© 2008 by Margaret Maron

Death’s Half Acre, the 14th book in Margaret Maron’s acclaimed Deborah Knott series, will appear in bookstores around the time this issue mails to subscribers. But while Knott fans have been able to follow her in a new book almost every year for more than a decade, the same is not true for fans of the earlier Maron character Sigrid Harald. The followimg brings Sigrid to life, and centerstage, again.

* * * *

“...so I ask you again, Miss Harald. Who wanted him dead?”

“And I tell you again, Inspector Giordano. I don’t know. I only met these people last evening.”

The weekend began innocuously enough when Elliott Buntrock, one of New York’s most respected art curators, shifted his chair to get out of the hot Italian sun and said, “It’ll be fun.” Seated in a sidewalk cafe a few quiet streets away from the Ponte Vecchio where tourists swarmed like mindless ants, he offered his companion a crostino thickly smeared with chopped black olives and said, “I’ll rent a car. We could be at the castle forty minutes after we check out of our hotel.”

The slender, dark-haired woman who sat across the table from him accepted the appetizer, but declined the suggestion. “I’m not a castle person, Elliott. Why can’t we stay here in Florence?”

“Florence is hot and crowded and all the real Florentines are up in the hills. It’s Tuscany, Sigrid. I bet you’ve never seen the Tuscan countryside.”

“We’re not here to look at landscapes.” She picked dubiously at the wild-boar salad he had persuaded her to order. “We came to retrieve Nauman’s paintings from that gallery.”

“And their attorneys say we can’t have them until Monday, so why not spend the weekend where it’s cool and relaxing? I promised an old friend who’s leading a tour of art enthusiasts that I’d speak to his group and he’s comping me to an apartment at the castle. It would be churlish not to go. Besides,” he said, knowing one of the reasons for her edgy impatience, “the place has its own swimming pool. A real pool, Sigrid, and Jim says it’s never crowded.”

And with good reason, Sigrid Harald thought, stroking arm over arm through the cool clear water a few hours later. More a short-term rental lodge than a hotel, the Castello di Montefugoni was built atop a steep hill and its views of trees and vineyards and more castles on distant hills were as spectacular as Elliott had promised. The self-service apartment that Dr. Jim Olson, Buntrock’s friend, had booked for them was airy and spacious: two large bedrooms and an even larger dining/sitting room with a small galley and furnishings that were comfortably shabby.

Unfortunately, there were no elevators and the pool was down three long flights of ancient stone steps. All very well to learn that Dante and Boccaccio had climbed these very same steps, it still took a fairly determined swimmer to make the trek. Despite the endless stairs, though, Sigrid would have gladly walked them twice over to get to this pool. Swimming was her one reliable stress-reliever and these last few months had pushed her almost to the breaking point.

Two years ago, she had been an NYPD homicide detective leading an uncomplicated life. Now, thanks to a hasty will written by her lover shortly before he died in a car wreck, she owned an estate worth millions. She first met Oscar Nauman when one of his colleagues was murdered, and the end of her investigation marked the beginning of their affair. She had vaguely known that he was one of the giants of the art world, but modern art left her cold. It was the man himself who had attracted her, not his reputation, and she had been devastated by his death.

Almost as devastating was the realization that she could not continue to work for the NYPD and manage Nauman’s estate, too, a decision made somewhat easier by a new boss who clearly resented her and never missed a chance to let her know it.

Professionally, she had been confident of her skills in solving tricky homicides, but she was unnerved to discover that collectors, gallery owners, and museum directors could be every bit as cutthroat as any hardened con men. Witness the Florentine gallery that had taken two of Nauman’s paintings on consignment before his death and now claimed the authority to buy them outright at the original price although they had since doubled in value.

It was Nauman’s friend Elliott Buntrock who had argued that the only way to get the pictures back was to come over and take physical possession of them herself. In this age of instant communication, she was infuriated that it should take a face-to-face meeting to handle the situation, but here in the water, her tension began to drain away. Swimming had gotten her through the worst of her grief after Nauman’s death. It would get her through settling his complicated estate and disposing of his pictures. In giving herself up to the water, she could let her mind float blankly, aware of nothing except the water itself.

When fully relaxed, she climbed from the pool and sluiced off at a shower almost hidden in a stone wall thickly covered in ivy. As she wrapped a towel around her wet body, an attractive blonde passed, gave her a friendly nod, and continued on to one of the deck chairs, where she dropped her towel and sunglasses and stood for a moment on the edge of the deep end. She appeared to be in her early forties and her well-toned body showed firm muscles.

“Is it cold?” she asked.

“Not really. Not once you’re in,” Sigrid said.

The woman executed a shallow dive that took her halfway across the pool’s width and there was a happy grin on her face when her head broke the surface. “Wonderful!”

“Hope I’m not interrupting?”

Sigrid glanced around to see a middle-aged man in red plaid swim trunks with a towel draped around his neck. His smile included both of them, but his eyes were on the woman in the water.

“I was just leaving,” Sigrid said and walked down the long grassy allée. As she neared the terrace steps, a voice called down to her.

Looking up, she saw Elliott Buntrock leaning over the balustrade of the terrace above. Interviewers often used long-legged bird images to describe his looks; and from this angle, his bony face and angular limbs did give him the appearance of a huge, if decidedly exotic, bird. He stood with his arms outstretched on either side, his hands on the ledge, so that the front of his linen jacket swung wide like stork wings.

“Do you see a grotto down there?” he asked.

Directly beneath the terrace and out of his sight was a semicircular alcove built into the wall. A chain across the front discouraged viewers from entering. Inside, the walls seemed to be made of gray mud daubed on by the trowel-load. Life-size statues of young men stood in niches around the walls and a colorful fresco brightened the domed ceiling.

“I guess you’d call it a grotto,” she said doubtfully.

“Are there frogs?”

The late-afternoon sun had cast deep shadows across the terraced gardens, but at the back of the alcove, she could make out a Grecian-looking goddess who seemed to be imploring heaven for a favor. At her feet were two young children and a figure that had the legs of a man and the body of a frog. More frog faces peered back at her from around the edges.

“Several,” she answered, but by then she heard his sandals clacking on the stone steps as he came down to join her.

He carried a digital camera and his homely face lit up as he took in the details of the grotto.

“Wonderful!” he murmured happily and folded his sticklike body in half to duck under the chain, whereupon he immediately began taking pictures.

Sigrid did not bother to point out that this was probably forbidden. Instead, she asked, “What’s the symbolism?”

“Metamorphosis. The goddess is changing them into frogs.”

“Why?”

“Go read your Ovid for the long version,” he said as he clicked away. “Short version? Leto came to a village spring with her children and asked for a drink of water, but the oafish villagers — those louts there—” He gestured to the statues of young men who menaced the goddess with rocks and sticks. “—refused and then stomped around to muddy the water so that she couldn’t drink. At that point, she decided that if they thought mud was so funny, then they could live in it the rest of their lives and she started turning them into frogs. See the terror in that guy’s face? He’s just realized what’s in store for him.”

He shot more pictures, then slipped back under the chain and smiled at her. “Good swim?”

“Very,” she said with an answering smile and her gray eyes shone almost silver in this light.

Despite high cheekbones and a thin nose, she was not conventionally beautiful and there was nothing sexy about her slender body, yet Buntrock no longer wondered why Oscar Nauman had been so intrigued. Her neck was too long, her mouth too wide, her chin too strong, and her smiles were rare. But when she did smile, it left no doubt as to why his friend had fallen in love with her.

“Hope you don’t mind, but I told Jim Olson we’d join them for drinks this evening.”

Earlier, and she might have balked. So soon after her swim, she merely said, “What time?”

When they arrived shortly before six, five of Dr. Olson’s seven-member group had already gathered in the apartment shared by Hugh Jensen and Darryl Jensen, two wealthy cousins who could have been brothers. Both were small, pudgy men of late middle-age with thinning gray hair, and both were at least six inches shorter than Sigrid, who, at five-ten, immediately found a chair and sat down so that she would not tower over them. Not that Darryl Jensen would have minded. He seemed like the effervescent, sweet-tempered yang to his cousin Hugh’s waspish and more volatile yin.

He poured her a glass of wine while Hugh Jensen made testy remarks about the lack of window screens. His face was blotched with angry red mosquito bites and he acted as if Dr. Olson were responsible for each and every one.

Jim Olson was a lanky, white-haired six-footer with a broad Midwestern face that made him look more like a dairy farmer than a professor of art history. He looked down at Hugh Jensen now with the same look of puzzlement that a kindly mastiff might give a yipping dachshund.

“Anybody have some insect repellant they could share with Hugh?”

Sigrid had caught a whiff of Off from the two gray-haired women seated nearby, but both shook their heads.

“Sorry, Hugh,” he said, then introduced the two newcomers: “Elliott Buntrock, who’ll be speaking to us tomorrow about the Severini frescoes, and his friend Sigrid Harald.”

He rattled off the names of the others, and Sigrid learned that the man who had spoken to her at the swimming pool was Gene Gallins. As he and the two cousins began to discuss the region’s red wines with Buntrock and Olson, the older of the two women smiled at Sigrid. “You probably didn’t catch our names. I’m Barbara Rosser. And this is my business partner, Alexa Hayne.”

“Partner?”

“Custom framing and art supplies,” said Alexa, who was a few years younger and at least three inches shorter. “We own a little shop near Jim’s university.”

The little shop must do quite well, Sigrid thought. Their linen shirts and slacks clearly came from an upscale boutique, and she was willing to bet that the wide gold cuff Alexa wore and the emerald earrings that sparkled on Barbara’s ears were genuine.

Abruptly, Sigrid realized that she was still acting like a police detective sizing up suspects at a murder scene. That was all in the past now, she told herself bleakly. She had never been good at the small talk of social gatherings, but this was to be her world now: art and art lovers. Nevertheless she lowered her voice and said, “The mosquitoes don’t bother you?”

The intensity of Alexa Hayne’s reply startled her. “Odious little man! If he were dying of thirst, I wouldn’t give him a teaspoon of warm spit.”

“Now, Alexa,” said her partner. “Every tour we’ve ever taken has had its Hugh Jensens.”

“Not rolled into one economy-size package.”

“True,” Barbara Rosser agreed. “Have you ever toured with a group, Sigrid?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re young yet. Jim’s are always small and intimate. Most of us either know each other or have mutual friends. At our age, it’s nice not to have to worry about hotels or restaurants and he builds in flexibility so that you can putter around a town on your own. If you’re dying to see a particular church or museum that isn’t on the itinerary, Jim’ll make sure you do. This is our third trip with him.”

“Spain last year, Germany the year before,” said Alexa. “When there are more than nine of us, his son Eric comes along to drive a second van, but our group is smaller than usual this year.”

“And fewer people seems to magnify any little personality quirks,” said Barbara.

“Pompous, know-it-all rudeness is not a ‘little personality quirk,’ ” Alexa snapped.

Barbara rolled her eyes, but Alexa was already citing chapter and verse of Hugh Jensen’s offenses: If leaving for a day trip in the van, he would be the last one out of the hotel. If meeting for the return drive, he would always come strolling up at least fifteen minutes later than the time agreed upon.

“And he makes sure he gets the best seat in the van, while Barbara—” Alexa Hayne’s black eyes glistened as she looked at her friend.

The older woman put a restraining hand on her partner’s arm. “Alexa babies me. My back does give me a little trouble, but because we’re always on time, we wind up climbing into the back of the van while Hugh helps himself to a seat in the middle row where it’s easier to get in and out.”

“So why not take those seats yourselves?” Sigrid asked.

“Because then he moans about how bumpy it is back there and how the air conditioner doesn’t reach to the back, or else he makes Jim stop the van so he can take pictures and whoever’s sitting in the middle row next to the door has to move to let him out. It’s easier to let him have his way.”

Barbara gave a rueful smile. “I know, I know. Giving in like that only reinforces his selfishness, but Italy was always my favorite country. We’re here to relax and enjoy its beauty and we don’t have the time or the energy to stage a confrontation.”

“In Venice, though, we missed our one chance at the Tiepolo ceiling because Hugh got us thoroughly lost,” Alexa said. “We knew the museum would close for renovations the day after we arrived, but there would have been plenty of time that first afternoon except that he insisted on finding some mask-maker’s studio that was supposed to be on the way.”

“And we can’t say a word because it so distresses Darryl, and he’s such a sweetie. Everything Hugh isn’t.”

“Ah, there you are!” cried the object of their dislike as the last two members of the group entered carrying lumpy packages that they deposited with others on a table by the door. “Better late than never.”

“You’re one to talk,” snapped Sabra Lyle, the athletic swimmer who had dived into the pool as Sigrid was leaving it.

To Sigrid’s surprise, the man behind her was Taylor Williams, an old friend of her mother’s and a professional photographer who had published several well-received coffee-table books on lesser-known artists.

“Sigrid!” he exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here? How’s your mom? Adjusting to married life nicely, I hope?”

Before they could begin to catch up, Hugh offered a tour of the apartment. Part of Montefugoni’s charm was that no two apartments were alike. Some had frescoed walls, others had allegorical pictures on the ceiling. Some windows opened onto the rather plain courtyard, others overlooked the hills. The first bedroom was Hugh’s, a beautiful large space with a good view. After all that Barbara and Alexa had told her, Sigrid was not surprised to see that the bedroom with only one window and no view belonged to Darryl, who confessed that he hadn’t noticed any mosquitoes on that side. (“They never bite me, anyhow.”) Two steps up from the common room was a smaller sitting area where more steps led to a locked wooden door, behind which were the Severini frescoes that Elliott was to lecture on tomorrow morning.

“They’re marvelous!” Hugh pronounced with proprietary pride, as if he had been extra clever in getting this particular apartment.

Jim Olson frowned. “You’ve already seen them?”

“Of course! I persuaded the girl at the reception desk to unlock them this afternoon and let me peek in. The colors are as fresh as if they’d been painted yesterday instead of in the ’thirties.”

“ ’Twenties,” Olson said, annoyed that Jensen had jumped the gun on the rest of the group. “They were painted in the nineteen-twenties.”

“Whenever.” He dismissed the correction with a wave of his pudgy fingers. “Is it show-and-tell time?”

The others followed him out to the table in the common room and began to unwrap their packages. Several had shopped for masks at the last minute before leaving Venice and this was their first chance to share and compare.

Gene Gallins unwrapped a glistening beauty, a colorful jester with little golden bells that tinkled when he laid it on the table.

Sabra Lyle’s mask was a large leaf enameled in full autumn colors and highlighted with touches of bronze and gold. “I bought these, too,” she said, laying three more leaf masks beside the first one. They were identical in shape, but had been left unpainted. “They’ll be perfect for my office!”

“Sabra’s a landscape designer,” Jim told the two newcomers. “She did the gardens at Wexton Grove.”

Sigrid smiled politely, having no idea where or what Wexton Grove was; but Elliott looked impressed. Sabra Lyle’s suntanned face and sturdy limbs suggested a hands-on gardener, a woman who hefted bags of peat moss or dug up rocks and did whatever else went into designing a garden.

“I’ll find someone to paint them for the other three seasons,” she said.

“Maybe Gallins can do that for you, too,” Hugh Jensen suggested with a knowing leer.

Sabra ignored him, but Sigrid saw Gene Gallins’s face darken briefly.

Hastily, Alexa said, “What’s yours, Darryl?”

“A zanni.” The comical half-mask began with a harlequin’s checkerboard forehead and cheeks and ended in a long pointed nose that stuck straight out at least eight inches. Darryl gave his cousin a sidelong grin full of mischief. “In the classical Commedia dell’arte, he’s the clown that plays tricks on the main clown.”

“How on earth will you get it home without breaking that nose?” someone asked.

“There’s a shipping service in Florence,” said Olson. “They’ll wrap and pack and guarantee safe delivery.”

“Mine will need extra insurance,” Hugh bragged, setting a canvas tote bag on the table. When he reached inside, though, he came up with only a handful of empty bubble wrap. He turned to his cousin in puzzlement. “Darryl? Did you do something with my mask?”

“Nope. Where did you leave it?”

“In my room.” He turned wrathfully to Jim Olson. “Dammit, Jim! You said it was safe to leave the doors unlocked and now it’s gone! My three-hundred euro gilded devil mask.”

“How appropriate,” Alexa murmured in Sigrid’s ear.

“I demand that you question all the maids.”

“There aren’t any maids,” Olson reminded him. “Everything’s self-service, remember? No maids or bellmen wandering through the stairwells and halls. Besides, the office closed at six-thirty.”

“Then all the rooms must be searched at once.”

Jaws began to tighten as the others realized he was accusing one of them of theft.

“Calm down, Hugh,” Olson said. “Maybe you left it on the van. We’ll check when we go to dinner.”

Although Jensen continued to grumble, conversation became more general and Taylor Williams cornered Sigrid to talk about his latest project. She rather liked the man, but he did tend to go on and on. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she could catch Elliott’s eye and signal the need for rescue, Jim Olson stood and tapped his watch. “Time to go, people. Our dinner reservation’s for seven. If you want me to ship your masks, leave them here and I’ll pick them up tomorrow. Okay, Darryl?”

“Fine with me.” He looked at Hugh, who shrugged and said, “We’ll leave the door unlocked, but we’re not responsible if anything else goes missing.”

As everyone drifted toward the stairs, Olson told Buntrock, “Sorry I can’t invite you to join us, but we had to reserve three weeks ago.”

“That’s okay. We’re dining here. We heard that the castle chef cooks a mean risotto con tartufi.”

This was news to Sigrid, but welcome news. After so much chitchat, she was glad to skip an elaborate dinner with the others.

“But stop in for a nightcap later,” Buntrock said. “I’ve picked up a nice Brunello.”

It was ten-thirty before Olson tapped at their half-open door. Sigrid glanced up from the book she was reading and Elliott immediately got up to uncork the wine.

“Sorry to be so late,” said Olson, “but I had to find some sleeping pills for Hugh and persuade Alexa to share some of her Off with him. Maybe if he gets a good night’s sleep, he’ll be in a better mood.”

“I take it his mask wasn’t in the van?” Elliott said sympathetically.

Olson shook his head. “If I’d known he was such a bastard to travel with, I would never have let him come on this trip, but Darryl asked and it never occurred to me that two cousins could be so different.”

As Elliott poured their wine, Sigrid said, “What do they do for a living?”

“Nothing: They were trust-fund kids. Their grandmother Nancy was a Reedy before she married their grandfather.”

“Reedy?” Elliott’s head swung around to peer at him like a curious stork. “As in the Reedy Foundation? Or the Corbett Reedy Investment Group?”

“Corbett Reedy was her father, yes. Even after she set up the Reedy Foundation, there was still enough money to leave her grandsons very generous trust funds. Darryl collects prints and Hugh sits on the boards of various art-related institutions.”

He took a deep swallow of wine. “You know how that works, Elliott. Being a director gives any little prick like Jensen the power to step on a lot of toes. Take Gene Gallins. Granted he’s not another Grant Wood or Andrew Wyeth, but he has talent and he has taste. Yet he didn’t get a show at one of the museums in our area because Hugh convinced them that Gene’s nothing more than a Sunday painter.”

“Gene Gallins and Sabra Lyle,” Sigrid said. “Are they sleeping together?”

Jim promptly strangled on his wine and Elliott jumped up to pound on his back.

“How on earth do you know that?” Olson gasped when he could speak again.

She shrugged. “The way he looked at her in the pool. And his reaction to something Jensen said tonight.”

“They’ve been very discreet.” Jim coughed again and wiped his eyes with the napkin she handed him. “I make it a point not to notice things like that, but Sabra did pay the extra supplement so that she wouldn’t have to share a room.”

“So why does Alexa hate him so much?” Sigrid persisted. “Surely it’s not just because he’s never on time or hogs the best seat on the van.”

Olson looked to Buntrock for help.

“Sorry, Jim,” Elliott said. “What can I say? She used to be a cop.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Olson said. “But it’s not something I can discuss and I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t speculate about it to the others.”

Sigrid regarded him a long moment, then nodded acquiescence.

Their talk soon turned to reminiscences of bygone years and people Sigrid had never met: “You saw where The Loaded Brush ran a long interview with Lou Brown?” and “What’s happening with Tang Cai?”

“He lucked into a group show at the Penelope Gallery this fall,” Elliott said. Sigrid tried to look interested as they discussed whether the Chinese artist’s visa would expire before he could establish a name for himself in the States.

“What about that kid who did those intelligent lithographs? Lynn Palmour? What’s she up to these days?”

Olson looked down into his glass and gently swirled the wine. “She took an overdose last month.”

“What? Why?”

“Remember how emotionally fragile she was? Her only brother was killed in a car crash over the holidays and then the one-woman show she was promised fell through.”

Elliott shook his head. “What a waste. She was a damn fine artist with a lot of potential.”

“Yeah,” Olson said and held out his glass for a refill.

As their talk turned to tomorrow’s schedule, Sigrid quit trying to suppress her yawns and announced that she was going to bed.

Even with unscreened windows, Sigrid slept unmolested by mosquitoes and emerged from her bedroom rested and refreshed next day. After an early swim in the deserted pool, she had intended to go straight back to the apartment, but the morning was so beautiful and the surroundings so peaceful that she paused in front of the grotto and looked out over the Tuscan landscape. In the far distance, a tractor labored up and down the steep hillside through row after row of grapevines. Nearer to the castle grounds were groves of greenish gray trees that Elliott had identified as olives. High overhead, swallows darted in and out of mud nests beneath the eaves of the castle and lacy mounds of red and pink geraniums tumbled over the edge of the terrace above.

Despite the emotional undercurrents swirling around last night, it was nothing to do with her and she was glad that Elliott had insisted on their coming. The pool was worth putting up with a few social niceties. Today was Friday. She would go hear him speak about those frescoes, then take herself back to the pool or hole up in their apartment with a book. On Monday they would return to Florence, retrieve the paintings, and, with a little luck, be back on a plane to New York by Tuesday.

As she passed the grotto, something caught her eye. She stopped short, looked closer, and almost laughed out loud. She had missed it coming down, but now she saw that one of the statues wore a gilded devil mask and leered at Leto with golden malevolence.

Smiling to herself, Sigrid climbed the steps and crossed the loggia to her stairwell, where the aroma of bacon drifted down to meet her.

“Just in time,” Elliott said, turning from the stovetop. “Come see how orange these egg yolks are! Laid by real free-range chickens, eating real grass.”

Suddenly ravenous, Sigrid dutifully admired them, then quickly changed into dry clothes. Elliott filled their plates with buttered toast, Italian bacon, and scrambled eggs, and as they ate, she told him about seeing Hugh Jensen’s mask on one of the grotto statues. “Wonder who put it there?”

“My money’s on Darryl. He had the best chance, and Jim says he has a quirky sense of humor.”

Sigrid smiled, remembering the mischievous grin Darryl had given Hugh while explaining what the zanni mask signified.

At ten o’clock, Sigrid and Elliott met Jim Olson in the large reception office off the main loggia. Several mismatched office desks had been arranged in a reverse L and castle business was conducted from the long side. The short side held a second computer for guests who could not bear to go too long without Internet access. The small staff doubled as needed around the castle and the attractive young woman on duty that morning was casually dressed in serviceable jeans and tank top. She plucked a large key from one of the pigeonholes on the rack behind her. It was five or six inches long and made of iron.

Olson hefted it in his hand. “It always feels weird to hold a key that the Sitwells must have used.”

“Sitwells?” asked Sigrid, who owned a large collection of poetry. “Edith Sitwell?”

“Didn’t you know?” said Elliott. “Her father bought the castle around nineteen ten. He’s the one who commissioned the Severini frescoes. There are stories that her brothers wanted Picasso, but the old man had met and liked Severini and since it was his money...”

A few minutes later, he was repeating the same words to the group who had gathered in the Jensen apartment. Sigrid noticed that Hugh’s diavolo mask was now on the table by the entrance hall, although nothing was said about it while Elliott finished his introductory remarks. “If Picasso had taken the commission, it would have no doubt been a cubist marvel, but by nineteen twenty-two, Severini had abandoned futurism, so now we get this!”

He turned the iron key in the plain wooden door and threw it open with a dramatic flourish. As the others crowded in behind him, their admiration for the bright and colorful masked harlequins that covered the walls of the small gallery quickly changed to laughter.

At the end of the room, Darryl Jensen lounged on the floor, his back against the wall. He wore the long-nosed mask he had bought in Venice and his dark blue pajamas that echoed the pantaloons in the frescoes.

“How funny, Darryl!” said Alexa Hayne. “You look as if you could just reach up and take some fruit from that painted bowl.”

“You idiot,” Hugh said, as if annoyed that his cousin had thought of the joke first. “Here, let me give you a hand up.”

He reached for Darryl’s hand, but there was no response.

“Darryl? Quit clowning.”

“What’s wrong?” someone cried as he slumped over. “Is he hurt?”

Sigrid pushed past the babbling art lovers and quickly knelt to feel for the man’s pulse.

“Everybody out,” she said. “Now!”

There was such authority in her voice that even Hugh obeyed.

“Is he dead?” Jim Olson asked, his face ashen.

“Yes,” she said succinctly.

To Sigrid’s bemusement, three separate police authorities responded to the call. First came the municipal officers, followed by the state and provincial.

It was almost one o’clock before they sorted out who had jurisdiction and Sigrid was summoned to a room off the castle’s courtyard.

“My apologies for not seeing you sooner, Miss Harald.” The big man in a rumpled brown suit spoke with a distinct English accent. “I’m Inspector Giordano of the state police.” He introduced his associates, invited her to be seated at the table he was using as a desk, and looked at her doubtfully. “I’m told you’re a police detective yourself? In New York?”

“I resigned several months ago, Inspector.”

“But you did handle homicides?”

“Yes.”

He gave a slight smile of approval. “Not one to waste words, are you? Good. Please describe the events you witnessed this morning.”

When she had finished telling him everything she had seen, including the devil mask on one of the grotto statues, he said, “Who killed him, Miss Harald?”

Sigrid shook her head. “I met all these people for the first time last evening.”

“Nevertheless...?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve formed no opinions.”

“No?”

“No,” she said firmly and asked a question of her own. “Was he killed in Hugh’s bed?”

She saw him struggle with the decision as to whether she should be told anything, then he shrugged, as if realizing that she probably knew almost as much as he, or soon would.

“Yes. We found signs on the pillowcase that he was smothered facedown while his arms were held immobile by the covers.”

“So no DNA under his fingernails,” Sigrid murmured, almost to herself. “Hugh blames himself. He made Darryl switch rooms because of the mosquitoes. You do realize that Hugh believes he was the killer’s target?”

“So he has told us,” the inspector said drily. “Several times. With increasing agitation. He’s demanding that we let him leave before the killer succeeds. You observed these people last night. Which do you think was the intended victim?”

“Probably Hugh. We met in their apartment before dinner last evening and were given a tour of the place, so everyone knew which bedroom was which. Darryl was well liked, while Hugh irritated nearly everyone. But how did the killer get Darryl’s body into the Severini gallery? I saw three other doors. One opens onto a blank wall, the others were locked with thumb bolts from the inside. The receptionist says there’s only one key and the office is locked at six-thirty, well before everyone left for dinner.”

“Did she also say that she found the key hanging on the doorknob of the office when she returned this morning?”

“The killer took it before the office was locked last night and she didn’t notice?”

“So she says.”

Sigrid nodded thoughtfully. “When I checked my e-mail this morning, I was left alone in the office for several minutes. The receptionist seems to run all over the castle. I assume the others were in and out of the office yesterday?”

“All except Mrs. Barbara Rosser. She doesn’t use the Internet, but—” He consulted the notes he had taken earlier. “—Mrs. Lyle, Mrs. Hayne, and Mr. Gallins were there when Mr. Hugh Jensen asked to see the frescoes. They would have seen where the key was kept and could have mentioned it to the others. And Dr. Olson, of course, has stayed here before. It’s a very distinctive key. Easy to spot. So I ask you again, Miss Harald. Who wanted Hugh Jensen dead?”

Again, Sigrid told him she could not say. Giordano let out a frustrated breath and gave a dismissive nod of his head. “Very well. Thank you for your help.”

“I wish I could have helped you more,” she said, suddenly homesick for the familiar routine of police work that had been taken from her.

The big rumpled man behind the desk cocked his head as if understanding her hesitation. “Was it easy to walk away from the job?”

“No.”

“You have no official standing here,” he warned her.

“I know.”

“But you will ask questions?”

“Probably.”

“And you will listen?”

“I usually do.”

“Bene,” he said, sounding Italian for the first time.

Trying to form a logical theory, Sigrid crossed the courtyard and almost bumped into Dr. Olson.

“Could I talk to you a minute?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Sunlight silvered his white hair as he followed her out to a table on the terrace where they could talk undisturbed, almost hidden by several huge tubs of red geraniums. Unfamiliar birds twittered in the tall cypress trees and the golden Tuscan light only underlined how far from New York and her past life she now was.

“Sorry,” Olson said, smothering a yawn. “Too much wine last night and now all this...”

Sigrid came straight to the point. “Is Barbara Rosser dying?”

He stared at her in disbelief. “How the hell—? Are you psychic or something?”

“No. Just an ex-cop. I listen to people. Not only to what they say, but what they don’t say. Alexa almost blurted it out to me last night, but Barbara stopped her. Then Barbara herself spoke of how Italy was always her favorite country. Was, not is. As if she never expected to come back.”

Olson sighed. “You’re right. This is her farewell trip. She decided to see Italy one last time rather than do another round of chemo and radiation. She didn’t want anyone else to know and made me promise that I wouldn’t treat her any differently from the rest. But I swear to God, I wanted to knock Hugh Jensen into the middle of next week when he made her miss seeing that Tiepolo ceiling in Venice.”

“I imagine Alexa wanted to herself,” Sigrid said and sat back to watch the wheels begin to turn.

“No,” he said at last. “Darryl was a small man but Alexa’s a smaller woman. She couldn’t have carried him up those stairs.”

“But Sabra Lyle could. If Hugh was a threat to her marriage...”

“Sabra’s divorced. Gene’s the married one. He sells an occasional picture, but the only way he can afford to paint full time is because of his wife’s money.”

“I thought Sabra was a successful landscape designer.”

“She is. That doesn’t mean she wants to support him.” He gave a wry smile. “So you’re not infallible, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sabra’s toured with me before. Gallins is merely this tour’s flavor of the month. There was someone different last year, there’ll be someone different next year. Adds a little spice to her vacations. You look shocked.”

Amused, Sigrid shook her head. “No. Surprised maybe, but not shocked. All the same, Gallins does have a grudge against Hugh for blackballing him with a museum, right?”

“A grudge, yes. But enough to kill? I don’t think so.”

“What about Taylor Williams? He have any run-ins with Hugh?”

“No more than any of the others. Hugh may have made some slighting remarks about how lightweight coffee-table books can be, but that’s all I’ve heard.” He stood up wearily. “I have to make some more phone calls. The others are having lunch downstairs if you want to join them.”

“Thanks,” she said, “but I’m not hungry.”

She watched him disappear down the sunlit stone staircase, then sat and thought about all the things she had seen, all she had heard, and all she had been told. Olson said he had given Hugh two sleeping pills. Assuming Hugh actually took them, anyone could have killed Darryl without waking his cousin.

She looked at her watch. Italian time was five or six hours ahead of New York so her attorney would not be at the office this early, but her e-mail would be waiting when he arrived.

As afternoon shadows deepened across the ancient stone courtyard, Inspector Giordano called them together again. “We have now questioned everyone in the castle,” he told them in his incongruous English accent.

Nervous glances were exchanged and a querulous Hugh Jensen broke the silence. “My God, man! Don’t play Hercule Poirot with us. If you know who killed Darryl, spit it out!”

“Mrs. Hayne,” Giordano said gently. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

Alexa Hayne’s eyes were frightened. “N-No, I don’t think so.”

“Two young Australian women were in the lower garden last evening. They saw you and Mr. Darryl Jensen.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Very well, Inspector. Yes, I helped Darryl put Hugh’s mask on that statue.”

“What?” said Hugh.

“It was a joke, Hugh. He said you were acting just like those selfish men who wouldn’t let the goddess drink — muddying the trip like they were muddying the water. He couldn’t understand why you were behaving so badly.”

Jensen started to speak, then clamped his mouth shut and sat back, shaking his head.

“Mr. Jensen, do any of these people benefit by your death?”

“Benefit?” he asked bitterly. “Other than getting rid of the person who seems to have wrecked this tour? I can’t believe Darryl hated me that much.”

“He didn’t hate you,” Alexa said. “He just thought you were too full of yourself and he wanted to tease you a little.”

“You and your cousin,” said Giordano. “You say that you both had trusts from your grandmother. Who inherits if you die?”

“As I told you this morning, the Reedy Foundation gets it. Same for Darryl. After our deaths, the trusts dissolve and the principal returns to the foundation.” He glared at the others. “No, Inspector. Whoever wants me dead, it’s not for my money.”

“No? What about your cousin’s money?” After the long hot June day, Giordano’s brown suit was a mass of untidy wrinkles. He drank from a liter-sized bottle of cold water, then unfolded a sheet of typescript. “Miss Harald received this message from her attorney. According to his discreet inquiries, the terms of your grandmother’s trust are not quite as you would have me believe.”

“What?” He glared at both of them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The terms are exactly as I told you.”

“After your deaths, the principal does indeed revert to the foundation,” Giordano said. “Both your deaths. Whoever survives gets the interest from both trusts until his death. With him gone—”

As Giordano’s words sank in, Hugh bristled indignantly. “Me? You’re accusing me? You’re crazy! We were like brothers.” His angry denials dwindled into sudden sobs. “Brothers,” he whimpered.

“Jacob and Esau were brothers, yet Jacob stole Esau’s inheritance,” Giordano said implacably. “You had the motive. You had the opportunity.” He stood up and towered over the small man. “I must ask you to come with us, Mr. Jensen.”

Protesting his innocence, Hugh Jensen was led away. While the others dispersed in stunned dismay, Jim Olson left to call the American consulate in Florence and Sigrid walked across the courtyard with Inspector Giordano. At the castle’s gate, he paused to thank her for her help.

“You would have reached the same conclusion without me,” Sigrid said.

“Probably,” he agreed complacently. “His was the only real motive. He was the one who conveniently gave you a tour of the apartment and then made his cousin change bedrooms. He stole the key earlier and he had the whole night to set that stage.”

“Why now, though?” she wondered aloud.

“Who knows the logic of a killer? I myself think that he began to plan this murder when Darryl bought that cheap mask in Venice. It could have been the final straw in a camel-load of resentment.”

“The zanni?”

He nodded. “From the Commedia dell’arte. Everyone says Darryl Jensen had a trickster sense of humor. Maybe that mask was a way of telling his cousin that he might be the subordinate clown, but that he — Hugh Jensen — was the greater clown and bigger fool.” Inspector Giordano took her hand. “So! La commedia é finita,” he said; and even though she did not speak Italian, Sigrid needed no translation.

Swallows and bats swooped and soared together in the cool evening air as twilight settled across the beautiful Tuscan landscape and the first bright stars pricked through the dark blue sky overhead. The others had gone downstairs to the castle’s outdoor restaurant, but Elliott and Sigrid remained seated with their wine at one of the terrace tables to keep Jim Olson company.

“Poor Darryl,” Olson said again. It had been a long tiring day and he looked almost haggard with fatigue. “Will Hugh be convicted, do you think?”

Sigrid turned the stem of her wineglass in her slender fingers. “Realistically?” she said at last. “I seriously doubt it. The evidence is all circumstantial and the Reedy Foundation will surely come to his rescue with extradition papers and clever attorneys.”

“So he not only gets off,” Olson said bleakly, “he gets to profit by Darryl’s death.”

“He may get off in court,” Sigrid said, turning her wineglass more slowly now, “but I imagine public opinion will find him guilty.”

“She’s right,” said Elliott. “He’ll be asked to resign from all the boards he sits on now, and decent people will shun him. So don’t worry, Jim. He’ll be punished for his sins.”

Sigrid carefully set her glass atop the wrought-iron table. “Unless, of course, you decide to confess.”

Both men stared at her.

“He’s stayed here before, Elliott. He knows where the key is kept and how the office is often left unattended. He knew where to place the body that he thought was Hugh’s before he realized he’d killed the wrong cousin.”

Elliott’s protest died in his throat when he saw the guilt and shame on his friend’s face. “You, Jim? Why?”

“The woman you asked about last night,” Sigrid told him. “The suicide.”

“Lynn Palmour?” Elliott was shocked. “Was it Jensen that blocked her one-man show?”

“At a time when she was still shattered by her brother’s death.” Olson’s voice was heavy with grief. “Then he told her he’d get it reinstated if she’d have sex with him. She was like the daughter I never had and that bastard killed her, Elliott. He killed that sweet kid as surely as if he’d given her the overdose himself. I could say he killed Darryl, too, making him change bedrooms like that, but...” He buried his head in his hands. “God help me.”

Distressed, Elliott turned to Sigrid.

She pushed back her chair and stood up. Without a confession, there was no more evidence against Olson than there was against Jensen. Less, even. And as Inspector Giordano had reminded her, she had no official standing here.

“Sigrid?”

She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I’m not a cop anymore, remember? Whatever happens is up to him,” she said. “Not me.”

© 2008 by Loren D. Estleman

Mystery without murder features in Loren D. Estleman’s Claudius Lyon series. Lyon’s first outing (EQMM June 2008) involved apparent fraud in the literary world; this time out he takes a case for a boy in search of his father. But Mr. Estleman has another side. His new hard-boiled thriller, Gas City, got starred reviews from PW, Booklist, and Kirkus, and Entertainment Weekly said: “He’s been called the heir to Chandler — and it’s easy to see why.”

The bomb dropped while I was card-indexing Claudius Lyon’s latest contribution to horticultural science, a hybrid tomato plant that comprised all the disadvantages of a beefsteak and none of the advantages of a roma, and Lyon, foundering up to his chins, as usual, behind his preposterously enormous desk, was pretending to read The Portable Schopenhauer. It was actually Carolyn Keene’s The Clue of the Dancing Puppet inside the drab dust jacket, and he’d read it twice before in my tenure.

“Arnie,” he said, “how long have you been working for me?”

I scowled at my typewriter, an IBM Selectric so sensitive it anticipates my mistakes and makes them for me. “Three years, two months, fifteen days, eleven minutes, and twenty-nine seconds.”

“How much do you estimate you’ve embezzled from me during that period?”

My fingers slipped. A Gordian knot of keys thudded against the card on the platen.

He looked up from his book with his Gerber-baby smile. “I am a genius, but not an absent-minded one. I call my bank from time to time and occasionally balance my checkbook. When you deposit the royalties from NASA on my father’s pressure-cooker gasket patent, you round down the amount and palm the rest. Absent a tedious study of the actual figures, I can arrive at a reasonable estimate by multiplying your time in my employ by the average sum pilfered. The product would support a modest harem.”

“Well, it was a lark while it flew,” I said finally. “Is it federal or local? I hear they put out a spread in the U.S. prisons. Anything beats mac-and-cheese Wednesday in Sing Sing.”

“There’s no need for bravado. I don’t intend to pursue charges. With whom would I replace you? There is only one Arnie Woodbine, and Archie Goodwin is permanently off the market. I must make the best of my knockoff. Dock yourself ten dollars a week until the account is even.”

“But that’ll take—”

“Six years, one month, twelve days, five hours, and thirty-two minutes. Consider it a long-term contract, which you’d be wise not to break.” He returned to his reading.

In case anything about the foregoing seems familiar — not counting the larceny — now is a good time to point out that “Claudius Lyon” is an invention. The man who uses the name has remodeled his life to conform to his hero’s, Nero Wolfe of Manhattan, who raises orchids, employs a world-class chef, and solves mysteries brought to him by baffled clients. Lyon’s own limitations have forced compromises: He grows tomatoes, eats kosher most of the time because that’s all his chef Gus knows how to cook, and depends upon me, the poor man’s Archie Goodwin (Wolfe’s legman and hectoring angel), for mundane errands.

He’s as fat as Wolfe but much shorter, and when he climbs into the big chair behind his desk he looks like Tweedledum with his legs swinging free. Not having any prior experience with geniuses, I don’t know if he is one, but he’s a damn clever little butterball who hasn’t forgotten a thing he’s learned from the thousands of whodunits he’s read. I’ve seen him take more than his share of pratfalls, but I’ve never seen him stumped.

Well, I had nothing better to do for the next six years, one month, etc., and I’d been to prison and found it not up to my standards, so I didn’t complain about the pay cut; instead I worked out an arrangement with Gus to buy generic lox and split the price difference. Lyon hasn’t Wolfe’s palate and wouldn’t know the gourmet brand from Karl’s Kut-Rate Kippers. It was a stingy little scam compared to the one I’d had going, even when I extended it to include gristly corned beef and day-old bagels, but it would do until something better came along. If you’re the type who can live life on the level without gnawing your nails down to the knuckle, congratulations, and keep it to yourself. Without a dash of pepper the stew’s just too flat.

The reason for all this chatter is, it explains how the principal resident of the townhouse at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush, put his chubby little gray cells to work on the problem of William Thew.

Gus’s main motivator in our conspiracy was the convenience of not having to take the crosstown bus to the snooty little market that sold the best kosher in the five boroughs; the cheap stuff was available on the corner, and it delivered. I happened to answer the doorbell the day the pushy delivery boy showed up lugging a paper sack bigger than he was. I had to part a bunch of celery to see his pinched little face under the obligatory backward baseball cap.

“Here, kid.” I traded him a buck for the sack.

“My name’s Jasper, not kid. Jasper Hull.”

“The hell you say. You got that from an eighty-six-year-old man’s obituary in the Daily News.”

“It’s Jasper just the same. I want to see Lyon.”

“What’s the matter, I don’t tip big enough?”

“I got a case for him. He’s a detective, ain’t he? That’s what it says in the Yellow Pages.”

“It doesn’t either. I wrote the ad. It says he provides answers to questions.”

“If I got it that way I’d’ve took my tip and went. I seen all the fortunetellers I want to. They charge you up front and tell you a lot of bogus stuff that could mean anything.”

“ ‘Satisfaction guaranteed.’ The ad says that too.”

“Okay. Here.” He held up the buck I’d given him.

“What’s that for?”

“It’s a what-do-you-call-it, a retainer.”

I grinned. “Nice try, kid. Tell Captain Stoddard he’s in violation of the child labor laws.” I started to push the door shut, but damn if he didn’t insert his wiry little body into the space. It was either squash him or stop. I considered the point and decided against squashing. It’s hell on the finish.

I said, “You’d think Fraud would have enough to keep it busy in a town this size without setting traps for one little fat guy with schizophrenic tendencies, but a month doesn’t go by without the cop in charge trying to trick Lyon into accepting payment and busting him for practicing private investigation without a license. Recruiting a kid’s bad enough; a dollar’s an insult to his intelligence. A fiver’s plenty cute given the inflationary index. I’m surprised Stoddard didn’t knock out a front tooth and give you a scruffy mutt from the pound.”

“How good can he be if he don’t charge?”

“So good he doesn’t need your dirty buck.”

“A minute ago it was your dirty buck.” He stuck it in his jeans pocket. “I don’t like cops, either. They say they’re there to help, but all they do is write stuff down and shove it in a drawer. The detective agencies I tried won’t listen to nobody but an adult. I seen Lyon’s name in the listing, and when this order came in where I work, I thought I’d take another shot.”

“Shot at what?”

“Finding my father.”

“Wipe your feet, kid.” I opened the door wide.

© 2008 by Tom Piccirilli

A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, Tom Piccirilli makes his EQMM debut here with a tale involving one of the most unusual scenarios for murder we’ve ever come across. He’s also the author of 17 novels. Of one of them, Headstones, the New York Times said: “beautiful and funny... a hardboiled hallucination... it gives you the distinctive shiver all good writing provides: the certainty that the writer’s own ghosts are in it.”

* * * *

His face was so anguished it was writhing. That was Frank Bradley the first time I saw him, about sixty feet off the ground.

His feet twined above me while we both dangled from the safety-line ropes. His forlorn moans echoed across the front-range hills, and he’d bitten through his bottom lip. Blood misted on the wind and flew down against my forehead.

The balloon smacked broadside into a pine tree and shook the other two guys on the ropes loose. Neither of them screamed on their way down. One landed on his back, and the impact drove him three feet underground. The other smacked a boulder that shattered his pelvis, severed his spinal column, and saved his life. He pinwheeled off the rock and came to rest on his face along the dog walk, in front of an elderly woman clutching a Pomeranian.

I held on, just like Frank Bradley, who shrieked at me, “Don’t let go! My son, my boy! Johnny!”

I wasn’t letting go. You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.

Spinning in the wind, I couldn’t see the kid in the basket, but I could hear him crying. He sounded terrified and very young. Maybe only six or seven. Too damn young to work the controls and hit whichever valve had to be pressed to lower the thing. I thought, What kind of father takes a child that young up in a hot-air balloon? And how the hell did the idiot get outside of it on the ropes with the kid still in the basket?

A lot goes through your mind when you’re six stories in the air and rising.

Despite his misery, I wanted to beat the hell out of Bradley — whose name I didn’t know then — all across the park meadow speeding by below us. Except I was still holding the line, and we were running out of acreage fast.

The balloon caromed into another stand of pine, and thick branches brutally scraped across Bradley’s back, breaking his grip. His fists opened and he flailed, slipping fifteen feet until he was side by side with me, holding the other rope. He screamed, “Don’t let go!”

I’d hold on as long as I could, but eventually I would have to let go. We’d both have to, and the idea scared the hell out of me. I had the rope in a death grip and didn’t want to wind up like the guy who’d be found planted half as deep as his casket would be. They were going to have to dig him up just to bury him again.

“There’s no way to do it!” I shouted.

“Don’t let go!”

“Listen—”

“Don’t let go!”

I wanted to shout, Stop saying that!

The balloon bounded from pine to pine, nothing slowing it. You’d think maybe the branches would’ve pierced the silk, but somehow — miraculously, really, if you could call it that — they didn’t. We had about another couple thousand feet of parkland forest to go and then there’d be nothing but empty fields until the first break of front-range stone ridges. After that, there were the canyon cliffs and brutal mountain winds working up for another fifteen miles until we’d be high in the Rockies.

I kept thinking, I never should’ve moved out West.

I kept thinking my crappy apartment in the East Village really hadn’t been so bad.

We couldn’t bring the balloon down by ourselves. It bounced into another huge tree and the awful, overwhelming crashing sound was harrowing around us. The balloon shook insanely and the ropes twisted. I cracked sideways into the trunk and pine needles tore at my face. My feet touched branches. Then I was standing on air, and then there were branches again. I had to drop. It was something you couldn’t think about, you just had to do it.

Another vicious collision nearly ripped my arms from the sockets and Bradley and I both let go at the same moment. We clung to thick tree limbs seventy-five feet off the ground. He let out a screech. I think I did, too. He glared at me with his agonized eyes and edged his way across the branch looking toward the balloon, which had almost cleared the trees and started to rise again.

The basket slipped free of the last limb with an enormous scraping noise, but the silk still hadn’t been pierced. Bradley worked like a maniac to get up to the basket, hand over hand as wads of bark came off and rained down to the ground. His palms were shredded. There was no way for him to get to it.

The boy inside cried out and a sob broke in my own throat. He whimpered, “Daddy, please, Daddy—” He was petrified but still thought his father could save him.

But he never raised his head over the top of the basket. I wanted to see his face, if only for an instant. It was extremely important to me, and I didn’t know why.

Bradley screamed, “Johnny!”

He and I watched the balloon soar away until we couldn’t hear his son anymore. It lifted higher and higher, caught on the canyon winds, occasionally bouncing against the cliff walls until it was over them and almost out of sight.

We were both breathless from our exertions, but he had enough left in him to turn back and glare at me some more. He said, “You let go!”

“So did you. We had no choice.”

“You could’ve held on!”

“We couldn’t have.”

Talking to the guy this high in the air, covered in pine bristles and sap, his blood drying on my face — just hanging there and waiting for the next moment to happen as his son floated away.

It took me twenty minutes to climb down out of the tree.

Bradley stayed up there wailing and cursing me as I cautiously clutched at branches and lowered myself. By the time I hit the ground there were two ambulances, a fire truck, and eight cruisers parked at the edge of the woods, cops and park rangers prowling everywhere.

The shock of what had happened hit me all at once, before I’d taken two steps toward anybody. A heaviness thickened in my chest and my hands started to tremble badly. My legs weakened and I could feel the blood draining out of my head. A wash of blackness passed across my eyes and I might’ve toppled over if a cop with the name badge Kowalski hadn’t grabbed me.

He had gray eyes and some real muscle and power to him. He held me up with one hand and said, “Sit down.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, but sit down.”

But I didn’t want to sit anywhere among the pines. I scanned the sky and didn’t see the balloon anywhere.

“The kid?” I asked.

“What kid?”

“The one in the balloon.”

“Somebody was in there?”

“The hell do you think we were all trying so hard to hold on to it for? Is anyone following it?”

“It’s gone over the tree line and ridge of the canyon.”

“You’ve got to get some rangers up there.”

He thumbed his radio but there was already lots of buzzing going on, people squawking and more sirens erupting in the distance. They were coming in from Fort Collins and Greeley and other nearby towns, everybody driving to the wrong place. I saw a helicopter go overhead.

Kowalski said, “Tell me what happened.”

“There’s not much.”

“Tell me anyway.”

We recognized each other as former New Yorkers transplanted to Colorado for reasons we still weren’t sure about. We both had the same general air of confusion and homesickness about us, mired in a false toughness and a general who-gives-a-damn attitude to hide our fears. It took one to recognize one. It was pretty obvious that somewhere along the way he’d made a misstep and it had fouled up his life so badly that he had to move two thousand miles away to get clear of it. Some kind of scandal — he’d taken money from the wrong guy or hadn’t given a cut of it to the right one. Whatever the mistake, it was costing him now and it would for the rest of his life. I was a different story.

A ring of cops stepped in close but no one said anything.

I explained how I’d been in the park staring off at Long’s Peak trying to find inspiration for the next story or song, the way I usually did when my thoughts ran dry.

I’d been sitting around the park a hell of a lot lately and not much had been shaking loose inside my head. I’d written one line — Between the Dark and the Daylight — knowing I was lifting it from somewhere but not caring so long as something else followed. Nothing did.

So I tried to sweat the next sentence out, staring into the white of the page. Sitting there like that for a while, waiting for something to guide my hand.

Instead, a tremendous shadow crossed over my notebook and a man howled and two guys ran past directly in front of me.

I looked up and there was the balloon, with Bradley dangling off one of the safety lines and shouting for help, the other two guys doing their best to catch up, reaching for the trailing ropes as the balloon swung low but still didn’t hit the ground.

You’re sitting there waiting for your next sentence and instead you get this.

I hadn’t seen a hot-air balloon since I was kid on Long Island and couldn’t figure out how anybody could lose one.

I got to my feet and started stumbling in that direction, the sheer forceful oddity of the situation sort of pulling me after it. The guy who’d eventually be paralyzed from the neck down looked back to me while he ran and shouted, “There’s a boy in there! We have to get it back down!”

I hesitated another second. It’s normal, it would happen to anybody. We don’t trust unfamiliar conditions and unknown people, it’s easier to sit back down and fight the empty page. But the kid let out a murmuring whine that caught on the wind and somehow that got me moving.

I sprinted maybe fifty yards across the park before I finally caught up to the lines. By then, Bradley had actually managed to climb up a few more feet, almost to within reaching distance of the basket, and the other guys had grabbed hold of the ropes. I did a weird flying dive that should have made me land on my head, but somehow it worked. I was on a safety line draping from the basket, flitting there, sort of flying along with three other men, and we were rising.

There should’ve been about ten emergency shut-offs and built-in features to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Without anybody working the burner, the balloon should’ve been lowering, even in the wind. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything but the bottom of the basket. Then the rope I was on flailed outwards a few feet and I spun around.

There were health nuts in the world that did this sort of thing for fun, I was sure. I craned my neck and saw that the burner was still lit, a lick of orange and blue flame igniting. Something had gone seriously wrong, and I’d jumped right into it. The balloon wasn’t going to come down on its own.

It was already too late to jump. We were over the small lake in the center of the park. Pretty but man-made, only about four feet deep. If any of us cut loose now, even over the water, we’d hit with enough force to drive our kneecaps up through our chests. My father used to tell me about parachuting soldiers who’d leaped out over the Nam jungles and landed wrong. Twenty years later and the images were still sharp and bright in my mind. On top of everything else, I wanted to clock my father.

The kid was crying and Bradley was moaning, unable to climb any higher. He didn’t sound smart or sane or even human. He should’ve been yelling to his kid to hit the kill switch. I opened my mouth to shout and could barely hear myself. The rushing wind drove my voice back into my throat.

If you’re lucky, you get to puzzle out your what-the-hell-am-I-doing moments later on in the game. You look back and you can’t believe it occurred, and you’ve got no idea how it was you wound up there, doing that thing.

Now I’d made it down again intact. The other two guys who’d lent a hand hadn’t.

“What the hell happened?” I asked. “Who is this guy? Where’d this balloon come from?”

There was a second when Kowalski almost gave me the “I’ll ask the questions, sir” speech, but he could see it wasn’t going to work on me the way it did on the rich retirees waiting out the end of their lives up in Estes Park.

A lot of yelling was coming from Bradley’s tree. It took three firemen on cherry pickers working up into the pine to finally grab hold of him and pull him down. He screamed as they lowered him and went wild when he hit the ground. He started seething and throwing punches and hissing worse than an animal, calling for Johnny like the kid might be just a few feet behind him, just out of eyeshot.

He spun on his heels and began to laugh in a way I’d never heard anybody laugh before, not even the schizos and addicts in the East Village alleys. It was so chilling it brushed me back a step. Kowalski felt it, too, and he puffed his chest out and held his chin up as a way to defend himself against it.

Three officers joined the firemen and they all wrestled Bradley onto his belly and got the cuffs on him.

I said, “Hey, come on...!” but Kowalski just scowled at me and started listening to and talking into his radio again. It looked like Bradley had slugged and elbowed a few of the cops. Blood speckled their faces. They’d follow procedure when it came down to somebody attacking their brother officers. It didn’t matter where you went, cops would always be the same about that.

They carried him to a cruiser and tossed him into the back. As it pulled across the field, Bradley turned in the backseat to stare at me. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but that goddamn chill stayed with me.

“Tell me what you people know so far,” I said.

Kowalski tightened his lips and then shrugged. “Information is still coming in. Looks like this one, his name’s Frank Bradley. Used to run some book in Nevada before he took a fall for bank robbery.”

“What?”

“Yeah, his wife split with the son. He figures it’s because he’s not making enough cash. So he walks in, grabs a manager by the throat, forces the guy to clear a couple of the tills. Sets off about five silent alarms. He gets something like three grand, walks outside, the dye pack explodes, and he’s standing there in the parking lot turning purple when the local PD arrives. He’s not what you call one of your better planners.”

I shook my head. “That’s more than just stupidity. This guy’s crazy.”

“Yeah, well, maybe. He did two years in the state pen. Gets out and goes looking for his wife. Finds out she’s split the state and come to Colorado. Tracks her to Berthoud. Grabs the kid and wheels off with him. Tells the boy he’s going to get him ice cream and toys and balloons. They drive by the spring carnival down there, off 17 and 287. They’ve got a hot-air balloon set up.”

“My God. So he hijacks it?”

“Figured he’d be funny, I guess. Probably tells his boy, ‘Look at the balloon I got you.’ Anyway, the thing is roped to the ground, it’s just supposed to go up twenty feet or so, then back down. But Bradley takes the kid up and unties the safety lines, forces the carnival guy to fire it all the way up. They start hovering and catch a stiff breeze. The carnival guy jumps out the other side of the basket, falls ten feet, and sprains his ankle. Bradley tries to screw around with the controls and the next thing you know—”

“The maniac is drifting over Loveland Park, holding on to one of the ropes himself.”

“Yeah.”

“Any chance the kid might be okay?”

“Maybe, if we can find him in time.”

It wasn’t going to happen.

He knew it and I knew it. I looked at the expanse of the Rockies, thinking about how far the balloon had already traveled, up from Berthoud. If the wind hadn’t been from the east, and the balloon had instead carried out toward Greeley, they could’ve tracked him no matter how long it took. There was nothing for thirty miles in that direction except farmland.

But heading west from the foothills, with the balloon drifting higher from the jammed burner, it would float across the range and just keep going until it hit a cliff and dumped the kid across a couple thousand feet of mountain.

Kowalski stared off in the direction the cruiser had gone with Bradley. I looked that way too, the chill working against me, tightening the skin on the back of my neck. That laugh. Jesus.

I made a full statement at the police department and signed the paperwork. They escorted me to my apartment and didn’t look back after they’d dropped me off. While I sat on my couch drinking a tumbler of whiskey — feeling the walls closing in on me, my hands twitching as if I were still holding on to the line, thinking I’d maybe never sleep again — I slept and dreamed of the boy.

He was dying, but not quite there yet. He stood in front of me, one small hand pressed against my chest. But his head was turned completely around. He spoke, and his words faded out behind him. I heard “Daddy,” and “Help,” and even my own name. It was one of those dreams where you couldn’t run or speak or do any damn thing at all. I knew I was asleep but couldn’t break out of it. I could feel myself gripping the cushions someplace far away, and heard a voice that wasn’t entirely my own, mewling there. I grabbed the kid by the shoulder and tried to spin him around, but his head kept turning away from me.

The media went nuts. It was a big story for Colorado. Bizarre and full of human interest. You looked at it one way and you saw a bunch of strangers trying to help out a kid, one of them losing his life, another paralyzed from the shoulders down. His name was Bill Mandor and he was on every channel. Half his face was bandaged and around the edges it looked like he’d been scraped to the bone when he hit the dog walk. The one good thing about his being paralyzed was that he couldn’t feel his shattered legs and spine and didn’t need painkillers. He looked clear-headed and spoke like the kind of heroes I remembered from when I was a kid. Men who could staunchly handle the worst events and injuries through willpower and nobility. He made me shake my head.

Reporters camped out on the lawn in front of my apartment manager’s door. I took the phone off the hook and didn’t answer the door for three days. Eventually the camera crews got bored and left. I watched cable news programs every waking moment hoping there’d be information about the boy, but despite hundreds of volunteers hiking all over the front range, the canyons, and the east side of the divide, nobody had seen the balloon. It seemed impossible.

At night, helicopters buzzed through the skies, heading up to the national park and the thousands of square miles of mountain terrain and forest land.

Kowalski called me five days later, on an afternoon full of sirens, and said, “Bradley’s loose.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“A former bank robber out of the joint only a couple of days hijacks a balloon that causes the death of a good samaritan, and you spring him?”

“Blame your judicial system, not me. He was obviously out of his head, so they put him under guard at the hospital, in the mental wing. They said it was depression brought on by grief. You can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, his kid gone and all. He got flowers and prayer cards by the truckload. He slept for ninety-six hours straight, cuffed to the bed. What they call nonresponsive. Not a coma, just a deep sleep. They thought he might be dying. Losing his will to live.”

“Cripes.”

“Like he was forcing himself to kick the bucket. He started going into respiratory failure, so they got a crash cart in there, defibrillator, oxygen mask, the whole works. Five minutes after they got him breathing normally again, he woke up, kicked the hell out of a nurse, and stole a car from the parking lot.”

I think I hissed. “This is terrific.”

“Anyway, Bradley knocked over another bank an hour after he got free, still wearing his hospital gown. Nobody knows where he got the gun. This time he smartened up some. Got almost thirty grand, no dye pack, though he set off an alarm. But he was out of there in a hurry, and now he’s on the run.”

I thought about the kind of man who would stop off somewhere for a gun but not put on a pair of pants before committing grand larceny.

“He’s going to come after me,” I said. “He thinks I killed his kid because I let go of the rope.”

Even if I hadn’t been a paranoid writer with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, I would’ve thought that. It had been that laugh of Bradley’s. It wasn’t only insane. It had that see-you-later quality to it.

Kowalski grunted. “He’s a nut. If he goes anywhere, it’ll be back to his ex-wife’s place.”

“No, he only went there for his son. Any word on the kid?”

“No, no sign of the balloon. Maybe it held to the front range and came down in somebody’s field. I don’t know. We probably won’t know for a while yet.”

“Listen—”

But he was done. Kowalski was the type of cop who got bored easily and always had to be in charge of a conversation. “I picked up one of your books,” he said. “I read about half of it. I didn’t like it. So I gave it to my wife.”

“Listen—”

“She reads everything. She didn’t like it either.”

“Listen to me. Bradley will show up here next.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“More than that, he just walked in my door. He’s got a gun on me. Gotta go.”

I hung up and Bradley smiled at me from my apartment doorway. I figured the apartment manager had gotten tired of dealing with reporters trying to get into the building and had disconnected the buzzer wiring. I was going to die because I hadn’t double-checked it. I’d gotten slack in Colorado. I wasn’t paranoid enough anymore, just bored, like Kowalski, and waiting for the end.

Bradley started in with that hideous laughter until every muscle in my body had tightened to the point of trembling. At least he’d put on pants, I was glad to see. How awful it would’ve been to get snuffed by a guy in a hospital gown. The noise got louder and I started breathing so fast that I got light-headed. For a second I saw the kid with his backwards head standing behind his father, still saying “Daddy,” his white hand pointing at me.

I’d had my run-ins with maniacs before. Most people in the world have, but definitely everybody in New York. They were common maniacs, but still pretty “out there.” With me, it had mostly been ex-girlfriends who started off talking about taking care of me for the rest of my life and ended up setting fire to my cars. I’d had an obsessive stalker who claimed one of my horror stories had opened a portal to hell and released his father. He’d shown up at my apartment in Manhattan with a switchblade and tried to stab me with it overhand instead of slipping it between my ribs. I had a half-inch-deep scarred gouge from where the knife had deflected off my sternum. It was one of the reasons why I’d left home.

Frank Bradley held a snub-nosed .38 on me. It wasn’t a Colorado gun. The guys out here carried Colt .45s and rifles, but nothing as slick as a snub .38. You didn’t show off to your cowboy barroom cronies or go hunting elk with a .38. There was only one purpose to it. You put it up to somebody’s forehead and you took him out of the game fast.

We stood there like that for two minutes. It was a long two minutes. It gave me time to think about my regrets. There were a lot of them. Bradley’s laughter eventually died out, but he kept sneering at me. It was an expression I’d seen many times in my life, and it infuriated me as much now as it always had before.

Up close now I saw the kind of man he was — had been, would always be. Every smashed hope etched into his features. The lost chances, the missed turnoffs. The failed efforts, the stupid moves, and the mistakes that shouldn’t have cost him as much as they had. All of them his own fault, by his own hand. All of them covered by a hundred excuses and scapegoats. You didn’t have to look hard to see it all there.

“Bradley, think about—”

“Don’t talk. I don’t want to hear you talk.”

So we stood there for another few minutes. It gave us both more time to think about the past, to wonder if there’d be a future.

You can get used to anything if you endure it long enough. Even with the gun trained on me, I started to relax. The longer someone doesn’t pull a trigger, the more you believe it won’t happen. Anything was better than listening to that laugh.

“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing with the barrel.

I moved down the hall and out into the parking lot with all the false dignity of an aristocrat heading for the guillotine. He pointed to a Mustang with the engine running. “You drive.”

“Where?”

“Don’t talk, I’ll tell you.”

I drove as he directed me. We roamed the area for a while in a strange pattern that I eventually recognized as the path the balloon probably took from Berthoud up 287 to the park. I saw the empty grounds where the carnival had set up. We slipped back into town and around the park and the lake before he aimed us toward the mountains.

I drove the canyon roads heading higher and higher into the Rockies, wondering if I should try something stupid like crashing into the narrow cliff walls. My mind was stuffed with dumb thoughts and I kept trying to cycle through them until something intelligent hit me. Nothing did.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“Because you’ve got a gun on me.”

“Here, in this town.”

“I’ve been trying very hard to figure that out.”

He swiped the pistol barrel across my head. I was lucky it was only a snub-nose. Despite his silence and his outward relative calm, he was wired and explosive. He really didn’t know how to handle a gun. He barely tapped me, but I didn’t take it lightly. The fact that he didn’t know what he was doing meant he might crack my skull open next time, or the .38 might accidentally go off.

“Do you know what you did?” he asked.

“Got involved,” I said.

“You killed my boy.”

“I tried to help. I held on to a rope sixty feet in the air for as long as I could.”

“Not long enough! You couldn’t hold it long enough!”

“Neither could you.”

He shoved the barrel into my ribs this time, growling and groaning, speaking words that weren’t words except maybe in his nightmares. For four days he’d forced himself to sleep, on his way toward death, but had woken up just so he could make this play for me, the scapegoat for his own stabbing conscience.

I noticed an odd sound, a tiny ringing in the car. I glanced over and saw that he was spinning a key on a chain. He noticed me looking and held it up, but said nothing. It was a bus-station locker key. I’d seen plenty of them when I was roaming the country, trying to settle down somewhere to find my art again. Sometimes you start to drift and you just keep going, for no reason you can name. You ride and ride and hope the right thing appears around the next corner, even though you have no idea what it might be. He shoved the key back in his pocket.

We kept climbing higher until we were in the switchbacks. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees over the last several miles. Another thousand feet and we’d be able to see our breath. We’d left the towns and the cabins behind and kept threading through the mountains. The car started puttering, the thin air fouling the engine. You were supposed to do something to the timing or the spark plugs or the air filter, who the hell knew. Bradley was getting more and more excited, as if he knew we were heading to a special, secret place where he’d put his past to rest.

Snow started to appear on the ground, on the rock. The air thinned but held in the cold, the atmosphere lush and vibrant around us. I’d never been up this far. The wind tore at the car, rocking us on our shocks. The trails thinned. Finally, we ran out of road.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Get out. Climb.”

We got out and he prodded me forward across the rugged, stony landscape. I’d been in Colorado five years and had never hiked through the national park, or anywhere else for that matter. Now he had me clambering up rocks like those adrenaline junkies who scaled sheer bluff faces. I was out of shape and I wouldn’t last long. Not that Bradley would need me to. I knew he was leading me to an edge someplace. His edge, my edge. Maybe he’d been here himself before, ready to throw himself off the rim. Maybe he was walking as blindly as me, just waiting for the next thing to come along.

We came to a slope that dropped off into nothingness. We were so high up that there was an electrical buzzing in my fingers and toes and chest, an assaulting awareness that one foot further would be a step into oblivion.

The wind slithered around us. Bradley jabbed the gun into my back again. “Move.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll kill you.”

“You know, Bradley... you give a man two choices at death and he’s going to choose the one that makes you work a little harder for it.”

“It’s just pulling a trigger.”

“It’s better to make you do it than do it myself.” I didn’t know why that was the case, but I knew it was true. I still wasn’t all that worried — maybe it was altitude sickness, or maybe I’d had a death wish for a while and only now was starting to realize it.

“Move! To the edge!”

“I’m not going down there.”

“Yes, you are. We both are.”

“Why are you doing this?”

He rushed me and jabbed the barrel under my chin. It hurt like hell. “I want you to know what it was like for my son.”

I growled, “You’re the one who put him in it. You’re the one who took him up.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re the one who let go, same as me. We had no choice.”

“Shut up, damn you!”

He jabbed the barrel harder into my throat until I gagged.

“Now, jump! Do it or I’ll put one in your brain.”

“How is that supposed to scare me at this point?”

“You might survive if you jump.”

“At twelve thousand feet? Yeah, right.”

Twelve thousand feet. One hundred and twenty stories. We were higher than the Empire State Building.

Not only had he gone insane with his rage and grief, but he really hadn’t thought about the end game at all. There wasn’t enough thrill in it for him. He was starting to understand that my death wouldn’t take away an ounce of his agony. It was descending on him very quickly now and an unbearable horror came with it. He’d be alone soon with nothing but his guilt. The fear in him was much greater than my own. I saw the realization grow in his eyes along with his terror.

My feet were slipping out from beneath me on the icy rock. I was gearing up for some kind of a stupid move. Everybody thinks it’s easy, you just attack, you just spin and kick, punch and whirl and karate chop. These people, the kind who never say boo to the boss, let their relatives roll over them, and take every gram of garbage force-fed to them through their entire lives. These people, they think it’s easy to make your move on death.

Then I saw it, no more than fifty feet from us, down in the rocks, nearly at the rim. I’d been expecting it the whole ride up, because when facing your fear you also face your fate, and in that moment, any damn thing can happen.

I pointed over his shoulder and said, “There’s the balloon.”

It had drifted twenty miles and more than six thousand feet thanks to the front-range winds. It was impossible, I thought. It had to be. There was no way the balloon could have gotten up this high. Even with the updraft carrying the kid along, it never should have made it this far. Even if the kid had accidentally gotten the burner opened up all the way, it shouldn’t have been enough to get the balloon this high.

It should have bounced into one of the cliffs miles ago. The silk would have torn and the whole thing would have plummeted down in the middle of the mountains. But somehow the flight of the balloon had missed every jagged rock. Hiding behind the ridges and within the thinning tree line of the national park so nobody could see it, dancing so close to the craggy banks that he just kept rising. With hundreds of volunteers searching for him and nobody seeing.

The balloon had wedged into a tight stony niche. The basket had folded in half and the deflated silk had collapsed on top of it. When you saw a hot-air balloon you saw a beautiful mammoth thing. This you could’ve fit in your closet.

Bradley let out a cry that was part despair and part elation. He dropped the gun and forgot about me. I had to keep reminding myself that he was crazy.

He ran up to the niche and started yanking at the silk, trying to pull the basket free. He screamed his son’s name, and the echoes swarmed across the cliffs like a thousand distressed men calling out the names of their thousand dead sons.

I picked up the pistol and tossed it over the edge.

Bradley yelled, “Help me!” I stared at him for a moment and then climbed over there.

It wasn’t for him. I wanted to see the boy’s face. It still felt very important that I actually see what the kid looked like.

Bradley gripped one end of the basket and I took hold of the other and we pulled until we got it open wide enough that he could climb in. He ducked low for a second and I lurched aside until I could peer into the cramped space.

The dry, cold mountain climate had preserved the boy these last several days. At this elevation, no animals or insects had been at him in the crags. Even though the basket had struck the mountain hard enough to crumple in on itself, his skin hadn’t been touched. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with holes in the big toes. The basket had folded around him like a cocoon, without actually coming in contact with his flesh. It was another miracle, depending on whether you saw it that way.

He was still facing away from me.

From what I could see, except for his coloring, he looked like a perfectly healthy, sleeping child.

Bradley screamed, “Johnny!” He took the boy in his arms and fell against the side of the basket.

It started to slide. I had a chance to dive, maybe grab ahold of it, but I didn’t see much point anymore. It skidded across the rock ledge and the deflated silk washed across the rocks and rippled like river water.

The basket began to tip but bumped an outcropping and righted itself. The silk flapped out as if trying to inflate, but failed.

For a moment, Bradley hung there in space with his arms around his dead little boy.

He stuck his hand out to me. I reached and he clutched my right forearm. I had maybe five seconds to haul him out of the basket before it flopped over the rim.

I stared into his eyes and thought, He’s just as insane now as he was a half-hour ago. Maybe more so. He still blames me. He’ll never see it any differently, especially after the kid falls into the chasm and his body is lost forever.

You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.

I kept thinking, Here it is.

I kept thinking, One last chance.

I wondered if Bradley could see the same things in my face that I saw in his — the foolishness, the screwed-up attempts, the ridiculous efforts and disappointments.

I never should’ve let the stalker scare me out of New York. I shouldn’t have lost my dream. I could’ve made it through the fire if only I’d held strong.

I snaked my free hand into his pocket and snagged the locker key.

It’s where the money would be. Thirty grand would help me get home again. A little start-up fund to make something right happen for once. A demo reel, time to write another book. One that would sell well enough that I could feel vindicated for all the hours I wasted glaring into the abysmal white of the endless empty page.

I leaned in closer and said, “You’re an idiot for putting your kid in a stolen hot-air balloon, you bastard.”

I had to snap my forearm hard aside twice before I broke his grip.

The basket dipped another foot over the edge, the silk whispering like a child. Bradley could’ve done something — made a wild dive the way I had the afternoon I caught the rope — but I could see he just didn’t have the resolve for it. He really had lost the will to live. Imagine.

He stood there with his lost son in his arms, no expression on his face, as he tipped out of sight.

The key chimed faintly in my hand, like the final small toll of every man’s wasted life. I still hadn’t seen the boy’s face, but it would be with me forever, on every page of my life and work from here on out.

I figured I could handle it.

© 2008 by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, was released in June 2008 (Ecco Press); and of particular interest to readers of this magazine, the Ontario Review Press recently reprinted in trade paperback her 1984 Mysteries of Winterthurn, in which detective hero Xavier Kilgarvan is confronted with three baffling cases.

In that instant of entering the house by the rear door when she sees, or thinks she sees, a fleeting movement like a shadow in the hallway beyond the kitchen and she hears a sharp intake of breath or panting, it is her decision not to retreat in panicked haste from her house but to step forward sharply calling Jeremy? Is that you? For she’d seen her sister-in-law’s car parked on the shoulder of the road some fifty feet before the driveway to her house, she is certain it must be Veronica’s Toyota which Jeremy often drives, it occurs to her now that she’d expected to see Veronica at the clinic that morning but Veronica hadn’t turned up, like buzzing hornets these thoughts rush at her even as she calls out more sharply Is that you? Jeremy? For the boy shouldn’t be here in this house, at this time, uninvited, she’d left the rear door unlocked as frequently she did driving into town to the clinic, returning and later in the day driving back into town to the clinic, a distance of precisely 2.6 miles, of which she has memorized each intervening property, driveway, intersecting road and street, to be played, replayed, and run backward in her mind as she drives into town, to the rehab clinic, to see her husband, and returns to the house in preparation for driving back to the clinic, which is, she has come to realize, but the preparation for returning home. For much of this morning she has been at the clinic, tries to arrive precisely at eight A.M. when the clinic opens its front doors to visitors, for she is an early riser, both she and Jim are early risers, rarely sleep past dawn on even bitter-cold sunless winter mornings. And at the clinic, at her husband’s bedside, usually she will remain until seven P.M. when, exhausted, she returns home for the remainder of the day. At Jim’s bedside she reads to him, checks e-mail on her laptop and reads to Jim those messages, ever decreasing in frequency, that seem to her important for Jim to hear; with childlike logic she is thinking If I am a good wife, if I am good, God will spare us, God will make him well again, and so far her prayer which she understands is both craven and futile has not been entirely scorned, for Jim has been transferred from the hospital to the clinic and there is the promise that one day soon he will be sent back home to recuperate and to recover his lost strength. Already he no longer needs to be fed through a tube, already the color is returning to his face that had been deathly pale. Though still he tires easily, nods off in the midst of speaking, friends who come to visit have learned to disguise their shock and discomfort at seeing Jim Gould so changed, poor Jim who’d once been so vital, so energetic, smiling and good-natured and much-loved and now his body seems to have shrunken, he has lost more than fifty pounds, his hands are weak, legs useless, the once-powerful muscles atrophied and now his legs are reduced to bones beneath thin hairless skin, terrible to see. And so she has learned not to see. And so she has learned to disguise her fear. And so she has learned to smile as nurses learn to smile. And when he has asked her please massage his legs, his legs hurt, she smiles and kneads the bone-hard legs, thin now as the legs of a young child, massaging these legs she jokes with her husband, she loves him so, she would die for this man, she believes, and yet: how fatigued she has grown in the past several weeks, how exasperated with her husband’s demands, Jim has become unpredictable in his moods, quick to become angry, this morning hurrying to get to the clinic she’d forgotten to bring with her the latest issue of a professional journal for which her husband has been an advisory editor, seeing she’d forgotten it Jim was visibly disappointed and sulky and she’d said, Darling, I’ll drive back to get the journal, it’s no trouble, and immediately he said no, it isn’t necessary, you can bring it next time, and she insisted yes, of course she would drive back to get it for him, she has other errands in town that need to be done this morning. And anyway, Jim was scheduled for tests this morning. And she kisses his cheek, tells him she will return within the hour, in secret she’s childishly relieved to be able to leave the clinic so soon after arriving, this dour dark dimly lighted place, the smells, don’t think of the smells, the accumulated smells of decades. And the other patients, and the other visitors who are mainly women her age and older, whom she has come to recognize at the clinic, as they have come to recognize her, and dread the sight of one another outside the clinic. She is one of the few who takes pains with her appearance, not a vain woman but a woman well aware of her face, her body, how men regard her, or once regarded her, with more than ordinary interest. On this weekday she is wearing an attractive creamy-pale yellow pants suit that is flattering to her shapely body, she thinks, and around her throat a peach-colored Italian scarf. Through her life she has been a big-boned beautiful girl yet never what one would call fat, the word fat is offensive to her ears, obscene. Her face is round, full-cheeked, her skin slightly flushed as if sunburnt, a classic brunette beauty her husband has called her but now, seeing herself in the rearview mirror of her car on the way home she is shocked by her creased forehead, feathery white lines bracketing her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, the coral lipstick she’d so carefully applied that morning has been eaten off, a little cry of distress escapes her It is unfair! My face is wearing out, I am still young. For she is seven years younger than the stricken man in the rehab clinic. How many years she’d been the youngest wife in their social circle. And in her heart, she is the youngest still, and the one men glance at, gaze at with admiration. And turning into Constitution Hill, and onto Westerly Drive, she sees a familiar car parked at a crooked angle partly in the roadway, partly on the shoulder, her sister-in-law’s black Toyota so oddly parked, this is a car her seventeen-year-old nephew Jeremy has been driving recently. She feels a tinge of disapproval, neither her brother nor her sister-in-law seem capable of disciplining Jeremy who has been suspended from high school for drugs, threatening other students, threatening a teacher, she knows that Jeremy has a juvenile record for break-ins in his neighborhood near the university. Yet turning into her driveway she ceases thinking of her nephew, the driveway is a steep graveled lane bordered by a straggling evergreen hedge, with her husband so suddenly hospitalized, now in rehab, no one has tended to the property, scarcely she thinks of it, seeing that litter has been blown into the shrubbery, old newspapers and flyers scattered across the lawn, the only time she notices the condition of the property is when she’s in the car and as soon as she steps out of the car to enter the house she will forget. Too many things to think of, it’s unfair. And now pushing the rear door that opens too readily to her touch, seeing that fleeting shadow against an inner wall. And she thinks with a rush of anger He believes that I am with Jim, at the clinic and not here. He believes that no one is home. For it has been said of Trudy Gould that she is a saint, every day at the hospital and now at the rehab clinic, she is selfless, uncomplaining at her husband’s bedside for months. She knows how people speak of her, she takes pride in being so spoken of, in fact she is terrified of the empty house, bitterly now she regrets having no children, yes but both she and her husband decided that the risk of adoption was too great, bringing a child of unknown parents into their orderly household. And now entering her kitchen with a deliberate clatter of her heels, expensive Italian-leather shoe boots with a two-inch heel, she feels a thrill of something like defiance, she will not be frightened of her own nephew, tall lanky sloe-eyed Jeremy whom she has known since his birth, Aunt Trudy the boy calls her, or called her until two years ago when so much seemed to change in him, still she thinks that Jeremy has always liked her, he would not hurt her. Entering the hallway now calling in a scolding voice Jeremy! I see you and seeing now that the boy’s face is strangely flushed, he is panting and his eyes are dilated and damp, he is on some drug she thinks, yet even now advancing upon him sharp-tongued and scolding Jeremy! what are you doing here! How dare you as he springs at her panting like a dog knocking her back against the wall, even now she is disbelieving He would not hurt me, this is my house and somehow they are in the kitchen, they are struggling together in the kitchen, a chair is overturned, in his hoarse raw boy’s voice Jeremy is crying Shut up, shut up you old bag, old bitch even as she screams at him to get away, to stop what he is doing. She slaps at him, blindly Jeremy has snatched up a knife from a kitchen counter, a small paring knife, yet sharp, blindly he is stabbing at her, his aunt whom he seems not to know, does not recognize, astonished Aunt Trudy he has known all his life staring at her now with glassy eyes narrowed to slits, helplessly she lifts her fleshy forearms against him, her outstretched hands to shield herself from the terrible stabbing blows, she is not scolding now, her voice is faltering, pleading now No no Jeremy please no don’t hurt me you don’t want to hurt me Jeremy as the short sharp blade flies at her like a maddened bird of prey, striking her face, her throat, her breasts straining at the now-damp creamy-pale yellow fabric of her jacket top, this furious stranger who resembles her seventeen-year-old nephew will back off from her to leave her sprawled on the sticky kitchen floor to suffocate in her own blood, her lungs have been punctured, her throat is filling up with blood, in something like elation he has thrown down the bloody paring knife, I told you! I told you! I told you God damn you leave me alone! He stumbles from the kitchen, runs upstairs though it has been years since he has been upstairs in his aunt’s house on Westerly Drive, wildly he rummages through bureau drawers leaving bloody fingerprints, bloody footprints as in an antic dance in the striking baroque design of his Nike soles, man is he high, flying high, this older girl he’s crazy for, a girl with whom he shares his drugs, has sex and shares drugs, he will boast to her that he hadn’t planned anything of what happened in the rich woman’s house, he’d acted out of sheer instinct, he’d told her he knows a house over in Constitution Hill, there’s a woman who is gone all day at the hospital with her husband, he did not tell the girl that the woman was his aunt, boasting he’d be safe roaming the house as long as he wanted looking for money and for things to take, over in Constitution Hill where the houses are so large, lots so large and set off from their neighbors, no one will see him and if there’s trouble no one will hear it, in that instant of pushing open the door she sees all this, as a single lightning flash can illuminate a nighttime landscape of gnarled and unimaginable intricacy, so in that instant she sees, sheerly by instinct she retreats from the door that has swung open too readily to her touch, in the tight-fitting Italian-leather shoe boots she runs stumbling down the gravel driveway, of course she’d seen her sister-in-law’s black Toyota parked out of place by the road, she’d recognized the Toyota by the pattern of dents on the rear bumper and by the first letters of the license plate VER, no she will not retreat, certainly she will not retreat, instead she turns the car into the steep gravel driveway, at the rear of the house which is the door she and Jim always use she sees, or thinks she sees, that the door is just slightly ajar, still there is time to retreat, with a part of her brain she knows I must not go inside, Jim would not want me to go inside for her responsibility is to her husband back at the clinic waiting for her, but this is her house in which she has lived with her husband Jim Gould for twenty-six years, no one has the right to keep her from entering this house, no one has the right to enter this house without her permission, even a relative, even her shy-sullen sloe-eyed nephew Jeremy, and so with an air of defiance she pushes into the kitchen, clatter of heels on the kitchen tile in that instant seeing a fleeting movement like a shadow in the hall beyond the kitchen, she hears a sharp intake of breath or panting, in that instant a rush of pure adrenalin flooding her veins she refuses to run stumbling and screaming down the gravel drive to summon help, a middle-aged fleshy woman in her early fifties, yet still girlish, in her manner and in her speech, she will not stagger next-door where a Hispanic housekeeper will take her in, in this way save her, dialing 911 as Mrs. Gould collapses onto a kitchen chair winded, panting like a terrified animal, that will not happen, she will not give in to fear, she will not flee from her own house, she will not be saved from suffocating in her own blood, it is her decision, she is Jim Gould’s classic brunette beauty, she has never been a vain woman but she thinks well of herself, she is not a weak woman like her sister-in-law and so she will not retreat in undignified haste from her own house, instead she will step forward with a scolding clatter of her shoe-boot heels sharply calling Jeremy? Is that you?

© 2008 by John C. Boland

John Boland returns to EQMM this issue after a long hiatus. The Baltimore author has had a number of stories in our sister publication, AHMM, since his last tale for us in 1989. He also authored half a dozen financial mysteries in the 1990s, novels Publishers Weekly called “wry and intelligent” and “suspenseful... and satisfying.”

* * * *

Don’t tell me about sunny Key West. I was painting a small, bad beach scene — just the ticket for some tourist who didn’t know yet that he wanted it — working in the cabin of my father’s boat, my feet freezing under two pairs of socks, chugging down my second pot of green tea, listening to the pinkety-pink of the leak in the head, when Hubbard Bennell hauled his 250 pounds aboard. In his yellow rain slicker, he pretty much filled the galley. “Have you got a job right now, Meggie?” he asked.

His tone implied he knew the question was impolite. Any half-competent investigator could find all the work she wanted in rowdy Key Wasted, couldn’t she?

I halfway liked him. He was a middle-aged Conch with sun scabs on the nose and the thickened hands of someone who had done real work before becoming a politico. He’d spent seven or eight years on the city commission without getting indicted, which was close to a local record. After the last municipal scandal over hack licenses, Hub had told a TV reporter that he was sure he wasn’t all that honest, no more so than the two commissioners who’d been arrested, so he guessed he was just slower to spot an opportunity. He said it with a melancholy, up-from-under grin. Dang if it ain’t sad what goes on here. A town where city fathers used to import marijuana loves winks and nods.

A job meant money, which I desperately needed.

“Nothing right now,” I said.

“Good, you can stake out my flight club. Somebody broke into the office last night.”

His flight club was actually an air-charter business, named by some long-ago eccentric who had flown rum over from Cuba. Hub’s business, so far as I knew, consisted of hauling tourists seventy miles out into the Gulf of Mexico for snorkeling trips among the Dry Tortugas.

We worked out the terms — that is, Hub told me what the gig was worth and I said okay. Then I called my sometime helper Babe McKenzie, who always needs a few bucks to feed her cats and her boyfriends.

Before dark, I hunkered down in Hub Bennell’s office, and Babe hid herself in the converted boathouse that served as a hangar for two island-hopping Cessna 185s. While we were doing that, somebody came ashore at my client’s stilt house two miles up the island and shot Hub deader than a crab leg.

I spent a lot of the night talking to the police.

Barry Irvington was my favorite cop when he was looking after me in a paternal way — not so favorite when he felt lonely and thought he needed a girlfriend thirty years younger than himself. Tonight he was red-eyed and rumpled, in a tan suit that belonged in a ’forties movie (one where the emotionally damaged hero washes ashore in the Tropics), his hair damp and finger-combed forward, his breath redolent of cigarettes. He wasn’t pretty and he was all business. Bennell had been a successful Key West businessman. He’d also been part of the political establishment. Right there, two strikes against me.

“He said he was worried about theft,” I repeated.

“Tell me again. Neither you nor the McKenzie woman saw anything?”

“There was a raccoon about eleven o’clock,” I reminded him. “But nobody out to steal an airplane.”

He was my friend, but he was also a cop. Five minutes into the interview, he’d checked my gun to see if it had been fired. It hadn’t been, not since I’d taken it out to the range two months ago, to satisfy myself I hadn’t forgotten everything Dad taught me about shooting. If you’re going to do security gigs in Florida, where everyone who isn’t officially a criminal or insane can get a carry permit, it’s stupid to work unarmed. I was carrying a Beretta .380 autoloader, which was a little too big for my hand.

Barry and I had already gone through the stuff about how Hub had acted: not like he expected someone to shoot him. Babe was getting the third degree, or at least a cup of coffee, in another detective’s car.

There was a tap at the window, and the deputy chief of police climbed into the backseat. Curtis LeMoye gave me a sour look. He hadn’t liked my father, and he saw no reason to like me.

“Why don’t you have her in handcuffs?” he grumbled.

Barry replied, “If she tries to escape, we can shoot her.”

LeMoye looked away from me. “We’re going to wrap this up, Irvington. I’ll leave a couple of guys on the scene. Zelda’s done with the body. Thinks he took two straight in the ticker, two in the head.”

He got back out into the rain. Barry gave Babe and me a ride back to her pickup truck at the flying club. As she cranked up the engine, she said, “Meggie, did Bennell pay you anything on account?” I had promised her a hundred dollars for the evening.

“No, sorry.”

“You’re not much of a businesswoman. Always get something on account.” She was in her mid forties, chesty as a sailing ship, blond as a swamp fire, opinionated as anyone’s mother. In upstate New York, she had been a sheriff’s deputy or a hooker, depending on how she felt when she told her story.

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said.

“I don’t see how,” Babe responded, and drove off.

Barry took me farther down the Atlantic side of the island to Hawkes’ Marina, where the masts of my father’s ten-meter fiberglass sailboat slashed the smudgy predawn. Boats can’t have premonitions, but this one looked as if it knew it had reached its last berth. Everything about it leaked. My father had been a serious drinker who hadn’t had time for boat maintenance. If the bilge pump ever died, the decks would be awash in twenty-four hours.

Dad hadn’t been great at family upkeep, either. My mother and I had been living in Connecticut when a cop called and asked if we were related to the Daniel Trevor who had been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Sailing alone, sixty-eight years old, probably with a celebratory glass of something in hand, toasting the windy sunset, toasting the frigate birds, stumbling on a coiled rope — something like that, dying stupid. A fisherman who came across the drifting boat towed it back to Key West. He refused a salvage claim because he thought Danny Trevor had been a hero. If you hit the right bars in the Lower Keys, CIA pensioners lean on their elbows recalling glory days on the Mosquito Coast. Or they try to remember the name of the guard who wired them up at Isla de Pinos. Like high school jocks reliving the big game of ’68.

Mom wasn’t interested in a half-sunk boat. I was four months out of college with no job in sight, so I came down to clear up the estate. Initially I thought there was nothing but the old ketch, which he called KeyHole, thinking it was funny painting a secret code word on the transom. Later I found the compartment in the ceiling, where he had stowed two handguns, one Ithaca side-by-side with jammed works, a couple of gray blocks of something that I knew, having never seen it before, was plastic explosive, and a fully automatic rifle without serial numbers. Altogether, enough to get me twenty years just for being an heir. What had he been planning?

I hadn’t told anyone about the compartment. Since the KeyHole wasn’t seaworthy, I couldn’t even haul the contraband out to the Gulfstream for disposal. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I could guard a lot of liquor stores without needing a cake of C4. My ex-boyfriend was back in New Haven, and I didn’t bear enough of a grudge to send him an exploding package.

When Barry dropped me off, the marina was quiet.

The man sitting in the cockpit of my boat didn’t belong there. He wasn’t trying to hide, maybe just the opposite, because the cigar tip glowed as I came down the walkway that Mimi Hawkes kept promising to repair. “Meggie,” he called — and I recognized the voice and stopped thinking “he.”

Apart from the cigar, Gloria Hasty could have been invisible in the dark. Black watch cap, black turtleneck, tight jeans, she was decked out for prowling. The watch cap hid short hair dyed so deeply red it looked metallic under the neon lights along the town’s main drag, where she bought dinner for tough boys who could have been her grandsons. We were a mile from Duval Street. Gloria stood up, and the cigar lit one hand well enough that I saw that it was all she was holding. The other hand was pushing back her watch cap.

“I’ve been waiting here for hours,” she complained.

“You should have called.” She was one of the few ex-Agency people my father counted as a friend. But it was after four in the morning and my mood was sour. “What do you want?”

“I got a sudden urge to buy one of your paintings, dear. Something with gulls and pelicans. Do you have any like that?” Her tone mocked both of us. My paintings were junk. She might hang one in one of the bungalows where her young men slept. A bad painting would be amusing, like the human curiosities. There was a flicker of light behind a curtain in the boat’s main cabin. When she saw that I had noticed, Gloria said, “I want you to meet someone, Meggie. Come on out, Tom! Switch on the deck lights.”

Blinking as the deck lights popped on, I moved a step closer.

“Tom’s housebroken,” Gloria announced as a shadow came out of the companionway and onto the aft deck. The shadow was tall and bearded and wore a big floppy safari hat, a black T-shirt, and a blazer with buttons that flashed almost as bright at Gloria’s cigar butt. He nodded across the space between us.

“You’re a pretty bad painter.” His beard was mostly white, and behind it he wore a big squinty grin.

“You broke into my boat.”

He gave a little shrug. “I’m not really housebroken. I’m Colonel Tom Parker.” He didn’t expect me to believe him. The name was one of those little jokes, like KeyHole, an all-purpose introduction as secret as a two-finger handshake while tugging your left ear: Langley calling.

Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I said, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Your old man was one of the great ones,” Tom Parker said. Having turned down coffee, he was sitting at the galley table, hands folded, showing a thick wedding band and clean fingernails. “He’d be sorry he didn’t get to go out in combat.”

If my father was sorry about anything when he died, it would be that he hadn’t had time for another Margarita. I didn’t think Parker had known him very well.

“Is that how you feel?” I asked. “Hoping to go out in combat?”

“Well, honey — officially I’m retired. Unofficially, I’m still in the game. Both me and Miss Gloria.”

Miss Gloria nodded vigorously. “We’d better tell Meggie what’s going on. A man named Hector Avila killed your client tonight, honey. Hector steals boats. Your client, Hubbard Bennell, has a boatyard. Guess what happens there?”

“I don’t know.”

Tom Parker stepped in. “The stolen boats get a new profile, fresh paint, brand new nameplate, made-to-order log books. Then some wetback takes ’em across to Veracruz — that’s the city named for the True Cross, kid — and they get sold to South Americanos who can afford both a hundred-foot boat and two mistresses. Hector Avila would steal the eyeballs off a corpse if there was a peso in it.”

“Where’s the boatyard?”

“Little east of Stock Island.”

“And why do you care?”

“CIA pension don’t stretch that far,” said Colonel Tom Parker. “But the marine-insurance people pay us pretty good. If we disrupt Avila’s export business, recover the last boat he pinched at Little Palm, me and Miss Gloria will clear about seventy-five K.”

“So you broke into my boat looking for Avila.”

“Naw, kid. I broke in ’cause I got bored waiting. Now the good news. If you want to help us, we’re good for a few hundred bucks. Help us a lot, there’s more.” He glanced around the cabin, which probably smelled musty if you hadn’t been living there. “Danny’s old boat looks like it could use repairs.”

The KeyHole needed more than repairs. The slip fee was due. My phone was running out of minutes. I had about seventy dollars to my name. For some reason — maybe it was the cold snap — tourists weren’t buying my paintings. I had been looking forward to a check from Hub Bennell.

“Why did Avila kill Mr. Bennell?” I asked Gloria.

“There’s no honor among thieves, Meggie. Even less with Hectorcito. I believe Tom is going to have to take him out.”

Tom nodded confidently.

Colonel Tom and Gloria shoved off before dawn, plowing across the small harbor in a Zodiac. I checked the hidden compartment, but there was no sign Tom had discovered it. His poking around seemed to have been random — correct that: eighty percent random, twenty percent perverted, which served me right for leaving personal items where the old creep could find them. I caught a few hours’ sleep with the hatches open, to blow out the stink of Gloria’s cigar.

By morning, the breeze pushing through the boat was warm, with a taste of Havana in it. I kicked off a sweaty sheet, plodded down to the marina for a shower, and then went across the road to the Carbuncle, a bikers’ dive, and ate chili for breakfast. Lem Samuel, the half-owner, claims the same kettle of chili has been simmering since the afternoon Nixon resigned. He had been letting me eat free because I was working on a portrait of him. His gray-streaked hair was almost Biblical in length, his bloodshot eyes could have been traced with red liner, and jailhouse X’s were tattooed on the backs of his fingers. I would have painted him for free.

“You want a beer?” he said.

It was eight-twenty in the morning.

“I can’t afford a beer.”

“You dance here on Friday night, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred wouldn’t cover the antibiotics.”

“Eat the chili, Meggie, it cures everything. Look at me. I don’t do doctors.” He leaned on the bar. “You hear about the murder?”

I waved him away. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“They say he was stabbed a dozen times right in his shop on Duval Street.”

I put down my spoon. “Who are we talking about?”

“Art dealer, important guy, Anders Hewitt. I don’t suppose he sells your paintings.” Grinning at close range, Lem showed me teeth that should have been in a mummy case. “Now let me ask you, what’s a rich guy doing in his gallery at five in the morning? That’s when he called the cops and spilled out onto the sidewalk.”

I still couldn’t face a beer, but I ordered a strong cup of coffee. That pot, too, had been brewing since the day Nixon resigned.

Duval Street commerce was at its finest. There were baby sharks in bottles, President bobbleheads, T-shirts with stale obscenities, then the art galleries — only one of those was roped off with yellow tape forcing pedestrians to walk into the street. A biker chewing on his wrist strap had one foot down, leaning toward a sweaty cop, whom I recognized as one of Deputy Chief Curtis LeMoye’s boys so I steered clear. There were blood spatters on the sidewalk outside the gallery, and the cop had his left heel in one of them. He was too busy chatting with the fellow on the V-8 to notice me peering in the shop window. The Last Island Gallery specialized in high-end art, oil paintings by people who had reputations, sculptures that looked liked they had come from Mayan ruins. Anders Hewitt, the late owner, got his picture in the newspaper every time the Arts Council donated a dollar to the homeless.

Barry Irvington came out of the gallery.

“Tell me you weren’t guarding Anders Hewitt,” he said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You want breakfast?”

The chili rumbled in my stomach. I shook my head. “What happened to Hewitt?”

“Fourteen knife wounds, started bleeding inside the store, made it to the sidewalk.” Barry walked me down the street, away from the biker and the cop. “We’ve got no weapon, no video, about a thousand fingerprints. I was hoping it’s a domestic thing, then there’d be a chance of solving it. But Hewitt lived with his sister, who says he was as sexless as a bee. No beefs with artists or customers. A wide circle of friendships, nothing intimate.”

For a minute I thought he was talking to himself, running through all the things he didn’t have. Then he said, “One of his friends was Hubbard Bennell.”

He was doing his job, trying to solve a couple of murders. I was doing mine, trying to make a living — which Tom Parker and Gloria’s gig promised to further. When I thought of one man with four bullets in him and another with fourteen stab wounds, I knew I was out of my class. I said, “Has the name Hector Avila turned up?”

“Where did you hear it?”

“Gloria Hasty paid me a visit last night. She had an old CIA type tagging along. They said Avila is a boat thief and that he killed Hub.”

Barry made a sour face. “How does Gloria know that?”

“Does Hub have a boatyard?”

“Yeah...”

I told him Tom Parker’s version of boat hijacking and refitting. As we talked, he thumbed through his notebook. “A couple of invoices at Hewitt’s gallery show payments to an ‘H. Avila’ for art.”

“So struggling artists survive stealing boats.”

“Avila isn’t struggling. Hewitt paid him an average of fifty thousand a month for most of last year. In fact—” he leafed back — “since April the payments added up to almost exactly fifty a month. Before that, it was thirty-five. Steady as rain. What does that have to do with stealing boats?”

We drove in an unmarked car across the bridge onto Stock Island and spotted the sign SAILHOOK MARINA arching above a side road like a leaping marlin. The sign offered boatyard services and storage. A handful of slips beside a concrete pier were empty except for a couple of pontoon boats with open, empty decks.

In the repair yard, two men were spray-coating the bottom of a cabin cruiser. When they saw Barry they removed their masks and switched off the compressor. He didn’t need to flash a badge. He probably didn’t need to put his fists on his hips, pushing back his jacket to reveal the gun on his hip, but he did.

“Who owns the boat?”

The smaller man was round, pale, and half bald. He wore a basketball shirt that exposed the red hair on his shoulders. “Calvin Bordreaux owns her, has for twenty years. You know Calvin?”

Barry looked the boat over. It didn’t fit the description I’d got from Gloria of the yacht stolen from the resort at Little Palm Island. It was stubby and old, needed varnish, and even with a clean bottom it looked too shabby to motor into a high-end resort. “What’s Calvin use her for?” Barry asked.

“He takes his wife out on Florida Bay and they listen to the radio. Maybe pretend to fish.”

“Have you had anything bigger in the yard? Say about fifty-five feet, Danish design. Called Bay Stomper?”

The other man, whose neck tattoos twined dripping daggers with skulls and butterflies, pointed to the boat slips. “Mr. Hub had one like that in the marina ten, twelve days ago. We didn’t do any work on it.”

His companion nodded. “Nice boat, but not the one you want. This was Morning Glory, out of Boca. Not much crew, one real mean Cuban. Told me to stay away from his boat.”

Barry was still sizing them up. For a yard that was supposed to refit stolen boats, the men seemed too relaxed. “You fellows usually work on boats like that?”

“I’d sure like to,” said the tattooed man.

“Have you worked here long?”

“Three years. But we do mostly small jobs, right, Hank?”

The red-haired man nodded.

As we walked around the yard, Barry said, “If this is a marine chop shop, I’m Jimmy Buffett. I’ve seen Hank at bars. He’s a lay preacher of some sort.”

“In bars?”

“Where would you expect to find lost souls? Next time, don’t believe everything Gloria Hasty tells you.”

“What about the Bay Stomper? And Hector Avila? Avila could have painted a new name on.”

“First, we only have Gloria’s word a boat was stolen. It hasn’t been reported to the Coast Guard.”

“A ‘mean Cuban’ could fit Avila.”

Barry nodded. “There was no address for Avila on Anders Hewitt’s invoices. Not much description of what Hewitt was buying, either — just ‘work of art.’ Did your two CIA pals mention whether Avila was an artist?”

“They said he was a killer.” Hands tucked into my back pockets, I watched the water. A couple of porpoises had come into the sheltered area herding baitfish. “They’ve got a source in your department, you know. A couple hours after Bennell got shot, Gloria and Parker were waiting on my boat, pitching the idea that Avila did it. There was a pretty good bet I would tell you.”

We drove back to town. Barry put a description of the Morning Glory out to local marinas. If you’re going to start searching for a single boat in the Lower Keys, you might as well also try naming frigate birds. He queried the national crime database on the name Hector Avila, got a dozen small charges from the ’nineties and an array of old mug shots. The most recent picture showed a narrow-faced man with long black hair. The men at Sailhook described their Cuban as over six feet, short-haired, and scrawny as a wood stork. The database had no current address on Avila.

Finding Tom Parker was easier. He had a suite at the Hilton looking down onto Mallory Square, where the pagans gather to celebrate sunset. Barry decided we should visit Parker in his room.

Two steps off the elevator, we heard a door open. A porky fellow in a gray suit stepped into the hall. I got a glimpse of a black brush cut, pug nose, bee-stung lips. He said a few words to someone in the room, then turned away from us and headed for a back stairway.

Barry unfroze. “That’s Lieutenant Kilgallen. He’s LeMoye’s assistant.”

“Assistant what?”

“Whatever the deputy chief needs, Larry Kilgallen fetches.”

“What do you want to bet, that’s Parker’s room he came out of.”

“I wouldn’t bet.”

“Let’s go see.”

“Let’s not.” He turned and pushed the elevator button. The car hadn’t gone anywhere. We went down to the lobby, out onto the square. It had turned into a bright, hot day, and a cruise ship was unloading a couple thousand tourists onto the pier, each of whom might buy a T-shirt or lunch, or get his pocket picked more directly, in any case contributing to the gross domestic product of the Conch Republic. The town had called itself a republic ever since a short-lived confrontation with the feds a quarter-century ago proved its rebellious spirit. When Dad took me on a boat ride out toward Fort Jefferson, spotting the sunken drug planes, he pointed out that none of them had carried untaxed English tea. He thought Key West should be called the Contraband Republic.

It was close to lunchtime. Barry got us a table on the square, ordered a Bloody Mary that put a little color in his cheeks. I had a diet ginger ale. “What do you think?” I said.

He found things to look at that didn’t include my eyes, which usually distracted him. The question hadn’t really come up, but I had assumed Barry Irvington was an honest cop, however you define that. He might look the other way for a friend — he had done so when I was getting wrecked saying goodbye to Dad — but I didn’t think he would look the other way because someone slipped him money.

His glance finally got around to me. “If Kilgallen and LeMoye have something going on, I don’t want to know about it. I could get used to living without my badge. Maybe I could get along without a pension. But I don’t want DEA getting a tip and finding a half-kilo of dope in my car. If it happened, nobody in the Department would jump up and say, ‘No, they got it all wrong, Irv’s a good cop.’”

“What about Parker?”

“Do you know Parker from before?”

“No. Dad didn’t bring his coworkers home. Parker says he’s retired.”

“Call him up and invite him down to lunch. I’ll be somewhere else. Tell him you need a few bucks so you can keep looking for Avila’s boat. Bat your pretty eyes at him.”

I used the Hilton’s house phone, and Parker came downstairs ten minutes later. He joined me at the table Barry had vacated. In daylight he looked older and flabby and the white beard had a yellow tinge. He was wearing a baby-blue guayabera shirt, cotton ducks, leather sandals over argyle socks. I wondered if this was a CIA-approved disguise. “You’re buying lunch,” I said. “I’m tapped out.”

“I think I can manage that, kid.”

“Also, I need a couple hundred on account.”

That widened his eyes. “On account of what?”

“If you’re looking for Avila, it’d help to put out word in the Cuban community. I can do that.”

He understood. There were bars in town where Anglo hombres weren’t welcome but an Anglo chick would get free drinks. “Also, if there’s money for whoever dimes him, it might go faster,” I said.

“Okay, two hundred.”

“You better make it five for the tipster. They need to believe you’re serious.”

He looked like he was passing a kidney stone. “All right. But the info’s got to be good.”

I ate a big lunch at Parker’s expense, collected two hundred dollars, and left him fumbling a credit card onto the check. A block later, Barry fell in beside me. “You’d better stay out of his way. He’ll know he was had. Parker had copies of police reports on last night’s murders. I’ll bet Larry Kilgallen left his prints on them.”

“You hit Parker’s room?”

“Crudely, too. Turned the place upside down. Borrowed an envelope at the front desk and mailed the reports to a lawyer. Parker also had mug shots of Avila, a nice little Walther .380 with two magazines. Hasn’t been fired for a while. Couple of phony ID’s. This guy is a clown.”

“He knows where my boat is,” I pointed out.

“Move in with me, he’ll never find you.”

“I’ll move in somewhere, but not with you.”

He tried not to look disappointed. I liked him a lot, but the poor guy was in his fifties.

I cleaned the stuff I needed out of my boat, made a deal with Babe McKenzie for a couple nights’ bivouac for a hundred dollars. She reminded me I owed her a hundred for the other night. She had a one-bedroom apartment in a decayed mansion close enough to Old Town that I wouldn’t need transportation. She let me have the couch and a corner of the fridge that wasn’t stuffed with cat food.

I met Barry at Anders Hewitt’s gallery and we took another look at the invoices made out to H. Avila. There were eighteen of them. None had an address or tax-ID number for Avila. The descriptions of the art Hewitt was buying were as skimpy as Barry had remembered, but the recorded amounts weren’t small: between eight thousand and twenty thousand dollars.

“That stuff should stand out even here,” Barry said. He led me through the gallery. There were five rooms. The blood spill was confined to the front gallery, where touristy stuff was on display. It was still high-end. The oil paintings of breaching killer whales — and when has anyone seen those off Key West? — were glossy and big, the kind hotels might hang in the lobby. Another room held paintings that didn’t have a local theme — still-lifes, landscapes, portraitists’ samples. Next-door was a den full of glass sculptures, some of them extraordinarily beautiful if you went for that sort of thing... and didn’t live on a rocking boat. There was a big, blue cresting wave so convincing that I looked for a surfer atop the glass. A little card beside each sculpture identified the artist and title and the nature of the glass. Beside the price was a small number-letter code.

“Are there numbers on Avila’s invoices?” I asked Barry.

He flipped through the pages. “A series: PC47, PC51, PC52, PC55, and so on.”

A large room at the end of a hall was filled with works tagged PC. The letters might have stood for pre-Columbian. H. Avila’s PC52 was a fat, malevolently ugly stone head the size of a pumpkin. The discreet little card said it was an Olmec deity, from circa 1,100 B.C. The price was fifty-five thousand dollars.

“Rents are high on Duval Street,” Barry murmured.

We scouted the rest of the room. There were twenty or thirty other items, most of them smaller than the head. They stood on tables, on Lucite shelves, in clear boxes. My guess about the meaning of “PC” was probably wrong. Some looked Mediterranean, others Asian. The lowest price was ten thousand dollars.

We couldn’t match any of the other items to Avila invoices. “Maybe Avila’s pieces sold,” I said. “Do you think the stuff’s authentic?”

“Maybe I’d better get someone in who knows,” Barry said.

As we reached the front, a voice snapped, “What’s she doing here?”

Curtis LeMoye’s sparse pink comb-over looked like it had just come in from the rain instead of from the sunny sidewalk. He could bake in the desert for a week and still look moist. The deputy chief had been leaning on a desk, studying an eight-foot-long nude painting that looked like a Modigliani. Maybe he planned to open a bar and needed a conversation piece.

“She has information that may help us,” Barry said. He told LeMoye that a man fitting Hector Avila’s description had briefly parked a boat at Bennell’s marina. “It looks like he also provided art to this gallery. That links him to both murders.”

“Do we have a picture — a description?”

“The photos are ten years old.”

“He’s Cuban, right? I’ll run him by some of my contacts.” He looked at me. “I wish the CIA stayed out of Key West.”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I told Barry I was glad to help and got out of there.

Gloria Hasty had a nineteenth-century house of Honduran mahogany facing Eaton Street, with two cottages around back behind a twenty-foot swimming pool. The cottages were where she put up her occasional boys, as she called them. There was no point in ringing at the front door. I opened the gate and went around back.

Gloria was in her swimming pool.

She was still wearing her midnight-prowler gear, minus the watch cap, so the red hair was a spiky halo. The pool was about eight feet deep at this end, and light and shadows wiggled on the surface, making it hard to tell exactly what I was seeing. Gloria appeared to have a spear of some kind through her chest. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. The alarmed girl on the pool apron with the sky behind her must have looked remote and useless from Gloria’s perspective.

“Turn around, dammit.”

I turned and came face to face with someone I hadn’t expected to see again. He wore a few days’ gray stubble, hair and brows were salt-lightened, cheeks were deeply sunken. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun. His eyes were hard and, for just an instant, murderous.

Still, it was the face I knew best, and missed most.

I said, “Hi, Dad.”

I wanted to hug him and blubber as if I were ten years old. But I was twenty-two and knew I had to make adult judgments about people, even him.

“Where did you get the shotgun?”

“From the house. Meggie, I heard you were down here. You look good. How’s your mom?”

Dating someone stable, I almost said. No point in taking cheap shots.

“Why were you in the house?”

“Looking for Gloria.”

“She’s in the pool.”

He took two steps, looked, muttered, “That’s great.” I couldn’t tell how he meant it.

We did our catching-up in one of the cottages. Dad perched on a chair where he could watch the yard. He was impressed that an old drinking buddy had towed the KeyHole, bemused that I was living aboard at the same slip he had used. He asked how I was making a living, and when I told him, he laughed a little. But the laugh was feeble. For the first time, he looked not just old but worn out.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Gloria and I took the boat out, and she pushed me overboard. She and I were — well, you know, spending time together. We had a lot in common.”

“I see,” I said crustily. Loyalty to Mom and all that.

“I was doing a little job, keeping an eye on some of the locals here. Gloria saw an angle.” He shrugged. “I was in the water two days, got picked up by a freighter headed for Tampico. It took a couple of months in the hospital before I was half-fit. One bullet messed me up a little.”

“One bullet?”

“She shot me a few times. Thorough lady, when she put her mind to something.”

“What did she do with the KeyHole?”

“Probably set it adrift a few miles out and took her Zodiac. She brought the inflatable in case we wanted to explore the mangroves. Nobody knew we’d gone out together.”

“She told me last night she was looking for Hector Avila.”

“Yeah?”

I told him about what had happened in town, and about Gloria and Parker’s visit.

“Describe the guy calling himself Parker.”

“Bearded, heavy, six-one, big wedding band, talk of not being housebroken, officially retired, called me kid.” I added, “He said you would be sorry you didn’t go out in combat.”

“But I did.” His smile was ragged. “The Parker description could fit a half-dozen guys I can think of. If he’s any good, he changes his appearance anyway.”

“According to Parker, Avila is running stolen boats to Mexico. He and Gloria said they were working an insurance angle.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. Avila was supplying art to Hewitt’s gallery.”

“Avila’s not in the art trade. He launders money for wise guys in Miami. He uses a boatyard, Hewitt’s gallery, probably a dozen other businesses that will do anything for ten percent. Gloria decided to take him out. She offered me first crack at the deal.”

“You didn’t agree?”

“I told her that messing with Avila was a fast way to get dead.”

“Tell me how the money-laundering works.”

“A guy like Anders Hewitt picks up a bunch of junk art, doesn’t matter what sort, creates a history. Supposedly it’s on consignment from an importer. It’s garbage. In a real sale, you couldn’t unload it for five grand. But he writes up a bill of sale for a hundred thousand, runs the money through his bank account, keeps ten or fifteen as his fee. Avila gets eighty-five thousand of his clients’ money back. Bingo, the capital is on deposit in Lauderdale or Miami for an import company owned by the wise guys. It started off as maybe racetrack skim or vigorish. Now it’s clean enough for casual inspection. The gallery owner’s biggest problem is deciding whether to report the fifteen thousand as income.” He yawned hugely. “I’ve been running on empty for a week. Got in twenty hours ago on a shrimp boat. Can I crash on the KeyHole?”

“Parker knows about the boat.” I told him about Sergeant Irvington ransacking Parker’s room. “He also had a visit from Lieutenant Kilgallen, who slipped out the back way like he didn’t want to be seen. Barry says Kilgallen is Deputy Chief LeMoye’s man.”

“Larry Kilgallen is one of the locals I was asked to watch.”

“Who asked you?”

He cracked an ugly grin. “People who knew I would work cheap. I don’t think they know Parker’s involved. And I never got a chance to tell them about Gloria.”

He slept for three hours while I kept watch. None of Gloria’s occasional boys was in residence. Nobody came around looking for her — or to clean the swimming pool. The only person besides us who knew about the body was the person who had put it there.

While he slept, I kept looking at him. I thought about calling Mom with the news, but she had had enough of this man for one lifetime. What had started out as heroic and romantic had gone bad. He had signed on during the Cold War believing everything, and had ended up believing nothing. And now... he had been in town twenty hours. Twenty hours ago, Bennell, Hewitt, and Gloria had been alive.

He got up late in the afternoon. When he’d had a shower and some coffee and food, we talked about stuff that had nothing to do with the case. He didn’t apologize for being a lousy husband or absent father. He had taught me to sail, and to shoot, and maybe to be too independent. Looking at me, he said he thought he’d done a good job.

After dark, he went into the water and pulled Gloria out. Wrapping her in a sheet, I saw more than I wanted to. The shaft through her body was a long African tribal knife, but it hadn’t made her only wound. She had been tortured. I went behind a tree and threw up.

Dad carried the body into the main house. Then we spent two hours in Bahama Village, making the rounds of places where he had friends. Twice we heard that a fat white guy without much money also was asking around. But nobody had seen Hector Avila in more than a week. That crazy Cuban? Oh, yessir, Mr. Danny, he likes them Chinese prostitutes upstairs of the bike rental. Yessir, that’s Hectorcito, same one as cut Shem the Tailor’s hamstring, Shem who specializes in pharmaceuticals.

It was a matter of time before Parker heard we were out there.

About one-thirty in the morning, a kid with a shaved head, awning-striped shirt, black trousers, shiny black tap shoes, and red suspenders came up to the bar at Puccini’s and handed Dad a note. The boy waited until I gave him five dollars, then ran out the door. Dad showed me the note, which said: 4 A.M. Room 407.

“That’s Parker’s hotel room.”

He nodded.

“We don’t want to go there,” I said.

“You’re not going. Parker and I’ve got business. Let’s camp at the boat for a while.”

I sat on deck in the dark while Dad used the head. He came topside carrying the knapsack I usually kept my paints in. Without asking I knew he had a gun in it. Under my breath, I said, “I’m coming with.”

He sat beside me. “You’ve never shot anyone, have you?” He took my silence as assent.

“We should be calling the cops.”

“Probably,” he agreed. I couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness, couldn’t tell what was there. “But that’s not how Parker and I play.”

“I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t, but I know the type.”

Of course he did. The type was just like himself.

Colonel Tom Parker wasn’t alone, but we hadn’t expected him to be. Even indoors he was wearing the big safari hat. He also had a body-armor vest on his torso, the Walther holstered on his hip, and a small machine pistol hanging from his shoulder. But he had the courtesy bar open, and he was making a show of being hospitable, putting out whiskey and mixers alongside a can of nuts. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said.

Lieutenant Kilgallen sat at a table near the window, watching us from slitted eyes, puffy lips set, a reef of cash in front of him held together with rubber bands.

The only surprise I got was finding Barry Irvington sitting next to Kilgallen. He had his fingers laced behind his head like a spectator who didn’t find the proceedings interesting. He didn’t look at me. I thought, Oh, crap. It was my day for disappointments.

Dad dropped the knapsack onto the sofa, and nodded to Parker. “Hi, Lou.”

“Hi, yourself.” Lou’s grin was almost as big as his hat. “Took a year off my life when I spotted you walking around Bahama Village tonight. When Gloria says she’s done someone, I thought I could take her word for it. She used to be better.”

“She wasn’t bad.”

I leaned against the wall beside the front door. Lou, or whoever he was, winked at me. “Some girl you got there, Dan. First off, I’m sorry about Hector. I know he was your boy, but he had to go.”

I shot my father a look, but he was watching the stack of money in front of Kilgallen. Without moving his head, he said, “What happened to him?”

“Gloria figured there wasn’t room for all three of us, and she liked me better.” The beard split in a grin.

“Two’s better than three,” my father agreed.

Listening to him, my heart sank.

Kilgallen cleared his throat. “Avila went in the gulf last week. Guess he didn’t float as well as you did, Dan. By the way, doing you was Gloria’s move. I wasn’t consulted. I got nothin’ against you. Are we okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He patted the cash. “This is your cut of what we did through December. Figured it might square things.”

“It’ll help.”

“Okay. Let’s get to our problem. We got two dead people that have to be explained. Sergeant Irvington here has kindly volunteered to be the fall guy. It won’t be airtight, but it’ll work.”

Barry’s glance met mine. For the first time, I noticed that the hands behind his head were manacled.

“Why would he have killed Bennell and Hewitt?” Dad asked.

Kilgallen lifted his shoulders. “Greed. We pass the hat, put twenty grand in his bank account. That would buy a local cop. Then we have a scenario. Crooked cop gets caught and eats his gun. We’re covered. The money-scrubbing business goes quiet for a while. Three months from now, we’re back up and running. No one from Miami gets bent out of shape, except at Avila, who’s run off with their money. You’re the only one we gotta bring on board, Dan.”

“What about Gloria Hasty?”

“What about her?” Kilgallen said.

“She’s dead.”

Kilgallen’s head turned. “Lou?”

Lou didn’t apologize. “One of those things. It can fit the cop. Okay with you, Danny?”

“Just fine. So which of you took care of Bennell and Hewitt?”

“Gloria.” He stopped playing with the whiskey bottle. “They’d gotten cold feet. She did it nice and clean with Bennell but lost it on Hewitt.”

“Okay. Why Gloria, Lou?”

“She had Avila’s boat. There’s about two million in good checks on it.” Lou tapped his big fingers nervously on the top of the machine gun. “I got the location out of her this afternoon.”

“Where’s the boat?” Kilgallen demanded.

Kilgallen and Lou stared at each other.

“We’ll talk about that later,” Lou said.

“Yeah, we will. That leaves who deals with Irv. Any volunteers?”

I couldn’t look at Barry. He had befriended me, had helped me over rough ground. If I hadn’t told him about Parker, he wouldn’t be here.

“Volunteers?” Kilgallen repeated.

“Guess it’s my turn,” my father said. My heart dropped. He took a big handgun from his jacket and was two steps from Barry when Lou complained, “Cripes, not here! It’s my room. Besides, if people are going to believe the cop did it, we got to set the stage.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Take the cop over to Gloria’s. She’s dead in the pool. Shoot him with her piece. Like the lieutenant says, it’ll work.”

My father rubbed his chin. “We’ll have to drive. Who’s got a car?”

“Dad,” I said. I owed him a warning. Behind me, I had my gun out.

Lou looked at me, and his hand moved a little on the machine gun. “Uh, Danny, we got a problem. Your kid is pals with Irvington.”

“She’s just stringing him for me,” my father said.

“You still shoulda known better than to bring her.”

Lou had the machine gun. When there’s one in the room, you can’t point a handgun and tell the guy to drop it. Both men had had the same training. Lou was about half a second late in realizing that in getting close to the fall guy, Dad had closed the distance with him, too. The protective vest he wore had a vulnerable area at the armholes. It’s where unlucky police officers catch one now and then. Dad was at the wrong angle for that. He shot Lou in both knees faster than you can say the words, and the heavy man went down too shocked to scream. Before Kilgallen could move, Dad had a knee on Lou’s back and was aiming across the table.

I stepped away from the door to have a better angle on the lieutenant. His hand twitched toward his jacket. He scowled. “What’s this, Dan? You want everything for yourself?”

Dad wagged the pistol. “Pull your gun, Larry.”

Kilgallen thought about it and shook his head. Then he blustered. “This is a stupid move.”

“Not for me.”

I said, “Dad...”

“Last chance to go for your gun, Larry.”

Kilgallen sat stock-still.

“No? Let me tell you something that might change your mind. Hector Avila was my friend. He also was an undercover Treasury agent. That makes killing him a capital crime. So, Larry: Are you sure you don’t want to try for your gun?”

Kilgallen kept his hands still. “I’ll take my chances in court,” he said.

When you sit with your father at a comfy restaurant, enjoying the sunset and the Straits wind, nibbling stone crab and Margaritas, it’s not a good time to say you were ready to shoot him. Not an ideal time to admit just how close he’d come, when he was moving toward my favorite cop.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth when I thought Hector was alive,” Dad said, as if that little fib was the only thing between us. “Gloria, Kilgallen, Bennell, and Hewitt were running the local laundry operation. It wasn’t a stable partnership even before Gloria decided to take out Avila and keep the money.”

“She said there was no honor among thieves,” I said.

“Once Gloria had the checks, she had to clean up the scene. Bennell and Hewitt had to go. She was leading Lou around by the nose searching for Hector’s boat, which she already had.” He chuckled in admiration. “I figure Lou got her just before she would’ve gotten him.”

He still looked haggard, after twenty hours’ sleep and a medical checkup at taxpayer expense. We had spent the afternoon arguing about the KeyHole. He wanted me to keep the boat, while I wanted to go back to Connecticut. He planned to be in Miami for a while.

“Get the damned explosives off the boat and I’ll think about it,” I said.

“They’re gone.” He set his drink down. He’d had several, was in a mood to have more. We were in the last port south, and the drinking flag was up. “What do you think I had in the knapsack? That was my fallback position.”

“What — blow up the hotel?” He’d spent several minutes on the boat. I hadn’t guessed why.

“I didn’t know who we were dealing with till we got there,” he reminded me. “If there were more cops, if it wasn’t just Kilgallen, I might have had to run a bluff. Anyway, if the bag blew, it wouldn’t have gone beyond the room.”

“We were in the room.”

He looked at me oddly. “I told you I didn’t want you along.”

His coldness sank in, and for the first time I understood how he could have abandoned Mom and me. How he could shoot another man faster than a coin hits the floor. The emptiness in this man I had always loved was a mile deep. Too deep for me to continue to care about him.

He flicked a hand at a waiter, who came with another drink.

© 2008 by Jon L. Breen

Why are so many writers who already have serious reputations in the wider world of literature turning to crime fiction? It could be the realization that the genre, far from limiting comment and creativity, offers infinite possibilities for exploring serious themes and societal mores. It could be dissatisfaction with the downgrading of plot in so-called literary fiction. In many cases, it is undoubtedly a commercial decision, in recognition of the shrinking audience for general fiction. Whatever the reason, many have made significant contributions, e.g. Joyce Carol Oates, James Lee Burke, and Michael Chabon. Invaders from the mainstream are especially welcome when they come not to subvert or “transcend” the genre but rather, armed with a knowledge and appreciation of its history and conventions, to practice it with a high level of skill. Take the recent example of Benjamin Black, pseudonym of Booker Prize winner John Banville, who demonstrates that a whodunit can keep the reader guessing without distorting or falsifying the characters.

**** Benjamin Black: The Lemur, Picador, $13. Burnt-out investigative journalist John Glass, an Irishman transplanted to Manhattan, is asked by his father-in-law, communications tycoon and former CIA agent Big Bill Mulholland, to write his biography. The Lemur of the title is researcher-for-hire Dylan Riley, who hints at blackmail and is murdered, leaving Glass to figure out who killed him and what family secret he had uncovered. The novel is beautifully written, admirably brief, and effective both as character study and mystery.

**** Ruth Rendell: Not in the Flesh, Crown, $25.95. Rendell achieved a serious literary reputation while working within the crime-fiction genre. Her Chief Inspector Wexford’s debut, From Doon With Death, appeared in 1964, making the English cop one of the longest active current sleuths. He remains in excellent form in a case involving an eleven-years-dead murder victim, whose skeleton is uncovered by a truffle-sniffing dog, and an ailing novelist on Biblical themes whose odd household includes both an ex-wife and a current one. A subplot concerns the appalling practice of female genital mutilation among Somali immigrants.

*** Laura Lippman: Another Thing to Fall, Morrow, $24.95. Baltimore private eye Tess Monaghan takes a job babysitting an accident-plagued TV series’s female star, whose unhealthy thinness and apparent vacuity are both pathetic and terrifying. Some of the characters, particularly one of Tess’s unlikely night-school students, are hard to believe, but the depiction of the city and of TV production are rich in amusing insights.

*** Max Allan Collins: Strip for Murder, illustrations by Terry Beatty, Berkley, $14. In 1953 Manhattan, former stripper Maggie Starr returns to the stage in a Broadway musical based on Hal Rapp’s hillbilly comic strip Tall Paul, leaving her Goodwinesque stepson Jack in charge of their newspaper syndicate. Was the death of Rapp’s bitter rival Sam Fizer, creator of the classic boxing strip Mug O’Malley, suicide or murder? The second in this good series offers conflicting clues, compulsive punning, period cultural references, and more thinly-disguised figures from the show biz and comics worlds, culminating in a Queenian challenge to the reader delivered via Beatty’s cartoons.

*** Parnell Hall: The Sudoku Puzzle Murders, St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95. As regular readers know, alleged Puzzle Lady Cora Felton couldn’t solve or construct a crossword to save her life, but it turns out she’s a whiz at sudokus. Both types of puzzles figure in a case involving two Japanese publishers, who are professional and romantic rivals, and a stolen samurai sword. Much of the bright dialogue, albeit used as an extending ingredient, is very funny, and the denouement features one of the most unusual comic courtroom scenes in fictional annals. Four sudokus of varying difficulty are credited to New York Times and NPR puzzle maven Will Shortz.

*** Mary Higgins Clark: Where Are You Now?, Simon and Schuster, $25.95. Ten years ago, Columbia University senior Mack MacKenzie disappeared, his only communications with his family annual phone calls on Mother’s Day. When his younger sister Carolyn sets out to find him, a wonderfully complicated plot involving a large cast is set in motion. You don’t read Clark for her prose, dialogue, or characterization (all serviceable at best), but her gift for story structure and personnel management explains her status as perennial bestseller.

*** Katherine Hall Page: The Body in the Gallery, Morrow, $23.95. Faith Fairchild, caterer and pastor’s wife in small-town Massachusetts, takes over the local museum’s restaurant operation in order to find out who replaced a friend’s donated art-work with a forgery. The titular body is a young shaven-headed woman who has taken the place of a goldfish in one of the alleged artworks on display. Ultimately the domestic side, including a subplot on the alarming phenomenon of cyberbullying, is more interesting than the mystery. This is a lesser entry in a literate, informative, and often amusing series that is always worth reading.

*** Dennis Palumbo: From Crime to Crime, Tallfellow, $24.95. In acknowledged homage to Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers (to the extent that the ultimate detective is a mutton-chopped elder named Isaac), the suburban husbands of the Smart Guys Marching Society turn their Sunday afternoon male-bonding sessions to armchair detection. Their EQMM debut, a locked-room mystery, is joined by eight cases new to print (with a dying message and ghost sightings among the trappings) and three non-series tales, one new and one (from The Strand) casting a young Albert Einstein as detective. While some of the plots stretch credulity (as did some of Asimov’s), classical detection buffs will enjoy these good-humored puzzles.

*** David Ossman: The Ronald Reagan Murder Case, BearManor, $19.95. In 1945 Hollywood, 25-year-old director and radio star George Tirebiter encounters murders old (a 1920 case combining elements of William Desmond Taylor and Thomas Ince) and new (a Reagan lookalike found wearing a duck suit in the Santa Monica surf by Lt. Reagan himself). Considering Tirebiter’s origin in the satirical Firesign Theatre and the broadness of some of the jokes — he works for Paranoid Pictures, and WOP is a Chicago radio station — the mystery is played fairly straight. Wartime Southern California and the network radio background are nicely captured, and the prose, pace, and dialogue are strong.

Two important writers have been added to the Rue Morgue Press reprint list ($14.95 each): John Dickson Carr with two classic locked-room puzzles from his peak year of 1938, The Crooked Hinge and The Judas Window, the latter written as Carter Dickson; and Colin Watson with the 1958 debut of his comic Flaxborough series, Coffin, Scarcely Used. As usual, publishers Tom and Enid Schantz provide informative introductions.

Shepard Rifkin’s excellent 1970 civil rights-era novel, The Murderer Vine ($6.99) is the latest in Hard Case Crime’s distinguished reprint line... In honor of Ian Fleming’s centenary, Penguin has all 14 James Bond books (twelve novels and two collections) in print in handsome trade paper editions. A rereading of the 1959 classic Goldfinger ($14) shows how good 007’s creator could be at his best.

© 2008 by Robert Barnard

The latest book from CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger recipient is a twisty stand-alone suspense novel entitled Last Post (Scribner, May 2008), in which a woman investigates hidden circumstances in her deceased mother’s life. Mr. Barnard is also a master short-story writer and we have several more of his tales to offer readers in coming months.

Well, this was one situation I hadn’t expected to find myself in! I had, in fact, been to church before. It was the funeral of Svein’s sister in Molde. He’d left me outside, but it was summer, and hot, and the church door had been left open. I walked into the lovely shade, lay down beside Svein in the aisle, and watched him while he tried to cope with the Lutheran church service, not knowing any of the hymns and struggling with any observance more challenging than reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He had not seen his sister for seventeen years, and it was a lot longer since he’d been to a service.

This was quite a lot different.

They seemed to have the right ideas. Though how long I, a dog, in my prime at nine, was going to be Svein’s best hope in years to come when he, at sixty-four, was coasting blithely to senility remained in doubt. I was open to offers.

I was at the monthly service of the English community in Bergen — and of course the English have the right idea when it comes to dogs. The oldest members of the community are mostly Shetland wives — women who married the Norwegians who sailed over to Scotland from occupied Norway and joined the British war effort. Later immigrants came also by marriage, or were academics, businessmen, or workers in the oil fields, though church attendance among the oil workers was exclusively Northern Irish or Scots, or so I was told. And here we were: a well-attended service because the bishop, who served the whole of Northern Europe, was attending: He was giving the sermon, while the local priest was taking the rest of the service.

The vicar was short, pudgy, and impressive only in the power of his voice. Retired from his English parish, he had for a time lived with his daughter in Bergen. This job was usually filled if possible by a retired clergyman who acted part-time and was rewarded meagrely. The bishop, on the other hand, was decidedly impressive: He could have presided at a royal wedding or a media-attended memorial service. Tall, lean, sleek, Kenneth Rose was the very image of an acceptable modern bishop. My dog’s instinct told me that much of the effect he made was show.

Before long I was deciding that an evening was like a thousand ages, because the bishop’s sermon did go on. I wasn’t used to oratory on this scale, because Svein’s verbal advances tend to be monosyllabic or confined to commonplaces and fatuous queries. But eventually the whole thing was over, we were out in the sunlight, and the priest and the bishop were shaking hands, the latter being friendly without being condescending, and making enquiries about absent members of the congregation.

“Just wait and watch, Loyd old boy,” muttered Svein. “We’re old friends of the bishop, remember.”

It was lovely late summer sunshine and eventually everyone drove off home, the bishop said goodbye to Humbleby the vicar, and then, waving in their direction, he eventually came over to us.

“I’ve told him you’re an old friend who is going to drive me to the airport,” he said. “I hope I can be forgiven a white lie.”

“If you can’t be, then God help the rest of us,” said Svein. The bishop smiled neutrally and allowed himself to be led to the car. The moment the pair were strapped into their seats the bishop began his spiel. He had paid, and did pay, no attention to me, reminding me of an English dog who once told me, feelingly, that the English were not a nation of dog-lovers as their reputation has it, but a nation of dog-neglecters. Anyway the bish certainly had his material under closer control than he had had his sermon.

“Let me get straight down to business,” he began, “since we haven’t got long. Mr. Humbleby, the priest here, came to Bergen to live about three years ago, together with his daughter Ellen.”

“Was she at the service tonight?” Svein asked.

“No-o-o,” said the bishop meaningfully. He went on: “He was made priest for Bergen and the Western Coast a year ago, when the previous man died. We mostly have retired English priests in these jobs, which are to look after Anglicans and English speakers in general, and in this case we had one to hand. It’s always worked well till now.”

“But not this appointment?” asked Svein.

The bishop took a deep breath.

“I am entering into this matter most reluctantly. I have no personal knowledge of it, you understand. I am acting after complaints — no, perhaps I should just say approaches — from members of his congregation, which means Anglicans from the West Coast here in Norway — from Stavanger to Trondheim.”

“Big area,” said Svein. “Complaints from all over, then.”

“I would prefer to say approaches from several individuals. When the Reverend Humbleby came here he was a widower — looked after, as I said, by his daughter. She, not surprisingly, has been wooed and won by a young Norwegian. She is a pretty girl, and by all accounts he is an eligible man, but perhaps she has been eager to accept and get away because — because her father has married again.”

Svein left a silence, as if to say that remarriage was not, in Norwegian eyes, either a crime or a misdemeanour. When he spoke, he said, “You seem to find the daughter’s marriage perfectly natural and understandable but the father’s marriage somehow... deplorable. Is Humbleby’s wife Norwegian?”

“Norwegian? Oh, dear me, no. I don’t imagine there would be any... approaches if she were. No, she is French, she says.”

“But people doubt it?”

“She speaks it beautifully, but her complexion is such that people feel there is probably North African blood. But you mustn’t get the impression this is a racial question.”

“Funny — I was just beginning to get just that idea,” said Svein, who was really handling this rather well, and made me suspect he had had a bad experience with a bishop as a boy.

“No, no. The question is about the lady’s past. The rumour that is going round is that Chantal has been employed — I must speak frankly — in a brothel, or brothels, in the South of France.”

“Ah,” said Svein. “Unusual for a clergyman’s wife. I’d have to admit I can’t see a Norwegian congregation standing for it.”

“I think not indeed. And in fact, many members of the congregations we get here are Norwegians: the children of one or other English parent, or the husbands and wives of Norwegians, or just people who prefer something a bit brighter than the standard Lutheran service of the state church here. No, really, I cannot see a Norwegian congregation standing for it, as you put it. Though of course there will always be one or two who mention Mary Magdalene.”

“Mary M—. That wouldn’t be the Virgin Mary, would it?”

“By no means.”

“Wait a sec. The woman taken in adultery!” said Svein, triumphantly.

“Popularly believed to be so. But we should not confuse adultery with prostitution. And we have no evidence Mary Magdalene went off and married a rabbi.”

“All very interesting,” said Svein, rubbing his hands in dirty-minded glee so that we swerved to avoid a red squirrel. “This will be a nice change for Loyd and me. We don’t even get much divorce work these days, now everything is so amicable, and laid down by law. Now, I believe the lady was not in the congregation today.”

“No. Very regrettable, but of course my schedule of visits is fixed months in advance. She was on holiday with her sister in Nice, so I’ve unfortunately missed seeing her. She’ll be back on Tuesday. In the meanwhile I have a picture of her — a photo.”

He handed it over. Before looking at it, Svein asked: “The question is, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to go to the South of France and get evidence one way or the other.”

“I have no French.”

“All the French speak English these days. It sticks in their throat, but they do it. And you will have your photograph.”

Svein looked at it.

“Very nice! Obviously a tremendous looker in her time. And still very easy on the eye.”

The bishop coughed a disapproving but forgiving cough. We were approaching Bergen airport, and he gathered his things together.

“I regret greatly not seeing the lady — er, the vicar’s wife. It presents a better face to the question if I have actually seen, or even talked to, the object of the... approaches to me. Nothing to be done about it. I leave the case to you, and I rely on you to do the job as speedily and as economically as such a case can be done.”

“Of course, I shall need to get a pet’s passport for my dog,” said Svein. The bishop’s eyebrows rose.

“Your dog? What use can a dog be in a case like this?”

“You don’t know Loyd. And brothels in France, particularly Marseilles, are notoriously rough, lawless places.”

“Really? I suppose that’s possible. One hears about pimps and people like that. Well, I rely on you, and of course on Loyd. I trust you will be discreet. This is a matter full of dreadful possibilities for scandal, scoffing, and general unseemly hilarity. Absolute discretion must be the watchword.”

Svein assured him that discretion always was our watchword, but the bish seemed to think he should be vouchsafed something special not given equally to the hoi polloi, and he went off towards the air terminal looking dubious, as if he had landed himself in uncharted waters and was fearful of finding himself in the maelstrom.

Svein took his time. He had an old policeman’s feeling (which I share) that a crime is a crime, and is something urgent, whereas something morally whiffy in the past is something that can be taken slowly, savoured. We had all the injections done on Monday, which I endured with truly canine stoicism, and on Wednesday we went on a visit to the Rev. Humbleby. An excuse for the visit took Svein some time to work out, but in the end he took a glove.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said when the Rev. Humbleby opened the door, “but the bishop thought he must have picked this up by mistake when he had lunch here on Sunday. He found it in his pocket when he was going for the plane.”

“I don’t think this is one of—” began Humbleby, no doubt wondering why anyone should have gloves lying around in September when the worst that the Bergen climate throws at you is rain, followed by rain, followed by more rain. But he was interrupted by a charming voice.

“Ah — quel charmant chien! What a ’andsome boy. Is ’e a boy? ’E ’as so much ’air ’e is modesty personified.”

I wagged my tail like crazy. It’s something I’ve never been able to stop myself doing, where what I should show is an official lack of interest. Charming women, especially dusky, mature, and incredibly sexy women do not feature much in Svein’s lifestyle, though they do sometimes in his official investigations.

“This is Loyd,” he said. “He used to be my most trusted police dog.”

“Oh, bring ’im in. I came back and found lots of cold meat left over from Sunday. Cold meat I habominate, and all leftovers. If the meal is good, there is no leftovers.”

We were in the vicarage’s sitting room, and Chantal bustled out into the kitchen and came back with a plate of slices of meat which I did justice to.

“You have been away?” asked Svein. “I didn’t see you on Sunday.”

“I ’ave been to Nice.”

“That’s nice,” said Svein, not making a joke but just showing the poverty of his vocabulary. “I mustn’t take up any more of your time. Loyd has managed to put away your beef very quickly.”

“I must be getting away, too,” came a voice from a far corner of the room. A thin man, short by Norwegian standards, stood up. He spoke perfect English. “We’ve done our business. Good to have you back with us, Mrs. Humbleby.”

We all trooped to the door and made our farewells. The vicarage was a small but charming house in Fana, and we went out into the weak autumn sunshine. The man introduced himself as Stan Shawston, one of Humbleby’s parishioners. As we walked towards our cars Svein made use of his new contact.

“Very charming woman, Mrs. Humbleby.”

“Delightful. A real addition to the congregation. Numbers have gone up on Sundays, I can tell you!”

“Oh really? I heard there’d been a lot of talk.”

“Did you? I suppose it got to the ear of the bishop, did it? He’s a bit of a figure from the past. That’s the sort who get to be bishops. The people like Humbleby are at the cutting edge: They have to move with the times or they lose their congregations.”

“I see,” said Svein. “There was one allegation that I must say would have caused a lot of mischief if it had concerned one of our pastor’s wives.”

“Oh, I think I know the one you mean. Nobody has taken much notice. To me it’s probably just talk. One or two of our members have been merchant seamen. They go around the world, often half-stoned. It’s probably a case of mistaken identity.”

“I see. So the women in the congregation haven’t been causing the trouble?”

“I see what you’re getting at. No, they haven’t been causing trouble. If this was happening twenty years ago, then maybe they would have kicked up a fuss. Made representations to the bish — that kind of thing. But nothing like that has happened this time. We’re in the twenty-first century now. And as Christians we have to judge people on what they are, not what they have been in the past. Otherwise what does repentance mean? What is the point of grace? I tell you, I act as Humbleby’s eyes and ears with the congregation, and everybody — women included — is delighted to have Chantal. She’s such a lovely person.”

So that was that. Pollyanna couldn’t have put it better. That was a view of the congregation’s opinion as authoritative as we were likely to get. But I could see that Svein was puzzled. Someone had approached the bishop — perhaps had assumed new and multiple identities to make it seem like a general unease. Who? The Rev Humbleby’s daughter, perhaps. The bishop had implied that she did not welcome her new stepmother, and Chantal’s remarks about leftovers from a meal Miss Humbleby had probably cooked suggested an incipient feud.

I won’t dwell on the journey to Marseilles. It was my first flight, and it was out of the question to enjoy the experience, imprisoned in a portable cage in the luggage hold. I howled for the first time in years. I knew no one could hear me or do anything about it, but sometimes you just have to howl to give adequate expression to your feelings. When I was relieved from captivity in Marseilles I spent the first hour throwing reproachful looks at Svein, who eventually twigged what I was trying to say.

“It’s rules and regulations, old boy,” he said. “You know all about them, having been a police dog.”

From that point on, things began to look up. We stayed at an unpretentious hotel that allowed dogs in the rooms and where the cooking was excellent. I wasn’t taken with truffles, which struck me as the sort of thing I wouldn’t mind digging up and playing with, but certainly not using as food. Otherwise the things that Svein brought up to my room from the restaurant were more than acceptable, particularly as right from the start Svein made one of his most sensible decisions: This was to begin his investigations of the brothel areas of the town at the top end of the range.

He based this decision on his perception that Mrs. Humbleby, if she had ever been involved in the trade, had to have been a class act. He got in to see a young policeman by flashing his old Bergen Police ID, and he got a list of the streets where the customers were of the highest standing: aristocrats, local politicians, big businessmen, and friends of Jacques Chirac. I got the impression that the policeman had all this info at his fingertips not through the call of duty, but through that of the flesh.

I will spare you the details of our activities. Svein hawked his picture around substantial houses, once-respectable family houses, and other places pretending to be elite hotels. Usually he left me outside, which for once I found entirely acceptable. “Cherchez la chienne,” the motto of the macho philosopher dog Hamsun in the 1960s, was the order of the day for me. Prostitutes often have delightful dogs, just as rich women do, to enhance their charms. Probably they find them much more devoted and faithful than the male humans they meet in the course of business. Anyway, I had the time of my life.

It was in the morning of the second day that Svein hit a bull’s-eye. It was at a rather run-down establishment in the Avenue Victor Hugo, where the past-his-prime doorkeeper had plenty of time on his hands, morning customers being restricted to men on nights and merchant seamen with only a limited time on shore. He stood there, his arms folded in a tough pose, at his feet a sleeping bitch long past her smell-by date. I went outside in disgust, but Svein did his usual spiel about not being a policeman and not investigating a crime, and the man recognised the photograph at once.

“That’s Mme. de Stael — Chantal was her real name. She was in the Hôtel de Nuit, the star attraction.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Oh, until a year or two ago. Lovely person, though she knew her worth. I was a sturdy chap when she started. I could throw three or four troublemakers out single-handed. But I never scored with her, or even made the suggestion. She only took the class customers. Not that she was a snob. It was the fact that she knew her worth. She had the looks and she had the technique to give a man a good time, and she was the soul of discretion. School headmasters, MPs, civil servants from Brussels, priests, diplomats — they were all safe with her. She worked half the hours of the other girls but earned twice the money. When they gave me the push because they said I was past it she talked about all the girls going on strike, but everyone knew she was going to get married so nothing came of it.”

“Who was she going to marry?”

“Oh, some priest or other with a funny name. I don’t get these religions. France is supposed to be a secular state, but you wouldn’t think so, the airs these priests give themselves.”

“What nationality was he?”

“Oh, British. They’re the worst. They’re always worrying whether they should give a tip.”

And that was all we got out of him. Svein tried at the Hôtel de Nuit further up the road but a tank-like doorman threatened to throw him off a pier and we both retreated in confusion.

“We’ve got what we wanted, Loyd old son,” he said. He even decided not to fly home, but to take the train to Hamburg and then the boat. I don’t think this was for my comfort but because airline meals were below even his standards of culinary acceptability. We had an excellent trip, I made my contentment known, and as soon as we were home to our flat in Minde, Svein took me out to renew acquaintanceship with the smells and the leavings of my friends and enemies in that suburb.

My mind, though, was on other things.

I don’t know about you, but I always think reading, writing, and even talking are much overrated by our two-footed friends. Most of them use talking as an alternative to actually experiencing. I didn’t need much in the way of conversation with les chiennes de Marseilles. Still, as we walked along in the rain of Bergen past gardens soaked to an autumnal dinginess, past the last falling roses on their second flowering, I wondered how to communicate my unease to Svein. I was afraid he would just pass on our discoveries to the bishop, send in his bill, and leave it at that. But how to communicate what needed to be done? So often it became nothing more than a game of “I spy with my little eye,” and this is what happened. Because in the end all I could think of to do was to look at a flower bush, look at Svein meaningfully, and bark.

“What’s up, Loyd? Nothing’s wrong here.”

So we’d walk along a bit further till we came to another bush, and I’d do the stop, the meaningful look, and the loaded bark all over again. Finally Svein banged his forehead.

“I’ve got it. You’re right, Loyd. I must do a bit more work on that one.”

And it happened that when we got back to the flat and really began to settle back in Svein found on his answer machine a message from Chantal Humbleby: “I think we should arrange a meeting. Will you ring me?” Svein stayed up surfing the Internet, and in the morning he had his breakfast with a distinct air of self-satisfaction.

Svein made an appointment to meet Chantal at the vicarage the next day. She said that her husband was on a visit to Alesund and Kristiansund, so she would be alone. Svein said he did not take this as a reversion to her old profession, and he was obviously relieved that it didn’t. When we arrived that evening promptly at seven Chantal welcomed me ecstatically, Svein decorously, and she poured gin and tonics for them and put down a bowl of freshly boiled stewing steak for me. A woman who knew how to please men! I gobbled it down in thirty seconds flat and went back to the living room.

“So you see, Edwin was getting rather worried. ’E talked to Stan, who told ’im the drift of your conversation, ’e thought about the visit you made ’ere, the business of the glove, and ’e thought: We are being investigated. Everyone in Bergen, naturally, has heard of Loyd. So ’oo is paying? What is their interest in this? What are they trying to do to us?”

“I think I can answer that,” said Svein. “They are trying to get rid of you.”

“But why? We love it ’ere. Bergen is the most beautiful place in the world when it don’t rain. I ’ave a lovely stepdaughter and we are good friends as long as she don’t cook. Everyone ’as been very welcoming to me. So ’oo is doing this?... You ’ave been to France, ’ave you not?”

“Well, I—”

“I knew it! Someone ’ave complained about my past. They pretend to love me, but all the time they are stabbing me in the back. And you ’ave found out where I worked. So? Here we say I was PA to several remarkable men. Everyone know what is meant by that. Who has complained to this bishop?”

“Ah... You have never met the bishop, have you?”

“Not yet. I was away visiting my sister when ’e came ’ere.”

“I suspect you will not meet him. There will be sudden illnesses, or pressing family business that prevent his usual routine visits.”

“But why? Am I so disgusting to his refined tastes?”

“By no means. He will not come here because you have met him before.”

Svein fished in his pocket and brought out a photograph of the bishop he had found in the files of Bergens Tidende. “This is Bishop Rose.”

She took it eagerly.

“Ha! Pious Pete! The only man who got on his knees and begged forgiveness before rather than after. Like a sort of grace. ‘For what we are about to receive.’ ’E is a ’orrible ’ippocrite.”

“Yes — I think that about sums him up. He was afraid you would recognise him and talk about his brothel visits.”

“Oh, I’d recognise him all right. But I’d never talk about ’im. All the priests and clergymen wanted anonymity — I pronounce that right? — but Pete, ’e was a complete mystery. I only know ’is name because one of the sailors knew ’im.”

“Yes. I’ve been looking him up on the Internet. He was pastor at the Seaman’s Mission in Marseilles. He must have known many of your... customers.”

“ ’E always wear a scarf over ’is face, coming and leaving. This sailor only see ’is face because ’e trip down stairs — legs tired out — and ’is scarf fall down when ’e tries to save ’imself. Ha! Pious Pete! Where do you get your satisfaction now? Not from anyone as kind and discreet as Mme. de Stael.”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps he has a ‘good friend’ in Oslo. Oh yes — a little more gin would be most welcome. Now what I propose to do is to ring him — he will appreciate there being no written evidence — and tell him what I found out in Marseilles, mention that he may have heard of the Hotel de Nuit when he was at the Seaman’s Mission, underline that I found no evidence of ‘scandal and concern’ in the congregation, emphasize that you are a woman of extreme discretion, and advise him strongly to do nothing further. It will be quite safe for him to visit Bergen. Then I will send him a very large bill.”

“Punish ’im for ’is ’ippocrisy. Good! I will talk to Edwin, tell ’im there was a misunderstanding, say it is all solved now, and everything can go on as before.”

“Excellent,” said Svein, getting up. “Thank you very much for your hospitality. Most welcome. Loyd thanks you, too.”

“Lovely to ’ave a dog in the ’ouse. I shall get a dog.”

“So you should. I’d advise against a poodle. There is a stereotype—”

“I know. I know. Remember you are talking to a woman of the world.”

“Quite, quite.” Svein paused at the door. “There is one question, rather embarrassing, that I’d like—”

“Of course. Everyone wants to ask it. To you I can reply honestly. Why did I marry my overweight, rather dull English vicar? Because ’e was the best lover I ever ’ad. You cannot believe it? You’d better, as the Yanks say. I am a woman who always insists on the best.”

© 2008 by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

A professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa, Meenakshi Gigi Durham got her start as a fiction writer in our Department of First Stories in 2004. Her new tale for us is set in what (as a result of her long marriage to a New Orleans native) she calls her “adopted hometown.” She uses the momentous events of Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop to her fictional murder.

I saw Riley on TV the other day. I am sure it was Riley; there could be no mistaking that knobby head of slicked-down Snoop Dogg braids, the red plastic glasses, the wonky eye with the scar blazing from brow to cheekbone — a souvenir of the time his stepdad threw a steak knife at him when he was a toddler.

He was slouching between two respectable-looking white people, a man and a woman, and some cleft-chin TV announcer was saying something about how they had befriended him while they were Red Cross rescue workers in the Dome. How the two white people were going to adopt him. His name was not Riley anymore, it seemed. “Antoine,” he said into the microphone. “Antoine Dupree. My family all drowned in the storm.” His good eye twitched, the way it always does when he is lying. But the adults around him were beaming, hugging him around the shoulders, talking about his bravery and his sweetness.

I wanted to call to him, Riley, it’s me! — knowing that I could not, knowing he could not hear me. Knowing full well what our rules were. Knowing that we were never supposed to see each other again, or even admit that our paths had ever crossed. (Swear on your mama’s life, Kiran? I swear, I swear.) If ever I saw him in real life, he would look away, he would feign ignorance. Neither one of us could betray, with the slightest flicker of emotion, that we were linked in any way.

It was important for Riley not to know me, I reminded myself. It is important sometimes for deep bonds forged in childhood to remain masked, especially when the real reason for the bond is murder.

© 2008 by Simon Levack

Simon Levack’s Aztec sleuth Yaotl, hero of this new story and several others for EQMM, also appears in four full-length novels: Demon of the Air (winner of the CWA Debut Dagger Award), Shadow of the Lords, City of Spies, and the latest, Tribute of Death. PW praised the series for making “comprehensible a society that seems at first glance alien” and for matching “impressive period research with tight plotting.”

* * * *

The young priest named Cemiquiztli Yaotl was not in a good mood.

In the Aztec city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, it was the day of the Feast of Maize and Beans. It was late in the spring, when the light winter rains were a memory and the life-renewing downpours of high summer were a dream. The rivers were sluggish and the roads were hard and dusty.

At no time of year were the ceremonies the priests undertook more important than now. The people of Mexico-Tenochtitlan depended on them to ensure the favour of the rain god; without that, there would be no rain and soon, no food. Nothing could be left to chance or human error; every detail of the rites must be observed, and any priest who was not entirely pure or who might make a mistake, however trivial, must be culled before the festival began. Nobody was exempt, not the youngest novice nor the most infirm old man.

To this end, Yaotl, a skinny young man, who had worn the black body paint and dark mantle of a priest from childhood, had spent five days being tested. He had been starved, immersed in the chilly lake that surrounded the city, had his body pierced with thorns, and been forced to enact pointless rituals. Hungry and exhausted as he was, he had spent each evening making little cairns of dough balls and tomatoes, knowing that if any rolled out of place, he would be punished, and that at this time even so trivial an error could see him expelled from the priesthood, beaten and half-drowned in the lake, and sent back to his family in disgrace.

Every year, Yaotl had passed the tests, sustained by the thought of what his family — in particular his elder brother, an arrogant young warrior named Mountain Lion — would say if he failed.

However, for Yaotl it was the sixth day — the day after the testing was over — that was the worst, because that was when the failures were dealt with. On the sixth day, the poor, dejected figures, the men trembling and with downcast eyes, the boys howling in terror, were pushed or dragged to the edge of the lake. Old and young alike were dumped into the cold water, jeered at, spat on, rolled in the mud, held under the surface until they choked, and finally, left to crawl away, miserable and shivering.

Custom and the will of the gods required him to join in, but Yaotl had never enjoyed it. It was too easy to see himself in the pathetic, slimy creatures whimpering on the shore.

“It’s a harsh business,” he murmured.

Beside him, his friend Telpoch said: “We all took the same test, Yaotl, and they had the same chance we had.” He turned away from the lake, back towards the close-packed houses and smoking temples of the city. “Anyway, here come their families, so it’s all over for them now.”

They watched the little group approaching: anxious-looking matrons bearing rabbit’s-fur blankets, stern fathers, truculent brothers and cousins.

One of the young men stopped in front of them.

“Yaotl? Is that you?”

He was not much older than Yaotl, but already sported a warrior’s lock of hair, and his orange cloak showed that he had taken two captives on the battlefield. For a skilled fighter, though, he seemed curiously unsure of himself.

He also looked strangely familiar. As recognition dawned, Yaotl’s eyes widened, their whites gleaming against the black dye on his face.

“What are you doing here?”

“I, er, need a favour.”

Telpoch said: “Who is this, Yaotl?”

“My brother, Mountain Lion.” Yaotl spoke between clenched teeth. “I suppose he must have thought I’d failed the test and come here to gloat.”

“Yaotl, you’re not listening...”

“Too right, I’m not!” He turned his back.

Telpoch stared at them both. “This warrior’s your brother?”

“The one who used to beat me up, and put live snakes in my breechcloth, and practiced with his throwing-stick by using me as a target. Oh, yes, that’s my brother!”

There was an outraged spluttering from behind him. “You gave as good as you got! What about the time you left a stolen cactus fruit on my sleeping mat and got me held over a fire of burning chiles?”

“Served you right! Come on, Telpoch, we’ve got work to do.”

He took a few steps, but his friend placed a restraining hand on his arm. “Wait a moment. He said he needed a favour.”

“Oh, forget it,” Lion snapped. “I’m not asking that worm for anything. They can burn the top of my head off, I don’t care. If he thinks I’m going to start crawling around his dirty feet...”

“Worms don’t have feet!”

“Yaotl, don’t be childish,” his friend admonished him. “Lion, just tell us what you want.”

“I need help tracking down a demon.”

For everyone but the priests, the festival was rather fun.

The common folk threw parties, inviting their neighbours to feast on maize and bean porridge. They made pots and pots of the stuff, ensuring there was plenty to spare. At night, young warriors and the girls from the pleasure houses would dance from house to house to demand a share.

Mountain Lion had good reason to be pleased with himself. He was tall for an Aztec. His sinews were like ropes coiled around his limbs, the result of years of military training in the House of Youth. His hair and his orange cloak signified the tally of his captives. Lion was everything an Aztec warrior should be: handsome, serious-minded, lean of body, and hard as stone.

“Mother, will you stop fussing over me?” he pleaded.

“I’m nearly done.” The lady’s voice was slightly muffled by the needle she held clamped between her lips as she bent over a small tear in the hem of the cloak. “If you wouldn’t keep treading on this... There.” She straightened up and stood back to admire her son’s appearance. “You want to look your best, don’t you? After all,” she added slyly, “Flower Necklace might be there.”

“What if she is?” Lion bristled.

“I thought you liked her?”

“I may have mentioned her name once...”

“Just once?”

The young man heaved an exasperated sigh. “Can I go now? The others will be waiting!”

“If that paint’s dry, yes.” His mother touched one of the white circles around his eyes with her fingertip “Now, have you got your stave?”

“Yes.” He picked up the maize stalk and shook it.

“And the jar?”

“No, I don’t need one, I can share...”

“Flower Necklace’s?”

“No, my friend Hummingbird Feather’s! Goodnight, Mother!”

His cloak billowed behind him as he swept out of the courtyard. His mother watched him out of sight with an indulgent smile.

The procession wound its way along the city’s highways and canal paths, a high-spirited little crowd of young men and girls out to enjoy themselves. The streets of the Aztec capital were normally silent after dark, when they belonged to creatures of the night, sorcerers and dangerous spirits. Tonight, though, was different, and the most superstitious of the young people could take comfort in their numbers and the light of their torches. Nobody was going to get much sleep tonight, and as they danced, whooped, and chanted their way through the streets, they left a trail of howling babies, yapping dogs, and cursing householders in their wake.

“When I do, when I do, give me a little of your porridge.” Lion sang the traditional, meaningless words lustily. “If you don’t give me some, I’ll break a hole in your house!” The others joined in, swaying more or less in time with the tune, while his friend Hummingbird Feather’s pine torch drew bright circles in the sky and set their shadows whirling.

The only thing that marred Lion’s enjoyment was the way the girl at his side kept bumping into him, thrusting her hip against his as they danced.

By the time Lion had met up with his friends, Hummingbird Feather already had the torch in one hand, a girl on his free arm, and a broad grin. “You can carry the jar,” he had said cheerfully, and Lion had no sooner picked it up by one handle than Flower Necklace had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to seize the other.

He could only glare at his friend and try to ignore his laughter. Watched enviously by his fellow warriors, he could hardly complain if one of the most desired girls from the pleasure house chose to attach herself to him.

When he had first seen Flower Necklace, just a few months ago, he had been as attracted to her as she seemed to be to him. But he had been just back from his first campaign, where at his very first battle he had taken two captives, both of them unaided, and he had been the talk of the city. His head whirling with success and sacred mushrooms, how could he resist the skilful attentions of a trained courtesan?

Unfortunately, it had not ended there, and soon there had been messages smuggled out of the pleasure house, his name called out in the street, and too many chance meetings. It had all been too much. The cochineal that stained her lips and teeth now seemed too red, the indigo dye in her hair too dark, the ochre on her skin too pale, and the figure under the thin cotton of her blouse too full.

Eventually his old mentor Fire Serpent, the Master of Young Men at the House of Youth where he had done his training, had taken him to one side and reminded him that pleasure girls were there for all successful warriors, not just one, and taking one as a concubine was against the law. At that point Lion had decided he ought to say something to Flower Necklace, but somehow the right words had never come.

He turned to her now, as they drew level with the next doorway and the threatening song rang out again.

“Um... Flower Necklace, there’s something I’ve been meaning to...”

Before he could go on, however, the householder had appeared. He was a small, anxious-looking man with the tonsured hair of a labourer or a farmhand. He had a bowl full of watery gruel, although his hands were shaking so much that the stuff kept slopping out onto the earth floor of his house.

“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” he muttered. “Take this, it’s all I’ve got.”

“A likely story!” As Hummingbird Feather shouldered his way to the front of the small crowd, his torch waved dangerously close to the wooden doorposts. The householder’s face, stained yellow by the flickering light, twisted in alarm.

“Look out! You’ll set the place alight!”

Hummingbird Feather glanced at the bowl, which had spilled most of its contents by now. “You can do better than that for the brave warriors who defend your city, can’t you?”

He aimed a kick at the wall beside him, driving his foot clean through the thin plaster. The girl on his arm gasped and giggled.

“Oh, I’m sorry, how clumsy of me. Now look, you’ve got a hole in your house!”

The little man backed away from the door. He looked as though he was about to burst into tears.

“That’s enough.” Lion thrust Flower Necklace away from him and stepped forward, to stand just in front of Hummingbird Feather. He held on to the jar with one hand.

“What do you mean?” The young man with the torch looked bemused. “Look, these people have to show us respect...”

Lion’s free hand moved to the knot in his cloak, shifting it a little on his right shoulder; by touching the orange cloth he reminded his friend who stood higher in the ranks of the warriors. “We asked him for a little of his porridge, Hummingbird Feather. That’s what he’s offered us. We’ll take it. It’s obviously all he’s worth.” He thrust the jar at the man in the house, who silently tipped the last few drops into it. “Now get back indoors and keep out of sight!” Lion advised him, before turning sharply on his heel and walking away.

The other young people stared wordlessly after him.

The procession had become more subdued by the time it reached the next house, the laughter, a little more forced. The crowd had split into two loose groups, one centred on Hummingbird Feather and his girl and the other on Lion and Flower Necklace. Flower Necklace kept cooing in Lion’s ear about how noble he had been at that last house, which did nothing to improve his mood.

“When I do, when I do, give me a little of your porridge. If you don’t give me some, I’ll break a hole in your house!”

This was a more imposing dwelling than the one before, with a newly whitewashed stone wall and a wide doorway opening into a courtyard. A brisk fire threw an unsteady light over the idols lining the walls and the domed sweat bath in the corner. Several people squatted close to the fire, where they could enjoy its warmth and help themselves to warm porridge from a large pot standing over it on a tripod.

Lion noticed that the people in the courtyard were of varying ages. The youngest were children just young enough to be wearing breechcloths under their short cloaks, while the man he took for the head of the household was a tall, vigorous-looking man whose bearing, as he rose and strode unhurriedly to the doorway, might well have been that of a former warrior.

The householder hailed them courteously with the traditional greeting: “You have come far, you are weary. Please rest and have something to eat.”

“That’s more like it!” Hummingbird Feather approached the doorway. “A big improvement on that last place!”

“Now,” the householder went on — and Lion noticed a slight catch in his voice, as though he was suddenly unsure of himself — “there’s just one small problem...”

“Oh, no, not again.” Lion groaned inwardly at the prospect of another confrontation.

The man’s tone was apologetic. “You see, my wife dropped the ladle and broke it. Now she’s gone indoors to look for a cup, but knowing her she’ll have broken all those, too. Stupid woman!” The last two words came out with surprising force. “Take my advice, lads,” he added, with a knowing look at Flower Necklace that made Lion wince. “Make sure you keep your wives in their place. Beat her on her wedding night and every night after that until she gets the message. It saves so much trouble in the long run!”

Lion avoided looking at the girl clinging to his arm. Glancing over the householder’s shoulder, he saw a small, stooped figure in a skirt and blouse emerge from indoors, carrying what looked like a cup. She shuffled towards the fire. None of the people seated around it moved, but she stepped diffidently between them before bending over the pot to dip the cup in it.

Lion gave a warning cough as she came over to the entrance, but nobody took any notice.

“Once they start answering you back, you know you’re in trouble,” the man went on. “And then you find things aren’t getting done. The household gods get dusty, the courtyard’s not swept, the turkeys aren’t fed, and they start breaking things, and the food’s not cooked properly — I have trouble keeping the stuff she prepares down sometimes!”

Lion was not sure whether “they” meant wives or turkeys, although in the householder’s view there did not seem to be much difference; but Hummingbird Feather seemed impressed. “Not to worry, sir. It sounds as if you have enough troubles, and we wouldn’t want to bother you. We’ll have our fill of porridge tonight anyway.” He turned away with an abrupt air of decision that defied anyone else to stay and insist on receiving their gift.

The small woman had reached the doorway. “Husband,” she whispered, “I found a cup.”

“About time, too.” He did not look at her but stretched out a hand to take it.

It never reached his lips, however.

Flower Necklace had been casting venomous glances at Hummingbird Feather’s back. Before Lion knew what she was doing, she suddenly detached herself from his side, stepped forward, snatched the cup from the householder’s hands, and tossed off the contents in one gulp. Then she pressed it back between the astonished man’s limp fingers, before turning and flashing a triumphant smile at her friends.

“There! We’ve got what we came for here, too!” she cried.

“What did you do that for?”

The singing and dancing were over. There was little to do but drift aimlessly from one house to the next, and the rest had gone on ahead, leaving Lion and Flower Necklace alone.

“I wanted to show up Hummingbird Feather and that beast back there!” The girl tossed her head, letting her long, loose hair fly about her neck. “And besides,” she added, touching his arm, “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I’ll be pleased when the sun rises and we can stop playing this silly game,” Lion said morosely. Hummingbird Feather had taken his torch around a corner and its light was just a slight lifting of the gloom at the end of the street. Lion was beginning to feel the night and its attendant terrors closing in on him. All Aztecs were superstitious, and brave warriors were usually among the worst.

She lowered her voice. “Well, there are other games we can play, if you like.”

The young man put his hand to his forehead. He took a deep breath. “Look, Flower Necklace...”

He never finished what he was going to say, however, as that was the moment when all his fears were realised.

If the attack had come along the street, Lion might have been able to meet it. He was used to seeing an enemy rushing at him, sword or spear upraised, mouth wide open in a scream of murderous rage. At the sound of pounding feet on the hard earth behind him, he might have done what he afterwards told himself he should have done: whirled around, seizing the only weapons he had to hand — the maize stalk and the porridge jar — and thrown himself between Flower Necklace and the threat, his own war cry bursting from his lips.

But neither his training nor his experience had prepared him to meet an assailant that dropped on him from the sky.

The first either Lion or Flower Necklace knew of the assault was an inhuman shriek that made them both leap up in fright. For a moment Lion stood, bewildered, head snapping back and forth as he tried to place the sound. It came again, from very close, and then Flower Necklace screamed in turn.

“Lion! Look up!”

Half the sky was hidden by the wall of the house they stood next to. Looming out over the other half, clearly discernible against the stars, was a shape that may have been human.

The scream came again: a quivering, inarticulate, piercing yell. It had not come from a man’s throat. Only a woman or a demon could have made a sound like that.

The jar fell and shattered. Lion saw the shape above him move, and then he lost his head. Forgetting Flower Necklace and his warrior’s dignity, he threw his maize stave aside and fled.

The torchlight had vanished by now, but he ran blindly towards the corner where he had last seen it. When he got there, he skidded to a halt so hard he scraped skin from his bare heel, and stared wildly into the darkness ahead of him. There was still no sign of the rest of the party, however.

“Hummingbird Feather! Wait!”

The cry came again. It was a little farther off now, but Lion had had more than he could take. He set off running again, and did not stop until his breath failed him and he crumpled in exhaustion.

It was not until the following afternoon that the shamefaced young warrior finally made his way home. His mother and father watched him in silence as he limped through the doorway into their courtyard. He said nothing, only wanting to crawl indoors onto his sleeping mat and forget everything that had happened in the night. However, he could not, because between him and the doorway stood Fire Serpent, the Master of Young Men. His arms were folded beneath the black-and-ochre mantle of a veteran warrior. As he eyed Lion’s torn, filthy clothes and drawn features, his expression was grim.

He spoke two words softly. “Flower Necklace.”

Lion’s jaw dropped. “Flower Necklace?” he repeated hoarsely. “What about her?”

“Where is she?”

Lion stared at him. He looked over his shoulder at his parents, but they might as well have been a couple of statues. Turning back to Fire Serpent, he stammered: “I thought she’d run away too. I–I’m sorry. It was the shock. I thought it was a demon, or a sorcerer — coming at me from up there, in the dark — look, I’m a warrior, not... Oh.” His eyes widened in horror. In a small voice he continued: “The demon got her?”

“What demon?” Fire Serpent demanded.

“Nobody’s said anything about a demon, Mountain Lion,” his father said.

“I should have stayed with her,” Lion whispered.

“You have no business staying with her, lad,” Fire Serpent retorted. “I’ve warned you before about trying to keep a pleasure girl to yourself. You’re lucky I got to hear about this in time to try to talk some sense into you. You know what will happen to you both if the authorities find out what you’ve been up to? The warriors will expel you and singe the warrior lock off your head, and she’ll be thrown out of the pleasure house with nothing but the clothes she stands up in.”

Lion’s mother added: “If you tell us where she is, son, then no harm’s done, but you have to let her go back to the pleasure house. Please!”

The young man looked from one to the other of them in confusion. “But I haven’t...”

Fire Serpent sighed. “I’m on your side, Lion. I was young once, after all! But this has to stop. I can cover for you until tonight, but if she’s not back at the pleasure house by then, I’m afraid you’re on your own!”

Hummingbird Feather woke up quickly, rolling off his sleeping mat and twisting his body so that Lion’s second kick caught his hip instead of the soft flesh of his side.

“Get up!”

He was on his hands and knees by now, ready to spring to his feet. “What’s going on? Lion? What are you doing?”

Lion lashed out again, but the other young man dodged and seized his ankle. Lion had anticipated the move, however. Throwing his whole weight onto his free foot, he lurched backwards, dragging Hummingbird Feather with him and leaving him sprawled facedown on the floor.

Lion leapt forward again, dropping onto the other young warrior’s shoulders and pinning him to the ground. The breath whooshed out of his victim.

“What did you do with her, you bastard?”

Hummingbird Feather groaned. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about! Flower Necklace — where is she?”

“The last I saw of her, she was with you! Ow!” The last syllable was jerked from his lips as Lion grabbed a handful of his hair and yanked hard.

“Do you think I’m stupid? You wanted to get back at us for what happened at that first house, didn’t you? And then the stupid girl grabbed that cup from the woman and made you look even smaller. So who was on the roof? That girl you were with? Did you put her up to it?”

“Roof? What roof? Have you gone mad — Lion, stop! You’ll tear my scalp off!”

“And to think I was convinced I’d seen a sorcerer or a demon. You must have thought I was a simpleton!”

Hummingbird Feather talked fast. “You’ve got to believe me. We lost sight of you two just after we’d called at that second house. We’d all pretty much given up on the dance, so we just took the girls back to the pleasure house. Flower Necklace wasn’t with us — the women there all thought she must be with you, they assumed the two of you had hidden yourselves away somewhere private. Just go there and ask anybody if you don’t believe me! I don’t know anything about demons and sorcerers!”

Lion relaxed his grip on the other man’s hair. “But if I believe you...”

“Are you going to let me up?”

After a moment’s reflection the young warrior released his friend. Hummingbird Feather eased himself into a squatting position and eyed Lion warily. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, then?”

He pursed his lips as he listened to the story.

“If it really was a demon, then there’s no telling what’s happened to the girl, is there? She’s probably been eaten. I don’t suppose they’ll even find a body!”

“Hummingbird Feather, please! Can’t you think of anything? I’ve got until nightfall to find her, otherwise I’m a dead man — or I might as well be!”

A grin had spread over the other man’s features as he witnessed Lion’s discomfiture, but it faded as he saw the genuine terror on his face. “Well, if it’s really a demon or a sorcerer that got her, why don’t you get another sorcerer to help you find her? Or maybe a priest?”

Lion shivered, his fear of magic reasserting itself. “Where would I find one of those? Could I trust him? Hummingbird Feather — What is it? What have you thought of?” The last words came out in an eager rush as he caught the sudden lightening of his friend’s expression.

“I’ve just remembered — your brother’s a priest.”

Lion turned pale.

“Oh, no. No, I am not asking Yaotl to do me a favour. I’d rather die!”

“Well?” Lion demanded anxiously. “Can you help?”

Yaotl had punctuated his brother’s tale with a commentary of derisive snorts, short barks of laughter, and mocking grins. Nonetheless he had listened, if only so that he could enjoy Lion’s misfortune to the full.

Telpoch looked at Yaotl. “Don’t you think we ought to help? After all, if there is a demon loose in the city...”

“You don’t go looking for demons, Telpoch — especially during the day. They find you at night, if you’re very unlucky. Our job is to drive them away — that’s why we have to wander in the hills at night with censers and fir branches to burn. Besides, we have duties. Talking of which...”

“No, we don’t,” Telpoch reminded him. “It’s a fast day. We’re not expected to do any work today, and anyway, we can say we were at the market buying paper vestments for the offering priests. Why don’t we go and look at where your brother saw this demon? Aren’t you even curious?”

“No!”

But Yaotl was lying. He looked sideways at his brother and found himself wondering what had really happened. As much as he had always loathed him, he had never seen him show fear before.

The two priests peered at the top of the wall. “I wonder how strong that roof is?” Telpoch said aloud.

“Why, are demons heavy?”

“Who knows? I’ve never tried picking one up!”

Yaotl looked along the path towards where it vanished around the corner. “Hummingbird Feather was up ahead, then?”

“He was out of sight, yes.”

“For how long?”

“It must have been awhile. I couldn’t see the torch when I started running. Not even after I rounded the corner.”

“Well, I don’t suppose Hummingbird Feather had anything to do with this. It sounds like it would have required too much imagination for any warrior I’ve ever met! If he and his girlfriend had been close enough for her to get back here in time to give you your scare, then you’d have seen the torch.”

“Maybe he doused the flame,” Telpoch suggested.

“Doubt it. He’d have had to find his way home afterwards, and I can’t see him waking some householder in the middle of the night and asking if he can rekindle it on his hearth. But we could always ask at the pleasure house if it was alight when they got back there.”

Lion looked nervously at the lengthening shadows. “We haven’t much time left.”

“You haven’t much time left, you mean!” Yaotl laughed unkindly. “Shall I come and fetch you home after they’ve finished with you in the warrior house?”

That was too much for Lion, who suddenly rounded on his brother, seizing him by the throat and shoving him hard against the wall. “Just remember this, you little creep,” he snarled. “After they throw me out, the first thing I’m going to do is come looking for you, and don’t think your black robes and your face paint will protect you!” He tightened his grip and shook the younger man so violently that flakes of soot fell off his skin onto the path.

As Yaotl gasped vainly for air, Telpoch tried to intervene. “Lion, this isn’t helping! Yaotl, please — can’t you try to think of something constructive?”

The only response at first was a choking sound. Eventually, however, Lion left off throttling his brother, who fell to rubbing his throat and groaning. Then he eyed the warrior balefully.

“You’ve got a funny way of persuading people to your point of view,” he mumbled resentfully. “But I did think of something, as it happens.” He pulled himself away from the wall and stepped warily past his brother.

“Where are you going?” Lion demanded.

“Back along your route last night. You’ll have to show me where you went — and tell me exactly what happened at each house you called at.”

The three of them stood by the entrance to the big house where Flower Necklace had snatched the cupful of porridge.

Yaotl peeped into the courtyard, observing the cold ashes where the fire had been, the idols, the sweat bath. There was nobody about.

“Now, tell me again what happened, and don’t leave anything out.”

“I’ve told you twice already!”

“Do you want the girl found or not?”

Lion sighed before going over the story once more. His brother frowned in what the young warrior suspected was mock concentration, but the frown deepened noticeably when he repeated the householder’s words.

“If Father came out with stuff like that about Mother, she’d make him pay for it!” Yaotl said.

“She would.” It was one thing they could both agree on. “But that doesn’t help me, does it?”

Suddenly a grin formed on his brother’s darkly stained features. Lion watched in horror as it grew broader. His fists clenched. “This isn’t funny, Yaotl, and if you still think it is...”

His brother chuckled. “Wrong on both counts, Brother — what our mother would do helps you a lot, and I’ve rarely known anything funnier! Wait here.”

With that, he stepped into the courtyard.

He was gone some time.

To look at Flower Necklace now, Yaotl thought, it was hard to see why she was one of the most popular girls in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Her face was drawn and her eyes were heavy with fatigue, and under what was left of her makeup, her skin was the colour of ash. Every so often she would suddenly turn and retch into a clay bowl that had been left beside her for the purpose.

The little woman, the householder’s wife, fussed anxiously about her, alternately adjusting her blanket and casting anxious glances at the black-robed priest in her doorway.

“You say she’s your sister?”

“Um, yes, that’s right. They told me she hadn’t come home so I thought I ought to come and look for her.”

“She’ll be all right, you know.”

“I’m sure she will,” he said neutrally. “It’s just something she ate, I expect. We’re very lucky you found her.”

“Will you take her home now? Only my husband’s still out in the fields, and he wasn’t very happy about my taking her in. He didn’t think I should go out there at night at all, but I had to get my cup back!”

“Quite.”

“So, anyway, if she’s not here when he returns, that would be just as well.”

The young man smiled. “Yes, I think she ought to go home. Some members of my family will be very happy to see her.”

He led the silent girl out of the house. At the gateway he paused while she rushed to the canal’s edge to heave emptily into the water, all under the mute, astonished gaze of Lion and Telpoch.

Yaotl laughed. “Demons, indeed!”

Fortitude, Telpoch reflected, was one of the most important qualities of a priest, but he had rarely needed it so much as now. Listening to his friend boasting of his own cleverness would try any man’s patience.

“I can’t pretend I knew all along,” Yaotl admitted, as they squatted in the priest house that night, enjoying the end of the fast and their first food since daybreak. “I’m not that clever!”

“No, really?” Telpoch spoke through a mouthful of leftover porridge.

“But you know what gave it away?”

“Do tell.”

“Lion’s mentioning my mother. There’d been all that stuff the householder said about his wife, and it occurred to me that the little woman would have found some way to get back at him. So she puts something in his food — that’s why he couldn’t stomach her cooking. She doesn’t do it all the time, of course, and it’s never anything deadly: just some emetic root, enough to make him thoroughly miserable.

“She didn’t break the ladle by accident. I suppose they’d had a row and she thought it was time for his medicine. So she found an excuse to go indoors for a cup. She put some of the poison in it, and topped it up with porridge from the pot.”

Telpoch swallowed the last of his food and yawned. “And then Flower Necklace snatched the cup out of his hands before he’d had a chance to taste it.” He wanted to get this over with so that he could sleep.

“That’s right. The poor woman would have been aghast. She knew the girl wouldn’t be seriously ill, but all the same, she obviously thought she’d better look after her, at least until she stopped puking. But it wouldn’t have done just to run after them, would it? She’d have to own up to what she’d been doing.”

“So it was her on the roof.”

“She’s small enough. She scared my brother off, but I expect the girl was too frightened to run away before her stomach started churning.” Yaotl laughed. “It’s funny, but Lion didn’t seem all that happy to be reunited with her, did he?”

Telpoch’s only reply was a loud snore.

© 2008 by Bill Pronzini

At the recent Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet in New York, Bill Pronzini was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, that organization’s most prestigious award. It’s an honor richly deserved, for he is one of the most versatile, insightful, and prolific authors the genre has known — equally accomplished at character study or action scene, historical or contemporary settings. His novel The Other Side of Silence is due out soon.

When you live in a small town and something way out of the ordinary happens, it’s bound to cause a pretty big fuss. Such as a woman everybody knows and some like and some don’t disappearing all of a sudden, without any warning or explanation. Tongues wag and rumors start flying. Folks can’t seem to talk about anything else.

That’s what happened in my town last year. Ridgedale, population 1,400. Hundred-year-old buildings around a central square and bandstand, countryside all pine-covered hills, rolling meadows, and streams full of fat trout. Prettiest little place you’d ever want to see. Of course, I’m biased. I was born and raised and married here, and proud to say I’ve never traveled more than two hundred miles in any direction in the fifty-two years since.

Mary Dawes, the woman who disappeared, wasn’t a native herself. She moved to Ridgedale from someplace upstate after divorcing a deadbeat husband. Just drifted in one day, liked the look of the town, got herself a waitress job at the Blue Moon Cafe and a cabin at the old converted auto court on the edge of town, and settled in. Good-looking woman in her thirties, full of jokes and fun, and none too shy when it came to liquor, men, and good times. She had more than her share of all three in the year or so she lived here, but I’m not one to sit in judgment of anybody’s morals. Fact is, I own Luke’s Tavern, Ridgedale’s one and only watering hole. Inherited it from my father, Luke Gebhardt, Senior, when he died twenty years ago.

Mary liked her fun, like I said, and rumor had it she didn’t much care if the man she had it with was married or single. But she never openly chased married men and she wasn’t all that promiscuous, even if some of the wives called her the town slut behind her back. One relationship at a time and not flagrant about it, if you know what I mean. She came into the tavern one or two nights a week and drank and laughed and played darts and pool with the other regulars, but I never once saw her leave with a man. She made her dates in private. And never gave me or anybody else any trouble.

One of the regulars gave her trouble, though, same as he gave trouble to a lot of other folks at one time or another. Tully Buford, the town bully. Big, ugly, with bad teeth and the disposition of a badger. Lived by himself in a run-down little farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Carpenter and woodworker by trade, picked up jobs often enough to get by because he was good at his work.

Thing about Tully, he was more or less tolerable when he was sober, but when he drank more than a few beers he turned loud-mouthed mean. More than once I had to throw him out when he had a snootful. More than once the county sheriff’s deputies had to arrest him for fighting and creating a public disturbance, too, but he never started any fights or did any damage in my place. If he had, I’d’ve eighty-sixed him permanently. Worse he ever did was devil people and throw his weight around, and as annoying as that was, I couldn’t justify barring him from the premises for it.

Oh hell now, Luke Gebhardt, be honest. You were afraid if you did bar him, he’d come in anyway and start some real serious trouble.

He was capable of it. Town bully wasn’t all he was. Vandal, too, or so most of us believed; Ridgedale had more than its share of that kind of mischief, all of it done on the sly at night so nobody could prove Tully was responsible. Animal abuse was another thing he was guilty of. Doc Dunaway saw him run down a stray dog with his pickup and swore it was deliberate, and there’d been some pet cats, a cow, and a goat shot that was likely his doing.

So it was easier and safer to just stay clear of him whenever possible and try to ignore him when it wasn’t. The only one who felt and acted different was J.B. Hatfield, but I’ll get to him in a minute.

Now and then Tully tried to date Mary Dawes. Like every other woman in Ridgedale, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Just laughed and made some comical remark meant to sting and walked away. One night, though, he prodded her too long and hard and she slapped his face and told him if he didn’t leave her alone, he’d have to go hunting a certain part of his anatomy in Jack Fisher’s cornfield. Everybody had a good laugh over that and Tully went stomping out. That was two days before Mary disappeared.

Disappeared into thin air, seemed like. One day she was there, big as life, and the next she was gone. The last time any of us saw her was when she left the tavern, alone, about eleven-thirty on a warm Thursday night in October.

She hadn’t told anybody she was thinking of leaving Ridgedale, hadn’t given notice at the Blue Moon. On Friday, Harry Duncan, the Blue Moon’s owner, went out to her cabin at the old auto court. Her car was there but she wasn’t. She hadn’t checked out and none of the other residents had seen her leave or knew where she’d gone. That’s when everybody started asking the same question.

What happened to Mary?

The first time I heard foul play suggested was on the second day after she went missing. J.B. Hatfield was the one who said it. Tully Buford was there, too, and so were old Doc Dunaway and Earl Pierce. Doc is a retired veterinarian, had to give up his profession when his arthritis got too bad; he’s the quiet one of the bunch, likes to play chess with Cody Smith, the town barber, or just sit minding his own business. Earl owns Pierce’s Auto Body, but he spends more time in my place than he does at his own; lazy is the word best describes him, and he’d be the first to admit it. J.B. works for Great Northwest Building Supply. Young fellow, husky, puts on a tough-guy act now and then but not in an offensive way. He’s the only one who wasn’t afraid to stand up to Tully Buford. Two of them were always sniping at each other. One time they went outside in the alley to settle an argument, but no blows were struck. Tully was the one who backed down, not that he’d ever admit it. J.B. got the worst of the face-off, though. It was his goat that was shot a week or so later.

The bar talk that evening was all about Mary Dawes, naturally, and J.B. said, “I wonder if somebody killed her.”

“Now who’d do a crazy thing like that?” I said.

“Her ex-husband, maybe.”

“Wasn’t a bitter divorce. What reason would he have?”

“Hell, I don’t know. But it sure is funny, her disappearing so sudden and her car still out there at the auto court.”

Earl said, “Could be she went with a man one time too many.”

“Picked the wrong one, you mean?” I said. “A stranger?”

“Somebody passing through and stopped in at the Blue Moon for a meal. Lot of crazies running around out there these days.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” J.B. said, and looked straight at Tully.

Tully didn’t catch the look. He said to Doc, “Hey, Doc, you think Mary’s been killed?”

“I have no opinion.”

“You never have no opinion about nothing. Come on, now, you old fart. If she was killed, who you suppose done it?”

“There’s no point in speculating.”

“I asked you a question,” Tully said, harsh. “I want an answer.”

Doc sighed and looked him square in the eye. He’s mild-mannered, Doc is; usually he just ignored Tully. But Tully picked on him more than most and even a quiet old gent can get fed up. “All right, then,” he said. “If she was murdered, the person responsible might be living right here in Ridgedale. Could even be the same coward who runs down stray dogs and shoots defenseless animals in the middle of the night.”

It got quiet in there. Tully’s face turned a slow, turkey-wattle red. He said, “You accusing me, Doc?”

“Did you hear me say your name?”

“You better not be accusing me. I told you before, I never run down that mutt on purpose. You go around accusing me of that and worse, you’ll be damn sorry.”

“What’ll you do?” Doc asked. “Throw a rock through one of my windows? Pour sugar in my gas tank? Shoot some more cats in my neighborhood?”

Tully shouted, “I never done none of those things!” and grabbed Doc’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make him yell.

“Leave him alone.” That was J.B. He stood up and pulled Tully’s hand off Doc’s shoulder. “Doc’s got bad arthritis — you know that, you damn fool.”

“Who you calling a damn fool?”

“You, you damn fool.”

Tully was up, too, by then and the two of them stood nose to nose, glaring. I said, “Take it outside, you want to fight,” but it didn’t come to blows between them this time, either. The glaring contest went on for about a minute. Then Tully said, “Ah, the hell with it, the hell with all of you,” and went storming out.

Earl said as J.B. sat down again, “I was you, J.B., I’d lock up that new goat of yours and keep a sharp eye on your property from now on.”

© 2008 by Mick Herron

In a starred review of the Herron novel Why We Die, PW said, “Smart, dogged and never down for the count, Zoë [Boehm] is a fine addition to the ranks of female PIs.” Indeed she is, and she’s here this month in a case involving her P.I. husband Joe Silvermann. Mr. Herron’s latest stand-alone thriller, Reconstruction (Soho 2008), also drew rave reviews from PW and the New York Times.

Some while ago — a few years before he died — Joe Silvermann chose a slow midweek morning to do some heavy shifting round the office; clear away the bits of orange peel and chewed pencil ends from under the filing cabinet. So he was wearing jeans and a Sticky Fingers T-shirt, and had built up a sweat, and hadn’t shaved — was everything, in fact, that the well-dressed private detective shouldn’t be when four million pounds came calling.

Or forty million, you wanted to get technical. If last year’s Rich List could be trusted.

“Is this a bad time?”

Joe looked down at his grimy clothing. “I’ve been undercover. But I’m free right now.”

He showed Russell Candy into the inner sanctum, which was more of a mess than when he’d started. Zoë was out. Joe had given up asking. When she was here, she was brain-deep in the computer, and when she wasn’t she was somewhere else.

“I should have made an appointment.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Candy. For you, I have time.”

Candy didn’t look surprised that Joe knew who he was — Oxford didn’t have so many residents with (British pounds)40 million-plus that the local paper ignored — and even less so that Joe had time for him. It would be an attitude he was used to. He was fifty or thereabouts, not much older than Joe, and his face was deeply lined, as if each million had scored its passage there. Anyone else, or anyone else with his money, might have done something about his hair, too, which had a gone-tomorrow look, and was flecked with what was probably dandruff, though Joe wasn’t a hair expert. His suit looked expensive, or at least fresh on, and his shoes were buffed to reflective glory.

Joe plucked a jar of instant from the shelf in the corner and waggled it invitingly. “I’m out of the real stuff,” he apologised, and then added, “Coffee,” in case Russell Candy thought he meant heroin. “Take a seat? How can I help?”

Candy took the visitor’s chair. “No coffee for me, thanks.”

“Tea? Water?”

“Nothing. Thank you.”

So Joe decided he didn’t want coffee either, and sat behind his desk instead.

“But you need a detective,” he said.

“Oxford Investigations,” Candy said. “You’re in the book.”

“We have a growing reputation.”

“And you’re handy. I live just up the road.”

Joe nodded, as if that had been part of his plan. “I’ve been here awhile. How can I help you, Mr. Candy? You have a problem?”

“It’s not a problem as such. More like an errand.”

“An errand.”

“A delivery. A collection and a delivery.”

“Like a courier service.”

“Pretty much. But I’ll pay your usual rates, don’t worry about that.”

Joe said, “Oh, I’m not worried, Mr. Candy. I’m sure you can afford my rates.”

“Good.”

“I’m just wondering why, if you need a courier service, you hire a private detective.”

“Well,” said Candy. “There’s the thing.”

© 2008 by Judith Cutler

British author Judith Cutler is equally adept with both historical and contemporary settings. This time she’s brought one of her series sleuths, Parson Tobias Campion, to life in a case from around 1810, involving the wrongful hanging of a poacher for armed robbery. Campion also takes the lead in Ms. Cutler’s recent novel The Keeper of Secrets (Allison & Busby, January 2008).

* * * *

William Scroggins, ragged, emaciated, balding, and bandy-legged, had very little in common with the heroic figure my sister Georgiana always wished would hold up the family coach. She regularly beguiled the long hours on the road from my father’s country seat in Derbyshire to our London house by imagining just such an adventure.

The moonlight glinting on his pistols and his pearly teeth, his eyes a-twinkle through the slits in the mask, a romantic figure on a jet-black horse would appear before us, ready to seize the strongbox. One sight of dearest Georgiana, however, would smite his heart. Begging her to do him the honour of descending from the coach, he would fend off the heavily armed postilions and outriders, swing her across his saddle bow, and gallop off into the night.

Presumably at this point Georgiana’s imagination transformed him from a thieving wretch into the handsome scion of one of the best families in the land, deprived by a cunning relative of his inheritance but not of his sense of propriety. Now he was ready to win and woo her like a Hyde Park beau, whereupon she would help him regain his title.

So what Georgiana would have made of a real highwayman, stinking from his incarceration in Warwick Gaol, and so far from heroic as to be weeping as he knelt in chains at my feet, I do not know.

While the rest of the country gossiped over the declaration that poor King George was to be replaced by his son as Regent, I had come to offer poor William the consolations of the next world, since he had so little time left in this. Indeed, he was to be hanged within the hour. The prison chaplain had already read the service to all the condemned men, but since William was one of my parishioners, and had, moreover, actually attended a few services, I wished to be there to offer my support and friendship.

“I’ve done some bad things, Parson Campion,” he said. “And no doubt I deserve to hang. I’ve poached all my life, stolen a sheep or two, scrumped apples, and I don’t know what besides. Three times the justice has let me off transportation with a warning.” I nodded — I knew the soft heart of that particular justice of the peace. “And three times I’ve let him down. And now I’ve come before the Assizes...” He wiped a tear with the back of his hand. “But I tell you straight, Parson, as God is my witness, I never took that there bauble. Here, let me lay my hand on that Good Book and swear it.” He suited the deed to the word.

I believed him. But I said very sadly, “Alas, Lady Grenfell swore to the court that you did, William. And you admitted that you were after rabbits in the area when the coach was robbed — and at gunpoint, too.”

He snorted. “Can you imagine me touting a pistol? How would I afford one of they things? Taking game’s one thing, Parson, but sending a fellow being to his death, that’s a different thing — in my book at least.”

It was in mine, too.

“What would I do with a diamond necklace, tell me that! I couldn’t eat it. I wouldn’t know where to sell it. I wouldn’t even have hidden it where no one’d find it! What would be the point? And tell me this, Parson, how could she have recognised me when I’m supposed to have had a scarf pulled over my face and hat over my eyes?”

I did not know. Taking his hand, I declared, “William, I will make one more appeal—”

He shook his head. “Nay, Parson. Even if you did, for sure they’d transport me. Look at me — do you see me lasting out the voyage to Australia? Well, I’d rather have a swift death and a burial in good English earth than a lingering one and a watery grave. That’d be the worst thing... But if you could spare a corner of the churchyard in Moreton St. Jude’s, I’d be mighty grateful. I should like to feel close to everyone I know. And — one last thing — swear you won’t let those anatomists or whatever they’re called take up my corpse. Else how can I be there for the Last Judgement?”

“No one but Dr. Hansard shall touch your body,” I declared.

And with that he had to be satisfied. The bodies of felons were not permitted the dignity of being buried whole. Dr. Hansard, not just the kindly justice of the peace who had been merciful to William in the past but also the best doctor in the neighbourhood, was in fact the first to argue that advances in medical knowledge depended on surgeons dissecting their corpses. On this occasion, however, he had begged the courts for the right to examine William himself. Poor William had a growth Hansard was privately sure would soon have proved fatal, and he wished to examine its origins.

There was a jangle of keys and the gaoler was upon us. It was time for the solemn journey to the scaffold, accompanied by the far from solemn jeers of the crowd. As we walked, we said together the prayer Our Lord taught us, and he died on the words “Deliver us from evil.”

I buried William the next day, bidding him farewell with a solemn knot of villagers who remembered his better days.

As the grave was filled, Dr. Hansard took my arm and led me off. “Time for a glass of Madeira, Tobias. Now, dear Maria tells me that our cook has made your favourite soup, and that if you do not come to sup with us at Langley Park she will be deeply offended.”

“I fear I will not be good company.”

“What are friends for, but to support you in times of solemn reflection? And I must tell you, Tobias, that poor William could not have survived long.” As he propelled me towards his gig, he explained what had ailed him.

“All the same, Edmund,” I protested, “a man is entitled to die in his bed, not have life snuffed out on someone’s false accusation!”

“Such men as poor William do not have the luxury of a four-poster or a half-tester!” he snorted. “And he would have soon been in such pain that even my skills could not have prevented the most extreme suffering.”

“So we are to thank Lady Grenfell for her part in what you see as an act of euthanasia?” I demanded bitterly.

“Indeed no! In fact, Tobias, one of the things we shall talk about tonight is how we will right this patent injustice.”

There were some who put it about that I was estranged from my family, but that was not the case. My father had certainly not wanted his youngest son to turn his back on success in this world and become a mere country parson; he spoke many harsh words. But they were not unforgiving — or unforgivable — words. Through the good offices of my dear mama, my family at last welcomed me back to its bosom — if not exactly as the prodigal son, because I in no wise repented my new life. Indeed, for the first visit or two, we had tiptoed round each other, as if performing a complicated Cotillion, with the steps of which no one was totally familiar. The sigh with which they bade me farewell was certainly one of regret, but I was not sure that it was not also one of relief.

However, if I was to find justice for poor William, it was to my family’s milieu that I must return. The Grenfells were — like my family — part of the ton, the upper ten thousand families who controlled, for better and often worse, the lives of the rest. Lady Grenfell, whom even her fellow aristocrats considered decidedly high in the instep, would certainly not receive as a caller a humble country parson, but if I were staying in my father’s London house, in Berkeley Square, and my mother were to accompany me, I might be positively welcome. Lady Grenfell might see it as an indication that I was at last in the marriage mart, and if my memory served me she had no fewer than five ill-favoured daughters to dispose of. My heart was by no means engaged elsewhere, I told my mother as I handed her from her carriage, but unless there had been divine intervention, I would not be seeking the hand of any one of them.

“But it would be a charitable act, my dear,” Mama declared with a twinkle — she was the only one of my family who dared tease me about my calling.

“I do not think the Almighty demands my martyrdom,” I responded. “Or if he did, I hope he would ask it in somewhere other than Mayfair. The very least I would hope for is to be boiled alive in Africa.”

“But are you going to flirt with one of Almeria’s girls?”

“I shall not mislead them — not a single heart will be even chipped, let alone broken, if I can help it. But if the only way I can speak to Lady Grenfell is when she is chaperoning her daughters, then so be it.”

Lady Grenfell had enjoyed ill health for as long as I had known her. Fading behind voluminous trailing shawls, without a wisp of energy to pick up something six inches from her hand, she ruled her household with a rod of iron, thinly disguised as the vinaigrette vital to deal with her palpitations. When she had her own way, of course, there was no sign of the ill health that Dr. Hansard would surely have diagnosed as chronic boredom and acute selfishness.

This morning there was no sign of the offending diamond necklace, nor should there have been, for neither Lady Grenfell nor my mama would have had any hesitation in stigmatising diamonds as vulgar if worn during the hours of daylight. There were daughters a-plenty, however, all plain and simpering, apart from Miss Honoria, the next to youngest. She was quiet to the point of surliness, and in other circumstances I would have devoted myself to drawing her out, and perhaps even making her smile. But that would have been construed as flirting, and if I were to flirt with anyone it must be with someone whose heart I believed incapable of pain. The pallor of Miss Honoria’s cheeks, emphasized by the dress of vicious mustard yellow she had for some reason chosen to wear, suggested feeling deeper than anything her invalidish mother had ever known.

As is the custom, we exchanged nothingnesses for precisely half an hour, at which point, correctly declining refreshment, we prepared to depart. But something was arousing Lady Grenfell from her fluttering inertia: We were the recipients of an invitation to an evening party.

“Nothing formal. Perhaps cards, perhaps three or four couples standing up to dance. You would be so welcome—” she murmured.

We bowed our acceptance and went on our way.

“Did you ever see such surprise as was on the faces of those pasty-faced dowds?” my mother demanded. “And poor Honoria in that hand-me-down that would have disgraced a nursery maid.”

“I fancy all was not well with her,” I mused, handing my mother into the carriage and looking significantly at the footman. My mother and others of her class enjoyed the sublime belief that persons from the lower classes were deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid. My work had shown me that the reverse was true. “Do we have any other calls to pay?”

“To Hatchard’s in Piccadilly, if you will. I have lent my copy of The Lady of the Lake to your aunt, and find I cannot survive without it another instant...”

I was too much in demand as a dancer to have a chance of speaking to Lady Grenfell at her soirée, or I might have commented on the diamonds sparkling like new about her surprisingly unlined neck. The promised three or four couples had metamorphosed into twenty or thirty, though females in the form of her five daughters heavily predominated. Even Stourton, her son, whose debts were rumoured to outstrip his father’s, graced the room for a whole ten minutes, though he did no more than lean against the wall, in what he no doubt conceived to be a Byronesque way. Naturally I could not slight the poor wallflowers, and it was thus left to my mother, kindly gracing an occasion that held absolutely no charm for her, to sit in the ranks of the dowagers and chaperones and whisper behind her fan to her hostess. From the way my partners’ eyes lit up at the sight, it was clear that they believed our joint futures were being discussed — each daughter smiled as voraciously as a hyena each time she caught my eye. Each except Miss Honoria, whose smile was at very best perfunctory.

The ballroom was no place to solicit confidences, so to her as to the others I addressed mere commonplaces, agreeing truthfully that the refreshments were excellent and lying about the quality of the Champagne. Of bigger issues, of the poor king’s health, for instance, or wars overseas, there was no mention.

It was not until my mother summoned me to her boudoir and dismissed her dresser that I asked what her conversation had uncovered.

“Uncovered, Tobias? What an agricultural term! I heard a great deal about Almeria Grenfell’s hideous ordeals, including the hideous strain of having to depose to the Warwick Assizes that her necklace had been veritably torn from her neck by a most vicious highwayman, clearly the William Scroggins who stood before her in the dock.”

“Torn from her neck? She stated it was removed from the jewel case she concealed beneath the carriage cushions. And what were her servants, her postilions, her outriders doing the while? Do not tell me that they were too terrified by poor William’s fearsome demeanour to protest! Why, the man would have been blown over by a good yell!”

“With a gun pointed inches from your employer’s bosom, perhaps even a yell is too great a risk,” she said drily.

“On the contrary, it would have been very good value, in my book,” I retorted. “And what other on-dits were you privy to, Mama?”

“Would it bring you to the blush to learn that Lady Grenfell considers you most eligible?”

“I hope that you disabused her. But Mama, you joke with me. Your eyes are twinkling like her diamond necklace. Did you hear anything to arouse your suspicions?”

“Only what I have told you — that Lady Grenfell has you in her sights, my love. For, I gather, one or other of the girls must marry soon. It is clear that Grenfell is expecting the duns any moment.”

I reflected on the cost of the Champagne, however inferior. “And they waste all that money on entertainment! And on a new diamond necklace.”

“On investment, my love — for you must know that a hostess must present her best looks to a prospective son-in-law.”

“Son-in-law!”

“News of an engagement would certainly stave off Grenfell’s creditors.”

I hung my head. “It was altogether wrong of me—”

“Nonsense! You do no more than pay a morning call and you become the property of one of her dreadful daughters? Leave them on the shelf where they have been gathering dust this age, my love.”

“But what of Miss Honoria? Why is she so melancholy? She is not old enough to have been too long on the marriage mart.”

Although the room was empty, Mama looked about her with the air of a conspirator. “There is a rumour — but not circulated by Almeria Grenfell, I do assure you—”

“By one of the other tabbies you were talking to?”

“Tabbies! I am bosom-bows with some of them! But not with Lady Cotteridge, who declared, almost unasked, that Honoria had entered into a most unsuitable liaison — with a gamester to whom her brother, that young scapegrace Stourton, introduced her. He even acted as go-between, would you believe?”

“He is far more than a scapegrace, Mama — well on the way to being a rake, by all accounts. And who was the man in the case? Did you discover that?”

“A Frenchman. The Comte de Valliers. Oh, he is no more a count than I am, Tobias, but a charming gamester. Beware of accepting one of his invitations to play at White’s, I beg you!”

“Mama, a country parson plays with no one at White’s, let alone an ivory turner. Now, I must bid you goodnight.”

She held me at arm’s length as I bent to kiss her. “Nay, these are country hours indeed, Tobias — and if you want to understand Miss Honoria’s plight, should you not speak to the villain in the piece himself? Here.” She reached into a drawer in her dressing-table. “You will not find this comte at White’s, of course — such a club is far too respectable. I understand from Lady Cotteridge that he is to be found at a discreet little hell in St. James’s.”

“Populated by card sharps with loaded dice!”

“Indeed. But you must know,” she said so serenely that I wondered what my elder brother had had in his youth to confess, “that the first time a young man presents himself they let him win for quite some time before they begin to cheat.” She pressed a heavy purse into my hand.

“So that he is lulled—”

“Just so. Promise me just one thing! Quit the table the instant you lose so much as a penny. For that purse holds a goodly part of my pin money, and I should not like to have to apply to your father for more, not, at any rate, with a truthful explanation of how it disappeared.”

The soi-disant Edmund Hansard — I had not only borrowed my mother’s money, I had assumed my best friend’s name — presented himself at a discreet door, naming my father as a guarantor. Papa would have been apoplectic had he known any of the night’s doings, but perhaps most of all at this appropriation of his good name. I stammered that I was but a distant cousin of his lordship, but that he had encouraged me to taste the delights of the town before I returned to my village.

My card skills had never been more than third-rate, even when I played regularly, but I was not surprised to see a steady stream of guineas coming my way. I was being gulled, softened up. With what I hoped was a suitably rustic grin, I called for a bumper for all those playing, even covering with bravado my wince as I understood the cost.

I soon found young Stourton at my elbow. There was an inner room, kept for a select few, he whispered, evincing no surprise that a man seen but two hours ago leading his sister into the dance should now be indulging in ludicrously high play. But he had dipped too deep to make rational judgments about anything. He did not even demur when I pumped him full of the expensive but throat-burning brandy I was now persuaded to buy.

Despising myself, I turned the conversation to his sisters. Like a man seeing a far distant shore with but a thin spar before him, he seized my arm and began to extol their virtues, displaying an imagination quite creditable in one so far gone.

“But Miss Honoria—” I shamelessly interrupted a disquisition on the eldest. “Tell me about her.”

He raised his eyes to the heavens. “Damn me if she isn’t quite in the basket.”

He belched. “Shouldn’t have said that. Forget it.”

“Of course. Do you mean that she has behaved without discretion?”

“Fine discretion getting yourself in the family way!”

I did not have to feign my shock and horror. Such a lapse is not uncommon amongst country lads and lasses, though I have tried most strongly to discourage such behaviour. But for a gentlewoman to betray herself — truly, I was appalled.

“And the man in question—?” I prompted, as if he were one of my flock.

“Would marry her, but for one thing.” He rubbed his fingers to suggest a fat dowry.

“But does her mother—?”

“No, no! Of course not.”

“Her condition will manifest itself ere long,” I pointed out.

“And that’s the devil of it. Antoine has slipped out of the country — things were getting a bit hot for him when they discovered how he loaded the dice. When he returns, I make no doubt that he will make an honest woman of her — egad, I shall call him to account if he does not — even if I have to buy the marriage licence myself!” he concluded, with an air of positive generosity, which he rather spoilt with another belch.

“So you need to win tonight,” I said, “and win well.”

He shook his head. “I’ve cash in hand, never fret. If only I can run Antoine to earth.”

“I’d heard that you were about to be hauled into a debtors’ prison,” I said.

“Aye, so I was — this far from the Marshalsea.” He held his fingers a hair’s breadth apart. “Or following Antoine to Geneva. But I had a plan. And damn me if it didn’t work rather well.”

“And what was the plan?”

He peered at me hazily. “Tell you what, if you’re ever dunned, I’ll tell you then. Until then, mum’s the word.” And that was the last I got from him.

To my amazement and horror, it was soon all about town that I was dangling after Miss Honoria. Since I had spoken to the young lady no more than one could achieve in a country dance and also knew her true position, I suspected that the origin of these rumours was none other than Lady Grenfell herself.

“I take it that you do not find these rumours likely to entice you into her family?” Mama asked, as I squired her to the Royal Academy.

“On the contrary, they raise horrible suspicions.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Against whom?”

I flushed. I had not revealed even to her that Miss Honoria might be enceinte. “About Lady Grenfell’s truthfulness,” I answered at last.

“You mean in the matter of the diamond necklace?”

“Exactly. I simply cannot believe that family up to its eyes in debt buys a diamond necklace. Champagne, yes, a necklace, no. And Lady Grenfell’s shone like new, did it not?”

She nodded.

“Mama, which jeweller does her ladyship patronise?”

When I indicated to John Bridge, of Messrs. Rundell and Bridge, that I wished to speak with him on a matter of some delicacy, he glanced with amazement at my clerical garb, worn for the first time in London, but swiftly returned to his usual calm and pleasant demeanour, inviting me into his private office.

“In fact, it is not a matter of some delicacy,” I corrected myself, “but of the utmost delicacy — secrecy, indeed.”

He bowed. “You have my word, my Lord—”

“Parson Campion,” I corrected him. “I am not here on family business. I am here to enquire about the purchase of a diamond necklace.”

“You know that I may not betray secrets,” he demurred.

“I do indeed. Neither may I, in my calling, though the two are somewhat different. But I believe that someone has been punished for a crime he did not commit. May I ask you if anyone has recently bought a diamond necklace to replace a lost one?”

He responded to my smile with a courteous one of his own. “It is — I am pleased to say — an all too regular occurrence. But I do keep records: Perhaps if you gave me a definite name I might check? But please do not ask me to do more than confirm an absolute truth. I dare not point you in anyone’s direction!”

I held his gaze. “Mr. Bridge, did Lady Grenfell purchase a copy of her stolen diamond necklace?”

“Sir, she did not.”

My mother heard the news with interest. “But Almeria was certainly wearing a necklace remarkably similar to the lost one. Indeed,” she added reflectively, “it positively glistered.”

“And all that glisters is not gold!” I quoted the proverb with gusto. More soberly I added, “I fear I have to ask a few questions — nay, not of Lady Grenfell herself. Not yet. Now, Mama, if you had to have a copy of a necklace made, to which discreet jeweller would you go?”

“To the one to which you have already been — to Rundell and Bridge, of course.”

My mother had kindly invited Dr. Hansard and his wife to join us in Berkeley Square, engaging to show Mrs. Hansard the sights of the town and introduce her to her milliner and her modiste while Edmund and I conferred about our next move. Our dispositions were somewhat hampered by the continued presence in the capital of Miss Honoria, looking more and more unwell.

“If only her wretched lover would return and remove her from the country for good! It cannot be good for a lady in her condition to be embroiled in the scandal that is about to ensue,” I said.

Dr. Hansard raised an eyebrow. “Women are a great deal tougher than is widely believed,” he declared. “But her very situation must be distressing, and a wedding band, put in place by no matter how shady a gamester, might be perceived as preferable to prolonged rustication and separation from her bastard babe, which is usually the price such unfortunate girls must pay to be rehabilitated into society.”

“We have no alternative but to seek out Stourton again. He must have some idea of the young man’s whereabouts. He might even be prevailed on to escort his sister to whichever city he has descended upon,” I added slowly.

But such an idea found no favour with Stourton. He had no particular reason not to go, but mentioned an engagement with friends, a horse to see to — all facile excuses that made my knuckles itch.

“It would be the deed of a generous brother,” I urged

“When was I ever generous?” he asked with an unpleasing sincerity.

Lady Grenfell was equally unhelpful. Without suggesting outright that Miss Honoria had lost her virtue, we hinted as best we could the reason for her illness. Whether her ladyship was indeed ignorant, or else so stupid as not to understand our insinuations, I know not. But she averred without hesitation that her daughter was not at home, but had just stepped out to a lending library.

At last I could restrain myself no longer. “Lady Grenfell, may I speak to you about the diamond necklace you wore to your ball?”

How did I expect her to react? With a blush of guilt? One of her famous spasms?

Certainly not with an indulgent beam.

“Dear Stourton knew how upset I was when that monster stole it from around my very neck! He had a run of luck at cards or on the horses... What a sweet boy, to purchase a replacement for me.”

“Sweet indeed,” I echoed.

“So what is your latest theory?” Mama asked me indulgently, as we ate an exquisite luncheon. “Do you believe that young Stourton has such a generous spirit as to buy such a gift for a woman with whom he has scarcely been on speaking terms this last five years?”

“No,” Edmund replied on my behalf. “On the contrary, I believe she suspected him of stealing it — hence her lies under oath to the court. To ‘prove’ his innocence, he came up with a replacement. Which may not be a replacement at all, but paste.”

“Since it glisters,” Mama agreed, nodding to me. “So you need to see the necklace again, but more closely. We will invite the family to dine before joining us in our box for the opera. No woman worth her salt would fail to wear her diamonds for such an event. Now what is it, Tobias?” I might have been an importunate seven-year-old tugging at her skirt.

“Would not such an invitation lend credence to this ridiculous rumour about my attachment to Miss Honoria?” I asked stiffly.

“It might indeed. Or it might shock her into confessing that she is... betrothed... to someone else.”

Hansard smiled. “I see only one problem, my lady. How do we get a sufficiently close look at this necklace? It cannot be such an event as you would invite Mr. Rundell or Mr. Bridge!”

“That does not mean that they cannot give an opinion,” I declared. “Mr. Bridge will only answer direct questions, not volunteer information. Last time I asked the wrong question. This time I must ask the correct one.”

The party never reached the opera, but a fine drama was enacted before our eyes.

It was Miss Honoria — or rather her absence, with a trifling indisposition, according to her mama, her eyes spitting fire — who provoked what threatened to become an unseemly altercation.

Stourton looked from one cool face to the next, finished his Champagne in one gulp — a mistake, as he was already well into his cups when he arrived.

“We have such hope of you two lovers,” she announced, with a hard titter and a smile in my direction. “Do we not, Stourton?”

“I am sure Stourton has no such thing,” I declared, incensed. “Stourton knows that Miss Honoria’s feelings are engaged elsewhere, and he is in fact about to take his sister to her intended.”

“Am I, old chap? I think not.”

“I think so indeed,” I persevered. “You have a great deal of money at your disposal, have you not? And you might as well spend it on someone who — if not precisely deserving — is in need of it. And once you have reached Geneva—”

“Geneva!” he snorted. “I learned today that he has fled to Canada! Catch me going there!”

“Well, you will escort your sister there instead. I suggest that you stay there. In fact, if you ever return to this country, you will almost certainly hang.”

As we had arranged, Hansard was carefully watching not me or Stourton, but Lady Grenfell. In a moment he was at her side, producing smelling salts and pressing her back into her chair. “Nay, your Ladyship — please remain seated. I cannot answer for your health otherwise.” As he plied the vinaigrette, he most deftly unfastened her necklace.

“Hang? Why should a gentleman hang?” Stourton asked insolently, but with a pallor that suggested he knew exactly why.

“For sending an innocent man to the gallows. That poor wretch whom you identified in court, ma’am, was entirely innocent, as I am sure you know. You recognised your son as he robbed you. What words you exchanged subsequently I can only imagine. But I suspect that you demanded the return of your property as the price of your silence — a reasonable request, after all. What mother would want her son to swing? Accordingly, your necklace was returned. As a gesture of remorse, your son had even had it cleaned. It looked very fine. But in fact, Lady Grenfell, your son reneged on the deal. He had the necklace copied.” So much had Mr. Bridge confirmed.

“Indeed, these are but trumpery beads!” Hansard concluded, casting them at her feet.

“Do you now object to Stourton’s journey abroad?” I asked. “I cannot think so, because he will of course be escorting you, ma’am. You may have had no hand in the robbery, but you committed perjury of the very worst sort. You sent an innocent man to a hideous death. You deserve — you both deserve — to be handed over to the law this very evening. But we will be generous where you were not. We will give you till tomorrow night to quit these shores forever, with a written undertaking that you will never return — and, of course, why. Go now. I fear our dinner engagement must be cancelled.”

“At least poor Honoria will have her mother beside her when she marries,” Mama declared sentimentally. “And when she delivers her child.”

“I think not, ma’am,” Hansard said, staring down at the fire. “You tell me that she has long cried wolf in the matter of her health. So I fear that no one will take any notice at her next spasm or the next but one. But I can tell you that her pulse indicates the most serious of heart conditions. She will not reach Canada if the crossing is rough.”

“She would be buried at sea?” I asked slowly.

“In all probability.”

“Then truly God moves in mysterious ways. I thought that we had let the pair off lightly. But now it seems that poor William is truly avenged after all.”

© 2008 by Mike Wiecek

A winner of the PWA’s Shamus Award for best short story, in 2006, and a two-time winner of the Derringer Award for best short story, Mike Wiecek makes a first appearance in EQMM here with a tale of the murderous side of a high-rolling businessman. He is the author of the 2005 novel Exit Strategy (Jove), which received a nomination from the International Thriller Writers for their best-novel award.

I admit, I thought hard before agreeing to meet Tarnbeck where he want-ed. Generally, my clients are keen to conduct our business in private — they need to see me in person, but they’re more than skittish about potential blowback. Tarnbeck, evidently marching to a different drummer, suggested the shooting range at his club.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I heard him right on the cell phone.

“I try to fire a few hundred rounds a week. You have to practice too, right? We’ll make it a working meeting.”

I do keep up my training, in fact, but that’s part of my job. Tarnbeck was CEO of a six-billion-dollar manufacturing company. Did I have any lunatic enemies devious enough to arrange a hit in Connecticut’s third-priciest country club?

But I needed the work, so I said yes. Life is too short to worry whether ninjas had infiltrated the blue-blazer set.

So there we were, two guys on the outdoor range in perfect weather: cool, overcast, and no wind whatsoever. October in Fairfield County can go either way, what with global warming and all, but we’d lucked out. A few gold and red leaves had escaped the grounds crew, lying on the greensward between asphalted shooting strips. Before we started, I couldn’t see a single gleam of brass anywhere, even in the berm behind the target row, which meant the groundskeepers were spending hours picking over the lawn every night.

When did golfing and squash give way to semiautomatic weapons? I tell you, New Money has too much time on its hands.

“Nice handgun,” Tarnbeck had said when I pulled out the Sig P226 I normally use. He had an unmodified Model 1911 himself, and from fifty yards was plinking the headplates steadily, six at a time. I’ll say this for him, he looked good: about sixty, with a runner’s rangy build, a silver brush cut, and a nice, easy stance while he popped away. I used the big Mickey Mouse ears — I value my hearing — but Tarnbeck stayed with the small foam plugs favored by those with an image to protect.

Of course, that meant we could barely hear each other, and I wasn’t about to go hollering out our business. So the conversation proceeded fitfully during reloads, when I could loosen the earmuffs.

“Here’s the problem,” he said as we refilled our magazines. “This blowhard died in my boardroom the other day.”

“I heard.” It was in the papers. Tarnbeck’s company was “exploring strategic alternatives,” as they say, and one of the suitors, some private-equity partner, had keeled over during a private negotiation. “Heart attack. You have a liability issue?”

“Of course not.” Tarnbeck glanced at me impatiently. “He should have cut back on the steaks and whiskey a long time ago.”

“How fast did EMS get there?” Call it professional curiosity — 911 response time sometimes matters to me, for all kinds of reasons.

“A few minutes.” He shrugged, finished with his last magazine, and snapped it back into the pistol. “Long enough for everyone else in the room to speed-dial his broker.”

That was a nice image: The guy on the floor gasping and clutching at his chest while all around him his pals were busy shorting his debt. Tarnbeck grinned and stepped back to the line, raising his pistol.

Five minutes later we started up again.

“Someone’s trying to horn in on my buyout,” Tarnbeck said. “Buying our stock on the sly, raising money in the unregulated markets. It’s got the bankers all jumpy about event risk, so they’re jacking up our short-term rates. Lots of rumors, and I have no idea who’s behind it all.”

“Nothing in the 13-D’s?” The SEC requires investors to fess up once they’ve acquired more than five percent of a public company, for just this reason.

“Not for another week. It’s too recent.”

“So you’ve got another bidder.” Tarnbeck nodded shortly, and started shooting again.

I could see the problem. Tarnbeck wanted to take the company private himself. As CEO, he knew exactly where he could slash and burn, to cash out asset value hidden from current shareholders. If some other buyout group outbid him, not only would Tarnbeck lose the deal and its hundreds of millions of easy money, he’d also surely lose his job. He wanted the LBO, and he wanted it cheap, and some jackal had shown up to contest the carcass.

Of course, the shareholders — whose interests Tarnbeck was supposed to represent — would benefit from a higher price. Can you say, conflict of interest?

We moved back to 75 yards and switched to silhouette targets. Long range for handguns, though Tarnbeck kept his groupings impressively tight. You could tell that everything he did he made into a competition, and he was obviously paying attention to my own results. So I let my shots drift around, mostly on the paper but randomly spaced. Hey, I needed the job.

“I guess I know why you looked me up,” I said, while we waited for the rangemaster to trot out more boxes of ammo.

Tarnbeck nodded, looking straight at me. “Lots of investigators could find out who it is,” he said. “Probably quicker than you, too. But then what, they’re gonna write me a report? I need this problem settled for good.”

“For good,” I repeated.

“You know what I mean. Do I have to spell it out?”

The dead guy in his boardroom must have been an inspiration. I sounded him out on fees, and he was sensible enough not to nickel-and-dime the bonus calculation, so we got to a handshake quick enough.

Tarnbeck didn’t turn back to the targets, though. He stood watching me, thoughtful, keeping his pistol pointed correctly downrange.

“I wonder,” he said. “This amounts to inside knowledge. A man in your position could arrange to profit on any number of side trades ahead of the, ah, precipitating event.”

The smarter ones figure this out. “That’s right.”

Tarnbeck thought about it some more. “But... you don’t have the capital to make it worthwhile, do you?”

Like, twenty percent of nothing is still nothing. Maybe it’s a cliché, but it’s still true: You got to have money to make money.

“I’m not living off investments,” I said. “I earn my pay.”

“Got it.” Tarnbeck seemed satisfied. “Sure you don’t want to shoot some more?”

“No.” I had already put the Sig away. “My hand hurts.”

© 2008 by Amelia Symington

Amelia Symington is the pen name of a Canadian who came to “the States” to go to graduate school and fell in love with an American. With her husband and daughter, she lived in New England for a while, where she walked along the ocean for the first time, and experienced the climate and setting that provide the ambience for this first story.

The sands were drifting into the corpse’s eyes and falling into the open mouth. He was lying on his back and his belly made an unnatural mound on the flat beach, a slight hill that was skirted by the scurrying crabs and small birds. The tide was coming in, but he lay high above the tide line, most likely safe from the pull of the ocean. On the other hand, the wind was picking up, and with the storm offshore it was hard to be sure exactly where the high-tide line would be in the next twenty-four hours.

Wally stood at the corpse’s feet, holding his dog, B.D., on a short leash.

“Don’t you go messing up the scene of the crime.” he said.

B.D. obeyed the tone of voice and calmed down. Like his owner, he was a shaggy, thin old mutt without the energy to fuss for long.

Wally considered his options. The wind was coming on strong and the forecast was for the last real blow of the season, maybe a bad storm, maybe hurricane strong. The body could easily be buried before the afternoon was out. He walked here every day and he could find it again, if he had the time and brought the dog. But the new sheriff wouldn’t want to wait. In Wally’s opinion, the young man was way too eager to consolidate his newly elected position by doing, doing, doing.

That’s not going to impress people, he thought. What they want is loyalty and safety and someone they can call on when they really need a hand. That’s what Wally himself had done for twenty-five years. He was only mildly annoyed that he’d lost the election last year to the new guy. Another man would have fumed and maybe undermined the new guy’s authority, but not Wally. For example, he could wait and call the sheriff later, after he got home. All it would take was a small lie, that he’d forgotten his cell phone. Then, the sheriff would have to wait until the next day, which was the sensible thing with this storm coming up. But it was the sheriff’s call, not his.

Wally pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his old jeans. First he took a picture of the corpse’s face. Anyone could see it was Gene Barnes. Then he took a couple of the body. There were no visible wounds, no pool of blood anywhere. A small flask was visible next to the right hand. Not surprising, since the body stank of alcohol. Then, Wally stood with his back to the ocean and took a quick picture of the few scraggly trees perched on the edge of the beach. They looked like outcasts stranded so far from the line of other small trees that stretched thick and scrubby on either side of this bare hundred yards or so of shoreline. Next he took a shot to the north and another to the south. It seemed unnecessary, but the new sheriff had posted this procedure on his personal Web site for citizens who came across just this sort of thing. Using “triangulation” was supposed to pinpoint the scene for the coroner or the judge or even the jury if it came to that. Wally punched in the sheriff’s e-mail address (Bradley@yoursherriff.org) and sent the photos off to him. Finally, Wally punched in his old work number. At least Bradley hadn’t changed that.

“Hello, Bradley? Gene Barnes is dead and stinking up the beach down here about a mile north of the Sparrow Beach stairs. I just sent you pictures.”

“Don’t touch a thing, I’ll be right there.” To Wally’s ears he sounded excited and ready to roll.

“I’ll wait for you down at the stairs,” Wally said, hanging up without waiting for Bradley’s advice and starting down the beach with B.D. in tow.

Some people hated the New England hurricane season, but not Wally. It got your juices flowing, brought neighbors out of their houses and away from their solitary TV sets. In his experience, people were better than generally given credit for, especially when they had an excuse for helping one another out. Now was the time to make a phone call to check on the young mother whose husband was on the road, a quick stop by a retired couple to be sure they had the windows nailed tight, a call to the cousins to assure them all was well. He and Terry were never busier than those days when the storms were threatening. She used to say that the wind sort of blew folks together. Now, the winds reminded him of her, his beloved wife, dead and gone for three long years.

Of course, there were some people who weren’t like that. There were folks who would rob you blind any day of the week, as soon as look at you. Guys like Gene Barnes, for example. As owner and sole worker at Gene’s Garage, he was a good mechanic, when he was feeling “born again,” usually around the end of the month. Now, if he’d simply been the town drunk, the ladies would have taken him under their wing, given him castoffs and free meals in exchange for a few hours of sober work hauling away junk or digging new flower beds. He’d have had enough to keep him in booze and they’d have kept him out of trouble, by and large. But Gene had the misfortune to straddle the worlds of respectable productivity and bleary-eyed senselessness. Maybe, Wally thought, it might have been better to lock Gene up from time to time. Instead he’d just taken Gene’s keys and driven him home after the heavy man stumbled out of the bar at closing time. Wally always hoped that Gene would sleep it off and be sober enough to work the next day, but Gene usually got up real early looking for a hair of the dog that bit him. No telling how many “repairs” that were never needed were done, or not done right. Gene was more of a menace under the hood of a car than behind the wheel of one.

Well, he was harmless now, and off to another world. Wally figured that Gene was finding out God’s considered judgment about the kind of life that he had lived. Maybe God’s good wrath was stirring up this storm and giving Gene the anonymous grave he deserved. Wally silently apologized to the man upstairs, because even if he wasn’t the sheriff anymore, Wally knew that he was doing the right thing by reporting this body, and he hoped that God would understand that he meant no disrespect, not leaving this in God’s good hands.

Wally made his way down the beach towards the stairs. The wind was picking up and B.D. was making things difficult by running first ahead and then behind him. The dog wasn’t happy that they kept going away from home, but he had faith in Wally, faith that any minute he’d change direction.

“I know, old fellow. We’ll be safe enough when Bradley gets here. We’ll get a ride in that nice new truck of his, you’ll see.”

Wally always drove an old truck. Never in his life had he bought a new one. The truth was that he’d fallen in love with his first old red Ford, the one he’d had when he was sixteen. It was about the same time that he’d fallen in love with Terry. In his heart he knew that there hadn’t been a single day in the last sixty years, not a half-hour even, that he hadn’t loved Terry full out.

The guys made fun of him for it. Lyle was the worst. He had married the banker’s daughter, who everyone knew was a trifle balmy, but Lyle didn’t seem to understand that he should be damned grateful to find any woman who would settle for a pipsqueak, a man who made the runt of the litter look like good pickings. It took Lyle fifteen years to give up his womanizing and decide to be content with his warm and, in Wally’s opinion, far too understanding wife. Wally’s best friend, Augie, didn’t have money to attract real women, but he was so cute there was always somebody’s daughter mooning over his “boyish good looks” and the ever-anticipated literary success that he’d enjoy just as soon as he got over being an accountant. The two men just didn’t understand the value of constancy or commitment where women were concerned.

Then there was Gene, laughing at the way some men were always falling all over themselves on account of one woman or another. Wally knew it was an act, because Terry had told him how Gene had been following her around all her freshman year, and how he asked Terry to marry him and go off with him to Boston when he was accepted to some no-name college there. When she declined, Gene offered to wait till she was through high school, but she told him she was in love with someone else. Gene never went to college, and he started drinking seriously about the time that Wally and Terry were married. For years Wally had worked at not feeling sorry for the guy, but if he’d been the one who lost Terry, he’d just have slipped into the nearest grave and pulled the sod up over his head.

Wally reached the stairs and sat down to get his breath back. There it was again, a soft pain that swamped his heart and took a short trip down his arm. These days it was his secret. At first he had told the doctor when it happened, but there had been lots of talk about sticking probes into his arteries or even bypass surgery if it came to that. Not for Wally, not after watching Terry fight to keep the pain from her face and waste her precious time being the perfect patient for a bunch of strangers. Not that he’d ever said an unkind word to them or done anything but support her in those last days. It was the hardest thing he ever did. He looked out at the ocean roaring before the wind, free and full of life. When his time came, it would be a short trip to join her and he wasn’t going to any hospital to make some doctor feel good about keeping the two of them apart longer.

Wally pulled out his cell phone again and checked the time. Over an hour since he had called Bradley. The young man should be here by now. Maybe he wasn’t interested in meeting up with Wally. Maybe he just looked at the pictures and figured out where the body was and headed straight for it.

No sense going back down the beach against this wind now. The warm wind was picking up bits of dry sand and using them to drill at his face and hands. He buttoned up his denim jacket so that he wouldn’t feel it plastering his Red Sox T-shirt to his chest, rolled up his cap and tucked it into his back pocket so it wouldn’t blow away on him.

There was a path that was pretty sheltered up near the parking lot, at the top of the stairs. It ran parallel to the beach without actually leaving the trees that separated the grassy mud from the sand for most of the length of the beach. From there, he’d be able to see if Bradley had arrived at the body by another route.

Wally scraped a hole in the sand to make a bed for B.D. under the stairs, mounded the sand to protect him from the wind, and tied his leash to a nearby support beam. “Stay. I’ll be back,” he said. The wind was getting awful strong for an old dog.

The stairs felt steeper than he remembered, and Wally had to rest halfway up. He decided to risk losing the cap and wear it for a while to keep his hair from blowing into his eyes so much. At the top he came to a complete stop when he saw the sheriff’s new truck parked on the far side of the otherwise empty lot.

Why park so far away from the stairs? Wally thought. Besides, if Bradley had left when Wally called and driven here and parked at the far end of the lot, he’d have found Wally at the bottom of the stairs before now and saved him the long climb. Something wasn’t right.

The parking lot was one of those created by the state for tourists, and no one local used it because it was faster to park on the side of the highway and take one of the barely visible dirt paths that led directly to the beach. With the storm pending, the parking lot was empty even of tourists.

Wally looked up at the sky; clouds, but no lightning to worry about. He rested against a tree out of sight of the truck. The truck looked empty, but there was no harm in keeping a low profile.

The truck was parked into the wind. Nobody parks their vehicle into the ocean wind knowing what the wet air does to your wiring, not if he wants to drive home later. So either Bradley was in such a hurry that he didn’t care, or he expected to get back in the truck pretty damn quick. So he wasn’t planning on going a mile up the beach to the body. So what exactly was the truck doing here?

Wally wished he had B.D. with him. Even an old dog is some comfort when you’re not sure what you’re getting into. Going back for B.D. meant another trip down and then up those stairs. No, he wasn’t going to do that more than he had to.

Wally unbuttoned his jacket and the holster he still wore under his right armpit as if he were still a working lawman. He’d never had to shoot it, but it was useful for putting the fear of God into anyone with a guilty conscience. He took a deep breath, ignored the effect of the adrenaline on his heart rate, and left the trees so that he was approaching the truck from the passenger side, moving into the blind spot. Then a final dash and he had the door handle in his hand and the door open. The truck looked empty.

The ringing of his cell phone rattled his teeth. Wally swung up into the truck’s cab and closed the door. He waited for his hand to stop shaking before he answered it.

“Wally, I can’t get there. My damn truck’s in for repairs. This loaner Gene gave me has crapped out. Get your butt back here before this storm catches you.”

“Bradley, you’ll never guess where I’m sitting right now,” Wally said, but the phone had gone dead. Silly new gadgets! To be reliable they had to be plugged into an outlet half the time. He didn’t understand how they’d ever gotten to be so popular.

As he replaced the gun in his holster, Wally couldn’t think why he hadn’t guessed that it was Gene who drove the truck here. Gene was always giving nice cars a little test drive when they were in the shop. When they were all kids in high school, the gang of them took every new car in town for a “joy ride,” as soon as anyone left one on the street unattended. Everyone joked about it and they didn’t do any harm. That stopped when old man Turner complained to the state police. Gene got a month in the detention center. The rest of them got off with a warning, but then, Gene was the unofficial leader and everyone knew that Gene’s mother wasn’t about to give him the hiding that was waiting for the boys with the great good luck to have fathers.

So it was Gene who parked here. He was the one expecting to be gone just a short time and he wasn’t coming back.

The first raindrops marked the windshield. It was high time he collected B.D. and got himself home. On the off-chance that the salt sea air hadn’t eaten anything important yet, Wally hot-wired the truck and was rewarded by a short sputtering sound before the battery died completely. “Ptwey to you, too,” he said, imitating the sound.

Behind the sprinkling rain, the sky was getting that green-mud look that comes before a serious storm. Better to make for the lighthouse now before the wind picked up any. Two miles to the lighthouse was quicker than the five miles home.

Wally had never been in the new sheriff’s red truck before. When he handed over the reins to the youngster, he’d given him all the advice he could think to give. He’d even given him the old “extra” revolver that he had kept in the glove compartment of his old truck.

“When you’re in a small department, you know there are going to be times when it’s just you and the bad guy, no one else around to help out. You’re the guy with the gun, but someday, some idiot’s going to be tempted to try and take it away from you. That’s bad because then odds are either he’s shot, or you’re shot, or he ends up being the guy with the gun. So what you do is, you leave another gun right there in the glove compartment and you let him see it. If he’s feeling lucky, he can go for that gun. By the time he finds out there isn’t any firing pin, you have the upper hand well and good.” That’s what he told Bradley. The question was, did Bradley listen to him?

Wally popped open the glove compartment. A bundle of money was crammed in so tightly that it didn’t even fall forward when the compartment opened. Wally pulled it out, then looked deeper, feeling over the driver’s manual and finding no gun. What he did find was a folded brown envelope.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a great hairy face appear in the side window and snapped his head up. Looking closer, he recognized the nose brushing against the window and the tongue wagging under it. “Damn, B.D., you’ll give me a heart attack yet,” Wally said.

The dog was standing on his back legs, paws against the door, and Wally had to open the window a bit so B.D. would hear his commanding, “Down, boy, down.”

When he opened the door, Wally heard the ocean eating up new ground on the beach below. B.D. squeezed past him into the shelter of the cab. Wally held B.D. on his lap, stroking his neck and back until both their heart rates returned to normal, then made the dog move his long legs and sit in the driver’s seat.

At least B.D. was safe here with him. By the sound of the waves, he’d soon have been drowned by that rising tide if Wally hadn’t gotten down the stairs real quick. Lucky thing the clasp had broken on his collar. First time that had happened.

Wally patted B.D., his big hands checking for any sign that the dog had hurt himself pulling on the collar, and instead he found the collar was still there, intact. Someone had let him off the leash. Wally reached back into his holster for the gun, leaning on B.D. to hide the motion from anyone watching. Somewhere, someone was out there.

The skies ran out of patience and sent all the rain the clouds had been collecting from miles of ocean. The rain created a grey cocoon blocking Wally’s view out the windows. If anyone was lying in wait for him, they were getting good and soaked now.

B.D. jumped across Wally’s lap as the driver’s-side door opened. Rain water sprayed them both and someone wearing a rain slicker pushed his way into the cab. In a single motion, Wally grabbed the collar of the rain slicker and pressed the gun into the neck behind it.

“Jeez, Wally, it’s me. Lyle Simons.”

The voice confirmed the identity of the little man. For some reason, his voice had never “broken,” just remained the pure soprano of the twelve-year-old choirboy. That was weird enough back when he was a blond-haired and blue-eyed young man. Now that he was bald and bearded, new people looked around to see who else was in the room when he spoke.

Wally let go and busied himself putting his gun back in the holster. He managed it without letting Lyle see how much his hands were shaking. Then he corralled B.D. between his outstretched arms, pressing his hands hard against the dashboard and tightening every muscle in his arms, neck, and back. He concentrated on relaxing them one by one and his breathing settled down again.

“What are you doing sitting here in Bradley’s new truck?” Lyle asked. He brushed his small hand over his well-kept beard, drying it out by spraying water everywhere else.

“Trying to get it started. No luck.”

“Too late for that. Can’t see in this rain. You’d just run yourself off the road.” Lyle shook his head as if to say that Wally needed a keeper.

“What are you doing out in this weather?” Wally asked.

“Would you believe that I was sent by an angel of mercy? That would be my Pammie. These days, the sickness makes her almost as squirrelly as the menopause did. She was worried that you’d get caught in the storm, knowing that you walk this beach every morning early. She just went on and on about it until I said I’d come looking for you. So I got all dressed up in this silly yellow rain gear she bought for me and, sure enough, she changed her mind and said there wasn’t enough time for me to be any use but I came anyway. Women!”

Wally stopped listening after he heard “not enough time for me to be any use.” It reminded him of how useless he felt when Terry was dying. Now it was happening to Lyle. His wife was sick with some rare disease that hardly anyone knew how to pronounce. Terry and Pammie had been good friends and strong in so many ways. Wally always thought that they would end up widows, living together long after he and Lyle were dead and buried. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be, the men running on ahead and leaving the women at home to clean up a few things before they came along in the second car and caught the guys having one last beer instead of setting up the campsite for the night?

“I don’t think Pammie has much time left,” Lyle said.

“Sorry, Lyle.”

“They enrolled her in those clinical trials in Boston but I guess she didn’t get the good stuff.” The little man fumbled around under the rain slicker until he found a handkerchief and used it first on his bald head, then on his nose.

Wally tried to think of something to say. Lyle had the money to try everything under the sun to save Pammie. He didn’t have to wonder what more money might have bought. Not like Wally, a dumb public servant scraping by on a sheriff’s salary who hoped the local docs knew enough at least to make Terry comfortable at the end. Still, he felt sorry for Lyle. Sometimes it was hard to see the little bit of luck you did have.

“It was you unleashed B.D.?”

“Yep. I heard him howling and figured he’d find you for me.”

B.D. looked around at the sound of his name to see what was expected of him. Wally told him to lie down and he curled up around Wally’s feet.

“Last year the water came all the way up over the highway,” Wally said.

The two men looked back towards the highway, noticing again how much higher it was than the parking lot. It rose above the ground on both sides. Having driven it many times, they knew that you could see the ocean to the left and to the right. If the water washed over the highway, they would be at sea for sure. It was a good truck, but it wasn’t a boat and the water could pretty much cover it.

“We’d be better off at the lighthouse, if that happened,” Lyle said.

Again Wally thought that the lighthouse was two miles away. He felt the strength of the wind pounding on the windows. He remembered how hard it had been climbing up the stairs. For the first time in his life he wished Lyle was a bigger, stronger man. As it was, the odds of his making it two miles through the rising wind were not good, alone or with Lyle by his side.

“I found Gene’s body on the beach,” Wally said.

“Gene? He’s younger than I am. What do you suppose did him in?”

“No blood. Nothing on the outside I noticed.”

“Too much booze, I’d guess.”

“Another thing. Look at all this money.” Wally showed Lyle where the bills were stuffed in the glove compartment.

“You know Gene was a funny guy sometimes. Like about the election.”

“What do you mean? About the election?”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. Gene paid a pile to fix that election so you’d lose. Sorry, Wally. If it wasn’t for Pammie being so sick, I’d have got wind of it in time to stop him. As it was, we were in Boston and...”

“Don’t see how his fixing the election fits into this,” Wally said.

“Well, it’s Bradley’s truck and he’s the guy who won the election. Maybe the money was a final payoff.”

Wally tried to get his head around it. Bradley winning the election by buying votes outright? Using Gene to hand out the payoffs? It sounded more like something Gene would make up than something Bradley would do. More than that, it meant a lot of people on the take, and he just didn’t want to believe that.

“So Bradley had the money to pay Gene.”

“Maybe he just left it in the glove compartment before he left the truck at Gene’s garage.”

Wally felt very tired. He hadn’t said anything to Lyle about Gene driving Bradley’s truck here. It was something Lyle could have guessed, but more likely something he knew from having seen Gene drive it here. That sure explained why Lyle hadn’t asked where Bradley was, even though they were sitting right here in Bradley’s truck.

“There was a brown envelope in the glove compartment, too,” Wally said. It wasn’t a very strong challenge to Lyle’s explanation, but rich men aren’t used to any challenge at all and Wally knew it didn’t take much to send them running down the very road they were trying to avoid.

“Gene was an awful bastard, Wally. I heard all about his run-in with you last Saturday. Everyone heard about his telling you that Terry ought never to have married you, that she’d be alive and kicking if she’d been his wife.”

“Yep, a lot of people heard about that,” Wally said, thinking that the story of Gene’s outburst had spread like wildfire because it was such an odd thing. In all these years, Gene hadn’t said a thing to anyone about Terry as far as Wally knew. If he was still angry about losing Terry he’d pretty much kept it to himself.

“What I’m saying is, maybe Gene just got what he deserved from someone who was fed up with him.”

“Fed up with his mouthing off in bars?” Wally asked. “If that’s enough to get a man killed, than half the men in town are in deep trouble.”

“No. Fed up with his being a dangerous drunk! You know he was. You knew it all the time and you did nothing. You were the sheriff and you did nothing. So he just went on and on making money off people while he messed up their cars. His life didn’t skip a beat even when he let people drive off in cars that had bad brakes that gave out on steep hills and crippled people for life.”

There it was then. Twenty years ago Lyle’s right-hand man was crushed in a car accident. The accident was caused by defective brakes.

“You mean like Darren’s accident. What makes you think it was Gene’s fault?”

“Look in the brown envelope, why don’t you?”

Wally pulled the envelope out of the glove compartment, pushing the money back in while he dealt with the envelope. It held only one page, a copy of a day’s repair log from Gene’s Garage. It was from the day before Darren’s accident. The top entry was a charge for brake repair for the only yellow Caddy in town and that had belonged to Darren.

“So Gene drove here for a short meeting with you, in a parking lot that was bound to be empty this time of year, in this weather?” Wally said. He watched Lyle thinking, chewing on his lip, realizing how far down this particular road he had gone.

The wind was shaking the cab and B.D. stuck his head up between Wally’s knees looking for a sign that they were going to get out of here.

At last Lyle said, “I didn’t intend to kill him. I sent him an anonymous e-mail, told him to bring all the money he could lay his hands on. Mailed him the copy of the log.”

“That does explain the money. He brought a lot of it. Still, he’s dead on the beach, Lyle. What happened?”

“I was an hour late showing up. It wasn’t dark or light, just grey, and he’d already been drinking, so I surprised him sitting on the top of the stairs. He had a gun in his hands, Wally. The bastard was looking to shoot someone!”

“So you were looking into the barrel of a gun?” Wally said.

“I just pretended he was joking. Showed him a flask and told him I’d snuck away for a little binge on my own, wink, wink. He never for a minute thought I was the one sent him that log page.”

“So you walked him down the beach to the break in the trees where you could keep an eye out in every direction, make sure no one saw you together?”

“No, that was his idea. He kept looking over his shoulder. Maybe he had some premonition, you know, that there was someone there who wanted to see him pay for all his sins.”

“How did he die, Lyle?”

“Drinking. Let’s face it. That’s how he’d want to go anyways.”

“Drinking what?”

“Homemade hooch. A new batch. Pretty high octane. It’d have to be to stop a heart that pickled. I didn’t make him drink it! I didn’t pour it down his throat!” Lyle said. There were tears in his eyes, but his lips were tight and his eyebrows were almost level.

“You brought the hooch with you, then?”

“Yes, but I’d already changed my mind about that. I decided that I’d settle for just taking the money and telling him he had to close up the garage. Then he pulled the gun and I had to pretend I was there to drink myself silly. So I pretended to take a swig or two and soon he was really belting it back like he couldn’t get enough of it.”

“There was no gun by the body.”

“No. It’s right here, Wally.” Lyle pulled a gun out of his pocket, holding it in his left hand, finger on the trigger, barrel towards Wally. If he pulled the trigger he’d likely break his wrist. Lyle knew less about guns than anyone in the county, except maybe Gene.

Wally felt the wave of determination that lifted Lyle’s chin. The look in his eye said he was thinking that he was a man who had done one hard thing and he was ready to do another.

“Why now? After all these years?”

“The IRS was auditing Gene. Augie was helping sort the more recent records from the old records. You know how messy Gene’s filing was. Anyway, Augie spotted the entry, got a copy to me.”

“You could have waited, until after Pammie...”

“No. I tried waiting but I was just sitting there day after day thinking about what to do about Gene instead of thinking what to do for Pammie. I wasn’t going to waste any more time that way.”

Wally sighed. He thought of Lyle at Pammie’s bedside, wanting to run away, wanting not to watch her die, wanting to watch anyone else die.

Wally reached over and took the gun. It came away easily, old friend that it was. Somehow, he felt better, knowing that Bradley had taken his advice and kept the “extra” gun in the glove compartment of his new truck. Gene must have found it there when he was trying to stuff all that cash in there. Gene wasn’t the kind of man to come up with a plan to kill someone, even a blackmailer, but given a gun right there in his hand on the morning he was going to meet a blackmailer, it must have been too tempting. Wally made a show of taking the bullets out of the gun. No need to point out the missing firing pin. He handed the empty gun back to Lyle.

“You go throw this into the ocean, so no one will be asking any questions about it. I’ll burn the log-book page. Then we’ll see if we can make it to that lighthouse.”

Lyle perked up and gave Wally a hopeful little smile, took the gun, and pushed the door open against the storm.

Wally looked over the page from the logbook. There were six entries besides the one for Darren’s midlife crisis on wheels. There, at the bottom of the page, was an entry that had a dozen slashes through it. That was the entry Gene thought he was being called to judgment about and it was for Terry’s Chevy, in for a routine oil change. If anyone looked at the records for that month, they’d find it was in for a routine this and a routine that every damn Thursday. Wally forgave Terry when she told him about it. What else could he do? She thought he was carrying on with some waitress in the next town and she was angry with him. It was Gene who told her about that waitress and he was lying as usual. Gene was playing on Terry’s insecurity but he forgot that she really loved Wally too much to let it go on long.

All these years Gene must have been waiting for Wally to punish him for that month. Wally tried to look at it from Gene’s point of view. Terry was gone. Wally wasn’t even sheriff anymore and so maybe he had nothing left to lose. Then there was the log with Terry’s appointment arriving in his mailbox, followed by an e-mail demanding a meeting in this out of the way place not far from where Wally walked every morning. That Wally was after him was certainly more likely than that Lyle had grown a backbone at this time of life.

Wally tore the log page into little pieces and burned them, one piece at a time, in the ashtray. Maybe if he had run Gene out of town Lyle would be sitting at home next to his wife, waiting for that final breath and hoping she couldn’t see how frightened he was of dying alone someday after she was gone.

When the page was gone, Wally closed the glove compartment on the bundle of money and waited for Lyle to come back. Of course, Lyle didn’t have to come back. He could just head out for the lighthouse on his own and leave Wally to the storm, if he had a mind to do that.

All in all there was not much chance that the storm would bring the ocean up over the truck. Wally’s own odds were better just staying where he was until it blew over. He thought it through, slowly. He and Lyle sitting in the truck until it was safe to leave, going back to town. Then what? Both of them knowing about the hooch, waiting for the other to tell. Lyle trying not to think about it and eventually unburdening his soul. The search through Gene’s records, the inevitable discovery of the odd pattern of Terry’s repairs that month. Bradley asking questions, secrets guessed at.

The wind was bending the trees in two. They were young and, like rubber, they folded easily. It was going to be a very big blow.

Wally patted his knee and B.D. climbed up on his lap.

“Sorry, old boy. We’re going to take our chances with the storm. Just as soon as Lyle gets back, we’ll head out for the lighthouse. Then we’ll all just leave this one in God’s good hands.”

© 2008 by Twist Phelan

“The Peahen’ is an homage to Peter Dexter,” Twist Phelan told EQMM. “In the 1970s and ’80s, before he earned ac-claim for his novels Paris Trout and Deadwood, Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, he cut to the heart of the American character... My story is based on one of those columns, which looks at the tension that arises from the influx of things foreign on all-American endeavors.”

The peahen appeared in Dex’s barn the same day he had trouble with the tractor. It was there when he came back from scraping the driveway. The gravel was always rutted and uneven after a winter under the snowplow. So every year, three weeks after the last melt, Dex ran the scraper over it. He liked how a farmer’s life was regular that way.

Dex knew what kind of bird it was because he’d seen a picture at the library. Not that Dex was a reader. It was August, and there were three patrons ahead of Maeve in the checkout line, and the library was air-conditioned. Dex had flipped through a book that had been left out on a table so the librarian wouldn’t ask him to leave. The book had thick pages, and photos, all of birds.

The Peterses only needed one car. Dex drove Maeve on her errands — to the market, to the doctor, and, once a week, to the library. He had never liked the idea of her alone in town.

The book said a peahen was a female peacock. That didn’t make sense to Dex. It was like saying a doe was a female buck, instead of a female deer. There had to be a word that applied to both. Otherwise what was a peacock? A male peahen?

The peahen in the barn was a dull green. At least it would have been dull on a peacock. For a peahen, it was probably average. Could even be spectacular, for all Dex knew. The book hadn’t said anything about that.

Maeve hadn’t been one for bright colors. At least that’s what Dex had thought. But then she’d started wearing that scarf. Red and purple twined around, colors that raised his pulse just looking at them. The store in town didn’t sell anything like it.

Dex noticed the peahen when he was maneuvering the tractor into the barn (tricky with the scraper attached on the front). While it was the first exotic bird ever to wander onto his property, Dex wasn’t in the frame of mind to appreciate it. His barn and house sat on a slight rise. When he was driving up the incline, the tractor had started making that horrible racket.

The noise upset Dex. He needed the tractor to plow his acreage, plant his seed, harvest his crops. A farmer’s whole life depended on his tractor.

The tractor hadn’t been all that quiet to begin with. Even before the noise started, it was so loud, Dex had trouble hearing anything else when he was driving it. Not birds, not the occasional car down the dirt road, not a person walking to the farm next-door.

It seemed to Dex that the noise meant big trouble. The engine, like the rest of the tractor, was Italian, as notoriously temperamental as those people.

And it wasn’t just the noise. The tractor was a Bendorini, a company that had gone into bankruptcy right after Dex bought the tractor. Another company had bought the name and liabilities. The closest authorized dealership was in Boise.

Dex didn’t live in Boise. He lived in Stanley, a small mountain town almost four hours away. By car. It would take longer if he had to go by tractor.

Not that he expected it would help if he did get there. Dex was pretty sure the dealer wouldn’t repair the tractor, at least not without charging him. That’s because he’d bought the tractor secondhand from his neighbor, Victor Rossi. A used tractor was like a used car. Buy a Bendorini from Victor Rossi, and you had to go back to Victor if there was a problem. Unless Victor had printed As Is on the bottom of the bill of sale. And Victor had.

Dex suspected the problem was either in the engine or the transmission — a flaw in the heart of the machine. The noise — a human-like scream of pain or pleasure — had occurred half a dozen times as he climbed the hill to the barn. Dex never wanted to hear that sort of noise again.

Dex drove his Italian Chapter 11 tractor to the rear of the barn. He killed the engine — with a Bendorini, you didn’t turn a key, you pulled a lever that strangled it. He popped the hood and touched a piece of metal and burned himself. While he held his reddened fingers under cold water, he thought about how things might have been different if he’d bought a John Deere like everybody else.

John Deere was American through and through. No parts from China, no Mexicans putting it together. The company had been founded in Illinois by a blacksmith turned plow-maker nearly two hundred years ago. Dex had worn the company’s kelly-green trucker hats all through high school.

The Bendorini was red. Dex remembered the first time he saw it. It had been last fall, the second week of October. Victor was sitting on the tractor, parked beside the road where his property adjoined Dex’s. Maeve was there, too. Every day except Sunday she walked down the dusty track to check their mailbox, even though there were usually only bills, and those arrived toward the end of the month. Later, Dex would find out Maeve walked other places, too.

His wife had her head tilted back, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. While Dex watched, Victor said something to her, they both laughed, then Maeve walked back up the driveway. Right then, Dex decided he wanted a Bendorini.

“I’m buying a Bendorini,” he’d told Maeve that night when she was putting away the laundry. He liked how she folded his T-shirts so they lined up like kernels of corn in his drawer.

A new tractor cost sixty thousand dollars. Dex didn’t have sixty thousand dollars. Neither did the bank, at least not to lend to him. So Dex had walked down the driveway and bought the Bendorini from Victor for a little cash, plus an acre of plum trees Victor said he’d had his eye on. Dex’s father had planted the trees when he bought the farm fifty-nine years ago. Maeve used to make jam from the fruit.

While Dex ran his hand under the faucet, his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the barn. The peahen had moved to the corner.

If she was bothered by the noise of the tractor — it had stopped screaming now that it wasn’t climbing hills — she didn’t show it. She stared at Dex. He stared at her.

Dex walked over to see what the peahen thought she was doing in his barn. While she wasn’t exactly friendly, she did sidle over so he could see what she was looking at. They both stared at the washing machine.

When their old dryer had given out and they had to buy a new one, Maeve asked if they could get the matching washing machine, too. Dex had put the old washer in the barn. Maeve had used it to wash his overalls and rags and other really dirty stuff. But even on the Sanitize setting, it couldn’t get all the stains out. Dex had to burn the shirt and pants he’d been wearing two weeks ago.

Dex put some rags into the washer, added detergent, and pressed the On/Off button. The light above the button changed from green to red as the washer filled with water. He and the peahen stood there for a while, enjoying the On/Off light. When Dex began to imagine them as a married couple watching the sunset, he realized it was time to go back and look at the tractor.

The peahen stayed where she was. Dex admired her for knowing what she liked and sticking with it. People should be as constant.

He got out his toolbox and looked for his favorite wrench for a few minutes — the big one with the oversized head — before he remembered he didn’t have it anymore. So he took out another wrench and tried to tighten a bolt.

The wrench didn’t fit. Dex went through two more wrenches before he realized the bolts were metric, and he didn’t have metric wrenches. So he went inside and called the dealership in Boise. They referred him to the regional distributorship in Salt Lake, who gave him a number to call in Los Angeles.

Dex called the number. It was either the company that had bought Bendorini out of bankruptcy or a law firm, he wasn’t sure. By that time he was using bad language, language so bad that he felt he should call up his best friend Tommy DeFillipi to apologize for what he’d been saying about Italians. But it had been awhile since he and Tommy had been in touch.

Before he hung up on Dex, the person in Los Angeles suggested the problem might be the tension in the belt. Having no one else to call, Dex went back to the barn to check.

The peahen didn’t move as he walked past. She was completely involved in the washer light.

Dex reached under the tractor. This time he didn’t burn himself because the metal was cool. He fingered the belt that connected the engine to the mower part. It felt all right, but it was hard to tell for sure. Things that he thought should be within his grasp weren’t always. He tried again, then gave up. Dex figured some people were born to fix certain things, and some weren’t. It was like being born Italian. Either you were, or you weren’t.

He thought some more, then decided that if he sharpened the scraper, it wouldn’t have been a wasted afternoon. So he got out a pair of pliers — his wrenches were still useless — unfastened the scraper deck, and slid it out from underneath the tractor.

It weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex distinctly remembered Victor telling him how easy it would be to take off the deck for sharpening. A couple of bolts, a couple of linchpins, and that was it. Victor hadn’t mentioned how hard it was to maneuver a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex had found this out for himself two weeks ago.

Dex sharpened the scraper blade, caressing the edge with the file, doing it more gently than he usually would. When he was finished, he decided to put the scraper back on. An hour later, sweaty, arms shaking, he finally got one of the linchpins in place. After that, it was easy to reassemble everything else. He’d found nothing that might explain the scream. He had bashed his right hand, though, the one he’d used to swing the big wrench with the oversized head.

After putting away the file, Dex went to the barn entrance. He pressed his palms against his aching back, looked toward his neighbor’s farm. Victor’s place was much larger than Dex’s. Next to the silo was a green tractor. Beyond was five thousand acres of soybeans. Dex had twelve hundred acres of corn.

Soy was a more profitable crop than corn. Easier to grow, too. But Dex’s father had served in the Pacific. “I’m not growing Jap food,” he had told the seed company rep. Dex could see his point. Three months ago, when Maeve started making the new red sauce, he had stopped eating spaghetti.

It would take Dex twenty minutes to walk down his driveway, along the road, then up Victor’s driveway to the big house in the trees. A trail cut behind Dex’s barn in the direction of Victor’s place, but Dex had never used it. New grass was sprouting in the track. Soon the trail would be overgrown. Lifting the keys from the peg by the door, Dex got into his pickup.

Victor’s eyes narrowed when he saw Dex standing on his porch. He didn’t ask him in, but instead talked to him through the screen door. Victor lived alone. From what Dex could see through the screen, his house was tidier than Dex’s. Not as nice as Maeve would have kept it. But close. Dex wished his house was tidy again.

Dex explained about the disturbing tractor noises. Victor started shaking his head before he finished.

“I sold that tractor to you as is,” he said.

Dex was tempted to use bad language again, but didn’t. Instead he asked Victor if he wouldn’t mind taking a look at the tractor. Maybe because he used to own it he would know what was wrong with it.

“You got any metric wrenches?” Dex said.

Dex drove them back to his place. He saw Victor glance at the side yard of the house as they passed, where Maeve used to hang the bed sheets on the clothesline. She said they smelled better when they were air-dried. Dex wondered if that was true, why she didn’t dry everything that way. They wouldn’t have needed a new dryer. Or a washer, either.

“Maeve still at her sister’s?” Victor said, breaking the silence that had descended when they got into the truck. His voice was slightly accented.

Dex grunted. He parked the truck and led the way into the barn.

“What the hell?” Victor eyed the peahen.

“She likes looking at the washing machine.” Dex said.

“It’s a peafowl.” Victor took out his cell phone.

Peafowl. Leave it to Victor to know the word. Dex started the tractor. Victor scowled, pressed the phone against his ear, and kept talking. Dex let the tractor run.

Victor closed the phone. “Sounds fine to me.”

Dex grunted and lifted the hood.

Victor looked over the engine without touching it.

“Looks fine to me.”

Dex felt a rush of anger. The tractor, Dex, nothing was fine. They’d never be fine again, and Victor knew it. Dex picked up the biggest of Victor’s metric wrenches and pointed.

“What about that part there?”

Victor leaned over to see what Dex was pointing at. The wrench hit the base of Victor’s skull with a dull thud that Dex felt in his stomach.

The peahen never looked away from the washing machine.

Dex set down the metric wrench. It had worked just as well as his big one with the oversized head.

He rolled Victor’s body into a tarp, then hoisted it onto the scraper attachment. Pain shot through his lower back. The muscles were still sore from lifting Maeve.

Dex put a sack of lime on top of the rolled-up tarp. He’d have to buy more in Boise. Already he’d picked up the season’s order from the hardware in town.

The sun shone through the barn door. Dust motes swirled. Two hours left in the farming day. Dex climbed onto the tractor. At least the ground wouldn’t be near-frozen this time.

He drove the tractor out of the barn. The peahen didn’t flinch.

It was almost dark when Dex drove the tractor back up the hill. No shriek. Maybe everything was fixed now.

Dex climbed off the tractor. He noticed the peahen still standing in front of the washer, staring at the red light.

“Show’s over,” Dex said. He punched the On/Off button. The red light went off.

The bird stared at Dex as though she couldn’t believe what he had done. As Dex headed into the house to strip off his clothes and burn them, the peahen opened her beak and the air shattered and Dex understood in that moment that the noise had not come from the tractor.

A car bumped up the driveway. A sheriff’s deputy leaned his head out the window. He wore a baseball cap that said Animal Control across the front.

“Hey, Mr. Peters,” he said. “Got a call about a peahen. Do you know where I can find Victor Rossi?”

That’s the radio, Allison, but I caught the symbolism.

© 2006 by Edward D. Hoch. First published in Great Britain in I.D.: Crimes of Identity, edited by Martin Edwards.

Here, for the first time in print in the U. S., is a story Edward D. Hoch wrote for the British anthology I.D.: Crimes of Identity (edited by Martin Edwards) in 2006. Readers in search of more new Hoch stories should look for a copy of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, which contains the new Hoch tale “The Automaton Museum.” Next month we’ll be featuring the last story the great short-story writer worked on, completed by Jon. L. Breen.

Linda O’Toole had been in Gibraltar only a few hours when a rumpled little man stopped her in the lobby of the Rock Hotel and asked, “Pardon me, but are you Laura Nostrum?”

“That’s right,” she agreed. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Liam Fitzhugh with the London Daily Mail. Do you have any comment on the Internet news story stating that you’re an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency?”

Linda gave him her brightest smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about. I’m here representing Osage Investment Corporation at the Casino Conference.”

“Then you deny any involvement with the CIA?”

“I certainly do. If you’ll excuse me now, I have a meeting to attend.” When he showed no interest in stepping aside, she walked around him and out of the hotel.

© 2008 by Paul Halter; translation © 2008 by Robert Adey and John Pugmire.

EQMM has mentioned before the availability in English of Paul Halter’s short story collection The Night of the Wolf, whose title story appeared in EQMM in 2006. It’s worth noting, however, that one of the other tales that appeared in that volume, “The Flower Girl,” received a nomination for the Barry Award for Best Short Story of 2007. Currently three Halter novels have been translated into English, and all await a U.S. publisher.

Translated from the French by Robert Adey and John Pugmire

© 2008 by Jean Femling

Californian Jean Femling is the author of three mystery novels: Getting Mine and Hush Money (St. Martin’s), and Backyard (Harper & Row). Her short stories have appeared in Without a Clue, Descant, and elsewhere. She joins us this month with a high-speed, high-tension adventure on the road that has its origin in a situation many of us have witnessed.

She started it.

She made it happen.

Dillon was just sitting there in the double left-turn pocket onto Fair waiting for the signal to change when he happened to glance over at the car beside him. And there she was, staring at him. Her mouth was even open a little — when his eyes met hers she kind of flinched like she was waking up and snapped her eyes forward. Probably she couldn’t believe her luck.

She gave him a good long look at her profile, which was perfect. A little prize, she was, silky skin bare to the shoulder and then everything covered; light blond hair pulled up on top in a bunch. Her left forearm was lying on the doorframe, her window actually open. Little hands with natural pink fingernails white-tipped, none of this black garbage, and he really liked that, too. She was sort of stroking her side mirror, like it was somebody’s face.

His new music system going, the gigantic bass speakers booming almost too low to hear, you more felt them; so low they shook the ground and the car like bombs tramping. She had to feel them, too, slamming into her, invading, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t get away, she had to sit right there and take it. He stared at her but she kept turned away, she wouldn’t look back. That was calculated, too; everything to lure him.

Dillon was so turned on he only now thought to lean over and talk to her. But then the signal changed, the cars in front started to move, and she jumped forward like a scared little rabbit. The car in front of Dillon was slow and he wanted him to stomp it so he could pull even with her and get something going. She had bitchin’ wheels; a tan Mercedes 360SL — probably a high-school graduation present from her daddy. Maybe even her sixteenth birthday. Probably she was her daddy’s Babygirl, he would get her anything. She had only to ask. Not like Dillon’s beat-up Camaro; it still needed a lot of work and he was still paying on it.

How old would she be? Twenty, max, he’d bet. Dillon was old enough to get his guts shot out, if he was stupid enough to volunteer, but not to buy a beer. An hour till he had to be at work; his two junk classes for the day done. He had time.

Babygirl’s lane was moving faster than his: Dillon shoved his snout right in behind her, making the next car back hit his brakes with a screech and an angry honk. And Babygirl noticed Dillon: In her rearview mirror he saw the sudden panic flare in her eyes. Now, how to get her to stop? Too much traffic to pull alongside and try the old low rear tire bit on her. Follow her when she pulled off? She might be pretty close to home, though. He could see the top half of her face perfectly, and she wasn’t looking at him now. Worried, more. Like guilty, daydreaming about a strange guy in another car.

What was all that crap along the bottom of her rear window? Oh; little stuffed toys. A monkey, a tiger — alligator, bluebird, polar bear. Even a buffalo with horns. The car in front of Babygirl now was a dusty old chug, and that suited Dillon just fine for the moment. Heyyy... she was moving one lane left, maybe for the freeway entry lane. This was beginning to look promising.

Onto the freeway and starting to move. Now Dillon could let it out a little, let her see his style. Some way he had to get her to pull off at one of these exits. He couldn’t do anything till he got to talk to her. Through the 405 bottleneck; time enough here to give him a sign. But she got into the middle lane and built up to 75, and then just held steady. Seven or eight cars ahead of her there was a big square truck, plain white: She’d have to go around that. In the meantime Dillon tried pulling up close behind her right on her bumper and then backing off a little, rocking it up and back, up and back, as close as he dared. She’d have to get that signal. But she drove straight ahead, hunched forward over the wheel.

Harass her enough so she’d be screaming to get off the freeway. Dillon tried pulling alongside her and then swerving like he was going to jam himself in front of her; and again, again. But she held her speed, her eyes terrified. The truck ahead was opening up, they were all beginning to move. Ah; now her cell phone comes out, glued to her head. Dillon was too close for her to pick up his license number, he was positive. Only four cars ahead of her, and now three. Two.

Cell phone down. Dillon sees Babygirl looking to move over into the right lane, certainly to get off. But no, they fly right on past the off ramp, she’s not going to get off. Baby bitch. And he the dog in heat. Dillon grins: a good song title. Now she’s the last one and she pulls in snug behind the truck. Like a sheep and it’s some kind of shelter. Nutso — the truck driver has no idea she’s back there, he can’t possibly see her. And suddenly the truck isn’t moving ahead: It’s shuddering, tires screaming, that huge block of white getting bigger — Babygirl is going straight into it, everything in slo-mo, it takes forever and here goes Dillon, there’s nowhere else, he braces his arms on the wheel, her rear window a sheet of red like a shade coming down onto the toys... Too-loud glass crumbling... escalating beyond hearing—

In orbit, screaming in a long flat trajectory too fast to hear. Out of sight — Blinding — Everything black...

Cool Empty

One part screams — crushing him. Caught. Held. Sudden cold. Too many sensations.

© 2008 by Stephen Ross

2006 Department of First Stories author Stephen Ross makes his second appearance in EQMM this month. His “day job” as an IT programmer and technical writer also involves editing and contributing to his company’s magazine, and he sometimes freelances as a newspaper columnist. But writing is not Mr. Ross’s only interest. The New Zealand resident also composes songs and plays the piano.

* * * *

The knife-edge of winter was a pleasant time during which to travel by rail. Autumn’s dying breath could be observed from the warmth of the train carriage, and the moment savored with a sip from a flask of hot tea.

Inspector Quayle drained the mug. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the yearly demise of the English countryside, but rather, he welcomed the sense of coziness it ushered in — a warm fire, a comfortable armchair, and a damn good book. And were it not for the fact the country was at war, he would have enjoyed it a whole lot more.

Quayle lit a cigarette. He was a slim man with a slight moustache. There had to be better things to occupy his time than investigating the disappearance of an elderly schoolmaster-cum-tutor from a country estate in the West Midlands. It wasn’t as if London was without its share of missing persons — Herr Hitler was seeing to that on a nightly basis.

The word had come from on high. The schoolmaster was an elderly man by the name of Peter Black. Black was tutor to the two Wickern boys at Mallbright, and the boys’ father, Lord Wickern, was a senior official at the ministry of defense with the ear of the prime minister. Black had vanished, seemingly without trace, and Lord Wickern wanted it “looked into and taken care of.“

The journey was three hours by rail out of Paddington Station. Mallbright was nestled in among the rolling hills and vales north of the Cotswolds. It had been the seat of the Wickern family since the time of Cromwell.

The Mallbright groundsman collected Quayle from the local train station in the late afternoon, and from there it was a forty-minute ride by horse and open carriage.

The groundsman went by the name of Standish. He was a gruff old man of few words. Easily in his eighties, wiry with a grizzled jaw, he had the appearance of someone who’d been left out in the rain for a year. And fifteen minutes into the carriage ride, he finally spoke. He leant back in the driver’s seat and asked a question over his shoulder: “Is it just you, then?”

“What were you expecting?” Quayle asked. He was seated directly behind the old man.

“The master said there were coppers coming. Is it only you?”

“Yes. Finding a missing schoolmaster is hardly a priority at this point in the kingdom’s history.”

The groundsman nodded appreciatively. He snapped his whip at the horses.

Quayle adjusted his scarf. It was bitterly cold. “Aside from the Wickern boys, who lives at Mallbright at the moment?”

“There’s Mrs. Chalmers, the housekeeper. There’s young Margaret, the housemaid. There’s Joseph, the stable lad. And then there’s me — I look after the grounds and tend to things.”

“And the schoolmaster would have made five?”

“Aye, a staff of five. In ordinary times, we be forty-two of us, but not since the war come.” He shook his head. “They’ve all gone now — some into factories, some into uniform.”

The final approach to Mallbright was along a sweeping drive leading to a building that reminded Quayle rather of the British Museum — three floors of austere gray architecture and a facade the length of his entire neighborhood back in Shepherd’s Bush.

“How often does Lord Wickern come up from London?”

“We’ve not seen the master in a year.”

As the horses brought the carriage closer to the house, Standish glanced back over his shoulder. “This is what we’re fighting for,” he rasped.

“Your master’s house?”

“England.”

Mrs. Chalmers, the housekeeper, was a strong-minded Irishwoman who walked with the clip of a woman thirty years her junior. She was dressed in drab colors and her hair was tied back into a severe bun. Quayle trailed along behind her.

“The schoolmaster’s been gone for nearly two weeks,” Mrs. Chalmers reported. “One day he was here, the next day he was not.”

The interior of the house — if such a word suited — was labyrinthine. Hallways and passages led to even more hallways and passages, with staircases leading up and down seemingly around every turn. And every inch of it was devoid of life. It was like touring a mausoleum.

“This must be a difficult place to keep clean,” Quayle observed. His voice actually echoed.

The Irishwoman glanced back at him. There was weariness in her brow. “Most of the rooms have been shut up since the war’s come. The south wing has been closed down entirely — ever since Lady Wickern died.” She crossed herself. “God rest her soul.”

“The boys’ mother?”

She nodded. “Lady Wickern was returning from New York in the first months of the war. A German U-boat sank her ship in the middle of the night. All lives were lost.”

The destination of Mrs. Chalmers’ march was the schoolmaster’s bedroom. It was a small, tidy room. There was a bed, a bookshelf, and a writing desk with a view of the grounds to the west of the house.

She drew back the curtain. “Like I said. One day the schoolmaster was here, the next day he was not.”

“What do you think happened to him?” Quayle asked.

She looked doubtful. “Were it not for his shoes, I wouldn’t have troubled Lord Wickern. I would have assumed the man had just up and left in the night.”

“His shoes?”

“Black has four pairs of shoes, and if you look in his closet, you will find four pairs of shoes.”

Quayle looked. There were four pairs of polished shoes.

“He was always a fancy dresser,” the housekeeper remarked. “Always well turned out.”

Quayle had noted the clothing hanging above the shoes. The schoolmaster evidently knew a good tailor.

“And as best I can see, not one stitch is missing. If he did just up and leave in the night, he did so in bare feet and in his nightshirt.”

Quayle took a look under the bed. There was a suitcase. He dragged it out. The suitcase was adorned with numerous luggage labels. He opened it. It was empty.

“Where’s his passport?”

The housekeeper didn’t know.

On the bedside table was a pair of spectacles and a book: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. On the writing desk beneath the window lay a pocket watch and a pipe. There was also a ration book — it was in Black’s name. Even just a cursory glance about the room suggested that if the man had just up and left in the night, he had apparently done so empty-handed.

“I will need to speak to the boys.”

“They’ll be at their lessons in the schoolroom.”

“Without a teacher?”

Mrs. Chalmers nodded. “They’re very good. Like little gentlemen, they are.”

The schoolroom was on the floor above the servants’ hall. There was a blackboard at the front, next to which was a desk for the teacher. There was a large globe, several bookcases lined with scholarly tomes, and, facing the blackboard, six student desks — suggesting the room had served many generations of Wickerns.

“You’re a policeman, aren’t you?” one of the Wickern boys inquired. He didn’t look up from his book. His voice sounded like that of a mildly irritated peer of the realm.

Quayle had entered and had been observing from the rear.

The boys were seated at their desks. The boy who had spoken was studying a book on the history of the monarchy. He glanced back over his shoulder to confirm his suspicion. The scar on his cheek announced him as Richard Wickern — he had fallen badly from a tree when he was six.

Quayle crossed the room. “I’m Detective Inspector Quayle.” He walked around and in front of the desks.

The Wickern boys were identical twins. They had matching small faces, curly blond hair, and pale blue eyes. There was only one distinguishing feature that could separate the two of them — Richard’s scar.

“Are you with Scotland Yard?” the other boy, Rawdon Wickern, asked.

“Yes.”

Rawdon was preoccupied with tying knots into lengths of twine, reading the instructions from a Boy Scout manual. He was as well spoken as his brother. “Have you come to look for the schoolmaster?”

“Yes, I have.”

“May we see your identification?” Richard asked.

Quayle obliged.

Richard took the inspector’s badge, and the two boys examined it with forensic interest.

The Wickern boys were dressed alike in tailored outfits. They were children, but with their manner and tone of speaking — daggers dipped in honey — they were like two miniature Edwardian gentlemen.

“Where were you born, Inspector Ian Edward Quayle?” Richard asked.

“London.”

“Shouldn’t you be fighting in the war?” Rawdon asked.

“I’m too old for that.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixty-six.”

“We’re fourteen. We’re twins.”

“Did you fight in the Great War?” Richard asked.

Quayle nodded. “I was a sergeant.”

Richard passed the identification back. “Have you met our father?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Our father works at the War Office.”

“He’s very important,” Rawdon added.

“So I understand.”

Richard leant back in his chair and stared indifferently at the inspector. “We don’t know where Black has gone.” His pronunciation of the schoolmaster’s name was with such distinctive sharpness, it almost carved the word into two syllables.

“What kind of man was he?” Quayle asked. He lit a cigarette.

Young Margaret motioned to speak, but then thought better of it. The housemaid couldn’t have been much older than the two boys, a tiny thing with a face of freckles.

The five of them — Quayle, Standish, Mrs. Chalmers, Margaret, and Joseph the stableboy — were seated at the dinner table in the servants’ hall. Supper had been polished off, and coffee was being drunk. The Wickern boys had been fed earlier, upstairs in the dining room, and had been seen off to bed.

Joseph the stableboy had said nothing throughout the supper. He was a peculiar boy of eighteen. His eyes never appeared to focus on anything, and his face seemed to be permanently on the verge of a smile.

“The schoolmaster was always reading,” Mrs. Chalmers commented. “He always had a book in his hand.” She licked her fingertip and dabbed up the remaining crumbs from the breadboard. “I couldn’t begin to think what’s happened to him.”

Standish lit his pipe. “Maybe the man got what he deserved.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying.” Standish stubbed out his match in an ashtray. “I never did like the man.”

“Why didn’t you like him?” Quayle asked.

The groundsman’s face crinkled up into a scowl. “He was a bit toffee, for a servant. He spoke with an accent like he was one of them upstairs.”

“So, he was well spoken and well dressed,” the housekeeper said. “That’s no reason to wish ill of him.”

Standish shook his head. “If you ask me, you’re wasting your time.” He glanced across the table at the inspector. “The man’s cleared off. It’s as plain as the moustache under your nose.”

“We heard something,” young Margaret finally said.

“What did you hear?” Quayle asked her.

“In the night. We heard a noise. I reckon it was a gun.” She nodded with wide eyes. “It came from the south wing.”

“There’s nowt in the south wing,” Standish remarked.

Mrs. Chalmers was shaking her head. “That noise, whatever it was, had nothing to do with the schoolmaster’s disappearance. We heard that noise the night after he’d gone.”

Mallbright was freezing at night. It was after two in the morning, and Quayle was sitting upright in bed, buried under a mound of blankets and wearing a woolen nightcap. He had been billeted in the schoolmaster’s room. The bed had been made fresh the day the man had disappeared, and Mrs. Chalmers saw no good reason in opening up any other rooms, given that an empty bed already lay waiting.

Quayle examined the book lying on the bedside table. He opened it to the first page. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens was one of his favorite authors. The author was also apparently one of the schoolmaster’s favorites — there was a dedication on the book’s title page. It was written in a wide hand:

To Peter, Because I know you adore Dickens. Your brother, DES London, 1897

The book had been read many times since that dedication. On almost every page, Black had made annotations in the margins — scholarly observations, in small, delicate handwriting.

There were footsteps. Quayle looked up. Someone was outside in the hallway. There was a faint reflection of candlelight on the shiny floorboards underneath the closed door. Someone had stopped outside his room.

Quayle listened closely. There were softly spoken voices — to whom they belonged and what they were saying he couldn’t determine. There was a click as the door handle was taken in someone’s hand. It slowly began to rotate.

“Who is it?” Quayle asked in a sharp voice.

The door handle fell limp. The reflection of candlelight vanished.

Quayle jumped out of bed. Within seconds, he had opened the door and was standing outside his room.

There was no one there. The only sound he could now hear was that of the wind rustling branches against the windowpanes at the end of the hallway.

Breakfast the next morning consisted of coffee and a cigarette. Quayle consumed it in the servant’s hall around eight. He was alone — the household staff having promptly begun their day at five-thirty. And after breakfast, he ventured to another country: the south wing.

The south wing was the oldest part of the house. It constituted the original Mallbright — the building having been steadily augmented and added to by every successive generation of Wickerns. As a result, the overall structure was that of a vast maze of mismatched rooms, passageways, and staircases.

There was a discernible stillness in the rooms of the south wing. It was as though life had taken pause there and was waiting patiently for the war to end. No one lived in that part of the house. It was dark and empty, and acres of sheets covered nearly everything in sight. There was also a distinctive mustiness — a damp odor that hung in the air in the hallways. It made Quayle’s nose itch.

“Who goes there?”

The blunt barrel of a rifle confronted the inspector. He had just turned a corner in the hallway, and Rawdon was aiming at his head.

“What is the password?” the boy demanded.

“Put that down,” Quayle barked. Rawdon was holding a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle.

“Don’t worry, Inspector,” Richard said. “It isn’t loaded.” He had come out of the darkness from behind his brother.

Rawdon lowered the rifle.

“Why are you boys playing in this part of the house?” Quayle asked. He noticed Richard was holding a similar rifle. “I thought this part of the house was closed down?”

“We’re not playing,” Richard explained. “We’re practicing. If the German army invades, we wish to be ready.” The boy then slung the strap of his rifle over his shoulder and marched back up the hall from where he had come.

Rawdon did the same, but he paused for a moment before following his brother. “He had a secret.”

“Who did?” Quayle asked.

“The schoolmaster.”

“What kind of secret?”

“A dirty secret.” The boy then about-faced and marched off like a toy solider.

Quayle followed after them.

The boys were quick. They slipped away with ease. They knew the layout of the house from instinct, and within a minute, Quayle had lost sight of them completely.

Turning another corner, and starting to run, Quayle’s shin connected with a solid deadweight on wheels — a wooden trolley — and he tripped headfirst over it.

“Oh dear, oh dear! Have you hurt yourself?” It was Mrs. Chalmers. She was approaching from another direction, a tin of Brasso in one hand and a cloth in the other. She helped the inspector back to his feet.

“I’ve told the boys not to play with that,” she said of the trolley. “It’s for moving pianos. It’s not a toy. And it’s not meant to be left out in the hallway where visitors can do themselves an injury by tripping over it.”

“I’m all right,” Quayle insisted. His trouser leg was ripped, and he was bleeding.

The housekeeper led the inspector back to the other side of the house. Along the way, she explained that there were four pianos in the house, that Lady Wickern — God rest her soul — had been a pianist of some ability, and ever since her death, not a solitary note had been played on any one of the things.

Mrs. Chalmers wrapped a bandage around Quayle’s leg as best she could. The inspector had his foot up on a chair in the kitchen.

“It won’t stop the bruising,” she remarked. “But it will settle it down.”

“How did Black and the two boys get along together?” Quayle asked.

“I think the three of them got along well.” She safety-pinned the bandage in place. “They were certainly always together, I can tell you that.”

“What did the boys think of Black, did they ever say?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I supposed they liked him. I can’t be saying I’ve ever had reason to think otherwise.”

Quayle tried walking. It was uncomfortable. “One other thing. Do you have any idea where I could locate his brother, Des?”

The housekeeper shook her head. “I really couldn’t say.” She then added: “I didn’t know the schoolmaster had a brother called Des. I knew of a brother called David, but he died some time ago.”

Young Margaret informed Quayle she had turned fifteen only two weeks earlier — she was proud of this fact. She was dusting in the main dining room. The dining table was a long slab of oak with seating for forty.

Young Margaret also had an opinion on the relationship between the schoolmaster and the two boys. “He liked Richard and Rawdon very much,” she said. She then corrected herself. “No, he loved them. He thought the world of those two boys. They were like his children.”

She also commented that she found the schoolmaster to be a kind and gentle man. She knew the other household staff didn’t care for him, in particular Mr. Standish, but the schoolmaster had always been thoroughly pleasant to her.

“Where are the bullets kept?” Quayle asked.

“What bullets would they be?” Standish replied. He was standing by the stable entrance. He held the halter to a chestnut-coloured gelding and was gently stroking its neck. Joseph the stableboy was at the rear of the horse, hammering in a new shoe.

“The two boys are inside playing soldiers,” Quayle said. “They’ve got a couple of army-issue rifles.”

“All the bullets are under lock and key.”

“Whose lock and key?”

“Mine. And never you mind the boys. They’re just children. They’re just playing.”

Quayle lit a cigarette. “When I was a lad, I played with marbles and conkers.”

Joseph finished his task. He wandered up alongside Standish and stared at the inspector. It was unnerving. The boy never blinked.

“He’s not right,” Standish remarked. He patted Joseph’s head.

Joseph grinned. “The snow will come soon,” he announced. “Everything will be white.”

“That thought worries me.” Quayle looked out across the lawn and into the distance. Almost all he could see was Mallbright — the estate was several hundred acres of rolling countryside. “Is there anywhere on the property Black could have ventured to and got into trouble?”

“Like I said last night at supper,” Standish rasped, “the schoolmaster’s cleared off. He’ll not be found here.”

Quayle stared at him. “You seem rather sure of that.”

The old man led the horse out of the stable. Its shoes clattered on the cobbles. “There’s nowt happens at Mallbright that I don’t know about.”

“Then, by that statement, you know what happened to him.”

Standish answered with stony silence. He led the horse away.

Three hours later, it occurred to Quayle he should have brought something to eat. He had gone on a ramble to the far reaches of the grounds with nothing more than a sore leg, cigarettes, and a half-full hip flask of brandy.

He also realized he didn’t much fancy winter in the countryside. The air had a forbidding and arctic bite to it, the trees were all dead, and the ground was sodden. And nowhere on the estate was the schoolmaster to be found — as far as he could determine.

In the late afternoon, Quayle found the Wickern boys back in the schoolroom. They were reading — one had a book on British naval victories, the other a book on Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Neither was in a pressing hurry to acknowledge the inspector’s presence.

He stood in front of their desks and cleared his throat.

Rawdon eventually looked up.

“What was his secret?” Quayle asked.

The child didn’t answer. His expression gave away nothing.

Richard glanced at his brother. It was an icy stare.

“You said the schoolmaster had a dirty secret. What was it?”

“It is distasteful,” Richard answered on his brother’s behalf. “And we do not care to discuss it.”

Rawdon brought a single finger vertically to his pursed lips and made the gesture of silence. “We’re reading,” he whispered. The pair of them returned to the depths of their books.

Quayle exhaled a gust of air. The two boys might have been child-ren, but they had mastered the landed gentry’s ability to thoroughly ignore anyone should they choose to.

“Last night, someone went to open the door to my room,” Quayle said. “That was you two boys, wasn’t it?”

Richard nodded unabashedly. “You are correct.”

No explanation was forthcoming.

Quayle put a cigarette to his mouth. “May I ask why?” He took out his matches.

“We were on patrol,” Rawdon answered. “And we would prefer it if you did not smoke in this room.”

“What do you mean — you were on patrol?“

“Night watch,” Richard said. “We patrol the house at set times during the evening.”

“We don’t want to be caught off guard,” Rawdon added. “If there is an attack, it will come in the night.”

Quayle returned his cigarette to the case. He shook his head. “You boys are utterly obsessed with this war.”

“War is a serious thing, Inspector,” Richard remarked.

“You’re children. You’re living here in the lap of luxury. You’re hundreds of miles from the hell that is London at the moment, or the Continent. You should be enjoying your childhoods.”

The sound of a distant bell echoed in the hall outside the schoolroom. The two boys instinctively closed their books and stood up from their desks.

“Excuse us,” Richard said. “That is our call to dinner.”

“So, where is the schoolmaster?” Mrs. Chalmers asked.

“Yes,” young Margaret asked. “Do you know what’s happened to him?”

Quayle shook his head. “No, I don’t.” He glanced across the table at Standish. The old man avoided his eyes and drank from his mug.

The four members of the household staff, together with the inspector, were back at the dinner table in the servants’ hall. They were eating a supper of bangers and mash, albeit meager portions. Outside the house, the howling of wind could be heard. The weather had turned in the night.

Mrs. Chalmers looked dissatisfied. “Have you in fact learnt anything about his disappearance?”

Quayle wiped his lips on a napkin. “I don’t know where the schoolmaster is, but I am certain of three things.”

“It’s going to snow soon,” Joseph said. He giggled. “Everything will be white.”

Standish hit the boy over the back of the head to shut him up, after which Joseph stared at the tabletop with a sour expression.

“I’m certain he didn’t leave this house of his own volition,” Quayle said. “His personal effects are still present in his room. Simply put, as you yourself observed, Mrs. Chalmers — four pairs of shoes.”

“And the second thing?” she asked him.

“Black was well traveled. The markings on his suitcase demonstrate that — Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and so on. And yet his passport is not to be found.”

“Did you not find it in his room?”

“No. In fact, it’s the only possession of Black’s that does seem to be missing. I am certain the explanation for its absence will prove important.”

“What is the third thing?” young Margaret asked.

Quayle ran his eyes around the table. They came to a rest on Standish. “I am absolutely certain there are people in this house who know more about what happened to the schoolmaster than they are telling me.”

Young Margaret noticed the inspector’s stare.

“I’m going into the village tomorrow,” Quayle said. “I’m going to call on the local constabulary, and the constabulary for the district. I’m going to organize a thorough search of this entire house and of the grounds. I will get to the bottom of this mystery, you can sleep soundly on that.”

Mrs. Chalmers had also noticed. She herself was now staring at the groundsman.

“And when the truth comes out,” Quayle added. “I may find I am not a happy man.”

“Standish,” Mrs. Chalmers asked. “Do you know something about where the schoolmaster’s gone?”

The old man shook his head. He ignored their eyes and proceeded to light his pipe.

At that moment, upstairs in the schoolmaster’s bedroom, Richard was seated on the edge of the bed. He was examining Quayle’s police notebook, having already quietly and efficiently gone through the inspector’s other belongings.

Downstairs, the door to the servant’s dining room was open, and outside in the hallway, unseen by any of those seated at the table, was Rawdon. His back was hard against the wall next to the open doorway and his head was crooked, affording him the best position to hear the conversation from within.

Quayle lit a cigarette. “Mrs. Chalmers, did you know that Richard and Rawdon come out and play at night, after everyone’s gone to bed?”

“They do?” This was news to her.

“They patrol the house, pretending to be soldiers.”

Young Margaret was nodding. “I’ve heard them.”

“Well, they should be in their room and in bed,” Mrs. Chalmers said. “They shouldn’t be out at night.”

“I don’t think they should be playing with rifles, either,” Quayle added. “Whether they’re loaded or not.”

Standish cleared his throat. “If the German army comes, them two young masters will be the only ones here to protect us.” He swallowed the last contents of his mug, stood it on the table with a clap, and got to his feet. He muttered something to Joseph, clipped the boy about the head, and then the two of them left.

Mrs. Chalmers gave their departure a long stare. “I hope this dreadful war ends soon,” she said. “So we can all live normally again and this house can be back to the way it should be.”

“Amen to that,” Quayle said.

Sometime after one in the morning, Quayle woke. The bedroom door was open, and the bed was shaking. There were shadows — someone had climbed onto the bed and had straddled him. Clomp. He was hit in the head with a club of wood and knocked unconscious.

Quayle regained some of his senses. His limbs were bound with tight rope. He could see little. He was on his side, less than a foot above the ground, and was moving slowly along the hallway — he was lying on the piano trolley.

A voice whispered: “He’s awake.”

Clomp.

Quayle opened his eyes. There was a candle burning. His sight was blurred and his head was throbbing. He had a migraine. He felt his hands — they were no longer tied together. His nightdress was filthy, and he ached from bruises. He had been dragged across the floor for part of his journey and dumped into this location.

He was on the floor in a room without windows. The door was shut. The only thing in the room was a small wooden box — an empty wine case. A solitary candle in a silver holder stood upon it.

He sat up. The floor was stone and cold. The air was damp and musty. The dampness was familiar. His nose itched. He guessed he was in the south wing, beneath the floors, in the cellar.

The door opened. Richard and Rawdon entered. They were dressed in black clothes — uniform-like — and they blended into the night like shadows. They wore solemn expressions.

“What in God’s name are you boys playing at?” Quayle asked.

“Whom are you working for?” Richard asked.

“Why have you come to Mallbright?” Rawdon asked.

“Why have you dragged me down into the cellar in the middle of the night?” Quayle shot back at them. He clambered to get up. He was groggy. His eyes could barely focus. When he was almost to his feet, a chain connecting from the wall to a manacle clamped around his ankle came abruptly to its full length. The jolt toppled him, bringing him crashing back to the ground again.

“Unlock this!” Quayle barked from the floor. “Let me out of this!”

The boys stared at him, unmoved.

“You two are in a lot of trouble,” Quayle growled. “I don’t give a damn who you have for a father.”

“You are compiling reports,” Richard said. He held up the inspector’s notebook. “There are reports in this book on everyone in the house, about the house itself, our weapons, and the location of our ammunition.”

“I’m a policeman,” Quayle said. “Those are notes. That is what you will find in a policeman’s notebook.”

“You acknowledge this book is yours,” Richard asked. “And written by your hand?”

“Of course it’s mine and written by me,” Quayle answered him. “You know that very well. You’ve apparently stolen it from my room.”

The two boys nodded to each other, then turned about and left.

“Come back here,” Quayle shouted after them.

They left the door open. He was indeed in the cellar. There was a dark corridor leading away from his cell.

Quayle tried to free his leg, but it wasn’t possible. The manacle was iron and layered with rust. The chain was bolted to the wall.

“Hello?” Quayle shouted. “Can anyone hear me?”

Rawdon stepped into the doorway — the two boys were apparently just outside, just beyond the door. He shook his head. “You’re too far away for any of them to hear you.” He stepped out of sight again.

Quayle could hear the boys’ voices, faint whispers and murmurs. A discussion went on for some time. There was debate. And then agreement.

A moment later, they returned.

Richard stepped up and addressed the prisoner. “Ian Edward Quayle, if that is indeed your true name, you have been found guilty of spying for the German enemy.”

Quayle stared in disbelief. “Spying?”

Richard nodded. “And for this crime, you have been condemned to death.”

Quayle roared in anger. “This game stops right here and right now!”

Richard turned about and left the room.

Rawdon remained. He stared thoughtfully at the inspector. “What you said tonight at your dinner was correct. The schoolmaster’s passport was important.”

Quayle tried to get to his feet, but could only manage to get to his knees.

Rawdon reached into his back pocket. He produced a German passport. He stepped forward and held it open in front of Quayle’s face. “Read the name.”

Quayle read it aloud: Peter Heinrich Schwarz.

“Schwarz is the German word for Black,” Rawdon explained. “The schoolmaster lied about his identity. He was German. He pretended to be English. He hid this passport, but we found it.”

Quayle remembered the brother’s dedication in the book in the schoolmaster’s room: DES. Mrs. Chalmers had said she only knew of a brother called David. DES wasn’t a name — it was the initials of a name.

“This is the schoolmaster’s dirty secret?” Quayle asked.

The boy nodded.

Quayle shook his head wearily. “Hundreds of Germans living in this country have changed or hidden their names, so as to avoid persecution or internment. They have nothing to do with the fighting.”

Rawdon closed the passport and returned it to his pocket.

“It’s not a crime to have been born in Germany or to have had German ancestry.”

“We are at war with Germany,” Rawdon replied. There was no emotion in his eyes.

“My God,” Quayle said. “This is what happened to the schoolmaster. You dragged him from his bed and brought him down here.”

Richard returned. He held one of the rifles.

The enormity of what had happened, and what was now happening, burned inside the inspector’s skull.

Rawdon brought a finger to his lips... silence.

Richard aimed the rifle. Before he pulled the trigger, he said: “This is for our mother.”

© 2008 by Joseph Wallace

Professional nonfiction writer Joseph Wallace’s books include The Autobiography of Baseball, which was nominated for the Seymour medal for best baseball book of 1998. He began writing short stories recently and has appeared in the anthologies Hardboiled Brooklyn, Baltimore Noir, and Bronx Noir. For his EQMM debut he employs his knowledge of baseball in a most inventive way.

* * * *

“You’ve got no choice,” the man said.

He leaned back against the splintery bench, his head outlined against the steel-gray sky and sea, and smiled down at the girl sitting beside him. His teeth were white behind his thin lips, and his eyes were silvery as they scanned her face.

The two of them sitting there like father and daughter on a visit to Coney Island. But no family in its right mind would linger on the Boardwalk today, with the wind chasing curtains of sand and ragged waves grinding against the beach. The only other people in sight were hurrying past, heads down, hats pulled low over their eyes.

“No choice,” the man said again.

The girl, a fair-skinned teenager with an oval face and dark eyes, huddled deeper into her cloth coat and didn’t speak.

“You listening to me?”

Finally she lifted her head to look at him. “I’m listening,” she said in a whispery voice. “The answer’s still no.”

He shook his head, and for an instant seemed almost sorry for her. “You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “You don’t get it.”

No longer smiling, he got to his feet.

“But you will,” he said.

The big man stood at home plate, waving that ridiculously heavy bat over his head and grinning out at the mound. He wasn’t young anymore, and all those hot dogs and cigars and late nights had begun to take their toll. For a few years already he’d had a bit of a shelf above his thin waist and banjo legs, but now he was running to fat, his belly pushing against his pinstriped jersey.

Same grin as always, though. Same moon face and crinkled-up eyes and pure joy in doing whatever he did. Those hadn’t changed. You almost had to smile back when you saw him.

Unless you were standing just sixty feet and a hair away from him and those amazing arms that could whip the bat around and send the ball back at you twice as fast as you threw it in. Take your head off and you’d find yourself thinking, “How’d that happen?” out in centerfield somewhere while your body was still standing on the mound.

“You ready, kid?” he called out.

Rue Thomas nodded.

The big man took a vicious cut, his bat a blur. “Then let’s go.”

The crowd loving it. How many? Four thousand, at least. Maybe five. More than had ever packed little Mansfield Grounds before, that was for sure. Yelling and screaming and making the old wooden grandstands shake. Sending a fleet of gulls flapping away towards the ocean in panic.

Everybody who could buy or beg or steal a ticket was here. Here for an event big enough to shut down Coney Island, to hush the clatter of the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt. All of the attractions silent, because what would be the use of opening till the game ended? Who would come to Coney Island today and not want to see the Babe, the Bambino, the Big Bam, Jidge.

Babe Ruth, the most famous man on earth, facing off against Rue Thomas, the seventeen-year-old Brooklyn girl with lightning in her left arm.

The Babe settled back into his coiled batting stance. He was still grinning, but Rue could see something different in those guileless eyes. They seemed to sharpen, and his face, his whole body, grew still, watchful, attentive. Focused.

On Rue, on her hand, on the ball itself.

This white sphere.

Rue was nine when she first found out.

Before that, she wasn’t much different from any other kid on East 21st Street, skinny and dirty-kneed, with a mass of dark ringlets that framed her face.

But though few noticed, her hands were different, bigger and stronger than most of the boys’. And her fingers were long and tapered, ideal for running up and down the keys of a piano, people told her, if her parents could have afforded one.

Still, she was just another neighborhood girl until the day Billy O’Reilly tried to steal her brother Nick’s bicycle.

Billy O’Reilly and his gang from up on Nostrand Avenue, coming through like a thunderstorm. Four of them, pushing poor little Tim Trotta into the bushes, throwing Cliff Jamison’s hat up onto a roof.

The usual. You just waited for it to pass, like you’d wait out the storm.

But then Billy grabbed Nick’s bike and took off. Nick had worked for a year delivering milk with Mr. Stephanides to buy that bike. Now, even if they saw it again, it would be wrecked. No one could bust something up like Billy could.

Nick and a couple of the others went running down the street, chasing, but it was hopeless. The littler kids just stood and watched, except for Rue.

Rue, standing in her front yard, looked down at the stone resting in her left hand. She’d picked it up without even realizing, and now she hefted it, enjoying its weight and cool smoothness against her palm.

Then she let fly, and an instant later Billy lay moaning on the street. The newly riderless bike made a gentle right turn and fell on its side.

There was a moment of dead silence as everyone stared at her. Then, shouting and cursing, Billy’s friends came running back.

Rue bent down and picked up another stone. “Watch,” she said in her wispy little-girl’s voice, a voice that was usually easy to ignore. But not now, not when the second stone whanged off a street sign, leaving a big dent. Not when she found a third one and raised her eyes to look at them again.

As his friends hoisted Billy up and half-carried him away, everyone else clustered around her. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Nick said. He was holding his bike like it was a gift from heaven.

Rue shrugged. A million hours spent throwing a ragged stitched-up ball against a white square painted on the garage wall, and no one had ever noticed.

Till now. The very next Saturday Nick brought her down to Marine Park, and an hour later she was pitching for the neighborhood baseball team.

Some people said the diamond was no place for a girl, especially a little one like Rue Thomas. But the minute they saw her fastball and drop curve and fadeaway, they shut right up.

Because they played for money, every Sunday morning in Marine Park. Money and neighborhood pride. And if it would help you win, no rule book said a chimpanzee, an alligator, a sewer rat, or a girl couldn’t play.

He showed up for the first time midway through Rue’s rookie season with the Comets, just a week after her sixteenth birthday. He was waiting outside the players’ door at Mansfield Grounds after a game, leaning against a scrawny locust tree like he had all the time in the world.

Thin, well-dressed, with a quick, toothy grin and silvery eyes. Smiling at her as she walked past, heading towards the El.

He fell into step beside her. “Buy you a soda?”

His voice gentler than she’d expected. But confident, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.

She kept walking.

“Or a — whaddaya call it? An egg cream?”

From out of town. She’d guessed from his look, and from his voice, too, though she hadn’t done enough traveling yet to figure out where. She stopped and looked him up and down, in his gray suit and well-brushed hat.

Forty years old, maybe more. And far from the first to try this. “Sorry,” she said. “Not interested.”

He laughed, showing those white teeth. “What you’re thinking, I’m not interested either,” he said. “I’m talking about business. Baseball business.”

Rue hesitated. It was 1931, and times were hard. Her parents had already moved twice, from the house on East 21st to an apartment over on Ocean Avenue, and then to another one in a worse neighborhood on Quentin Road. Sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat.

If someone wanted to talk business, you listened.

“I’ll buy you a burger,” the man said. “To go along with that soda.”

His name was Chase. He said he was from Chicago.

All she had to do, he told her, was lose every once in a while.

They sat in a booth way in the back of Benny’s, a place a few blocks towards the bad side of Coney Island. She’d never been there before, but the food tasted just fine.

She let him describe what he wanted, although she’d understood where he was headed in the first ten seconds. She knew how it worked, with ballplayers being paid to make an error here, strike out there, throw just a few bad pitches at important moments.

That kind of thing had been around as long as baseball. It’d gotten so bad that a whole World Series had been lost on purpose, Rue knew, back in 1919, when she was only four. After that they’d brought in this old man, a judge, to make sure baseball stayed on the up and up. The first thing he’d done was kick eight of the guilty players out of baseball forever.

Rue had pitched against one of them, Joe Jackson, a tired, hollow-eyed old guy, when a barnstorming team had stopped in Brooklyn the previous fall. He hadn’t been able to get around on her fastball.

She listened to Chase. Waited till she was nearly done with her Coke and hamburger before saying, “Sorry.”

He looked at her. “At least listen to what we’re offering.”

She shook her head.

Chase seemed unruffled. “Not every game, of course. Only every once in a while. Wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.” He paused for a second. “Though it might be better for you in the long run, you weren’t quite so good.”

At the time, Rue was 9–1, with an earned-run average of under 2.00.

“You’re hot stuff,” he went on. “Some think it’s a joke, a setup. Others think you’re for real. Either way, there’s a ton of action whenever you pitch, all over the country.”

Rue thought about that.

He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Five hundred every time you do what we ask. Like every three or four starts. Nobody will ever know.”

Rue did the math. She probably had fifteen more starts left in the season, so he was talking about two thousand bucks, maybe more. A lot of money.

But lose on purpose? How could she do that? “No,” she said, draining the last of her drink and getting to her feet. “Still no.”

Her wide eyes, her quiet voice, making him disbelieve her. “You’ll come around,” he said. “You’ll change your mind.”

She turned away.

“Your problem is, you think you’ve got a choice,” he called after her. “But you don’t.”

The first time she heard that from him, but not the last.

Diamond Ruby. Belle of the Ball. Queen of Diamonds. The “Out” Girl.

The Angel of Brooklyn.

Silent Rue, sometimes, because of her fragile voice.

Even just plain Rue every once in a while. It made for a good headline joke: “Opponents Rue the Day Captain Mansfield Signed Girl Phenom.”

She’d been just fifteen when the old Army officer who owned the Coney Island Comets came to watch her pitch in Marine Park. By then she’d gotten some local attention, not that it mattered much to her. All she wanted to do was pitch, win, and collect the money she was owed to help her family scrape along.

Captain Mansfield, bluff, loud, friendly, looking at his team like it was a toy, had other ideas. “Sign with me,” he’d said, “and we’ll make a fortune.”

Underneath all his jollity he was a smart businessman. Because he certainly made himself a pretty penny from all the fans who came to the ballpark to watch Diamond Ruby, the freak of nature straight out of a Coney Island sideshow, pitch. To see this little girl with the unhittable fastball and knee-buckling curve mow down men who were heading to the majors, or who’d already been there and were heading down.

But very few of those pretty pennies ever made it into Diamond Ruby’s pockets.

Rue’s first pitch to the Babe bounced two feet in front of the plate, skipped past Jimmy Connelly, the Comets’ catcher, and rolled all the way to the backstop.

The crowd howled. Some of them were Comets fans — she could see a scattering of familiar faces — but most were here for the show, the spectacle, the Babe. If the girl pitcher made a fool of herself, that was okay with them.

But Rue had never bounced a pitch by mistake in her life. No, that wasn’t true, sure she had, once or twice. On rainy days, or freezing ones, when the ball felt like a chunk of ice in her hand.

It was warm and sunny today, though.

She met Babe Ruth a week after Captain Mansfield and the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Rupert, old war buddies, arranged the big exhibition game. The Comets, with Rue starting, would face a team of minor-leaguers and local stars... plus the Babe, the only one who really mattered. The two owners knowing that even in the depths of the Great Depression, people would hand over their hard-earned dollars for a chance to see, as one of the tabloids put it, “Big Bam vs. Great Gams.”

The Bambino was game for it. He was game for anything. Hospitals, orphanages, boxing rings, football fields, rodeos — just promise him some diversion and he’d be there.

They gathered for lunch at Lundy’s Clam Shack, a little place built on wooden stilts over Sheepshead Bay. Rue and the Babe and his business manager, a silent man in an expensive suit who sipped coffee and kept a close eye on both of them throughout the meal, and dapper Colonel Ruppert and Captain Mansfield, who kept grinning like kids on Christmas morning. All the other tables in the shack were empty, and Rue knew that this single lunch was probably costing more than she earned all year.

While they talked, the Bambino ate a mountain of steamed clams, drowning each one in butter before chomping it down. Rue tried to keep count, but lost track after thirty-four. That was early in the lunch.

“Call me Jidge,” Ruth told her. He called her “kid,” but that was okay, it was what he called almost everybody. And anyway, she was a kid, and sure felt like one facing the Babe across a table. He was bigger than she’d thought from the newsreels and pictures, and under his extra flesh she could see the rippling muscles of his arms and torso.

He saw her looking at him. “So, kid, you think you can strike me out?”

She shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “I think I can hit your best pitch into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Atlantic’s behind home plate,” she said. “Foul territory.”

His eyes narrowed. “Okay, the Pacific. Just take the ball a little longer to get there.”

“Might take longer than you think,” she said.

The Babe stared at her, then began to laugh. “Okay,” he said, as if she’d passed a test. “I got an idea. Let’s make this fun.”

“Oh, I know it’s going to be fun, Jidge,” Captain Mansfield said.

The Babe shot him a look that shut him up and turned back to Rue. “Tell you what, kid,” he said. “You bounce the first one, get everybody laughing. Then you give me something funny, like a big old curve, and I’ll swing and miss by a mile.” His face crinkled into a grin. “I’ll kick up a big fuss, a real hullabaloo, which should get the folks’ attention.”

“And after that?” Rue asked.

“After that?” Serious now, he gave her a direct look, a look of supreme self-confidence.

“After that, no script,” he said. “Just you against me, kid.”

The Babe missed Rue’s second pitch by at least three feet, spinning so hard after his wild swing that it looked like he was trying to drill himself into the ground. He stared out at her in what seemed like shocked disbelief, then threw his bat to the ground with such violence that it raised a puff of dust when it hit. Stomping around the plate, he swore and shook his fists and waved his arms around, while Jimmy Connelly and old Byron Mack, the umpire, the other players on the field, and the whole enormous bellowing crowd, ate it up.

Rue thought the grandstands might come down around her ears.

Finally Jimmy threw the ball back to her. The Babe picked up his bat and started settling himself into his stance. But then he stopped, and Rue saw him grin. He raised his bat and pointed with it towards the deepest part of centerfield.

“The Pacific Ocean, kid,” he called out.

Rue started to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. Rubbing the ball between her palms, she let her gaze slide away from the Babe to a man sitting in the front row of the stands just to the left of home plate. A man who remained entirely still while the fans surged around him.

An old man with wiry white hair, bushy eyebrows, a lined face, and pale, piercing eyes that never seemed to blink.

Rue felt her heart thump against her ribs. She dragged her attention back to home plate. Jimmy gave her the sign: One finger for a fastball.

Just you against me, kid.

It was time.

“It’s time,” the old man said. “Well past time. This can’t go any further.”

Rue didn’t know what he was talking about. “Further?”

“Girls aren’t meant to play baseball,” he said.

Rue had heard it before, many times before, usually from opposing players before she faced them, and then again — in a different tone — after. She’d been hearing it since she was nine, and the words had long since lost any meaning to her.

Until now, just two days before her confrontation with Babe Ruth.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball, the Czar, leaned back in his chair and looked at her. He was the man the baseball owners had brought in after the 1919 World Series to kick the crooks and gamblers out of the game, the man with power enough to make the rules and enforce them.

“Baseball is too strenuous for women,” Landis said, holding her in his cold, unblinking gaze. “You are not constitutionally suited to it.”

Rue spread her arms as if to say, Look at me. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not the point. You’re setting a bad example.”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He looked nettled. “That’s not the point either,” he said. “I can’t tolerate having you out there on the field.”

Rue felt her temper flare. “Why?” she asked, hating her passionless voice. “Because I strike them out? Because I win?”

He didn’t reply.

She took a deep breath. She’d always sworn she wouldn’t beg for anything, but still she forced the words out. “I need this,” she said.

Judge Landis gave the slightest shrug inside his expensive suit. “I’m sorry.”

They sat in silence for a few moments in the dimly lit room with its smell of cigars and whiskey and treated leather. Then she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “What about Saturday?”

“Saturday,” the Czar said, shaking his head. “I’ve given a substantial amount of thought to Saturday, and I’ve decided to let the game go on as scheduled. The fans — and Captain Mansfield — would be too disappointed if I canceled your—” He cleared his throat. “Your confrontation with the Babe.”

His thin lips turned downward. “But I will make the announcement immediately afterwards.” He shook his head. “Articles about you in The Sporting News, Baseball magazine,even The New York Times. You’re making a mockery of the game.”

“Jidge doesn’t think so,” she said.

Landis’s bushy eyebrows shot upward like outraged caterpillars. “Oh,” he said, “now we’re taking lessons in dignity from Babe Ruth?”

After that she knew it was hopeless. He was just an old man. He had no idea what it felt like to be standing out there on the field during a game. The Babe did, and Jimmy Connelly, and she did too. Every player did. But not the Czar.

She got to her feet, the room’s still air roaring in her ears. He rose too, came around his desk, and walked her across the room.

“Enjoy your last hurrah,” he said, closing the door behind her.

You’ve got no choice.

“See?” Chase said. “Told you so.”

They’d met this time at a delicatessen in Borough Park, a world away from Coney Island and anyone she knew. The windows were streaked with steam, and a bowl of pickled tomatoes sent up sour fumes from the tabletop between them. They were the only people in the place speaking English.

“You knew that Landis was going to throw me out?” Rue asked.

“Sure.” Chase looked bored. “Only a matter of time.”

He showed his teeth. “Notice something about baseball?” he said. “It’s all about white men.”

Rue took a deep breath. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

His eyes brightened and he leaned forward. “Just throw one pitch,” he said. “That’s all we’re asking.”

Jimmy Connelly signaled fastball.

Rue nodded. She stood on the rubber, the ball shielded in her glove. Usually, all her focus would be on the plate, the batter, the catcher’s mitt. But this time she let her attention stray from the Babe, deadly serious now, and back over to Judge Landis in the first row.

Her eyes met his. He didn’t blink or change expression.

Then, amid all the blurred frenzy of the crowd, she glimpsed more purposeful movement, a dark figure moving towards him.

In a moment, much sooner than she’d anticipated, Chase stood behind the Czar’s left shoulder. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a cloth cap pulled low over his brow.

Rue saw his hand come out of his coat pocket, saw the glint of sunlight off steel, and knew at last exactly what was about to happen.

Though really, she’d known from the start.

Judge Landis didn’t notice, nor did Captain Mansfield beside him, or any of the fans around them. Just as Chase had predicted, every eye, every camera, was focused on the field, on the battle between pitcher and batter.

Rue went into her windup.

Enjoy your last hurrah, she thought.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

Rue nodded.

“You sure? Be a bad idea to miss.”

“I can hit him,” she said.

“In the head?”

She didn’t answer.

Chase frowned, then made a face and shrugged. “Okay, yeah, that’s a lot to ask. But we’ve got a ton riding on the Cubs this year, and they have a straight shot through the Series if the Babe’s not right.” He paused. “Would be a great exacta, but that’s okay. You just plunk Ruth good, put him on the ground, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“What do you mean — the rest?”

For a moment his face darkened, but he got hold of himself. “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then she said, “If I say yes, I’ll be able to keep pitching?”

“Garr-annn-teeed.” He looked calm now, relaxed, as if he’d just put a penny into a gumball machine and knew the gum would soon come rolling out of the chute. “The next commish will know who’s really in charge.”

He paused, thinking about it. “Might even be, no one will want the job.”

“All right,” Rue said. “I’m in.”

Chase smiled.

“Garr-annn-teeed,” he said again.

The most famous man in America standing at home plate.

The crowd bellowing with anticipation.

The cold-eyed old Czar on his feet like everyone else, as still as death in his black coat and black hat.

The man in the aisle beside him, teeth shining white, something half-hidden in his hand.

The girl on the mound, awaiting an oncoming storm only she knew about.

The long, breathless moment preceding the pitch.

Rue rocked back, raised her hands above her head, broke them apart, hurled herself forward with the controlled violence that always ended with a fastball whistling across the plate. Only not this time. This time, in the middle of her motion, she stumbled.

Or seemed to stumble.

Her arm whipped forward and she released the ball, just as the toe of her spikes caught on a chewed-up patch of ground and she fell flat on her face.

Lying there, unmoving, she heard the dull, solid thump. There was a moment’s pause, as if the world itself was holding its breath, and then the silence was broken by a woman’s high-pitched shriek. This was followed by the upwelling, frightened sound of the crowd.

Rue got slowly to her feet. She took her time looking over, because she didn’t really need to. She knew what she was going to see.

But she had a role to play, so when she did look, she found herself running towards the stands. The commissioner of baseball was standing there, his face ashen as he stared down at something lying at his feet.

Chase, glazed eyes half open, an enormous purple knot sprouting from his left temple.

Rue scrambled over the railing and dropped to her knees beside the stricken man. Her face was full of shock and concern as she put her mouth close to his ear.

“To answer your question, I can hit anything I want to,” she whispered, “where I want to.”

He blinked, and his lips moved, but no sound came out.

“And I always have a choice,” she said.

She got back to her feet and moved closer to Landis. He was hanging on the railing with both hands.

“It’s him,” she said so only he could hear. “Chase. I didn’t get a chance to warn you — it happened too fast.”

Rallying himself, the commissioner spoke to the cops who had congregated around his seat. It only took them a few seconds to find the knife pinned under Chase’s body. That got everybody’s attention.

When he was gone, heading to the hospital under the law’s watchful eye, Rue looked up at the Czar. After a moment he gave a brief, reluctant nod.

“Thank you,” she said, and went back to work.

It was the day before the big game, the “Battle ’tween Teen and Titan,” in the words of one poetic scribe, and Judge Landis was exhausted.

He’d had enough. The New York dailies and out-of-town papers alike had been mad with excitement and anticipation for days. Reporters from as far away as Seattle and Santa Fe had been ringing his telephone off the hook. It was all he could do to keep his opinions to himself for one more day.

So the last thing he needed was to see the girl, the cause of all this tumult, walking into his office and perching on the edge of his desk as if she owned it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She didn’t answer at once, but there was an expression on her face that he’d never seen there before. She looked, he thought suddenly, like someone who’d just won the World Series.

“Miss Thomas,” he said, struggling to keep his temper, “we have nothing further to talk about.”

“But we do,” she said.

And then, leaning forward so he’d hear every word, she told him what it was, and what they were going to do about it.

“Think you can get one over this time?” Babe Ruth asked her.

Rue grinned. They were standing midway between the mound and the plate. The players were back in their positions, and the crowd, quiet and subdued now, was focused on the field again.

“Sure,” she said.

“Good. Then let’s give them a show.”

He turned away, then looked back over his shoulder. “Hey, kid.”

She waited.

“Heard that old windbag Landis was going to toss you out after the game.”

Rue shook her head. “You heard wrong. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah?” The Babe looked surprised. “Glad to hear it, ’cause you can throw.”

“And you can hit, Jidge,” she said.

He laughed and headed back to the plate. Got right into his stance, no fooling around this time. Jimmy Connelly signaled fastball, and Rue threw one.

The bat whipped around, and there was a sound like a cannon shot. The ball streaked upward and headed towards the Pacific Ocean.

The crowd let loose. The Babe dropped his bat and watched the blast leave the yard before starting his laughing, clownish circuit around the bases. Rue, stone-faced, held up her glove and waited for the ump to toss her a new ball.

But inside she was smiling. Sometimes, she knew, you just had to give the fans what they’d come to see.