you were in the water, motion sickness was not as much of a problem.

Had she been in a different state of mind, she might have found the trouble she had getting into the water comical. Every time she tried to step over the gunwale, the long, round-hulled boat threatened to capsize — or so it seemed. She tried going over at the bow, but it rose up too high. Same story in the stern, plus the outboard was in the way. There was the water, inches away, and she could not get into it. She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, feeling the frustration that had dogged her since her arrival in the town. Feeling the hysteria lurking behind it. Wondering why her life seemed to have been diminished by her every choice, separated by each decision from other lives, reduced in momentum to the point where the foot-high side of a wooden boat could stop it cold.

At the top of the next wave, she pulled the mask down over her face, bit hard on the snorkel mouthpiece, and threw herself in.

She went under the surface a bit, then came up, blowing water out of the snorkel. The boat floated lightly next to her. The water was a marvelous temperature, warm but refreshing. Her nausea subsided almost immediately. She scissored her legs and felt the power of the fins push her shoulders out of the water. She bobbed there for a while, riding the swells up and down, feeling herself relax. Then she took a deep breath and put her face in the water.

It was not like anything she had experienced before.

She was floating over a field of tall sea grass anchored in a sandy bottom. The grass bent lazily over, each green blade drooping in the same direction. But as she watched, the grass began to straighten. She thought she might touch it, but felt herself being pulled away. Then she was accelerating upward, flying in the astonishingly clear water high above the reaching fingers of the grass. A moment’s pause, and she was plunging back down, racing toward the bottom, and the grass was drooping again, changing color as it flattened from a deep green to a silvery gray. Another wave came along and the cycle began all over again.

A school of small fish came along, silvery, like the flattened grass. They rose with the water, fell with it, hung motionless at the crests, never changing in their positions relative to each other, rigid in space, like some living crystal lattice. Geri kicked her fins and swam near. A simultaneous shiver passed through the fish, and the lattice translated itself — seemingly instantaneously — to a position several feet away. Geri kicked again, approached, and the school shivered out of reach. She kicked again. And again. Never spooking the fish. Never disturbing their precise order. But never getting closer than a constant distance — a little under three feet — either. She wondered if they were all following one fish, or one simultaneous impulse.

She was exhilarated and mesmerized, simultaneously. She felt something let go deep within herself. She allowed her arms and legs to float free, to go where buoyancy would take them. She felt her breathing slow down, the hollow whooshes of the snorkel tube coming easily now, a rhythm slower than her heart, faster than the waves, but in concert with them all.

She could see her shadow on the grass, cast with the clarity of a cloud’s shadow on dry land. And then she saw another shadow. And a hand touched the small of her back.

She surfaced with him. Smiling broadly — he really did look like Tom Cruise when he smiled — he held up out of the water four fat fish, a delicately pink color, their fins a deeper shade, almost red.

“Snapper,” he said. “We’re going to have one fine déjeuner this après-midi.”

“Mmmnh,” she said, imagining them sizzling fragrantly on the hotel stove. Then she imagined drinking wine with them and feeling a little drunk, and a warm, liquid feeling spread within her. And when Mike Godchaux threw the fish and his spear gun in the canoe and paddled back to her, she reached out and put her hands on his broad, muscled shoulders and allowed him to pull her, like a tugboat, back to the boat, into which they both threw their masks, snorkels, and fins. And as they floated in the warm water, she lifted the straps of the bathing suit he had given her from her own shoulders and allowed him to complete the job of pulling the stretchy maillot down off her body. And he shucked his trunks and they floated in the clear water, and she looked at his nakedness for a long, hungry moment before they fitted their bodies together.

They were both back in the boat and she was toweling her hair, when Mike said: “Well, you sure gave me a surprise.”

She twisted the towel around her hair and lifted her chin. “What do you mean?”

“Well, me and Bébé, when we saw you yesterday, we thought for sure you were trolling for dark meat.”

“Excuse me?” She frowned — impossible that she had heard what she thought she had heard.

“You know, a little dark island rhythm to liven up the old white clapboard house?”

He was smiling again, like Tom Cruise still, but with a cocked eyebrow. An insinuating, amused eyebrow.

Her back stiffened, and a hot pain shot up between her shoulder blades.

“Lotta girls do that, you know,” he said. “Want to try that devil’s food just once before they settle down to life with Mr. White Bread. When you had lunch with that trucker yesterday, I said to Bébé, watch if they don’t take a room. And when you did, I said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one girl who’s not going to be interested in this white Southern boy.’”

Her entire back was in spasm now, the pain shrilling through her muscles and bones. She imagined the fish that he had caught must have felt like this when the barbed end of the spear had slammed through their sides.

“Tell you the truth, I was pretty pleased when you had that little argument and he headed off. I’m glad it worked out like this. Aren’t you?”

It took Mike Godchaux five minutes to get the ancient, coverless outboard started. Staring at the tanned wedge of his back, watching him pull again and again on the cord, each time the muscles on the backs of his upper arms tensing into crisp ropes, she went a little mad for the second time. She saw herself back at the hotel, on the terrace where they dined, and all around people laughing at her. Bébé. Gerard. Mike Godchaux. Etienne Dalhousie. The woman to whom she’d addressed the question about sewage on the beach. The vendors whose awning she’d knocked over. Her coworkers back in New York, especially the poisonous Marta. Her sister and her sister’s lover. Her parents. All laughing, all amused at this woman who had reached thirty-three years of age without, evidently, learning anything about the basic process of connecting with other human beings.

Unbelievably, the spasm that had speared her back grew worse, the pain shrieking up to her neck and down to the bottoms of her legs, filling her eyes with tears, compressing her lips, turning the skin around them white. Unable to speak, nearly paralyzed, it took her forever to reach down and grab the cocked spear gun from the bottom of the canoe. She put the stock to her shoulder, touched her finger to the trigger, and aimed it at the center of Mike’s back.

The engine started and then almost died. Mike played with the throttle, twisting it back and forth, and coaxed it to life. When it was running smoothly, he turned around.

His instinctive reaction when he saw the spear gun pointed at him was to smile that Tom Cruise smile. At the joke she was surely playing. She realized then that there was no malice in him, no desire to humiliate her. He was an innocent, happy in his bright and easy world, totally ignorant of the hard and painful landscape of hers. The realization stopped her from sending the spear through his chest, splitting the breastbone, puncturing his heart. She lowered the gun several inches and pulled the trigger.

The spear passed through the flesh on the inside of his right thigh and buried itself in the wooden plank he was sitting on. He bellowed in shock and pain, doubling over and grabbing his leg.

Her back spasm disappeared. It was as if the spear had taken all her pain and transferred it to Mike.

She threw the spear gun overboard and put on her fins and her mask and snorkel.

“What are you doing?” he screamed. “What have you done?” There was a good deal of blood flowing from his leg, spreading out on the seat, and dripping onto the bottom of the canoe. A lot of blood, but it didn’t appear that any vital artery or vein had been cut.

“You’re crazy!” he screamed. “You’re insane! Help me get this thing out! I’m stuck! Can’t you see I’m pinned here?”

She could see, and she counted it as a piece of good luck. The only problem facing her now was the outboard. She solved that by pulling the rubber hose out of the orange gas tank that was under her seat in the bow. The engine sputtered and died. She lifted up the gas can and threw it overboard. He wouldn’t be following her now. Especially when she cut the anchor line and the boat began drifting toward the reef. He would have his hands full just getting himself free and stopping the advance of the boat. But there was a paddle on board, and he was strong. He would be okay.

“What are you doing?! What in Christ’s name are you doing? What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?”

His shout was the last thing she heard before she threw herself backward over the gunwale of the canoe.

She swam hard away from the boat, away from the direction of the reef, toward the open Atlantic. When she surfaced, sputtering, in the trough of a wave, she was unable to see the canoe, unable to see anything other than the steep blue hills of water on either side of her and the pale sky above. But when she rose up, she spotted the canoe. Already a hundred feet away and increasing in distance as she watched. Mike was still struggling in the stern — it was not clear whether he had freed himself yet. But he would. He was too competent to do otherwise.

She adjusted the straps of her face mask, straightened the snorkel tube, and then put her face down in the water and began swimming steadily away. After a while she slowed her pace and gave herself back to the waves and water. A vast, liquid relaxation spread through her, seemed almost to dissolve the boundary between her and the water in which she floated.

She felt free. She felt alive. She felt happy. She felt grateful that she had at last found contentment and she promised herself she would keep her heart and mind and all her senses open until the current dragged her back and the last beautiful soaring wave rose up high over the reef, revealing the perfect crescent of the beach, the perfect blue of the bay, the perfect white of the town and the emerald hills behind it — and then smashed her down on the sharp coral, bringing to all the lonely, clenched years of her existence the grace of a courageous end.

Copyright © 2006 Jeff Williamson

The Happening

by Eddie Newton

Last year’s winner of the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American writer, for the EQMM Department of First Stories tale “Home,” Eddie Newton returns this month with a tongue-in-cheek cozy based on the world’s most famous mystery board game. Mr. Newton and his wife and children live in North Dakota.

1

It So Happens...

There was a mystery afoot. Or perhaps, more accurately, the foot was the mystery. It was Mystery Mansion Weekend, sponsored by former U.S. Senator Kent Powers. The family has more money than the U.S. Mint; Powers only hosts this community gathering as a way of attaching his name to something that makes the social elite of New England smile. Half the time, the patriarch of Massachusetts’s preeminent family doesn’t even bother making an appearance. He’s the golden child of New England celebrity. The Kennedys haven’t held a candle to the Powerses in decades, and they never hosted a bash like this.

The Powers mansion has a character all its own. It has three dozen rooms, a third of them bedrooms. The ballroom is as large as the average McDonald’s. Its nineteenth-century architect and decorator was a middle-aged bachelor from France named Charlemagne Haversham. He leveled everything within a square mile of the mansion’s foundation except for an old apple tree that had been there long before he ever set foot in Massachusetts. It took him ten years to build the mansion, starting in 1854. Every fall, on the anniversary of the groundbreaking, he would pick four ripe apples from the tree and bake a splendid apple pie, then ceremoniously sit and eat the entire confection in one helping. Legend has it that after the mansion was completed, he went out into the landscaped backyard and picked his apples just as he had for ten years. He baked his pie. It was still warm as he ate every last crumb. Then he climbed up on the tallest, sturdiest branch of the tree, with a rope and no further purpose in life. Old Charlie looped that noose around his neck and jumped, his pie-loaded belly bouncing when the rope drew taut.

The apple tree was gone, but the legend had stood as long as the house.

How morbid that an annual Murder Mystery Weekend is held on this very estate.

This year, old man Powers sent his son Oliver in his stead. Ollie was about as personable as a guy comes; he was immediately the life of the party. His syndicated radio show had been the most popular thing on AM for years now. The Voice of Choice, he was dubbed. Supposedly, he was the searcher after truth, he who deciphered the tangled political spin. He was credited with a large influence in getting his brother elected to the governorship in Massachusetts. There were “Ol lovers” who believed that every word that dripped from his golden tongue was truth itself. Right now, he was settling his considerable bulk down on a leather sofa. The only thing bigger than Oliver Powers’s mouth was Ollie himself.

Soon he was regaling a tiny woman in an even tinier dress with his theory of how extremist factions within the government secretly experiment on random small towns, infecting their drinking water with designer viruses in an effort to prepare the nation against biological attack by rogue nations, unbeknownst to the upper echelons of the three branches of government. The woman was listening with interest. Did she buy this garbage or was she amazed by his effortless fabrication?

The woman was wearing a stunning scarlet outfit. She was beautiful, but no older than her early twenties, easily half Oliver’s age. Her jet-black hair was shoulder length and perfectly framed her stunning face. She was a vision, and a paragon of politeness as she listened to Oliver’s bombastic diatribe. It was hard to tell whether the look on her face was accepting naiveté or intelligent discernment.

There were six players this year, and each had a role. Ollie was a professor and seemed to believe that giving long orations on tedious topics was a requirement for his part. Oliver Powers was paid to talk, and he appeared very adept at his job. He continued to batter the young woman in the tiny scarlet dress with facts pertaining to everything from the Civil War to the legitimacy of NASCAR as a sport. One man was staring at Ollie, amazed that anyone would listen to more than two words out of the overflowing mouth. He sat in his yellow jacket, as bright as a fresh daffodil, staring at Oliver Powers and seesawing from doubt to outright disbelief.

Detective Adam Jericho wasn’t buying Oliver Powers’s tall tales. He’d seen enough bull in his life to know the beef from the bouillon. He had effectively tuned out Ollie’s rants and he concentrated on the game. He solved real-life murders for a living, surely he could puzzle out this silly little game. He looked over his clues, and as with most games that mimic real life, nothing quite jelled for him. A manufactured mystery left no room for the quality that Jericho most depended on in his occupation: instinct. Logic was anathema to him. Like poker or Yahtzee, detecting was, he thought, two-thirds luck and one-third chance. Brains were extra baggage.

The corpse was missing a foot. What kind of murderer takes the foot? And why? A lunatic podiatrist? A maniac with a foot fetish? A diminutive psychopath who will do anything for an extra foot? This was Jericho’s first year at this little soiree. He’d earned his place here as a result of a high-publicity bust that had made him something of a celebrity in New England the past few weeks. He had personally tracked down serial killer Shane Richards and put the maniac behind bars. When the invitation came, he thought it might be fun. He had spent the better part of the last three decades tracking down serial murderers. It was his specialty. He was as good as they got. Surely, a little game like this would be nothing. But Adam Jericho had never gone up against someone with a predilection for severed feet.

Another player was an old woman with a hat that looked like a dead peacock. Her hair was an awful shade of blue. She swore up and down that she had solved the mystery, but the rules of the silly game stated that the solution would be revealed at dinner that night. That was three hours away yet. Three... very... long... hours... away.

There was a young girl in the group, the daughter of a rich oil magnate from down South. He sent his daughter to Massachusetts as his emissary, much as Kent Powers had sent his son in his place. The girl looked no older than sixteen and was unnaturally pale. One would imagine that a tanning booth was within the family budget? Or even a weekend on the beaches of Jamaica? Hair streaked red and held by little neon hair-ties stuck up in clumps all over her head. Her T-shirt had the charming epithet Drop Dead across the chest. She had been here when Jericho arrived, along with the woman in the small red dress.

Miss White stared blankly at the walls much of the time. She had set aside the material for the game moments after receiving the stacks of facts. She had either solved it instantly or had no interest in doing so.

An actress by the name of Kelly Greene was whisking around the room in a dress cut nearly to her navel, trying to be the center of attention. Someone ought to have informed her that she was about ten years and two tummy-tucks past being the center of anyone’s attention. She was being talked about for an Oscar this year for her work in All in Good Time. Her publicist insisted that she put on a show here at the mystery mansion, for there were powerful people about tonight. Word had it that the woman in the tiny scarlet dress that Ollie was drooling over had influence in Hollywood publishing. She would be a good person to have on your side in Tinseltown, especially around Oscar time.

Not one of these people seemed like the type to amputate feet. Not even Ms. Greene, who was overacting her part as a lustful maid. She added some character touches of her own, making the maid Southern, though the accent sounded more like an Irish nanny mimicking a German with a lisp. She also declared that the maid was an alcoholic; such was her excuse to down Southern Comfort as if it were water. She wasn’t the type who could hurt a fly. Detective Jericho was starting to seriously suspect himself, though he couldn’t find a spare limb anywhere amongst his belongings. The game was so contrived and generic that he’d have declared the butler did it, but no one was playing a butler.

What kind of murder mystery didn’t have a butler, anyway?

Supper drew nearer with such excruciating slowness that instead of the murderer, Jericho wondered if he would end up being the murderee for lack of sustenance. Finally the cook announced that the meal would be served in thirty minutes. Although Jericho’s belly rumbled in anticipation, all thoughts of food and solutions to silly made-up murders would be far from his mind when the thirty-minute mark arrived. He decided to follow the annoying Oliver Powers around after his lovely consort went upstairs to “wash up” for the meal. Ollie meandered through room after room, looking at the detailed architecture that had been designed by the suicidal Charlemagne well over a century ago as if he had never seen it before. Perhaps he had not. It must be a rough life if one has never laid eyes on one of one’s father’s mansions.

Aside from a short and rather confrontational conversation between Ollie and the old lady with blue hair, the next few minutes were uneventful. The old woman argued that late-night talk shows are subversive outlets for extremists who believe that all drugs should be legalized. Oliver countered that Letterman didn’t have a subversive bone in his body. As the old woman went on to assert that Letterman’s Top Ten List was a subliminal instrument for getting teens to smoke pot, Jericho made his way away from the nonsense.

Thinking that the dinner bell ought to be ringing any second, Jericho went out to the main ballroom with the others. Oliver and the old woman followed him, neither talking, both fuming. Everyone was gathered again but for the woman in the tiny red getup, the powerful publishing exec. Dinner was waiting on her. The ageing actress volunteered to get her. “Maybe she fell in the toilet,” she quipped as she bounced up the stairs, and everyone got to staring longingly at the table set with lavish china and expensive silverware. Jericho’s name was embroidered on a napkin at the foot of the table. That got him to thinking again about the foot... the mystery they were here to solve... And then he solved it. He knew the answer, without a doubt. He was fairly sure he was the only one who had puzzled out the correct solution. Detective Adam Jericho was once again going to dazzle the common folk with his breathtaking deductions.

Then there was a scream upstairs and all thoughts of dinner and missing feet left Jericho’s head. Here was something else to engage the sleuthing mind, something more than just a game. The over-the-hill actress appeared at the top of the staircase. She was sobbing theatrically. This was a scene that Adam Jericho had seen a hundred times before. It wasn’t the type of moment that could be acted, not even by De Niro or Streep. Certainly not by a woman who starred in such trash as Petty Cash and The Arkadelphia Conspiracy. This was a genuine moment. If the Academy were passing out trophies right now, Ms. Greene would be walking away with some gold.

“She’s dead,” she bawled. “She’s been murdered.”

2

What Happened?

The cops were immediately called, but this being an old mansion, and there being a murder and all, the night decided to erupt into a fantastic storm. The rains would prevent the police from coming for some while. Adam Jericho took charge of the crime scene, sifting through the evidence with a fine-tooth comb. A comb that revealed hairs that were definitely not the property of a woman in her twenties. The hairs were blue. Jericho bagged them with a suspicious glance at the old woman, who peeked through the doorway with the others. They were like vultures to carrion. Luckily the corpse was in the bathroom, away from prying eyes.

The woman who had been in the tiny red dress wasn’t wearing the dress anymore. A red towel was wrapped around her body, as if she’d been ready to take a shower. Her head was stuffed into the toilet bowl like so much excrement. Someone had held her head under the water until she drowned. Her hands were limp on either side of the bowl. If she’d given the murderer a fight, she had lost. What a shameful way to die. Jericho saw to it that no one saw the state of the corpse except for him (and Kelly Greene, who had seen too much already). He would not disturb the corpse before the tech boys showed up.

The others watched every move he was making as he examined the bedroom. This wasn’t some highway accident that you just couldn’t turn away from. They had all spent the afternoon with this woman. So he walked over and closed the door to cut off the gawkers’ view.

He found her journal. It was sitting beside a half-eaten bagel spread with cream cheese. She’d made an entry before she’d been stuffed into the toilet and drowned. “I think I’m in trouble” was all it said. Short, simple, and completely damning. If the girl in the scarlet dress was suspicious of one of the others in this mansion, surely she had confided in someone.

Someone had gone through her things. Her bureau drawers were all open and clothes were scattered about. What had they been looking for? Was it a robbery gone bad? Had a thief been caught with his hand in the cookie jar? The woman in scarlet was a powerful Hollywood executive. She’d been sporting fine jewelry all night. Had someone wanted her fine necklaces and bracelet so much that they resorted to murder? Or was it something more personal? Did someone in this mansion have a bone to pick with little miss tiny red dress?

Jericho came across a key to her door as he prowled about the room. He locked the scene of the crime up tight for the tech boys. They would arrive right after the storm let up, whenever that might be. The way the wind and sky were warring right now, it didn’t look as if that would be before morning. That gave Detective Jericho plenty of time to interrogate the people at this happening. He figured he might as well get some interviews in while the events were still fresh in everyone’s mind. He descended the steps. As he scanned the lobby full of distraught players of a game suddenly turned real, he saw immediately who he wanted to question first.

He escorted the sniffling Kelly Greene into the kitchen, despite the simmering glare he got from Oliver Powers. The radio personality seemed to distrust him, though he had never given the gargantuan man any reason to be suspicious. Jericho made note of his reaction. Perhaps the powerful Mr. Powers was trying to cover his own guilt by pretending to suspect Jericho of foul play. But Oliver would have to wait. He had to focus his attentions now on the woman who discovered the body.

Kelly Greene was sniffling still and Jericho couldn’t help but believe the tears were real. He’d seen a number of her films and was quite positive that she was not a good enough actress to manufacture such waterworks. But were they tears of shock and fear, or simply the reaction of a woman who had done a terrible thing and was having a hard time dealing with it? There are many people in this world who have murdered but are not natural killers. Most people don’t have the stomach for it. They might muster the drive to complete the act, but guilt gets them in the end. Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have closed half their cases if the killers hadn’t wanted to be caught.

Jericho took Ms. Greene’s hand gently in his. The personal touch. He was a friend. You could tell ole Adam anything. And Kelly Greene did tell him everything, precious little that it was. She had gone up to check on the woman in red. She had rapped on the door several times, and getting no response, had tried the doorknob. The door had been open. Kelly went inside, calling the woman’s name. No answer. Kelly admitted that she had started getting worried. She saw the drawers that looked like someone had gone through them. Then, entering the bathroom, she saw the woman in the red towel. That’s when she’d run downstairs, hysterical. She hadn’t seen anything else. She didn’t notice anyone acting suspicious.

“Has anyone talked to you about her jewelry?” Jericho asked.

Kelly Greene looked off into the distance, searching her memory. She came up with a little something. Yes, the pale teenager from the South had asked Kelly if she thought the jewels complemented the red dress. “Very pretty,” the girl had said, or so Kelly Greene recalled. Was the actress just trying to throw Jericho off the scent?

Jericho went upstairs again, to the scene of the murder. He wanted to verify that the woman in scarlet was no longer wearing the diamond jewelry. He carefully pulled her submerged head out of the toilet and looked inside the bowl in case something had slipped off. Nothing. Her ears were naked; her neck was bare; her wrists were empty of ornamentation. Jericho now had a solid motive for her murder. This wasn’t personal. It was pure greed. Or was Kelly Greene just making it look like that? He hadn’t made up his mind yet, but all signs right now pointed to the pale teenager.

The teenager’s name was Sally Freddins. She sat silently in the conservatory as Jericho circled her. He wanted to intimidate her a little, but the girl seemed to live on a planet all her own. No, she didn’t know the woman in red. No, she hadn’t thought about anyone, including herself, stealing the jewels. No, she hadn’t paid any attention to the woman’s necklace or bracelet or earrings. No, she didn’t give one hoot or holler what Jericho “suspected” or what he found missing in the scarlet-toweled corpse’s room, or that Detective Adam Jericho had put sixteen murderers behind bars in his long and illustrious career. Sally Freddins just wanted to go back to Texas.

Jericho finally excused her after she ducked more than a dozen questions, answering without more than a mumble. He did notice the cut on the side of her head, though. Had the demure albino been in a tussle? Had the poor victim in the scarlet dress put up a fight, trying to defend herself against a lunatic kleptomaniac teen who was holding her head in the toilet? Jericho watched the antisocial girl leave and wondered just what she was doing at this little party when she so obviously detested companionship. Was she here merely to rob other rich snobs? Sally was at the top of Jericho’s list.

The old woman with the blue hair was named Margaret Painsbum and she soon became a veritable pain in Detective Jericho’s bum. Jericho managed to ask her only one question before she turned the tables on him, interrogating him like a CIA agent with a Communist mole in the hot seat. Jericho actually found himself sweating inside that sunshine-yellow coat, feeling like he was under a hot lamp, though the library to which they’d retreated was shadowy and cool. He wondered if the old hag might have been a cruel librarian or maybe a prison guard before she married Gene Painsbum of Painsbum Enterprises a century or so ago. “Do you have an alibi for the time the victim was attacked and killed?” she demanded. “You’re the only one of us who is not independently wealthy, so isn’t it logical that you would most desire the valuable jewels? I noticed you eyeing the woman earlier tonight; did she spurn your romantic advances and you reacted violently? Just what did you learn from all those psychopaths you tracked down?”

Jericho finally let her go after almost half an hour (or was it Mrs. Painsbum who let the detective go?). But not before he noticed that she had a slight tear in the brim of her peacock hat. Had she been in a struggle? Surely someone so regal would never prance around in such shabby headdress. Unless she did not want to draw attention to the ostentatious hat’s absence if she’d tried to get rid of the torn evidence. Jericho’s gut now made him suspect the old woman of foul play.

He knew that talking with Oliver Powers was going to be a treat. The massive man was parked in the large easy chair in the study. There was a smug upturn to each of his doughy cheeks, a cocky smirk that mocked Jericho’s authority. Ollie was one of those guys who thought that everyone in leadership was inept at everything they did: cops, teachers, other news folk, politicians (especially the politicians). No one knew anything in the whole wide world except the egotist himself.

“Shouldn’t we be waiting for the police to start this whole process?”

Jericho assured him that he was a cop, after all.

“I’d rather wait for the local authorities.”

Jericho knew that Oliver did not like celebrity cops. But Jericho’s fame had been hard won. He’d caught the notorious murderess Danielle Kohl when he was barely a kid! And that was just for starters. Oliver’s digs at his qualifications were getting to him. Just as Oliver Powers wanted. Why was he pushing Jericho? Was he trying to throw him off, afraid that Jericho’s superior detective skills might smoke out the murderer before the locals arrived? Maybe Ollie had a very good reason to try to stop this investigation.

Jericho let Oliver go, but he did note that the man had a white smudge on his left sleeve. It looked like cream cheese, possibly from a bagel — maybe the bagel that was sitting beside the journal of the woman in scarlet. Jericho did not recall seeing another such bagel anywhere in the mansion tonight. Another strange coincidence? There were a lot of odd parallels here. Too many. Some of those connections were not just chance.

Jericho gathered the guests together in the living room. It was time that he solved this murder.

3

What Might Have Happened

Oliver Powers sat on the davenport, engulfing nearly half of the large piece of furniture. He glared at Jericho with a look that was half amusement, as if he were a barker at a carnival sideshow, and half disdain, as if he’d have preferred to get right up and sit on Adam Jericho’s brilliant little head. On the other end of the grand sofa sat Kelly Greene, keeping up the appearance of being distraught, although her performance was starting to flag. Sally Freddins was curled into a high-back leather chair with hand-carved birch legs turned in ornate shapes and stained as dark as Sally was pale. The chair huddled in the shadows and Sally seemed to blanket herself in the darkness, almost disappearing into the sliver of night. Margaret Painsbum looked as if being relegated to the audience — the subject of speculation instead of the purveyor of questioning — was pure torture. She stared out of withered eyes as Jericho began to outline the events of the night.

It started as the woman in the red dress ascended the steps to retire to her room before dinner. Jericho had been there when Oliver bade her goodbye. They had all seen Kelly and the woman go their separate ways at the top of the stairs, after a short conversation in which they had briefly discussed the possibility that the killer in the game was the woman in scarlet. The lady in red had answered Kelly with a sly smile. She went to her room alone, though she was not alone for long. Jericho whirled around and glared at Margaret Painsbum, who was still staring at him like a hungry vulture. He was holding the Ziploc bag that contained her hair.

“You were in that room,” he accused the old woman.

She sat still, unblinking. She was not rattled at all. Either she hid her guilt well, or she was not the murderer. Jericho still wasn’t positive, but this was the process that all great detectives went through to solve the case: Poirot, Holmes, Frank and Joe Hardy.

Mrs. Painsbum did not deny it. In fact, she nodded her head once, slowly. She admitted to being there! Jericho found it very suspicious that she had not mentioned this before. A wide smile spread across his face.

But then the old woman asserted that she had been invited to stop by the room of the woman in the red dress. When Jericho pressed her for an explanation another look flickered across her eye: something that wasn’t stubborn superiority. It looked more like shame.

“Fine. You need proof of my innocence...” She reached up and lifted off her hat. Her blue hair came with it. She was bald beneath the camouflage of hat and hair. “She said she had a comb that could loosen some of the snarls in this thing. Wigs get so tangled, you see. I even tore my hat with the comb, pulling the snarls out. Said she’d help me stitch the hat. Tomorrow. Never, I guess. Nice girl. Didn’t ask a thing about the cancer. Didn’t have pity. Just wanted to help me look nice.” Her voice trailed off. Did Jericho hear it crack at the end? Was it in sorrow at the passing of a kind stranger, or was she so humiliated that her concrete countenance had crumbled?

Moving on...

He had all but eliminated Margaret Painsbum. She could be lying, but he didn’t think so. Besides, he had other suspects. He turned to Oliver Powers and looked down his nose at the mountain of opinionated flesh. He hoped with all his heart that Powers was the killer. “You shared a bagel with the deceased!” For dramatic effect, Jericho thrust his finger in Oliver’s face. He pulled it back when it looked as if Powers was considering biting the extremity right off. “Explain that stain on your shirt sleeve!”

Oliver, too, had an explanation. One that was also less than flattering. This interrogation was turning into an exercise in embarrassment.

“I went to her room. I brought her a bagel. More original than flowers, I thought. I asked her if she’d care to see me after this game was over. She... wasn’t interested. I told her to keep the bagel. No hard feelings. A guy like me can get girls whenever he wants. It wasn’t a big deal.” He faltered in the middle, but by the end of his statement, the Powers attitude was back in full force. Humiliation was a state seldom visited by a Powers, and one they were quick to recover from. Jericho felt some smug satisfaction at the fact that Ollie had been turned down by the woman in red.

It was the other girl’s turn, little Sally from Texas, who looked more like death than the corpse upstairs. He walked right up to her and leaned into the chair in which she was trying to disappear. Her pale face glowed in the thick shadow. “And where did you get that cut?” he said. Sally’s hand went up to her head, almost as if she’d forgotten about it, a guilty reminder of a terrible sin, like an adulterer who forgets his mistress’s lipstick smeared across his neck. Jericho enjoyed watching the rich little girl squirm. Her life of convenience was over. This quiet little thief-turned-murderer was going to jail.

She looked confused, almost as if she’d just woken up. Jericho wondered if she’d only just realized that this wasn’t a part of the game. There was a real dead person upstairs. There was an honest-to-goodness punishment for such a transgression. There was a great detective present who was going to solve this terrible crime, and the guilty party was going to jail. This wasn’t some little rich girl’s world where money buys freedom. “The scratch... I didn’t. It wasn’t her. It was her.” Sally pointed across the room at Kelly Greene.

From her seat on the davenport the actress gaped wide-eyed at her pale accuser. “I... It was an accident. I brushed her temple with a serving tray while we were preparing for dinner.” The actress. Of course! She had been the one who told Jericho that the girl had admired the dead woman’s jewelry. She had put the scrape on Sally’s head to cause suspicion, to cause Jericho to envision some sort of struggle with the deceased, a superficial injury that might have been incurred during the tussle before the murder was complete.

Jericho crossed the room toward the guilty thespian at a brisk pace. If he’d had his handcuffs with him, he’d have been slapping them on her right then and there.

“Wait, wait,” she said, sinking back into the sofa, clearly fearful of the charging cop. No doubt she would try to come up with something, anything, that might clear her name. How clever that she had “volunteered” to find the body. Certainly it made her seem less suspicious. But she had not anticipated the presence of a world-class detective in the house. None of these pompous elitists had realized what Adam Jericho was capable of before the murder. He’d hoped his name might make someone slip up and reveal themselves. A story that fooled the locals would not be able to trick the great Adam Jericho.

But then Kelly Greene did something that made it all click. She reached up and tugged her ear, fiddling with the gold heart that was stabbed through her left lobe. It was a nervous gesture, completely unconscious, but it caused one of those revelations in Jericho: like at the end of a great Scooby-Doo mystery when the caretaker at the cemetery sneezes and reveals himself as the monster who’s been chasing the Scooby gang around the haunted graveyard for the last half-hour. Everything fell into place. There was suddenly a piece of incontrovertible evidence that wasn’t going to be easily explained. Someone in this room had slipped up.

“Tell us, Sally,” he said. “Why did you kill her?”

4

The Way It Happened

Sally looked even more pale than she had before, if pure white can get any whiter. She sat there, stunned. Jericho didn’t rush at her as he had Kelly. He didn’t want to frighten her. She was the killer. He had no doubt. “Where are the jewels, Sally?” If she gave them up, he’d have hard evidence. Sure, he’d put it all together. But she was rich. He needed to catch her red-handed if he was going to avoid public embarrassment. He needed the diamonds. Jericho knew she had them. Sally did not reply.

He walked around the room. Outside, the thunder rumbled, enhancing the dramatic mood in the mystery mansion. It was time to reveal what exactly had happened upstairs this evening. “This is the way it happened...” he said.

“The woman in the red dress went upstairs about the same time Kelly did. Not long after she retired to her room, after a short debate with Oliver and me, Mrs. Painsbum went to the victim’s room for help with her wig. Not long after Mrs. Painsbum left, Oliver made a brief visit with his request for a date, and was shot down. Sometime after that you came along, Miss Freddins.”

The pale girl was shaking her head, but did not speak. The others were listening with only a modicum of interest, for Jericho had accused almost everyone and had not yet provided them with a shred of evidence. He alone knew that he had Sally Freddins in the bag. And the terrified look on Sally’s face suggested that she knew that she was busted. But there was nowhere to run.

“What exactly happened when Sally knocked on the door to the woman’s room? I suppose we won’t know for sure unless Sally cares to enlighten us. Nevertheless, I can guess. The woman let you in without suspicion, Sally. Maybe because you’re the only one here who was around her own age. Whatever her motivation, she did not suspect you when she let you in. She certainly didn’t know what was coming when you grabbed her from behind.

“She knew you liked her jewels, though. And maybe she caught on a bit when you were using the bathroom in her room. Maybe it wasn’t you she was writing about, but you saw her journal. She wrote ‘I think I’m in trouble.’ Did that make you scared? Was that what made you decide you had to kill her to get the jewels? You couldn’t steal them if she’d already noticed you eyeing them, could you, Sally?”

At that point, Oliver Powers spoke up, a liberal mastermind who always came rushing to the defense of the guilty, willing to let murderers back on the streets, ready to fill the world with compassion and weakness. “What kind of evidence do you have, Jericho?”

The masterstroke. Jericho savored it. He made his dramatic pause. He wanted this climax to last as long as possible.

“It was the woman in the red dress’s hair,” he said. “It hung down on each side of her face in a perfect frame of her head. When everyone else talked about her jewels, it was the ones that we could see. You could see her bracelet and you could see her necklace, but no one had been able to see her earrings. Her hair completely covered the woman’s ears. But Sally said that she hadn’t even paid any attention to the girl’s earrings. How could she know that the woman had earrings unless she herself took them out of her ears?!”

The whole group gasped. Jericho grinned triumphantly. Of course, they were all thinking. It made perfect sense. She was as guilty as sin.

Sally leapt from the chair, tears trailing a river down her alabaster cheeks. She looked like an albino tiger loosed from its cage. Her teeth were bared. “Those were my jewels!”

She further damned herself with her outburst. Were all rich people so demented as to believe that all pretty things were their own? Jericho was thankful he wasn’t wearing a Gucci belt or she might have slain him, too, just to hitch up her jeans.

Jericho advanced on her, and Sally slowly retreated, crying hysterically. The detective drew his gun.

“Did you hold her head down while she drowned?” he taunted her. “Did you watch her choke on the water, drinking it, filling her lungs with it? How long did she take to die, Sally? Did you take off her jewelry afterward, pull it off her corpse, or had she already removed it for a shower? Did you have to pluck the earrings off of her cold, lifeless ears? Or were they already out and hidden? Is that why you ransacked the room, looking for them? Or was that just another distraction? How long were you planning this, Miss Freddins?”

The girl tripped over a step, then backed into the large table that was still set for their long-postponed game. The props for the game were all strewn about in disarray. Sally’s hand fell on the pipe. (Not the lead pipe of fame. This is the age of lead-poisoning. This one was made of good old American steel.) She grabbed the primitive weapon. If it was good enough for Colonel Mustard in the conservatory, it was good enough for her.

“Stay back,” Sally warned. Jericho kept advancing on her. She was backing toward the front door, waving the pipe in front of her. “You’re nuts.” Everyone is always crazy, Jericho thought, except for the loonies themselves. He told her to stop.

“Maybe you’re the murderer,” she said. “How do I know you won’t shoot me whether I stop or go?” The others watched the standoff between cop and criminal. The pipe was no threat to anyone but Sally herself. It certainly couldn’t stop a bullet. She opened the door and backed outside. The rain was wild and burst through the doorway. The night was chaos. Sally backed out into the storm, brandishing her pipe. She was still yelling, but no one could hear her over the thunder. Jericho kept his gun trained on her, but still she retreated. He could not bring himself to shoot the girl. She was not threatening him or anyone with that pipe. But he couldn’t very well let her get away. He lowered his aim to her left thigh at the same time a bolt of lightning crashed out of the sky and struck the steel pipe that Sally was holding like a baseball bat.

Both of her shoes exploded like firecrackers. She might have been screaming, but it couldn’t be heard over the crackling of the superheated electrical fire that scorched her skin and clothing to a charred crust in mere seconds. When her corpse cooled enough for Jericho to get a good look, he saw that her left foot was completely gone and her hands were melted around the steel pipe as if it had always been a part of her body. There was a hole in her skull the size of a lemon where the lightning blew her boiling brains out like buckshot. Justice is served hot, Jericho thought. A murderer sent to God’s version of the electric chair before the lawyers had a chance to muck it up.

Epilogue

What Really Happened

Monica Wheeler just had to get out of the little scarlet dress. The thing was too tiny. She’d been hoping there might be a cute guy or two here who also happened to be rich, and perhaps even single. But the only bloke who showed the least interest was a man old enough to be her father and fat enough to be her father, mother, and two brothers rolled into one. Since the only other choice was a stuck-up guy in a tacky yellow coat, she was eager for this little escape. A half-hour until dinner. A half-hour before she had to resume this tired little game. She was going to kill her boss for sending her on this publicity stunt.

Kelly Greene walked her upstairs and asked her for the fifth time if she was the murderer. Monica didn’t even know, or care. It was a stupid game about a fake murder. Now, if there was a real body without a foot down there, then things might be a little fun. But this was like playing a game about skydiving: Some things you can pretend, and other things have just got to be for real. She told Kelly that she really didn’t know. Kelly seemed to think it was she. Monica went to her room and wrote in her journal. She figured that Kelly was going to point her out as the murderer so she wrote “I think I’m in trouble.” She wasn’t really sad that she was going to lose this stupid game.

She needed to find something more comfortable to wear to dinner. She was tired of Oliver Powers gawking at her legs, which were showing way too much in this little red dress. She went through her drawers and dug out a more comfortable and conser-vative scarlet pantsuit. She laid out the outfit on her bed. Now she was craving a relaxing shower. She still had almost twenty-five minutes before she had to be back to the group.

There was a knock on the door. It was the old woman from downstairs. Monica had invited her up. She’d spotted a terrible snarl in the old woman’s hair and offered to give her a hand. She had this comb that could work magic with even synthetic hair. The two fought the stubborn tangle and finally worked it loose. They put a tear in Margaret’s beautiful peacock hat, though. “I can sew that later, if you like,” Monica said. Her mother had passed on from cancer years ago. She had recognized the stubborn sadness in the woman’s eyes when she first arrived. Monica immediately had a soft spot for the vulnerable curmudgeon.

She headed for the bathroom, ready to finally get out of the little scarlet number. She was stripped down and ready for the hot water when there was another knock at the door. Was it Sally? She was expecting the girl to stop by. She quickly grabbed the towel off of the sink as she headed for the door, wrapping herself in it as she went.

It was Oliver. He offered her a bagel and asked her out. Charming, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off what her towel wasn’t hiding. Not in a million years would she let Ollie get a look underneath that towel. She politely declined and he left her with the bagel. He took her decline graciously. She gobbled a bite and set the remains beside her journal, then walked toward the bathroom. She wondered again if Sally was going to stop by. And the name stopped her dead in her tracks. She stared at the mirror in front of her. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail. There were no earrings in her ears. Her neck was bare. She’d taken off the jewelry by habit, preparing for the shower. But she didn’t recall at all where she’d put them. She had a moment of panic and then she turned and went back to her dresser where she’d selected her outfit for dinner.

She yanked out random clothes in alarm as she tried to remember where she’d left the expensive diamonds. She just couldn’t have misplaced them! Sally would kill her. The girl had lent them to her when Monica first arrived at the mystery mansion. “Gosh, those are beautiful,” Monica had said after Sally had introduced herself. The bracelet and necklace and earrings were all of a set. Sally told her that they would go great with her red dress. Monica just had to wear them, she insisted. Monica sensed that the girl was trying to befriend her. She must be used to having to buy her friends. Rather than hurt the girl’s feelings, she accepted.

But now she’d lost the bloody things! She’d had them ten minutes ago. But where? Her mother always said she’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached. Where had she left them? Where? Then the memory welled in her mind. She recalled setting them on the bathroom sink, right between the toilet and the tub. Right on top of the red towel that she was now wearing. Then where were they now? She ran into the bathroom. There was nothing on the sink! Had she been robbed?! What would she tell Sally? But no, she saw them. They twinkled like ice in the harsh winter sun. They had dropped into the toilet when she yanked up the red towel after Oliver had knocked on her door. She even vaguely recalled hearing the splash. She grinned, relieved. Easy enough to fish out.

She took one step onto the tiled floor of the regal bathroom. The jewelry had splashed just enough water from the toilet to make a decent slippery spot right under where Monica’s foot landed. She fell straight forward and her head went right into the porcelain bowl, her face plunging into the toilet’s water and banging hard against the bottom of the bowl. She saw stars. Reflexively, she gulped in a big mouthful of water, choking. She almost swallowed an earring, just inches from her face. She pulled back her head and her skull caught on the underside of the toilet’s rim, making the stars she was seeing double up. Dizzy, she tried to get a footing to shift her weight to lift her face out of the water, but her foot just slipped again, and she went down once more.

She was drowning and she was too disoriented to get her face out of the toilet. Flailing, panicking, she reached up and managed to pull the handle, and the toilet flushed. Water escaped down the drain, giving her a second of succulent air. The bracelet and necklace and earrings chased the water. The jewels were gone. Monica didn’t even notice because the water quickly rose again, burying her face before she even caught a breath. She had just one chance. She reached up and up, trying to grab the toilet handle again, flailing around for the flipper. One more try. One last attempt. She wasn’t going to die in a toilet. She just couldn’t let it end this way.

Copyright © 2006 Eddie Newton

At Willow-Walk-Behind

by James Powell

Shortly after this issue goes to the printer, James Powell will be receiving the Grant Allen Award, reserved for Canadian crime-writing pioneers, at the Wolfe Island Scene of the Crime Festival in Canada’s Thousand Islands. Mr. Powell has had more than 75 stories published in EQMM. A longtime resident of the U.S., he has invented his own sub-genre of the mystery, mixing fantasy, crime, and humor.

* * * *

On a windy March afternoon in 1929, a piebald day, now cloudy, now sunshine, Ambrose Ganelon III drove his white Terrapin convertible with the top up along the narrow, twisting road that tunneled through the Old Forest, the dense stand of trees covering much of Transporpentine San Sebastiano. His destination was Willow-Walk-Behind, a religious retreat house run by the monks of Saint Magnus.

As the trees hurried by, Ganelon recalled his father saying that when Hannibal’s elephants crossed the Alps people thought they were seeing a forest on the march, a Birnam Wood in search of some southern Dunsinane. And, speaking of trees, he remembered reading somewhere that even the oldest of families seldom outlive three oak trees. Grim food for thought, he being the third of his name to operate the principality’s famous detective agency. True, his archrivals, the descendants of the evil Dr. Ludwig Fong, were in their third generation, too. But they had prospered since the War, particularly the English branch of the family led by Dorian Fong-Smythe, while the private detective business had never been worse.

The sudden slapping of rubber interrupted Ganelon’s gloomy musing. He had a flat. An impatient frown crossed his battered, street fighter’s face as he pulled off the road beside some ancient apple trees. In a clearing behind them stood an orchard of younger trees in full blossom, their trunks wrapped in white cloth like the legs of racehorses. He got out his jack and spare and changed the tire. Then he leaned against the car and lit a cigarette.

Suddenly a cloud crossed the sun and a voice close-by said, “Some say it was this time of the year when Adam and Eve were created.”

Ganelon swung around. An old man was leaning against one of the dotard apple trees. Brown and gnarled, he might have been carved from its wood. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he apologized. Then, glancing back at the apple blossoms, he continued. “Let’s hope Paradise lasted longer than just the time between the flower and the fruit.”

“You said it,” agreed Ganelon.

The old man smiled. “Came to help you with your tire. Can’t move as quickly as I once did. Are you going far?” When Ganelon said Willow-Walk-Behind, the smile vanished. “Be careful in those woods, brother,” said the old man. “Something has gotten into the trees.”

With a smart beep-beep, a low-slung bright blue roadster with an attractive young woman behind the wheel rushed past them. Ganelon watched the driver disappear around a corner. “Maybe it’s only the wind,” he answered absently, his mind still with the pretty lady.

“Something strange, I mean,” insisted the old man.

The retreat house was an ancient stone mill to which substantial additions had been made. The parking area in front was crowded. Ganelon noted the bright blue roadster whose registration number said it was from northwestern France.

Father Boniface, the portly, red-faced retreat master, came out to welcome Ganelon, who was a frequent visitor because his friend and teacher Father Sylvanus lived in a nearby hermitage. “Looks like business is booming,” said the detective.

“Not the religious retreat end of things,” the priest told him. “No, but Prentiss-Jenkins Aviation draws a lot of people who need a place to stay.”

Ganelon recalled that a large area of woods in the neighborhood had recently been cut down to provide a runway and a storage area for the British company, which was buying up surplus fighters and bombers from the War, flying them here, and storing them under canvas for resale.

“Yes, it’s all ‘Come Josephine in My Flying Machine’ around here,” said Father Boniface, who’d been a song plugger and a ballroom dancer — some said he was the original “Willie” in “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” — until the carnality of the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear drove him to a late religious vocation.

“As if things aren’t hectic enough,” continued the retreat master, “one of our guests wandered off after dinner last night. Probably got himself lost in the woods. We only discovered him missing at breakfast. We’ve had people out looking for him all morning. I’ve called the police. All this on the feast of Saint Magnus, our founder. And a very special Saint Magnus Day, at that.”

Before Ganelon could ask what was special about it, Father Boniface winked and held out his hand. “I’d better put it in our safe,” he said, cocking his head apologetically.

Ganelon had forgotten to leave his Hrosco automatic at home. Now he unstrapped holster and weapon and handed them over. As they disappeared inside Father Boniface’s habit, one corner of the monk’s mouth turned downward and the other up in a perfect replica of Ganelon’s trademark cockeyed smile.

Picking up Ganelon’s suitcase to take it to the detective’s usual room, the priest turned back to say, “When you see Father Sylvanus, ask yourself if perhaps he’s been alone in the woods too long.”

As Father Boniface entered the retreat house, Ganelon’s old friend Captain Alain Jerome came out the same door. Jerome possessed an aviator’s confident air and a dashing moustache. During the War he commanded San Sebastiano’s tiny air force with its cabbage-rose roundel, operating from an airfield just behind the lines where Ganelon’s regiment saw action. Jerome’s unit had taken “Love in the Clouds” as their theme song, a melody dating back to the giraffe craze of the 1840s when Anatole and Natalie were the most popular animals in the San Sebastiano zoo. His pilots even painted giraffe markings on their sturdy little Prentiss-Jenkins Hedgehog IIIs as a kind of ur-camouflage.

The last time Ganelon saw Jerome was three years ago as the man set out on a surveying job for something called the Cairo to Cathay Railroad.

“Your march through Syria, Arabia, Persia, and beyond, you said it sounded like fun. Was it?” asked the detective.

Jerome laughed. “As far as it went. When I reached Teheran I found a telegraph telling me I was let go. My employers had run out of money.

“As luck would have it, Riza Khan, who had been Persia’s Minister of War and had just become the Shah, heard of my arrival and invited me to dinner to discuss the railroad project. I found him a down-to-earth and ambitious leader.

“When he told me he meant to bind his unruly country together by increasing the army three-fold, I recalled the words of the British staff officer in Constantinople when I described my surveying trip. The Brit said they couldn’t guarantee my safety. But if the Bedouins did capture me, he promised to send out planes and bomb the beggars until they let me go.

“I heard myself suggesting that the Shah might do the same job with an air force and at a fraction of the cost. How better to put down tribal revolts and maintain order in remote corners of the country? With warplanes a glut on the market he could buy all he needed for next to nothing. And there were plenty of aviators who’d jump at the chance to fly them.

“The Shah said he’d study the idea,” said Jerome. “But I could tell he liked it. Now for the long and short of it. A month ago I received his letter authorizing me to put together a Persian air force. Needless to say, there’ll be a tidy commission for yours truly when I do. So here I am, looking over what the Prentiss-Jenkins people have in the way of aircraft and interviewing pilots. My old friend Wing Commander Timmons is here representing a British team. Not to mention our old nemesis Baron Waldteufel on behalf of his German flyers. Even the Soviets are interested.” Jerome looked at his wrist watch. “An hour ago the Shah’s man General Massoudi arrived in San Sebastiano by British flying boat from Alexandria to see what I’ve put together.”

As he spoke, an old open touring car turned in at the retreat-house gate. It made a complete circle of the parking lot as though Father Carlus, the driver, who was done up in motorcycle goggles and a white duster, was reluctant to end the journey. Three visitors and their baggage sat behind him fresh from San Sebastiano’s old port where Imperial Airways had a quay-side hangar for their giant amphibious aircraft.

“That’s Massoudi, the one in the military uniform,” said Jerome. “The other two are my old Cairo to Cathay employers, Major Ibrahim and Mr. Wang.” He indicated the tall man in a white suit, with a long jaw and a red tarboosh, carrying a horsehair fly whisk, and an Oriental gentleman who seemed uncomfortable pent up in western dress. “They’re here to discuss fresh financing for their railroad with Miss Khalila Assad.” With a nod toward the blue car, Jerome went to greet the passengers.

Waving to Father Carlus, who had stopped to admire the Terrapin, Ganelon continued on his way to the back of the retreat house where a flagstone walk and a dozen sturdy willow trees circled a good-sized pond. Centuries before, a stream on the property had been dammed up, creating the pond and a millrace to drive the mill’s waterwheel, long since fallen to ruin. The unharnessed overflow still found its way down to the sea, where its brown water vanished like chimney smoke into the sky-blue Mediterranean.

It was Friday. Two young monks were out on the pond in a rowboat trying to net carp for dinner. Ganelon recalled Father Boniface’s complaint, “English monks always chose salmon rivers when they built their cathedrals. We must do with carp.”

Suddenly a monk gave a shout and jumped into the water. His companion followed. Wading across to a large willow, they struggled, trying to extricate something from the submerged tangle of the tree’s roots. As Ganelon reached them they were dragging the body of a man in a dark suit up onto the grass. One monk hurried off to fetch Father Boniface.

Ganelon knelt to examine the body, noting the wound from a heavy blow to the back of the head. The other monk said they’d seen the dead man’s heels floating beneath the willow branches. The detective found that the most interesting thing, the torso and head floating below the feet, so deep in the water.

“It’s Mr. Elmer Shypoke, the missing guest,” said a woman’s voice.

Ganelon looked up. The beautiful driver of the blue roadster was standing there. He was sorry he’d surrendered his Hrosco. The cockeyed grin it gave him charmed the ladies.

“Strange the way he was floating,” she added, pushing her black hair out of an alert and intelligent face.

“You’ve a good eye,” said Ganelon.

A male voice with an English accent said, “A shoulder money belt filled with gold guineas will do that to you.” The speaker was a tall, fair-haired man wearing a blazer and a Royal Flying Corps tie. He had a twisted chin and an indentation like a deep thumbprint low on one cheek. A casse-gueule, as the French called those who brought face wounds out of the War. The man introduced himself. “Timmons,” he said.

Ganelon opened the dead man’s jacket to reveal the bulging shoulder money belt. Well, the killer’s motive hadn’t been robbery. “You the one who led Jerome around in the hospital when he couldn’t see?” he asked Timmons. Jerome had been caught on the ground during one of Baron Waldteufel’s aerial gas attacks. Temporarily blinded, he’d been led away in a crocodile of like-injured. During his long recuperation in a San Sebastiano hospital, Jerome and Timmons had become fast friends.

“My jaw was all wired up,” said Timmons. “It was the dumb leading the blind. Have you met Miss Khalila Assad?”

“So you are the famous private detective,” said the young woman. “Please call me Khalila. May I help you in your investigation? I am not without experience in such matters.”

Ganelon remembered something from one of the magazines he subscribed to — was it P.I. Tidbits? — about a Levantine religious youth group solving crimes in the city of Nancy. “Better leave this to the police,” he said. He could tell she was disappointed. But he had his reasons.

Jerome and Father Boniface came hurrying down the path. While the priest knelt to pray beside the body, Khalila told Jerome, “Mr. Ganelon says this is a police matter. That’s fine with me. I don’t work well with men who talk to trees.”

“You were driving fast,” protested Ganelon. “This old man came out of the orchard to help me change a tire.”

Khalila frowned at him, put her arm in Jerome’s arm, and led him away. As he went the pilot shot Ganelon a puzzled look over his shoulder.

Ganelon watched the woman go. “Something of a coquette,” he said to Timmons.

“Don’t ask me,” replied the Englishman.

“The money belt, how come you knew about it?”

“We flew over from Croydon to Paris together, Shypoke, Baron Waldteufel, and I. Shypoke bragged about the gold and showed off what he called his shooting iron to keep it safe.”

Then he added, “If you ask me, Standard Oil sent the man to fish in troubled waters. Anglo-Persian Oil’s agreement is with a local warlord. The Shah could invalidate it.”

“I hear the country’s oil production could one day equal that of the U. S.,” said Ganelon.

“So they say,” said Timmons. “Perhaps Shypoke thought the gold might help him with the Shah’s man Massoudi. Shypoke’s arrival certainly spooked the Anglo-Persian people. Instead of waiting for Massoudi, they left this morning for Teheran to deal with the Shah directly.”

“And Waldteufel was on your Paris flight, you say?”

“Yes, our plane was a tri-engine Prentiss-Jenkins Gladiator, the ‘box kite,’ as they call them. A noon takeoff followed by a leisurely lunch on a wide table in a spacious cabin made it a very popular flight. Waldteufel was on board, but just barely. We were powering up when a chauffeured Daimler drove out onto the field to deliver him and his baggage.”

“The Daimler driver, did he have a club foot?” asked Ganelon, describing Eustace, Dorian Fong-Smythe’s chauffeur. Timmons hesitated. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

Ganelon set out for Father Sylvanus’s hermitage again, taking a path beside the nearby retreat-house chapel which led deep into the woods.

It was perhaps ironic that a private detective of the two-fisted school would be a student of the art of nonviolent self-defense called the via felix, the Happy Way. Invented by Saint Magnus for his monks’ use in protecting the holy places of Europe during the early Middle Ages, it involved a hip lift and the redistribution of an adversary’s body humors (blood, phlegm, choler, black bile), changing him temperamentally, from, say, a homicidal maniac into a hail-fellow-well-met sort. An adept practiced using a heavy wooden planchette grooved with elaborate channels and four colored balls. Ganelon had just mastered a very difficult maneuver called Navigating between Presumption and Despair which was the door to a higher level of the Happy Way.

The detective followed the narrow path for some distance before he reached a small clearing where a fat blue-green cedar tree built of galvanized metal stood. During the War, Fong Armaments manufactured these sniper boxes and observation posts for the German army. Ganelon remembered the festive note they added to the forward saps and no-man’s-land at Christmas. After the Armistice, the Fongs sold some off as outhouses, toolsheds, and, in Father Sylvanus’s case, a hermitage.

Ganelon’s father once described Father Sylvanus as the very image of El Greco’s famous portrait of Saint Ildefonso, the patron saint of dart players. Curious, Ganelon had looked the painting up in an art book. The saint had been sitting at a small table reading his breviary. As El Greco captured him, he is holding up a dart which probably served as his bookmark and is about to let fly at a dartboard somewhere off the canvas.

Father Sylvanus certainly had the saint’s high forehead, long aristocratic nose, and whimsical smile. But today he was solemn and preoccupied. He invited Ganelon in and congratulated him after watching his work with the planchette. “Your father had not come this far.” Then his eyes went to the open door. “The trees are restless,” he observed.

“You’re the second person to tell me that today. It’s the wind.”

The hermit shook his head. “I grew up near woods like these. When I was a boy people used to say: ‘Elms do grieve. Oak he do hate. Willows do walk if you travels late.’”

“Willows walk?”

“Indeed,” said Father Sylvanus. “Uproot themselves at night and stalk unwary travelers muttering all the way.”

“Then Willow-Walk-Behind didn’t take its name from the willows and the walk behind the retreat house?”

“It was called that and shunned locally long before our order bought the old abandoned mill and ancient willows around the millpond. We wanted the property because our founder and his early followers lived as hermits hereabouts.”

In a voice as casual as he could make it, Ganelon said, “Father Boniface thinks you have been in the woods too long.”

“And he may be right. When the winter wind works their twigs and branches I’ve started to believe I can read something of what the trees are dreaming. They are not happy dreams. The willows may be the unhappiest, though I haven’t yet learned the cursive script of their branches. The trees fear for something. I think it is the Cairo to Cathay Railroad.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Chinese say a train journey of a thousand miles begins with a single wooden railway tie,” said the priest. “Railroads devour forests. Oh, trees are as innocent as children. When they saw their first woodman’s axe they said, ‘Look, look, part of it is one of us.’ But like children their anger, when it comes, can be a terrible and mindless thing.”

Father Sylvanus stopped. “Leave me now,” he said. “I have much to do.”

On the threshold of the hermitage Ganelon turned back to ask, “What did Father Boniface mean when he said this was a very special Saint Magnus Day?”

“Our founder rose from his deathbed, went outside, stuck his head in a hollow tree, and shouted a last prayer. Ever since we’ve had stories of monks meditating alone in the woods on Saint Magnus Day hearing a muffled voice speaking to them. From records kept we have discovered that this phenomenon occurs once every seventy-five years. Today is such a special day.”

As Ganelon approached the retreat house he saw a man in a tweed suit and hat, leather gaiters, and a narrow Malacca cane under his arm hunkered down examining Shypoke’s body as Father Boniface looked on. Inspector Nestor Flanel, a third-generation policeman, had a personality so grating his superiors gave him every suburban assignment just to get him as far from the prefecture as possible. This explained the gaiters and cane, useful for investigating crime scenes in long grass. Flanel saw Ganelon and made a cold what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here face.

Ganelon’s two-fisted image would suffer if Flanel suspected he was a student of the Happy Way. The detective decided to pretend he’d come to Willow-Walk-Behind for spiritual refreshment. He turned abruptly and entered the retreat house chapel.

The little church was famous for its unusual windows. The one toward the retreat house depicted Saint Magnus Preaching to the Trees of the Forest in bright stained glass. The window’s mate on the forest side was of clear glass, as if inviting the trees to peek in.

Ganelon paused as he had many times before to admire the stained glass. There was the saint shaping his fingers into the twiglike runic characters the forest understood. Crowded around him were trees of every size and description. Even the oak had come and brought his friend the pine. Conveniently, the window had an inch-wide border of clear glass so he could also keep an eye on Flanel at the millpond.

When Ganelon’s eyes grew accustomed to the chapel’s dim he discovered he was not alone. Khalila stood nearby, staring up at the stained glass.

“Sorry to intrude,” he said.

“My people told me to be sure not to miss seeing this famous window,” she said without turning. “It’s very impressive. And, oh, I know now why you didn’t want to get involved in Mr. Shypoke’s murder. Inspector Flanel is a very unpleasant person. He made it quite clear he didn’t want amateurs or private detectives interfering with his investigation.”

“There’s more to it than that,” said Ganelon, explaining how, over the years, his family had driven every competent criminal from San Sebastiano. So its police force no longer attracted minds of high caliber. Men like Flanel blame their lackluster careers on the Ganelons and spurn their help. He didn’t tell her that his family’s reputation had driven his own business away as well. Sometimes, after reflecting on his father’s and his grandfather’s brilliant achievements, there was nothing left for Ganelon to do but visit some low bar and pick a fight with the biggest and meanest guy in the place.

Then he heard himself say, “I’m surprised your people would trust the Cairo to Cathay business to—” He hesitated over the right words. “—someone so young and good-looking.”

She laughed. “I thought you were going to say to such a flirt,” she said, using the word allumeuse, which went back to gaslight days. Then it meant a female lamplighter. Today it was a woman who lights the boys up and walks away.

“Being friendly does help me with my task,” she admitted. “I’ve been sent here with a tentative proposal for the Cairo to Cathay principals. But my people also want to know if Persia is stable enough for a railroad to be built across it. I think the guests here at Willow-Walk-Behind can answer that question. Being friendly helps.”

“Why the interest in the railroad?”

“My people are reclusive, industrious, and astute in the way of business. They must think it a solid proposition,” she said, adding with a smile, “though China has always fascinated my people. If I repeated some of the China stories our elders tell you’d have to laugh.”

Wondering if she’d found Shypoke an unsettling presence, Ganelon asked, “Did you see Shypoke last night?”

“Now you sound like Inspector Flanel.”

“Flanel can make a real shambles of things. When he’s around, a parallel investigation never hurts.”

“I saw Shypoke at dinner,” she said. “That’s it.”

“What did you do last night?”

“I took a walk with Captain Jerome,” she said. “Along the way we met with Ivanov, the Russian pilot. He walked with us for a bit. After that I went to my room. I came down later to Father Boniface’s office. He lets me use his telephone to keep my people in the picture. But somebody else was using it. I believe it was Baron Waldteufel. So I went to bed.”

Having answered his questions, Khalila left the chapel.

Ganelon remained where he was, watching Flanel oversee the loading of Shypoke’s body onto a coroner’s gurney. Then Khalila appeared at the millpond. A moment later Jerome and Timmons came around a corner of the retreat house, standing aside as the gurney trundled by.

Suddenly an excited monk came running out of the woods, shouting and pointing back the way he had come. Flanel and the others followed him back into the woods.

Ganelon came out of the chapel to find out what was happening. As he passed the millpond Baron Waldteufel stepped from behind a willow tree. “Still lurking, are we, Baron?” he said. In aerial action over the trenches the German liked to creep up on an enemy aviator by flitting from cloud to cloud until ready to pounce.

The Baron stared at Ganelon through his monocle before giving a smart click of his heels and a short bow from the neck. Then he said, “Two monks on a work party in the woods discovered a second body in a crashed airplane. The others have gone to investigate.” He pointed to the path they had taken.

“Then I think I’ll join them,” said Ganelon. “Care to come along?”

The Baron shook his head. “It’s the Russian, Ivanov. Yesterday he buzzed the retreat house, no doubt hoping to impress General Massoudi with loop-the-loops and barrel rolls. He didn’t know Massoudi had been held up in Alexandria by a sandstorm. This morning the Prentiss-Jenkins people had us all over at their facility for a champagne brunch and a walk-around to show off some newly arrived aircraft. Miss Assad was invited, too. Ivanov stayed on after we left. No doubt he meant to repeat his aerial display for Massoudi today.”

Then, as if he knew Ganelon’s next question, Waldteufel said, “Inspector Flanel asked when I saw Shypoke for the last time. I said at dinner. But on reflection I think I heard him later that night. I was using Father Boniface’s telephone. I’m pretty sure somebody was outside listening at the window next-door where the Anglo-Persian Oil people and Timmons were meeting. I believe it was Shypoke.”

Striding off into the woods, Ganelon soon caught sight of the others. When Jerome saw him he dropped back. “I hope our dead man isn’t Ivanov,” he told Ganelon. “That would complicate things. Massoudi brought word the Shah favors a Russian team. I rather think he feels the Russians have their hands too full with their tin-pot revolution to pose any threat to his country.”

“And the British would bring too much of an imperial agenda to the task,” said Ganelon. “Which leaves Waldteufel and his Germans.”

Jerome nodded. Then after a few moments he said, “By the way, the old guy you talked to back there by the orchard, I’m sure he was only a fruit farmer. But when I was a boy, they told stories about the Old Apple-Tree Man, a tame tree spirit who warned people when it wasn’t wise to go into the woods.”

“Then he should have warned Shypoke,” said Ganelon. “And speaking of Shypoke—”

“Let’s see,” said Jerome. “I saw him at dinner. Afterwards I went for a walk with Khalila, who had some questions about the feasibility of the Cairo to Cathay Railroad. A very smart girl. And oh, yes, we ran into Ivanov. Later I was standing at my window when I saw Shypoke again. He was coming around the side of the retreat house.”

“Was anyone following him?”

“Not right behind him, no,” said Jerome, adding, “Look, I’m sorry. I still take these drops for my eyes before I go to bed. I chose just that moment to put them in. Remember the story of the blind man cured at Bethesda? At first he said he saw men like trees walking. That’s what I saw, a blurry shape just like a tree walking come out of the retreat house and head off in the direction Shypoke had gone.”

Ganelon sighed to himself. That’s all he needed, a walking tree. He imagined his grandfather laying his oboe aside to give his full attention to so intriguing a development. He saw his father bouncing his fingertips together thoughtfully as he considered the truth hidden behind so unscientific a story. Ganelon found himself wondering where the nearest bar was.

He and Jerome walked on for another fifteen minutes until they reached the crashed Russian biplane. Nicknamed a Pasternaki from its tapered, parsniplike fuselage, it had come down across a clearing and smashed into the base of a large tree. The dead pilot, a round-faced blond young man, wore a green uniform with red markings.

With a nod at his partner standing by the airplane, the monk who’d guided them to the crash explained, “Brother and I had been sent to clean the brush away around what we hope is Saint Magnus’s Tree. As Father Boniface put it, ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’ if we’re lucky enough to hear our founder’s voice speaking to us across the centuries. Anyway, as we were starting back we heard the plane go over. Then its engine cut out and we heard it crash.”

Flanel examined the body and announced the pilot’s neck had been broken in the crash. After walking slowly around the airplane, he stood rocking back and forth on his heels and tugging at his lower lip, doing a fine impersonation of a man deep in thought.

Khalila toured the wreckage. When she reached the gas tank she rapped on it. Then she came over next to Ganelon. “Sounds empty to me,” she murmured.

Ganelon had wondered why there’d been no fire or explosion on impact. Nice detective work. You bet, business was slow at the agency. But having a beautiful junior partner around might make the time go faster.

At Flanel’s signal the monks emptied a scythe and two rakes from their wheelbarrow, loaded up Ivanov’s body, and trundled back to the retreat house with everyone following behind.

Two dead bodies or not, it still wasn’t Ganelon’s case. Maybe that was just as well. He was here to get to the next level in the Happy Way. With that in mind he left the others when they reached a small side path that led to Father Sylvanus’s hermitage.

Ganelon found the hermit sweeping the dirt floor of his galvanized dwelling with a broom of twigs. “Any chance of squeezing in a lesson, Father?”

The priest gave him a sad smile. “Let’s leave that for the new Father Sylvanus,” he said, adding, “Did I ever tell you I was born on Saint Magnus Day seventy-five years ago? I came in with our founder’s prayer and I have a strong premonition that I will go out with it. So I have much to do, including the naming of the new Father Sylvanus from among those I have trained. I had high hopes for Father Carlus before he chose the byway of speed-demonry.”

The old priest looked around at the forests as if for the last time and said, “Saint Magnus was much in awe of trees, the way they stood half in heaven and half deep in the earth, much as we humans do. Meditating on this set him to wondering if the vast underground network of tree and seaweed roots could be used as a long-distance communication system. Stick your head in a hollow tree, shout your message, and someone with his head in a tree at the other end would hear what you said. Imagine sending a message from one end of Australia to the other using the roots of the shady coolabah tree.

“Fortunately Saint Magnus confided this wild idea to no one. Otherwise he might have been judged mad and unfit for canonization.

“But my predecessor and teacher, Old Father Sylvanus, as they called him, found the saint’s secret diary among some ancient manuscripts in our library. By translating it he was able to calculate the precise hour when the saint’s prayer, having circled the world, would return to where it had started. Tonight we will find out if his calculations were correct.

“Of course, the original tree has long since fallen to dust. But any hollow tree of the same kind would surely do. Though reasonable men may disagree on what kind of tree it was.”

Father Sylvanus returned to his sweeping for a moment. Then he said out of nowhere, “Some say the next great battle between Christianity and Islam is nigh. I hear some Germans are telling the French that when that day comes their Mr. Hitler will be the new Charles Martel, the hero-warrior who will defeat the Arabs once and for all.

“Be that as it may, a small religious group called the Druze believe that when this conflict ends and the victorious side, whichever it is, stands bloody and exhausted, then a vast Druze army will march out of China, defeat the victor, and rule the world.”

“A Druze army in China?”

Father Sylvanus nodded. “The Druze believe that for centuries their male dead have been reincarnated in China for just this purpose.”

“And how better and faster to move such an army than by rail?” added Ganelon.

“Indeed, so you may live to see exciting times. Well, I leave all that to you. Goodbye, Ambrose.” Ganelon went down on one knee to receive the old priest’s blessing. Then Father Sylvanus went back into his metal hermitage.

Ganelon returned to the retreat house with a troubled mind. Since the death of China’s president Sun Yat-sen several years ago he’d heard rumors that Fong-Smythe had forged an alliance with the country’s most powerful warlords, for what purpose he hadn’t discovered. If an army did come out of China, would it be Fong-Smythe’s?

Ganelon started dressing for dinner early. Knotting his tie at the window, he noticed Timmons and Massoudi below him on the flagstone walk in animated conversation as the twilight deepened. He couldn’t hear anything. But then he saw Timmons hold his hand out, thumb and fingers pointing down at the knuckles, making the Dragon’s Claw, the sign of the Fongs, the thumb buried deep wherever the clan leader was and each finger in one of the world’s four corners. Massoudi shook his head at the claw in disbelief. But clearly it left him unsettled. If Timmons connected the Baron with the Fongs he’d have gone a long way to disqualifying Waldteufel for the Persian job.

Ganelon watched as Massoudi and Timmons went their separate ways. Then he saw Waldteufel, ever the lurker, step from behind a nearby willow and glare in the direction the Englishman had gone.

As the detective finished dressing there was a knock. Timmons stood in the doorway with a bottle of scotch under one arm, a gazogene under the other, and carrying two glasses. “What’d you say to a drink before dinner?” he asked.

Ganelon invited the Wing Commander in.

As he made the drinks Timmons said, “You know, there’s much more involved here than jobs for redundant aviators or the sale of surplus aircraft or how a Persian strongman controls his trackless empire.” He passed Ganelon his drink and gestured at the wall as if it were a map of Asia. “They used to call it the Great Game. Persia lies athwart Britain’s road to India and it keeps the Russians away from their long-sought-after warm-water port.” He lit a cigarette. “The British have much history in the area. And the Russians. Before nineteen seventeen the Persian army was officered by Russians who trained the Shah himself.”

“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about,” said Ganelon.

“A friend in high places filled me in on things when he heard I might be heading to that neck of the woods.”

Ganelon nodded as if he accepted Timmons’s explanation. But all it did was convince him that the man was British Secret Service. “By the way,” he asked, “when did you see Shypoke for the last time?”

Timmons shrugged. “Last night I met with the Anglo-Persian Oil people. I hoped they might persuade General Massoudi to favor my people for the flying part. I thought I heard someone outside the window. When I looked I saw Shypoke listening at Father Boniface’s window. Why, I don’t know. It was none of my business.”

As soon as Timmons left, Ganelon hurried off to the dining room hoping to get the chair next to Khalila at the Cairo to Cathay Railroad table. The four of them made a jolly bunch. When different nationalities gather they often find common ground by telling humorous stories about the English. When Ganelon’s turn came he quoted Alphonse Allais’ remark, “Queer people, the English. Whereas we in France name our public places after famous victories — Rue de Rocroy, Place Iéna, Avenue de Wagram — the English insist on naming theirs after famous defeats — Trafalgar Square, Waterloo Station, and so on.” Khalila’s laughter rang silver in his ears.

Then he saw Jerome at a corner table throw down his napkin and leave the dining room and noticed for the first time that the pilot’s friend and table companion Timmons wasn’t there. Excusing himself, Ganelon rose and went after Jerome.

As he fell in step with him the pilot said, “I went by Timmons’s room on my way to dinner. No answer. I figured he’d gone down ahead. When he wasn’t at our table I decided he’d been sidetracked. But not for this long. There’s one man who really likes his rations.”

At Timmons’s room Ganelon turned the knob and the door swung open. The Englishman lay stretched out on the floor amid a wreckage of bottles and glasses, dead from a blow to the back of the head. The killer must have been waiting behind the door when Timmons returned from Ganelon’s room.

Noticing something odd about the dead man’s large aviator’s wrist watch, Ganelon checked it, hoping it might have stopped during the assault, giving a clue to the time of death. But the watch was still running. It had just lost its crystal.

Grim-faced, Jerome looked down at the dead body. “My friend deserved better than this,” he said.

Inspector Flanel arrived quickly, gaiters and all. He interrogated Ganelon and Jerome. Then they left him hunkered down viewing the crime scene from multiple angles and turning things over with his stick.

After compline, a procession of monks carrying fat candles set out for the hollow oak Father Boniface had decided was St. Magnus’s Tree. Those guests who wished to come along fell in behind, dressed for the cool night air. They included Khalila and her Cairo to Cathay people, the Baron, General Massoudi, and Ganelon and Jerome, who arrived at the last minute.

They entered the woods and proceeded to Father Sylvanus’s hermitage. After a bit, when no one appeared, the retreat master said, “I guess the good Father still doesn’t believe my tree is the kind our founder used. He may regret not joining us.” Then he ordered the procession to continue.

They started out on the same path they had taken that afternoon to the crash site. But for Ganelon the trees loomed larger now on either side and seemed to fall in behind them as they passed. He chalked this up to the darkness, the candlelight, and Father Sylvanus’s stories. But he didn’t remember so many tree roots in the path. The stumbling monks uttered gentle appeals to this saint or that as their candle flames sketched abrupt patterns on the darkness. More forceful expletives came from the guests in a Babel of languages to which an owl or two uttered replies. Just beyond the wreckage of the Russian airplane a breeze sprang up, guttering the candles. Protective hands cupped the flames, dimming the light even more.

At last the procession reached a place where the bracken had been scythed and raked away around an ancient oak standing alone some twenty feet off the path. It had a large waist-high hole in its trunk. The monks turned in and gathered in a semicircle about the tree.

Father Boniface produced a pocket watch. “The hour of our blessed founder’s prayer approaches,” he said. “Forgive us if we of his order listen first.” Then he directed the monks, in alphabetical turns, to put their heads in the hollow oak, tapping each on the shoulder when his time was up. So the minutes passed. None heard the expected voice. Pulling his own head out of the tree, Father Boniface shook it sadly and signaled the guests to take their turns. Ganelon went last. The hollow in the tree was silent as a tomb. Then the hour had passed.

The downcast procession returned, more strung-out and stumbling than before. As the lights of the retreat house came in view they discovered that Baron Waldteufel had gone missing somewhere along the way. Arming himself with a candle, Jerome volunteered to go back and try to find him.

When the others reached the millpond they found a monk with his head and shoulders inside a hollow willow near the one in whose roots Shypoke’s body had been entangled. When Father Boniface touched him and said Saint Magnus’s hour had passed, the body slid from the willow and onto the grass. It was Father Sylvanus. The dead priest’s face wore a smile of final contentment.

Ganelon asked, “Does the smile mean he learned Saint Magnus’s prayer?”

“Oh, the prayer is no secret,” said Father Boniface. “No, his joy must mean he heard it spoken in our founder’s very voice. You see, late in life Saint Magnus turned mystical in an attempt to discover the unknowable side of the Almighty, the deus abscondus, the hidden God. He rose from his deathbed and had a disciple help him to a hollow tree nearby, and in a ‘Hello, Central, Get Me Heaven’ kind of thing, he stuck his head inside and shouted: ‘God, Whoever You are, I love You.’”

The monks carried Father Sylvanus’s body into the chapel. The guests returned to the retreat house, except for Ganelon and Khalila. Ganelon followed the body out of respect for his teacher. Khalila came, too, saying, “The Cairo to Cathay people have accepted our terms. I leave for home in the morning. But I’d like a chance to see the famous window by candlelight.”

Half an hour later Ganelon and Khalila left the monks to their vigil over Father Sylvanus’s body. As they came outside they saw Inspector Flanel heading in their direction.

“I hear Baron Waldteufel wandered off and Jerome’s gone back to find him,” said the policeman. “When he does I intend to arrest the baron for murder. He was killing off his rivals for the Persian air force job. He had the motive and the opportunity to siphon off Commissar Ivanov’s gasoline. And I have proof positive he killed Wing Commander Timmons. During my careful examination of the broken glass in Timmons’s room I found this, the baron’s monocle.” Flanel opened his hand triumphantly to reveal the crystal from Timmons’s watch.

Just then Jerome emerged from the forest darkness. He was alone. “I went as far back as the last spot I remembered seeing Waldteufel with the procession. No baron.”

Examining the night, Flanel decided it was too late to start a search. He promised to return in the morning.

Ganelon walked Khalila back to the retreat house. “Flanel’s a very lucky man, being right for so wrong a reason,” he said. “He may make Chief Inspector yet.” Then he added, “We have to ask ourselves, what’s so important about the Persian air force job to make it worth killing two people?”

“Three, counting Shypoke,” said Khalila.

“Shypoke was a mistake all round. The man wanted to eavesdrop on the Anglo-Persian Oil people’s meeting but got the wrong window. The baron thought Shypoke was listening in on his telephone call to England. That’s why he killed him. Know the name Dorian Fong-Smythe?”

When Khalila shook her head, Ganelon told himself she soon would if she came into partnership with him. Then he said, “He’s Waldteufel’s employer. So why’s it so important to Fong-Smythe that the baron gets the Persian job?”

Early the next morning Ganelon and Khalila led Flanel on the route the procession had taken and described the events of the night before. On the way the inspector looked for traces of the baron’s wandering off. They had not expected to get as far as the hollow oak. But that was where they discovered Waldteufel dead next to the tree, the blade of a scythe driven through his body.

Flanel waved them behind him and studied the scene, stroking his chin.

As Ganelon looked at the wooden-handled scythe he suddenly remembered Father Sylvanus’s remark about what the trees had said about the woodman’s axe: “Look, look, part of it is one of us.”

After a bit Flanel said, “Here’s what happened. On the way back to the retreat house the Baron got separated from the procession. In the dark and half blind — for let us not forget, I found his monocle at the crime scene — he was beset by his guilty conscience and panicked. He started to run. As often happens in these cases, he went around in a circle and came back to the hollow oak, plowing headlong into a lower limb. See the mark of a blow to his head. Stunned, he accidentally fell on the scythe a careless monk left behind after clearing the bramble around the tree. Case closed.”

“A wound toward the back of the head is tough to come by running full tilt into a tree limb,” observed Ganelon.

Flanel gave a dismissive laugh. “As he ran he heard one of the owls you spoke of. Wild-eyed, Waldteufel looked back over his shoulder toward the sound. Bang!”

Ganelon and Khalila exchanged glances. Then, promising to send two monks back with the wheelbarrow, they left Flanel hunkered down examining the scene of the crime.

They walked in silence for a long distance, neither wanting to bring up the terrible murder. At last Khalila said, “I can’t imagine Jerome a killer.”

“That scythe sure didn’t walk back there on its own,” said Ganelon. “I saw it at the crash site on our way to the tree. It was right where the monks left it when they emptied their wheelbarrow to load up Ivanov’s body. Look, when the procession started back Jerome got Waldteufel to hang back on some pretext and hit him a good one, leaving him for dead. On the way back Jerome had second thoughts about whether he’d killed him or not. He volunteered to find the baron so he could finish the job, picking up the scythe on the way.”

“Still—” protested Khalila.

“Waldteufel and Jerome spent the entire war trying to kill each other off. Those are things you can set aside in peacetime. But it’s something else when an old enemy kills your best friend.”

Later that morning Ganelon was waiting, suitcase in hand, beside the blue roadster when Khalila came out of the retreat house dressed for travel in a cloche hat and a coat with a fur collar. A monk followed behind carrying her suitcases.

She was surprised to see him. “I thought we’d said our goodbyes,” she said while her baggage was being loaded.

They had. But Ganelon had something he couldn’t ask her until he’d gotten his Hrosco back from Father Boniface. He gave his cockeyed grin. Would she, as a professional courtesy, one private detective to another, give him a lift back to San Sebastiano? “I promise you a good lunch, a tour of our little city, and a business proposition you might find interesting.”

“But what about your big white car?” she asked.

“I’m leaving it here,” said Ganelon. “Tomorrow’s the feast of Saint Fiacre, patron saint of taxi drivers, when the monks do the Blessing of the Automobiles. Afterward Father Carlus will drive the Terrapin into town for me. His assistant will follow in the touring car to make the Imperial Airways pickup. Carlus will go back with him.”

“Isn’t Saint Fiacre patron of gardeners?” asked Khalila suspiciously.

Ganelon grinned again, a bit more urgently this time. “Some saints wear two halos,” he said. “So is it a deal?”

She raised an amused eyebrow. “A deal,” she said and slid behind the steering wheel. Ganelon got in on the passenger side, stowing his suitcase behind the seat.

As they sped off toward San Sebastiano, Ganelon said, “By the way, I spoke to Jerome just now. He asked General Massoudi to let him put together the Shah’s air force using the San Sebastiano pilots he’d led during the war. Massoudi agreed.”

Talk of Jerome still bothered Khalila. But Ganelon knew that any army coming out of China on the Cairo to Cathay Railroad would need control of Persian airspace. Intentionally or not, Jerome had frustrated Fong-Smythe’s grand design. And anyone who could do that, Ganelon considered his friend.

As the roadster passed the new orchard an old man working among the trees waved a brown arm at them. When Khalila pretended not to see him and smiled down into her fur collar, Ganelon leaned over and gave the horn a smart beep-beep.

Copyright © 2006 James Powell

Empathy

by Buzz Mauro

Poetry

We’re soul mates, dear, aren’t we? I know you so well.

I’m sure I know just how you felt as you fell.

You thought as you finished your last somersault

That none of it could have been seen as your fault.

That handsome young doctor — he sure wasn’t planned!

You just couldn’t help it. I quite understand.

The man from the carnival — What was his name?

In any case, I know the beer was to blame.

This Grand Canyon trip’s unrelated, I know,

To that vendor you met at the Phoenix trade show.

The baker, the cop... Did one make candlesticks?

All you lacked was an Indian chief in the mix.

But one day I came to my senses, you see.

I took your M.O. and applied it to me.

I learned from you, dear, and the oats you had sown

How to get out and have me some fun of my own.

It occurred to me, too, just today on the plane,

You might like to be rid of the old ball and chain.

If you had any sense, and I know that you did,

You must have been wishing me dead, God forbid!

So I’m sure you know just how I felt on that ledge—

Why I kept a safe distance away from the edge

As you leaned out so far to admire the view.

If the tables were turned, dear — now what would you do?

Copyright © 2006 Buzz Mauro

The Copyist

by Paul Lascaux, Stefan Slupetzky, Anke Gebert, Richard Lifka, Thomas Przybilka, & Christoph Spielberg

The idea for the following tale originated with Thomas Przybilka, head of the prize jury for the German Crime Writer’s Association. Asked to contribute a tale to a crime calendar, he proposed a “relay” story, in which each member of the prize jury (all notable fiction writers) would write a scene and pass the baton to the next member. Paul Lascaux led with a flexible scenario involving a Renoir painting, which allowed those who followed creative scope.

* * * *

The sign on the front of the otherwise unprepossessing residence in a suburb of Grechtenweil boasted gold letters on black enamel and spelled out Winfred Kaltendorf. And under the name stood: Painter, Portraitist,Copier. The order ought to have been backwards, of course, when viewed from the standpoint of the activity that brought in Kaltendorf’s meager income. Indeed, a new commission had just arrived. The Grechtenweil Boating Club wanted a copy of Auguste Renoir’s Oarsman’s Breakfast for its clubhouse. Two thousand euros. To be delivered in one month, in time for the club’s anniversary celebration.

Winfred sighed gustily, startling the gray-and-white cat on the window sill out of her afternoon nap. The fee would cover the rent on his little house and the canvas and painting supplies he needed, but the few cents left over for liquor after he had paid the grocery bill scarcely rewarded the work of copying the Renoir. And besides: What did the boating club want with a copy when it could have a genuine Kaltendorf? Winfred longed to show the world that his own skills were every bit the equal of the great masters. He was only willing to concede a point or two on the issue of originality. And on the fact that he would never enjoy a place in the annals of art history; that much was clear.

He had already painted the entire background of the Oarsman. Only the painting’s figures and their heads were missing. Winfred bent over the local paper — or, to be more precise, over the page with the death notices. He had never had any patience with the sanctimonious sayings usually found there: “called to his last rest”; “torn abruptly from life.” Kicked the bucket; bit the dust; pushing up daisies; shuffled off this mortal coil: That’s the way Kaltendorf would have written death notices. And then that expressionless black-and-white photo of Mareike Koller, whose face Winfred was now painting carefully under the brim of the straw hat of the young woman leaning casually on the railing in the back of Oarsman’s Breakfast. The shadow cast by the hat was a blessing; it hid her lifeless eyes. Kaltendorf hadn’t had a chance to shoot his own photo of Mareike after the young woman came racing around the blind curve and steered her car over the cliff. He’d barely had time to get the warning signs that he’d used to block off the road stowed safely away in the trunk of his car before the sirens were audible. Someone in that nearby house must have noticed the accident. Faster, at any rate, than Mareike had noticed what she’d done when her car ruthlessly swept his favorite cat from the street. It was a stiff, inanimate face that stared up at him from the painting. Kaltendorf had to admit that this was not yet his masterpiece.

It’s a funny thing about art. The dramatist Johann Nestroy once said, “It’s only art when you can’t do it yourself. Because if you can, there’s nothing magical about it.” Well now, Winfred Kaltendorf could wield a paintbrush with the best of them — at least purely from the point of view of technique. But solid technique alone doesn’t make a genius, as he had been forced to admit to himself in his sorrowful but thankfully rare moments of self-understanding. His pictures just didn’t breathe, they didn’t live; they were missing a certain quality that separates the painter-for-a-living from the artist who is truly called to greatness.

Now, however, he had found it. The element that had been missing from his vocation, the salt in the bread of his creative prowess. He was sure of it... With a lightly furrowed brow he bent over and studied the portly man in the photo he had wedged into the lower corner of the easel. It was a good photo this time, even if it was a bit underexposed. Just like the mind of the man it depicted, thought Winfred, and smiled maliciously, in spite of himself. The photo showed Erich Pollack, owner of a small gallery in downtown Grechtenweil. An arrogant philistine who couldn’t distinguish a Rembrandt from a dirty spot on the wallpaper. “My dear Mr. Kaltendorf,” he’d said to Winfred when the latter had showed him his work, “You’re not exactly Van Gogh, are you now...?”

Kaltendorf began to copy Pollack’s face onto the canvas with painstaking attention to detail. He placed it on the body of a young man who was bending over a girl in the right side of the picture. “Perfect,” he purred to himself, comparing his work with the photograph. “Just perfect. And nobody can see that his ear’s been cut off...” There comes a time, you see, when a man just has to defend his honor. Such as when he’s compared with a lunatic Dutchman. The photo didn’t reveal how much more had been severed from the head than just the right ear — namely, the entire body. But that had no meaning at all from the spatial-conceptual point of view: Pollack’s “mortal coil” fit masterfully in Renoir’s composition.

Maybe Nestroy hadn’t been right, after all. Winfred’s mother had always said that art came from skill. As Winfred painted the portrait of the girl sitting at the table on the right side of the picture, he was suddenly very sure that his mother (God rest her soul) had been right, as she always was. Because he was painting as he’d never painted before!

It was Amelie’s face that came to life on the girl, looking up so expectantly at the man who was now wearing Pollack’s visage. And for this portrait, for the first time in his life, he didn’t need a photo or a drawing, not even the real Amelie as a model. Like a great pianist, who only needs to hear a melody once to be able to play it from memory, even to rearrange it or improvise on it, Winfred now made Amelie beautiful — more beautiful, perhaps, than she had really been. He regretted that he only had room for her face and her slim throat. He would have liked to immortalize her shoulders, her breasts, her thighs, and the dark triangle above them. He closed his eyes, remembering every detail. But the template forced upon him by Oarsman’s Breakfast did not allow him more. He painted like a man possessed. And isn’t possession one of the signs of a true artist? Winfred closed his eyes and saw Amelie, and then opened them and painted Amelie.

She had been his model. But not just a model, like all her predecessors. No, she was supposed to be more than that. His muse, at the very least. But now she was dead. And Winfred was creating her memorial. Painting like crazy, just the way he’d done when Amelie sat in his studio, naked and provocative. He’d studied her, painted, studied her again. He’d wanted to touch her, had used every opportunity at his disposal, arranging her in poses, composing her, you could say, his hands on her as often as possible. Amelie had let it happen and had laughed her carefree laugh. Until the day when Kaltendorf took hold of her and didn’t let go. And then Amelie abruptly pushed him away. And said things like “old” and “fat.” And asked him what made him imagine... And laughed, a dirty laugh that Winfred had never heard from her before. Well, that was it for Winfred Kaltendorf! And for Amelie. After all, she was only a college student; whatever had made her think...? He could have had any of the models he’d had before her, all of them, if he’d wanted them. But Winfred had desired only Amelie, and she hadn’t had the sense to appreciate it. “The most despicable women are the ones who lure a man and then push him away,” his mother had said once, and she’d been right, she always was.

Kaltendorf closed his eyes and saw Amelie. Her face hadn’t been all that pretty in her last moments, it’s true. He opened his eyes and saw Amelie on the painting — as beautiful as if she were still alive. He owed this masterful painting to his great skill — and just a little to her.

Winfred Kaltendorf walked heavily into his studio, sat down on the wobbly stool, and rested his face in his damp, earth-encrusted hands. He wasn’t used to physical work; it had exhausted him, every bone in his body ached and he gasped for breath. It’d been a close call, but he’d managed it.

It was all the fault of that arrogant snoop. He’d claimed to be interested in buying Winfred’s original paintings, had praised them, praised them so highly that Winfred allowed himself to be blinded: finally someone who appreciated him as an artist, understood his art! He took his hands away from his face and looked over at his copy of the Renoir, and then at the rocking chair that stood next to his easel. His own stupid vanity and the cheap rot-gut had made him careless. Thank God he had turned around one more time on his way out to the shed to get more paintings. There the fellow stood, in front of his easel, throwing back the sheet under which Winfred had hid Oarsman’s Breakfast. But even that might have been bearable if the photo of the earless Pollack hadn’t still been wedged into the corner of the easel.

A slight groan escaped the painter’s lips as he stood up. His back hurt and his arms felt like lead. But there was nothing he could do about that, there was work to be done! He pulled the stool over to the picture and wiped his hands on his brown corduroy trousers. Lovingly he regarded his “oarsmen”: Koller, Pollack, and Amelie. Amelie! In front of her, a muscular man, still headless, sat backwards on his chair. Winfred’s eyes slid over to the right, toward the rocking chair, and took in the pale face. Precisely. It was just right. He mixed the facial color on his palette and selected a mid-sized cat’s tongue brush of red marten hair. He began with the throat, applying the ground color, and noticed that a blister was developing between his thumb and forefinger, a blister that hindered his brush strokes. That heavy spade. Onward! he told himself sternly. The portrait had to be finished before dawn. And filling in the hole in the garden would take some time, too. He positioned the brush anew, and then paused again. Should I make a photo of him after all? he asked himself, and then shook his head. No, he’d never have an opportunity like this again. Slowly, the throat and head took on form, and once again he was a man possessed. He forgot the pain, forgot the world around him. In a trance he mixed color, compared, corrected, added shadows. It was nearly three when he let the palette drop, stood, stretched, and took a step back to observe. Perfect — faithful to the original, natural, and full of life.

Ramirez Arnaldo Lainez sat in the lounge of the Hotel Husa Via Romana in Saragossa. His cellphone was strategically placed on the low table next to his armchair. Content with himself and the world, he ordered another glass of Rioja from the bar and leafed through the newsletter of the Grechtenweil Boating Club, which he had subscribed to since being stranded in southern Europe years ago, when he was just an exchange student. Now he called himself Arnaldo Lainez and was regarded by those around him as a Spaniard. Other features of his new life included a formidable house in an elegant neighborhood in Alicante, a pretty wife — no children, thank God — and a collection of paintings representing almost all of the impressionists, a collection that was famous beyond national borders. Those paintings he had acquired legally hung in his house, awaiting the ever-ready admiration of his visitors. And Arnaldo alone knew about the walk-in safe in the basement. Here, he admired those artworks that had found their way into his collection through channels best left undescribed. An exquisitely balanced lighting system threw the brush strokes in the paintings into clear relief, and it gave him tremendous pleasure to sit sunken in his armchair and view this intimate little collection. Spatters of blood clung to some of the pictures, but that didn’t matter to him.

Over the course of time, Arnaldo Lainez had built up a small network of trustworthy informants all over Europe who kept him abreast of privately owned art. The brief mention of the Renoir copy in the boating club’s newsletter might have escaped his notice if one of his best informants, Berlin’s art historian Dr. Felix Hoffmann, hadn’t drawn it to his attention. (Hoffmann had also made a name for himself as an artist: His pacemaker installations had been the start of the so-called “CardioArt” movement.) Several days ago, one of Lainez’s confidants, the Grechtenweil gallery owner Erich Pollack, had agreed to find out more about this copy for Lainez. Lainez had waited impatiently for Pollack’s telephone call. When, after two days, no call came, Lainez had sent his man for delicate operations to Grechtenweil to investigate. And now Arnaldo Lainez waited impatiently for his man’s telephone call in the lounge of the Hotel Husa Via Romana. His glance slid repeatedly toward his cellphone. Even the delightful anticipation of having a copy to hang next to the original in his safe could not entirely quell the nervousness slowly rising in him. Why didn’t his man call? His last message had consisted merely of the information that he was standing outside Winfred Kaltendorf’s studio in Grechtenweil and would telephone again as soon as he had spoken to the copyist. Slowly Arnaldo Lainez was losing his taste for the Rioja.

The painter regarded his figures almost lovingly. None of these people would ever humiliate him again. Never! For a long time, he’d pondered who should serve as his model for the arrogant fellow in the front on the left. And then who should appear out of the blue but his neighbor, complaining of extreme financial distress and inquiring with an odd grin what Winfred had been up to in his garden in the middle of the night — and had thereby solved Winfred’s problem. Now the only thing missing was the man in the top hat.

In the future, Kaltendorf decided, he’d continue to stick to familiar paintings. Not that he lacked any ideas of his own, mind you. His works wouldn’t really be copies, you see; they’d just make it easy for people to recognize his genius when they compared his paintings to the originals. He’d be the one to truly perfect the original painting’s artistic idea! Winfred also realized that he’d been too cautious and petty in the choice of his, ah, circle of models. In the future he’d have to be much bolder. After all, his mission extended beyond mere bourgeois revenge fantasies; it was intended to be worthy of the quality of his art. Art, he realized, is the fusion of genius and life, of death and grace! Grace! He liked the word. He who is graced can also show mercy. Hadn’t it been the quintessence of mercy to release these people from the meaninglessness of their material lives, to grant them immortality through his art?

The telephone rang. It was an Arnaldo somebody-or-other from Spain, asking for Pollack. Arnaldo! Kaltendorf didn’t know any Arnaldo, but he knew the voice. Even after all these years he’d recognize it among a thousand voices — the arrogant tones of a former fellow student who had never paid him any notice. Doubtless this “Arnaldo” would soon turn up in person — and he’d be the perfect “man with a top hat”!

But that was enough for today. Almost. Kaltendorf had given some thought to what, in the end, had caused his predecessors to fail. They were painters who’d never really been pushed beyond their own limits. Van Gogh, vastly overestimated, had cut off his ear. An ear! How ridiculous! Had Van Gogh painted with his ears? He, Kaltendorf, would sacrifice something truly absolute on the altar of art. He positioned the axe carefully and with deliberation. The right or the left? After a moment’s hesitation he decided on the right. Naturally, he nearly fainted from the pain. And yet his left hand would learn, virginally and unencumbered by the past, to wield the brush. And through the throbbing and the blood that had spattered in his eyes, he had a vision of his next works: Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, for example, or Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. And just as his existence seemed to be composed of nothing but searing, burning pain, his ultimate masterpiece came to him in a flash — Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus!

Copyright © 2006 by Paul Lascaux, Stefan Slupetzky, Anke Gebert, Richard Lifka, Thomas Przybilka, & Christoph Spielberg.

Translation © 2006 by Mary Tannert.

Devil’s Brew

by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini’s stellar reputation in the mystery field is based mainly on his fiction writing, but his name is also seen frequently as the editor of mystery anthologies. His most recent editorial project is a book of Erle Stanley Gardner stories entitled The Casebook of Sidney Zoom (Crippen & Landru/July ’06). He also had a new novel out this past summer. See The Crimes of Jordan Wise (Walker/June ’06).

* * * *

There were few more undesirable places for a detective and temperance man to be plying his trade, Quincannon reflected sourly, not for the first time in the past week, than the bowels of a blasted brewery.

The fine, rich perfume of malt, hops, yeast, and brewing and fermenting beer permeated every nook and cranny of the two-story, block-square brick building that housed Golden Gate Steam Beer. Whenever he prowled its multitude of rooms and passages, he was enveloped in a pungent miasma that tightened and dried his throat, created a thirst that plain water couldn’t quite slake. In his drinking days he had been mightily fond of the type of lager, invented during the Gold Rush and unique to San Francisco, known as “steam beer.” John Wieland’s Philadelphia Brewery, the National Brewery, and others operating in the city in this year of 1896 specialized in porter and pilsner; if one of their owners had sought his services, he would not be suffering such pangs as this place instilled in him. But it had been Golden Gate’s James Carreaux who had come calling, and the fee-plus-bonus he’d offered for an investigation into the bizarre death of his head brewmaster was a sum no Scot in his right mind could afford to turn down.

In the five years since Quincannon had taken the pledge, he had seldom been even mildly tempted to return to his bibulous ways. Even on those occasions when he visited his old watering hole, Hoolihan’s Saloon, to spend an evening with cronies or clients, he hadn’t once considered imbibing anything stronger than his usual mug of clam juice. But after one full week of undercover work in the Golden Gate’s rarefied atmosphere, his craving for a tankard of San Francisco’s best lager had grown to the barely manageable level. Another week here and he might well be seduced.

Well, it was a moot point. He wouldn’t be here in the guise of a city sanitation inspector for a second week, or even for one more day. There was no longer any doubt that Otto Ackermann’s death had been a deliberate homicide, not the freak accident the authorities had ruled it to be. He knew who had manufactured what Carreaux referred to as a “devil’s brew” by coshing Ackermann and pitching him into a vat of fermenting beer to drown, and he was tolerably certain he knew the reason behind the deed. All that was needed now was additional proof.

Instead of entering the brewery with the arriving employees, as he had on previous mornings, he loitered outside the main entrance. The cold, fog-laden March wind was much preferable to the brewery perfume. He smoked his pipe, feigning interest in the big dray wagons laden with both full and empty kegs that passed by on Fremont Street.

Caleb Lansing, the assistant brewmaster, was among the last to arrive, heavily bundled in cap, bandanna, and peacoat. He barely glanced at Quincannon as he passed and entered the building. Quincannon essayed a small satisfied smile around the stem of his briar. Lansing had no idea that he was about to be yaffled for his crime; if he had, he would have taken it on the lammas by now.

When Quincannon finished his pipe he strolled briskly to Market Street, where he boarded a westbound streetcar. He rode it as far as Duboce, walked the two blocks south to Fourteenth Street — a workingman’s neighborhood of beer halls, oyster dealers, Chinese laundries, grocers, and other small merchants.

The front door of the boardinghouse where Lansing hung his hat was unlocked; he sauntered in as if he belonged there, climbed creaking stairs to the second floor. The hallway there was deserted. He paused before the door bearing a pot-metal numeral 8 and tested the latch. Locked, of course. Not that this presented much of a problem. Quincannon had developed certain skills during his years with the United States Secret Service and subsequent time as a private investigator, some of which rivaled those of the most accomplished yeggs and cracksmen. The set of burglar tools he had liberated from a scruff named Wandering Ned several years ago gave him swift access to Lansing’s two small rooms.

Both sitting room and bedroom were cluttered with personal items, as well as several bottles of rye whiskey. But no steam beer; Lansing evidently had little taste for what he helped brew. In the fireplace grate Quincannon found a partially charred note penned in a sprawling backhand. Much of its content was unburned and legible, including an injunction from the writer to Lansing to destroy it after reading. Also present and damning was the writer’s signature, X.J. Very few men in San Francisco could lay claim to those initials. The only one Quincannon knew of was Xavier Jameson, the head brewmaster at one of Golden Gate’s rivals, West Star Steam Beer.

His second discovery took longer, but was equally rewarding. In a small strongbox cleverly concealed behind a loose board in the bedroom closet he found two thousand dollars in greenbacks and a handful of gold double eagles. As much as he enjoyed the look and feel of spendable currency, he hesitated only a few seconds before returning the money to the strongbox and the strongbox to its hiding place.

Criminals — faugh! The lot of them were arrogant and careless dolts. Lansing’s failure to completely burn the note and his hiding of the payoff money here in his rooms, coupled with the testimony of the witness who had seen him entering the brewery late on the night of Ackermann’s death, Lansing’s denial of the fact, and a slip he’d made that revealed his dealings with Xavier Jameson and West Star Steam Beer, was more than sufficient evidence to hang him.

Quincannon whistled an old temperance tune, “The Brewers’ Big Horses Can’t Run Over Me,” as he left the boardinghouse. Naught was left but to confront Lansing, urge a confession out of him through one means or another, and hand him over to those inept, blue-coated denizens of the Hall of Justice who had the audacity to call themselves San Francisco’s finest. Then he could return to the relative peace and clean air of the offices of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, where his only temptation — one he yearned to succumb to — was the charms of his partner and unrequited love, Sabina Carpenter.

Golden Gate’s business offices were clustered at the east end of the second floor, all of them small and cramped except for James Carreaux’s. This was Quincannon’s first stop upon his return, but Caleb Lansing was not in his office. Waiting there for the assistant brewmaster was not an option; he was anything but a patient man when he was about to yaffle a miscreant. He went down the hall to the nearest occupied office, that of the company bookeeper, Adam Corby, and poked his head inside.

“Would you know where I can find Lansing, Mr. Corby?”

Corby, a bantam of a man in striped galluses and rough twill trousers, paused in his writing in an open ledger book. “Lansing? Why no, I don’t.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Just after I arrived this morning. Have you tried the brewhouse?”

“My next stop.”

The brewhouse was at the opposite end of the building. Lansing was nowhere to be found in the rooms containing the malt storage tanks and mash tun. Jacob Drew, the mash boss, a red-haired, red-bearded giant, reported that he’d seen Lansing in the fermenting room a few minutes earlier.

“What d’ye want with him, mister?” Drew asked. “Something to do with your inspection?”

“No. Another matter entirely.”

“The lad’s a weak stick, but he’s done competent work since poor Ackermann’s accident.”

“That he has,” Quincannon said. “Though not in the brewer’s art.”

He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort — an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer” — a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at 60–70 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city’s winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler’s relief valve.

The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon’s nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He wished, ruefully, that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.

On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a mixture of hop resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.

Quincannon hastened to climb the stairs. From the catwalk, the cooking wort and interiors of the fermenting vats were visible. An unappetizing view, to be sure. The vat in which Ackermann had died had been cleaned and was no longer in use, but Quincannon’s imagination was sufficient to conjure up the scene that had confronted the workmen the morning after.

Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious sort in his middle years, given to smoking odiferous long-nines; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. Sudden anxious tension pulled his vulpine features out of shape. The look of a guilty man, by grab; Quincannon had seen it often enough to know it well.

Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I’ll have a word with you, Lansing.”

“Not now you won’t. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“My business with you won’t wait.”

“What business?”

“Otto Ackermann. Xavier Jameson. And the West Star Brewing Company.”

Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster’s narrow face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The game’s up, Lansing. I know the whole lay.”

Lansing said, “Damned fly cop!” under his breath and shoved past him. He would have run then if Quincannon hadn’t grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.

“No trouble now, or you’ll—”

The blasted scoundrel was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon’s shin, sent him staggering backward against the railing. Lansing fled to the stairs, clattered down them as Quincannon, growling an oath, regained his balance and hobbled in pursuit.

“Stop him!” he shouted at the workers below. “Stop that man!”

“No, no, don’t let him catch me!” Lansing cried in return. “He’s an assassin, he’s trying to kill me!”

The workers stood in clustered confusion, looking from one to the other of the running men. Lansing threaded through them, vaulted an intestinal coiling of pipes, and disappeared behind one of the vats. Quincannon might have snagged him before he escaped from the fermenting room if a moustached workman hadn’t stepped into his path, saying, “Here, what’s the idea of—” Quincannon bowled him over, but in doing so his foot slipped on the wet floor and he went skidding headfirst into a snakelike tangle of hose. By the time he disengaged himself and regained his feet, fought off clutching hands, and went ahead in a limping rush, Lansing was nowhere to be seen.

There was only one way out of this section of the brewery. Still hobbling, Quincannon went through the boiler room, past the corner room where the vats of rejected beer stood in heavy shadow, then past the freight elevator and down the stairs to the lower floor. An electrically lit passage led into the main tunnel that divided the building in half. He hurried along the tunnel, out onto the Seventh Street loading dock. There was no sign of Lansing anywhere in the vicinity. Half a dozen burly workmen were wrestling filled kegs onto a pair of massive Studebaker wagons; Quincannon called to them. No, they hadn’t seen Lansing come out.

So his quarry was still in the building. But for how long?

Quincannon’s leg still smarted, but he could move more or less normally again; he ran back inside. Perpendicular to the tunnel was another wide corridor that led in one direction to the shipping offices and the main entrance, in the other to the cellars. There was no exit from the cellars; he hastened the other way. But then he encountered a clerk on his way to the dock with a handful of bills of lading, who told him that Lansing hadn’t gone that way, either. The clerk had been conversing with another man in the passage for the past five minutes and would have seen him if he had.

Now Quincannon was nonplussed. He retraced his path along the side corridor to the brick-walled one that led downward to the cellars. A workman pushing a hand truck laden with fifty-pound sacks of barley was just coming up. Mr. Lansing? Yes, sir, just a few moments ago. Heading into the storerooms.

“The storerooms? Are you certain, man?”

“Aye. In a great hurry he was.”

Why the devil would Lansing go there? To hide? Fool’s game, if that was his intention. The storerooms, where all the ingredients that went into the mass production of beer were kept, were a collective dead end. So were the cellar rooms that housed filled kegs and the enormous cedar vats where “green” beer was ripened and finished beer was held before being piped to the company’s bottling plant in a separate building next-door.

Quincannon was not wearing his Navy Colt; James Carreaux had an aversion to firearms and would not permit them in his brewery under any circumstances. As he made his way down the passage, he berated himself for not defying Carreaux’s edict. Unarmed, he would have to proceed with considerably more caution. Men who blundered into uncertain situations were ripe for the suffering of consequences. This was doubly true of detectives.

The temperature dropped noticeably as he descended. When he reached the artery that led into the storerooms, the air was frosty enough to require the buttoning of his coat. He passed through a large room stacked on two sides with empty kegs. At its far end, a solid oak door barred the way into the remaining storerooms.

The door, Quincannon had been told, had been installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage. Years before, a former brewery employee had returned at night and helped himself to a wagonload of sugar and barley, and Carreaux would brook no repeat of that business. The door was kept open during the day but locked at end of shift. Only a handful of men in supervisory positions had keys.

It should not have been closed now. Nor should it have been locked, which it was. Quincannon muttered an imprecation. Lansing must have done the locking; he had access to a key. But why? What could he be up to in the storerooms?

Quincannon listened at the door. No sounds came to him through the heavy wood. He bent at the waist to peer through the keyhole. All he could make out was an empty section of concrete floor, lighted but shadow-ridden. He straightened again, scowling, tugging at his beard. The loading-dock foreman, Jack Malloy, would have a key; find him, then, and waste no time in doing it.

Just as he turned away, the muffled bark of a pistol came from somewhere inside the storerooms.

Hell and damn! Quincannon swung back to the door, coming up hard against it, rattling it in its frame. Reflex made him tug futilely at the handle. There was no second report, but when he pressed an ear to the wood he heard several faint sounds.

Movement, but what sort he couldn’t tell. The silence that followed crackled with tension.

He pushed away again and ran back along the passage until he came on a workman just emerging from the cellars. He sent the man after the loading-dock foreman, then took himself back to the door. He tested the latch to make sure it was still locked, even though there was no way anyone could have come out and gotten past him.

Malloy arrived on the run, two other men trailing behind him. “What’s the trouble here?” he demanded.

“Someone fired a pistol behind that locked door,” Quincannon told him, “not five minutes ago.”

“A pistol?” Malloy said, astonished. “In the storerooms?”

“There’s no mistake.”

“But... Mr. Carreaux has strict orders against firearms on the premises...”

Quincannon made an impatient growling noise. “Button your lip, lad, and unlock the blasted door.”

The foreman was used to the voice of authority; quickly he produced his ring of keys. The door opened inward and Quincannon crowded through first. Two large, chilly rooms opened off the passage, one filled with sacks of barley, the other with boxes of yeast and fifty-pound sacks of malt, hops, and sugar stacked on end. Both enclosures were empty. The sacks and boxes were so tightly packed together that no one could have hidden behind or among them without being seen at a glance.

At the far end of the passage stood another closed door. “What’s beyond there?” he asked the foreman.

“Utility room. Well-pump and equipment storage.”

Quincannon tried the door. It refused his hand on the latch. “You have a key, Malloy?”

“The lock’s the same as on the storeroom door.”

“Then open it, man, open it.”

Malloy obeyed. The heavy, dank smells of mold and earth, and the acrid scent of gunpowder, tickled Quincannon’s nostrils as the door creaked inward. Only one electric bulb burned here. Gloom lay thick beyond the threshold, enfolding the shapes of well-pump, coiled hoses, hand trucks, and other equipment. Quincannon found a lucifer in his pocket, scraped it alight on the rough brick wall.

“Lord save us!” Malloy said.

Caleb Lansing lay sprawled on the dirt floor in front of the well-pump. Blood glistened blackly on his shirtfront. Beside one outflung hand was an old LeMat revolver, the type that used pinfire cartridges. Quincannon knelt to press fingers against the artery in Lansing’s neck. Not even the flicker of a pulse.

“What are you men doing here? What’s going on?”

The new voice belonged to Adam Corby, the pint-sized bookkeeper. He pushed his way forward, sucked in his breath audibly when he saw what lay at his feet.

“Mr. Lansing’s shot himself,” Malloy said.

“Shot himself? Here?”

“Crazy place for it, by all that’s holy.”

“Suicide,” Corby said in awed tones. “Lansing, of all people.”

Quincannon paid no attention to them. While they were gabbling, he finished his examination of the dead man and picked up the LeMat revolver, slipped it into his coat pocket.

Suicide?

Bah!

Murder, plain enough.

“Murder?” James Carreaux said in disbelief. “How can Lansing’s death possibly be murder? He died alone behind not one but two locked doors!”

“No, sir,” Quincannon said. “Not alone and not by his own hand.”

“I don’t understand how you can make such a claim.”

“He had no weapon when I braced him in the fermenting room — I would have noticed a pistol the size and shape of a LeMat. If he had been armed, he’d’ve drawn down on me instead of running like a scared rabbit.”

“He could have smuggled it in earlier and stashed it somewhere, couldn’t he?”

“Plan to take his own life when he had enough money to flee the city? And do it here in the brewery, in a blasted utility room? No, Mr. Carreaux, Caleb Lansing was murdered.” Quincannon paused to light his stubby briar. “Three facts prove it beyond a doubt.”

“What facts?”

“The location of the fatal wound, for one. Lansing was shot on the left side of the chest, just above the rib cage — a decidedly awkward angle for a man to hold a handgun for a self-inflicted wound. Most gunshot suicides choose the head as their target, for the obvious reason.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Carreaux said reluctantly.

“Second fact: There were no powder burns on Lansing’s shirt or vest. He was shot from a distance of at least eighteen inches, a physical impossibility if his were the finger on the trigger.”

“And the third fact?”

“His key to the two doors. It wasn’t on his person or anywhere in the utility room. He couldn’t have locked that door without it, now could he?”

The brewery owner sighed and swiveled his creaking chair for a long stare out the window behind his desk. Fog lay over China Basin and the bay beyond; tall ships’ masts were visible through its drift, like the fingers of skeletal apparitions. Quincannon, puffing furiously, created an equivalently thick tobacco fog in the office. The good rich aroma of navy plug helped mask some of the Golden Gate’s insidious pungency.

At length Carreaux swiveled back to face him. He was a large man of fifty-odd years, florid, with sideburns that resembled woolly tufts of cotton, and morose gray eyes. Not a happy gent, Quincannon judged, even at the best of times. He said obliquely, “Now you know why I have such an aversion to firearms.”

Quincannon made no comment.

“Well, then. You’ve convinced me — murder has been done in my house. Who the devil is responsible?”

“Lansing’s accomplice, of course.”

“Accomplice?”

“In the theft of Otto Ackermann’s formula for steam beer.”

“For the finest steam beer on the West Coast,” Carreaux amended grimly. “Golden Gate’s exclusive formula, until now. I don’t suppose there is any chance that Lansing, or this alleged accomplice of his, has yet to turn it over to West Star?”

“None, I’m afraid,” Quincannon said. “The charred note and the two thousand dollars in Lansing’s flat testify to a consummated deal.”

Carreaux sighed again. “I’ll try to get an injunction against West Star. But that may not stop them from implementing Ackermann’s formula, even with their duplicitous brewmaster in jail.”

“You still have the copy of the formula that Ackermann gave you?”

“Yes, in a safe place, but that was years ago. It’s possible he made refinements since then. Even if he didn’t... the competition, man, the competition.”

Quincannon understood; he’d been well schooled in the subject. A master brewer’s formula, the proportions in which he mixes his ingredients, the manner in which he treats them in the processing, is the lifeblood of a successful brewery. Golden Gate’s reputation as San Francisco’s best producer of steam beer would suffer, and lead to reduced sales, if West Star were to begin brewing lager of comparable quality.

“Tell me this, Quincannon. Why would Lansing need an accomplice to steal the formula, when he had access to it himself as Ackermann’s assistant?”

“The accomplice was likely the brains of the pair. His idea and plan, mayhap. He may even have had a hold of some sort on Lansing to force him into the crime.”

“You suspected there were two of them all along, then?”

“Of course,” Quincannon lied. He should have suspected it, given Lansing’s weak-stick nature. When viewed in the proper light, the man was a poor candidate for the solo planning and execution of such a crime. Ackermann had been a burly gent; it could not have been an easy task to cosh him and then pitch him into that vat of fermenting lager. Well, even the best detectives suffered a blind spot now and then. Not that he would ever admit it to a client, or to Sabina or anyone else.

“The motive for Lansing’s murder?” Carreaux asked. “And why in such a location?”

“My suspicion is that the two arranged to meet secretly in the utility room this morning, likely not for the first time. Lansing was consulting his watch when I found him in the fermenting room, which suggests that the time of a meeting was near at hand. When he escaped from me, he fled to the storerooms to keep the rendezvous and to tell his partner that the game was up. Lansing was the sort who would spill everything in an instant, once he was caught, and the accomplice knew it. Either he felt he had no choice but to dispose of him then and there before his name was revealed, or the killing was premeditated; the latter would explain why he was armed.”

“Do you have any idea of his identity?”

“Not as yet.”

“Or how he could have committed murder behind two locked doors and escaped unseen with you and others guarding the only exit route?”

“Not as yet. But I’ll find out, never fear.”

“You’d better, Quincannon,” Carreaux said. “You advertise yourself as San Francisco’s premier detective. Well, then, prove it as a fact and not mere braggadocio — and prove it quickly. For the sake of your reputation and mine!”

The door to the storerooms had been locked again after the removal of Caleb Lansing’s body, at Quincannon’s urging and Carreaux’s order. And all the keys had been rounded up and accounted for. Quincannon took one of the keys with him when he left Carreaux’s office. He appropriated a bug-eye lantern from the shipping offices to supplement the weak electric light, and then let himself into the storerooms and locked the door again behind him.

He re-searched the utility room first, in the interest of thoroughness. It contained nothing that he might have overlooked the first time. He went next to the room housing the sacked barley. The dusty smells of grain and burlap were thick enough to clog his sinuses and produce several explosive sneezes as he shined the bug-eye over the piled sacks. They were stacked close together, at a height of some five feet and flush against the back and side walls. Nothing larger than a kitten could have hidden itself behind or among any of them.

He crossed into the other large room. The boxes of yeast and heavy sacks of malt, sugar, and hops stood in long, tightly packed rows along the side walls. No one could have hidden behind or among them, either. The floor at the far end wall was bare; a pile of empty hop sacks and a pair of hand trucks lay against the near end wall. Everything was as it had been when he’d looked in earlier.

Or was it?

No. Something seemed different now...

Quincannon stood for a few moments, cudgeling his memory. Then he made a careful examination of the room and its contents. A thin smile split his freebooter’s beard when he finished. So that was the answer! Bully!

He dusted a smudge of yellow powder off his fingers, relocked the storeroom door, and sought out Jack Malloy. The answers to the questions he asked the loading-dock foreman added weight to his conclusions.

Time now to confront his man.

Only it wasn’t, not quite.

The bookkeeper’s cubicle in the office wing was empty. A quick search revealed further damning evidence: a yellow smear on one leg of the desk chair, and two small dried flower buds on the floor under the desk. There could be no doubt now that Adam Corby was Lansing’s accomplice, or of how the murder and his “disappearance” from the locked storerooms had been managed.

He would have proceeded to comb the brewery for Corby, but one of the office staff put a crimp in that notion. “Mr. Corby left early,” he was told, “not more than half an hour ago. Said he had an important errand to run.”

Important errand? Nefarious one, more likely. Well, thirty minutes wasn’t too long a headstart; if he made haste, he might be able to prevent Corby from completing it and vanishing yet again.

There were no hansom cabs in the vicinity of the brewery. Quincannon had to cover the two blocks to Market Street on shanks’ mare before he found one. As he was settling inside, one of the newfangled horseless carriages passed by snorting and growling like a bull on the charge. Dratted machines were noisy polluters that frightened women, children, and horses, but he had to admit that they were capable of traveling at an astonishing rate of speed. Too bad he hadn’t the use of one right now; it would get him to his destination twice as fast as the hansom, and speed was of the essence.

At the promise of a fifty-cent tip, the hack driver drove his horse at a brisk pace through the crowded streets. Luck rode with Quincannon; the timing of their arrival at Caleb Lansing’s boardinghouse was almost perfect. Two minutes earlier and it would have saved him a considerable amount of temper and exertion.

As it was, Golden Gate’s diminutive bookkeeper had just emerged and was on his way through the front gate when the hansom rattled to a stop. Quincannon flung coins at the driver and hopped out. In stentorian tones he roared, “Corby! Adam Corby!”

Corby froze for an instant, his head craned and his eyes abulge. Then he emitted a cry that sounded like “Awk!” and broke into a headlong run.

One foot chase in a single day was irritation enough; two offended Quincannon’s dignity and sense of fair play, stoked his wrath. Damned cheeky felons! Growling and grumbling, he plunged after his quarry.

Corby dashed into the street, passing so close to an oncoming carriage that the horse reared. The animal’s flashing hooves narrowly missed Quincannon as it buck-jumped forward. This served to increase both his outrage and his foot speed. The little man was driven by panic, however, and there was still a distance of some twenty rods separating them when he leapt up onto the far sidewalk. He banged into a woman pedestrian, sent her and her reticule flying. Though the collision staggered him, he managed to stay on his feet; seconds later he ducked through the doorway of an oyster house.

By the time Quincannon reached the eatery and flung inside, Corby was at a counter at the far end and had swung around to face him. Something came flying from his hand, whizzed by Quincannon’s head as he advanced, and splattered him with trailing liquid. It was followed by two more of the same — large oysters, unshucked, from an iced bucket on the counter. One of them thumped stingingly against his chest before he could twist aside.

Another indignity! Damn the man’s eyes!

Corby spun, raced out a side entrance. Quincannon, unslowed by the hurled oysters, shoved his way through a clutch of startled customers and emerged into a wide cobbled alley. The scoundrel’s lead was less than twenty rods now. He threw a look over his shoulder, saw Quincannon gaining on him, and veered sideways across a short yard and through a pair of open doors into a ramshackle wooden building. A sign above the doors proclaimed: Thomas Vail and Sons, Cooperage.

Quincannon pounded inside in Corby’s wake. The interior was weakly lighted, inhabited by a trio of men in leather aprons working with hammer, saw, and lathe. Barrels and kegs of various types and sizes rose in stacks along one wall. The rest of the space was cluttered with tools, lumber, staves, forged metal rings. Corby was at the far end, hopping back and forth, searching desperately for a nonexistent rear exit. One of the coopers shouted something that Quincannon paid no attention to. He advanced implacably.

Another “Awk!” came out of the little man. He dodged sideways, quick but not quick enough. Quincannon clamped fingers around one arm, brought him up short. Corby struggled, managed to tear loose, but in doing so he fell backwards against a stack of barrels; the barrels toppled over on him with a great clatter, knocked him flat to the sawdusted wooden floor. Quincannon danced out of the way just in time to avoid a similar fate.

Corby wasn’t badly hurt. He moaned and tried to regain his feet. An extra-solid thump on the cranium changed the little scruff’s mind. And a second thump stretched him out cold.

Quincannon was on one knee beside his prisoner, transferring to his own pockets the greenbacks and gold double eagles Corby had taken from Lansing’s rooms, when one of the coopers came rushing up. “Here, what’s the meaning of all this?” the man demanded in irate tones. “Look what you’ve done to these barrels!”

Straightening, Quincannon pressed one of the double eagles into his palm.

“This will pay for the damage.”

The cooper gawped at the coin, then at him. “Who are you, mister?”

“John Quincannon, of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. At your service.”

“A detective?”

“The finest in San Francisco,” Quincannon said virtuously, “if not in the nation and the entire world.”

It was not often that he could persuade Sabina to dine with him, but he managed it the next day by promising her a full accounting of his prowess in the devil’s-brew case. Generally his thrifty Scot’s nature limited his restaurant meals to the less expensive establishments, but on this evening he surprised Sabina by calling for her in a rented carriage and taking her to Maison Riche — one of the city’s tonier French bistros, at Dupont and Geary streets, whose specialties included such epicurean delights as caviar sur canane and poulet de grain aux cresson. There were two dining rooms on the ground floor; he requested seating in the smaller, more intimate one with individual tables. He would have preferred one of the discreet dining cubicles on the upper floor, whose amenities included a velvet couch and a door that could be locked from the inside. But Sabina, of course, would have had none of that and he didn’t bother to suggest it.

She had dressed well for him, he was heartened to note. Beneath her lamb’s-wool coat, she wore a brocade jacket over a snowy shirtwaist and a wine-colored skirt. Pendant ruby earrings, a gift from her late husband, made a fiery complement to her sleek dark hair. Even more to his liking was the shell brooch at her breast — a gift from her doting partner, bought for her while he’d been away on a case in the Hawaiian islands the previous year.

When they were seated and their drink orders placed — French wine for Sabina, clam juice for him — Quincannon took one of her small hands in his. “You look particularly lovely tonight, my dear,” he said.

She permitted him to hold her hand while she thanked him for the compliment, and then gently withdrew it. “Now then, John,” she said. “Let’s have your explanation.”

“Explanation?”

“Of the devil’s-brew case, as you promised.”

“Business before we dine?”

“We both know you’ve been eager to glory in your latest triumph. You’ve worn your preening look all day.”

“I do not have a preening look.”

“Yes, you do. Like a peacock about to crow. Well, go ahead and spread your feathers.”

Quincannon pretended to be wounded. “You do me a grave injustice.”

“Oh, bosh,” she said. “How did you know Adam Corby was guilty of murdering his partner?”

“Lupulin,” he said.

“...I beg your pardon?”

“Yellow glands between the petals of hop flowers. A fine powdery dust clings to them, some of which is released when the flowers are picked.” He added sententiously, courtesy of Jack Malloy, that it was this dust, not the hop buds themselves, that offset the sweetness of malt and gave beer its sedative and digestive qualities.

“Amazing,” Sabina said, not without irony.

“There was a smudge of the powder on the leg of Corby’s office chair. And two dried hop flowers on the floor under his desk.”

“Dried? I thought you said the powder comes from freshly picked flowers.”

“It does.”

“John...”

“Those were the essential clues. Along with two others.”

“And what were they?”

“The fact that Corby appeared in the storerooms so soon after we discovered Lansing’s body. And the man’s stature.”

“What do you mean, his stature?”

“Just that. He was the only Golden Gate employee who could have been guilty.”

Sabina nudged him with the toe of her shoe, not lightly. “You’re being deliberately cryptic. Come now — how did these clues identify Corby as the murderer and his method of perpetrating the crime?”

Quincannon fluffed his well-groomed whiskers and adopted a brisk professional air. Sabina was not a woman to be trifled with when it came to business matters; she had been a Pinkerton operative in Denver before he met her, with a record every bit as exemplary, if not more so, than his own. She was not to be trifled with as a woman, either, as he had learned to his frustration and chagrin. Both qualities made her all the more desirable.

“The short and sweet of it, then,” he said, and began by relating the same facts and suppositions he had presented to James Carreaux after the murder. “Corby intended to shoot Lansing at their prearranged meeting in the utility room, had brought the pistol with him for that reason. His motives being self-protection and Lansing’s share of the West Star payoff money. Once Lansing told him that I had accosted and chased him, he wasted no time firing the fatal shot. He placed the revolver near Lansing’s hand, rifled his pocket for both the storeroom key and the key to Lansing’s rooms. In different circumstances he would have simply unlocked the storeroom door and slipped out at the first opportunity. But he’d heard the sounds I made at the door, knew the shot had been heard and the passage was blocked. He was trapped there with a dead man. What could he do?”

“What did he do?”

“He had two options,” Quincannon said. “Hold fast and bluff it out, claim that he’d tried and failed to stop Lansing from shooting himself. But he had no way of knowing how much I knew and he was afraid such a story wouldn’t be believed. His second option was to hide and hope his hiding place would be overlooked in the first rush.

“Corby was quick-witted, I’ll give him that. He had less than five minutes to formulate and implement a plan and he used every second. The first thing he did was to lock the utility-room door; the key that operates the storeroom door lock works on that one as well. The idea of that was to create more confusion and solidify the false impression of suicide. Then he entered the room containing the sacks of malt and hops and established his clever hiding place.”

“Where?” Sabina asked. “You said you looked into that room and there was no place for a man to hide.”

“No obvious place. Corby counted on the fact that the first inspection would be cursory, and that is what happened. If there’d been time for a careful inspection then, I would have found him quickly enough. But I and the others were intent on finding out what had happened to Lansing.”

“Well? Where was he?”

“When I first looked in the room, I registered a single sack of hops propped against the end wall. When I returned later, the sack was no longer there; it had been moved back into the tightly wedged row along the side wall. That fact and the pile of empty hop sacks gave me the answer.”

“Ah! Corby hid inside one of the empty sacks.”

“Just so. He dragged a full sack from the end of the row, climbed into an empty sack or pulled it down over him, and wedged himself into the space. When Malloy opened the storeroom door and we rushed in, Corby held himself in such a position that he resembled the other sacks in the row. Now you see what I meant by his stature being proof of his guilt. Only a bantam-sized man could have fit inside a fifty-pound hop sack.”

“And while you and the other men were huddled around Lansing’s body, Corby stepped out of the sack, tossed it onto the pile of empties, returned the full sack to its proper place, and pretended to have just arrived.”

Quincannon nodded. “It struck me odd at the time that he should have shown up when he did. A brewery’s bookkeeper has little business in the storerooms. Unless he’d been there all along and his business was murder.”

“The hop flowers you found in his office came from the hideout sack?”

“Yes. Caught on the twill of his trousers or inside the cuffs.”

“And the lupulin?”

“Also from the inside of the sack. Golden Gate buys its hops from a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The flowers are picked, dried, and sacked there, and now and then dried hops are put into bags previously used by pickers. In such cases, a residue of the yellow powder clings to the inside of the burlap. Corby hadn’t changed trousers when I apprehended him; the yellow residue was still visible on both legs.”

“Well done, John, I must say. But I do have one more question.”

“Ask it, my dear.”

“I assume you turned the partially burned note over to the police as evidence against Corby. Did you also turn over the two thousand dollars he took from Lansing’s rooms?”

Quincannon assumed an injured expression. “And have it disappear into the pockets of a corrupt bluecoat five minutes after I left the Hall of Justice? That would have been irresponsible.”

“Which means you still have the money and you intend to keep it.”

“And why not?” he said defensively. “It doesn’t legally belong to our client or to anyone else. We have just as much right to it as a fat jailer or corrupt desk sergeant. More of a right, by godfrey, as an added bonus for pure and noble detective work. And I won’t listen to any argument to the contrary.”

“I won’t even try. When it comes to money, John Quincannon, you’re incorrigible.”

He gazed fondly, longingly into her dark blue eyes. Money was not the only thing about which he was incorrigible.

Copyright © 2006 by Bill Pronzini

Content

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

The Richard Parker Coincidence by Nancy Pickard

Dead Even by Clark Howard

Murder at the Butt End of Nowhere by Meredith Anthony

A Convergence of Clerics by Edward D. Hoch

The Perfect Beach by Jeff Williamson

The Happening by Eddie Newton

1 It So Happens...

2 What Happened?

3 What Might Have Happened

4 The Way It Happened

Epilogue What Really Happened

At Willow-Walk-Behind by James Powell

Empathy by Buzz Mauro

The Copyist by Paul Lascaux, Stefan Slupetzky, Anke Gebert, Richard Lifka, Thomas Przybilka, & Christoph Spielberg

Devil’s Brew by Bill Pronzini