As a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, Jeffry Scott traveled widely and reported some of the most dramatic stories of the day, including the Jonestown cult mass-suicides in Guyana. In his fiction, however, he mostly stays close to home and shows as fine a sense as anyone of the possibilities for crime in the domestic niche...

The only diverting, smile-inducing thing about her — not that she had ever seen humour in it — was her name. That apart, Esme Huddle was quiet, practical, sardonic; unfrivolous enough to be mistaken for dour.

She and men did not agree. It wasn’t a violent dislike on either side, but Esme and males had never quite hit it off. She was prepared to concede being the loser by that, since most women seemed to value a partnership of some kind, but there you were.

Courted in her youth, Esme had tended to lose patience with suitors’ posturing and moodiness. Fellows talked such a lot, half or more of it rubbish.

In turn, Archie and Gerald and Tim turned moody when she refused to let them “take liberties” — and they had struck her as amiable enough, initially. If they were the cream of the crop, it did not bode well for the rest, but still she wed Peter Huddle. Mainly because he was docile, promisingly terse, and kept asking her. Esme didn’t like marriage much, asking herself why romantic novelists made such a fuss about the whole thing. Once her curiosity was satisfied, sex seemed messy and repetitive. After certain patient years Mr. Huddle came to share her opinion, visiting his mother for the weekend and never returning. Their divorce was painless.

Esme kept the house in Chinnery Gardens, buying her ex-husband’s half by monthly installments. While her job as technical librarian with an engineering company was not particularly well paid, she spent little on clothes, less on cosmetics, and never took holidays. The wolf was far from the door.

Her parents died, as elderly folk will. Esme got their house and her father’s business, so the wolf retired to the horizon. So too did Esme, though only from the technical library to Chinnery Gardens.

Her father’s off-license shop, selling beer, wines, and spirits to take away, was not in the best trading neighbourhood but it would get no worse. Esme interviewed the manager, whom her father had recruited the previous year, listening patiently before setting him straight.

“You’ll take money at my expense unless I sack you and run this place myself, and I don’t want to do that. No, let me finish. Salesmen bribe you and I dare say you know somebody who knows somebody who supplies stock that’s fallen off the back of a lorry, and the profit on that is all yours. Then there’s playing tunes on the cash register.” Esme suspected that the register was his golden goose, if only because he had enthused over it being state of the art, and uncheatable.

“I’ve never been talked to this way,” he faltered.

Restraining an impulse to point out that there is always a first time, she said, “We’ll take that as read and get on quicker.” Esme wrote a figure on a piece of paper and passed it to him.

“That’s the minimum I want each and every week. Anything over is yours. If it’s less for more than two weeks running, out you go. Mr. Goodbody looks after my tax business, he will be in touch, all your paperwork goes to him. He catches you out, it’s your funeral. Good afternoon.”

Between the shop income — the manager’s fail-safe total was revised upwards periodically, in line with the economy — and capital gained from selling her parents’ house, Esme Huddle was comfortably off.

Thanks to inflation and rising taxation, a little less so by the time she was fifty, however. If she did not buy much or often, she purchased the best: good furniture, good ingredients for simple meals cooked twice a day, a good audio system costing nearly as much as a modest family car. The exterior of her house had to be painted every three years; Peter Huddle had scoffed at her insistence on this but Esme didn’t care. You just had to have that done, standing over workmen to ensure that they burnt the old paint off instead of slapping more over the previous stuff — else something dreadful would happen.

There came a time when she began to recognise telltale envelopes. Esme neither allowed their mere arrival to spoil breakfast nor postponed opening them. That wasn’t her style. But bank and building society statements earned her farsighted concern. It wasn’t a crisis, not even a problem yet. It never would be, were she prepared to sell the house and retrench to a studio flat. All the same...

At that stage a solution presented itself. Esme attended a midweek gathering of the Civic Society, enjoying a slides-illustrated talk on Georgian buildings, rare as unicorns in her outer-London suburb. It was such a nice afternoon that she took the long way home, glancing idly into the shops along Normandy Parade. Then she retraced her steps. The newsagent displayed handwritten advertisements in a corner of his window.

“LODGINGS FOR SINGLE WOMAN, £70 P.W.” “ROOM, BUSINESS LADY ONLY, £75 P.W.” “CLEAN, NEAT (underlined) NONSMOKING (underlined twice) LODGER INVITED, TWO MINS STATION AND BUSES, TERMS BY AGREEMENT.” “THIRD WOMAN FOR SMALL BUT LOVELY HOUSE, SALON-GRADE HAIR DRYER AND SATELLITE TV, £250 PER MONTH.” Esme raised her eyebrows and — she retained a shred of the tomboy — whistled softly.

Her house had three bedrooms. By rearranging furniture and selling one bed, she could produce a bedroom and a private sitting room. Priced at... no call to be greedy, say £85 a week, throw in cooked breakfast and high tea. Fiver a week discount for cash, then accountant Goodbody and the Inland Revenue need not bother their heads over the matter. Some four thousand pounds a year, off the books, untaxed. It bore thinking about.

Her lodger must not be female. They could be worse than men under your roof — more territorial, given to hatching grievances, chattering, and she could envisage clammy tights left to dry in the bathroom. Esme’s paying guest would be a man.

Actually she wouldn’t mind a bit of company. In moderation, on her terms. Men might be, indeed were, men, but a lodger seemed different. More manageable; neutered, somehow.

The eight published short stories in Steven Saylor’s Gordianus series, all set in the period between the Roman civil wars, fill in the temporal gap between the first two Gordianus novels, Roman Blood (which begins in79 B.C.) and Arms of Nemesis (72 B.C.). Mr. Saylor plans eventually to use short stories to cover other periods skipped over as he continues Gordianus’s adventures in his novels. His current offering remains in the period between the wars, when Julius Caesar was a young man. Readers who would like a look ahead in time might try the latest Gordianus novel, The Venus Throw (St. Martin’s Press).

“Well met Gordianus! Tell me, have you heard what they’re saying down in the Forum about Marius’s young nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar?”

It was my good friend Lucius Claudius who called to me on the steps of the Senian Baths. He appeared to be on his way out, while I was on my way in.

“If you mean that old story about his playing queen to King Nicomedes while he was in Bythinia, I’ve heard it all before — from you, I believe, more than once, and with increasingly graphic details each time.”

“No, no, that bit of gossip is ancient history now. I’m talking about this tale of pirates, ransom, revenge — crucifixions!”

I looked at him blankly.

Lucius grinned, which caused his two chins to meld into one. His chubby cheeks were pink from the heat of the baths and his frazzled orange curls were still damp. The twinkle in his eyes held that special joy of being the first to relate an especially juicy bit of gossip.

I confessed to him that my curiosity was piqued. However, as it appeared that Lucius was leaving the baths, while I had only just arrived, and as I was especially looking forward to the hot plunge, given the night nip that lingered in the spring air — alas, the story would have to wait.

“What, and let someone else tell it to you, and get the details all confused? I think not, Gordianus! No, I’ll accompany you.” He gestured to his entourage to turn around. The dresser, the barber, the manicurist, the masseur, and the bodyguards all looked a bit confused but followed us compliantly back into the baths.

This turned out to be a stroke of luck for me, as I was in need of a bit of pampering. Bethesda did her best at cutting my hair, and as a masseuse her touch was golden, but Lucius Claudius was wealthy enough to afford the very best in body servants. There is something to be said for having occasional access to the services of a rich man’s slaves. As my fingernails and toenails were carefully clipped and filed and buffed, my hair expertly trimmed, and my beard painlessly shorn, Lucius kept trying to begin his tale and I kept putting him off, wanting to make sure I received the full treatment.

It was not until our second visit to the hot plunge that I allowed him to begin in earnest. Amid clouds of steam, with our heads bobbing on the water like little islands in the mist, he related his nautical tale.

“As you know, Gordianus, in recent years the problem of piracy has grown increasingly severe.”

“Blame it on Sulla and Marius and the civil war,” I said. “Wars mean refugees, and refugees mean more bandits on the highways and more pirates on the sea.”

“Yes, well, whatever the cause, we all see the results. Ships seized and looted, cities sacked, Roman citizens taken hostage.”

“While the senate vacillates, as usual.”

“What can they do? Would you have them grant a special naval command to some power-mad general, who can then use the forces we give him to attack his political rivals and set off another civil war?”

I shook my head. “Trapped between warlords and brigands, with the Roman senate to lead us — sometimes I despair for our republic.”

“As do all thinking men,” agreed Lucius. We shared a moment of silent contemplation on the crisis of the Roman republic, then he eagerly launched into his tale again.

“Anyway, when I say that the pirates have grown so bold as to kidnap Roman citizens, I don’t simply mean some merchant they happened to pluck from a trading vessel. I mean citizens of distinction, noble Romans whom even ignorant pirates should know better than to molest. I mean young Gaius Julius Caesar himself.”

“When was this?”

“Just as winter was setting in. Caesar had spent the summer on the island of Rhodes, studying rhetoric under Apollonius Molo. He was due to serve as an attaché to the governor of Cilicia, but he lingered on Rhodes as long as he could, and set out at the very close of the sailing season. Just off the island of Pharmacusa his ship was given chase and captured by pirates. Caesar and his whole entourage were taken prisoner!”

Lucius raised an eyebrow, which prompted a curious pattern of wrinkles across his fleshy brow. “Now keep in mind that Caesar is only twenty-two, which may explain how he could be so recklessly bold. Remember also that his good looks, wealth, and connections have pretty much always gotten him whatever he wants. Imagine, he finds himself in the clutches of Cilician pirates, the most bloodthirsty people on earth. Does he cringe beneath their threats? Bow his head? Make himself humble and meek? Far from it. Exactly the opposite! He taunted his captors from the very beginning. They told him they were planning to demand a ransom of half a million sesterces. Caesar laughed in their faces! For a captive such as himself, he told them, they were fools not to demand at least a million — which they did!”

“Interesting,” I said. “By placing a greater value on his life, he forced the pirates to do likewise. I suppose even bloodthirsty killers tend to take better care of a million-sesterce hostage than one worth only half as much.”

“So you think the gambit shows Caesar’s cleverness? His enemies ascribe it to simple vanity. But I give him full credit for what he did next, which was to arrange for the release of almost everyone else in his party. His numerous secretaries and assistants were let go because Caesar insisted that the ransom of a million sesterces would have to be raised from various sources in various places, requiring the labor of his whole entourage. The only ones he kept with him were two slaves — that being the absolute minimum to see to a nobleman’s comfort — and his personal physician, whom Caesar can hardly do without because of his bouts of falling sickness.

“Well, they say Caesar spent nearly forty days in the pirates’ clutches, and treated his captivity as if it were a vacation. If he had a mind to take a nap and the pirates were making too much noise, he would send out one of his slaves to tell them to shut up! When the pirates engaged in exercises and games, Caesar joined them, and as often as not bested them, treating them as if they were not his captors but his guards. To fill his idle time he wrote speeches and composed verses, such as he had learned to do under Apollonius Molo, and when he finished a work he would make the pirates sit quietly and listen to him. If they interrupted him or made critical remarks, he called them barbarians and illiterates to their faces. He made jokes about having them whipped, as if they were unruly children, and even joked about having them put to death on the cross for insulting the dignity of a Roman patrician.”

“The pirates put up with such behavior?”

“They seemed to adore it! Caesar exercised a kind of fascination over them, by sheer power of his will. The more he abused and insulted them, the more they were charmed.

“At last, the ransom arrived, and Caesar was released. Right away he headed for Miletus, took charge of some ships, and went straight back to the island where the pirates were stationed. He took them by surprise, captured most of them, and not only reclaimed the ransom money but took the pirates’ hoard as well, claiming it as the spoils of battle. When the local governor hesitated over deciding the pirates’ fate, trying to think of some legal loophole whereby he could claim the booty for his treasury, Caesar took it upon himself to tend to the pirates’ punishment. Many times while he was their captive he boasted that he would see them crucified, and they had laughed, thinking the threat was merely a boy’s bravado — but in the end it was Caesar who laughed, when he saw them nailed naked upon crosses. ‘Let men learn to take me at my word,’ he said.”

I shivered, despite the heat of the bath. “You heard this in the Forum, Lucius?”

“Yes, it’s on everyone’s lips. Caesar is on his way back to Rome, and the story of his exploits precedes him.”

“Just the sort of moral tale that Romans love to hear!” I grunted. “No doubt the ambitious young patrician plans a career in politics. This is the very thing to build up his reputation with the voters.”

“Well, Caesar needs something to recover his dignity, after having given it up to King Nicomedes,” said Lucius with a leer.

“Yes, in the eyes of the mob, nothing enhances a Roman’s dignity like having another man nailed to a cross,” I said glumly.

“And nothing more diminishes his dignity than being nailed himself, even by a king,” observed Lucius.

“This water grows too hot; it makes me irritable. I think I could use the services of your masseur now, Lucius Claudius.”

Joan Richter debuted in EQMM in August of 1962 with two Department of First Stories entries. The author had been a creative writing student of Frederic Dannay, then editor of the magazine, and she went on to write several other fine stories for EQMM before a job with American Express in the 1980s sent her “rocketing around the world for the next ten years.” She returns to us after this long hiatus with a story that is longer and more complex than her earlier stories...

Detective Kenneth Reid looked around, taking in the spring growth of the Connecticut woods, the ferns and mountain laurel, the wild honeysuckle and the layers of white dogwood blossoms overhead. His friends called him Kentucky. He still had relatives there, but he didn’t visit often.

He remembered a woods like this when he was a kid. The thought held him for a while, but then he glanced back down at the wet ground, to where the body lay.

“Well, I suppose you couldn’t ask for a more peaceful place to die,” he said, wanting to break the silence.

Beside him Charlie Player turned. His face was pale. Kentucky had never noticed the young man’s freckles before, but he saw them now, like spatters of chocolate across his nose and cheeks. Kentucky waited, giving him time to pull it together. He was betting Player hadn’t seen many bodies.

“There was no peace in the way this guy went,” Player finally said.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“I didn’t know a body had that much blood.”

Kentucky had thought that himself at first, but then he remembered last night’s rain. With the layers of leaves on the ground acting like an oiled cloth, holding the rain, it looked like the man was lying in a deep pool of blood.

Kentucky didn’t want to make anything big of it, but it wouldn’t be fair not to point it out. “Head wounds bleed a lot,” he said matter-of-factly, “but some of what’s here is rain water.”

Player nodded.

They looked around, careful not to disturb the scene. The medical examiner and his crew were on the way.

Then, for the experience, and to help him collect his thoughts, Kentucky had Player make some notes.

Detectives Kenneth Reid and Charlie Player respond to call from patrol car two. Possible murder victim, male, found in woods behind West Hills Golf Club.

Kentucky figured the man had been dead about twenty-four hours, which meant the murder took place sometime Sunday afternoon, maybe early evening. If it was murder, there was no mystery about the weapon. It was there right alongside the body, a golf club. It looked like a number two iron.

This was Cranford’s second murder in a year. If things kept up, they’d have to add more than a detective unit. They might even get around to getting us an unmarked car, Kentucky thought. He and Player had been on the job three months. Cranford hadn’t had an investigative unit before.

Two men from the medical examiner’s office arrived, but not the M.E. himself. He was away for a long weekend. Kentucky and Player hung around awhile, to hear the initial reactions and wait for the body to be identified.

The dead man’s car was parked in a pull-off a hundred yards back, on the dirt road. An insurance card in the glove compartment and a driver’s license in his wallet identified him as James Fullerton, 122 Oak Lane, Cranford.

Kentucky looked at Player. “He’s been here all night. It’s a wonder someone didn’t report him missing. Let’s go over to the Fullerton house and see what we find there.”

Player drove. Kentucky was still learning his way around Cranford, having just moved over from Hartford. Player had gone to Cranford High and knew a shortcut behind the football field that would get them to Oak Street. “I used to have a girl that lived on Oak. I looked her up as soon as I got back here, but she’s moved away.”

“Keating’s most remarkable skill,” said William L. DeAndrea in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, “lies in his ability to induce in the most provincial reader an interest in, and sympathy for, characters facing mystery in unusual environments. The best known of these environments is the Bombay of Keating’s best-known creation, Inspector Ganesh Ghote.” Mr. Keating takes us to Ghote’s Bombay in this new story, but with himself instead of Ghote as a central character...

I hadn’t gone very far from my hotel, walking slowly in the fizzling Bombay heat, when someone came sidling up beside me.

“It is the notable British author?” he said, half a question, half a statement.

He’d got it right. Or, at least, he’d identified me as the person the paper I’d been interviewed in the day before, with picture, had headlined with that typically Indian English phrase.

“Yes?” I answered cautiously.

More than a little cautiously, in fact. There was something about this fellow that set doubts hopping in my mind. More than doubts. Plain distrust. No sooner had he put his question than his glance had flicked away, as if he preferred no one to look at him too closely. Nor was his whole appearance any more reassuring. Check shirt, faintly greasy at neck and cuffs. Cotton khaki trousers with a long dark smear down one thigh. Shoes, rather than sandals, on his sockless feet, their black leather cracked and dry from lack of polish. The only sign of respectability about him, apart from his reasonably good English, was the briefcase he carried. And that was suspiciously thin and empty looking.

But now he turned to me again, two enormous pointy ears poking forward, and flashed me a wide, white-toothed smile.

Too quick a smile?

“You will be very much wanting to know what I am able to tell,” he said.

“Oh yes?”

Was money hopefully going to change hands? That what this was all about?

“Yes, yes. You see, I am private eye itself. Junior Investigator. Star of Hind Detective Agency. Soon-soon becoming Senior. Hike of salary also. Star of Hind Agency is full member A.I.S.O.I.”

He slid one of a pack of large business cards out of his shirt pocket, thrust it out to me. I took it unwillingly, oily all round the edges as it was with sweaty handling. But before I put it into my own pocket — I could hardly get rid of it at once — I saw at least that it looked like the genuine article.

“But what is this A.I.S. — whatever?” I asked, before realising I had given this unsavoury fellow a new toehold.

“It is Association of Investigators and Security Organisation of India. Sahib, I am very much surprised you are not knowing a name of such all-India fame.”

Another inch gained in keeping my acquaintance. Hadn’t I been put in the position now of having to explain myself? Even apologise?

“Well, you know, I haven’t been in India very long. And, writing about my Inspector Ghote, I’m really more interested in the police than... er... private investigators.”

I should have left it at that. But, stupidly, I tried for a final brush-off.

“Readers of my books expect rather more than catching out naughty husbands.”

“Then, sahib, I must be telling you about time I was committing my first murder.”

I gulped.

A murderer? And— And didn’t a first imply a second? Even a third? Maybe not a serial killer but, private eye though he might be, someone ready to end a life in the course of robbery? Had he got it into his head that an author from the affluent West was bound to have some huge amount on his person? Under that dirty shirt there could well be a. knife. The work of an instant to slip it out, strike, snatch a wallet, melt into the crowd.

I thought fast. Even furiously.

“Er— Yes. Yes, I’d be very interested to hear about— About that. Very. But I imagine you’ll want to be paid for such information. Such good information. And, as it so happens, I’ve left my wallet— Yes, in my hotel.”

I began to turn back.

“Oh, sahib, no, no, no. What I am wishing to tell is out of respect only. Respect for one notable author visiting India.”

Was that likely?

Well, the fellow’s face seemed now to be shining with sincerity. Perhaps I had misjudged him. And it wouldn’t be easy to get away without being brutally impolite.

“That’s very kind of you. Most kind.”

“Oh, very good, sahib. Very good. Here is one damn fine cold-drinks place. We should go in.”

I allowed myself to be led into the place — it was called the Edward VIII Juice Nook — and we sat down on either side of one of the narrow tables.

But as my new acquaintance leant forward to lower himself onto his plastic-covered bench, his grease-edged shirt, flopped open a little and I saw what could only be the top of a sheath for a knife.

Was I after all going to be one in the series that had begun with that first murder?

No, surely not. A sudden stabbing and a quick grab out in the street was a possibility, but surely not inside here. Surely?

And he might really have a story to tell. Good material.

Once we had been brought our drinks, a Mangola for me, something long, brightly coloured, and sticky-looking called a falooda for my friend, he began his tale. Innocently enough. If you could be innocent telling how, apparently, you had committed a murder. Your first.

“Sahib,” he said, bringing those huge pointy ears of his to focus directly at me, “before I am recounting whole damn thing I will make one matter very-very clear. I am altogether good at my job. First class only. Let me give you example.”

Could I stop that? Say Get on to this first murder of yours, that’s what I want to hear about. But no, I couldn’t. He had me trapped.

“Sahib, I was once given task by our boss of tracing one girl who had been working for five-six years in prostitution line. She had auntie who had married a foreigner, and that fellow had died, leaving said auntie in possession of one lakh rupees. That is a big sum for us, you know.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Auntie was wishing to make her one and only living relative as heir to all her wealths. But one condition only. She was to give up prostitution racket, even if it was high-class itself.”

“Okay, I understand, I understand. So what happened?”

“I was finding and locating that prostitute. Not too hard to do. Ask and ask and before too long you are learning. But question was: Would this prostitute be scared to be found out by hundred-percent-respectable auntie? So what was I doing? Oh, sahib, very-very clever. Under disguise of customer I was booking this girl for night at five-star hotel. I tell you also, sahib, I was very much wishing to do some side-business with her, isn’t it?”

Eyes in the ratty face opposite rolled and rolled.

“But I was not at all attempting same. Payment in advance was company money. What would I be able to say in my report? So duty was calling and I was just only chit-chatting that girl. I gave out I was one damn-good fortuneteller. Then straightaway she was asking me to read her palm. And I was telling her her own history, which I was all the time damn well knowing from what Auntie had told. You have just only one female relative not seen for many-many years, I told. Correct, correct, she was answering. Next I was saying her palm told this auntie was rich, rich lady. Good, good, she was replying. So at last I was asking what would feelings be if fate brought her to meet this lady. Very fine, very fine, was her answer.”

My friend leant back and burst into loud brays of laughter. I looked round in embarrassment. But no one in the little place seemed to be taking much notice.

“You know what was happening when Auntie was saying she would give and bequeath to this prostitute one lakh rupees?” my acquaintance plunged on when at last he had brought himself to stop laughing. “No? You are not at all able to guess. But I will tell. Prostitute was saying: In one night I am making rupees fifteen-hundred, half to my boss, but still more in one year than you are offering as total, Auntie. So goodbye and back to foreign.”

More brays of raucous laughter.

“But you were going to tell me about a murder,” I broke in exasperatedly. “Your first murder.”

He leant across the narrow table towards me. A strong whiff of mingled falooda sweetness and sheer bad breath.

“Yes, yes. Well, I had thought that day was going to be a good day for me itself. When I was reporting for duty I was finding I had not been assigned some hard-work, no-fun job. What we are calling market survey. Number Two product being sold under false tiptop trademark. Keeping one close watch on shop until you are seeing supplier come, and then follow-following until you are able to track down entire organisation. No, no. That day it was erring-wife job.” Across the table I was given an appalling leer.

“Such I am always liking best. When it is matter of seeing with own eyes moment of hanky-panky itself. So I was setting off with what we are calling keyhole camera in briefcase. No bugging apparatus, you understand, because such is illegal under Indian Wireless and Telegraphic Act, nineteen thirty-three.”

“Very commendable, but—”

“Yes, yes. So I was watching until lady in question would come out of husband’s posh flat, Malabar Hill. After some time I saw their driver take car from garage and sit waiting for memsahib. At once I was securing taxi to be hundred percent ready to follow. In five-ten minutes Madam was coming. Then I in my taxi was trailing-trailing until we were reaching building at Marine Lines. There, as previously ascertained by my co-colleague, was staying Madam’s good friend known by the name of Laxmi. But what colleague had not at all considered was the block was having side exit also. But I in my taxi went, quick-quick, round corner, and in one minute, yes, please, Madam was coming out and waving-waving for taxi herself.”

Hands rubbed vigorously together in delight.

I began to think I had wasted the price of a Mangola and a falooda.

“To Colaba, Madam was going, just only where we are now. Myself following, promise-promising money to my taxiwalla. Here in Colaba, Madam was hurry-scurrying down some lane and into one Class-Two hotel. Five-ten minutes I was giving her, and then I was going in there also. Rupees five to fellow at Reception, and he was telling which room she had gone to and that also Mister was there in advance. Very good, very good.”

He tapped his tall glass sharply on the table. I was already aware it had been drained to the last dreg. The prolonged sucking sound had not been very agreeable.

Ah, well, I thought, might as well hear the end of the story. One more falooda won’t break the bank.

A long sticky swallow of the new tall glass and he was off again.

“Oh, you would have liked to see what I was seeing, sahib, when I was putting eye to keyhole. By twisting-twisting I was able to see bed itself. Lady’s sari hanging down from end. Madam one hundred percent invisible. Underneath big-big gentleman. Big-big bottom up and down, up and down. Like pile driver only. By God, I was so damn interested I was nearly forgetting my bounden duty.”

Yes, yes, you squitty little horror. Get on with it. Your sordid details are never going to form part of an Inspector Ghote investigation. But this murder... your first.

“You are liking-liking this story, yes? Then I am telling Part Two. At last, you understand, I was remembering keyhole camera. You know, what you must be getting in my line always is photographic evidence. Damn fool husbands never willing to believe naughty-naughty lady’s doings without evidence of own blasted eyes.”

“I dare say.”

“But then— Oh, sahib, sahib, damn-damn shame.”

“No film in your camera?”

Not a very nice thing to say, but I felt I was owed it.

“No, no, sahib. Not at all, not at all. I was telling, isn’t it, I am damn good operator. Always check-checking.”

“I’m sure you are. It was just that you said something was a shame.”

“Yes, yes. Two hundred percent shame. You must be knowing keyhole camera is able to take shot just only directly in front. And that bed with the up-down bottom going and going was not in exact straight line with door. I myself was able to see funny goings-on. Yes, yes. But I was able somewhat to wriggle round. Camera, no.”

He took a long swallow at his second falooda. Perhaps for consolation.

“But this murder...” I prompted.

Once more I could not help glancing at the tip of the leather sheath under my friend’s shirt.

“Yes, yes, I am coming to murder only. But it is important-important you should first be acquainted with each and every detail of beforehand. Or you would not be understanding whole damn affair.”

“No? Well, go on then.”

“So after looking and looking through what they are calling viewfinder— You are knowing viewfinder?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, at last I was having very-very quietly, you understand, to open door two-three inches and try for shot from changed angle. Perhaps better. Face of Madam now visible. One expression, utmost delight.”

“Yes, yes. But what happened?”

“Oh, sahib, bloody disaster. You see, at that moment Mister Big-Behind was turning face in that direction also. And, even if Madam was so enjoying she was having no eyes for door opening just only one crack, Mister was different kettle-fish to one hundred percent.”

I began to hope my peeping friend had got the thumping he deserved. But when was this first murder of his coming in?

“Yes, I can see you were in big trouble,” I said, by way of urging him on.

“Oh, sahib, you are not at all knowing how much of troubles I was in.”

“No?”

“No, no, sahib. You see, when I was observing whole of that man, just only as he was jumping off the bed, off lady also, I was at once seeing who it was. And, sahib, then I was knowing real-real disaster was there.”

“Why was that?”

“Sahib, perhaps, coming from foreign, you are not even knowing name of Bombay Number One top smuggler. Sahib, it is Munna Thakur. Thakur Dada, we are calling him. Famous-famous. Name in papers each and every day. Police very much respecting. And bad also. Bad-bad-bad.”

“And he had seen you? Is that it?”

“Oh yes, sahib. He had damn well seen all right. And I also had seen, I had seen he was not once ever going to forget this face.”

Well, I thought, as a face it’s not exactly prepossessing. But with those two great big pointy ears, you’re right, my friend, it’s certainly memorable.

“Yes, I suppose you must have felt you were in a pretty tight corner. Did you manage to do anything about it? Or are you still trying to dodge — what did you call him? — Thakur Dada?”

“Oh no, sahib. Altogether okay now. I was telling, it is my first murder.”

“You mean you murdered him? This top smuggler? Feared by the police even? But didn’t he have a gang? Bodyguards? What do you call them? Goondas.”

“Yes, yes. He was having. Many-many tough-tough goondas. That was why I was needing to act damn quick. I was just only lucky the gentleman was in state of undress itself.”

“Yes, I suppose he could hardly chase you out into the street.”

“Correct, correct. But I tell you, he was into a trouser and out of that hotel room even before I had run down each and every stair.”

“He chased you then? Was he armed at all?”

“Oh yes, sahib. A gentleman like Thakur Dada is always carrying a gun. He was waving and waving same as he ran after me along lane going towards Colaba Causeway.”

“But I suppose he couldn’t fire at you? Not in a lane crowded with people?”

“Oh, sahib, such would not have stopped Thakur Dada. If he had been able, he would have put bullets three-four into myself, and walk off laughing only.”

“But wouldn’t the passersby have set on him? Held him until the police came?”

“Sahib, it was Thakur Dada there.”

“Really? He has that much power, does he?”

I was beginning to wonder if, after all, I might be learning something to put into some future book. To show your hero in a really good light you need a villain of real stature.

“Oh, sahib. Thakur Dada cannot be touched.”

“Cannot? So he’s still there? After you?”

“No, no, sahib. I should have been saying He could not be touched.”

“Then it was him that you— Who was the— The victim of your first murder?”

“Ji haan, sahib.”

It was clear only his own language would do to make that claim. Ji haan: Yes, indeed.

“But how? How did you manage to — to murder a man like that?”

“Sahib, I will tell you. But you only. Because I have such respect for notable British author.”

“That— That’s very kind. Well, thank you. Thank you.”

“Sahib, this is what was happening. Truly. There I was, running and running, and thinking with each and every step Thakur Dada is there. He would wipe me out just only like I would slap one mosquito. And he is big-big and I am small-small itself. In two-three minutes I will be feeling his big-big hands round my throat. What to do? What to do?”

“What did you do?”

My heart had begun to pound almost as thumpingly as my friend’s must have done.

“Oh, sahib, at that moment, just as I was coming into Colaba Causeway itself. Sahib, just outside here, going straight-straight from Prince of Wales Museum to utmost tip of Bombay.”

“Yes, yes. I’ve been here before. Very crowded. Traffic hooting and honking everywhere.”

“Very good, sahib. Well, just as I reached, I was seeing a fellow with a handcart selling mangoes. Hundred percent rotten fruit. Cheap, cheap. And idea, was coming to me that if I was taking one of those baskets and tipping same on ground, perhaps Thakur Dada would be slipping and sliding and falling down to his very face.”

“Good thinking. And it came off? You got away?”

Could I use that trick in a Ghote story? There were times when I had him chased by goondas and outnumbered. But this seemed a little too good to be true.

As it turned out to be.

“Sahib, I was not so clever as that. And also if I had got away that time, how long would it be before one dark night I was meeting four-five goondas and coming to my very end?”

“So, what happened?”

“What was happening was that this mangowalla was not at all liking some passing individual seizing his basket, however much of rotten were his fruits.”

“So...?”

“And colliding also with Thakur Dada.”

“So that put an end to the chase, I suppose. But surely it can’t have been what saved you?”

“No, no, sahib. But, you see, this mangowalla was coming out fast, impact was sending Thakur Dada, who was dancing here and there so as not to slide on those fruits, falling-sprawling right into roadway.”

“Yes?”

“And, sahib, bus was passing. Number One Limited, very much of nonstop.”

I admit I felt a tumbling sense of anticlimax. So this first murder was no murder at all. I suppose I should have been glad to find I was not sitting opposite a killer — he had just drained his second falooda, every bit as noisily — but somehow at that moment I felt distinctly cheated.

“And then you ran off?” I said.

“Sahib, no, no, no. What good would be there? If the fellows of Thakur Dada’s gang were finding out who had caused death of their hero, then once more I would be in big-big soup.”

“I suppose you would be. So you didn’t run off? Is that it?”

My big-eared friend sat up straighter and gave me a look of terribly greasy cockiness.

“No problem, sahib, no problem.”

“I would have thought—”

“Sahib, I was seeing out of corner of eye what had happened. So at once, quick-quick, I was running back. I was taking out this knife I have.” He flicked open his shirt, and I saw to my surprise that his long leather sheath actually contained nothing. “Sahib, you must be knowing that private eye is sometimes needing one weapon only. And, sahib, I was at once kneeling down and plunging same deep-deep into body of Thakur Dada and leaving there.”

“But why did you do that? Wasn’t he dead? Or what?”

“Oh, sahib, yes. Dead-dead. But that knife was having on it my name. So in not much of time entire Bombay was knowing who had disposed of Thakur Dada. Who had the daring to do it. So now no one will do anything against me. They are damn well knowing, if so, they are facing Murder Number Two.”

I looked at my friend.

No, I thought, no. I don’t really believe Inspector Ghote is ever going to have to solve the case of the serial-killer private eye.

Jo Bannister is as clever as they come with the twist-in-the-tail short story. For those interested in trying her longer, fiction, St. Martin’s Press has a new novel due out in May entitled A Taste for Burning, and her previous Book, Charisma, published by St. Martin’s last autumn, is available in bookstores...

It didn’t look much like a witch’s cottage. For one thing, it wasn’t in the middle of a deep dark wood at the end of a winding path overhung with cockle, spurge, dead nettles, and Old Man’s Beard. A witch living in Colliers Row would have to take two buses to anywhere you could pick ingredients for even a very modest spell, to cure boils on a cat, for instance. A love potion for a tax inspector would involve a longer journey than that.

For another thing, the curtains at the parlour window were yellow gingham and the sill was decorated with a collection of china pigs. All right, so maybe modern witches prefer not to advertise their presence with plum velvet and wax effigies; still, there was something distinctly nonoccult about yellow gingham and china pigs.

Denzil Boswell and Geordie Baker passed Colliers Row going to and from work each day — Denzil at a hardware store, Geordie as an apprentice butcher — so the cottage was part of their local scenery. You might think they would long ago have stopped noticing it; but no. Hardly a day went past without one of them cracking some joke about it or crossing his fingers to ward off the evil eye. This they did with great hilarity and hoots of mirth, without realising that such obsessive derision was only another way of paying respect to the myth. Two young men who really thought it was nonsense would have talked about something else.

“Did you ever see her?” Denzil asked once. “My mum says she’s all shrivelled and wrinkled, and ninety if she’s a day.”

“Your mum thinks everybody’s shrivelled and wrinkled unless they go through turnstiles sideways.” It was true. Mrs. Boswell came from Jamaica, where anybody worth a row of beans is expected to have at least two chins.

“My mum says she was a famous witch in Haiti but she had to leave. Something to do with an army officer’s son and a goat.”

Geordie stared. “What — she turned him into one?”

“Turned him into one, married him to one — something like that.” Denzil affected a nonchalance he didn’t altogether feel. The West Indian blood in his veins was significantly diluted by the Tyneside steelrigger who had been his father, but the spirit of the islands sends out long fingers, and at times like these he could feel them stirring in his hair.

Denzil’s mother was a devout Christian and knew voodoo for the work of the Devil. If asked, she would say she’d told her children about mambos and houngans as an awful warning. But the truth was that Mrs. Boswell was a natural storyteller, that she sometimes missed the vibrant colours and fevered passions of home, and that the violent erotic activities of the voodoo pantheon — of Damballah the snake god and Erzulie the temptress and Baron Samedi the lord of the underwprld — sent a delectable shiver up the spine if related with sufficient enthusiasm over a well-made fire on a cold northern night.

So though Denzil Boswell considered himself a modem urban Englishman, rational and pragmatic, there was something about the idea of a voodoo witch living two streets away that teased and intrigued him.

“Our Joyce” — Geordie’s sister worked in the supermarket — “says she wears gold jewellery all the time, big earrings and bangles and things, and pulls out wads of notes to buy a tin of dog food.”

“What’s she called?” All Denzil could remember was that it was something long, complicated, and foreign.

Geordie didn’t know either. He shrugged. “Something Froggy.”

Her name was Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour, and she was somewhere in her ninth decade. Even she wasn’t quite sure where: public records in Haiti at the beginning of the century fell somewhat short of Somerset House standards. She had lived in England for more than forty years and if she, like Mrs. Boswell, missed the warmth and spontaneity of the West Indies, she didn’t miss the way people in authority could make your life a misery if they took against you. And it was such a little goat, and any fair-minded person would have said it was hers and not the army officer’s son’s to start with. Well, probably.

So she fled Port au Prince and came to England as housekeeper to a cousin’s brother-in-law, a widowed shopkeeper. Clarice looked after him until he died, when, having no children, he left her the little house in Colliers Row and enough money to see her through her own old age.

Though this closing phase of her life was lasting longer than either of them had expected. Fortunately Clarice had ways to boost her savings over and above the rate of inflation. There were advantages in being seen as a practitioner of the old arts.

She didn’t practice much now: partly because of her age, more because of the age they lived in. People today, you threaten to put a hex on them, they laugh in your face. You threaten to take their duppy, they think you’re talking about something you buy in a pet shop.

Still, there were worse places in the world for a woman to grow old without family, without friends, with just a hit of money to keep the wolf from her door.

Until the night she was snoozing in the old bentwood rocking chair by the embers of the parlour fire and woke with a start to hear someone opening the kitchen door.

The thought of the old witch, shrivelled and wrinkled and shunning the world except for rare occasions when she went shopping with a wad of notes, filled Denzil Boswell’s thoughts more and more. He thought about her while stacking galvanised buckets, while weighing out nails, while decanting white spirit, and when he went home at night he dreamed of her. What else did she keep in that little house, behind the gingham curtains? Were there effigies and lambs’ hearts stuck with thorns? Was there a black cat that suckled from a nipple in her armpit?

And the money: How much was there? She was a very old woman, she was probably deaf, you could probably hammer her down with a twelve-pound maul and not wake her. He would dearly love to see the effigies, and if he were to find her hoard of witch’s gold she probably wouldn’t miss a little of it. She probably didn’t know how much she had.

Denzil thought he could get into her house easily enough. The back door gave onto a small yard reached from an alley running behind the row, just like his mother’s house; and just like his mother, she probably forgot to lock it half the time. He could be in and out without her even knowing, with a handful of gold and one of those effigies to show Geordie the next day. Geordie was a bit law-abiding at times, but stealing from a witch wasn’t like stealing, it was more like proving yourself. A rite of passage.

In the end he’d thought about it so long, in such detail, that it became inevitable. If doing it proved him a man, what did failing to do it prove? So late one night, when his mother was asleep, he crept out by their own back door — unlocked, naturally; one day they’d have burglars — and slipped along the alleys to Colliers Row.

It was a strange frame of mind in which he found himself: at once elated and afraid, eager to get there and aching to get home, proud of himself and also ashamed. But this wasn’t about how he felt, it was about what he did. And he was going to take some witch’s gold, just to show that he could.

It was an ominously dark night: low clouds, no stars. He’d come by the back alleys to avoid being seen — his mum would kick up a stink if she ever heard what he’d been up to — but it was an unnecessary precaution. In dark clothes, with his middling-dark colouring, he was as hard to spot as a prowling cat.

The house with the yellow curtains was the last in Colliers Row, so it didn’t take much counting on his fingers to work out which was the right yard. The yard gate was latched but not bolted: Denzil let himself in with only a little creak from an unoiled hinge. It was enough to stop his heart for a beat or two but nobody else could have heard it.

The back door was indeed unlocked. His blood raced. If he’d been wrong about that, if the witch had put her cat out and locked up last thing like sensible people, he’d have had to go home. Now he had to go on. He let himself into the kitchen and groped his way around the familiar layout to the parlour door. All these little houses were built the same, but he was taken aback by the smell, which was strange, musky and spicy. The smell of the islands, he supposed, though he’d never been there. His mother’s cooking inclined more to meat and two veg.

The parlour smelled odd too: a dry, dusty, powdery smell he could almost but not quite identify. Also there was the smell of clinker from the embers of a fire. A couple of glowing coals and the glimmer through the gingham curtains of a distant streetlamp — all the nearer ones having been broken — was the only light in the room. It wasn’t enough to see the hand in front of his face. He stood just inside the door, breathing unsteadily, getting his bearings.

Close at hand a voice — a strange voice, ancient and creaking as the hinge outside, a voice with an accent like the singing in his mother’s church — said, “Stay where you are, child. The baron is watching you.”

Denzil’s heart pounded as if it would come out through his ears. But he did as she said. That was what that strange powdery smell was: the smell of old ladies. She was here in the dark room with him: the witch who never slept. Who turned army officers’ sons into goats.

He stammered, “The baron?”

“Baron Samedi,” she croaked in the terrible darkness, and then he understood. Those dreadful tales of his mother’s that brought the incense of Caribbean nights and passions to the backstreets of Tyneside came back to him, years after he had last thought of them. Baron Samedi, chief of the evil Petro gods; also known as Baron Cimetièrre and Baron Crois. Not a nice chap. Not a nice chap at all.

And, of course, entirely mythical. Denzil drew a deep breath, forced his shoulders back, straightened to his full height. Did this mad old woman really think she could scare him with a Haitian bogeyman? Even if he’d felt inclined to believe in gods and demons, which he did not, surely there was a question of jurisdiction? Gods are like wines: not all of them travel well.

“A witch?” he snorted, with perhaps a shade more bravado than he felt. “There’s no such thing!”

“I never said there was,” she retorted calmly. “I just said you should keep still while the baron has his eyes on you. You don’t want to upset the baron; oh no indeed.”

Denzil’s fingers were groping along the wall for a light switch; then he realised that, even if he wanted to see her, he didn’t want her to see him. His hand dropped to his side. “There’s nobody here, old woman. Just you and me, and in a minute there’ll just be you.”

“Stay where you are,” she said again, her musical voice hardening. “The baron’s gettin’ upset now. You gotta be nice to Clarice. Respectful.”

“Who?” He was thinking. She’s old and alone, and if she has a cane to defend herself with that’s the most she’ll have. I can walk out of here any time I want. Hell, I can bundle her under the stairs and take a proper look round, and she can do damn-all to stop me. He wondered why he was even bothering to talk to her.

“Me,” she snapped irritably. “Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour. Miss.”

Denzil laughed out loud. “Clarice Erzulie Tituba Vincour? Lady, that’s a hell of a name for a crazy old Haitian woman!”

“What you know, child?” she demanded, her rusty voice soaring angrily. “What you know about Haiti? What you know about me? You know nothin’. Nothin’!”

He felt oddly piqued by her disdain. “I know about your crazy gods — about Baron Samedi. The lord of Saturday. Also known as the lord of the cemetery and the lord of the cross. The chief of the Petro gods in the voodoo pantheon.” He’d impressed himself; it remained to be seen if he’d impressed her.

Perhaps he had, because when she spoke again her voice was softer. “You know all that? Somebody given you a good education once. Pity to waste it robbing old ladies.”

“Old ladies who produce wads of money at supermarkets deserve to be robbed. Tell me where it is. I won’t take it all.”

“You won’t take any of it,” Miss Vincour corrected him robustly. “Not while I got Baron Samedi to guard it.”

Denzil was getting cross. He hadn’t come here to hurt anyone, didn’t see himself as a mugger of pensioners, but she was getting on his nerves with all her mumbo jumbo. He started to say, “Clarice, you say that one more time—”

Then in the darkness he felt a gust of hot air move across the back of his hand and heard a soft, inhuman, panting, chuckling sound. It froze him to the marrow of his bones.

Clarice chuckled too, an old dry chuckle like breaking sticks. “I guess you’re going to tell me now that Baron Samedi’s a hell of a name for a Rottweiler.”

In the darkness, close by Denzil’s leg, the panting turned to a growl.

William Tapply is a regular contributor to a number of sporting and gardening magazines, including Outdoor Life and Sports Illustrated. In 1984 his first crime novel appeared, featuring lawyer sleuth Brady Coyne, the protagonist of eleven subsequent books. The legal profession plays a key role not only in Mr. Tap-ply’s novels but in this new short story for EQMM...

I was sitting on my usual bench on the Boston Common, the one that faced up the hill to the golden dome of the State House, thumbing through the paper and tossing popcorn at the pigeons and enjoying the warmth of the April afternoon, when a guy in a three-piece suit sat down beside me. “Filthy creatures,” he said, kicking a pigeon away from his leg.

“I like ’em,” I said. I threw a handful of popcorn near the guy’s feet. “Better than people. Pigeons’re honest, at least. You always know where you stand with a pigeon.”

“They just want something for nothing.”

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

“Not me,” he said. “I pay.”

“Who’re you?”

He turned and held out his hand. “Call me John. And you’re Manny, right?”

I ignored his hand and touched the lapel of his suit jacket. “Nice,” I said. “You a lawyer?”

“Actually, I am. Why? Does it matter?”

I shrugged. “A man can always use a good lawyer. Are you good?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I’m very good.” He smiled. “And I heard you were too.”

“You heard right. I’m pretty good.”

“Two hundred up front, the rest on delivery, I understand.”

“Two hundred now,” I said. “Nonrefundable. Then we can talk.”

He smiled and reached into his jacket pocket. He was fiftyish, with iron-gray hair worn longish on the sides and thinning on top. A good-looking, trim guy. The suit was expensive and the shoes were shiny. He fished four fifties out of his thin wallet, folded them together, and pressed them into my hand.

I jammed them into my pants pocket. “Okay,” I said. “We can talk.”

“It’s a house in Harlow—”

“Suburbs cost more,” I said.

He waved his hand. “Sure. Anyhow, you’ll find three leather-bound albums in an upstairs bedroom.”

“Stamps?”

He shook his head. “Baseball cards, actually. The place will be empty between seven and eleven in the evening. There’s a backdoor key behind the shutter to the left of the kitchen window.”

“You’re sure of all this?”

He smiled and nodded.

“Between seven and eleven every evening?”

“For the foreseeable future, anyway.”

“What about an alarm?”

“No. It’s just a development house. Nothing fancy.”

“Dogs?”

He shook his head.

“What about delivery?”

“How about here, same time tomorrow?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t make deliveries in my own office.”

“Not a problem,” he said. “There’s a coffee shop on Charles Street. Vincent’s.”

“I’ll find it,” I said. “Bring twenty fifties. Or fifty twenties. Or some combination thereof.”

He pressed a piece of paper into my hand. “We got a deal?” he said.

I glanced at the paper. “James Bascomb, 29 Harrington St., Harlow,” was scrawled on it. I stuck it into the pocket with the fifties. “Okay,” I said. “A deal. I’ll see you tomorrow at Vincent’s.”

Edward D. Hoch takes Michael Vlado on a Spanish odyssey this time, where he finds intrigue in the pageantry of Holy Week. Spain is renowned for its festivals; not least of which (from the perspective of crime readers) is Semana Negra — Black Week — funded by the Spanish government and designed to celebrate crime fiction in all its forms...

In anyplace but Seville it would have been a bizarre sight. Dozens of red-robed figures, wearing conical gold hoods with eyeholes and carrying five-foot-tall candles like shepherds’ staffs, moved slowly in a long single line toward the cathedral. It was Holy Week — Semana Santa — all over Spain and the Christian world, but only in Seville was the pageantry so elaborate. Wearing the colorful costumes of penitents, usually masked, members of fifty-two religious brotherhoods converged on the cathedral where the Spanish cardinal would conduct services. Each of the brotherhoods represented a local church, and each carried a richly bedecked statue marking the passion and death of Christ as they paraded to loud music more martial than sacred.

Now, as the gold-hooded procession came upon another group wearing rich purple hoods, they slowed to let the others past. Eyes went to the heavy golden figure of Christ being scourged, carried on the shoulders of a team of volunteers. “A burdensome task in this heat,” one of the hooded penitents remarked to his companion. “Though well worth the effort.” Enrique did not answer him, and Juan Diaz took the other’s silence as an admonition at this holy time. They continued on for another block, reaching the intersection where the procession made its final turn toward the gaping front doors of the cathedral. His companion whispered something that Juan Diaz didn’t catch. “What? What did you say?” he asked.

As they passed through the cathedral doors Enrique pulled him aside, out of the line, as the others made their way down the center aisle to the assigned seating section. “This way, Juan Diaz!”

He followed Enrique into the shadows as the remaining penitents passed them by. “What is it? Why do you lead me here? My place is with the Lord.”

“You will be with the Lord soon enough,” the figure in red and gold said. “Soon enough.” A hand came out from beneath the robe and then Juan Diaz saw the ugly steel bayonet.

“You are not Enrique! Who are you?”

He felt the blade break through his skin as he wrenched off the other’s conical hood and looked upon the face of his murderer.

This month we are featuring stories by an unusually large number of authors who have made their mystery short story debut in EQMM. Besides our two Department of First Stories features, we have contributions by former Department of First Story-ers Terry Mullins, Steven Saylor, and Joan Richter, and by British writers Jeffry Scott and Ruth Rendell, whose first U.S. short story publication was with EQMM. To their number we add Barbara Callahan, who appeared in the Department of First Stories in 1974. Ms. Callahan has written at least a dozen stories for us since, although we haven’t had from her before a satire as broad as this one...

Ricardo wanted me. Maurice wanted me. Zazu wanted me. All those daytime TV show hosts wanted me to appear as a guest. It was a bit overwhelming. Ever since the tabloid SLEEZ printed my story and told where I worked, I’d been hounded by producers. They jumped out of cars in the parking lot of the We Never Sleep convenience store, falling all over each other to get to me first. Some of my regular customers got real mad, like Hector Goertz, the town cabbie.

“I come in here every morning, Ruth Anne, expecting fresh coffee, and what do I get lately? Some stuff that’s been sitting out all night and tastes like diesel fuel because you’ve been larking around with the blow-dry crowd. Well, I can take my business elsewhere.”

I felt bad because there is no elsewhere. No other store is open at 5:30 when Hector goes to work. Instead of sympathizing with Hector, the Ricardo producer laughed and told me I should chuck my job and take the “big bucks we can offer.” Then the Maurice producer shoved the Ricardo producer into the Spuds potato chip display and told me his show could top Ricardo’s offer any day. His comment amused the Zazu producer, who said, “We can top their paltry fees any day. And naturally, we want Billy on the show, too. He’d like that, wouldn’t he?”

Billy is my ex-boyfriend who is now my current boyfriend and is responsible for this national interest. After I won him back in a bingo game from my ex-friend Sally Sue, Billy contacted SLEEZ with our story. Sally Sue and I have been competing for Billy’s affections for ten years, since junior year in high school, and we have done some bizarre things to take him away from each other. The SLEEZ headline read, “Bingo! Ruth Anne Wins Billy.”

SLEEZ ran pictures of the three of us, right there on the front page, the one everyone looks at in the supermarket checkout lines. Billy was so proud. He went to the market and while I shopped, he posed himself right next to the SLEEZ rack. He had a pen in hand, ready to sign autographs, but nobody recognized him. Maybe it’s because Billy sent SLEEZ his high-school photograph, the one where he looks like Sylvester Stallone with a crew cut. And Sally Sue’s and my cooking have added a few chins to his original one.

It was a real challenge winning Billy back. I had to cover the four corners on eight bingo cards under the rules Sally Sue and I agreed on. At first, Billy seemed happy to be with me, but lately he’d been acting bored. I think it was our living quarters. “I’m too mobile for a mobile home,” he said. That’s because Billy used to drive a truck before his sciatica forced him to spend his days on the sofa, drinking beer and watching TV.

I hadn’t told him about the letters the three TV producers sent me before they came to the store because Billy always makes fun of the guests on daytime TV shows. When he saw the Zazu show with the man who actually does go out and sleep in the dog house when his wife is mad at him, Billy hooted about him for days.

Being pursued by three gentlemen who shave and change their shirts every day should have been a boost for my dysfunctional self-esteem (Billy teaches me those terms he learns from the TV therapists), but it didn’t. I lost my job that day. Hector complained to the owner of the store, who came in and saw me talking to the producers instead of waiting on customers. That and the bags of potato chips squished by the Maurice producer made the owner say it was the last straw.

Billy would have said something funny like, “You mean the last chip,” but I don’t have that quick sense of humor.

When Billy saw how depressed I was about losing my job, he actually got off the sofa and opened a can of tortellini-o’s for our lunch. It was thoughtful things like that that made me love Billy so much and gave me the strength to battle Sally Sue over the years for his affection.

“Now tell me all about it, hon,” Billy said.

As I sobbed out the story of the three producers, Billy sat thoughtfully scratching his belly. He didn’t laugh or snort about them wanting us to go on TV like I thought he would. Even through my tears I could tell that Billy was planning something or “taking charge of his life” as the TV therapists put it. After I finished my story, right down to the un-Elvis-like curl of my boss’s lips, Billy burped, a sure sign that he was about to say something deep.

He handed me a Kleenex and said, “Hon, you just dry those tears. We want your eyes all nice and sparkly for those three TV shows.”

“Three?” I gasped.

“Why sure. There’s enough of you for all three. And me too.”

“But I thought you didn’t like those shows,” I said.

“Well, usually I don’t, hon, but that’s before I knew there’d be some monetary compensation.”

I loved it when Billy used big words. I got all tingly. When I recovered, I asked him how we could possibly be on three shows at once.

“Not at once, at staggered times. Heck, those shows use the same people all the time. I saw that dog-house guy on Ricardo the week after Zazu and on Maurice the week after Ricardo.”

Billy patted his belly contentedly and gave me a little pat on the thigh of my Lady Bountiful slacks. Sweet gestures like that made me love Billy so much. He never poked fun at my weight without poking fun at his too, although on him it looked cute.

“Now you just relax and finish clipping the hedges around the trailer while I put my mind to our problem. And don’t worry about paying bills. That money from SLEEZ paid off my bookie, all except five hundred dollars, and he’s willing to wait a couple of weeks for that. And the phone company and electric company’s been real understanding since I told them you’d been kidnapped by aliens and soon as you got back from Mars, you’d pay.”

Billy sure can put things in perspective. I was actually humming as I attacked the hedges, which had grown too high for me even to see the mobile home across from us. What with working two shifts at the convenience store and tending to the housework and laundry, I had really let the hedges go. But lunch with Billy had cured my guilt about the hedges and losing my job. As one of the TV therapists that Billy liked to quote said, “Don’t cry over spilt guilt. It’s better out than in. Were all victims.”

After fifteen minutes, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked at the home across the way. It had been for sale but somebody had bought it and moved in. The home sported frilly new curtains and a flock of wooden sheep with curly wool grazing on the lawn. I couldn’t wait to tell Billy. I’d be the one with humor for a change.

“Hey, Billy, hon,” I’d say, “Little Bo Beep has moved in across the way.”

And Billy would say something funny like, “Well, I’ll be Little Jack Homer stuck in a corner,” or something clever like that.

But I didn’t have a chance to test out my new comedy routine. Billy came outside, squinted in the sunlight, and plopped down on a lawn chair from the exertion.

“Hey, Ruth Anne, hon,” he said, “look across the way. Little Sally Sue is waving howdy-do.”

I spun around and laid eyes on my enemy herself, Sally Sue Bilodeau. There she stood in the middle of those smiling sheep looking like she was feeding them silly pills. The sight of her waving amidst those grinning animals gave me a weak spell and I fell backwards onto the lap of Billy, who said, “Oosh,” as we tumbled to the ground. Luckily we weren’t hurt, but unluckily our collapse gave Sally Sue the excuse to scurry over and coo, “Are you hurt, Billy? Do you feel a great weight on your chest? I’ve had CPR training.”

The great weight on Billy’s chest rolled off and scrambled to her feet.

“I’ll count to three and you’d better be out of here, Sally Sue,” I snarled. “Your silly sheep need tending.”

Sally Sue dimpled prettily and brushed back a wisp of her long blond hair. She wears the same style she did in high school when she was voted “Most Likely to Dye Early.”

“Why, Ruth Anne,” she simpered, “I just thought I’d move close by so you wouldn’t have to walk so far to deliver Billy when I win him back. I’ve got a great idea. We’ve never played horseshoes for Billy and I’ve got a brand new set.”

When I waved the hedge clippers menacingly, Sally Sue covered her Rapunzel tresses with both hands.

“No more bets for Billy, Sally Sue. The bingo game was the grand finale.”

During this exchange Billy just grinned. Sometimes I believed that he enjoyed us bickering over him, but he always stepped in, or created an intervention as the TV therapists put it, before Sally Sue and I did each other harm.

On that afternoon Billy’s intervention stopped us cold. “Hey, hons,” he hollered, “you’d better save your energies for the talk shows us three are going on.”

“Us three?” I squeaked.

“Sure, us three. The whole story’s about a love triangle and a triangle has three sides, ergo, us three have got to go.”

Ergo. What a word! I just loved it when Billy talked foreign. That word just melted all my hostilities toward Sally Sue. Billy cracked open a couple of cans of beer while he filled Sally Sue in, and I took three business cards out of my handbag and called the producers. They sounded happy to hear from me. The Ricardo Show, scheduled for three weeks from the day I lost my job, would be our first.

After the phone calls, Sally Sue and I went into training, and Billy acted as our coach. His pep talk really motivated us.

“Now hons, you have got to look good on those TV shows. You’ve got to go out there and make me proud that you both are fighting over me. As of now, you are in training. Ruth Anne, no more tortellini-o’s, just parsley and prunes. And I’ll develop an exercise program for you too, hon. And Sally Sue, hon, you’ve got to get a haircut.”

“Oh no,” she cried.

“Oh yes,” thundered Billy, hands on hips, baseball cap pushed low on his forehead, a natural coach if there ever was one. Billy didn’t thunder often but I loved it when he did.

Eyes narrowed, Billy said, “Sally Sue, your hair falls over your face and you look like a sheep dog. Do you want millions of viewers to think that I would want to be returned to a sheep dog?”

“No, Billy. I’ll go to the beauty shop tomorrow,” she sighed.

“They’ll have their work cut out for them,” I quipped. “Let me do it. I have the hedge clippers.”

“Now, now, team,” Billy chided, “no infighting. We’re the Three Talk-Showteers. Let’s get to work. Ruth Anne, you jog to the newsstand and get me Racing News. It’ll do wonders for your weight. And Sally Sue, you tie your hair back and read me the list of TV shows on this week. Real nice and low. We’ve got to work on your voice. It’s too high-pitched. We don’t want our viewers turning off their sets because their dogs are running away from home.”

Three weeks of intensive training followed. The coach posted my daily routine to the refrigerator:

Oh, that Billy! Free time! Free time for taking my Z’s. After a quick shower, I’d crawl to my bed and fall asleep to the hypnotic drone of Sally Sue in the living room doing her voice lessons with ‘Billy by reading aloud from the phone book.

“Aaronson, Malachi, four-one-four Wyoming Avenue, five-five-five-nine-oh-two-three; Aaronson, Rupert, one-two-five Woodcrest Road, five-five-five-nine-oh-eight-seven; Aaronson, Vera, one-two-four Curtis Avenue, five-five-five-oh-nine-six-five.” At each new phone listing Billy would bark, “Lower, lower!” until Sally Sue sounded like she could do justice to “Old Man River.”

By the end of the second week, my Lady Bountifuls were feeling loose, so Billy canceled his Wednesday seminar so that Sally Sue and I could go shopping for outfits for the shows. We were so excited to have a three-hour pass from boot camp that we giggled like school girls. Or I should say, giggled like a school girl and a school boy. Sally Sue’s giggle had dropped several octaves. I let out a whoop when I found out that I had gone down two sizes. Sally Sue agreed that the mauve pantsuit with the fuchsia scarf that I picked out would be perfect for the show.

The saleswoman who had her back turned when Sally Sue asked directions to the petite department for her outfit answered, “Through the arch and to your right, sir.” Instead of being surprised at the saleswoman’s mistake, Sally Sue was pleased. “Billy’s lessons are working,” she said. However, when Sally Sue came out of the dressing room wearing a beige mini-dress that matched the color of her new short haircut and asked me how I liked it, I thought that she looked and sounded like a female impersonator. But hey, there are plenty of those on TV talk shows too, so I told her she looked cool.

Billy approved of our purchases and said we had done so well that he was canceling the seminars altogether so that we could shop for his Ricardo/Maurice/Zazu outfits. Billy thought it only right, since he was the pursued and therefore the central figure in our drama, that he should have a different outfit for each show. It was Billy’s stand-up guy honesty that made me love him so. Sally Sue pouted, but I think her sore throat had put her out of sorts.

For Ricardo, who’s rather low-key, Billy chose a subdued red, yellow, and green plaid blazer; silk tie painted with Van Gogh look-alike sunflowers; and Statement! jeans. Those loafers with the cute little tassels added, as Billy put it, a “je ne sais quoi” touch to the ensemble. Oh, that Billy and foreign words! Sally Sue and I should have begun to suspect that his fashion sense and language skills would attract other women.

For Maurice, who’s somewhat manic, Billy decided on a biker motif. We had to do massive mall-crawls to find the perfect foundation for his look. At Rip-Off Tees, we finally found it: a dynamite black T-shirt that looked as if its sleeves had been cut off by a reckless three-year-old. The store owner assured us of the authenticity of its prewrinkled fabric. The Neckrowfiles Biker Club had placed it on Highway One and run over it thirty times. Billy reverently handed it to the clerk, amazed that the relic cost only seventy-five dollars.

The tee really set off the studded denim vest and oil-slicked jeans he wore, but the most masterful touch was the fake tattoo. At the decal store, Billy bought four letters and let us each put two on his right bicep to spell H-O-N-S. Since Billy called us both hon, we were each represented on his arm. A real diplomat, that Billy, but why hadn’t he gotten a permanent tattoo?

For Zazu, who’s quite the lady, brimming with concern for the world, Billy decided on environmental correctness. He bought everything at Rita’s Recycled Rags: a burlap suit that made him sneeze a lot; a pink shirt fashioned from plastic shopping bags; and squeaky white shoes made from takeout containers from fast-food restaurants from which catsup and relish stains had carefully been removed.

Our costumes in place, all that remained was for us to be briefed. When we arrived on the Ricardo set two hours ahead of taping, Yvette, the associate producer, escorted us into the green room and filled us in.

“Although, we strive for spontaneity on Ricardo, we are not above making some suggestions that will enliven the show. In your case,” she said, eyes flashing, “we want hostility.”

The way she almost shouted the word hostility made Sally Sue and me jump, but Billy took it in stride, just sat there gaping at Yvette like she was a New York attraction, which in a slickly beautiful, overly made-up way she was. Just before we went on the set, she growled at Sally Sue and me, “Go out there and fight for your man.” Her voice softened, though, when she wished Billy luck and kissed him smack on the lips.

Yvette’s send-off to us really created the mood she wanted. Eyes blazing, nostrils flaring, we brought the right amount of anger to the set, but not with each other — anger at Billy for ogling Yvette and enjoying her kiss. When we made our entrance, our man beamed brighter than any of those lights on the set. Sally Sue looked like she wanted to shut off the switch behind his eyes, but Billy, as he took the center chair of the three set up for us, winked her a coy Billy wink and gave my hand a firm Billy squeeze. It was like he was telling us, hey, I can play the game too. Oh, that Billy! His incredible timing made me redirect my hostility back at Sally Sue like I was supposed to.

Ricardo, who tends to ooze sincerity, told the beginning of our story to the audience — the gymnastics contest we arranged in high school to see who would take Billy to the prom (I did. I held onto the parallel bars three seconds longer than Sally Sue, but I had to wear gauze on my hands to the dance). During Ricardo’s recital he scratched his head and frowned quite a bit to convey his sincere puzzlement over our actions, but his hostly need to stir things up made him jab us a bit as he told about the bingo game, before delivering the knockout question.

Turning to us, Ricardo asked, “Is the contest wearing you girls out? I mean, going from parallel bars to four-corner bingo indicates a steep decline in physical ability. What’s happened to you?”

Before Sally Sue or I could respond, Billy winked at the audience and said, “They’ve gotten older.”

By emphasizing “they” and removing himself from the aging process, Billy Peter-Panned himself into the hearts of the audience, who laughed appreciatively. Once again, Ricardo attempted to direct his attention to Sally Sue and me.

“I have here a list,” he said, “of the various antics you two have undertaken in this yo-yo match for Billy. By the way, have you ever set up a yo-yo contest for Billy?”

Before Sally Sue or I could answer, Billy piped up with, “Nah, they never yo-yoed for this yo-yo.”

The audience howled. Billy’s cute self-mockery went over big. Ricardo scowled at him, but Billy kept his eyes riveted on the camera.

“May I have your permission to read this list, Billy?” Ricardo asked, oozing sarcasm instead of sincerity.

“Oh, be my guest,” Billy answered.

Ricardo flashed Billy the kind of withering schoolteacher look reserved for the class cutup before bellowing, “No, Billy, be MY guest and observe the politeness expected of guests.”

A grandmotherly-looking woman in the audience shouted, “Oh, lighten up, Ricardo. You’re too full of yourself.”

Ricardo bounded off the stage and sprinted toward her. Dimpling appealingly, he handed her the mike and said, “Well, how would you handle this guest?”

“Handle him? Where, in my hot tub or in my waterbed?”

The audience roared. Ricardo worked up a blush and said, “Why grandma, what big hormones you have!”

Grandma grinned and pinched Ricardo’s bottom.

“You can say that again, Ricky,” she yelled as the host raced back to the stage.

Somehow my natural good-heartedness kicked in and I wanted to rescue Ricardo.

“I’d like to hear what you have on that list, Ricardo,” I said.

Gratefully, he turned to me. “And so you shall, my dear. Here we go. After the gymnastics contest, there was the roping event for which you and Sally Sue studied lassoing to prepare to capture Billy. Am I correct, Sally Sue?”

After having been a spectator for so long, Sally Sue had kind of settled into the role. She looked at Ricardo blankly, then squeaked, “Yes, sir,” completely forgetting the voice lessons that had made her a baritone. Her failure gave Henry Higgins the opening to speak for her.

“A regular Annie Oakley she was, too,” Billy said, then tugged shyly at his cowlick. Slipping into movie cowpoke-ese, he added, “Shucks, I plum forgit that Annie was a sharpshooter. What I shoulda’ said was that Sally Sue was a wonderful roper, a regular Wilhelmina Rogers, right?”

When the audience hooted in agreement, there was no stopping Billy. Ricardo might as well have gone into the green room to take a nap.

Seizing center stage, Billy worked the audience like a pro. “And I’ll bet you all would like a demo of just how the little lady roped me, wouldn’t you?”

The audience applauded wildly.

“Yvette, hon, you just bring out that equipment I sent to you.”

Yvette entered the stage holding the lasso at arm’s length as if it were a snake ready to spring.

“Here,” she told Billy.

As she turned to sashay off the set, Billy, like the emcee he had become, shouted at the audience, “Let’s give the little lady a big hand.”

Once more the audience applauded wildly. I stole a glance at Ricardo, who was off to the side miming his need for an aspirin to a stagehand.

Billy gestured to Sally Sue who obediently went over to him, looking as relaxed as a wax-museum dummy. For the first time, my heart went out to my opponent.

“Now folks, this here is Sally Sue. She won me in a roping contest. And let me tell you, she’s good. And that ain’t no bull.”

Oh, that Billy! Didn’t I say once before that Billy’s timing was incredible? Well, it didn’t fail him on the Ricardo Show. As soon as he said bull, Billy pulled two little horns from his pocket and Velcroed them to his head. After snorting cutely and pawing the floor, Billy was ready for roping. He pranced away from Sally Sue, then lowered his head and playfully charged her.

Remembering her voice lessons, Sally Sue swallowed the second half of a squeal. As Billy gamboled around the stage, she twirled the lasso masterfully, tossed it high in the air, and snagged Ricardo. That critter didn’t respond well to roping. The glance he gave Sally Sue as he threw her the rope was toxic. Poor Sally Sue lost her confidence and before Yvette removed her from the set, she had lassoed an overhead light, the zoom camera, and the show’s psychologist, Dr. Anna Floyd. All during Sally Sue’s disgrace, Billy pirouetted, do-si-doed, did the electric slide, and bunny-hopped all over the stage and down the aisle into the audience. His performance that day inspired the dance craze, The Billy.

When the applause finally died down, Dr. Anna Floyd, who, with her highlighted bob and supermodel figure, didn’t look like any doctor I ever went to, instantly proclaimed our diagnosis.

“A remarkable case,” she said. “It surpasses folie à deux, the abnormality in which two people perform acts they would never have done if they hadn’t met. Sally Sue, Ruth Anne, and Billy are engaged in folie à trois, a condition in which three people exploit one another’s weaknesses.”

Believing he had at last regained control of his show, Ricardo shoved the mike under the nose of a mild-looking woman in the audience who shouted, “Folie à deux to you too, Floyd. You’re the crazy one. Billy’s just fine.”

After some of the audience started dancing The Billy in the aisles, Ricardo quickly led into the phone-call segment of the show. The dancers sat down to applaud every pro-Billy caller. And there were many, their comments ranging from, “He’s adorable and cuddly,” to, “He’s worth every hair-pulling contest those two ever got into.”

That comment riled me. I raised my hand to attract Ricardo’s attention, but he ignored me. I wanted to tell the world that Sally Sue and I never pulled hair. We maintained our dignity throughout. I thought Billy would defend us but he just tugged at his cowlick and smirked. Oh, that Billy! He was loving every minute of the Billyfest. Sally Sue looked about to cry and I felt about ready to lose my parsley and prune breakfast.

An unlikely knight rode the telephone wires to our rescue.

“Hey, Ricardo,” rasped a gravelly voice. “I want to address my comments to Sally Sue and Ruth Anne.”

“Sure,” answered Ricardo. “Just give us your first name and where you’re from.”

“Just call me Bruno from the Bronx.”

“Okay, Bruno from the Bronx, talk to the girls.”

“They ain’t girls, Ricardo. They’re women.”

“Oh, sorry,” dimpled Ricardo.

“Ruth Anne and Sally Sue, I’m a sensitive, caring, nineties kind of guy and I am deeply disturbed that a creep like Billy should dominate you.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Sally Sue and I.

“You two should get on with your lives and I am in a profession that can help you do that.”

Dr. Anna Floyd looked threatened. “Psychology is the only profession that can help them, Bruno. Are you a therapist?”

Bruno chuckled. “You might say that, Doc. I do solve a lot of problems. Now back to Sally Sue and Ruth Anne. Women, my profession, the one I use on my tax returns, is elimination specialist.”

“Waste disposal?” queried Ricardo.

“Yeah, I waste a lot of people. And I could do a beautiful job on Billy. I wouldn’t even charge a fee. I’d do it for nothing for the sake of all the sensitive, caring, nineties kind of guys like me who are out here. Just say the word.”

The audience gasped, Ricardo froze, Billy choked, Dr. Anna Floyd sneezed, Sally Sue frowned, and I grinned.

“Well thanks, Bruno,” I said. “Let me think it over.”

“Sure,” he answered. “I ain’t the kind of guy to rush a lady.”

At that moment, Yvette ran out on the set and yelled, “Trace that call. The man made a terroristic threat on the phone.”

“I’m calling from a pay phone, mizz,” Bruno said. “Women, I’ll be in touch.”

And he was. When Sally Sue and I came home (Billy-less because Viewer magazine wanted to do a cover story on him) to our respective trailers, we each found a business card slipped under our door. The card read, “Bruno, Elimination Specialist, (609) 555-3201. Confidentiality insured.”

“I think he means ‘assured,’ ” Sally Sue said when we met at her place to rehash the show. I didn’t dispute her because Sally Sue used to be a proofreader before she took five years off to write a romance novel. When she finished it, Billy was supposed to grow his hair to his shoulders and pose for the cover. Each of us tucked the Bruno card into our wallets.

Watching the video of the Ricardo Show, I mean, the Billy Show, was traumatic for Sally Sue. She sobbed all during the part where she lassoed the lights, camera, and Ricardo.

“I look like a crazed cowgirl,” she wailed.

Although her self-analysis was more on target than her roping, I told her she did fine. She returned the compliment by saying how slender I looked during the seventeen seconds I spent on camera. Over hot-fudge sundaes, we both agreed that Billy, oh that Billy, had roped them all in. We clicked our sticky sundae dishes in a toast to our good taste.

“We found him first,” I mumbled as I attacked the whipped cream.

“You don’t think Billy will get conceited from all this attention, do you?” Sally Sue asked.

“Never,” I said.

“Never,” Sally Sue echoed.

Billy called several times during the next week to apologize for not coming home before the Maurice Show. What with the spread in Viewer magazine and The Billy dance video he was making, his agent, he told us, just didn’t think Billy could spare the time.

“Agent?” Sally Sue squealed.

“Yes, agent, hon,” Billy replied. “We’re really hitting the big time. Now, you girls, I mean, women, just keep to your routines. Sally Sue, you read the R’s in that old phone book, and Ruth Anne, you stay on friendly terms with the parsley and the prunes.”

“Yes, Billy,” I answered.

“Good. Now I’ll meet you in the green room two hours before the taping of the Maurice Show next week. Love ya, hons.”

“Love ya too, Billy,” we chimed.

Grimly, Sally Sue picked up the phone book. More grimly, I started dicing prunes. By the eve of the Maurice Show, I had lost four more pounds, and Sally Sue had rasped her way to Rzyardich, Ronald, 212 Pine St., 555-2318.

When Sally Sue and I entered the green room of the Maurice Show, we didn’t see Billy, only a stylish young woman who looked amazingly like Yvette of the Ricardo Show. Actually, she was Yvette.

“Oh, you work on this show too,” roared Sally Sue, all those R’s making her resonate resoundingly.

“Of course not,” she snapped. “I quit my job and now I’m Billy’s agent. He’s got a great future in this business. I’m just in here waiting for you two.”

“Where is Billy?” Sally Sue rumbled.

“Where he can’t be disturbed. He likes to meditate before he performs. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

Then she flounced out of the room. Yes, flounced. All my life I had wanted to see a flounce and I instinctively knew that the swish of the hair when in synch with the swish of the clothing is a definite flounce.

“She flounced,” I said admiringly.

“Who cares!” Sally Sue bellowed. “She won’t let us see Billy.”

“No one keeps us from Billy,” I said, as I marched boldly down corridors, Sally Sue in tow, scanning nameplates on doors. When I saw an unnamed door sporting a handmade star, I knew we had found our man.

“Open up, Yvette,” I yelled. “We know you’re holding Billy against his will. He wants to see us.”

The thought of Billy as prisoner enraged Sally Sue. After thrusting her right shoulder against the door as they do in movies, she let out a howl of pain as she bounced from the door to the wall. Discreetly, I turned the knob and kicked open the door so that Sally Sue wouldn’t think her injury had been in vain.

The “prisoner” cooperated with our attempt at freeing him by unwrapping himself from the embrace of Yvette and croaking, “Hi, hons.”

“Our names are Ruth Anne and Sally Sue, not hons,” I said frostily.

Spotting a box of pastry on the desk, I flounced over and took a jelly doughnut, careful to lick every granule of sugar off my fingers.

“Now, now, hon, I mean Ruth Anne, you’re breaking training.”

“And you’re breaking hearts, Billy. I think the TV viewers should learn of your treachery.”

Billy paled, but brightened after Yvette squeezed his bicep and said we wouldn’t dare, which, of course, we wouldn’t. He was wearing the biker outfit. A close inspection revealed that the decal H-O-N-S had been washed off.

“Don’t worry, Billy,” she cooed, “I’ve orchestrated the show so that these two won’t be able to say a word.”

Oh, that Billy. He tugged at his cowlick and shrugged so boyishly that Sally Sue and I knew immediately he was a victim, just like all those other TV talk-show victims. Yvette must have forced him to change the decals and to embrace her. Poor baby. I threw the second doughnut into the trash and received a thumbs-up sign from Billy for my resolve. Knowing we were back in his camp gave him the strength to sprint onto the set and acknowledge the applause that was much louder for him than for Maurice.

A tall, imposing Frenchman on the order of Charles de Gaulle, Maurice oozed militarism. When he ordered Billy to surrender center stage and take his seat, a mutinous pro-Billy audience hissed its displeasure. Brandishing the mike like a bayonet, Maurice silenced them. Mistakenly, I thought Maurice would triumph over Billy in the battle of the egos, but I underestimated our man. As Maurice spoke to us, reviewing our contests for Billy, our hero sat still, allowing the audience to gaze upon his biker-ness. In the midst of Maurice’s recap of our contests, a woman in the audience shouted, “Hey, stud, I just love the studs on your vest.”

“They do reflect my studliness, don’t they, ma’am?” Billy responded.

The audience howled until Maurice eyed them coldly, as if selecting the worst offenders to be executed on the spot.

“As I was saying,” he snapped, “one of your endeavors involved a dart-shooting match in which you, Ruth Anne, were the victor. Am I correct?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered smartly.

“And today we’re going to reenact that great event.”

At that moment, a dart-board descended from the ceiling on the left side of the set. The audience cheered, Billy grinned, Sally Sue groaned, and I started to sweat. The spectators in the Sudzy Wudzy Tavern, the arena where I had won Billy in darts, numbered five, and four of them had imbided too much sudzy to focus on the game. Now I was to perform in front of the studio audience and the trillions at home.

After Maurice handed me the darts, I stalled for time by casting a critical eye over the absolutely perfect feathers. Another reprieve occurred when Sally Sue dropped a dart on her instep and hobbled off the set. Gallantly, Billy followed her. The audience cheered her as they would an injured athlete, but Maurice glared at her as if Sally Sue were a malingering recruit.

“Since your opponent has defected, Ruth Anne, you must carry on alone,” Maurice commanded. “Perform solo!”

Of course, I saluted. It was the proper thing to do. Then, to avoid court-martial, I threw three bull’s-eyes in a row. When I turned to acknowledge the roar that had erupted from the audience, I saw Billy doing a wheelie on a motorcycle. Oh, that Billy! He hadn’t gone backstage to help Sally Sue; he went there to get the cycle! He upstaged my three bull’s-eyes!

“Halt, I say halt,” shouted Maurice as Billy vroomed into the audience, up and down the aisles, braking occasionally to kiss a young woman or to hoist a thrilled granny onto the seat behind him. When the exhaust from the bike had created a haze over the studio that threatened to eclipse him, Billy leaped from the cycle and did The Billy. The audience went crazy.

And so did Maurice. In one swift move that looked like an uncle-ish pat on the head, he conked Billy with the mike. As Billy slid to the floor, Maurice grabbed him and set him firmly in a chair next to Sally Sue, who had limped back to the set. The audience laughed at Billy’s “pretend” daze.

Resuming control, Maurice announced, “We’ll take calls from our viewers now.”

Two biker “old ladies” called and told Billy they wanted to be his old lady. A woman from Walla Walla wanted to know where to buy The Billy video. When Yvette came on stage to give the answer, Billy came out of his coma. As she flounced offstage, Billy turned to watch her and my heart sank. Decaled on the back of his right ear were the letters Y-V-E-T. It’s not that Billy can’t spell. It’s just that he has small ears.

When Bruno from the Bronx called, it was like hearing from an old friend.

“Yo, Maurice, Bruno from the Bronx here. How ya doing?”

“State your business,” ordered Maurice.

“Sure. I got a question for Sally Sue and Ruth Anne. Women, since this guy is not a sensitive, caring, nineties man like me, and he is definitely not meeting your needs, would you like me to off him?”

Maurice beamed. “Why, that’s an interesting idea, Bruno.”

“Maurice, I ain’t talking to you.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I glanced at Sally Sue, who looked wistful. During a break for a commercial, she whispered to me that she too had seen the letters behind Billy’s ear. But we both thanked Bruno and said no after Billy, that master of timing, had blown us each a kiss.

Only the wrap-up remained, and to perform that sacred duty, Maurice turned to Dr. Carla Young, psychologist, who oozed self-confidence.

“It’s quite obvious to all but the certified dull that what we have here is a case of the exhibitionist, Billy, strutting his stuff for the voyeurs, Sally Sue and Ruth Anne. It’s not that they love Billy per se. It’s just that they love peeking at him and these so-called contests are merely transactions to determine who gets the next peek.”

For the first time in her TV career, Dr. Young was soundly booed. She twirled her hair and bit her thumbnail as she staggered offstage. For once I was grateful to Billy’s fans, who truly believed that we loved him.

After the show, Billy had no time to talk to us. A photographer from Motorcycle Mania magazine had posed him on the Billycycle, the name on the back of the bike. Oh, that Yvette! She must have been really busy buying glittery gold decals for bikes and ears, and setting up photo opportunities, and nudging out Sally Sue and me for Billy’s affections. All those activities must have seriously cut into her flouncing time.

As soon as we got back to my place, I kicked off my shoes and curled up in Billy’s old recliner. Somehow I knew that chair was as close as I’d get to Billy from then on, but I was too tired to care. Before long I fell asleep and had an insightful dream. In it, Sally Sue and I were standing next to a table in a laboratory. When lightning flashed through the windows, I saw a man asleep on the table. Sally Sue and I put on white coats and then attached jumper cables to his temples. We pulled some switches and electricity zigzagged through the man. The shocks woke him up and he ripped off the straps that bound him to the table. “Hi, hons,” he said before he started destroying the room.

Startled, I woke up and called out to Sally Sue, who had come home with me, supposedly to make more sundaes. Actually, she had come to my place for another reason which I soon found out.

“Sally Sue, I need to talk to you,” I yelled again.

“Be right there. I’m on the phone.”

The sound of Sally Sue talking in her normal voice helped me shake off the scariness of the dream. When she came into the living room, I knew what I had to tell her.

“Sally Sue, I’ve had a dream and it explains everything. Brace yourself: my dream tells me that we’ve created Billystein, a monster.”

“I know.” She grinned. “That’s what. I just told Bruno and he agreed that Billy is our Frankenstein.”

“Bruno?”

“Yes, Bruno from the Bronx. I just spoke to him. I lost his business card and came here to use the one he sent you. Bruno’s going to carry out the plan I thought of, but we have to do our part.”

“Do our part?” I croaked.

“Yes, and on the Zazu Show. It will be a talk-show first.”

This couldn’t be happening. I was locked in the dream laboratory. To prove it, I yanked at my hair. It hurt. I was awake and that person in front of me, talking with all the assurance of a TV therapist, was my former archrival, Sally Sue. When she told me the plan, I said I wanted nothing to do with it, but the package Billy had delivered to my door changed my mind.

The note in the box read: “Hons, don’t forget the training program. Sally Sue, take a bite out of the Big Apple by practicing your speech lessons on the Manhattan phone book. Ruth Anne, here’s some New York City inorganically grown parsley for you to sprinkle on your prunes. Don’t bother calling to thank me, I’m tied up with my agent. Love, Billy.”

After receiving Billy’s package, the only time I wavered about carrying out the plan was when we entered the green room for the Zazu Show. She was a non-bottom pinching, environmentally correct grandmother who had stocked the green room with refreshments (in recyclable containers, of course) for us. Such thoughtfulness made me want to ditch the plan until Billy flounced into the green room. Yes, flounced. The jacket of his burlap coat swished at the exact moment that his cowlick bobbed and his reusable-container shoes squeaked. I’d call that a three-ring flounce.

“Hons,” he began.

“Our names are not hons,” Sally Sue and I retorted.

“Oh, okay. Well, Sally Sue and Ruth Anne, just don’t use too much airtime bowling over me.”

“Bowling?” I asked.

“Yep. They’re setting up a miniature bowling lane on the set so you girls—”

“Women,” corrected Sally Sue.

“So you girls can do it all over again like the night Sally Sue won me at Bowla-Bowla. But hurry it up. Yvette figures a minute and a half ought to do it. That will give me the camera time I need now that I’m a celebrity.”

Executing a reverse flounce, he left the room. Oh, that Billy! As the romance novels like to say, he had just sealed his fate.

After Zazu introduced us, Sally Sue nudged me and pointed to the audience. Although we knew him only from a blurry photo he had sent, I recognized at once the person Sally Sue had singled out. In the spirit of Sally Sue’s plan, Bruno from the Bronx had dressed in a military-looking khaki outfit set off by a jaunty brown beret. He looked like a young Saddam Hussein. I squirmed. There was still time to call off the plan. I could fake a faint, perhaps another talk-show first, but Sally Sue, sensing my distress, whispered, “Courage.”

Veering from the standard talk-show format, Zazu let the TV therapist, Dr. Sharon Thorney, open the show because, Zazu said, “The whole world knows about Billy, Sally Sue, and Ruth Anne now. So what’s your opinion, Doctor?”

Flipping her long blond hair away from her right eye, Dr. Thorney pronounced us certifiable. “A deep psychosis is at work here. Obviously all three have multiple personalities that manifest themselves in each other. Obviously, Billy is really Sally Sue and Ruth Anne. Clearly, Sally Sue is really Billy and Ruth Anne. Definitely, Ruth Anne is really Billy and Sally Sue.”

Before Dr. Thorney could continue, Zazu jumped in and thanked her drily for “acquainting us with the disorder of the week.” Dr. Thorney pulled her feet up under her and curled up into a tight little ball.

“So let the game begin,” said Zazu as two stagehands carried out the portable bowling lane.

Sally Sue and I bowled four strikes in a row. We were having such a good time that I forgot about the plan until Billy’s antics made me remember it. As Sally Sue and I were talcing our fingers for the fifth frame, Billy, jealous of the audience’s attention to us, sprinted in front of the lane.

“Hey, you environmentally correct audience, let me tell you about my outfit. The suit’s been recycled from potato sacks, the shoes from fast-food orders, and...”

“Sit down, Billy,” hollered a sweet-looking young woman. “I’m getting a bowling lesson watching Sally Sue and Ruth Anne.”

To win her over, Billy grinned and tugged at his cowlick, his trademark “aw shucks” gesture that shot Bruno from the Bronx right out of his seat. Bruno was wearing an “I’m a sensitive, caring assassin” look and was panting for action, but it was too soon. Sally Sue signaled him to wait. She wanted the plan to go into effect when everyone was absorbed in the show. Billy soon obliged us by performing a real attention-grabber.

“Miss, I appreciate your wanting to take a bowling lesson,” Billy said sweetly, “but how about you taking a recycling lesson from me? How about I show you my recycled skivvies, made out of plastic shopping bags from the Outrageous Undies shop?”

The audience whistled and cheered. The young woman yelled, “Sit down, Sally Sue and Ruth Anne. We want Billy.”

To the chant of “We want Billy,” the monster began to undress, doing a crude version of a striptease and handing discarded pieces of clothing to Yvette, who had come onto the set. At precisely the moment when Billy started to unbuckle his belt, Sally Sue nodded at Bruno from the Bronx. Shots rang out, the set went dark, the audience stampeded up the aisles, Yvette screamed, Zazu gasped, Sally Sue laughed, and I giggled. Oh, that Billy! We were free of him at last.

When the backup lights went on, Yvette became completely unflounced. Weakly, she pointed to Billy’s chair.

“He’s gone,” she sobbed. “Someone shot out the lights so he could kidnap Billy in the dark.”

“But hark, there’s a note pinned to Billy’s chair,” said Sally Sue, a bit dramatically, I thought.

“Let’s not overdo it, Sally Sue,” I cautioned. “No more harking. Let someone else read the note.”

“Okay.” She grinned.

It was only right that Zazu should read the note (composed by Sally Sue); after all, it was her show until Billy took over. In solemn tones she read:

A sensitive, caring New York cabdriver who recognized Billy from a newspaper photo picked him up the next morning on 38th Street and drove him to the TV studio to reclaim his clothes. On the way, Billy spotted Yvette entering an unemployment office. Shirtless and shivering, he jumped out of the cab and caught up with her.

“Hon, hon,” he panted, “I’m back from my terrible ordeal. We can be together again.”

“Buzz off, Billy,” Yvette said as she pushed him from her. “You’re unmarketable. Nobody wants to hire somebody with a price on his head. I’m collecting unemployment till I find another client. Now get away from me. I don’t want to be hit by a stray bullet. There’s a TV camera across the street filming this. Already you’re breaking your contract with Bruno from the Bronx.”

The evening news showed Billy dashing to the cab and diving onto the floor. The camera also caught Yvette in a magnificent flounce. Security guards, fearful that Billy’s presence in a TV studio might draw sniper fire, refused him entrance, but did drop his shirt, tie, and jacket down five floors to him.

Back home, Sally Sue and I toasted each other as we waited for the inevitable collect phone call.

“Hons, I love you both,” he began. “I thought of the two of you and the good times we’ve had as I sat chained to a lawn chair in the basement of a house in Beirut.”

“The Bronx, Billy,” I corrected.

“It might as well have been Beirut,” he pouted. “I rode for miles stuffed in a car trunk and you know how bad that is for my sciatica.”

“Poor baby,” chuckled Sally Sue, who had picked up the call on the portable phone. “And when you got to the basement, were you tortured?”

“Was I! A madman wearing a beret and Groucho glasses and moustache slammed a Manhattan telephone directory on my lap and made me read it out loud for hours. He wouldn’t feed me till I got to the D’s.”

“So what did he bring you?” I asked.

“A meal not fit for a human being. Diced prunes and parsley! I was so desperate I signed the agreement.”

Oh, that Bruno! He followed our instructions to the letter. Sally Sue and I slapped hands in a gleeful high five.

“So, hons, I want to come home,” he whined. “And I’ll divide my time evenly between you.”

“Sorry, Billy, but I’ll be too busy. I’m turning my romance novel into a thriller,” said Sally Sue.

“I’m sorry too, Billy,” I said. “I’m going back to school.”

“But hons,” he wailed.

“Can’t talk any longer, Billy,” I said. “Someone’s on Call Waiting. Since Bruno from the Bronx gave our numbers to legions of sensitive, caring, nineties guys, the phone’s been ringing night and day. Ciao.”

Men who choose to develop a female sleuth as a central series character are still relatively rare in our field. William Beechcroft is trying it for the first time in the following story, which introduces police detective “Kat” Curtci in a homicide case that may make or break her...

When he caught sight of the object in the canal behind his house, Sam Wolff thought it was a manatee, not an uncommon visitor this time of year on their Southwest Florida barrier island.

“I don’t think so, Sammy,” Myra Wolff said, her butterless melba toast arrested halfway to her mouth. “It’s not moving.”

They had been enjoying breakfast in the cool of early morning on the canal-side upper deck of their piling house. Now their attention was on the large gray object nudging their dock down in the canal.

“Tide’s coming in,” Sam observed. “It’s a dead manatee, drifted in from the bay.”

He set down his coffee mug, pushed back from the glass-topped table, and walked down the rear steps to the sparse lawn.

Out on the dock, he felt as if he’d been hit with a jolt of electric current. He stared down at a human body, face down, dressed in gray slacks and long-sleeved shirt, its left shoulder gently bumping the corner dock piling.

“What is it, Sam?” Myra called from up on the deck.

“Don’t come down, honeybun. It’s a floater.”

He was surprised at his word choice. Too much TV. “A body, Myra. Some unfortunate fellow drowned.”

“Omigod!” Myra shrieked. “Should I call Nine-One-One?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” Sam shouted back. “But use the regular police number. It’s not an emergency now.”

Thirteen minutes later, he had a yardful of people.

When it comes to creating an authentic atmosphere for the historical mystery Clayton Emery ranks with the best in the genre. He shares with writers like Britain’s Paul Doherty a lack of squeamishness in portraying the grislier side of medieval life, with all its sights, sounds, and smells. In this new adventure of Robin Hood, the outlaw and the ever-astute Marian have got to solve a traditional whodunit...

“Unclean! ’Ware! ’Ware the leper!”

Robin and Marian needed no more warning. They backed down the narrow road to a trough where an ash had toppled, slid under it amidst brush. Robin drew a cross in the dirt with his right toe. “Hie then! Get yourself by and gone!”

Husband and wife watched the pathetic figure straggle past. Clad in a hooded robe gray with filth, the leper hobbled on crippled feet. A tin bell atop his tall staff clanked mournfully. “Unclean! Unclean! ’Ware the leper!”

Shuffle, shuffle, the unseen feet plodded through new-fallen leaves of oak and ash and beech and elm. Robin and Marian waited until the pariah was out of sight, then took to the road again.

“There but for the grace of God,” Robin breathed. “They should be cast away from decent folk altogether.”

Marian asked. “I don’t abide the notion sick people have sinned, you know. It doesn’t take the wrath of God to unbalance your humours.”

“Only God could curse you with leprosy.” Robin swung his bow as they walked. He kept an arrow crooked alongside in case they flushed game. “It’s the worst fate there is. You’re neither alive nor dead, wandering like a ghost, yet shackled with worldly woes.”

“I know that.” Marian was dressed like her husband, in a tattered shirt and trousers of green — they had yet to switch to winter brown — with a laced deerskin tunic and tall greased boots. A soft hat with a jaunty pheasant feather spilled over her dark hair. Both carried bows and quivers, a knife, a satchel of provisions. “I’ve seen many at the leprosarium in the caves under Nottingham Castle. For their suffering, they should be pitied.”

“I’ll pity ’em. From a bowshot away.”

They saved their breath for walking, and soon breasted a rise that revealed their destination. Long Valley Screed was a fertile pocket torn from the tree-covered hills, almost bluffs, so sheer shelves of yellow sandstone were exposed. Only the east side lay open. Perched on a knoll to the north was a small hall, more hunting lodge than manor house, the Duke of Lancaster’s. Elsewhere, cottages and byres lay higgledy-piggledy amidst fields of barley, rye, and wheat that shone red-gold in the late-afternoon sun.

Robin instinctively nocked his arrow. “Something’s amiss.”

“Aye.” With no threat of rain, everyone from priest to crofter should have been harvesting. Instead, the rabbits and crows had the fields to themselves.

Robin Hood pointed across the valley where a bright stream spilled from a cleft in the hillside. “There. At the mill.”

“Woe betide the miller.”

Woe indeed. The whole village of two hundred had gathered outside the gristmill.

Marian stopped to watch the women. One — pretty, Saxon, blond, and slim — wore a gown of red sarcenet and taffeta that marked her from her drab neighbours like an oriole over ouzels, though she was dusty as any from winnowing. She wept uncontrollably.

The men clustered at the door, peeking in. They hushed and stared at Robin. Two greeted the tall archer by name, though he didn’t know theirs. “Hail and met well. What transpires within?”

“Our miller’s dead,” said a man with salty beard and a cast in one eye. “Fell through the floorboards into his own works.”

“It’s a shilling that killed him,” said another elder.

“A shilling?” asked the outlaw. “How’s that?”

“Old Hosea’d pinch a farthing till it squealed. Our carpenter, Geoffrey, told him a mote a’ times the floor was rotten from damp. Offered to replace his floorboards at a shilling apiece. Hosea saved himself some coin, then paid in blood.” Other men muttered about Hosea’s parsimony.

“Speak not ill of the dead, lest they long for company,” Robin advised. “Now excuse me.” He pushed past.

The gristmill was small. Centermost were two round millstones supported by posts above and below, and a hopper to feed them. Round about were a workbench of tools, a corner fireplace, a stair up and down, sacks and baskets of grain heaped high. A loft ringed the room, one side the miller’s quarters, the remaining space stacked with sacks of flour. Out two small windows, shutters wide, Robin saw the great mossy millwheel had stopped.

By the twin millstones was a squarish hole in the floor. Robin peeked through and found why the mill was silent.

Up in the loft, three dusty men moved sacks of flour to thump the walls. Two wore tabards of coarse linen, the third a knight’s surcoat of lawn, all red with King Richard’s three lions barred by French fleur-de-lis. Two servants, then, of the Duke of Lancaster, and the steward knight who maintained the fief in the lord’s absence. They’d undoubtedly come to collect the heriot and mortuary, the death taxes.

The steward rubbed his nose, sneezed, clapped hands over his ears to keep out evil spirits. He was square-cut, clean-shaven, stern-faced. “Begone, villein! No one’s to enter, by order of the duke!”

“No villein I, but a free man,” Robin called up. “I see your miller’s dead.”

Accustomed to obedience, the knight turned imperious. “Free man or no, hie your arse out yon door or I’ll spank it along! We’ve business to attend! Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Martin of Lincoln. Your delving has yet to turn up any silver, I’d guess.”

The steward leant on the railing, brushed his breast. “You wear the green of Lincoln, I see, but then so does the devil and Robin Hood. And only that wolfs head and Welshmen carry bows taller than their heads.”

“Take me for a bowyer then,” — Robin smiled — “late of Wales and fetching this oddity along. In my travels, I’ve seen something of coin and hiding spots. May I help ferret out your lord’s tithe? If he lacks his share, so do you.”

The steward sneezed again. He studied the outlaw and the woman who came in after him. “Very well. If you find it, you’ll receive a sixteenth. If not, I’ll scourge you for intruding. Strikes you fair?”

“Let us conjoin and see what we strike. I’ll begin below.”

“Below? But—”

“Wait here, will you, uh, Matilda?” Marian would see the knight did nothing untoward, like rouse his followers to capture a wanted outlaw.

Robin descended the stairwell. The cellar was dank, the walls slimy stone. Slivers of light from cracks between the floorboards added to the dungeon air. Millpond water trickled through the foundation and made a gutter of mud. Stripes of flour matched the cracks overhead.

A torch of folded beech bark was stuck in the mud. Robin Hood picked it up, fanned it brighter. He flinched as something flittered overhead like an errant autumn leaf, then skittered up the stairway. A bat in the daytime: a sure sign of death.

By the light of the new-broken hole in the floorboards and the torch, Robin traced the millworks and the miller’s unfortunate path.

Outside, Robin had seen, was a spring-fed millpond shored by a stone-and-mud dike. Alongside the building, nestled in a pit, was a mill wheel ten feet high. A wooden sluice channeled water that overshot the wheel and filled its deep buckets, so both the force and weight of the water turned the wheel. The millshaft passed through the stone wall and ended in an oaken crown wheel with cogged teeth like a whale’s jaw. This vertical wheel, or gear, turned a matching horizontal gear. Its post rose through the ceiling and turned a grooved millstone of granite. Atop that sat a stationary stone surmounted by a hopper.

The miller had only to lean out the window and open the sluice gate to start all these shafts and wheels spinning, and thus the millstones grinding. He filled the hopper with grain, where it settled between the millstones and was sheared to flour that trickled out the grooves onto a catchboard. The miller swept the flour into sacks. For his services, he got a sixteenth of the flour, while the owner, the lord of the manor, got two sixteenths. Thus millers tended to be the second-richest men in the community.

This miller had valued his money over his mill.

Hosea of Long Valley Screed had been bald and near-toothless, with the paunch of a rich man. His weight had been his undoing, it seemed. A rotten floorboard had shattered and dropped him into the cellar. Half-impaled on the horizontal gear, one fat knee had jammed where the gears closed. Under the terrible power of the millwheel, wooden teeth had rent skin and flesh, then snapped.

Trapped, Hosea had bled to death. In agony, to judge by the lines etched in his face. He lay propped against the descending post, arms outspread. Blood had spattered gears and posts and miller. Its coppery stink compounded the fug of mud and moss.

Spooked, the outlaw wondered that the torch stayed lit: It should extinguish near a corpse. Robin crossed himself and muttered the Lord’s Prayer to quiet the miller’s soul.

“Rob?”

“H-here, Marian.”

His wife tripped down the stairs, ducking to admit her back quiver. “They hunt hard money. They’re not after us.” Ofttimes, sheriffs or barons or forest rangers imposed bounties on Robin’s outlaws, usually two pounds, same as for a wolf’s head. The church always rescinded the bounty, yet rumours persisted and inflated it to ten pounds, fifty, five hundred.

Marian assessed the scene. “The price of sloth, poor man.”

“Aye. He neglected his mill and it killed him.”

“And in dying, killed the mill.” Marian wrinkled her nose, sniffed at the man’s face. “Drunk, too. That helped. Though he smells...”

“Like a brewery?”

“No. Like a vineyard. Where would a miller get wine this time of year?”

Robin nodded upwards. “I dislike that floorboard.”

“Eh?”

He raised the torch to examine the splintery ends of the plank framing the hole. Snapped off clean against the joists, the boards were punky gray along the bottom from rot, but the middles were pale yellow. The outlaw pulled out his Irish knife and tapped. “That heart is sound as Little John’s arm. It shouldn’t have broken.”

“He had a heavy tread.”

“No. I could rear a war-horse atop oak this thick.” Handing Marian the torch, he picked up fragments of floorboard, moved under the square hole for light, and fitted them together like a puzzle.

“A small horse, perhaps,” offered Marian. “Maybe he shouldered a hundredweight of grain while standing in the wrong spot?”

More head-shaking. The outlaw plucked something feathery from a splintered edge. “Fibers. A rope was wrapped around this board. But that wouldn’t break it even if someone yanked hard.”

“Someone down here?”

“Where else?” Robin took the torch, prowled the cellar floor. Grit clung to his deerhide boots. The gutter of mud and blood marred the middle, but the rest of the floor was sand stained dark by oak-leaf tannin, striped light by flour. Half-hunched, Robin searched, then grunted. Marian joined him.

Twin footprints faced a corner. Robin dabbed at a white jot in one heelprint. “Bat dung. Fresh, just this morning. And the edges of the footprints are still sharp.”

Marian peered around her husband’s shoulder. “Why face the corner?”

“There’s a woman’s question,” Robin jibed. He leaned over the footprints and sniffed in the corner like a hound. “He drained his bladder.”

“Oh.” Marian rubbed her nose. “So someone was down here.”

“Someone with narrow feet and good shoes.”

The outlaw crossed to the corpse. One leg was folded under the body, so Robin whispered another prayer as he wiggled the tom shoe off the leg mangled in the gears. It jiggled sickeningly. “His ankle’s broken.”

“A lot of him’s broken, poor man.”

With Marian holding the torch, Robin compared the miller’s shoe against the footprints. Almost twice as wide. Marian murmured, “Fat men’s feet spread to bear their weight.”

As Robin replaced the shoe, the hole was eclipsed by a frowning head. The steward called down, “If you seek to rob the dead, I’ve already searched him.”

Marian countered, “Where is the priest?”

The frown deepened. “Father Peter’s so old he’s abed most of the day. They’ll fetch the corpse to him. I said a prayer of contrition, but Hosea had too many sins for one Hail Mary to absolve.”

Floorboards creaked, shoes scuffled. Four villagers clattered down the narrow stairs toting a wide plank. It was grim work to pry Hosea’s body from the gears. They roped the corpse to carry it up sideways. Robin and Marian followed, blinking in the daylight.

Still within the mill, a wise woman loosened the knots in Hosea’s clothing, sprinkled salt on his chest, and saw he was lugged out the door feet-first, precautions to keep his spirit within his body. Outside, women wailed in sympathy for the new widow. Villagers pressed forward to touch the corpse’s brow, encouraging their children to do the same, to prevent nightmares. The woman in the silk robe swooned and had to be supported by both elbows.

The Vixen of Sherwood, nodding to herself, then shoved through the crowd, grabbed the young widow’s left hand, and clapped it on the corpse’s face.

Shocked, the girl bleated. Women stopped sobbing to buzz at their neighbours. Men grunted. Marian ignored them. Still clamping the girl’s hand, she watched the miller’s mutilated leg. Then she hemmed, begged pardon of the wife, and returned to the doorstep.

“What was that all in aid of?” asked her husband.

“Tell you later.”

The steward ordered the bearers to move on. Fuddled, sobbing, mumbling, the villagers trailed after the bier. Hosea and his wife and neighbours would spend the night on vigil in the chapel. The only one remaining was the wise woman, who washed the threshold to banish contamination.

Inside, the evening sun slanted sharp and golden through western windows. Clouds of dust danced in the sunbeams. The two servants idly tapped walls. The steward folded his arms as if to butt the intruders out the door. “Are you finished prying then? There’s nothing for you here.”

He was surprised at Robin’s mild inquiry. “How are you called, good sirrah?”

The steward blinked. “Sir Luther, Martin of Lincoln.”

“Luther, you seem a smart and capable man. We’ve somewhat to tell you.”

Nonplussed by their casual affront to authority, the knight waggled both hands. “I’ve no time to dally with wastrels. Tell me where he kept his money or get ye gone.”

“Oh yes, his fortune...” Robin stroked his beard. “Where have you looked?”

“Everywhere!” The knight gestured, making dust swirl. “There isn’t a lot to search, but it must be here. Hosea, honest fellow, wasn’t one to bury anything in the forest, not fat-as-butter he. And there are prying eyes throughout the valley.”

Robin only nodded. Marian said, “Have you asked his wife?”

“Yes. She claims not to know. She may not. Her husband was old but no dotard. Elgiva spent money faster than the man could make it, questing after fancy gowns to lord over the parish.

“But then his fortune may not be here,” he corrected with a sigh. “Our good miller hauled his share of flour to Werchesop every fortnight. Mayhaps he banked his coin with some Jew or Roman, though we’ve found no tally sticks, either. And traveling, he’d need worry about thieves, of which we’ve plenty on the roads hereabouts.” He glared at Robin.

“Fear more the men of law and God who rob you. You can’t call them to court.” The archer scanned the main floor, crowded with baskets and sacks of grain, the loft heaped with sacks of milled flour. “Let me see...”

Handing Marian his bow, he mounted the staircase to the loft, walked to a corner where three sacks sat alone. Humming, he moved two sacks and pulled out the cornermost one. Rat-gnawed brown flour trickled out. People below watched in wonder as Robin thumped the sack on the floor three times, then hoisted it, felt the bottom, and chuckled. He untied the top, shot in his arm to the pit, and pulled out a dusty round something he blew clean and tossed down to Luther.

It was a purse chock full of silver: pennies, shillings, half-crowns, and a few crowns.

“How...?” began the knight.

Robin descended, brushing his arm. “Men hide things in familiar places. A cordwainer favours a money belt, a crofter a false bottom in a chest, a tailor secret pockets. Millers hide their money in flour. It wouldn’t be in the grain down here, for it’s yet to be milled, so it must be above. The largest heap of sacks belong to the village, those six to his lordship, which leaves three the miller’s fee. Any coin would be in the hardest-to-reach sack. Simple.”

“Simple,” muttered Luther. “Withal, I promised you a sixteenth part, so we needs count it.”

Robin waved a dusty hand. “No need. Send to the alehouse and we’ll be quits.”

“What?” The knight laughed. “Better, dine with me at the hall. It’s not often I entertain such a distinguished — bowyer.”

“Done!” said Robin.

Michael Luth is a native Coloradan who currently makes his living as circulation manager for a national financial daily. He tells us that he has been writing fiction almost since he learned to read at the age of four, but has only recently begun to submit his work to magazines. His first published work reflects his interest in the psychology behind a criminal act...

Gene fingered the cold metal object in his jacket pocket and continued his wait, hunkering his shoulders against the wind. He had been playing with the thing absentmindedly to make the time pass, his index finger tracing the flat edge, following the circumference from the blunt-ended shaft to the narrow, tapering point. When he realized what he was doing, he smiled to himself, recalling the owner of the object. If things went well, it would be returned.

He had to show it to Vicky first. She would see it and it would help his cause. He turned it around and around, thinking what he would tell her when she arrived. He just had to win her back. It had taken so long to get her to meet with him. She would listen, he knew, when she realized how much he loved her and how miserable he was without her. The beginning of the end of that misery had started only yesterday, here by the river.

The day had held the promise of Indian summer with the appearance of a fuzzy, October-like sun, but there was slushy, dirty snow beside the trail and it was January and only forty-five degrees. Gene held the soda bottle by the twist-off cap, swinging it at his side as his feet propelled him along the asphalt trail that ran beside the Cache la Poudre River. When he came to the footbridge, he trudged up the incline and across the span, stopping in the middle. He opened the bottle, took a swig, and looked out over the slowly moving river.

The water was strangely high for January and the only icy patches lay in the shadows from the scruffy, leafless willows on the south bank of the river. Far downstream, in a quiet, wide stretch, he saw several ducks gently rocking with the current. He watched them for a while, sipping his soda, but his mind floated off with the sound of the rushing water and he began to think about Vicky.

He missed her body and wanted to hold her, if only for a moment. She had been so wonderful to touch and hold, and when she touched him back, her learned, gentle way of being sexual was so foreign to anything he’d experienced with any other woman that he felt she had invented it herself. That you could approach ecstasy from a quiet hand-holding place and reach it so easily and completely without the wild tearing and screaming run at it he’d always assumed was necessary, had been a revelation. And now he might never know it again.

A deep sigh took his breath away as completely as a punch in the stomach. More than anything he missed her simple presence. Just being in the same room with her and hearing her talk, listening to her enthusiasm over a book she had read or the taste of a pastry she’d made from a magazine recipe. She was so wide in her interests and so rich in her passions that he felt humble and a little naive. He’d always believed his mother had ruined him for strong, knowing women before she had gone, but he had been wrong. There was something special about Vicky, and now, God help him, now she wouldn’t even see him, wouldn’t even return his calls. She even managed to be out of the office when he made his coffee deliveries to her building.

Gene crossed to the other side of the bridge, went down the embankment and off the main trail, taking the muddy path that snaked through the trees on the north side of the river. He lost thought of her for a few minutes as he worked his way between the puddles and dirty snow patches, making a game of not getting his shoes dirty. He succeeded fairly well until he suddenly heard her voice, as clearly as if she were walking behind him.

“You’re twenty-seven and I’m forty-five. That’s just too much of a difference. I didn’t think it was at first, but then I didn’t think things would go this far. We, I mean I, made a mistake. Let’s just be thankful for what we had and go on.”

This was her phone voice, words she’d told him after finally returning three days’ worth of unanswered messages. She’d shown some concern about their differences in education, but seemed most concerned about their ages. He had thought that it would pass, that she would come to believe how little it mattered to him, but it had blown up in his face.

Gene came to a broad open space, a meadow with a large pond. Even though it was well above freezing, the pond was covered with ice and the ice was littered with branches and large stones. The mountains, the front range of the Rockies, rose up in the distance behind the pond. He walked over to one of the pair of picnic tables along the pond’s east bank and arranged himself so he could look out at the pond and the mountains. The sun was surprisingly low, already prepared to slide behind the mountains and bring on the winter night.

He had only dated her for a month. She had flirted with him mildly for six months, always smiling and polite, never condescending. He had decided finally to ask her out when he sensed that she was attracted to him, that her jokes and banter were ways of extending their brief conversations when he made his weekly stop to service the office coffee station. He knew she’d been surprised at his request that Friday to meet her for a beer after work, too surprised to do anything but laugh and shake her finger and walk away. But then she had somehow managed to get his phone number and had called him and arranged a date, saying she didn’t want any gossip around the office. She’d been that forward, and now she wouldn’t even talk to him.

He tried to think of her arguments, what she’d said that last time, after their last dinner together.

“I’m almost as old as your mother.”

“You’re nothing like my mother. She doesn’t know how to French kiss,” he’d replied.

“It’s not funny. I’ll be going through menopause any time now. Maybe I am right now. Maybe that’s why I’m acting crazy.” She said this with tears in her eyes. “You don’t even know what menopause is.”

“I know what it is. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll help you through it.”

“Oh God, you’re so naive. You don’t know what life does to you.”

“I’m willing to find out.”

“Don’t you see, when you’re my age, I’ll be an old woman. You’ll want someone younger for sure. Even if we lasted that long.” She shook her head slowly, looking right through him. “It just won’t work.”

That was the last time he saw her. She left his car and went into her house and closed the door and then let his phone messages pile up on her machine without answering even one. It was like his mother, leaving him; leaving him and never coming back.

Gene heard the low barking of a dog and turned to see a black mongrel go skittering out onto the ice in pursuit of a bright orange Frisbee. The dog looked like it had Lab in it and was old and shaggy-looking. What surprised Gene was that the person the dog returned the Frisbee to was not some similarly shaggy college student but a short, gray-haired woman. She took the disc from the dog and threw it again. As the dog took off, the woman walked on up the trail that went around the pond from the south side. She had a cane or a walking stick but still moved along at a brisk pace.

When the dog returned with the Frisbee after the second toss, the woman ignored it and the dog fell into place behind her, matching her pace. She marched along, the actions of her stick serving to speed her up in an unexpected way. When she came to a young, barren cottonwood, she took the stick and batted it about the lower branches as if checking the tree’s sturdiness or maybe trying to shake something out. The dog sat down and looked expectantly up into the tree, the chewed-up Frisbee hanging in his mouth.

The woman moved on down the trail. When she was exactly opposite Gene, on the other side of the pond, she stopped again and seemed to be taking in the view of the mountains. The dog sat beside her and dropped the disc. The sun shone above her head and in the far-off distance you could see Long’s Peak. She and the dog stood as still as icons. They might have been praying.

Watching her with her dog, Gene could not help thinking about Vicky, and he would have given anything for her to be there with him, to be able to say to her how lovely she would be in twenty years and how grateful he would be to still be with her. It came to him in a great surge, tears distorting his view while his throat constricted around a huge dry lump.

Gene leaned back against the top of the picnic table and drank the last of his soda. He knew he was feeling overly sentimental; he knew he should just get on with his life. The last swig of soda was warm and sickeningly sweet. He carefully replaced the cap and set the bottle on the bench beside him. He looked up at the blue sky, trying to enjoy the day, the extraordinary warmth, the clear sky, the sense that spring would, after all, eventually arrive. He knew he should be grateful for the day, but it was like a picture in a magazine and his senses were dead to all but a dull perception that he was in the picture.

He heard the jangle of chains and to his right he saw the black dog come trotting up the trail with the Frisbee in his mouth. The dog saw Gene and stopped uncertainly and looked back to where the old woman was emerging from the copse of small, barren cottonwood trees just up the trail. She was moving a little slower now, using the walking stick to probe the way ahead. When the dog appeared sure that she was coming, he resumed his trot, heading straight for Gene.

Gene expected the woman to say something to the dog, to call it back, but she seemed unconcerned. He wasn’t really a dog person, so he was uncertain about what to do when the dog came within a few feet and dropped the Frisbee and looked at him. The Frisbee was faded and worn and had numerous tooth holes in it. Gene wouldn’t have touched it if you’d paid him. The dog stared at him. It had gray in its muzzle and rheumy eyes.

“Nice old guy,” he said. “Nice dog.”

“Stewart is always in the mood to play,” the woman said, close enough now for her strong voice to carry over the fifty yards. “I suppose that is one of the privileges of being a dog: You don’t have to mature and in fact are a more pleasant companion if you retain your puppy qualities.”

Gene nodded, trying to get a line on the way the woman spoke. It almost sounded foreign, it was so graceful and dignified. He saw the careful arrangement of her silver hair and nice coat and tasteful slacks and thought that her voice and diction matched her perfectly. She was beautiful, mature, and playful, all at the same time. Just the way Vicky would be when she was older — he just knew it.

“I guess it’s a nice day to be a puppy,” Gene said. It wasn’t the way he felt, but it sounded right.

“Yes indeed. Stewart and I come here every day and this is indeed a ‘good one,’ ” she said, not really looking at him. She stooped down gingerly, using the stick for support, and picked up the Frisbee. Steadying herself, she gave it a flip up the trail. The dog, Stewart, took out after it, nudging it along with his nose until he was able to get a purchase with his teeth and pick it up. Rather than returning it, he rambled on ahead. The woman continued on too, looking ahead at the dog or something beyond, perhaps the river.

Gene watched her move out of sight, back along the river toward the bridge. The feeling of loss compounded itself in him and he felt himself sinking lower and lower. It just wasn’t fair. He felt only love and it brought him nothing but pain. It wasn’t fair at all. He grabbed the bottle beside him and tried to take a drink. It somehow angered him to find that it was empty, as if someone else had drunk it. Suddenly furious, he threw the bottle high into the air, out over the pond. His arm wasn’t very strong and the bottle didn’t travel far, but still he expected it to break. It angered him more when it merely rang hollowly, bounced twice, and then spun on its side.

He almost ran out onto the pond, but knew the ice was too thin. Instead, he searched for some rocks. The soil was sandy and not frozen, but there were no throwing-size rocks readily visible. He dug about with the toe of his boot and managed to dislodge a few stones the size of a walnut. When he had accumulated nearly a dozen, he set them aside and carefully launched each one at the bottle. He threw as hard as he could, wanting each stone to be deadly and purposeful, to shatter the bottle into a thousand pieces. The shattering of the bottle was important and would prove something, would relieve him of his sorrow and pain. It made sense to him in a way that none of the rest of it did. His arm grew sore before he made it through the dozen rocks. None of his throws so much as threatened the bottle.

He started back home, walking with his head down, trying to imagine the embryos of spring flowers beneath the slimy, mucky mud along the trail. He let his shoes get covered with the brown mud as he continued down the middle of the trail right through the worst part, since he didn’t want to damage any of those flower embryos. It was something like empathy for the flowers, as if he was another unbloomed, frozen thing, imprisoned in a cold place.

He was looking down like that when he saw the thing stuck in the cold ground. At first he thought it might be the tip of an arrow. It was pointed enough to have stuck into the ground, but it came out easily when he reached to retrieve it. He spun it around with his fingertips to see if he could tell what it was. It was gray with oxidation at the top, but was shiny and worn on the very tip. It had a round, cylindrical head with an opening that looked as if something had been inside, because it was not as tarnished as the rest of it. The other head of the cylinder had a spike on the end of it, long and square with a dull, rounded point. It was the tip of something all right, but it was too large to have been on an arrow. He put it in his pocket and continued on.

When he crossed the bridge again and came to the paved part of the trail, he stopped for a minute and used the pointed object to scrape the mud from his shoes. Up ahead, at the parking lot, he saw the woman letting the dog into the backseat of a small blue car. She walked carefully around to the other side, put the walking stick in ahead of her, got into the car herself, and then slowly drove away.

Watching her leave, Gene felt a great hopelessness, as if the old woman’s leaving was symbolic of his never getting back together with Vicky. The hopelessness made his feet stick to the walkway and he had to drag himself toward home. At the door, he fumbled for his keys and came upon the object and suddenly realized what it was. It had to be the end to the woman’s cane. That was what it had to be. And the fact that he had found it when he felt so low and that it came from the beautiful old woman made him realize that he shouldn’t feel so gloomy. This had to be a sign of good luck. He took it as a symbol of hope and resolved that he would try one more time to convince Vicky. He fondled the small hard object and knew he would find a way.

He tried to be cagey about timing his call to her, so he could catch her when she might answer reflexively and not filter the call through her answering machine. He spent the night turning the light beside his bed on and off as he kept thinking of things to tell her, reaching for the message pad on his nightstand to record the thoughts. The minute he put pencil to paper, his thoughts lost their coherence. At five A.M. Gene got up, put on his sweats, and jogged up to the 7-Eleven for a coffee and an apple fritter.

The phone trembled in his hands when he finally decided to dial her number at six-fifteen. She would be getting up to let in her cat and take a shower and might be groggy enough to simply pick up and not think about it. Gene held the notebook in his hand. The flimsy pages trembled and he knew the coffee had been a bad idea. He punched the numbers, all but the last digit. He looked at what he had written and decided it was worthless, decided to let it go. Somehow his finger hit the seven anyway.

It rang only once before she answered in a wholly awake voice that startled him with its cheerfulness. He had expected to have the upper hand, catching her groggy and unalert, but it was he who listened to her say “Hello” three times before he even responded, and then only to grunt out a “Vicky” which sounded as if he was trying to disguise his voice.

“Gene,” she said quickly, amazing him with her instant recognition of his voice.

“I just wanted to see how you’ve been getting along,” he said. “It’s been so long since we’ve spoken.”

“You know, I’m thinking about changing my phone number. I can’t have you leaving all of those messages and tying up my machine.”

“I only want to let you know that I’m thinking about you. There’s nothing sinister about it. You don’t need to change your phone number.”

“Don’t sound so pitiful.”

“I’m not being pitiful.” He knew he had to channel this in another direction. He was losing his edge. “Why do you care so little about how I feel? If I didn’t care so much I wouldn’t call. It doesn’t really matter what you think of me. I’m only concerned about you.”

“Don’t try to make me feel bad about my decision, or I’ll hang up.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad. Why are you being so hard?” This had been a bad idea. Everything he said was the wrong thing. He wanted to be angry, but was too desperate to feel angry. “I only wanted to see how you were doing and tell you that I found that lost earring of yours. The jade one that you got from your daughter.”

“You found it? I thought we turned your house inside out. Where was it?”

“It was stuck to a little flap of duct tape on the back of the nightstand. It fell off like we thought, but never made it to the floor. It got stuck on this tape.”

Gene had totally forgotten about the earring until the moment he blurted out about finding it. He knew what the earring meant to her. He should have thought of it earlier. “I wanted to return it and see how you were.”

She was silent for a moment and he knew it was no time to hesitate. “I know that you’d probably prefer I didn’t bring it by your apartment. Would you mind if we met somewhere so I could give it to you? It wouldn’t take but a second.”

“Couldn’t you just leave it at the office?”

“I could, but I’d really like to give it to you personally,” he said, adding quietly, as if as an afterthought, “We could just meet at the park. You know, Martinez Park, down by the river.” They had taken walks there before.

“I really don’t think we should see each other again. I’ve said everything I want to say and there’s no point in rehashing things. Why don’t you just drop it off at the office. Leave it with Marie. She’ll get it to me.”

“Please, Vicky. I don’t want to make a big thing out of this, but it’d be really nice if we could just meet and say hello, and I could give you your earring.” Gene was prepared to say he wouldn’t give it to her any other way, but that would be his last, desperate option. He didn’t want her to know his desperation. He knew that was what frightened her.

“Okay, Gene. But I’m warning you: I’ll only stay long enough to say hello and get the earring back. Not a second longer.”

“Vicky, that’s all I want. Nothing more.”

And now she was walking toward him and Gene knew he should resist the urge to rush over and hug her and kiss her and show her how he felt. Instead, he calmly let her walk over to where he stood waiting on the hill above the playground. The October-like weather of the day before had been replaced by a quick-moving cold front. A thin layer of snow laced the entire area. It was in the thirties, but a brisk wind out of the northwest made it feel much colder.

She had on a pale blue hat of lambswool and matching scarf and mittens. Her hair, the blond of an Aspen tree’s bark with the same silvery streaks, fluttered around her face. She stood without speaking, holding her mittened hands before her. Gene moved toward her, feeling tears leak from his eyes, wind-tears, but it wasn’t the wind at all.

“Hi, Vick,” he said, reaching his arms out to hug her. She stopped just short of him, his gesture dying as his arms slowly fell to his side. “You look great,” he said as he noticed how she self-consciously avoided coming any closer. He sniffed and looked over his shoulder toward the path. “Would you mind a little walk?”

She had on her long coat and as the wind continued to whip around them, she crossed her arms and angled her head at him. “I know you don’t intentionally try to deceive me, but that’s just what you’re doing.” She shook her head, which still held that angle. “I really don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I just don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

Gene smiled, calculating that it would make him look sheepish. “Please. We’ll just go a little way. There’s something I want to show you.”

“I need to get back to work. Would you just return my earring?”

Gene felt the end of the walking stick in his pocket and suddenly wished that he had arranged this all differently. He’d thought she would be more giving if they met face-to-face, but she still seemed to have totally abandoned him. If he could only touch her, maybe that would make the difference. He felt the urge in his hands and his arms, he wanted just to feel her body and he would have some relief, but he resisted.

“I’ll give it to you if that’s all you want, but I don’t think that what I have to say will delay you too much. And there really is something I’d like for you to see. It might explain to you how I really feel.”

She continued to hug herself, letting the wind buffet her about as if she were on the bobbing bow of a ship. She looked at him closely for the first time, and he caught a sense that she was hurting in some way. He suddenly knew that she wouldn’t have agreed to come at all if she hadn’t needed to see him. And she probably wanted to touch him, too. He moved to her and grabbed her hand, even as she pulled away.

“Come on. You’re really going to appreciate this. I know you will.”

Her struggle was meager, but Gene could feel her reluctance as he led her along the trail. The wind was directly in their faces now and they both kept their heads down. There was a stiffness in her hand and she did not return his grip. He knew that she might pull away at any moment. He said nothing until they came to the bridge.

“It’s over by the pond,” he said, lifting his wrist to see his watch and ascertain that it was about the right time. Her hand came up with his and after he glanced at the watch, he kissed her fingers through the mitten, and when he looked at her face, he saw a smile. He thought of a hundred things to say, but knew that none of them would sound right until he had shown her, until she realized what she meant to him.

The trail to the pond, sticky with mud the day before, was now frozen and covered with gritty patches of snow. The precariousness of the footing finally made her grab his hand firmly. As they came out of the trees along the river and into the open area around the pond, the sun abruptly flashed from behind one of the speeding clouds and its warmth momentarily neutralized the sting of the wind. He led her to the picnic table and they sat down. Gene looked around the pond, but did not see the old woman or her dog. She said she came every day, though: She should be by soon.

They still hadn’t spoken. For Gene, her presence, still allowing him to hold her hand, was communication enough. They sat facing each other on the cold wooden slats. He compressed her hands between his.

“There was something, someone, I saw here yesterday that reminded me of you. It gave me such an overpowering feeling, that I just had to tell you about it.” He heard the trembling in his voice, but could not control it. “But I knew you weren’t really interested in talking to me and anyway, it was something you needed to see.”

She turned her head and moved her lips to speak, but no words came out. A few more strands of her hair had come loose and were whipping against her cheek and down to the scarf on her throat. Gene wanted to brush the hair away from her skin, to tuck it away and then to kiss her cheek. He wanted to do this in such a strong way, but again he resisted. She would have to see first. He knew that somehow she was softening toward him, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

“I wish you hadn’t shut me off so completely,” he said, sensing her nervousness. She had pulled her hand away and had brushed the hair from her face, as if she had known that he wanted to do it himself. “You don’t know how much I miss you.”

“I know that you miss me. Sometimes, I miss you too. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re just too different, just too far apart.” She smiled sadly when she said this and Gene saw how much she meant it.

“We’re not really that far apart. Not in years. Not really.”

“It’s not just our ages.”

The sun had gone behind the clouds again and Gene felt the cold eating away at his determination. He looked around but still did not see the old woman. Nothing would change unless Vicky met her. He had to show her and try to re-create for her what he had felt the day before. But maybe the old woman wouldn’t show up. He didn’t know how long he could wait.

“I can change the things you don’t like about me. I can see why you think I’m immature. I know I’m sloppy and don’t eat the right things and watch too much TV. I know these things, but I can change them. I care so much for you that I’m willing to do anything. I want you to know that. Anything.”

She reached out and put her hands in his again. They looked like two puffy blue kittens curling up in hand. The wind-tears came into his eyes again.

“...can’t pretend that I can ignore those things you spoke about as well as the differences in our ages,” she was saying. “I want you to be you and I want to be me. I want a nice calm life with someone I can rely on... to be there when I need him down the road.”

“That’s me, Vicky,” he said, the tears in his voice now. “That’s me.”

“I wish it was,” she said, “I really do.”

“You don’t understand,” he suddenly shouted, standing up, banging his knee on the underside of the picnic table. He turned his back to her, to the wind, and scanned for the old woman again. The trees along the river rocked in the wind, their barren branches looking stiff and frigid and ready to break. The old woman had said that she came for a walk with her dog every day. Maybe the footing was too poor for her. Maybe she had lied.

Vicky stood up beside him. She had her arms wrapped around herself. “I’m getting cold, Gene. And I really need to get back to the office. Could you just let me have the earring? Let’s not get all worked up over what we can’t change.”

Gene had forgotten about the earring. He had forgotten his story. He put his hand in his coat pocket as if the earring might magically be there. Instead, his fingers found the cold metal object, the end to the woman’s cane, and he knew that it was all he had to show Vicky. The woman wasn’t going to come, and his words were futile. This was his last chance.

“I wanted to introduce you to this woman, this old woman I saw yesterday. She reminded me of you.” He had turned to face her. She had her back to the wind, to the pond, and loose strands of her hair were whipping around again. The wind bit at his chafed face. The change came over her face slowly, a hardening of the corners of her mouth that spread up her face, along her cheeks, and to the corners of her eyes, which suddenly glazed over, making him glance at the pond to see if it were now sheeted over with ice, too.

“How could some old woman remind you of me?” she asked in a frigid voice.

“It wasn’t that she was old. That’s not what I meant. It was this combination of things, this joy of life and this dignity.”

“But she was old,” Vicky said, and he knew how hard it was going to be to get her to see. “How old is old? I mean, to qualify as an old woman did she seem to be sixty or seventy or ninety?” She paused and Gene knew just what she was going to say and he was already shaking his head. “Or was she my age?”

“No, no, no. You don’t see. It’s just the opposite of what you think. Just exactly the opposite.” He still had his fingers on the thing. He wondered if he should show her. She was angry and defensive now. Anything might set her off. “She had this dog. I forget his name, but he carried around this Frisbee and she threw it for him and you should have heard her laugh.”

“An old woman with an old dog who reminded you of me.” Now she was shaking her head. “This is why we can’t be together. You claim to be mature but if you were you wouldn’t even mention such things. You wouldn’t go to such pains to point them out. If you’ll just give me my earring, I’ll be going now.”

“I don’t have your earring,” he said, louder than he intended. “I never had your earring. I just wanted to see you, to explain how I felt and somehow it just hasn’t worked out like I planned.”

Now she looked like the ice had totally penetrated her, had even become compressed into something harder and colder than ice, like coal pressed into a diamond. She stood before him like an ice-diamond, beautiful and colder than anything that had ever existed.

“On top of everything else, you lied,” she said and he could barely understand her words, they were so tinny and high and frigid. She turned and started off.

“She had a walking stick, too,” he said, although he knew she wouldn’t hear even if she was listening. “She used it so gracefully, like it was just a part of her. I know that’s how beautiful and graceful you would be and I only wanted to be beside you when it happened.”

She was halfway to those barren cottonwoods along the river when he found that he was moving, too. And he had the end of the walking stick in his hand. He had it in his right hand and his arms were pumping as he took long strides in a jog, coming up on the back of her. When he got close enough, he reached out to stop her, reached out his right hand as if to tap her on the shoulder.

She let out a scream as the edge of the walking stick swished by her head, narrowly missing the whiteness at the back of her neck. He knew what would happen when the pointed object hit her, even as he raised his arm to bring it down again, this time too close to miss. It would not be blood, he knew that, there was no chance for it to be anything as warm and essential as blood. It would be something blue that came out, something blue and frigid that came from a cold heart. Oddly, he missed her again, as she had fallen. He stood over her, the both of them breathing hard, jetting mists of exhausted life into the air.

“You don’t deserve my love,” was all he said. “I met someone yesterday and thought you would be as worthy, but I was wrong.”

He was both kneeling and raising his arm to try again when he saw the dog, the handkerchief around its neck and the Frisbee in its mouth. The old woman was twenty yards back, coming up slowly, a strange grimace on her face. She looked as if she was saying something as she approached, but Gene could hear nothing but his own ragged breathing. He saw her step carefully around a particularly large snow-covered piece of the frozen trail, using the stick, but the bare wooden end of it slipped and he knew he should return the tip, he had it right here in his hand.

Gene tried to stand again, to offer her the end of the walking stick. He was still wondering why she had raised the stick when it cracked against his head, just above his ear. He continued to offer her the object as the blows moved to other parts of his body and he felt the teeth of the dog at his arm. He still thought this was just a simple misunderstanding, even as the stick caught him across the mouth and he tasted his own cold blood.

A master of all forms of suspense from the mystery short-short to complex detective novels, Ruth Rendell has two new hooks out this spring, No Night is Too Long, under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and Simisola, as Ruth Rendell, both from Harmony Books...

“You shouldn’t scratch it. You’ve made it bleed.”

“It itches. It’s giving me hell. You don’t react to mosquito bites the way I do.”

“It’s just where the belt on your jeans rubs. I think I’d better put a plaster on it.”

“They’re in the bathroom cabinet,” he said.

“I know where they are.”

She removed the plaster from its plastic packaging and applied it to the small of his back. He reached for his cigarettes, put one in his mouth, and lit it.

“I wonder if you’re allergic to mosquito bites,” she said. “I mean, I wonder if you should be taking antihistamine when you get bitten. You know, you should try one of those sprays that ease the itching.”

“They don’t do any good.”

“How do you know if you don’t try? I don’t suppose smoking helps. Oh, yes, I know that sounds ridiculous to you, but smoking does affect your general health. I bet you didn’t tell the doctor you had all these allergies when you were examined for that life insurance you took out.”

“What do you mean, ‘all these allergies’? I don’t have allergies. I have rather a strong reaction to mosquito bites.”

“I bet you didn’t tell them you smoked,” she said.

“Of course I told them. You don’t mess about when you’re taking out a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of insurance on your life.” He lit a cigarette from the stub of the last one. “Why d’you think I pay such high premiums?”

“I bet you didn’t tell them you smoke forty a day.”

“I said I was afraid I was a heavy smoker.”

“You ought to give it up,” she said. “Mind you, I’d like a thousand pounds for every time I’ve said that. I’d like a pound. You smokers don’t know what it’s like living with it. You don’t know how you smell, your clothes, your hands, the lot. It gets in the curtains. You may laugh, but it’s no joke.”

“I’m going to bed,” he said.

One of the delights of reading an historical mystery is the probability of coming across some tidbit of information one did not know before. And of course it’s not only the reader who may discover something new. Terry Mullins tells us: “Before writing ‘Mandeville and the Staple’ I had not realized the full importance of wool in English history. I knew about the famous woolsack on which the Lord Chancellor sits when the House of Lords is in session, but it was largely a curiosity to me. In fact, it symbolizes the part wool played in making England a world power. That woolsack has sat beside the throne since before the time of Henry VIII.” Mr. Mullins’s sleuth, Sir John Mandeville, is based on an historical figure...

For several centuries before the Renaissance, an organization of large wool merchants controlled the sale of wool from England to the Continent through The Staple. They shaped the commercial destiny of Western Europe through this monopoly.

A while after giving up his wanderings over the globe and settling down in the quiet town of Liege to write, Sir John Mandeville heard that the merchants of The Staple were threatened with destruction of their trade. As a member of the Fellowship of The Staple, Sir John felt compelled to go to their aid.

He left Liege two weeks before Lent was over and he planned to stay until after Easter. The Bishop of Liege had become somewhat too zealous in encouraging the good citizens of Liege to fast, and Sir John’s landlord (and taverner) was responding with inexplicable devotion. Since Sir John liked meat and drink almost as much as he liked a good audience for his stories, he viewed the encroaching saintliness with disfavor. The Bishop of Calais was, as he well knew, more broadminded about such things.

He found the merchants of The Staple terrified and confused. Jorge Stonor, the hearty, honest man in charge of The Staple, seemed at his wits’ end.

“We have had a time of it, Sir John,” he said. “We have really had a time of it. It’s an even chance whether we’ll have to move The Staple back to England.”

“Tell me about it, Jorge. I’ve only heard rumors, some of them pretty wild.”

“We get the wool over from England all right. It’s here in Calais the mischief begins. There’s been wool burnt and seals broken and even a customs officer of the English Crown beaten. The Crown demands that we protect its officers as well as our own members — which we would, we would, if we had any idea who’s behind it all. If we was in England, where wool lost by one man could easily be replaced from another source, I’d suspect the Lombards, but they wouldn’t damage wool here, not when they’re buying and scarce wool will drive the price up. No, I can’t fix the blame at all.”

“Any new people around?”

“Not in The Staple. ’Course, there’s new people all the time ’prenticed to the wool merchants and there’s more small merchants all the time. Two new ones came with the fleet last crossing, but they’s as scart as the rest of us. It’s a near thing, Sir John, a near thing. If The Staple’s damaged, all England’s damaged. The Crown depends on us for its customs revenue, not to mention borrowing from merchants when it’s short of deniers, which is most always.

“Trouble for The Staple is danger for all England. Money for ships and soldiers comes from us. It ain’t easy to fight England’s troops, not after Crécy and Poitiers, nor to get at the king. But it’s easy as pie to hide and damage The Staple. And that counts as good as winning in fair battle.”

“You could always go to Bruges.”

“What good would that do? They would just follow us.”

“Or go with you. Yes, I agree that Bruges or Antwerp wouldn’t help you none. Since The Staple is in the dark, I’d like to talk with some of the smaller merchants.”

Jorge seemed relieved. Just the presence of Sir John was comforting, but having him take part was downright encouraging. “Here’s a list of the hosts where we put up the merchants who don’t own homes. We have three of the small merchants with Clark Torney.”

He seemed about to go through the whole list, but Sir John broke in, “That sounds fine. If there’s room at Clark Torney’s I’d like to stay there and get to know the three who lodge there.”

Jorge was delighted, poured Sir John some more beer, and gave him directions for reaching Clark Torney’s house.

Sir John went first to see the governor of Calais, Sir Peter Courtenay, Knight of the Garter and a gallant but impetuous fighter. He welcomed Sir John and promised to see justice done if the culprits were caught, but he made it clear that the royal troops were for military action and The Staple would have to do its own police work. They talked for some time and made some plans.

That evening Sir John dined at the high table with his host and was glad to see that the three small merchants staying there had not been relegated to side tables but were beside him. They were young men, earnest and intent, but somewhat lacking in assurance. Richard Buckley of Broadway had made three trips to Calais and knew his way around. Elward Philpot and Bill Stace, both of Northleach, had made their first crossing. All three were in awe of the great traveler who had journeyed through Cathay on camel-back, had walked the Land of Promissin, and had talked with Saracen, Turk, and paynim in their own tongues.

“Do any of you have ’prentices?” Sir John asked.

They laughed. “That’s too high for us,” Bill Stace replied. “Ned and I have a man watching our fells with a musket and Dick here hired a local man to keep an eye on his until all is sold, but we do the business ourselves. Frederick Elthan has two ’prentices working for him, big louts but crafty. And Charles Swynford has three, but they didn’t save him from having six fells stole and a bale of wool burnt.”

This was the sort of thing Sir John wanted. “When did all this start?” he asked.

“It’s been going on for a couple of weeks, since two days after we landed. Lewis Tyburn had five sarplers cut into and the seals broke. Canvas where the wool was packed was slashed and bales throwed into the water. So most of us took precautions, but soon fire was set to the shed where Robert Picard had his wool stored. He’s a big merchant and he’d’ve lost all he had if his man hadn’t smelled sump-tin and raised a crew to put it out. Since then, every night it’s been sumptin and the customs officer was beat, too. Now there’s talk about moving The Staple out of Calais.”

“Who’s been hurt the most?”

“So far it’s been Tyburn and Picard that’s suffered the most loss.”

“And who hasn’t been hit yet?”

“None of the small merchants has been hurt. A couple of them is sleeping on their wool all night to protect it. Among the important merchants, Frederick Elthan of Lambeton hasn’t been bothered, but he’s worried. I seen him today and I can tell you, he’s worried.”

Before Sir John could continue the conversation, the meal arrived and Clark Torney himself pronounced the blessing. Sir John was delighted to see that it was English fare with nothing of Lent about it. There were puddings, an enormous goose, pastries, and plain beans of several sorts. The meal was served by two elderly male servants whom Sir John supposed to be French, though they never said a word.

They were commanded by Dame Torney, a large woman who sat at her husband’s right, spoke only to the servants but never looked at them, and whose eyes missed nothing. She was the only person at the table who seemed unimpressed by Sir John, and he mistrusted her greatly.

The great traveler was expected to entertain the feast with one of his marvelous stories, and some quirk of perversity led him to tell of the isles of Colcos and Lango whose lord, Yporcas, had a daughter who looked remarkably like an enormous dragon and lived in an old castle in a cave from which she emerged only twice or thrice a year. If any man were to have the courage to kiss her on the mouth, she would become fair and comely and he would become lord of the kingdom. So far as Sir John knew, several had died in the attempt, and none had succeeded.

The men of the company enjoyed the tale, but Dame Torney received it coldly.

As usual, they drank sparingly of the wine, but after the meal the men remained for ginger cakes and beer. Sir John intended to secure the help of the three young wool merchants to put an end to the menace to The Staple, but first he needed to take the measure of his potential allies and to learn more about circumstances. He approached his task with admirable indirection.

“Have any of you heard of Engelbert of Admont?”

None had.

“He was a writer and thinker of a generation or so before yours. He held that sufficiency, tranquility, and security are the necessary conditions for a prosperous state. I think there is much to be said for his position.”

The men agreed. Torney called for more beer and the young men waited for Sir John to continue. He waited for the beer, dealt with it, and resumed.

“Now the wool trade is providing sufficiency for England, and the strength of The Staple has provided a certain amount of tranquility and security as well. The recent Treaty of Bretigny bids fair to give us the sort of peace which may continue the prosperity of the state. But if The Staple is destroyed, or seriously damaged, all of this will be undone. Much as you small merchants dislike or envy The Staple, you know that the bulk of revenue for governing England comes from Staple customs payments on wool, leather, and tin. We cannot do without it.”

Clark Torney voiced his hearty agreement. Even the young men, who as small wool merchants were not part of The Staple and who tended to resent its power, were swayed by Sir John’s logic. Buckley suggested that Spaniards were behind the attack on The Staple. No one agreed with him.

“Spanish wool and English wool don’t compete,” Philpot said. “Theirs is next-best wool and can’t be used alone by any of the weavers of Ghent or Michlin. Except it be mixed with English wool, it is useless. So without English wool, Spanish wool would have no market for its product.”

Sir John thought it time to come to the point. “Are you planning to check on your wool tonight?” he asked.

“Yes. We usually go an hour or two after supper, but it ain’t easy getting around a strange town in the dark.”

“Do you go armed?”

“Each of us has a musket.”

Sir John frowned. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“I don’t like firearms,” Sir John said. “There’s no telling who’s going to get shot. I thought I might come with you tonight, but not if you are using muskets.”

Eager to have Sir John’s help, Bill Stace said, “We wouldn’t need to take them if you didn’t want.” He looked at his fellow merchants, who nodded agreement.

“Good,” said Sir John. “Arm yourself with daggers or clubs. I have my sword. We’ll set out at your usual time, and when you’ve secured your property, we’ll go after the vandals at a place where I think we can find them.”

The ginger cakes were gone, so they drank a final round of beer and then set off for their rooms to prepare for the night’s adventure.

Sir John came down dressed for the work of the night. He found the young merchants dressed as if they were going to a fair. They all wore their best boots, so tightly laced as to make walking elegant and running impossible. Buckley actually wore a Flemish beaver hat. Philpot and Stace also wore fresh clothes which looked as if they had been newly bought from some booth at a Flemish fair. All three wore gloves, and Buckley had lace on his cuffs.

“Do you realize,” Sir John asked, “that it’s so damned dark out there that no one will be able to see you?”

They missed the point entirely and Philpot replied, “Of course. The moon has been dying for four days past half moon and there’s a beastly fog from the sea, but we can find our way. Don’t worry.”

Sir John shrugged. It was clear that any walk through a strange town was an occasion for these young men and they dressed for it regardless. He hoped they did not underestimate the seriousness of their undertaking. Ruffians who attack storehouses, steal bales of wool, set fire to buildings, and assault customs officers were not likely to respect the persons of honest wool merchants met in dark and deserted streets at night.

Clark Torney saw them off and promised that his servant would be on hand to readmit them when they returned. “This reminds me,” he reminisced, “of the days when King Edward brought his army to Calais. Another writer stayed with me then, a young poet named Geoff Chaucer, who was in the service of Prince Lionel. He used to slip through Calais at night and go across the Channel and back with secret dispatches. The French caught him and Prince Lionel had to pay his ransom. I showed him a copy of your Travels and he was much impressed.”

Sir John paused going out the door and said, “That’s the first you’ve mentioned it. You must tell me more when we have time. For now there is dire business ahead and I must deal with it promptly.”

And so he left the candlelit house of Clark Torney and plunged into the Stygian blackness of a fog-wrapped Calais.

He and Buckley went together, followed by the Northleach merchants. Sir John found Buckley of Broadway a mixed bag of goods. The young man had nothing of the sea about him except a rough reddish sunburn which might have been acquired in any outdoor occupation. His walk was a long stride without the sailor’s roll to it, and his hands, though strong enough, lacked the heavy calluses of a seaman. He had a broad plain face which suggested honesty without guaranteeing it. He stood a head taller than his Northleach companions.

They, in turn, had the half-sea, half-soil look which marked most of the English in Calais, whether they were wool merchants or clerks. The Treaty of Calais in 1359 had filled the city with hundreds of such hearty tradesmen. Sir John felt a comfortable superiority in such company and assumed a leadership which they never questioned.

They made their way first to the small warehouse where Buckley’s wool was stored. The guard was asleep and when Buckley shook him to wake him up, the fellow thought he was being attacked and tried to flee. However, all was well and they left the place more safely guarded than they found it.

So off they went, the tall young man now following the shorter two and Sir John a cautious fourth. He wanted to see how well the young men knew Calais. They had got to the first warehouse quite directly. The second was not far, and there they found the guard awake and prepared to shoot them. On finding out who they were, he seemed glad for company and the five of them talked awhile in the dark. As they talked, a land breeze sprang up and the sky cleared. A crescent moon hung almost overhead and gave enough light to show the shapes of buildings but not enough to throw a shadow.

“And now we must go to Frederick Elthan’s warehouses,” Sir John said.

“Why?”

“Because we have to scotch those vandals. It will do little good for you to save this shipment of wool if you never make another. These attacks could drive The Staple out of Calais; and that could drive England from the Continent. A few large merchants form the main support of The Staple and Elthan is one of the most important.”

“Why Elthan in particular?”

“Because of something you all told me at supper. Come now, his warehouses are a way off and I want to get there before they are damaged.”

Philpot and Stace were willing enough, but Buckley was not enthusiastic. Since seeing to his own goods, he had lost all sense of urgency. He was, Sir John realized, a loner who was not sure enough of himself to go it alone. He finally went with Sir John because the others did.

From there on Sir John had to lead the way. Sensing that he had a captive audience, he described some of his early adventures. “I was only thirteen when I first came to Calais,” he said. “A local wool merchant had just bought all of our May clipping. (We always sold to merchants, never to broggers.) And I talked my father into letting me go with the merchant as a ’prentice. I earned and learned, for the man kept me busy helping at whatever task needed an extra pair of hands. We sailed from Hull and halfway across were attacked by Scottish pirates. We held them off with a small cannon and our bows. Once when the others were busy breaking out the darts, I got to fire the cannon, but they never let me load it. That, they said, took skill. When the pirates saw we were well armed, they steered off and we never saw them again.”

For a while they talked about pirates and storms, of ships lost, men lost, and worst of all, whole cargoes of wool lost.

They were less than a quarter of a mile from Elthan’s houses when they heard cries for help. Brandishing their clubs, the three young men rushed forward. They heard sounds of a small but furious scuffle and, as they reached the scene, they saw a torch being lit.

Two ruffians were assaulting the guard while a third man was waving his newly lit pine torch to get it to burn more vigorously. His intention was obvious. He was just waiting for the other two to dispose of the guard and he was going to set fire to the building.

The attackers heard Sir John’s party and turned to face them. A vicious but unskilled brawl ensued. Stace struck the firebrand from the first man’s hand and dealt him a solid blow on the ear before the man seized a small timber and counterattacked. The others were evenly matched, clubs against clubs. Sir John observed that Buckley was mainly concerned to counter the blows of his opponent, and as a result received several blows to his arm and shoulder. The two from Northleach were driving fiercely forward, backing their adversaries down the street. Sir John drew his sword, and when the vandals saw the glint of moonlight on steel, they dropped their clubs and fled.

Sir John stamped out the burning slivers and helped the warehouse guard to his feet.

“You was just in time,” the guard said. “In another few minutes they would’ve killed me and burnt the house.”

Sir John turned to his friends. “What damage did you do?” he asked.

“Mine will have a fat ear tomorrow,” Stace replied.

“And mine a knot on his noggin,” Philpot added.

“Good,” said Sir John. “Let us remember that. Now I think we can return to our lodging.”

Doubtless his words stirred some curiosity in the three wool merchants, but he gave them no opportunity to question him, for he talked all the way back.

Jere Hoar has worn many hats in his working life: editor, reporter, part-time lawyer, and teacher. The events of 1994 entitle him to wear one more: fiction writer. It was shortly after Mr. Hoar’s unpublished novel was named a finalist in the 1994 Hemingway First Novel Contest that he received the news that EQMM had accepted “Prey Don’t Tell.” We welcome the author, who hails from Oxford, Mississippi, to the ranks of EQMM firsts...

Charlie smells like musk perfume. He wears a green or maroon jacket with wide lapels, black pants with two-inch cuffs, black shoes with sponge soles, and an open-collar shirt that stands tall in back. The flat gold chain around his neck gets buried in gray hair that curls in the V of his collar. A college ring with a blue stone weights the third finger of his right hand. On the left hand is a band set with diamonds — not chips. He doesn’t need knucks. He doesn’t need a gun. Charlie is strong. “Just let some guy smart-mouth me,” he says. “Just let them!”

I’m a keeper at the zoo, Jack Leonard by name, Jack L. by nickname. Smart guys say it like “jackal.” I got a limp and I’m ugly. Now that Kally has left, I got Charlie for a friend. The lioness I’m in charge of don’t like me at all. Or if she does, she likes me the way she likes any cripple’ thing. She sees the hitch in my hip and says, Uh-huh! Just you wait, cripple man. Just you wait!

In Birmingham she clawed a keeper. They’d’ve put her down but she’s so pretty, we offered a trade. Got this fur on her neck like a lady’s cape. Got a walk about her, and a talk about her. When I throw her meat chunks she chuckle down deep. Thank you, cripple man, she say.

Some evenings after work when Charlie ain’t hurrying home to the good supper Kally cooked for him, or got a ball game to watch on his big TV, him and me sit outside the cat house and drink us some beer. “A twilight respite,” Charlie calls it.

Charlie explains things to me. His eyes hide deep in his face, like in caves, and sparkle out little and bright. Charlie’s maybe the smartest man I know, and the quickest. A man that crosses Charlie will have cause to wish he hadn’t.

Drinking on the grounds is against all rules, but we carry our beer in a paper sack to show the night guards some respect. They make a wide circle around Charlie. One that joked about seeing Charlie drink beer got fired for sleeping on duty and carelessness with a firearm. None of the rest of them want to see the grounds boss drink beer.

Charlie and me don’t call attention to ourselves. Just once we did. Charlie got the notion our oldest lion, Leo, needed some fresh meat. I took Leo on a chain to Monkey Island and let him look at them hanging in trees, screaming. I knew he wouldn’t cross the moat to get him one. He’s so old and spoiled he expects me to feed him.

When Leo came padding out of his cage, roaring loud enough to deafen a man, everything in the zoo screamed or barked or yowled or brayed. Leo showed his yellow snags and looked at Charlie. Charlie don’t like to be in the thin center of a lion’s eye. Leo made a little jump at him, but I got the chain and Leo ain’t gonna do nothing. He ain’t got it in him. But what does Charlie do? He runs.

I yell after Charlie, “Come back, Shane! Come back!”

Charlie comes back, draws himself up, and says, “Well, Jack L., I can retrieve my beer can, but I don’t think I can retrieve my dignity.”

I say, “How’d you move that fast, Charlie? I never saw a stout man run so fast.”

“Let it alone.”

I giggle.

“Okay, wise guy. What would you do if a lion came after you, and you didn’t have a weapon?”

“I’d order it to its cage.”

“Suppose that didn’t work.”

“I could run pretty fast if I had to.”

Charlie says patiently, “No you couldn’t. One of your legs is two inches shorter than the other.”

I showed Charlie and Leo my Reeboks. “These are magic shoes. I been practicing.”

“I can beat you in a fifty-meter dash, even with this.” Charlie pats the roll hanging over his belt.

“You named that thing?”

Charlie’s face gets hard like a rock. “Put that cat up. I’m going home and see what Kally fixed me for dinner.”

“Stay awhile, Charlie. I got another six-pack.”

“Get a life, why don’t you?”

That night I ate two peanut butter sandwiches with sour pickles while I watched a nature program about wolves. When there is not a nature program on TV, I watch my tapes. I’ve bought all the predator tapes. I got a life. There’s nothing better than living with predators, except maybe living with Kally.

“Jeez!” Charlie says the next time we meet for a drink. His lips tighten and he lifts his nose. “You smell like cat piss, man. You bathe in it?”

“No, I’m real careful, Charlie. I don’t want to get any on me. Cat piss must hop oh me from what cats have pissed on. It jumps like ticks do. That’s what I figure.”

“Where’d you acquire that idea?”

“I don’t know. I just thought it up.”

“Jeez! I don’t know why I put up with you. You’re nasty. You’re inhuman.”

“Kally didn’t think I was,” I say. My voice sounds whiny.

“Aw, kid, Kally felt sorry for you. You know how it is when you get some poor crippled dog out of the pound, and you want to feed it and make it normal?”

“Kally liked me. I know she did.”

“How could a woman stand a man that smells like cat piss?”

“You don’t have to talk to me like that, Charlie. It’s all right that you took Kally. I’m glad for her to live in your good house. I don’t have nothing like that for her.”

Charlie wipes the air with his hand and turns his face away.

“Here, have some beer. It’s imported, Charlie. I was working late and didn’t have time to wash like I should. I’ll sit downwind.”

Charlie reaches out a hand to feel the temperature of a bottle in the paper sack. Everything’s all right then, because this is the Bass Pale Ale Charlie likes. He slips one out of the sack, fumbles in his coat pocket, and asks, as always, “You got the key?”

“Charlie, does Kally ever — you know, ax you about me? How I’m doing and all?”

“Naw.” He gurgles the beer I’ve opened. “Kally don’t ax me nothing. Do not say ax ever again to me.”

“How is she?”

He shrugs.

“You used to brag on her. You used to tell me things she said.”

Charlie rubs his jaw. He hums “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He gives me a sweet, sweet smile. “Will you shut up about Kally? Will you just shut up?”

“Charlie—” The whine that I don’t want in my voice has come. “Just one more thing. Does she ask about Duchess?”

“Naw.”

“That sounds wrong. Are you sure?”

“She doesn’t, I’m telling you.”

I shake my head.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I don’t know... Yeah, Charlie, I’m calling you a liar. You’re lying, Charlie. You’re lying.” I’ve doubled up my fists. I’m thinking about all the people I know who work big cats. We know cats better than people, and care about them every bit as much.

Charlie turns on the bench and pokes his red face toward mine. His yellowish eyes bulge. Every word sounds like a hammer tap. “She — ain’t — ever — coming — back. Get Kally out of your stupid head.”

“Why, Charlie, why?” I can’t seem to stop my whine.

Charlie’s words snap like whip cracks. “ ’Cause I kicked her narrow ass out. She’s gone. She got on the bus and left town. Took her brown suitcase and that hanging bag. We broke up. We split the blanket.”

“Oh.”

“So that’s that.”

“I guess.”

“No more Kally. I don’t have to listen to you carry on about Kally. Right?”

“I guess so.” Something hurt in my chest. My throat felt tight and dry. My eyes wanted to run. I didn’t have any taste for icy, imported beer. “—I guess that’s right.”

Charlie drank the six-pack of Bass alone.

For a while after I found out Kally was gone for good, nothing seemed to matter to me. I just went through the motions of being a keeper. Charlie tried to help. “Jeez!” he’d say. “Stand up straight. You look like your damn back is broke. What do you care about that whore?”

“Kally wasn’t a whore.”

“Sure she was. Didn’t I buy her off of you?”

“You never.”

“Sure I bought her.”

“She wouldn’t do that.” I was shaking my face back and forth, hard. My cheeks and nose were swaying on my face bones. “I want you to take that back.”

“Take it easy, kid. You’re right, in a manner of speaking. A man couldn’t buy her for twenty bucks, nor forty either.”

“Not a hundred! She worked, hard work, in the cat house taking care of tigers.”

Charlie smiled. “Okay, she worked in a cat house and wouldn’t lay down for a hundred. But she could be bought, Jack L. She went for the intangibles. Offer Kally intangibles and she’d open her legs.” His voice rose to falsetto. “She’d say, ‘Take me, take me.’ ”

“Bull! What’s intangibles?”

“Stuff you can’t even see. Good will... hot air. I gave her the words she wanted to hear... pictures made up out of air. I bought her for puffery. I said, ‘Come live with me, Kally. I can’t live without you.’ That’s what she wanted to hear. Coin of the realm with women.” Charlie slapped his leg and grinned like we were equals. “You told her you loved her. She told me you did.”

Charlie wiped his hand through the air like a bear slapping bees. “Ah, you dope. If a man wants to get in a woman’s pants the first thing he says is ‘I love you.’ Maybe he does love her while he’s in heat. Or maybe he thinks he’s in love because she’s all he thinks about at first.”

“You asked her to live with you,” I argued. “You must have felt something.”

“That’s the peanut you give a monkey to do its trick. See, if a guy my age wants a young woman regular, it’s what I have to pay. It’s what I buy her with. Now do you get it?”

“You mean you lied? I get it, Charlie. I get it real good.”

He wipes his hand through the air again, then brings it down and rubs his nose. “Did I ever lie to you? I lie to people who hold their hands out asking for it, begging for it. I lie to the ones who say ‘Give me the words I want to hear. I don’t care whether they are true or not.’ ”

“It was wrong. It was wrong to bait Kally off her job and then throw her away when you was done with her.”

Charlie sighs. “Nah, kid. It was right. That explains why I’m a supervisor and you shovel cat shit. I see the world as it is. You live in a dream world where the Blind Lady’s scales tilt in favor of the dummies. That makes you as stupid as Kally.”

What happened between Kally and Charlie I don’t know, and may never know, but something did. Something soured Charlie. After he told me she was gone he hated female things. We sat on the bench at the lion habitat more than before. He had time for it. But Charlie stared at the Duchess with squinty, mean eyes.

“The zoo ought to get shut of that cat. She’s a fugging menace,” Charlie says. “You can’t trust a female. Why do you come out here every night?”

“That beauty is very fussy. If I don’t take care of her she will starve down to a moth-eat rug. Somebody got to do what’s right for her.”

“You’re a natural fool,” Charlie says. “Leo, he’s steady and lazy. You can predict what a male will do. With Duchess you’ll find you’re a half-step slow.”

I drink my beer and grin and belch.

“She hates me,” he says bitterly.

“She loves me. Every time I go inside she takes the measure of my meatiest bones.”

“You can’t trust a bitch.” Charlie has drunk many beers. His voice catches. “They’ll step out on you.”

Across the moat, in the habitat, Duchess walks back and forth, back and forth. She yellow-eyes us like we’re impala on the Kalahari.

She’d moved into the run-down house surrounded by flat, open fields to die. Not because she’d seen a doctor, not because she was ill or had a genetic disorder. Simply because she was so empty. There was nothing left.

To her, the miles and miles of wintry farmland symbolized her state of mind. Miles and miles of nothing. Her friends called it burnout, but she called it living death. So she’d left the city and her steady job, her circle of friends, and the pain of Rob’s leaving her, and she’d come here. To a place where she was surprised if she saw two pickups pass her house on the same day! To where nightfall meant darkness, with no streetlights or distant glow from the city. To a solitude so lonely even a radio blaring couldn’t penetrate the silence. And at first, she’d wallowed in it. Licking her wounds. Picking up the pieces. Sorting things out. But then she’d grown bored. Burn-out or broken heart, neither was fatal, and waiting for death wasn’t everything she’d thought it would be. Finally she tired of it altogether and drove into town to look for work.

It had been easy getting a job. Miss Timmons had been the Honors English teacher for too many generations of local families, until now, in her senility, it was finally time to retire her to a nursing home and find a quick replacement. Caryn would be doing what she did best: teaching. And this time it would be different. Kids bussed to a consolidated high school from good, righteous farm families would inspire her, bring back the old feelings of accomplishment and pride in a job well done. Only city kids were rude and unmotivated, joined gangs and scribbled graffiti — traits inherent to cement jungles and low incomes. This time she’d remember why she’d wanted to be a teacher to begin with.

When mystery aficionados talk about the revolution that occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of the strong female sleuth, they oughtn’t to forget the work of Janice Law, whose fictional investigator Anna Peters is about as tough as they come. Ms. Law’s first Anna Peters novel (1976) was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award and she has gone on to write a number of other novels and stories both in the Peters series and out. Her new story for us is somewhat off her usual track in that it is pure psychological suspense...

The sun still lit a high, cloudless sky, but the worst of the heat had sunk into the sienna- and ocher-toned buildings, making them glow as if by some subtle, internal fire. The big courtyard of the cafe was now mostly shadowed, and, freed of the heat and glare, the Bolognese were loitering over a Campari or a glass of mineral water or ordering pretty dishes of ices and biscuits. Michael smelled the smoke of their cigarettes, exhaust from the street, and a woman’s passing perfume, all touched with that more elusive smell, the faint exhalation of old stone and old buildings. Overhead, the swifts were beginning to swoop and twitter, while fat pigeons whirred between the tables and looked for crumbs underfoot.

Michael opened his notebook and glanced again at the column of figures. He had done all right. More than all right. The astronomy faculty had liked his presentation, admired the new software, understood the documentation; he had done the translations and now he had the orders sewed up. It was a good feeling, and he was thinking how much he liked Italians in general and the Bolognese in particular when a woman’s voice asked, “Do you speak English?”

Sometimes Michael ignored these appeals. His Italian was fluent, nearly perfect; his German was passable; his French, very good; and he could manage in both Portuguese and Dutch. Sometimes he would shrug, smile sympathetically, and shake his head.

“You must be American,” said the voice. “I’ve got one of the older models. A bit slow now.”

She must have noticed his company briefcase. Michael turned to see a nicely dressed woman with faded blond hair pulled back into an untidy knot. She was wearing oversized sunglasses with very dark lenses, and Michael was reflected as a tiny figure against a vast and somber sky.

“That must be the P-ninety-six?” he asked politely. You never know when you may find a customer.

“A generation before, actually. I’ve got one of the P-eighties.” She was somewhere in late middle age, a tall, sturdy woman with the confident smile of someone used to meeting people, used to making friends, or, perhaps, like Michael, used to making useful contacts.

“Really! Bane of our existence,” Michael joked. “How can we sell new software when those old dinosaurs are still going strong?”

“Slow but sound,” she said.

“A vintage model,” Michael admitted. “For personal use. For business applications now, our new line is the only thing to consider.” He could hear himself switching into his sales mode and smiled. “But you’re not here on business.”

Her expression adjusted subtly, and Michael wondered if he’d given offense. He nodded toward the guidebook and map that lay on her table.

“Travel and business,” she said after a moment, and there was a long pause. “You could say that travel has become my business.”

A waiter approached, very bright, neat, and important like all the cafe staff, and she ordered a San Pellegrino. Her Italian was quite passable, Michael noticed.

“I look at restaurants, hotels, tourist itineraries,” she remarked. “This is only my second time in Bologna. An underrated city.”

“One of the nicest in Italy.”

“That is what I think. I think it’s ready to be an important secondary destination if presented in the right way. Much more could be done with the university area as a package of entertainment, culture, and history. But not too touristy. That’s important for the publications I write for.”

Michael smiled at her enthusiasm.

“You’re wondering why I spoke to you,” she said.

“Americans abroad usually appeal for translations.”

“You are” — she hesitated, tipped her head to one side — “thirty-six, thirty-seven?”

“Thirty-six. Thirty-seven soon,” he added and instantly regretted it, for she said, “My son’s age exactly. He would have been thirty-seven next month. I saw you sitting there, and I said, he’s Mark’s age. That’s what Mark would have looked like. That’s what Mark would look like sitting in Bologna at the Cafe Visconti.”

“Your son... died?”

“I don’t know. I think now that he is dead, but I don’t know for a certainty.” Her expression momentarily turned vague and distracted, and Michael began to fear eccentricity, mental disturbance, all the anguish of emotional illness.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. He would wait a minute, he thought, then call the waiter and ask for his check. He was glad now that he had his briefcase and could use the excuse of a meeting.

“I didn’t believe it for a long time,” she said in a reflective tone. “There are days when I don’t believe it yet. I can understand those MIA families, I really can. Until you have something to bury, you don’t believe. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Someone is young and alive without a problem in the world and then — he’s gone.”

“An auto accident?” Michael asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and something about the gesture made him think that she must once have been attractive, desirable. “I don’t think it could have been an auto accident. Those are reported. No, he disappeared years ago on a cross-country trip. He’d been camping out, hitching from one town to the next. It was the thing to do then, backpack, hitchhike, ‘see the world.’ Perhaps you did the same yourself.”

Michael nodded before he could stop himself. “I traveled around a bit after my senior year.”

“You’d have been seventeen,” she said very definitely. “You might have been at the same campsites. It’s a small world. When I travel, I meet so many people...” The waiter appeared with a coaster, a napkin, a little bottle beaded with condensation, and a glass garnished with a slice of lime; he laid them out smartly and was gone with a flourish. “...who might have known Mark,” she resumed without a break, “who might have seen him, who were the right age or in the right place. Over the long run, that has become comforting.”

“There was an investigation, of course...”

“No ‘of course’ about it,” she said sharply. “It was strictly after a fashion. You know that was also the time for running away, dropping out. It was hard to convince the authorities that Mark would never just have disappeared.”

“You did not accept that.”

“Never.”

“I suppose you searched, yourself...”

“Searched, hired detectives, put up posters, leafleted the entire area. It was in northern Arizona — not a very populous place. I don’t think I left anything undone. That’s a bad thought, the thought of having left something undone. I still wake up sometimes at night, sit up in bed with my heart pounding, thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten something. What was it I was supposed to do? Where was it I was supposed to go?’ But I haven’t forgotten anything.” She took a sip of her mineral water and looked around the cafe and then back at Michael. It was impossible to see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “I can assure you I’ve followed every lead, every clue.”

“I’m sure you have,” Michael said. He put his hand on his briefcase, ready to get up, ready to leave.

“Twenty years,” she said. “A lifetime. It’s been a very curious life. But you’d have a different perspective. Twenty years ago, you’d have been seventeen, and twenty years later my son would have looked like you.”

“It’s a very sad story,” Michael said and shifted forward in his seat. He looked around with his hand half raised, but the alert and efficient waiters were all inside.

“There was a grove of aspens,” she said, and as soon as she spoke, Michael felt the shift of some inner tide. “There was a small lake, too. When I first went there, the aspens were turning; I remember little pale gold leaves shivering in the wind and, behind them, mountains the color of lead.”

“But you said he ‘disappeared,’ ” Michael said. “No one was to blame, was there? There was no suspicion, no evidence? You’ve said as much...”

She studied her glass for a moment. “There was evidence,” she said, “if you looked hard enough. What was hard was to convince the authorities to do something. To convince them that Mark would never have...”

“It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Michael said abruptly. “It’s hard to know what anyone will do in a given situation.”

“But some people you just know,” she said. “In extraordinary circumstances, yes, that’s true. In extraordinary circumstances, who knows what we would do. I look at those poor Bosnians and Romanians sitting in the arcades...”

“Some of them are professionals,” Michael said. He prided himself on knowing a scam when he saw one. “They’re refugees today, Gypsies tomorrow, pickpockets the day after.”

“They look miserable enough,” she said, “wherever they come from. That is a drawback to Bologna.”

“As an ‘important secondary destination’?”

Like so many determined and energetic people, she was immune to satire. “What would we do in their place?” she asked in turn. “In their place, with poverty and disaster? That is one thing. But on a camping trip in the West?”

“Sometimes extraordinary things find us in ordinary places.”

“That was what I said! I said something terrible must have happened. That’s why I believe he must be dead.”

“Other things can happen,” Michael began. “People have been known to—”

“No, no, you don’t understand. Let me tell you...”

“I’m sorry. It’s been good talking to you, but I really must be going.” Even to himself, Michael found his voice unconvincing. “I’ve got this meeting.”

“Not now, surely,” she said, imperturbably, relentlessly. “This is the hour for cafes, for aperitifs, for reflection. Especially for reflection. I see you are the sort of man who reflects, who remembers. As soon as I mentioned the lake and the aspens, I saw that you were a man who remembers.”

Michael laughed and gathered his forces. “You made me think about camping in the mid-seventies. Evenings in a sleeping bag, listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Stones.”

“Yes,” she said eagerly, “all that wonderful music. All that loud, wonderful music. Generation-breaking music, but not for us. Mark and I grew up together. Was that an advantage or a disadvantage, do you think?”

Michael shrugged. “My parents were older than average. Quite a bit older.”

“I had Mark when I was eighteen. So, you see, I understood him. I understood his generation. The wanting to get away, to experience life, to see the world. Our town was small. The button factory and the cloth mill were still running then. ‘Make something of yourself or you’ll end up in the mill,’ that was what I was told as a girl. And then the sixties came and the new electronics plaint and the real-estate businesses and it wasn’t as hard for a woman to earn a living anymore.”

“And Mark’s father? What did he do?” Michael asked abruptly, although it was rude, although it would surely delay his departure.

“That’s what Mark always wanted to know.”

“He didn’t know?”

“It was irrelevant, completely irrelevant.”

“Perhaps not to him,” Michael protested.

“Mark’s father was like me, young and foolish. But he didn’t have any staying power, and so he became irrelevant.”

“Boys need a man in their lives.”

“Of course, you had a father. A conventional life. But Mark had his grandfather. My parents were very kind. I had a wonderful life when Mark was small. I had a part-time job with the local travel agent. Twenty-five hours a week. The rest of the time I took care of Mark. We went fishing and on picnics along the river; we went to the swings in the little town park. We never missed the children’s matinee at the movie theater or the special programs at the library. That was the happiest time of my life.”

“Then he grew up,” Michael said. “He got too old for the park and picnics and being perfect.”

She took a sip of her mineral water and ignored the implications. “It was an adjustment when he went to school. Though I had to work, so I was away part of the time anyway. And then he did so well, no one could say I hadn’t done a good job with him. No one. He started the trumpet in elementary school, then played with the high-school band. Do you play an instrument?”

“As a child.” He remembered the shiny, flaring brass mouth, the padded valves, the amazing amount of slimy fluid distilled from puffing out the notes of the “Triumphal March.”

She smiled. “And sports. Baseball, of course. That was the big sport in our town. We had an adult team as well. And he insisted on playing football, although he was too light. That was the only thing we ever argued about. I went to all his games, and I suffered through every one of them until his junior’ year. Junior year, he broke his right leg in a game. I remember that awful sound, that terrible, unmistakable crack. I was in the stands and the sound went right through my heart.”

She put her hand to the base of her throat. Her hands were strong and capable, Michael noticed, but spotted with age and beginning to wrinkle.

“After that, I said ‘no more,’ though I think he played sometimes with the boys after school. I think he did.”

“But he was off the team?” Michael asked.

“The leg didn’t heal quite right. It was shattered. A bad, bad break. And the local hospital wasn’t the greatest — I still regret I didn’t insist he be taken to Providence or Hartford. But he was in such pain, and I was scared to death. Do you have children?”

Michael shook his head. “I haven’t been married long. We’re hoping.”

“You will know when you have children. The fear, the regrets. It left him with a slight limp. Most of the time it was undetectable, but when he was tired, you noticed.”

“Athletic injuries are so common now,” Michael said. “My right knee isn’t all it might be.” He was aware of a strange, tactile memory, not in his mind so much as in his shoulders: the weight of pads, the last of the old-fashioned leather pads, and the shock of impact, the springy force of bone and muscle and leather.

“Oh yes,” she agreed. He could feel how much she wanted to agree with him. “And contemporary lives have certain parallels, certain points in common. Like you and Mark. The same age, the same desire to ‘see the world.’ Music as a child, too, and sports? Did you play sports, too?”

“Soccer,” Michael said too quickly. “And a little tennis.”

“Tennis, too,” she said with a smile. Her smiles were beginning to make him uneasy. She seemed to be finding some sort of confirmation from him, and Michael told himself that he was crazy to be trapped in a cafe by this stranger.

“It’s getting late,” he said, looking at his watch. “I really do have a meeting.”

The old buildings were turning from sienna to a deep, shadowy umber, and the waiters were putting down the umbrellas. The sky had shifted imperceptibly from blue to pink, and her sunglasses reflected an amber and purple void.

“Of course,” she said, “of course you must keep your appointment.”

There was a hint of condescension in her voice, and Michael said, “It might not have been the way you remember. It might not have been that way at all.”

“But you know nothing about it,” she said.

“He never knew his father,” Michael said. “You told me that. What boy wouldn’t be unhappy? And in a small town...”

“Where everyone knows everything? Is that what you think?”

“Children are cruel.”

“And adults, too. We are not an attractive species, are we? You think he was miserable, that he ran away, that for twenty years, twenty years! he left his mother wondering what had happened to him. Is that what you think?”

“I don’t...”

“He wrote me every week,” she said triumphantly. “Or called. Called more than wrote. Collect. My phone bills were huge. Hi, Mom, he’d say. I’m in Cleveland or Denver or Mesa. Wherever. I was going to fly to San Francisco and meet him there in two weeks. To celebrate his cross-country trip. Does that sound like alienated youth? I got the records from the phone company and showed them to the police. Week after week, he called. Then new friends, the campsite up in the aspens with the lake and the lead-colored mountains, and he was never heard from again. What do you think?”

“His story might be different,” Michael said. “He might have wanted to know—”

“Secrets?” she asked. Her well-shaped hands had rather long nails. Rather long; he had not noticed that. And though the light was almost gone, she still had not removed her glasses. Michael turned slightly. Three of the waiters were back by their station. One was smoking, the other two were starting to wipe up the tables and put away the chairs.

“What do we owe children?” she asked. “Love, care, a decent life. Do we owe them our history? Yes? Even if it is a terrible one?”

“It isn’t for me to say. It was for your son.”

“But he’s been dead for twenty years. You must answer for him.”

Michael felt his chest tighten. He’d developed a touch of asthma after he turned thirty; it acted up under stress or in smoky places. “I would want to know,” he said. “He would be a grown man and he’d want to know.”

“But now Mark would have a secret, too,” she said. “As you must. By thirty-six, one has had time to accumulate follies and secrets. Isn’t that right?”

“But you believe your son is dead.”

“Mark has one of two secrets: the secret of his death or the secret of his disappearance.” She leaned forward in her chair, and for the first time, Michael caught a glimpse of her eyes, light, lighter than his own, intent, pained, and cruel. He understood that she was not pathetic but dangerous. “I propose a swap,” she said.

“I can see you were always manipulative,” he said before he could stop himself. “Trading off one thing for another. Trading silence for a ‘nice’ life, for money, for protection.”

“For my son’s happiness,” she replied quickly. “For a way to live. I was eighteen years old. No, I lied, I was barely seventeen when he was born, and scared to death. At seventeen, he was on a cross-country trip to ‘find himself,’ but at that age I was faced with supporting an infant and myself with all my hopes and dreams ended.”

“You should have thought of that before you got into bed.”

“Do you suppose that’s what he thought?” she asked. “I would be happy if he had, but I think he had other fears. You would understand that. I can see you have imagination. I can see you have an appreciation of what is not ordinary.”

“Things happen,” Michael said. A little breeze sprang up out of the arcades and chilled his damp chest.

“Things happened up in the aspen grove,” she said. “I am an intelligent woman. I didn’t know that at seventeen — or even at thirty-four. I’ve discovered that since. As I’ve discovered what happened. Twenty years is a long time. The works of Shakespeare, the theory of relativity, a treatment for cancer. What can’t be done in twenty years if one puts one’s whole mind to work?”

“Not everyone can write like Shakespeare,” Michael said.

“But maybe there is a task for everyone,” she said. “A unique task. My task was always Mark, protecting him, searching for him. You might be interested in how I proceeded.”

“It is getting late,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “very late. Brian, David, Judy, and one other. Up in the aspen grove. I spoke to the camp manager. He is a rather sour, indifferent man. He remembered drinking, marijuana, loud music. The night Mark disappeared, he heard shouts in the dark, but he was not one ‘to borrow trouble.’ That was his phrase, ‘to borrow trouble.’ He just sat in his office and collected the camp rentals, but he was decent enough to store Mark’s gear.” She reached into her bag and produced a snapshot. “Judy. It took five years to find her. A fortuitous meeting. You know, it was rather sad about her. She died on her honeymoon in Hawaii — one of the very first cases of attacks on tourists. She left the campsite the same night Mark disappeared. I got these from her.”

Michael looked at the photos spread on the table: young men with scruffy beards, shorts, hiking boots, and big rucksacks on frames. He remembered the smell of dust and unwashed socks and hemp. “That was David,” she remarked.

“Was?”

“It only took me three years to find David. An unattractive person,” she added reflectively, “Not the sort of friend Mark had been used to having. He had a motorcycle accident. I read later that they believed he’d been forced off the road by another vehicle.”

“How did you find him?” Michael asked.

“Judy’s snapshots. She knew his name. I found his address by contacting every motor vehicle department in the country. It took a lot of time. David told me about the party. There had been a fight, he thought, but he had been too drunk to remember. In the morning, he said, Mark was gone. I did not believe him.”

“Perhaps you should have believed him,” Michael said.

“But that would have raised other questions. Brian, now, took nearly eight years. He’d gone into camping equipment, working at a mail-order company for serious backpackers and hikers. There are a surprising number of mail-order companies. I paid to have a computer age the image from Judy’s snapshot. And, of course, travel is my business. I found him in San Diego.”

“How did he die?” Michael asked. His voice, sounded hollow, unfamiliar.

She looked at him quizzically. “He died in a fall,” she said. “Ironic for a climber, but he fell down his office stair.”

“Four years ago?” Michael asked.

“Just about. I’d figured maybe another six or seven for you, but there is always serendipity. I saw you sitting here when I least expected to, but of course you’d always been in my mind.”

“Of course,” Michael said.

“And now we must swap,” she said. She laid her handbag on the table. It was the size of a small duffel bag and looked heavy.

“Perhaps you do not really want to,” he said.

“Perhaps you are afraid,” she said. “Afraid to know.”

“None of this has anything to do with me,” Michael said. “Now Mark...”

“Yes?”

“Mark was afraid.”

She waited.

“When it happened — and before — he was afraid...”

“Ah,” she said, “when what happened?”

“The fight, the accident. It really was an accident; it was no one’s fault.”

“Up in the aspens,” she said. “The night of the party.”

“That’s right.”

“He was afraid...” She stopped and, for the first time, hesitated.

“He was afraid of violence, of unforeseen craziness and confusion.”

“Why?” she asked and bit her lip.

“I think that is what you have to swap,” Michael said. The lights were coming on. Their golden pinpoints swam in her dark lenses.

“There was no way he could have known,” she said softly.

“There are always rumors, hints.”

“In a small town, yes, rumors, hints, whispers.”

“And when it happened — we were all drunk, you know — when it happened—”

“It? It?” she demanded.

“You’ve been there,” Michael said. “The loneliness of it, the mountains, the sheet of water with the trees quivering and dancing.”

“The campsite was sordid.”

“In the mountains, you feel small,” Michael said. “The wind comes down and blows your soul away.”

“But if he was afraid,” she said, “he was afraid of himself.”

“He had a temper,” Michael agreed.

“But nothing like...”

“You were going to say?”

“I was going to say, ‘Nothing like his father.’ Nothing like.”

“Yet he worried,” Michael said and gripped the edge of the cafe table.

“There was no sign,” she said carefully. “There was no sign whatsoever. Schizophrenia develops typically in adolescence. His father — his father was ill from the time he was eleven or twelve.”

“A fine father you picked for your son,” Michael said.

“ ‘Picked’ is not the right word. But that’s another story. We were talking about Mark. He was seventeen when he disappeared. True, the danger years, but there was no sign ever.”

“But you must understand,” Michael said. “The night awash in beer, rivalry, anger, a sudden violence—”

“And my son was killed,” she said in a cold voice.

“There was blood,” Michael admitted; he sounded surprised. Yes, there had been blood. “Even in midsummer, it is very cold there in the morning. The light is bluish and the mountains are the color of lead. You can wake up there and see the very shape of your fears lying in a pool of blood.”

“You had killed...”

“Let me give you the situation, all right? This guy was in the camp. A stranger passing through. He joined the party that night. He made a pass at Judy, picked a fight. In the morning, he was lying dead in the tent, and the others were gone.”

“They would have had ordinary fears,” she observed, not unsympathetically.

“They bugged out. Mark had no head for alcohol. By the time he came to, everyone else was gone. He was left to... clean up.”

“The lake,” she suggested.

“The lake is very deep,” Michael agreed.

“But not as deep as deception.”

“Nor as madness. There was the proof, wasn’t there? Proof of what he’d always wanted not to know. Proof of the rumors about crazy Uncle Ben, who’d done something terrible, who was locked up far away, who could never, ever be released.”

“You knew all this and yet you left him,” she said, her voice dangerous again.

“I’m trying to give you the situation.” ‘

“The situation in which he died or in which he ‘disappeared’?” She began fumbling in her purse and Michael stood up.

“It was Uncle Ben, wasn’t it?” he demanded. “Mark’s father was loony Uncle Ben?”

“You see,” she said softly, “why it was better not to tell him. You see how much I had to protect him from. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Maybe you can see why he had to protect you, too.” Michael’s whole body pounded with his heart like a great resonating chamber, and a gray morning light suffused the Cafe Visconti, bringing with it the inescapable awkwardness of death. “Why life was impossible for him. How could he have told you, for God’s sake!”

“He would have told me in the end,” she said calmly. “We were very close. I can’t expect you to understand that, but he would never have left me wondering and grieving for twenty years. Never. You had an ordinary life, a conventional home. You have no idea.” A little black snub-nosed pistol peeked out over the top of her purse. “You are the very last,” she said. “After twenty years.” She raised the pistol, and, full of anger and regret and fear, Michael leaped back from the table and broke for the street. His bad leg slowed him, and she saw that the instant before she saw the car. She jumped up and shouted his name, and he glanced back — she would remember that he did glance back — but he had hidden too well, the past was too terrible, and all alternative futures too full of regrets and recriminations. He was still running when he hit the street.

The squeal of brakes and the thump transfixed her heart and turned her nerves to thorns. After a few seconds, she sat back down and laid the child’s pistol on the table. When the caribinière arrived, the pistol would be lying there, a harmless toy, and she would be staring toward the dark street behind her tinted glasses. She knew what she would say, something about a present for a friend’s child, a misunderstanding, a curiously unstable stranger. She knew she would say those things, though she was not sure why she should bother, for now she was not convinced that she had not, after all, made a terrible mistake.

Legal settings often enter into Michael Gilbert’s crime fiction, and it is a profession the author, himself a London solicitor, knows well. Mr. Gilbert was a writer, however, long before he became a lawyer. His first book was completed in 1930 (though not published until much later) and he was one of the founding members of the Crime Writers Association of Britain. His new story for us introduces a senior managing clerk to a firm of London solicitors who seems to know, or be able to figure out, just about anything...

Friday, March 18th, was a date Hugo Bracknell was destined to remember. Having missed by two minutes the fast 6:30 train from Liverpool Street to Colchester, he had been forced to take, instead, the 6:55 train on the Braintree line. Anxious study of the timetable had shown him that it would, if it ran to time, reach Witham at 7:55. The snag was that it seemed to be a commuter special, stopping no fewer than nine times before it reached Shenfield; discharging at each of these stops a number of businessmen on the way back to their residences at Chadwell Heath, Gidea Park, Brentwood, and other portions of the suburban sprawl which separated East London from Essex.

After Shenfield it seemed to get a move on, stopping only at Ingatestone, Chelmsford, and Hatfield Peverel before reaching Witham.

It was important that it should run to time. He had been invited to spend the weekend with his aunt. She was a formidable old lady who liked to dine promptly at eight. If the train dallied, or there was any difficulty over picking up a taxi at the station, he was going to keep her from her grub. Unthinkable.

“Then don’t think about it,” he said. “Either you make it or you don’t. So stop worrying.”

His thoughts reverted to personal matters; and there was much to think about.

For he had reached a milestone.

After leaving Oxford he had been allowed two years to widen his horizons, to enlarge his knowledge of human nature, to improve his mind; in fact, to enjoy himself, before plunging into the job for which he had been destined from birth.

He was now, and had been for the past ten days, articled to his father, Bob Bracknell, who, with Francis Fearne, constituted the partnership of Fearne and Bracknell, solicitors, in Little Bethel, an odd backwater near the northern end of Tower Bridge, flanked by the offices and warehouse of Ridolfi Brothers on one side and on the other by the Roaring Forties public house. When spoken of in the City — and for a small firm they were spoken of a good deal — they were naturally referred to as Fern and Bracken and strangers sometimes wrote to them under this name. It made no difference. The postmen all knew them.

Ingatestone was briefly stopped at, and left behind them. Three stations to go. Still only 7:45. Relax. Plenty of time.

Fearne and Bracknell was not a big firm. Far from it. But they had that mysterious, indefinable, unchallengeable something. Reputation. People said of them, “Fern and Bracken. Very practical firm, that. Get on with the job, you know. No highfalutin law about them, but sound. Break the law? Of course not. They’re not sharp. Just reliable.”

Hugo sometimes wondered how much of this reputation stemmed from their senior managing clerk, Horace Piggin. He had met Mr. Piggin on many occasions when visiting the office in his school days and had sat kicking his heels in the waiting room whilst his father dealt with some long-winded client. Mr. Piggin had put himself out to entertain the boy.

He remembered one conversation which had taken place when he was in his last year at Rugby. Mr. Piggin had set the ball rolling by asking him why he had decided to take up law. With a brashness which made him blush when he thought about it, he had said, “Oh, I knew Dad would give me my articles here. And after all, being a solicitor isn’t difficult. Look at some of the types you see doing it.”

Mr. Piggin had agreed with him, gravely.

“Of course, I don’t mean you, Piggy. And I don’t mean this firm. We’re different. I mean the stooges in Lincoln’s Inn and Bedford Row who read it all up in books and copy it out.”

“That’s one fault,” Mr. Piggin had agreed, “that you’ll not find in this firm. We have hardly a law book in the place.”

“But surely, Piggy, you must want to look things up sometimes.”

To which Mr. Piggin’s memorable reply had been, “If reference to the authorities is required, I trot along to the public library, scribble down the information, and trot back with it.”

The thought of Mr. Piggin trotting up Tower Bridge Road with his white hair streaming in the wind had enchanted Hugo.

Chelmsford. A rather larger place. Might that mean a longer stop? But no. Quite a few men got off the now nearly empty train, but there were no passengers waiting to get on. Hatfield Peverel next. No one got off, no one got on. Excellent. Minutes were important.

It occurred to Hugo, who was in the rear coach, that he could save a little time on arrival at Witham if he moved up to a point nearer the centre. There was no difficulty about this. The train consisted of twelve coaches in three blocks of four, and it was possible to move from one block to the other. He passed two men, one at either end of the first carriage. The next two were empty. In the fourth carriage there were a woman with a dog and a man and a girl who were sitting close together and getting on with some very private business. Hugo skirted them and passed through the cubicle which joined the rear four carriages to the central four.

Again an empty carriage. In the next, there was one man slouched in his seat and blocking the door in the centre of the carriage that Hugo had been planning to use. As the train jerked to a stop, the man rolled over and lay across the two seats, staring up at the roof with a puzzled look on his face, and Hugo saw the narrow wound in the back of his neck with the dark blood oozing out of it.

It was instinct that led his hand to the handle of the door. Must have help. Must have air. Get the door open. He stumbled onto the platform and stood holding on desperately to the handle.

The guard shouted, “Stand away,” an order which Hugo was unable and unwilling to obey. A louder shout brought out the station master, peremptory and indignant at the sight of a young man, apparently drunk, holding himself up by the door handle.

By this time the guard had come up. Hugo used his free hand to wave towards the interior of the carriage.

After that, things happened slowly.

First the arrival of a local constable. Then a more senior policeman. Then the business of evacuating the few remaining passengers and shunting the train onto a lay-by. Then the arrival of photographers and a police surgeon and a string of questions which Hugo answered as best he could while trying to control his rebellious stomach. Finally the body was moved and Hugo, his identity established and checked, was at last allowed to take possession of the taxi he had secured and to depart and endeavour to placate his aunt.

He was able in the circumstances to excuse himself from carrying out his projected weekend visit; but he further disrupted his aunt’s domestic arrangements by asking to be called at six-thirty. He reached his office at nine o’clock. Fearne and Bracknell — old-fashioned in this as in everything else — worked on Saturday mornings and he arrived, as planned, before either of the partners put in an appearance and made his way straight to the sanctum of their managing clerk. It was Mr. Piggin’s advice and support that he wanted.

“So you are the young man,” said Mr. Piggin, “described, but tactfully unnamed, whose exploits I have been reading about in the morning papers.”

“That’s me, Piggy,” said Hugo. “And I’ll tell you something mighty strange. Nobody I encountered seemed in the least surprised at what I told them. Disturbed, excited, even shocked, but not surprised. The official people at Witham were clearly keeping something back, and my aunt, when she’d heard my story, simply closed her mind to it and discussed a problem she was having with the committee of the Women’s Institute. But she knew something. I’m sure of it.”

Mr. Piggin seemed to be faintly amused. He said, “If you had opened a newspaper three or four months ago you’d have read little or nothing about indiscretions in Whitehall or massacres in Kurdistan. The front page of the paper and other pages as well would have been full of the activities of the creature they christened the Knifeman.”

“Are you telling me that yesterday was not the first—”

“It was the sixth known occasion on which he has struck. You have not seen one of today’s papers? No. Well, I can assure you that he has regained his position on the front page. Was there nothing in the papers where you were?”

“The Italian press don’t pay much attention to crime in other countries. They’ve got plenty of their own. Though now that you mention it, I do recall a brief comment about a serial murderer. When did it all start?”

Mr. Piggin had been turning over the pages of his working diaries. He said, “The first one was sixteen months ago, on Tuesday, November tenth. The next, near the beginning of last year, on Friday, February nineteenth. Then on June fifteenth, August thirteenth — which was also a Friday — and on Monday, October eleventh.”

“How did they know that these were all the same man?”

“It could not, of course, be known,” said Mr. Piggin precisely, “but the evidence that it was so was almost conclusive. His procedure in every case was the same. He waited until he was alone with one other man in the carriage, walked up to him as though he was making for the door, and struck him on the head with a loaded stick or life preserver. As his victim crumpled up he produced his second weapon. This the pathologists, in every case, thought to be a long, slender surgical-type lancet. He drove this upward, through the back of his victim’s neck, into his brain, killing him instantly.”

Although Mr. Piggin was speaking flatly, as though he was explaining a legal problem, his words recalled the horror of the moment and Hugo found himself shuddering. He said, “The man who does this — he must be mad — but he must also be wholly ordinary in appearance, so as not to excite any suspicion of his intentions.”

“Wholly so. And this agrees with the only description we have of him.”

“You mean — he was seen—”

“Exercise a little patience,” said Mr. Piggin, “and I will endeavour to explain. After five attacks, commuters — as you can imagine — became careful. They took precautions. They travelled, where possible, in parties. Then came this period of more than three months in which nothing happened. Precautions were relaxed — prematurely, you may think — but such is human nature.”

Mr. Piggin was now studying his current year’s diary.

“On Thursday, January twentieth, a Mr. Osbaldistone was travelling to Bures, where he planned to spend a long weekend with an old friend. This involved changing at Marks Tey. The train was slowing as it approached Kelvedon, the station before Marks Tey, when he suddenly realised that he was alone in the carriage with one other man and that this man was advancing on him, with his left hand in his overcoat pocket. The consciousness of his peril deprived him, he said, of the power to move or shout. He was mesmerised. Most fortunately, at that moment a young man — the son of the house that he was visiting — came through the connecting vestibule into the carriage. He said, ‘Mr. Osbaldistone, isn’t it? I guessed it might be you. You’re spending the weekend with us.’ By this time the other man had opened the carriage door and departed. When Mr. Osbaldistone related his experience, as he did, with some embarrassment, that evening, his hosts impressed on him that it was his duty to communicate with the police. Whether he was right or wrong in his suspicions, it was at least possible that he was the first man to come face-to-face with the killer and live to tell the tale. ‘You must describe him,’ they said.”

Because the first victim, a Mr. Mathieson, had worked in Stepney and lived in Romford, both places being in No. 2 Area East, the case had been assigned to the head of that area, Chief Superintendent Oliphant. He had delegated the routine handling of it to Chief Inspector Mayburgh at Cable Street, and it was to Mayburgh that Mr. Osbaldistone duly reported.

Mr. Piggin said, “I gathered from them — Osbaldistone is, by the way, a client of this firm and an old friend of your father’s — that it was not a happy experience. I’m sure he did his best, but it amounted to very little. He said, quite reasonably, that he wasn’t examining the man’s face. His attention was fixed on his left hand, which appeared to be drawing some sort of weapon out of his coat pocket. He couldn’t see more than the handle, but yes, it might have been a life preserver, something like that. ‘Or the whole thing might have been your imagination,’ says Mayburgh. ‘Yes, it might have been,’ Osbaldistone agreed. ‘But I was too worked up to notice precise details.’ All this was in answer to a series of bad-tempered questions and grunts. The inspector considered that Mr. Osbaldistone had no right to get worked up. He should have been making a careful inspection of his assailant.”

“Mayburgh sounds a bit of a brute,” said Hugo.

“He’s an old-fashioned rhinoceros who tries to arrive at the truth by butting at it, head first. His second-in-command, Inspector Barley, on the other hand, is what you might call — hum — a scientific policeman.”

Hugo gathered from Mr. Piggin’s tone that his description of Inspector Barley was not intended to be entirely complimentary.

“In the end,” he said, “he got nothing out of Mr. O. except that his presumed attacker looked, in every way, like a normal City worker. Pale face, clean-shaven, indeterminate features, no distinguishing marks. When he said that the man was ‘ordinary’ he had said it all. His failure on that occasion may account for the inspector’s wish to question you.”

“For God’s sake! Why me? I never even saw the man.”

“The working of the inspector’s mind is a closed book to me. All I can tell you is that there was a message on our answer-phone when I arrived that he would like to see you at ten o’clock. It’s a quarter to ten now. Better not keep the rhinoceros waiting.”