There is probably no famous author in history other than Ellery Queen of whom it could be debated seriously whether the contributions he or she made were greater in the sphere of writing or editing. Though Ellery Queen’s enormous importance as a detective writer inspired critic Anthony Boucher to say “Ellery Queen is the American detective story,” Frederic Dannay (one half of the two-man Queen team) is said to have wondered whether the most enduring part of the Queen legacy might ultimately prove to be the anthologies and critical studies Queen produced, and above all, this magazine. To celebrate the achievements of Ellery Queen — as we will be doing throughout this centenary year — and not give space to Queen’s various editorial roles would be unthinkable.

The earliest appearance of Editor Queen was at the helm of the 1933-34 magazine Mystery League. In the article that leads this issue, Jon L. Breen gives us a glimpse of what was inside the four now very hard to find issues that comprised the full run of that first brave magazine devoted to “quality” detective and crime fiction. The two magazines of which Queen was founding editor, Mystery League and EQMM, grew out of the longstanding scholarly and critical interests of the two men who assumed the Queen pseudonym, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. So it is not surprising that at the same time Queen was launching EQMM, he was compiling and editing perhaps the most important anthology of detective fiction ever to see print: 101 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories 1841–1941. In the early years of EQMM, Queen drew on the extensive knowledge of detective-fiction history displayed in the drawing together of that volume to introduce the magazine’s readers to forgotten or overlooked gems of mystery fiction. In turn, both Mystery League and EQMM provided the seeds out of which other scholarly, critical, and editorial projects grew.

Editor Queen’s name appears on some one hundred mystery fiction anthologies and collections, many of them consisting primarily of stories from EQMM. One of the more notable of the books is The Golden Thirteen, a collection of the winners of the Worldwide Short Story Contests sponsored by EQMM in its early years. These contests stand as one of Queen’s great editorial accomplishments. They served to bring attention to and help realize his goal of “raising the sights of mystery writers generally” so that mystery fiction might be accorded a highly respected place in the literary world. Nowadays the literary quality of mystery fiction is so often touted we take it for granted that the field attracts many “serious” writers. But Queen was one of the first to articulate the belief that a mystery story could at the same time serve literary ends. And so successful was he in promoting his contests that submissions poured in from all over the globe, not only by mystery-fiction luminaries but by authors of literary renown such as William Faulkner.

Another laudable innovation of Editor Queen was the establishment, in EQMM, of a “Department of First Stories” in which unknown authors could make their debut alongside the likes of Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett. Stanley Ellin, subsequent multiple Edgar Allan Poe Award winner, was one of several new talents first published in EQMM who went on to mystery stardom. One would not want to forget, either, in the list of things he was either the first or the best at, Queen’s seminal critical work on short mystery fiction, Queen’s Quorum, a reference sought by fans and scholars to this day.

Much more could be said about Editor Queen, but in these highlights of his career, readers will see, we hope, why many consider him the best editor, critic, and scholar the field has ever produced. To readers interested in pursuing the subject further, we highly recommend Francis M. Nevins’s Royal Bloodlines, and, of course, the following piece by award-winning reviewer and writer Jon L. Breen.

The darkly comic situations in many of Neil Schofield’s stories seem ideally suited for adaptation to radio, film, or television. Nowhere do we get a better sense of this than in this new story about a daffy ex-military man who falls prey to a more sinister, if equally unbalanced, character. Mr. Schofield currently lives in France; he is a past finalist in our Readers Award competition, and one of our best short story writers.

When, over breakfast in the morning room at “Dar-es-Salaam,” Jimbo Garside showed the latest issue of Man o’ War to Mrs. Maj. Garside and with a certain pride pointed out this letter, she told him he was a perfect cretin and went off to prepare for her coffee morning at the Women’s Institute, in which she was an activist member of the Militant Wing. Mrs. Garside was a large woman, and when she Made An Exit it was an impressive sight. But she paused at the morning-room door to point out that the penultimate sentence should have ended with a question mark, since the simple soldier had started out to ask a question but, exhilarated by the giddy literary tiderace, had clearly forgotten this fact by the time he reached the end of the sentence. In addition, if it was now going to be open house for all manner of riffraff and barrack-sweepings, could he please not refer to her as the spouse of self? She found this not only rotten English but also maladroit. And finally, who on earth was “Loopy” Drinkwater? She certainly didn’t remember any “Loopy” Drinkwater. He definitely hadn’t been on her father’s staff. With this she swept out, leaving Jimbo dispiritedly chewing the last of his bacon and toast.

He had always been a disappointment to the Memsahib, he knew, ever since he had retired as a mere major, which she had told him more than once was the sign of abject failure. All right, fair dos, he wasn’t very bright, never had been, but he could tell the Mem was vexed, that was clear, he just couldn’t for the life of him see why. Mind you, she had always been tiptop on the old grammar, going so far as to vet and correct his personal messages on last year’s Christmas cards. In red pen, what was more.

Oh, Lord.

He stared at himself in the hall mirror, adjusting his tie before leaving to catch his train up to town for a meeting with his solicitor. He also pushed his moustache into place. His face was plump and pink and he had moist blue eyes which stared mournfully back at him. He had a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and he knew why.

“Oh, Lord,” he said to the reflected Jimbo, “the Mem’s out of sorts. Short commons for a bit, now. Be dining on cold shoulder tonight, I shouldn’t wonder, old man.”

But he was an ex-soldier, and he straightened his back, knowing that some things just have to be faced, however unpleasant. He tugged fretfully at the jacket of what he called his town suit, a charcoal-grey chalk stripe.

“All because of a measly letter, too,” he added to himself for good measure. “Rotten poor show on the Mem’s part. And someone she doesn’t even know.” Because, it was true, he had remembered far too late that “Loopy” Drinkwater and he had been messmates before his secondment to General Bollingsworth’s staff in KL and therefore before the advent of Mrs. Maj. Garside, nee Hetty Bollingsworth. “Well, I don’t care. Don’t know that I won’t give her a bit of cold shoulder of my own.”

And with that cheering if deeply implausible thought, he left the house. At least the Memsahib had left the garage doors and the main gates open for him when she left in her Morris shooting brake.

Before leaving, he took a stroll around the orchard, or what he liked to call the orchard, to take a roll call of the Ribstone Pippins and the Cox’s Orange. In fact, there were barely twenty trees, but it was a pleasant quarter-acre or so, to which Jimbo frequently escaped when the Mem was out of sorts, or to smoke a last cigar before turning in. The whole property was bounded by a high wall of venerable weathered red brick, built when the house and grounds were owned by the local squire. This gave Jimbo the pleasant feeling of being in a fortified place, and kept the villagers out. Not that the villagers often wanted to come in, especially when the Mem was out of sorts.

He drove his ancient Rover out of the high wooden gates, which he religiously closed lest the underclasses should gawp importunately at the imposing frontage of Dar-es-Salaam, a habit which the Mem was intent on stamping out. Driving down the lane which led to the main village street and then to the station, Jimbo tried to remember the last occasion on which he and Loopy Drinkwater had soldiered together.

“Singapore,” Jimbo said aloud, hastily returning the salute of Sergeant Bosworth, who comprised the sole and entire police presence in Handlebury, “Singapore is where it was. Dear old Loopy. Wonder what he’s doing now.”

Val McDermid’s name has appeared on numerous awards lists over the past few years. In 2004, her novel The Distant Echo (St. Martin’s Minotaur) won both Sherlock magazine’s award for best novel (unique among mystery awards in that it goes to the fictional detective, not the author) and the Barry Award, sponsored by Deadly Pleasures magazine. The author’s many fans will be happy to know that her new book, The Torment of Others, will soon be out.

I shifted in my canvas chair, trying to get uncomfortable. The hardest thing about listening to somebody sleeping is staying awake yourself. Mind you, there wasn’t much to hear. Greg Thomas was never going to get complaints from his girlfriends about his snoring. I’d come on stakeout duty at midnight, and all I’d heard was the tinny tail end of some American sports commentary on the TV, the flushing of a toilet, and a few grunts that I took to be him getting comfortable in the big bed that dominated his extravagantly stylish studio penthouse.

I knew about the bed and the expensive style because we also had video surveillance inside Thomas’s flat. Well, we’d had it till the previous afternoon. According to Jimmy Lister, who shared the day shift, Thomas had stopped in at the florist’s on his way back from a meet with one of his dealers and emerged with two big bunches of lilies. Back at the flat, he’d stuffed them into a vase and placed them right in front of the wee fibre-optic camera. Almost as if he knew.

But of course, he couldn’t have known. If he’d had any inkling that we were watching, it wouldn’t have been business as usual in the Greg Thomas drugs empire. He wouldn’t have gone near his network of middlemen, and he certainly wouldn’t have been calling his partner in crime to discuss her forthcoming trip to Curacao. If he’d known we were watching him, he’d have assumed we were trying to close him down and he’d have been living the blameless life.

He’d have been wrong. I’m not that sort of cop. That’s not to say I don’t think people like Greg Thomas should be put away for a very long time. They should. They are responsible for a disproportionate amount of human misery, and they don’t deserve to be living the high life. Thomas’s cupidity played on others’ stupidity, but that didn’t make any of it all right.

Nevertheless, my interest was not in making a case against Thomas. What mattered to me was the reason nobody else had been able to do just that. Three times the Drugs Squad had initiated operations against Greg Thomas’s multimillion-pound business, and three times they’d come away empty-handed. There was only one possible conclusion. Somebody on the inside was taking Thomas’s shilling.

Samuels, who runs the Drugs Squad, had finally conceded he wasn’t going to put Greg Thomas away until he’d put his own house in order. And that’s where we came in.

Nobody loves us. Our fellow cops call us the Scaffies. That’s Scots for “bin men.” My brother, who studied Scottish literature at university, says it’s probably a corruption of scavengers. Me, I prefer to knock off the first two letters. Avengers, that’s what we are. We’re there to avenge the punters who pay our wages and get robbed of justice because some cops see get-rich-quick opportunities where the rest of us see the chance to make a collar.

It’s easy to be cynical in my line of work. When your job is to sniff out corruption, it’s hard to see past that. It’s difficult to hang on to the missionary zeal when you’re constantly exposed to the venality of your fellow man. I’ve seen cops selling their mates down the river for the price of a package holiday. Sometimes I almost believe that some of them do it for the same reason as criminals commit crimes — because they can. And they’re the ones who are most affronted when we sit them down and confront them with what theu’ve done.

So. Nobody loves us. But what’s worse is that doing this job for any length of time provokes a kind of emotional reversal. It’s almost impossible for us Scaffies to love anybody. Mistrust becomes a habit, and nothing will poison a relationship faster than that. In the end, all you’ve got is your team. There’s eight of us, and we’re closer than most marriages. We’re a detective inspector, two sergeants, and five constables. But rank matters less here than anywhere else in the force. We need to believe in each other, and that’s the bottom line.

Movement in the street below caught my attention. A shambling figure, staggering slightly, making his way down the pavement opposite our vantage point. I nudged my partner Dennis, who rolled his shoulders as he leaned forward, focussed the camera, and snapped off a couple of shots. Not that they’d be any use. The three a.m. drunk was dressed for the weather, the collar of his Puffa jacket close round his neck and his baseball cap pulled down low. He stopped outside Thomas’s building and keyed the entry code into the door. There were sixteen flats in the block and we knew most of the residents by sight. I didn’t recognise this guy, though.

Through the glass frontage of the building opposite, we could see him weaving his way to the lift. He hit the call button and practically fell inside when the doors opened. I was fully alert now. Not because I thought anything untoward was going down, but because anything that gets the adrenaline going in middle-of-the-night surveillance is welcome. The lift stopped on the second floor, and the drunk lurched out into the lobby, turning to his left and heading for one of the flats at the rear of the building. We relaxed and settled back into our chairs. Dennis, my partner, snorted. “I wouldn’t like to be inside his head in the morning,” he said.

I reached down and pulled a thermos of coffee out of my bag. “You want some?”

Dennis shook his head. “I’ll stick to the Diet Coke,” he said.

It was about fifteen minutes later that we heard it. Our headphones exploded into life with a volley of sneezing. I nearly fell out of my chair. The volume was deafening. It seemed to go on forever. A choking, spluttering, gasping fit that I thought would never end. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended. I looked at Dennis. “What the hell was that?”

He shrugged. “Guy’s coming down with a cold?”

“Out of the blue? Just like that?”

“Maybe he decided to have a wee taste of his own product.”

“Oh aye, right. You wake up in the night, you can’t get back to sleep, so you do a line of coke?”

Dennis laughed. “Right enough,” he said. We left it at that. After all, there’s nothing inherently suspicious about somebody having a sneezing fit in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, they never wake up.

I was spark out myself when Greg Thomas made his presence felt again. Groggy with tiredness, I reached for the phone, registering the time on my bedside clock. Just after one o’clock. I’d been in bed for less than four hours. I’d barely grunted a greeting when a familiar voice battered my eardrum.

“What the hell were you doing last night?” Detective Inspector Phil Barclay demanded.

“Listening in, boss,” I said. “With Dennis. Like I was supposed to be. Why?”

“Because while you were listening in, somebody cut Greg Thomas’s throat.”

On my way to the scene, I called Jimmy Lister and tried to piece together what had happened. When the day shift hadn’t heard a peep out of Thomas by noon, they’d grown suspicious. They began to wonder if he’d somehow done a runner. So they’d got the management company to let them into Thomas’s flat and they’d found him sprawled across his bed, throat gaping like some monstrous grin.

By the time I got to the flat, there was a huddle of people on the landing. Drugs Squad, Serious Crime guys, and, of course, the Scaffies. Phil Barclay was at the centre of the group. “There you are, Chrissie,” he said. “So how the hell did you miss a murder while you were staking out the victim?” For Phil to turn on one of his own in front of other cops was unheard of. I knew I was in for a very rough ride.

Before I could answer, Dennis emerged from the stairwell. “Listen to the tapes, boss,” he said. “Then you’ll hear everything we did. Which is nothing.”

“Except for the sneezing,” I said slowly.

All the eyes were on me now. “About twenty past three. Somebody had a sneezing fit. It must have lasted a couple of minutes at least.” I looked at Dennis, who nodded in confirmation.

“We assumed it was Thomas,” he said.

“That would fit,” one of the other cops said. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he was from Serious Crime. “The pathologist estimates time of death between two and five a.m.”

Samuels from the Drugs Squad stuck his head out of the flat. “Phil, do you want to take a look inside, see if anything’s out of place from when you had the video running?”

Barclay looked momentarily uncomfortable. “Chrissie, you and Dennis take a look. I didn’t really pay much attention to the video footage.”

“Talk about distancing yourself,” Dennis muttered as we entered the flat, sidestepping a SOCO who was examining the lock on the door through a jeweller’s loupe.

I paused and said, “Key or picks?”

The SOCO looked up. “Picks, I’d say. Fresh scratches on the tumblers.”

“He must have been bloody good,” I said. “We never heard a thing.”

Greg Thomas wasn’t a pretty sight. I was supposed to be looking round the flat, but my eyes were constantly drawn back to the bed. “How come we never heard it? You’d think he’d have made some sort of noise.”

One of the technicians looked up from the surface he was dusting for prints. “The doc said it must have been an incredibly sharp blade. Went through right to the spine, knife through butter. He maybe would have made a wee gurgle, but that’s all.”

At first glance, nothing in the flat looked different. I stepped round the bed towards the alcove where Thomas had his work station. “His laptop’s gone,” I said, pointing to the cable lying disconnected on the desk.

“Great. So now we know we’re looking for a killer with a laptop,” Dennis said. “That’ll narrow it down.”

Back on the landing, Phil told us abruptly to head back to base. “We’ll have a debrief in an hour,” he said. “The Drugs Squad guys can run us through Thomas’s known associates and enemies. Maybe they’ll recognise somebody from our surveillance.”

I walked back to my car, turning everything over in my head. The timing stuck in my throat. It felt like an uncomfortable coincidence that Greg Thomas had been killed the very night we’d lost our video cover. I knew Phil Barclay and Samuels were tight from way back and wondered whether my boss had mentioned the problem to Samuels. If the mole knew we were watching, he might have decided the best way to avoid detection was to silence his paymaster for good. That would also explain the silence. None of Thomas’s rivals could have known about the need to keep the noise levels down.

Slowly, an idea began to form in my head. We might have lost the direct route to the Drugs Squad’s bad apple, but maybe there was still an indirect passage to the truth. I made a wee detour on the way back to the office, wondering at my own temerity for even daring to think the way I was.

The debrief was the usual mixture of knowledge and speculation, but because there were three separate teams involved, the atmosphere was edgy. The DI from the Serious Crime Squad told us to assume our unidentified drunk was the killer. He hadn’t been heading for a flat, he’d been making for the back stairs. Apparently the lock on the door leading to the penthouse floor showed signs of having been forced. He’d probably left by the same route, using the fire door at the rear of the building. He showed our pix on the big screen, but not even the guy’s mother could have identified him from that. “And that is all we know so far,” he said.

The silhouette I’d been expecting finally showed up outside the frosted glass door of the briefing room. I put up my hand. “Not quite all, sir,” I said. “We also know he’s allergic to lily pollen.”

As I spoke, the door opened and the desk officer walked in, looking sheepish behind a big bouquet of stargazer lilies. The fragrance spread out in an arc before him as he walked towards Samuels. “I was told these were urgent,” he said apologetically.

I held my breath, my eyes nailed to the astonished faces of Samuels and his cohort of Drugs Squad detectives.

And that’s when Phil Barclay shattered the stunned silence with a fusillade of sneezes.

“If there is a theme to this story,” author David Dean told EQMM, “it is the difference betwixt justice and reckoning, and how one can so closely resemble the other.” The situation his protagonist confronts is one many readers will be familiar with, even if not to so devastating an extreme: the need to deal with a socially disruptive neighbor. Mr. Dean is a police captain in a New Jersey resort town, and he’s chosen to make his lead character this time someone from the police.

Rueben had lived in the same house for twelve years and held the same job for two more and considered himself a steady man and a good neighbor, or at least an undemanding one. When, he asked himself angrily on his drive home, had he offended anyone? In what way? Why did he now have to dread returning to his own neighborhood each night after work? When had the comfort of his routine and the blessed placidity of his solitary existence become so threatened?

These were not new questions that Rueben grappled with and, in fact, were rhetorical in nature: a mantra of dissatisfaction, unease, and frustration that was recited nightly on his long way home from the police department where he was employed. Rueben already knew the answers to the why and when of his questions; the agony lay in the what-to-do.

He was a good, even exceptionally good, dispatcher — an important, if unglamorous, profession; the first voice that the frightened, desperate, and irate heard when they dialed for help. When he’d had a few too many at the annual Christmas party, he was often heard to remark proudly, if a little resentfully, that without him (meaning all dispatchers, presumably) help would never arrive. There were few desperate situations that his disembodied voice had not been a party to, and yet, unlike the officers that he sent to the scene, he had never experienced the actual blood, vomit, and tears of unruly life, and in truth, he was glad.

Rueben contemplated the idea (for at least the hundredth time) of asking one of these officers to pay his neighbor a visit and, as always, dismissed the thought. The officers would see it for what it really was: a strong-arm demonstration, shady and gangsterlike, and would refuse. Worse, they would view him with contempt for not being man enough to do his own dirty work. Rueben squirmed at the thought as a sudden gust of wind shoved his car toward the center line.

An oncoming pair of headlights appeared suddenly from around a curve and began to flash high beams in an angry warning. Rueben twisted the wheel to the right, startled from his reverie by an accompanying blast from the other driver’s horn as the car flew by without slowing. Gravel played a metallic tattoo on the undercarriage of his ancient Ford as it rode onto the shoulder at too high a speed. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered, twisting the wheel yet again and resuming the roadway. “Concentrate... concentrate.”

The nightscape seemed to reflect his turmoil — wherever his headlights fell, movement and shadow grappled and receded. A small white branch shot out of the darkness and skittered across the windshield like a ghost crab; Rueben slowed the car.

Somewhere far ahead, just beyond the reaches of a lone street lamp, there was movement. At least, Rueben thought he saw movement, though he could see nothing now. Yet, there was something that had drawn his attention. Even now, like a ripple in a pond or a disturbance of the mist, there was the suggestion of something. Rueben strained his eyes in the gloom. Yes, there it was again, on his side of the street! Linear and purposeful... nothing out of nature, certainly, and moving right towards him. Rueben felt a drop of perspiration form beneath his heavy, long-out-of-fashion moustache. “What on earth,” he breathed uneasily. Car and phantom closed on one another.

A figure began to form at the murky outer fringes of the head-lamps: improbably tall and wobbly, a shifting dark kaleidoscope of flapping wings, limbs, and even tentacles, rushing headlong towards the car.

Then it arrived full-blown in the glare of the headlights: face, a rigid, unshaven mask of discomfort; eyes, squinted nearly shut behind dirty taped glasses that returned the car lamps’ brilliance in miniature. The tattered old army overcoat that the man wore waved and flapped about him as he pumped along on the spindly, rusty bike, and his filthy scarf and hair whipped this way and that in the wild wind. He glared at Rueben through the windshield, though it was impossible that he could see in. Rueben feared that he might intentionally collide with the car; he followed the white shoulder line so closely. He rode as if to challenge the oncoming driver.

“You idiot!” Rueben screamed as he swerved to the left at the last moment and the apparition was swallowed up by the night. “You idiot,” he repeated more softly, chancing a backwards glance and half expecting to see the hated cyclist following. He wiped each palm on his trouser legs as more beads of sweat popped out on his upper lip (the real reason he had never shaved the unfashionable face hair).

Him, Rueben fumed, unknowingly picking up speed. Was there no getting away from that demented lowlife? How had he ended up with such a neighbor? And to pop up just when he was thinking about him. What were the odds — out here; in the middle of the night?

It wasn’t always so bad, he mused, steadily picking up speed as he narrowed down to the last few miles. No, it wasn’t that bad before Curt died. Uncomfortable, yes. But now... intolerable.

If Rueben had been less distracted by his train of thought, he might have been forewarned by the events of his drive: the wind, the branch, the other car, even his hated neighbor — the wildness of the night seemed determined to drive all before it. Yet Rueben remained impervious, wrapped in his downward-spiraling thoughts, even as his foot grew ever heavier on the accelerator. The first deer had actually bounded in front of his car and vanished into the darkness of the other side of the road before his brain could signal his foot to brake. The fawn that followed was not so fortunate.

In the split second that it took for Rueben to react, he saw, or more accurately, perceived in a flash of tan and white and just the suggestion of a large, moist eye, the smaller animal attempt to make the same crossing as its mother. The sickening thud that followed was simultaneous with the scream of his tires attempting to grip the asphalt. The deerling was flung back in the direction from which it had sprung.

Rueben managed to stop the car on the shoulder of the road some fifty yards away and clambered out into a haze of burnt, stinking rubber that, incredibly, hung in the air like a fog. It was as if the hideous impact had silenced the very wind and the night world now watched with held breath. By the light of his remaining headlamp, Rueben examined the damage as best he could. Besides the lamp, he could see that the grille was smashed, and with a frisson of horror, that several tufts of fur were caught in it, but as no fluid appeared to be seeping from the car and the engine was apparently unaffected, he had only the tire to be concerned with. A long streak of blood led him to the wheel well. Cautiously, so as not to smear himself, he felt about until he was satisfied that the tire was not damaged or impeded by the crumpled quarter panel. Rueben stood and carefully inspected his palms, but saw only road dirt.

He stumbled along the roadside in the direction from which he had come, scanning this way and that for the injured animal, as small stones skittered from beneath his shoes. He prayed that it was not still alive and suffering, as he had no idea what to do in such a case and doubted that he had the nerve to put it out of its misery, if he did.

No nerve was required, however. Rueben found the small, broken body at the wood line, and even by the phosphorescent moon-light, it was obviously dead. He stared down at it from the edge of the lonely road and was struck with the enormity and finality of death, as evidenced by this tiny, frail, yet once vibrant creature. It already had the deflated look of the absence of life, and even the large, bright eye that he had glimpsed the second before collision was filmed and sticky-looking.

“You were goin’ too fast.”

Rueben uttered a small cry and took several steps backwards, almost losing his balance.

“Way too fast,” the phlegm-choked voice challenged again from the darkness.

Rueben’s dilated pupils were now able to make out the dim figure that stood like a statue in the greater darkness of a nearby oak. He could just discern the bicycle that the figure leaned on and that had brought him noiselessly to the scene. With a fresh outbreak of sweating on his upper lip and a slightly sick feeling in his stomach, Rueben acknowledged what he already knew — that his hated neighbor was now a witness to his crime against nature.

“I... I didn’t see it until... well, it was too late,” Rueben stammered as the figure detached itself from the moon shadow and approached, still wheeling the bicycle. “He just sprang out from the woods.” Rueben hated the wheedling, defensive sound of his voice. Why did this man always elicit this kind of reaction from him? Of course, the fact that he was evidently some kind of demented night crawler might explain some of it, he thought angrily. What was he doing out at this time of night? It was after one in the morning.

“Her,” the neighbor corrected, bending low over the carcass. Rueben had the impression that he might start feeding on the dead thing at any moment.

“It’s a her... a female,” the man repeated without looking up from his careful scrutiny.

With a shock of revulsion, Rueben realized that he had lifted the poor creature’s tail to expose the hindquarters for his benefit.

“Yes, I see... a female,” Rueben acknowledged uneasily.

Still squatting, he turned his face up to Rueben and smiled. This time it was the wan light of the moon that pooled in the grimy lenses of his skewed glasses, hiding the bloodshot piggish eyes that Rueben remembered so well. The same light delineated the face like a stark black-and-white portrait; each detail stood forth from the composite whole as unattractive in its own right, independent of the unpleasant picture they all conspired to create: the crown of the lumpy skull was nearly exposed, with only a few lank wisps trailing down to join the true hairline that began just above the large, furry ears. The rest had been allowed to grow to shoulder length and was so dirty that it looked like the hair of a drowned man — wet and twisted into greasy ropes by the currents. Dirty-looking stubble covered the drawn lower face, and Rueben briefly marveled at how someone could always be unshaven, yet never grow a beard. In the thousands of days that Rueben had watched his neighbor lounge about his property (no, his father’s property, Rueben primly corrected himself), his appearance never changed. The hair, the stubble, the lank, wispy moustache that barely draped the long, thin upper lip, even the glasses always sported some homemade, amateurish repair. He was like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber, Rueben thought meanly — hideous and unchanging.

The face continued to grin up at Rueben as if awaiting an answer that would surely be wrong. Rueben stared back, unable to shift his gaze or just walk away, aware for the first time just how much the man frightened him and how closely that fear resembled hatred.

“That mighta been me,” the neighbor observed as he stood. “Dead, like that.” He nudged the carcass with the toe of his engineer boot to emphasize his point. “Almost was.”

“You were on the wrong side of the street,” Rueben squeaked, outraged and made nervous by the insinuation.

“I’ve been runned over before,” he pronounced proudly, pointing to the left side of his face and turning his small, round head to best advantage in the moonlight.

Rueben was horrified to see a whorl of scar tissue at the man’s left temple that appeared to extend into the eye socket. Face-on, with the glasses, it was almost hidden, but from the angle he presented, it appeared as if a spike had been driven into his head and wrested out many years before. Rueben could barely contain his disgust.

“My God,” he whispered, “how did that...?”

“Speeder... like you,” the neighbor offered pleasantly, his tiny teeth an uneven row of mottled corn kernels. “Left me for dead.” As an afterthought, he added, “But I wasn’t.”

For the first time in the twelve years that Rueben had gone from amused tolerance of the youngster who seemed unable to leave his father’s nest to thinly disguised contempt for the surly abuser that ruled over his ageing parents like a tyrant, Rueben felt a spark of compassion. Was this injury the root cause of such repellent behavior?

“Danny,” Rueben tried the name like a foreign word; he hadn’t used it since Curtis, Danny’s poor, broken father, had died. “When did this happen... your accident, I mean?” He gestured weakly at the scar.

Danny seemed startled at the use of his name, but quickly recovered. “Right about when you moved into the neighborhood.” He stared into Rueben’s eyes meaningfully and smiled.

Now it was Rueben’s turn to be startled. “You’re not insinuating that I...” He stopped, unwilling to complete the implied accusation. “You’re not serious!”

Danny stopped smiling. “Mighta been you,” he opined evenly. “It almost was you tonight.”

“I was nowhere close to hitting you,” Rueben protested, the sweat breaking out on his forehead now as well. “You were on the wrong side of the street!” Rueben thought to take the initiative. “Besides, what are you doing out here at this time of night, any-way? And with no lights or reflectors?” he asked as accusingly as he dared.

“Gimme ten dollars,” Danny countered, taking a step closer.

“What?” Rueben was flummoxed by the sudden change in tack.

“Ten,” Danny repeated firmly. “The Bealwood closes in half an hour.”

The Bealwood was a local watering hole; not the kind of place Rueben patronized. “You want beer money?” Rueben gasped, taking a step back.

“Ten,” Danny repeated and shot out a grimy, black-nailed hand. “Then we’ll just keep this to ourselves.”

“Keep what?” Rueben protested, even as he pulled out his wallet and extracted a five with shaking hands. He was disgusted and ashamed of his easy capitulation, but the nearness of this man, the smashed animal at his feet, and the eerie solitude of their situation all conspired to deprive him of what little courage he possessed.

Danny snatched the five from his grip and instantly returned his open palm for Rueben’s inspection. “I said ten.”

Humiliated, Rueben dug out several more bills to find another five, only to have Danny snatch the remainder from his grasp and crush them into a ball without even bothering to count. Incredibly, he smiled and slapped Rueben on the shoulder.

“Wanna come get a drink?” he inquired amiably.

Rueben shook his head weakly and looked at his feet to hide the tears that welled up in his eyes.

“Aw’right, then,” Danny acquiesced cheerfully. “But I aw’ways shut the place down.” With that, he climbed onto his shaky bicycle and grunted and puffed until he gained enough speed to glide away.

“I could have him arrested,” Rueben told himself as he stared angrily after his antagonist, then just as quickly dismissed the idea. The additional humiliation of explaining to officers, people he saw on a daily basis, how he was robbed without a blow or a weapon was too much. He could easily imagine the sly exchanged glances and barely concealed smirks. No, he would tell no one. It would be unbearable.

Danny had been in his late teens when Rueben had bought the house just next-door, and even then, Rueben had sensed all was not well with his neighbors. Curtis and Dot were quiet, friendly folk who had made a point of welcoming Rueben to the neighborhood with an iced cinnamon cake baked by Dot herself. They had arrived at his door without their son, and never once mentioned him throughout their brief, chatty visit. Rueben might never have known he existed if not for his sullen, beer-drinking presence camped out for hours at a time in their backyard — ensconced in a lawn chair and glaring at Rueben whenever he ventured into his own. Apparently, he did not attend school, as Rueben (who had always worked the four-to-twelve shift) found to his dismay when he wished to enjoy his own yard. It was unsettling to be the subject of such intense and, seemingly, malevolent scrutiny, but Rueben kept his peace, not wishing to upset Curtis or Dot, who obviously bore a heavy, and what must have been disappointing, burden in their son. Rueben’s attempts to break the ice with a friendly wave were ordinarily met with a toadlike stare, the occasional curt nod, and more than once, the “finger.” If things had continued in this manner, Rueben might not have found himself standing on a lonely roadside twelve years later with a dead deer, an empty wallet, and, worse still, a gut-sick fear that was rapidly evolving into murderous hatred.

It was typical, if destructive, boyish pranks at first: a full garbage can left at the curb for pickup turned upside down, the lid vanished; impossible to right without emptying the entire stinking contents into the street. A carefully carved jack-o’-lantern smashed against the siding of the house, orange gore dripping and a stain that took great effort to wash away. A paper bag set aflame on his front step, which Rueben found, after stomping it out, to be full of excrement (he never cared to discover whether it was of animal or human origin). In every case, he could count on looking up and finding Danny watching impassively, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Events grew more alarming, and not just for Rueben. It seemed no one was exempt, even if Rueben was especially singled out. One neighbor got a brick through the windshield of his brand-new automobile left proudly parked on the street. Another awoke to find his newly filled pool fouled in a manner reminiscent of Rueben’s porch incident. There were accusations and recriminations, and even Rueben joined in after he awoke to find his front door spray-painted with the word “FAG” in bright yellow. It took several coats of enamel paint to conceal the epithet and Rueben noticed that several men in the neighborhood were cool to him afterwards.

Rueben was shocked at the appearance of Curtis and Dot when they warily answered his rings on this occasion. He had not seen them except at a distance for several years, so cool had relations become in the neighborhood as a result of their son’s depredations, and he found them shrunken and timid — hollowed out with shame and something else... fear, Rueben thought. They looked ancient. He hadn’t the heart to do anything other than ask them to keep an eye on Danny and beat a hasty, embarrassed retreat.

Danny was sitting on the front steps when he came out and Rueben gave him a terse nod. As he hurried past, a cigarette butt arced past his head like a tiny comet. He spun about to find Danny staring off into the middle distance, making perfect smoke rings.

Rueben’s cat did not return home the following day. A week later, he found the old tom curled up on the patio with his head tucked neatly beneath his tail — frozen solid and slowly defrosting in the blazing summer sun. In the adjacent yard, Danny leaned from his rickety lawn chair and retrieved a cold beer from the refrigerator plugged into an outside outlet that he kept for his convenience, and with slow exaggeration, rolled the sweating can across his sloping brow. Rueben fled into the house, tears of shame and rage choking him in a slow, steady grip.

As Danny could and did roam at all hours (he never held a job, to Rueben’s knowledge) and could, therefore, strike at will and without witnesses, the neighborhood simply hunkered down and tried not to gain his attention. Any complaint to the police resulted in inquiries at Danny’s door, which had the unfortunate result of identifying the complainant. Retribution was sure to follow.

Sadly, it was the hapless Curtis and Dot who suffered the silent scorn and universal condemnation of the community. Though their abhorred son had long ago reached adulthood, it was they who were afforded the status of “non-persons”: They were invited nowhere, spoken to only from necessity, and soundly, firmly, and pointedly ignored. The kindly middle-aged couple shrank from public scrutiny over time and were seen less and less often. Even as their closest neighbor, Rueben only caught glimpses of them as they ran the most necessary errands. After all, the beast must be fed, Rueben thought meanly, on more than one sighting. Yet he could see the toll taken on them. They looked more ill and frail than their years should have made them. Dot died the tenth year of Rueben’s residency, of ovarian cancer, and Curtis followed a scant two years after from a heart attack.

Both funerals were surprisingly well attended, though Rueben suspected baser motives at work than the simple act of mourning might portray. He suspected because he recognized the cowardice at work in himself. But if the crowd expected a softening from the son in the face of their apparent grief, they were sorely disappointed. Danny simply sat at the foot of the coffins like a drugged, though still potentially dangerous, guard dog, and stared out over the uncomfortable gatherings as if he were in an empty room.

The neighborhood was also to be disappointed in yet another way. With Curtis’s death, hope raised its head and happy speculation circulated from house to house. Surely, now, they would be released. The watch for the For Sale sign to appear was a happy and expectant one. It was not to be, however, for the truth eventually supplanted the rumors, and Danny was found to be the sole possessor of a mortgage-free home. If this was not disappointing enough, and infuriating for all those who would work thirty years to attain the same status, it also became known that he was the recipient of some mysterious source of income — not much, but enough to meet his basic needs. The neighborhood fell back in dismay and awaited the next blow.

Strangely, that blow had yet to fall, and this was almost worse than the campaign of depredations. The neighborhood and Rueben existed in a state of tension, an unbearable condition of expectation and dread: Like beaten dogs they seemed to scurry, not walk, always looking back to see who, or what, approached.

Danny’s lassitude only made matters worse. His lizardlike posture on his front porch was ascribed to planning; his seemingly casual forays on his bike were interpreted as reconnaissance, and when lights were seen in the windows of his house in the small hours, it was understood to bode ill for someone.

All of these thoughts raced through Rueben’s head as he stood at the edge of the road, the wind beginning to rise once more, as evidenced in a murmuring of dried leaves.

“Enough,” Rueben hissed. “I don’t deserve this! Who the hell does he think he is?” Rueben kicked the small, broken body that lay at his feet, and stepped back immediately with a stifled cry of horror and disgust at what he’d done. From across the street came an answering report of a snapped branch or twig, and Rueben spun about, fully expecting to find Danny returned — but saw only darkness. Breathlessly, he returned to his car, and hurriedly drove away with but one lamp left to light his progress.

Patricia McFall’s new story for EQMM reintroduces Lane Terry, the twenty-five-year-old failed performance artist turned private eye who was first seen in the short mystery “The Just Missed Blonde,” published in the 2001 Private Eye Writers of America’s anthology Mystery Street. Ms. McFall is also the author of the well-reviewed novel Night Butterfly (Worldwide Library 1992/Pocket Books 1994).

Daniel Mason dumped me the summer after I graduated from high school, and I hadn’t heard from him since. But one cloudy Monday afternoon in January eight years later, his brother Sean phoned.

The unfamiliar voice asked, “This Lane?”

“Why not?” I said. “Lane Terry, licensed investigator, at your service. Who’s this?”

“Baby Dude,” he said, using as instant identification my old nickname for him. At the time, he’d been a squeaky-throated little blond surfer, but with a lot of urban swagger superimposed to copy his big brother. I smiled at the memory and waited to hear what he wanted. He sounded nervous. After claiming how great it was to be back in touch with me and how much he’d always liked me, and how bad he’d felt when Danny and I broke up, he added, “Um, Lane, like, he willed his body to medical research...”

What would someone Daniel’s age need with a will? He was only three years older than me, so he’d be how old now — twenty-seven? — no, twenty-eight.

A heartbeat later, I realized what Sean was telling me.

Southern Californians can sometimes deliver bad news in this inappropriately upbeat, even cheerful manner. It’s a protective flat surface to cover up life’s darkness, if not its depths. We natives shimmer like the Pacific off Dana Point on a cloudless day, never mind any storm gathering just be-yond the lifeguards’ range. So even as I registered the message of Daniel’s death, I couldn’t help judging his little brother as being a bit detached — and Laguna Beach standards aren’t high.

But what he said next changed my mind: “See, he OD’ed last year on New Year’s Day, and my family just got the ashes back from the med school, so we’re planning to have a burial at sea and, Lane, I’d really appreciate it if you’d be there.”

Okay, so enough time had passed for him not to still feel the shock wave, but as for me, I sank down into the spavined old rattan chair in my living room cradling my forehead in my left hand. I tried to listen to what else Sean was saying. Apparently, he had rented a yacht to take his parents out past Newport Bay to scatter Danny’s ashes that Friday morning. I was a good sailor and an old friend, and they wanted me to go. I agreed to join them. It took me a few false starts to find a pen and paper and write down the information in a madwoman’s scrawl.

“You still there, Lane?”

“Yeah. I’m just — I can’t talk.”

“Well, look, we can talk later, but I...”

“No, go on. It’s okay.”

“I just want to thank you for helping.”

“No problem. I have to go now, Sean. See you Friday on the dock.”

Only after I’d hung up and cried and blown my nose and calmed down did it occur to me to wonder why nobody had told me a year earlier. And Sean’s lack of curiosity about my occupation would have made me think if I hadn’t been so raw with the news. Most old friends — especially those who’d known me as a performance artist and actress — had been astonished.

My mind was in and out of focus as I tried to process the hard fact of Daniel’s death. He was only three years older than me. How could he be dead? Sure, I’ve worked several homicide cases as a licensed investigator, so I have probably seen more of death than most people have by twenty-five — Americans, anyway. Up until this point, though, it had only been strangers and my great-uncle Frank, who had smoked since he was fourteen and eaten red meat since the first day he could chew. Besides, he was eighty-four. What did he expect?

I put on a warm jacket and light hikers and followed Pacific Coast Highway downtown just to get away from being alone with my thoughts, but it was no good. As I looked beyond the boardwalk and the volleyball court at the January-gray convergence of sky and sea, I tried to believe Daniel Mason was dead. I realized that his self-inflicted habits had killed him, too, but much stronger and swifter bad habits than Uncle Frank’s: cocaine and heroin instead of tobacco, and either fast food or self-starvation instead of comfort sludge. I turned inland at Ocean and plowed along the virtually empty sidewalk almost angry, scuffing a trail through fallen leaves. It really bothered me that Sean had waited until now to contact me, because we’d once been pretty close. Even though I knew the family had moved to Lake Elsinore soon after our breakup, Daniel had been my first boyfriend, from my fifteenth to my eighteenth summer. Worse, I’d recently ended another relationship that at this point seemed even less mature, ending in mutual loathing and amazement that we’d ever wanted to be in the same time zone as one another, let alone make love.

As I passed the playhouse, feeling a light sprinkle that had apparently begun while I wasn’t paying attention, smelling the earth-spice of wet eucalyptus leaves, I looked across the street and remembered. Daniel and I had bought each other nose rings ($20 each, installed) from a vendor at the Sawdust Festival, an outdoor arts and crafts fair Laguna has in the summer. My mother had completely lost it over the nose ring, even though she’d always claimed to be a mellow ’sixties person, and overlooked the childish commitment implied by the occasion. I didn’t care. I was in love for the first time, with someone I knew was my spiritual twin. Of course, six weeks later, Daniel and I were all over. Don’t get me wrong; showing me to the off ramp was the greatest possible graduation present, since he was headed for a spectacular pileup and saw me as — how did he put it? — “sanctimonial.” Daniel might have been hip, but not overly well read outside of the Beat poets and some of Public Enemy’s more insolent lyrics. I admit that his opinion of me was more on the mark than his vocabulary, but I’m not going to apologize for being straight-edge. I lived healthy. I didn’t do drugs, smoke, eat meat, or sleep with strangers. Things haven’t changed. I drink alcohol only when it’s necessary on a case. Other than the one on my right ankle, I don’t even have any tattoos that show. Maybe that makes me a bore, but at least I’d survived.

And Daniel hadn’t. Looking through the veil of raindrops, I stood across the street from the abandoned fairgrounds and imagined his voice, my name carried on a cold gust of the oncoming storm.

Called “the best of our home-grown police proceduralists” by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Peter Turnbull has used several different settings for his procedurals over the years. His Glasgow P-Division stories were based on his experiences as a social worker in Glasgow. After he’d returned to his native Yorkshire, he began a new series set in York. His latest book, Reality Check (Allison & Busby) is set in Cambridge, England.

MONDAY, 3RD JANUARY.

It was cold, very cold, pleasantly, reassuringly cold, for this was January of the year, still within the twelve days of Christmas; it was as it should be, as cold as the man could wish it, as cold as he recalled it being in his childhood. It was the period of snow and ice and biting easterlies, of the weather that folk would complain about. But in the last few years the winters had been mild, too mild, un-healthily mild, more like a pro-longed autumn than a proper winter. No good, hard, prolonged frost, which killed off all the sickly fauna and flora, and occasionally, tragically, a few aged and sickly humans as well, but then, the man thought, that was the nature of winter, it was how things should be in this part of the world, and this winter was like the winters of old. Not as long-lasting, perhaps, but the cold snap had lasted for a few days now, ice formed on ponds, householders worried about burst pipes, black ice caused car accidents, the air was cold to breathe for the first time in a very long time. The man walked with his dog on Askham Bogs; the ground beneath his feet reassuringly frozen. His dog, as all dogs are, was unhappy in the heat, but this weather suited him admirably, and the man himself, wrapped up against the cold, felt a sense of reassurance as he surveyed the frosty, Christmas-card-like scene, for this is exactly, exactly how it should be in Yorkshire during the winter. It was in Askham Bogs that the man, the dog-walker, met another man who did not complain about the weather. The second man was dead.

The dog walker first saw the man when he was still some distance away. His heart thumped in his chest at the sight, a pit seemed to open in his stomach with such suddenness that it felt like he had been punched. Hard. For the second man was certainly dead, even from that distance, it was clear he was dead, ill clad for the weather and lying facedown. It was, then, not yet eight A.M. and the dog-walker thought he knew what had happened: A youth, out partying, for this was the season to be merry, had taken too much alcohol, decided to walk home, become hypothermic and dazed, finally collapsing to sleep his last sleep in the midst of lonely Askham Bogs. The dog-walker turned to the other man, for life might not yet be extinct; his dog, too, seemed to sense the urgency and trotted beside his owner. But the urgency was wasted. Upon closer inspection, the man lying on the cold, cold ground beneath a cold blue sky was dead. Clad only in a shirt and denims and the sort of shoes joggers wear, he was clearly deceased, his arm already rising in rigor. He was youthful; the man saw a pleasant-looking blond-haired youth of about twenty summers. A life cut short, tragically short. The man plunged his hand into his pocket and took out his mobile phone and noticed his dog’s reaction with interest: The dog, knowing death, curled up on the ground some distance from the body but looked at it intently. The man phoned the three nines. “...very dead, I’d say,” he said. “Life is not threatened... not anymore.”

The man pocketed his mobile and, calling his dog, he walked away from the body towards Tadcaster Road to await the police vehicle and the ambulance. He was standing on the pavement of Tadcaster Road when the police vehicle arrived, followed by the ambulance. They would have been dispatched separately, but had clearly met each other on the traffic-free, pre-rush-hour roads.

“Oh, he’s dead, all right,” the man said to the youthful-looking constable and the equally youthful-looking ambulance crew, both female. “I’m a doctor in general practice... life is extinct... you can’t see him from here, but that direction,” he indicated a route about ninety degrees from the road, “follow your nose, you’ll see him... fine-looking young man. At least he was.”

“Happens every winter,” the constable said with a cynicism that the man thought was beyond his years. “A youth, male or female, gets a skinful of alcohol, a walk home turns out to be not the walk they planned. I knew there’d be a death in this cold snap... just knew it.”

“Strange place to walk...”

“Sorry, sir? What do you mean?” The constable took out his notebook. “Can I have your name, by the way?”

“Clark, Jeremy, Dr...” He gave an address in the nearby Bishop-thorpe estate.

“What do I mean? Well, like you, I assumed this to be a tragedy, a young man with too much alcohol gets disorientated, but look where he is... He is wearing only denims and a shirt — you’ll see that when you view the body. Where did he come from and where was he going that he might end up in Askham Bogs?”

“That’s a point, sir.”

“It was freezing last night. If he left the nearest houses, which are where I live, he would have succumbed to the cold long before he reached the centre of the bogs; he probably wouldn’t even have left the house in such an ill-clad manner.”

“Ah...” The constable gazed towards the bogs, trees clad in a white frost, hoarfrost on the grass, a blue sky above.

“Just a thought,” Dr. Clark said, “but it may be prudent to treat this death as suspicious until you know otherwise.”

The constable reached for his collar-mounted radio and pressed the Send button. “PC three-four-seven to Control.”

“Control receiving,” the radio crackled.

“Location... opposite Askham Bogs on Tadcaster Road, ambulance crew already in attendance... Death confirmed by member of the public who is medically qualified... death may be suspicious. C.I.D. attendance requested.”

“Control... Understood... out.”

“Well, I will leave it with you.” Dr. Clark shook his dog’s lead. “We must be off. My surgery starts at eight A.M.”

Though she is new to our pages, Maureen Tan is the author of two novels published by Warner Books (AKA Jane — hardcover 1997/paperback 1999; and Run Jane Run — hardcover 1999/paperback 2000), and the recently published A Perfect Cover, the first in a new series from Harlequin Bombshell. A second book in the Bombshell series is expected in May 2005. Her contribution to EQMM belongs to a genre we see little of these days — the spy story.

Ian Fleming lied. Suave, handsome men are not the best spies. Nor are young, glamorous women. Not that they don’t have their place, but it’s usually in someone else’s bed. Prone and passionate, seductive spies inspire subversive whispers and coerce confidences. But beyond the bed, it’s unremarkable, middle-aged women who are the masters of the trade.

Seduction is unnecessary and irrelevant.

I was female, fifty-eight, and ordinary. Not to say that on some days I didn’t feel extraordinary, mostly because I’d survived almost four decades in the intelligence business. But I didn’t look glamorous or remarkable. I never had. The face and body I was born with put me well on the way to plain. Makeup and wardrobe put me half a step into homely. But I avoided stepping into ugly.

People remember ugly better than they remember pretty. And people don’t trust ugly. By those standards, Professor Smith was extremely memorable and absolutely untrustworthy. He was tall, round-backed, and hairy. Mostly hairy. Wiry strands sprang, untamed and unkempt, from his head, ears, cheeks, upper lip, and chin. The hair framed a face that was dark-skinned, flat-nosed, and creased with lines that had not been formed by smiling.

Professor Smith was also brilliant. Those trying not to be racist called him a credit to his race. I, too, was black. But in the hallowed halls of Urbana State University, I was too insignificant to be considered a credit or debit to anyone’s race. I was just another woman working as a handmaiden to a Great Man. The university’s personnel office classified that position as Transcribing Typist III.

On the day I interviewed for my job, I sat in front of Professor Smith’s metal desk and leaned sideways so that I could see him past the backside of an oversized computer monitor and a tangle of cords and connectors that cascaded down the back of the desk and disappeared beneath it. There were no papers on his desk, no books in his bookcase, no posters or photographs on his office’s stark white walls. Professor Smith believed in the paperless society. He practiced his beliefs. Everything was stored on his computer, and his interactions with others were primarily electronic. He had no wife, no children, no lover, no friends, no students.

He couldn’t type.

“My thoughts, my words are to be transcribed exactly as I speak them,” Professor Smith said. “No editing. No reorganization. No commentary. Can you manage that? The last one couldn’t.”

The last one, I’d been told by someone in personnel, had lasted six weeks. And she’d done better than most.

“Yes, sir. I can do that. Only—”

I let a little fear creep into my voice.

Professor Smith didn’t notice. He had drifted back to his monitor, was absentmindedly twisting greasy facial hair between the fingers of one hand as he tapped at the keyboard with the fingers of the other. His chronic frown deepened into a scowl.

“What?”

Still, I hesitated, intent on emphasizing an all-important lie.

“What?” he repeated. His busy fingers paused and his impatient voice was angry.

“I’m not good with computers,” I said. “I’m okay to type onto them. I’m a good typist. Really fast. But those other computer things — the Internet and e-mail and spreadsheets and things — well, they confuse me.”

His attention remained on the screen, which was a window to one of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world. On it, the professor was designing a low-power propulsion system — a pulsed Teflon plasma thruster that worked in the 10-to-100-watt power range. Reports coming out of the U. S. Department of Defense anticipated that, within months, Professor Smith would perfect a system that was sophisticated, elegant, and essential to the efficient operation of small satellites. Those satellites were essential to a host of military and civilian applications. Which is why the university tolerated and the government funded such an unsophisticated, inelegant, and imperfect man.

“I asked for a typist,” he said. “I assume you’re qualified if they sent you. Be here tomorrow morning. Now go away.”

I left. And I wondered if, at any point, he would ask my name. The professor never did, which went a long way to making my job easier. I always found it difficult to kill someone I liked.

Brendan DuBois is better known for hard-edged thriller novels and stories than for the intriguing sort of cozy he’s produced for us this time out. He’s a two-time winner of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award and he penned two heart-pumping stand-alone thrillers, Resurrection Day (Putnam 1999) and Betrayed (St. Martin’s 2003). His latest novel, Buried Dreams (St. Martin’s) features series sleuth Lewis Cole.

When the services were over and the people had gone home, I stood on the dock by the boathouse, in a steady rain. Out before me were the wide and dark waters of the lake where I had grown up. If I squinted my eyes some, I would see what it had been like here years ago, with fewer homes and more trees. It had been awhile since I had stood on this worn wood. The house and the land and the dock and the boathouse had once belonged to my parents. Now, after today, it all belonged to me.

I turned as I listened to the creak of wood from the dock. My wife Angie approached, wearing a dark green raincoat, hood up over her black hair. She said not a word, came up to me and slid her warm hand into mine.

We stood in the rain, watching the mist float across the still waters of the lake, and she squeezed my hand and said, “You doing all right, Pat?”

“Doing okay,” I said.

She leaned into me. “It must have been wonderful living up here.”

I smiled at the memory. “Sure was. Except...”

Angie turned to me. “Except what?”

I shrugged. “Except one summer, when I was twelve.”

“What happened then?”

I turned back to the gray waters. “It wasn’t so wonderful anymore.”

“That’s something,” Angie said. “When things aren’t so wonderful. Guess it explains why you never liked coming up here that much.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She squeezed my hand again, staying quiet, as she often does when she knows my mind is working way at the back, like a miner in a deep cave, probing and tapping. I squeezed her hand back, said, “I think I owe you more.”

“You sure?”

I took a breath. “Yeah, I’m sure. I think it’s time.”

She squeezed my hand again, spoke quietly. “Only if you want.”

“I guess I want,” I said. I went into the boathouse, pulled out a wooden bench, and sat down. I patted the worn wood next to me and Angie sat down, too. Behind us oars, paddles, life jackets, and other odds and ends hung from wooden pegs. Shelves were filled with old paint and varnish cans, worn-out batteries, and other debris from years of boating on this lake.

“Thanks,” she said. “My ankles are killing me. So. What do you want to tell me?”

“Everything,” I said.

The following story by David Williams is, as far as we know, the last story he wrote before his death in 2002. Like all his fiction, it is elegantly written and full of his sharp but kindly observations of his fellow men. The last Williams novel, Practise to Deceive, was published by Allison & Busby (U.K.) in 2003, and features series character DCI Merlin Parry. Not published in the U.S., but it can be purchased on the Web.

I have made the decision to do away with Aunt Gloria twice in my life. The first time was when I was eight years old, but the execution was baulked. The second was quite recently. I am now thirty-six, which I mention to demonstrate just how long the period was when, despite a continued smouldering stern resentment, I succeeded in stemming a justified and singular murderous urge.

I mean, I have never ever wanted to liquidate anyone else.

Despite my initial failure, it would be unfair to dismiss the seriousness of my intention that first time. I wasn’t a particularly precocious or rebellious child, and certainly not, in the ordinary way, even remotely a homicidal one. I was certainly curious and inventive. At that age, understandably, I might well have lacked the tutored ingenuity and facility to pull off the deed.

I do still clearly remember what precipitated and justified my resolve at the time. Aunt Gloria had grossly insulted my mother, whom I adored. Like Sir Lancelot, my then favourite fictional character, I took an affront to my fair lady as a challenge.

To explain the circumstances: I had taken it upon myself to dye the curtains of the dormer window in the garret bedroom I always occupied when we visited Uncle Wilfred and Aunt Gloria. Their substantial country house was near Stratford-upon-Avon, in the pretty Shakespeare country, and twenty miles south of Uncle Wilfred’s factory in the industrial area that centres on Birmingham. The curtains were small, like the window they covered. They were also fairly old and faded. It had seemed to me that turning them from a boring pale green into a vivid, unmissable scarlet would be a service to my hosts as well as a pleasing surprise.

I had bought the packet of dye on impulse for sixpence in the local village shop. A specific use for my purchase had not suggested itself to me until I was on the way home. In any event, at the moment of revelation it seemed an admirable purpose, and a small price to pay for such a desirable transformation — as well as a good deed deserving gratitude.

After all, it had been my sixpence.

The instructions on the packet of dye seemed simple enough. All you needed besides hot water was a bucket and a pair of rubber gloves. The first accessory I borrowed from Uncle Wilfred’s garage, the second, more stealthily, from the kitchen. Fortunately, my aunt’s daily help had small hands.

It was simply unfortunate that my juvenile effort inadvertently and often patchily altered the hue of many other things besides the curtains. These included two towels in the small bathroom on the same floor as my room; a section of the newish, light-blue carpet in the corridor; the yellow coverlet on my bed; a surprisingly large section of wallpaper; inexplicably, bits of the corridor ceiling, as well as the fronts of the shirt and short grey trousers I had on at the start; and, after I had discarded those, my bare chest and my underpants. The exercise had been completed without interruption on a sunny July afternoon when my aunt was hosting a tennis party on the other side of the house. I had been relying on the sunshine to dry the curtains quickly outside my window, which it did, but not before they had turned the terra cotta tiles there what I have to admit was a hideous and permanent shade of vermilion.

For my own part, I was hurt beyond measure when my furious aunt later bawled me out to a degree quite disproportionate to the size of my mistake — which, after all, had begun as a well-intentioned good deed. But much worse than that was my later overhearing the outrageously scathing words she addressed to my saintly mother on the subject.

“Digby is an uncontrolled, ill-mannered little horror,” she asserted: The actual words are implanted in my mind. “It’s entirely your fault, Phyllis, for indulging him in every possible way. You should keep him under control. Not only do you demean yourself by giving him free rein, you let down the memory of our dear Arnold.” I should explain that Arnold Betcher was my dead father.

“You simply have to pull yourself together,” she went on mercilessly, “behave like a responsible mother, not a scared, scatterbrained, wimpish shopgirl.” By now she had reduced my sensitive mother to floods of tears. Her weeping had been clearly audible through the closed double doors to the drawing room before I threw them open dramatically and rushed to her side, shouting to my aunt to stop being such a bitch.

That did it, of course, not least because I was supposed to be confined to my room until Uncle Wilfred came home. When he did, he made far less of the curtain incident than his wife had done, though my calling her a bitch got me six hard whacks on my bottom with a slipper, plus my having to make a formal apology to my aunt, which was received with even less grace than I showed when offering it.

Despite the whacks, it really wasn’t Uncle Wilfred I had it in for next day when I dug the sizable hole on the narrow path which led down steeply between the overgrown rhododendrons at the bottom of their garden. This was where Aunt Gloria walked her bad-tempered, overfed Pekingese after breakfast on most mornings. I covered my excavation with a lattice of twigs disguised by grass cuttings. My expectation was that Aunt Gloria would step into the hole, break her neck, and, being unable to summon help, expire from loss of blood, or pneumonia, or starvation before her absence was noticed and her decomposing body discovered.

It was an outrageously improbable scenario, of course, but it was a brave knight’s stalwart intention that counted, after all.

Unfortunately, Aunt Gloria didn’t take her walk on the succeeding two days because it rained. Early on the third morning, the boy from next-door fell into the hole when we were playing hide-and-seek in the garden. He hurt his ankle and face and had to be ferried by Ogden, the decrepit gardener, in a wheelbarrow back up to the house, dazed and with a blackening eye and a bleeding lip. I took consolation from the fact that my plan had worked in principle, albeit against the wrong target.

“Danged squirrels digging up everything again, Mrs. Betcher,” Ogden complained to Aunt Gloria after the other boy’s mother had taken him away. I dearly wanted to inform the old fool that squirrels didn’t make holes that big, but naturally held my tongue.

The school-holiday visit to our only Betcher family relatives (my aunt and uncle had no children) ended the following day. I made no further attempt to exterminate Aunt Gloria on that occasion. Indeed, until late last summer, I never felt the same totally irresistible urge to get rid of her again. But that childhood effort to do so, I suppose, endured in my mind still as a sort of dark fairy tale — and endure it did.

My father had perished in a car accident. Driving while drunk, he had hit a tree. I was three at the time. His passing was deeply mourned by my mother, who never remarried. His memory was respected by Uncle Wilfred, who, for reasons that will become clear, for a time unfairly blamed himself for not having done enough to help and inspire his half-brother to make more of life, especially since in terms of inheritance, their father had treated Arnold as a less deserving, lower-grade offspring. More surprisingly, Aunt Gloria seemed desolated by my father’s demise, though according to contemporaries, she had shown him a good deal less affection in life than she did after he’d departed from it. Certainly she exhibited reducing concern for his grieving widow. An inveterate snob, my aunt was given to insisting, intentionally once in my hearing when I was eighteen, that my father had made “a quite unsuitable marriage to a little copy-typist who had driven him to drink.” I came to the conclusion then that my “well-born,” childless Aunt Gloria resented my mother, first, for having “married above her station,” and, secondly, for having been blessed with child — the last cause for bitterness embracing me as well. She was also incredibly mean with money.

Uncle Wilfred had been twenty-six when my father was born. Father was the only child of my grandfather’s late second marriage, as Wilfred had been of the first. Since Grandfather himself expired five years later, the older son increasingly grew to be a father figure to his only sibling. It was Wilfred who was to inherit the family business from my grandfather, whose will had made adequate and specific material provision for my Grandma Emma, his second wife, and “any progeny from our union,” under the terms of the couple’s marriage settlement. A later codicil to the will also looked to Wilfred “to care for Arnold’s general well-being until he is eighteen,” at which time he was to come into the income from a GBP10,000 trust fund my grandfather had set up for him, it seems as an afterthought.

It was pretty decent of Uncle Wilfred to have observed Grand-father’s wishes about my father’s situation until he came to his majority, especially as there had been nothing obligatory in the loose way those wishes had been expressed. Meantime, my Grandma Emma seems to have spent most of her settlement on herself rather than on her son. For instance, but for Wilfred’s generosity, Father would not have been sent to one of England’s most expensive private boarding schools, though it seems he lacked the intelligence, and probably the ambition, to benefit from the standard of tuition offered. Uncle also gave my father an allowance until, in 1953, he came into the income from the trust fund which would have produced around GBP600 a year — then just enough for a young bachelor to live on, but not lavishly.

In a sense, it was probably a pity that my father had any private income at all because, again according to contemporaries, being at heart just an engaging, good-looking playboy, he did no more than dabble with various jobs in the surety that when he failed in them he always had the trust income to fall back upon. One of his early jobs had been as a trainee salesman with the family firm. This had been created for him by my uncle, and it seems my father had failed at it miserably. At least he’d had the grace to resign his position rather than to further embarrass my uncle.

In 1961, when my parents married, far from being a lowly “copy-typist” (though that was one notch higher than “shopgirl” in my aunt’s social order), my mother had been private secretary to an important company director. This was the kind of responsible post she continued to fill, up to, and for thirty years after, my father’s death. She told me often what a charming, engaging, and entertaining man he was, that really his true vocation should have been in the creative arts — in music, acting, writing, or design (although I believe this was wishful thinking on her part) — and that he had only taken to drinking “a little too much” through frustrations stemming from his lack of career progress. She had adored him in his lifetime — and with added fervour after it when the causes of his failures would have been easier for her to disguise.

There was no doubt that it was my mother’s income that enabled the couple to live as well as they did at their pretty Victorian cottage in a country town twenty or so miles northwest of Uncle Wilfred’s mansion. After she became pregnant with me, though, it seems Father determined to take his responsibilities as a husband and future parent more seriously. As Mother admitted to me years later, he had gone to Uncle Wilfred desperately begging to be given another chance with the firm, and promising faithfully to justify the opportunity. Uncle had accepted his word, but because his half-brother’s previous attempts to become a salesman had proved so abysmal, this time he was put into the personnel department. It was unfortunate that three years later he proved to be a failure there as well.

The company manufactured metal components for the automotive industry. Uncle Wilfred was a graduate engineer and a business high-flyer. Under his direction, the organisation had grown hugely, so much so that it became an attractive takeover target, and in 1962 was merged with the market leader. Brilliant Wilfred was made chief executive of the much enlarged company and had risen to be chairman before his death from heart failure — which happened without warning in 1977 — relatively early for someone of his age. Grandma Emma was called to her reward, as my mother put it, in the same year at the French Riviera apartment where she had lived for many years, having severed relations with the family. I hope her heavenly reward was better than the one she left her relatives on earth. This was precisely nothing after her properties were sold and her debts paid.

This left only me, my mother, and Aunt Gloria — if you exclude her Pekingese, not the same one, but it was just as bad-tempered as the previous two.

Surprisingly, Uncle Wilfred had died legally intestate — meaning that he left no will. Probably this was because he had been too busy, or had not seen the need for a will at sixty-eight — something which could also have been stoked by a surreptitious but overweening belief in his own indestructibility, a common syndrome in ageing ex-whiz kids. Whatever the reason or reasons for his overlooking my continued existence, he left me without benefit or prospect of benefit from his life’s work.

In other words, Aunt Gloria got the lot.

I had never been involved with my uncle’s company — nor ever needed to be. After my father’s death, and definitely after the curtain-dyeing episode, my mother and I had seen less and less of the older Betcher couple. As time went on, my mother had grown in self-confidence and independence. In a sense, this played into the hands of Aunt Gloria, who was no doubt glad when we withdrew voluntarily from the scene. I suspect Uncle Wilfred had been too busy to notice, or that he left arrangements for family socialising to his wife, so that when there wasn’t any he assumed that this was how we wanted it. While it is possible that things might have been different if the original firm had survived, after it was subsumed, as it were, into a much larger public company, any sentimental, tribal attachments had withered on the bough.

The gift of a modest block of shares in the now mammoth corporation would not have seriously upset my mother’s principles, certainly if they had been left to me. We still had the income from the trust fund. This had grown over the years, but not nearly so much as the fund itself could have done if Grandfather had not specified that the capital could only be invested in government funds with a safe but unexciting yield. No matter: I had done well in the local state schools, entered architectural college at eighteen, and graduated, with no debts, five years later. It was not until then, of course, that I was able even to think about trying to repay my mother for looking after my every need since my father’s death, chiefly out of her own salary. In fact, she wouldn’t take a penny of my earnings, but at least I never had to accept any more of hers.

Three years ago I was made a full partner in a successful architectural practice in Birmingham after winning an international architectural competition for the design of a new town centre. As a result of that, I was headhunted to run the in-house design department of an international construction company with headquarters in London, with the promise of a seat on the board.

My mother was over the moon at all this — and so was Jenny Lagden, the woman who had just agreed to marry me. Blond, pretty, vivacious Jenny, eight years younger than me, was a talented actress who was close to making it onto London’s West End stage, while playing lead roles with good touring companies and showy supporting parts in TV dramas. In short, things were looking good for me — which is why, perhaps, I was greedy to make them even better.

It was a Sunday morning in mid September when I was driving Jenny from London to my mother’s. We were to spend the night with her. Mother had recently retired, but still lived in the house where she had brought me up. On a whim, more or less, I decided to make a diversion and drop in on Aunt Gloria. I didn’t telephone ahead because I wasn’t going to give my aunt the chance to make an excuse not to see us. She and I hadn’t met for over a decade, and I thought it was time to heal the rift. There were other reasons, too, one of them not quite so virtuous nor even so charitable as the others. Of course I wanted to show off Jenny, and perhaps to demonstrate to her that there was a stately home in the family. Then, to be absolutely honest, I also wanted to waken my immensely wealthy aunt to the fact that she had a successful nephew shortly to be wed, who deserved a wholesome wedding present or at least a place in her will.

Nor, all things considered, am I ashamed of that last aspiration — even if my mother would have been. Aunt Gloria was now in her eighties, and I felt it would be a pity if I allowed myself to be passed over from receiving a family legacy simply because I hadn’t troubled to remind her, in person, of my continued existence. We exchanged Christmas cards every year, but that was the current extent of our relationship.

Turning into the drive, my first impression was how much smaller the house was than I remembered. Even so, it was still a substantial, well-maintained Victorian pile with a large garden in a very desirable commuter area. At today’s prices, I figured it had to be worth close on two million pounds.

The person who answered the door was not my aunt. It was a younger, tallish woman, aged around sixty, who greeted us with a polite, enquiring smile. Slim, with dark, short, well-shaped hair, she was dressed conservatively in a white blouse under an oatmeal-coloured cardigan, and a flared tweed skirt. There was a short string of small matching pearls around her neck. What I noticed most about her, though, were the intelligent blue eyes — and the steely assessment, tinged perhaps with apprehension, that they were making of the two people standing before her.

When we introduced ourselves, the woman stiffened for a moment before offering her hand. “I thought I recognised a family likeness, Mr. Betcher. Well now, I thought we might never meet,” she said in a softly modulated, cultured voice and accent. “Do come in. Your aunt is on the terrace. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you. We were taking coffee outside in the sunshine.” She led us from the hall into the drawing room — through the double doors I recalled so well — and from there to the stone-flagged, south-facing terrace.

Unlike the house, Aunt Gloria had not worn well. She had shrunk, as most older people do, of course, but had also lost a good deal of weight. Her face was unduly wizened, and there was a walking stick propped against her chair. But she recognised me instantly, and her tone was firm as she proffered, less affably than the occasion merited: “So, as I expected, Digby, you hadn’t intended to abandon me permanently. Even so, you’ve left it quite late” — the last sentence came as she was studying Jenny.

The “tinge” of guilt I had felt about my underlying purpose in making the visit ratcheted up to “strong sense” after what I took to be the implication of my aunt’s words. Inwardly I cursed the wretched woman as a cynic — which, on reflection, I suppose made me a hypocrite.

She had shaken hands with me from her brightly cushioned raffia chair, but there had been no kissing. After repeating the performance with Jenny, she motioned us to sit. The other woman, now identified as a Mrs. Claire Amhurst, had left to find extra cups and to replenish the contents of the silver coffee pot. In her absence, my aunt explained that Mrs. Amhurst was a widow who had accepted to be her companion more than a year earlier. “The arrangement works very well,” she enlarged woodenly. “As you would expect, of course, between ladies with similar educated tastes, values, and... and religious beliefs.” There was special emphasis on the last two words. I had never been aware that my aunt was at all religious, and as for her educated tastes, she was one of the most uninformed women I had ever known. “Are you an architect, too, Miss, er... Miss Lagden?” she continued. We had already explained that we intended to marry.

“Please, call me Jenny,” my fiancée responded brightly. “No, I’m not an architect. Not clever enough for that. I’m an actress.”

There was a distinct drawing in of breath as my aunt digested what appeared for her to be undisguisedly unwholesome tidings. “Indeed. We seldom go to the theatre,” was her limited verbal response. I took it that “we” meant herself and her companion, not “we” in the way Queen Victoria always turned herself into a crowd, but I wouldn’t have put it past Aunt Gloria to have assumed regal appendages in her dotage.

“Jenny’s a very fine actress,” I put in defensively, adding unnecessarily, “She’s often on the TV.”

Before Aunt Gloria had the opportunity to tell us that “we” seldom watched television, her companion had reappeared.

It was Mrs. Amhurst who enquired whether we could stay for lunch. We refused politely, explaining that we were, genuinely as it happened, engaged to lunch with my mother. But I was intrigued to note that the invitation had come unprompted from Mrs. Amhurst, and without instigation or clearance from her employer — unless the two had been operating some especially subtle method of secret communication, and I doubted that. It did appear, though, in this and other contexts, that whilst Mrs. Amhurst was overly solicitous for my aunt’s every pleasure and whim, it was the companion who made the decisions, both small and large — such as whether my aunt should keep her hat on against the sun, or as in the matter of the luncheon invitation. It seemed that my aunt was very much under the other’s control.

Aunt Gloria had shown no dismay about our need to depart quite soon, and while she took the opportunity at the mention of my mother to enquire after her health, her concern did not extend beyond that cursory politeness. Her interest in my life and Jenny’s, and in our future together, was similarly scant — except Mrs. Amhurst tried to make the going here, too, most particularly where Jenny was concerned. Mrs. Amhurst had been distantly related to a prominent but now deceased actor with whom Jenny had appeared, in minor roles, during a short season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their exchanges on this subject proved thoroughly engaging, until my aunt rudely interrupted them with a dissertation about her wretched dog’s arthritis. The episode clearly irritated Jenny, whose normal disposition is warm and tolerant.

Just ahead of our departure, Mrs. Amhurst had absented herself again, unprompted, but I assumed out of good manners, on the pretext of removing the tray of coffee things. In her warmest yet comment on any thing or any body, my aunt then broke into a voluble commendation of her companion.

“Her presence here has given me a new savour for life,” she pronounced earnestly. “With her beside me I’m good for many years yet, to be cared for with unlimited affection.” She sniffed, long and pointedly, looking from me to Jenny, then back again. “Claire Amhurst’s dedication to me has to be experienced to be appreciated,” she continued. “Nothing is too much trouble for her if it brings me comfort. Such sacrifice is quite exceptional in today’s selfish world... She’s a treasure I rate above riches.”

“I’m so glad for you, Aunt, very glad,” I offered, wondering if the last comment was a way of self-excusing the fact that she was overpaying her companion: That would have been typical of her established skinflint ways.

“Good,” she replied. “And I’m glad you young people are making such a success of your lives, I hope spiritually as well as materially. Mrs. Amhurst hadn’t enjoyed many material benefits before she came to me. She had to nurse a very sick husband for many years before he died. Such dedication. He’d been a poor country parson before that.” She paused, shaking her head while she allowed us to ponder on the likely privations of life in the vicarage. “So that she will never need to want again, I’ve made her, in effect, my heir. After I’m gone she’ll not be too old to enjoy life fully for the first time.” There was another pause during which, despite the bombshell, I tried to appear objectively unaffected. “Although the... the family has chosen to neglect me all these years,” she went on, “I’ve still left you a modest legacy in my will, Digby. You must accept, even so, that our fortune is nothing, relatively speaking, to what it was in your uncle’s day. Taxes and living costs have soared so mercilessly.” Aunt Gloria had lost none of her directness — nor her exasperating way of rewriting history. “Of course,” she ended, “I took into account that you still enjoy the benefit of your grandfather’s trust fund, which he generously set aside for your father and his progeny, at the unselfish instigation of my dear husband and myself.” She hadn’t been able to resist this last invented and unprovable assertion.

The beatified Mrs. Amhurst materialised again at that point, wearing a disarmingly humble expression, possibly a bit of playacting, I thought, if she’d been behind the terrace door listening to the conversation. We left a minute or so later.

I was seized with fury about the glib way in which Aunt Gloria had chosen to as good as disown me, and my mother, too. If that cold and gullible woman had not systematically spurned our company, she could have enjoyed all the family love and goodwill she could ever have wanted. I could not countenance that my aunt had needed to look outside the family for good example when my mother had been exhibiting just that since the time she had married my father. More personally, I was the next natural heir to my grandfather’s fortune. Clearly, I could have accepted things if my aunt and uncle had produced any children, but they hadn’t. For the bulk of what was still my grandfather’s original estate now to be left to a virtual stranger, and conceivably a plausible trickster, passed my understanding. As for Mrs. Amhurst, it was unlikely that anyone in her right mind would lavish affection on my aunt except for an underlying profitable motive — and justifiably so.

In the next few months my anger at the injustice of the situation developed into a fixation that soured my disposition, the quality of my work, and prevented me from sleeping for nights on end. It came to the point that, for the second time in my life, I could think of nothing that gave me satisfaction except the plotting of a deadly vengeance against my unfeeling aunt, born of an ire I easily sublimated as revenge for the offence she had caused by belittling my Guinevere.

It was nearly December before I woke to the acceptance that I had worked myself into a mindless obsession, and, more practically, a pointless one involving a worse than merely juvenile, unhinged, and outrageous remedy. Despite the several methods Ihad devised in the dead of wide-awake nights to “do in” Aunt Gloria — far more refined and foolproof, I should add, than the “squirrel hole” of my untutored youth — the damage to me was done, and, no matter how sweet the revenge, murdering her would not undo it. The true cause of my initial fixation was not highfaluting injustice, but lowest-level filthy lucre, and once I had come to that demeaning truth, the obsession gradually dispersed. It’s a free world, and my aunt was entitled to leave her money to whomsoever she wished — damn her hide.

At least I had a “modest legacy” to anticipate — and I hoped it would be big enough to fund the luxury cruise to historic Greece that my mother had always longed to take, but to which she had never allowed me to treat her. It would be a nice irony if Aunt Gloria could be made to pay for it, even posthumously.

Since we first published Derek Nikitas last year, the Brockport, N.Y., author has sold non-genre stories to the literary magazines Traffic East and Chelsea, and a mystery to Judas E-Zine. Mr. Nikitas is the recipient of an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina. Joyce Carol Oates has called his stories “very subtly written, and quite touching and powerful.”

Anne had been waiting, preserving herself for over twenty-six years. Not for religious practice — though growing up she’d gone to church most holidays — and not unwillingly. She wasn’t desperate, either. Maybe rather gangly, kind of moonfaced and pale, and a couple matchsticks taller than most girls, but not ugly. Not by anyone’s standard.

Was it fear, maybe? Some nights thoughts of love would strobe through her mind, but whether those flashes brought thrill or dread she couldn’t tell. When she imagined her deflowering and what came afterward, it all looked just black, like the inner wall of a cocoon, as if she’d get reborn from it all malformed, thrashing around, unfit for survival.

But then Anne met and fell in love with Daniel Green, a theology graduate student at SUNY Hammersport. Met him when he walked into World Wide Travel, where she worked as an agent. Said he wanted to book a flight to Israel for thesis research. Tall enough to duck under the blow-up plastic airplanes that dangled by twine from the ceiling. A bit chubby, balding at his crown, dressed in a brown corduroy suit coat and pants. His first words to her were, “’Scuse me, ma’am. I hate so much to bother you.” For real, and spoken in all seriousness with a Southern twang she later learned was Georgian. He’d asked her to join him at a college art opening, and after that first date several weeks passed before Anne truly understood that they were a couple. Before he even tried to kiss her.

Now, six months later, Anne and Daniel were alone in her bedroom, where frigid air leaked through the window cracks and plastic insulation screens. The radiator clicked out its thin warmth, and Daniel knelt beside the bed like a child praying before sleep. He looked away from Anne whenever he spoke. He was shirtless, wearing his slacks and shoes, belt unbuckled.

On the bed, Anne lay above the comforter — naked for the first time in someone else’s presence. She wore only her white ankle socks. Goosebumps sprouted on her arms and legs, and she clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.

After a while Daniel removed his glasses, rested his head against her hipbone, and squinted at his own fingers sweeping along her belly. His fingers tapped her ribs as if he were playing piano keys, playing a song that she’d heard often in her dreams.

Anne tried not to look at her own body. Instead she pushed her fingers through Daniel’s thinning hair. A tea candle on her desk cast faint shuddering light across her bedroom, outlining the open closet door, the twin bed, the flat map of Earth on the wall beside her. The planet’s continents shrank and bulged as they dragged away from the Equator. Anne had traveled across that distorted globe — to Mexico and Sweden, the Bahamas. Back in college she’d studied in France and for a while taken on the style of the young Parisian women she admired — pageboy haircut, dark skirts, and knee-high boots.

“Are you sure you want to?” Daniel asked.

“Yes — of course,” she said. “I love you.” She chose Daniel for better reasons than mere attraction. She chose him because she knew he’d guide her carefully and patiently into what awaited her after tonight.

“Do you hear something?” Daniel asked her.

“What?” She covered herself with her arms.

“I thought I heard something.” He pushed himself up, groaning. His pale gut glowed yellowish in the candlelight. Anne looked away, into the darkness of her bedroom doorway. It was empty at first, but as she watched, the blackness in the entrance took on a human shape.

Someone else was standing there.

“Who are you?” Daniel said toward the door.

“Richard?” said Anne. Her voice came out raspy — the remnants of a recent flu. Daniel’s hands were no longer touching her. In an instant she was unanchored and drifting. She wanted to grab something to cover herself, but her arms wouldn’t budge.

“Gloria?” It was Richard. Her roommate Gloria’s boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He spoke from where he stood at the doorway to Anne’s bedroom. The wrong bedroom. He spoke Gloria’s name as if it belonged to him.

Daniel started to rise, but then he dropped just as swiftly back to the throw rug on the floor. The gust of his fall doused the tea candle and darkened the room. Through that fresh dark came an afterimage of Richard’s arm swiping, striking at Daniel. Then the thump of something hard against flesh.

Anne slid herself against the world map and thrust her knees against her chest, covered herself with a pillow. She couldn’t see through the darkness to where Daniel had dropped to the floor.

“Gloria?” It was Richard’s voice again.

“Richard,” Anne said.

“Anne? Is that Anne?” Richard said.

“What are you doing? Daniel? Did you hit Daniel?” Her shrill panicked voice rattled even her own heart. She was plummeting from the steady confidence she’d clutched just seconds before.

“Who?” Richard said. “What’s... where’s Gloria?”

“She’s not here!” Anne said. “This is my room!”

A sudden light shined, the overhead lamp, and it burned her eyes. She squinted at the vision that came blurred and bright like tropical noon. Daniel lay on his back with one arm crossed over his face. His skin looked all wrong to her, rubbery.

Richard was brush-cut and unshaven, darkness stamped in both his eye sockets. He clutched a chef’s blade that he must have stolen from Anne and Gloria’s kitchen. In the other hand he held a rock that was wet from melting snow and no bigger than a softball. It could have come from anywhere out there in that winter night, that rock he’d used to strike Daniel.

“I hit him. I thought you were Gloria,” Richard said in a voice unhinged. He struck the rock against his own forehead — a thick, meaty thump. Then he hissed at the pain.

“This is my room! What are you doing?” Anne said.

“Dammit! I thought she was in here with somebody — hiding in here — messing around. I took this rock first, and then the knife — I couldn’t stand it — hearing her in here with somebody else. I saw you people — naked — I didn’t think—”

Anne cringed at his voice, recoiled as if the air swarmed with razors all bearing down on her. She couldn’t hold her body tight enough in her own grasp. She wanted Richard to rush away, backwards, reversing everything, everything mistaken restored. All the way back to before they’d met him.

Edward D. Hoch is not only one of the world’s most prolific writers, he’s a voracious reader, and his advice to new writers often includes his belief that from wide reading ideas will flow. He is also a careful researcher; the information he employs in this story about train travel in the Western states in 1885 comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel book Across the Plains, which was serialized in 1883, published in 1892.

The business that brought Ben Snow to Sacramento early in 1885 had been satisfactorily concluded, and he boarded the train on Sunday morning for the return trip to Carson City, where he’d stabled his horse Oats. The train was called the Eagle, but with its broad smokestack and cowcatcher up front it hardly looked like any sort of bird. The trip was a short one of just a few hours, so he fully expected to be eating dinner in the Nevada capital that afternoon. But as the train passed through the cornfields just outside of Sacramento a young woman’s voice was to change those plans.

“Is this seat occupied?” she asked. It was not, of course, and Ben smiled at her as he removed his saddlebags and placed them on the floor by his feet. She wore a long blue velvet skirt with matching hat and white blouse, in a style he’d seen on the Sacramento streets. There was an empty seat across the aisle but the man with the black handlebar moustache and dark suit seated by the window was enough to make any single woman think twice.

“Are you going to Carson City?” Ben asked, eager for conversation.

She studied him for a few seconds before replying. “No, I’m traveling all the way to Ogden, Utah.” He guessed her to be about his age, in her mid twenties.

“I was wondering. Carson City is still a pretty rough place for a young lady, even though it’s the state capital.”

She eyed him with something like amusement. “Were you offering to escort me to my hotel?”

“I might have been.”

“You’re a cowboy, aren’t you? I’ll wager you have a brace of pistols in your saddlebags.”

He smiled back at her. “You’d lose that wager. I have only one. But tell me what’s taking you all the way to Ogden. That’s a two-day journey.”

“Why should I tell you? I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Ben Snow. Ever hear of me?”

“No. Ever hear of Samantha Gaines?”

“I’ve heard the name mentioned often.” His reply startled her, wiping the sly smile from her face. Her change of expression made him laugh. “No, no, I’m only joking. That’s you, I suppose.”

“It is.” She’d turned stern, but he knew that wouldn’t last for long. “And if it’s any of your business, I’m traveling to Ogden to protest the killing of buffalo by trainloads of Eastern sportsmen.”

Ben nodded, aware of the problem. Railroad and business executives, often with their wives, organized hunting parties with officers from frontier army posts. With an escort of soldiers to protect them from Indians, they traveled west by special trains to the areas where herds of buffalo still grazed near the tracks. The carcasses of their prey, shot from the trains, were often hung from the caboose on the return trip.

Before he could reply, the conductor came through collecting their tickets and money. He was a bony man wearing a brass-buttoned jacket and a flat peaked cap with a nameplate that read Central Pacific. “First trip on the Eagle?” he asked.

“For me it is,” Samantha admitted.

“This is one of the best trains on the Central Pacific line,” he told them. “See these high ceilings and fresh varnish? You won’t find that on those old Union Pacific cars east of Ogden. These new cars are airier, and you don’t need bed boards for sleeping. Our seats draw out and join in the center. We have this upper tier of berths that are closed by day but open at night.”

“That’s good to know,” Ben agreed.

“Here’s a little map of our route, with the stops indicated. We stop for breakfast in the morning, dinner between eleven and two, and supper sometime between five and nine. At all other times you can purchase fruit, lollipops, and cigars from Jimmy the newsboy. You’ll see him coming through the train. He also sells books and newspapers. My name is Bill Wallman, if you need anything else.”

“How many cars are on this train?” Ben asked.

“It varies. Today we have seven. There’s the engine and coal car, followed by the baggage car and the Chinese car. On the westbound trips with emigrants we sometimes need two or three baggage cars. Then there’s this car for men and women traveling without families, followed by the family car and the caboose.”

“Why are the Chinese kept separate?” Samantha asked Ben after the conductor had moved on. “Wasn’t it Chinese labor that laid most of these tracks?”

“They work cheaper than American labor. Somehow that makes them a threat.”

It wasn’t long afterwards that Jimmy arrived to introduce himself and show his wares. He was a bright smiling lad of sixteen or seventeen, carrying his products on a wooden tray supported by a strap around his neck. “I also have soap, towels, and washing-dishes for the mornings,” he explained.

“I’ll be leaving the train this afternoon at Carson City,” Ben explained. “My horse is stabled there.”

“Sorry to see you go,” the boy replied. “It’s great country across northern Nevada. We pass through lots of old mining camps.”

Samantha had noticed the conductor paying special attention to a well-dressed man a few seats ahead of them. “Who’s the white-haired gentleman?” she asked Jimmy. “He looks important.”

“He is! That’s Hiram Killcanon, the California state senator. He rides the Eagle to Ogden every few months. Meets up with a trainload of Easterners for some buffalo hunting. He’s so good at it his friends call him King Buffalo.”

“Do they, now!” Samantha exclaimed. “I just might need to have a talk with him.”

After Jimmy had gone on his way Ben tried to calm her down. “I don’t think you want to confront him on the train like this.”

“Oh, don’t I? That’s the reason for my journey to Ogden, to protest against this buffalo slaughter!”

She left her place and moved down the aisle to the seat where the white-haired senator was chatting with a woman Ben couldn’t see. Samantha spoke to him and he glanced up. She said something else Ben couldn’t hear and suddenly Killcanon was on his feet. “See here, young lady—” The woman reached out a restraining hand, but not fast enough. He slapped Samantha across the cheek.

There were gasps from the other passengers who’d witnessed the altercation, and Ben ran down the aisle to her side. “That was uncalled for, sir,” he told the politician.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear her foul language,” Hiram Killcanon replied.

Ben was about to strike the man, but Samantha said, “He didn’t hurt me. It was nothing compared to shooting a harmless buffalo.”

Ben turned with some reluctance and led her back to their seat. He’d had only a glimpse of the senator’s companion, a middle-aged woman with black hair and thick eyebrows, wearing a soft felt hat. “Was that his wife with him?”

“With King Buffalo, you mean? I don’t know. Probably his mistress.”

“Calm down. At least you let him know how you felt.” He noticed that the moustached fellow across the aisle had been watching it all with interest.

Before long, a young man who’d been seated across from Killcanon and the woman made his way back to Samantha’s seat. “The senator has asked me to apologize for the earlier incident. He’s deeply sorry he struck you.”

“Who are you?” Ben asked.

“Ralph Munsey. I’m Senator Killcanon’s personal aide.” He looked the part, clean-shaven with a dark suit and string tie. “He would like to buy you dinner when we stop in Carson City.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she replied somewhat coolly. “But I accept his apology.”

“I wish—”

“Please,” she said, holding up her hand. “It is a dead issue with me.”

Munsey retreated, and Ben said, “You handled that well.”

“I certainly wasn’t going to have dinner with him! It would probably be buffalo meat!”

The senator’s female companion came back past their seats but ignored them, edging by Jimmy with his tray of sundries. “I have some nice apples,” the newsboy pointed out.

Ben took some coins from his pocket. “Give us two.”

“Want me to slice them for you?”

Samantha shook her head. “They’re more fun if you munch right into them.”

The apple tasted good to Ben, too. “Do you just ride the train all week?” he asked the youth.

“My run is from San Francisco to Ogden and back again. When the passengers switch to the Union Pacific line I turn around. They supply their own newsboys. The round trip takes four days and I usually get a day off between trips.”

“You’re from San Francisco?” Samantha asked.

“Yeah. I live there with my mom.”

“How’d you land a job like this?”

Jimmy’s smile turned momentarily somber. “My dad worked for the state. He was killed in an accident and they wouldn’t give us any compensation for it. I had to quit school to help support my mom. I was lucky to land this job. You get to see all sorts of people on trains.”

Ben had to agree with that. Up ahead, he could see the conductor arguing with a short Chinese man attempting to enter their car. Finally Bill pushed the man bodily through the door to the Chinese coach. “What was all that about?” he asked Jimmy.

“The Chinese car is crowded. That’s Wu Khan. He’s traveled with us before and he asked me if he could sit in here where there are empty seats. I told him he’d have to ask the conductor.”

“I guess he got his answer,” Samantha commented.

Jimmy moved on and as they munched their apples Ben remarked, “Maybe you should try to help the Chinese instead of the buffalo.”

“It’s hardly the same thing. The buffalo are being shot dead.”

When the conductor announced they were about a half-hour outside of Carson City, Samantha excused herself to use the toilet at the front end of the car. Ben noticed that Killcanon’s female companion was headed in the same direction, as was the man with the moustache across the aisle. All the passengers seemed to be on the move and Jimmy was having difficulty squeezing past them with his tray.

Ben stood up to stretch and Senator Killcanon came back to say a few words. “I trust Ralph delivered my apologies.”

“Certainly,” Ben told him. “Everything’s fine.”

He nodded and turned back toward his seat. Ralph Munsey was standing, too, perhaps calculating the wait for the toilet, and Killcanon had to squeeze past him. Some Indian braves had ridden up, waving peacefully to the passengers as they kept pace with the train, and Ben’s attention was diverted to them. He didn’t see what happened next.

It was a woman who screamed first, and for an instant he thought it was Samantha. Then he saw that it was Killcanon’s dark-haired companion, returning from the toilet. The senator had crumpled to the floor as the conductor and Jimmy tried to reach him. Munsey stood frozen by his seat, trying to determine what had happened. “He’s bleeding!” the woman shouted at him. “Do something!”

Though Paul Halter is French (from Alsace-Lorraine), it isn’t easy to find short stories by him set in France, since he mostly writes about an English detective called Dr. Twist. This new tale, the author’s second for EQMM, is set in Le Havre, France. Mr. Halter is a great admirer of John Dickson Carr, and what he’s created this time would probably qualify as a locked room mystery — the genre for which Carr was renowned.

“You seem very thoughtful, sir.”

Roussel turned and studied the man who had just spoken to him and was approaching him with a friendly smile. There was un-doubtedly something elegant about the fifty-year-old with the long, carefully groomed hair, but his clothes had seen better days, and he held his arm in a sling. Roussel had already made his diagnosis: one of those brave unfortunates that a stroke of fate had thrown on the street, struggling to maintain a vestige of dignity, and more in need of human contact than money.

Roussel offered a brief smile before answering:

“Thoughtful? Hard to be otherwise when we have a tunnel here that kills people.”

For a few seconds, not a sound could be heard on that bleak October evening except the moaning of the wind blowing through Montmorency Street, in Le Havre.

“A tunnel?” gasped the newcomer, wide-eyed. “A tunnel that kills people? Which tunnel?”

“Why, the tunnel that houses the escalator there,” replied Roussel absent-mindedly, staring in front of him through the wire-mesh fence which protected a short passage open to the sky, leading to a wooden door.

“An escalator? Ah, yes! That’s what it says above the door.”

“The biggest in Europe, nearly two hundred metres long. Thanks to this monster, it only took five minutes to reach the top of the town, otherwise... You’re not from this region, are you?”

“No... No, I’m not from around here.”

So saying, the man lowered his eyes. He was standing in front of the mesh fence next to Roussel, who inspected him discreetly, but not without a measure of sympathy. Evidently someone more used to sleeping under the stars than in a bed. Roussel was on the point of asking him how he had injured his arm, but held back.

“When you say this escalator has killed people,” the man continued, now looking at Roussel with eyes of a strikingly clear blue, “I assume you mean there have been accidents?”

“No, not accidents. The escalator has killed three people, from revolver shots.”

“From revolver shots? You must be joking! An escalator couldn’t...”

“When it has been established beyond doubt that no human being could have done it, there is no other conclusion possible. Old Django warned us, by the way. He kept telling us: ‘Don’t shut down the escalator, don’t do it. It will take its revenge, you’ll see.’ Nobody listened to him. Three people are dead, in circumstances which, as I said before, preclude any possibility of human involvement. An insoluble mystery, which has haunted me for years and which, every so often, brings me here at night. I stand here, in front of the fence, and I try to find an explanation. But maybe I should start at the beginning, if you’re interested?”

“Very much so. But I must warn you, I’m a sceptic by nature. I don’t really believe in haunted castles or other such things.”

“You’ll see, the facts tell it all. Several years ago, it was deemed preferable to put this escalator out of service because the funds couldn’t cover the running costs. The municipal authorities set a date to shut it down, without taking into account the resentment of the people who used it, nor the warnings of old Django, a local gypsy and soothsayer. As I told you, he warned the municipal council members, buttonholing them in the street, telling them that the escalator would take its revenge if they insisted on closing it. The first murder took place the same week that the decision was announced, just at the time when people were returning home from work. In other words, at rush hour. There was the sound of a shot and a man in the middle of the escalator fell down, a bullet between his eyes. None of the people present had seen anyone pull out a weapon or make a suspicious movement. Which is pretty strange, you have to admit. There the people are, in Indian file on the moving stairs taking them to their destination, in a concrete tunnel offering no place to hide, each with eyes fixed on the person ahead. Nobody sees anything, and yet one of them is shot dead, right in the middle of the escalator. A few days later, the same scenario: a new victim in almost identical circumstances.”

The stranger nodded his head, a smile playing on his lips. “It’s certainly strange, but an insoluble mystery? Maybe not. A lapse of concentration and someone could very well have—”

“I admit that. But now listen to what happened next. Shortly after the second murder, old Django alerted Bertrand Charpie, a rich industrialist of the region and one of the country’s wealthiest men, telling him that he would suffer the same fate as the two others if ever he decided to take the escalator. Needless to say, Charpie hardly ever used that means of transport, but he was the type of man who could not resist a challenge — quite the contrary! That was how he had acquired his reputation and made his fortune. And so the day before the escalator was due to be shut down, Bertrand Charpie, in defiance of the prophecy, turned up... here, in fact, where we are standing right now.

“It was a grey September afternoon, and there had been several showers that morning. Charpie arrived with his wife, probably to underline his unswerving disregard for danger. Even so, he was accompanied by his bodyguard Martin, an ex-policeman, and by Pierre Picard, his young brother-in-law, a past master of martial arts. The police were also there. Needless to say, the escalator had been searched with a fine-tooth comb, and two officers had been posted here to guard the entrance, with two others at the exit.

“Imagine a seemingly endless concrete tube, three metres wide and almost two hundred long, dimly lit, with wooden steps about a square metre in size, slightly wider than deep. How could anyone hide in there?

“It was about three o’clock when Bertrand Charpie stepped on the escalator with his wife, his brother-in-law, his bodyguard, and two inspectors. There was nobody on the moving steps apart from those six people, divided into three groups: Pierre Picard and one of the inspectors on the same step, ten metres ahead of Charpie and his wife, also side by side; then, ten metres behind them, Martin and the other inspector. It was in mid journey that the shot rang out: a terrifying noise, in that tunnel, and with an echo every bit as frightening. Bertrand Charpie collapsed, mortally wounded by a bullet in the chest. He died that evening. Now can you see the problem?”

“Perhaps there was a hidden passage, or some opening that would allow the killer to fire a shot?”

“Nothing like that. As you can well imagine, after a crime like that the police examined every square millimetre with a magnifying glass. Furthermore, remember that the entrance and exit were being watched by police officers. They were adamant that, except for those accompanying Charpie, nobody left the tunnel after the murder; and prior to that, there wasn’t even so much as a cat inside. The weapon was found on the side of the escalator, between the wall and the handrail, level with the spot where Charpie fell. A Browning 7.65, with no fingerprints.”

The stranger shrugged his shoulders. “So the killer can only be one of the five people who were with the victim.”

“I was expecting you’d say that. First of all, please understand that the shot wasn’t point-blank. The experts put it at a minimum of five metres. Which rules out Charpie’s wife. In any case, the other four people were watching the couple closely and were ready to swear that there was no suspicious movement on her part at the moment the shot was fired. As for Martin and the police officer with him, standing ten metres behind the couple, each is ready to swear that the other could not have fired without being noticed. The same is true for the two people in front of the Charpies on the escalator. And I am particularly well placed to assure you that Pierre Picard could not have fired on his brother-in-law. He was as close to me then as you are now. I could see his hands; with the one, he was stroking his chin, and with the other he was holding his raincoat against his chest, a little bit like...”

The stranger looked at his arm in the sling with some amusement.

“Please excuse me,” said Roussel. “I wasn’t—”

“That’s all right. No offence taken. If I’ve understood you correctly, you were the inspector next to him.”

Roussel nodded.

“So you saw the murder committed before your very eyes?”

“Precisely. Picard and I were standing facing backwards, as we didn’t want to lose sight of Charpie for an instant. We were literally petrified by the sound of the shot, and watched him clutch his chest before collapsing. His wife started to scream... It was difficult to determine the angle of fire because Charpie had just turned — or was still turning — at the moment the shot was fired. It was hard for us to work it out, and we weren’t helped by the extraordinary effect of the echo. According to Madame Charpie, the shot had been fired right next to her. To me, the sound seemed to have come from several places at once.”

“Seen from that point of view, things look pretty strange, I have to agree. But tell me, apart from the weapon, did you find any other clues?”

“Nothing, apart from cigarette ends and scraps of paper. No, wait, there was one object that did intrigue us. We found it next to the exit, on the side of the escalator: a piece of wood with a leather strap at the end. Nobody could work out what it was. In any case, the murder could not have been committed with it.”

Roussel stopped, intrigued by the gleam of amusement in the stranger’s eye.

“Life is made of coincidences,” he observed, with a sort of dreamy contentment. “On the one hand, you’re a flatf — detective. And now this strange object. It’s incredible...”

“Don’t try and tell me that stick has something to do with the murder. I warn you, if you’re thinking that it’s some kind of ultra-sophisticated firing mechanism, you can forget about it. The experts were quite clear on that point.”

“I never said that.”

A long silence followed his words. Roussel had the distinct impression that the stranger had just solved the mystery. His calm and slightly condescending expression seemed to confirm that.

“From what I understand,” he said, eventually, “the victim had a very forceful personality.”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed Roussel. “Bertrand Charpie was not at all your typical captain of industry. His audacity was legendary, he launched an extraordinary number of new endeavours, and always successfully. He had also made a very promising start in politics. Yet, despite all that, he remained a very simple man of the people. He could often be seen buying one of his workers a drink...”

“...The more to exploit him. I see. I suppose that he also made grandiose philosophical speeches, preaching the love of one’s neighbour and disdaining all base material things, such as money and property.”

“Yes, he—”

“Do you honestly believe that it is possible to succeed as he did by following the philosophy that he preached?”

“Well, I—”

“Wasn’t he really the worst kind of hypocrite?”

“Maybe,” replied Roussel, noncommittally. “But what is your point?”

“Just this: Almost anybody could have held a grudge against such an individual, not least his relatives.”

“That may be. But it’s not the motive that’s the problem, it’s how the killer managed to do it. And I get the feeling,” added Roussel, his eyes narrowing, “that you have an idea.”

“Idea?” said the stranger, with a smirk. “I’d say I was certain.”

He stopped, looked furtively about him, thought for a moment, then continued:

“Listen, I can’t tell you right now, but I’m sure you’ll understand everything a few minutes after I’ve gone. For the time being, I’ll give you a clue. The killer is obviously one of the people in the tunnel at the time of the murder. Someone who has been carrying out a diabolical plan — sacrificing two innocent people so that Charpie’s death would look like some kind of curse. And I’ll bet the old gypsy’s palm was crossed with silver so he would utter his dire warnings. The challenge to Charpie was also part of the scheme: being the boastful braggart he was, he couldn’t have ignored it without damaging his reputation. As to how the trick was worked, I think the killer threw an exploding cigar, which he had just lit, an instant before he drew his gun, so as to create a diversion. I have to go now but, believe me, the rest will become clear to you. I’m sure of it.”

Taken by surprise, Roussel watched the stranger vanish into the night. Only the flutter of a few dead leaves marked the spot where he had been standing just a moment before.

I can’t tell you right now, but I’m sure you’ll understand everything... a few minutes after I’ve gone.

Mad as a hatter, thought Roussel. Not only had he tried to pretend that he had succeeded where a professional like himself, Roussel, had failed over the years, but, to cap it all, he had claimed that the solution would become clear in a few minutes, as if by magic. A candidate for the loony bin, no doubt about it.

Roussel started back towards his flat, but sleep was out of the question. He ducked into a bar, ordered a double scotch, and looked at his watch: eleven o’clock. Fifteen minutes had gone by since the stranger had disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders, emptied his glass, and ordered another one. In his mind’s eye, he saw the stranger with his arm in a sling. A curious individual. A tramp, as he had first thought? His eyes had been clear, not those of a wandering drunkard. Alert and mischievous...

Ten minutes later, he decided it was time to head home. He called for the bill and reached into his pocket, only to find his wallet had gone!

His wallet, which had contained more than half his pay.

Not only had it gone, but there was a large hole in his pocket, cut cleanly, as if by a razor.

— J. Masterson

James Powell seems to have at his fingertips an endless supply of fascinating but little-known facts. The “pig-faced woman” referred to in this new tale was a popular sideshow act in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, he tells us. Another of the story’s references is to the “Classic foot, which in William Blake’s apprentice etcher day was how feet were supposed to look.” In his story, it becomes the “Angelic foot.”

In 1859, after the birth of his colicky, leather-lunged son and namesake, Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency, began taking long late-night walks through the tiny principality.

Usually he kept to the city’s well-lit heart, for he found something sinister in gaslight, associating it with theater illuminations and pretense. As if he could fight all this falsity by staring it down, the detective’s steps often took him to the rue Babette arcade.

A few years back speculators had purchased several blocks of fine old apartment buildings there, gutted the interiors, and lowered the high ceilings, making three floors where two had been and three apartments where there had only been one, renting out these vast warrens to people who wanted a prestigious ad-dress behind a noble facade.

Then, inspired by the Crystal Palace in London and the souks of Libya, they had roofed over the streets before these buildings with iron and glass. Here the apartment dwellers came to escape their cramped quarters, strolling in slippers and with pipe to look in the shop windows or sitting in the cafes where they welcomed their friends as if into their own homes.

Ganelon shook his head over this confusion of indoors and out, of private and public, of day and night. At one time he thought the principality’s bright young men who walked their pet lobsters and tortoises on leashes there, each creature beneath its own little shell arcade, were mocking the scene.

Now he doubted they possessed such subtlety. Cardsharps used to fleece their marks by what was called glazing, where you sat your man down with a mirror behind him showing his cards. Eventually even the dullest of marks refused to sit anywhere near a mirror. But these young men walking their pets in the arcade wore the latest thing in men’s fashions, jackets with large silver buttons on whose surface the sharper could again read the mark’s cards. The style had come from Fong a la Mode, the Paris fashion house owned by Ganelon’s archrival, that master of pretense, the evil Dr. Ludwig Fong.

Ganelon suspected his seeing Fong behind everything was the onset of oboe madness, a common illness among players of woodwind instruments. When he mentioned this in his secret correspondence with the Mistress of Balmoral she told him the affliction was widespread in Scotland, where it was called “piper’s giddy,” and sent him a local nostrum for it which involved oatmeal and sheep tallow.

There were other evenings when Ganelon turned his back on the gaslight to walk through rougher neighborhoods still lit by sperm-whale oil lamps, which gave off a mellower light reminiscent of his childhood. These walks always ended at the Forest Gate and the customs booth of the rue Chenier, where taxes were collected on farm goods brought into the city each day.

Tonight, as Ganelon turned onto the rue Chenier, he discovered a man and woman ahead of him on the narrow sidewalk proceeding at a stately pace. Something about the couple drew the detective’s attention.

Ganelon placed the man in his mid forties, his clothes modest but well cared for, his shoes polished and not down-at-the-heels. This last observation proved little, however, since Fong Novelties of Essen introduced its patented heel that could be rotated to conceal wear. The only thing exceptional about the man was his tan bowler hat, a color, Ganelon understood, popular for seashore wear in England, where the salt air gave black bowlers a greenish tint.

The woman wore a long snuff-colored surtout reaching to the ground and a brimmed rice-straw hat with a veil so heavy a beekeeper would have envied it. Stockier and stoop-shouldered, she was taller than the man by a good inch. Though her companion held her by the elbow, she seemed to be setting the pace.

As he speculated, the couple abruptly swung around and came toward him. Caught off guard, Ganelon quickly stepped from the sidewalk to let them by, tipping his hat as he did.

The man solemnly returned the compliment as they passed. A pace or two later the woman turned back to look at the detective for a moment through her veil.

The set of the woman’s shoulders and the cock of her head as she did touched a dim corner of Ganelon’s memory, something too distant to be recalled. He stood watching in the gutter until the couple reached the corner and disappeared from sight.

And here was another thing. As they passed, Ganelon had been surprised by a familiar odor. The man smelled of eau de Tancredi, a toilet water concocted by the monks of Cologne especially for San Sebastiano’s royal house. As a privy counselor to Prince Conrad, Ganelon received a bottle of eau de Tancredi each Christmas. But how had this man come by his?

— Will Ryan

Robin Hathaway is the author of two popular series of mystery novels and the winner of the prestigious Agatha Award for mysteries in the cozy genre. She began her fiction-writing career in 1999 with the first of the Doctor Fenimore mysteries, the fourth of which, The Doctor Dines in Prague, came out in November of 2003. Her latest novel belongs to her “Jo Banks” series. See Satan’s Pony (St. Martin’s Press 9/04).

I searched the aisle signs for Soup. When I found it, I scanned the shelves for the familiar red, white, and gold labels. No-where in sight. Odd. Wait, there they are. But something’s wrong! They’re black, white, and gray. How strange. Why would Campbell’s give up such an attractive, well-known label for such a dull one? I turned to look at the shelves behind me, where the canned vegetables were displayed. Del Monte and Green Giant had also undergone changes. In-stead of green, white, and red, they were gray, white, and black. A panicky feeling came over me. Was I going color-blind? I looked up and down the aisle for something that would reassure me. A little boy came running toward me. He had black hair, pale skin, and wore a gray sweater. I swear I’d seen him when I came in the store and his sweater was light blue. I remembered noticing how it matched his eyes and wondered if his mother had chosen it for that reason. I looked down at my feet — and my stomach lurched. My sandals were a dingy gray. They had been an electric green when I’d put them on this morning! And my toenails — “Cherry Frost” when I’d painted them last night — were now jet black!

I stumbled down the aisle toward the produce department. A clerk in a white coat was spraying water on gray broccoli.

“Excuse me. Could you tell me what color my sandals are?” I was too upset to explain my odd question.

He gave me a quizzical look before glancing down at my feet. “What color were they when you put them on?” he asked with a mischievous grin.

“Green,” I said urgently. “Bright green.”

“Hmm.” He rubbed his chin, and I wondered if he was deciding whether or not to have some fun with me. “You must have stepped in a puddle,” he said, “’cause they’re a dirty gray now.”

“And my toenails?” I was desperate.

This time he looked at me as if I really was ready for the loony bin. “Black as the ace of spades.”

So it’s not my eyes! I felt a wave of relief. If this clerk saw everything in black, white, and gray, there must be something wrong with the lighting in the supermarket. I would speak to the manager. I stalked to the complaint department.

The young woman behind the counter was talking on her cell phone.

“Is the manager in?” I asked rather abruptly.

She shook her head, not bothering to interrupt what I was sure was a personal call.

“When will he be in?” I persisted.

She shrugged and turned her back on me.

Rude!

I decided I might as well do my shopping while I waited for the manager to show up. If this was a lighting problem and not some serious eye condition, I could relax a little. I picked out a few items and dropped them in my shopping cart. I made a point of choosing things that were normally white, like fish, potatoes, and cauliflower so they wouldn’t look so peculiar in my cart. I went back to the information desk twice to ask for the manager. The last time the woman was positively surly. I glanced at my watch. Almost time for General Hospital. Oh well, what was it to me if the supermarket had a lighting problem? I went through the checkout line.

As I stepped out into the parking lot, I almost dropped my shopping bag. All the cars were either black, white, or gray. I reached for the railing that kept the carts from rolling into the lot, for support.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” The boy in charge of the carts looked concerned.

“No, I’m not all right. What color are those cars out there?”

The boy looked puzzled. “Uh, some are black, there’s a gray one, and a couple are white... have you lost your car?”

“No. Yes. It’s a maroon Honda.”

The boy peered again at the lot. “I don’t see a maroon one, but there’s a black Honda over there.” He pointed.

“Oh, never mind.”

When I reached the black car he had indicated, I looked inside. There, on the front seat, was my yellow sweater (now white) where I had left it, and the paperback mystery, Death Is a Cold Mistress, that I had been reading. The scarlet pool of blood on the cover was now black. No need to check the license plate. It had to be my car. Maybe it was just because it was a dull, overcast day that everything looked so bleached and sickly. Or maybe an eclipse was coming. But there had been nothing on the TV or in the paper about it. I glanced at the sky. The sun was shining. I could feel its warmth on my face.

The ground around me looked as usual — black asphalt with the dirty remains of last week’s snowstorm. But across the street the normally yellow McDonald’s arches and the American flag hanging outside the post office had both been drained of their colors — replaced by black, white, and varying shades of gray.

The drive home was especially nerve-racking. The traffic lights were hard to read. The red light was black and the yellow and green were different shades of gray. I thought it would be reassuring to get home among familiar things. But it was just the opposite, because familiar things were no longer familiar. I forgot about General Hospital and wandered from room to room checking out the colors (or lack of them). My living-room rug, once a lovely pastel pink, was now a sickly gray. My favorite watercolor over the dining-room table was black and white. The only thing that was unchanged was the photograph of my parents on the piano. And it had always been black and white and gray. I stared at it for a full minute, seeking comfort from those dear faces. But they were gone now. They couldn’t help me. I turned away and picked up Sophie, my cat. She was also unchanged. Black, with one white paw, she looked the same as always. I settled into my favorite — once rose, now gray — wing chair, with Sophie on my lap, and stroked her. She purred loudly. Maybe I was just tired. I had been up late the night before watching the old-movie channel — an addiction of mine. There had been a double bill: The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, two of my favorites. I closed my eyes.

I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, the room had darkened and Sophie had vanished. I heard her mewing in the kitchen. I picked up my grocery bag, hoping the fish hadn’t spoiled, and made my way to the back of the house — flicking on every lamp and light switch within my reach as I passed. But the illumination was disappointing. Dimmer than usual, as if someone had replaced all the 60-watt bulbs with 25-watt bulbs.

My kitchen, a cheery yellow when I’d left this afternoon, was the color of dirty cement. I poured some cat nibbles into Sophie’s formerly blue, now gray, bowl. Undeterred by their new pallor, she gobbled the nibbles down with her usual gusto. Had I read that animals are color-blind?

The telephone on the counter rang. I answered it. A telemarketer. It was getting to be that time of day. Dinnertime. As I hung up, I wondered at my stupidity. Why don’t you call a friend? Ask them what’s happened? Before I did that, I turned on the little TV I kept in the kitchen to see if the five o’clock news had anything about this disaster. The anchor was reporting as usual about Iraq and the White House, a recent earthquake in the Far East, and a new snowstorm from the northwest. Nothing about a gray-out in Philadelphia. The only new thing about the news was that it wasn’t in Technicolor. It reminded me of when I was a child and all TV was black-and-white. In fact, this whole experience made me feel as if I was inside one of those old black-and-white noir movies that I used to love. Notorious, The Maltese Falcon, Rebecca. I doubted if I would ever watch one again. A musical comedy, in vivid Technicolor — that was what I craved! Now I knew how Dorothy must have felt in The Wizard of Oz when she returned to Kansas after her visit to the Emerald City. Only she, unlike me, had been happy to leave the colorful world behind.

I reached for the phone again and dialed Emily. She was my oldest and dearest friend. We had met in kindergarten. She was the only one I could ask about this weird situation who wouldn’t think I was crazy. The phone rang half a dozen times before Emily’s perky voice said, “Hello, everyone! I’ve taken off for the Bahamas for a few days. Leave your name and number and I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”

“Shoot.” I’d forgotten she’d left yesterday for her annual winter trip to the islands. As I replaced the receiver, I shivered. The thought of Emily sitting on a beach lined with colorful umbrellas, soaking up the sun, made me feel cold — and depressed. I could call someone else, but... This was ridiculous. It had to be my eyes. Otherwise everyone would be in a panic. Reporters would be screaming that the world had gone gray. Some would be blaming the terrorists — others would be blaming the President. But it was too late to see an eye doctor tonight. It took weeks to get an appointment, unless it was an emergency. I could call Angie, my neighbor. But she was such a busybody. As soon as I hung up she’d be calling everyone in the neighborhood, spreading the word that I was going blind — or getting senile.

I tried to read. At least the newspaper looked the same. Black type on white paper. But there wasn’t a thing in it about the incredible catastrophe. Of course this issue had come out this morning.

I paced the living-room floor. Sophie watched me disapprovingly from the sofa. I was usually a calm person. I should really eat something. But I had no appetite. And that stuff I’d bought at the supermarket had no appeal for me. Maybe I should go to bed. The sooner I fell asleep, the sooner it would be morning and I could call the doctor and describe my symptoms. Maybe if I really laid it on, he would even see me. Resigned that I could do nothing about my situation that night, I trudged upstairs. The bathroom was reassuring, at least. I lived in an old house and the bathroom was all white — white tile, white porcelain, and white plaster. The toothpaste and soap were white, too. All completely normal. The only off note was my toothbrush. Usually lavender, it was now — surprise, surprise — a dull gray.

In the middle of brushing my teeth, I stopped. What had that grocery clerk said? That my toenails were as “black as the ace of spades.” It couldn’t be my eyes, if my nails looked black to him, too. Unless he was pulling my leg. Having fun at the expense of an old woman.

I left the bathroom and went down the hall to my bedroom. When I stepped in, I was struck by how much it resembled the bedroom in the film Laura. I half expected Gene Tierney to step out of the closet in one of her satin and lace negligees. Or Bogart, as Sam Spade, to sit on the edge of the bed, putting together one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. Or Cary Grant to rush in and rescue me from Claude Rains. I wouldn’t mind Cary Grant showing up, but as I crawled between my gray sheets (they had been lilac this morning) and turned out the light, the room became peopled with less charming characters: Claude Rains’s scary mother; Mr. Gutman, a.k.a. The Fat Man; and that creepy housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. I was becoming like the heroine in Rebecca, played to perfection by Joan Fontaine. She was afraid of everything, expecting a bogeyman under every bed and a ghost around every corner.

Get hold of yourself, I said aloud. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this. Some of these eye conditions could come on suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. Maybe in the morning, when I was rested, everything would be back to normal. With that comforting thought I turned out the light and snuggled under the covers. At least in the dark, everything was the same as the night before.

I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, the clock said one-thirty. I stretched my legs, hunting for Sophie with my toes. She wasn’t there. She always slept at the end of my bed. I switched on the light and the gray room burst upon me, more startling than if it had become neon pink or orange. I reached for my robe, slid into my slippers, and went to look for her.

“Sophie?” I called from the top of the stairs. Usually, when she heard my voice, she came swiftly, padding up the stairs, and wrapped herself around my legs. The stairs remained empty. I started down. On the third step, I heard something. Not a noise, exactly, but a definite sound. A sort of soft shuffling. Cautiously, I descended three more steps. That sound again. I stood, rooted to the step — afraid to go up or down.

Crash!

I jumped. There was nothing soft about that! It was a relief to hear a real noise. Sophie must be into something. The noise had come from the kitchen. She must have knocked over a pot or pan. I hurried down the rest of the stairs. As before, I flicked on the lights as I passed through each room. And, as before, the illumination was weak due to my eye condition — or whatever it was.

“Sophie?” I stepped into the kitchen and switched on the light. A pot lay upside down on the floor near the stove. But no cat brushed my bare ankles. Instead, I felt a cold draft. The back door was ajar. I was sure I had locked it before I went to bed. Oh dear, maybe the cat had gotten out. Or maybe someone else... had gotten in. I stood riveted, wondering if I should call 911.

I lifted the receiver. Hands grabbed me around the throat and began to squeeze. The phone slipped from my hand. I struggled, gasping, clawing at the hands. Their pressure increased. I felt dizzy. I stared at the blank, gray kitchen wall (which had been yellow that morning). As I stared, two words slowly emerged in the center — in dark type — just as they had at the close of all those noir movies long ago — except for one thing: This time the words were backwards, and — who were all those strangers on the other side, staring up at me...? DNE EHT

Carmel California’s Robin Wilson has had several dozen science fiction short stories and novelettes published over the years, and in 1995 St. Martin’s Press brought out his mystery novel Death by Degrees. The author is a former employee of the CIA, and says that he also knows the world of higher education “truly well.” His setting for this story is the world of academe, a California college where it appears that one professor has it out for another.

Professors divide themselves into sects, and you can tell one faith from another by the cars they drive. Faculties in Business Administration and Engineering drive big American cars, mostly SUVs. They vote Republican. Those of us in the Liberal Arts and Sciences favor unassuming Fords, Hondas, or Chevys, if we haven’t made tenure, or the least expensive Volvo, Mercedes, or an occasional BMW, if we have. We vote Democrat. And people in the fine and performing arts wheel around in battered VW campers or tiny Japanese vehicles that look like they ought to have a winding key sticking up out of their tops. And they vote for odd parties you’ve never heard of. There are exceptions, of course, but they only prove my case.

So I was surprised one warm autumn day after lunch in downtown Greenfield, as I was walking back to campus with my blue blazer slung over my shoulder, to be honked out of my reverie by a huge black Lincoln Navigator that swooshed to the curb next to me and revealed its driver to be the ethereal Naomi Cordier, Associate Professor of Dance, clad, as usual, in something diaphanous and floral. In her mid thirties, small, short dark hair, ravishingly beautiful, Naomi had enjoyed a good — for a dancer — ten-year run with major companies, until a foot injury had forced her retirement. She had picked up an MFA in Dance that would allow her to teach, and when she came to Greenfield State three or four years ago, every straight man on campus fell instantly in love. But Naomi in the Navigator? Think Audrey Hepburn suited up to play linebacker for the 49ers.

She leaned across to call out through the passenger-side window: “Dr. Haas! Peter! Have you got a minute? I was just on my way to campus to try to see you. I — uh — we’ve got a problem.”

And of course “problem” is the magic word for me. Like Shazam! or the click of Dorothy’s slippers, that word is transforming, in my case from a middle-aged English professor with the bland looks of a Dutch cheese salesman into the university president’s executive assistant charged with discreetly resolving all puzzles, conundrums, screwups, and dastardly acts likely to bring embarrassment to our campus.

“Sure, Naomi,” I said, climbing into the Navigator. “Where’d you get this juggernaut?”

“It’s Harrison’s,” she said, pulling back into Main Street traffic. “Harrison Buckman. You know, in Electrical Engineering?”

“Yes, we’ve done some rock climbing together.”

Harrison was much admired as “The King of Grants,” and he deserved it. His crew of a dozen scientists and technicians in our Nanotechnology Lab had brought Greenfield State University a modicum of fame.

“Harrison and I, we...” She glanced appraisingly at me and then returned her eyes to the crowded road ahead. “We’ve been living together...” Her voice died and she drove on in silence as if weighing choices. Then, with a determined shake of her head: “Harrison has been hurt. He’ll be all right. The doctor says there’s been no permanent damage, but someone beat him up pretty badly.”

“Beat him up! Who?”

“That’s the problem. Harrison says he doesn’t know who did it. He was out as usual walking his dog on the hiking trail behind our — his house last evening, just after dark, when it happened.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I wanted to, but Harrison said no, I don’t know why.”

“And you want me to do... what?”

“Will you come out to the house and talk to Harrison? He’s in too much pain to drive to campus.”

“Does he want to talk with me?”

Her voice subdued, telling tales out of school, Naomi said, “He doesn’t know I’ve come to see you.”

She wheeled the Navigator in at the campus parking-lot entrance, stopped, and turned to me, her eyes moist. “Please, Peter, we need help. Something’s wrong and I’m worried.”

I dropped down from the Navigator with a promise of action, retrieved my Volvo from the lot, and cell-phoned my office to tell them I would be late returning from lunch. I followed Naomi then back up Main and across town to Mariposa Estates, a development of modest one-story mission-style homes where many faculty lived. Naomi pulled up a driveway and into a garage, its door sliding down behind the Navigator. I parked at the curb and she met me at the door, elfin, beautiful, worried. “He’s out on the patio,” she said, leading me through a book-lined living room and out a pair of French doors onto a shaded pad of tile, into air scented with jasmine. A redwood recliner bore Harrison Buckman, a wiry, athletic man in his mid forties suddenly fattened by swaths of gauze and tape across his chest, over one shoulder, and around his right arm and hand. He turned his head towards us in obvious pain. His face was red and bruised, one eye nearly swollen shut. “What the hell, Naomi!” he muttered. He sighed and struggled up to a seated position and shook my hand with his left hand. “Hey, Peter. Sorry to bother you with this.”

“Wow, Harrison,” I said. “How fast was it going when it hit you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Naomi tell you what happened?”

“She says you don’t know who did it. Were you robbed? Don’t you think you ought to make a police report?”

Instead of answering, Buckman glanced over my shoulder at Naomi and said, “Hey, Naomi, I’m dying of thirst. Could you get me and Peter something? A beer, maybe? You, Peter?”

“Maybe a Coke.”

Naomi disappeared and Buckman leaned toward me. “Sit down, Peter,” he whispered. “I wasn’t robbed. And I don’t want to upset Naomi, but I think the guy who did this to me was Joe Hayden.”

“In Fine Arts? The painter who used to play NFL football?”

“Yes. Played defensive end a couple of seasons for the Raiders back in the ’eighties, before he got hurt. I guess he discovered painting in therapy, began to sell well up in Bay Area galleries, and got picked up by the GSU Art Department.”

“Can you identify him to the cops?”

Harrison shook his head gingerly, eyes closed. “No. I really didn’t see who it was. Just a dark shadow out of the corner of my eye and whap! Dropped a bag over my head filled with something. Ether, maybe? Whatever it was, I tried to pull the bag off, took one breath, and I was out for fifteen, twenty minutes. Came to all beat to hell, with Lolly — that’s my dog — licking my arm.” He shifted on the recliner to find a more comfortable position. “Bruised some ribs and damn near broke my right arm, and my right hand looks like he stamped on it. Broke two fingers.”

“So what makes you think it’s Hayden?”

“Hayden is Naomi’s ex. They got married about a year after she came here, but it didn’t work out and she left him.”

“And you think that’s why he popped you? Because you and Naomi...?”

“It’s a good bet. She says he’s never really gotten over their divorce. Still telephones once in a while and sends her cards on anniversaries. I don’t think she’s afraid of him, but he worries her. She says he’s gentle, a lot more artist than footballer, but maybe a little nuts.”

“All the more reason to call the cops,” I said.

“No way, Peter. I’ve got to handle this my own way. First of all, if Naomi knew Joe did this, she’d be really upset. And if word got out about it, can you imagine the stories in the Greenfield Gazette? Hell, in the San Francisco Chronicle? ‘GSU Professor Beaten in Love Triangle.’ That’s all it would take to shut off the National Science Foundation and every other granting agency. I might just as well kiss the Nanotech Lab goodbye. I mean, you don’t have to be a saint to do good science, but the big foundations like Hewlett and Keck and Carnegie, they won’t let you play in their sandbox if your reputation’s smudged with any kind of sex thing.”

I nodded. “I can see that. But why would he do something like this? Was he trying to get rid of you permanently?”

“No. I don’t think so. He could have done it easily enough with me completely out like that.”

I was puzzled. “I don’t know Hayden very well. We talked once at one of those faculty teas the Swensons throw; you know, where the only ‘t’ consumed is preceeded by ‘mar’ and followed by ‘ni.’ How sure are you he’s the guy?”

“Well, the bag he used. It’s over there by the railing. Take a look.”

I crossed the patio and spotted the bag, crumpled brown canvas, the kind of sack you might carry fifty pounds of potatoes in. Or four or five footballs. It still gave off a faint medicinal smell. On one side was a stencil in white of a pirate wearing an eye patch, the logo of the Oakland Raiders.

“See?” said Buckman. “And what his motive was, I’m not sure, but he went to a lot of trouble to disable my right arm and hand. I’m not one of those theoretical guys who do all their research with a blackboard and a computer. I’m hands-on, and in nanotechnology, a good hand is pretty important. I mean, you’re manipulating stuff under the scope that’s only a few atoms wide. Maybe he thought he could put me out of business.” Buckman paused, squirming to relieve some pain. “Anyway, I don’t give a damn why he did it, but first chance I get, I’m going to lay for him with a baseball bat. See how he likes to paint with his arm in a sling.”

“In the Internet age,” says Timothy Dempsey, “just a moment’s weakness can lead to grave con-sequences. There are probably millions of good family men [like the one in this story] who could suddenly appear to be less than they are.” Mr. Dempsey lives in North Carolina. He has been published in several professional journals, but this is his first fiction. He is currently finishing up his first novel.

Fred was about to hit the snooze alarm for the third time when he realized he had better get out of bed. It took each member of the family a little longer on Mondays, and each of them relied on him to get things started. If he slept too late, the morning became a panic and everyone blamed him. He’d rather drag his head off the pillow now than have to listen to all the chatter that would come his way if he delayed. He swung his legs off his side of the bed, slipped on his boxers, and stumbled down the hallway. He stuck his head in his son’s room. “David, time to get up.” David mumbled, but Fred knew his words were not registering. He walked in and shook his fifteen-year-old’s shoulder. “David, it’s seven-oh-seven; I’ll be back in ten minutes to make sure you’re up. You need to print out your paper, remember?”

“Dad, go away.”

“You asked me to remind you!”

“Remind me in ten minutes.”

Fred backed out of the room and proceeded down the hallway. He knocked on his daughter’s door. No response. He knocked louder. “Pumpkin, time to get up.” Still no reply. He cracked open the door and peeked in, knowing how much Connie hated it if he looked in on her while she was dressing. All he saw was a big lump under the heavy quilt. As he shook the lump, he looked beyond it to the empty bed on the other side of the room, so nicely made and covered with a collection of colorful stuffed animals, most of them acquired, one at a time, on his business trips. As usual, he had a twinge, just a moment, of missing his other daughter, wondering what routine she used to get out of bed in the dorm. “Come on, Connie, time to roll. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

He retreated to his bedroom, noticed that his wife, Sheila, was still sleeping, and quietly slipped into their bathroom, closing the door behind him. He ran the shower to get the hot water up while he brushed his teeth. He just needed a quick rinse, having showered and shaved the night before. He dried himself hurriedly, slipped into a pair of sweatpants, and threw on a T-shirt, preparing himself for round two.

Back to David’s room. “Seven twenty-one, Son; boat sails in thirty-nine minutes.”

“All right, all right, I’m up.” That was easy. Knock on Connie’s door. No reply. Crack the door again. The lump had not budged; there were no indications that it harbored any signs of life. He leaned over and shook it. “Connie, thirty-eight minutes to liftoff.” Nothing, not a stir. He dug at the quilt trying to locate her head, pulled the quilt back and saw the mass of unkempt, tangled, and knotted blond hair. Her face must be in there somewhere. He brushed the hair back till he found it, smiled at how peaceful she looked, then all but yelled, “C’mon, Connie, it’s time to get up. Let’s go.” She half opened her eyes, barely uncovering her baby blues behind the narrow slits.

“Uumpf,” she said, but that was enough for Fred.

He bounded down the stairs, let the dog out into the fenced-in backyard, and walked up the front driveway to retrieve his Newsday. Back inside, he checked to assure that all the bodies were stirring. David was in the shower and Connie was pounding on the door telling him to hurry up. Good. Everything was normal. He put the coffee on, grabbed some cereal, a bowl, and some milk, and sat at the breakfast table to look at the paper. Starting at the back, he checked the football scores first and scanned some of the articles, happy that the Jets had won the Sunday-night game, during which he had fallen asleep. He flipped the paper to the front, just as David and Connie entered the kitchen. He glanced up at the digital clock on the microwave and said, “Nine minutes to liftoff.”

Both kids groaned at the same time. Connie said, “Dad, don’t you ever get tired of annoying us?”

He laughed, grabbed his “World’s Greatest Dad” mug of coffee, and headed up the stairs, dropping a quick and curt “Morning” to Sheila as he passed her on the stairs. Out of the sweats and T-shirt and into a golf shirt and khakis in no more than a minute. God, he loved casual dress. Since they’d stopped insisting on suits in the office, a good ten minutes of his time had been freed up every morning. He looked in the mirror and ran his hand through his thinning hair, bounded down the stairs, poured the rest of his coffee into an Amazon.com travel cup, and added some hot coffee from the pot to top it off. “C’mon, kids, let’s go, time to move out. It’s eight-oh-two; we’re two minutes late; let’s get the lead out.”

Sheila was standing by the coffee machine. She had turned the TV on and she was watching the Today show. He leaned down to kiss her goodbye and he could see that she was upset. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“It’s happened again.”

“What’s happened again, Hon?”

“A fourteen-year-old girl. Kidnapped right out of her own bedroom.” She looked up with tears in her eyes, then glanced across the room at her thirteen-year-old daughter. “Fred, she lives out on the Island, on the North Fork, just an hour or so from here. Oh God, Fred, this is so frightening. I don’t care what you say, I want a house alarm. I don’t care what it costs. I’m calling today. I’m going to have one installed as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you want. But we gotta go.”

Here with a story about newspapermen is lifelong newspaperman Jeffry Scott. As many longtime EQMM readers will know, “Jeffry Scott” is a pseudonym the author uses for his short fiction — which he’s been producing for EQMM for more than thirty years. Just like the characters in his new story, Mr. Scott once traveled the globe in pursuit of news. Now he’s mostly to be found in England.

It is not a big canvas as they go, about three feet deep by two wide, rather dull and muddy at a distance and the composition seems odd. Most of the bottom third is filled by a tiled floor — plain tiles — uninteresting.

Then comes the chair, a chunky, peasant-made job with-out curves or decoration, its color only a touch darker than those tiles — unless that’s a trick of the eye, difficult to tell somehow — so it appears to be growing out of the floor like fungus. Perhaps the picture needed cleaning or the on-looker was confused.

I’ve never seen the thing, you understand. We are dealing in hearsay.

Robin Ratcliffe told me all about it and that is how I can describe this painting in considerable detail. Robin wasn’t one for art galleries but he felt seedy one morning-after and needed a washroom in a hurry. Public buildings tend to have them. He was halfway between a bar and a hotel at the time, but the gallery was right across the street so that’s where he went.

He wouldn’t say at the time what city he was in. I think he feared that morbid curiosity might drive me to try my own luck, if I knew the location. With hindsight I believe that the gallery is in New York, west of Central Park. I could confirm that; I have no intention of doing so.

Brits are strange, self-conscious creatures, especially when abroad. Pit stop completed, Robin decided that it was bad form to treat a shrine of culture so dismissively, as if anyone noticed him enter or would have cared if they had done. The place was cool without being chilly, quiet and calm and restful, persuading him to make a token round of the exhibits.

Robin was very much your see-one-Old-Master-and-go-off-home type but he did his best. Works on show were impressively mounted and some forbade viewers to cross red cords fencing a wall-space, but the pictures struck him as no better than passable to mediocre. Bored yet dutiful, he drifted through a couple of rooms and then he found sanctuary as the queasiness struck again.

The gallery wasn’t busy at the time, and a side room small enough to be humanly scaled seemed to beckon. It looked cosy, Robin said bitterly. Settling into a corner of a surprisingly comfortable window seat, he closed his eyes to offset a brief spell of dizziness. He definitely did not nod off, Robin Ratcliffe assured me long afterwards. Then he apologised for raising his voice. (I had not suggested that he’d dreamed what happened to him; he was just understandably... sensitive about the incident.)

The next bit came out during his second or third version of the story. Originally, Robin skipped the part where he opened his eyes. After a few retellings he understood that I wouldn’t laugh at him or, worse still, remain solemn and then speed back to El Vino, the Fleet Street hangout, to announce that Robbo had lost it or, best possible case, turned most peculiar.

Eyes closed, for no logical reason Robin felt uneasy and borderline alarmed. It was an illogical relief to find upon opening his eyes that he still had the side room to himself. He took a deep, reassuring breath. Quietness deeper than a hush had been claustrophobic enough to generate minor panic. He said, inadequately, that it was as if an invisible balloon had inflated to expel all sound and a lot of air from the room.

He was rising from the couch, idly scanning the far wall, because that was the one facing him, when he noticed a darkish mass in a particular frame. Robin took it for storm clouds over a calm sea turned gory by the setting sun. It wasn’t that he liked seascapes so much as that they offered the charm of the familiar. Generations of his family had been Royal Navy and he’d grown up with Squall in the Narrows, Dawn Over the Bay of Bengal and suchlike. Instead of leaving, he walked over to investigate.

Disappointingly, the picture turned out to be a domestic interior, a kitchen by the look of it, probably turn of the nineteenth century. The clouds were — he couldn’t be bothered to make out what they were — and the sunset sea was a tiled floor in need of a damned good scrubbing. Five wasted paces, yet seconds later Robin remained in place.

No expert, as we have established, he was trying to calculate whether this was a very good picture that was easy to overlook or an amateurish effort, out of its league. Its clumsiness could be deliberate and clever, to those capable of appreciating an artist’s intention. Maybe so much featureless floor with everything else crammed in the top right corner was clever, too.

“Everything else” came down to a wooden chair, graceless and putting him in mind of Van Gogh, except that the chair on the tiles didn’t gladden the eye. It’s got something, all the same, Robin told himself, and then he leaned forward, wondering how he could have been so unobservant.

He’d assumed that dark blobs and blotches on the chair made up a poorly rendered coat or shawl thrown over the ladder-back. No such thing: It was an old woman sitting there. At which point Robin Ratcliffe caught on at last.

He was looking at a trick picture, like Magritte’s musical instrument which is also a face. Or those more elaborate novelties: the painted surface is corrugated so that the subject depends on one’s angle. Change that and the subject melts from a beauty in full finery to a solitary macaw profiled on its perch.

The chair thing was so take-it-or-leave-it simple — what I see is what you get and it interested me, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, the artist seemed to snarl — that the concept of a deliberate illusion hadn’t occurred to Robin.

Now that he was studying rather than glancing, it was obvious. The whole thing was a double bluff, overtly naive and unskilled but (cliché, sorry) fiendishly cunning. A visual equivalent to the breed of con man playing the hick to take marks off-guard.

There she was, the old woman, waiting to be found.

Go away, whined a voice at the back of Robin’s mind, and of course he ignored it. Her back was turned to the viewer. Yes, he made out the curve of her spine and a large, lumpy head, except that it had to be one of those coal-scuttle bonnets. An unlikely, awkward blotch of shadow on the side of the chair was her hand, evidently black-gloved.

That accounted for the impression of arrested movement, once the figure came into focus and revealed itself. She’d heard footsteps or the creak of a door and she was about to peer over her shoulder... The longer he stared, the more he saw.

Gloved fingers gripped the chair, and if the shadows dispersed one would find her thin arm braced and straining to swivel the meager body. Okay, done that, a bored strand of his thinking ran. Let’s be on our way.

Urgency wasn’t involved, as it had been with the earlier, near-subconscious pleading to be anywhere but near the old woman. Mission Control sent the message that he was emerging from a medium-bad hangover, not before time, and some food would be appreciated.

Robin Ratcliffe’s tale ended there, first time around, with a hangdog grimace. In newspaper jargon I’d wasted attention on a “delayed drop,” meaning introductory matter unfolded at length — only there was nothing to follow. Politely put, an anticlimax; less politely, he had suckered me into a shaggy-dog story and I’d missed the punch line.

Except that Robin wasn’t like that. The trivial incident — as it seemed at first telling — had impressed him enough to share it. Shortly afterwards, our flight was called or the lift doors opened and the man we awaited stepped out — for the life of me I cannot recall the setting or how we came to be talking about a picture in the first place.

My memory is no worse than the next fellow’s, whoever he is. I have good recall of what Robin Ratcliffe told me over a five-year period. It’s just that I was pinballing around the world at the time, one eye on my watch, waiting for the Tilt light to start flashing — missed deadline or faulty telex machines, on which one relied in the primitive era a quarter-century or so ago. Actually, now that it’s going on paper I do remember where he told me, and belatedly, a connection is made.

Robin started explaining about the art gallery because...

Ruth Francisco’s first short story for EQMM, “Dream of Murder,” also formed part of her second novel, Good Morning, Darkness (Mysterious Press/’04). At the time of our publication, reviews of the book were not in. Now they are, and here’s what PW has to say: “The adroit plotting and additional fillip at the end are sufficiently compelling to qualify this as one of the year’s best mysteries.” Hats off to an extraordinarily promising new author!

October, 1935. Dr. George Kendall Dazey arrived home for a late lunch, hoping to see his wife before dashing back to Santa Monica Hospital for Mrs. Ruby Crockett’s operation at 3:45. He parked his maroon Roadster at the corner of Twenty-third and Georgina, and cut across the lawn to his front door.

As he stepped over the spongy grass, trying not to muddy his shoes, he glanced up: A white figure appeared to be floating inside the front window. He heard a crash followed by a frustrated moan. He ran to the front door. It was locked. “Doris! Are you all right?” Breaking into a sweat, he jammed his key into the lock and swung open the door.

Teetering tiptoed on the edge of a dining-room chair, Doris reached for the top of the Dutch cupboard. She yanked a candy dish off the top shelf and thrust her fingers beneath the pale-blue wrappers. “Goddammit!” She whirled the dish across the room; butterscotch candies skittered over the terra cotta tiles like hail.

“I found all of your hiding places when you were away,” Dazey said calmly. He placed his medical bag on the dining-room table, then took off his hat and coat.

Doris spun around and fell back into the cupboard, yelping as the sharp shelves dug into her ribs. “I hate you,” she hissed, swatting away his hand. “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” She lost her balance and grabbed the shelves. The cupboard rocked forward: Porcelain cups and glass goblets slid and shattered on the floor. As she let go, the chair wobbled and her foot slipped. Dazey rushed to catch her.

She punched his arms, smacking his spectacles across the room. The chair tipped over and she fell on top of him. Dazey’s legs buckled and they both tumbled to the floor. She beat his chest, thrashing wildly. “Let go of me, you bastard!”

He grabbed her wrists and rolled her over, straddling her as gently as he could. He glanced down at her legs, spread-eagled, her nightgown hitched up around her waist, her thighs bloody, cut from the broken glass. He felt hollowed out, as if a cold damp cavern had replaced the core of his being.

“Makes you hard, doesn’t it?” She sang, taunting him, “Dr. Dick with his big fat prick, puts you to sleep with a candy stick.”

He couldn’t bring himself to slap her. He leaned on her wrists and brushed his nose over her naked shoulder, breathing her in, whispering as if to a baby, “Shh, darling, quiet. Everything is all right.” She groaned, relaxing, then burst into tears.

He sat back on his heels and let her cry for a few moments. He then wrapped one arm around her waist, the other under her knees, and lifted her carefully. She clung to his neck, whimpering softly like a child yanked from the path of an oncoming train.

As he carried his wife upstairs, her perfumed heat seeped from her torn nightgown. Her breath smelled of sherry as she gulped for air. He must have missed a bottle in the kitchen used for cooking. Doris hadn’t.

“I’m so scared!” she sobbed, clutching at his collar.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” he assured her, which set off another set of howls in sliding octaves, slicing the air like scimitars in a ritual dance.

He kissed her hair, his lips trembling. Nothing was enough. Not his love, not his drugs, not his professional expertise. He stood by helplessly as demons tried to scratch their way out of her skull. “It’s okay, angel,” he whispered. “I’m here. You’re safe now.” But he knew it wasn’t true.

Dazey laid her on the bed. He tucked the pink satin sheet under her chin, leaving her left arm exposed. Her crooning subsided to a whimper; she followed his movements with watery blue eyes wide open. He pushed up the sleeve of her nightgown, unlocked a drawer in the bureau, and pulled out a black box that looked like a revolver case. He opened it. Inside sat ten prepared hypodermic needles packed as snug as bullets.

Dazey brushed her hair out of her face. Her beauty took his breath away. It always had.

They met in 1933 at the Cocoanut Grove. He was smitten by her, a tall, thin actress with honeycomb curls bouncing on her shoulders. Her large eyes, cerulean blue, were set off by a white lock of hair that started above her right eye and curled around her ear. Dazey knew immediately that she was ill, hopped-up on studio white, downing champagne with the thirst of a long-distance runner. He watched her from across the lounge: her eyes darting back and forth between the guests, her delicate hands gesturing to someone, then landing on her fur collar as if seeking warmth and security, like an injured sparrow chirping for help, fraying her broken wings as she beat the ground in fear and frustration. He yearned to save her.

Yet he knew even then that there would be no gratitude and little love. He knew that if an injured bird doesn’t die in your care, it will peck your hands bloody to be free. He knew that one day she would hate him.

Many of his friends wondered what he saw in her, but to him her soul was as pure and elusive as a child’s laugh, her beauty so intense, it nearly hurt him to look at her. She made him feel strong and capable and generous. She had once kissed his palms and told him they were like the sculptured hands of Michelangelo’s “David.” They made her feel safe, she said, words that flooded his body with love for her; if he could do this, to still her distress for even a moment, perhaps she could be saved.

Dazey dabbed her arm with alcohol and placed the used needle in a tray.

She closed her eyes, smiled, then opened them again. “I don’t think I’ll go out tonight,” she said. “I think I’ll stay right here.”

“We’ll see how you feel,” he said cautiously. Even a hint of disapproval might send her on a frenzied escapade.

“Maybe I’ll go pick up Wally and make you dinner.”

Even now she was beautiful, he thought, her moist eyes sparkling like a grove of blue spruce after an ice storm, her mouth turned up sweetly. “I need to check on my patients,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Do you want me to have Betty Rose come stay with you?”

“No, I’m fine. I feel better now.”

“Okay, my precious.” He’d call Betty anyhow. “You get some rest.” He kissed her on the forehead and left the door to her room ajar.

Bill Pronzini is one of the most versatile writers working in the mystery field. Several recent books should interest his fans. Five Star Press has a new collection entitled A “Nameless Detective” Casebook, featuring Mr. Pronzini’s most famous character (from 40 short stories and 28 novels). The most recent Nameless novel is Spook (Carroll & Graf). There’s also a recent stand-alone novel, Alias Man (Walker 2004).

I was sitting in Jocko’s Cafe, at my usual place in front of the open-air window facing Round Bay.

Jocko’s isn’t much. Just your standard back-island roadside bar and grill, mostly frequented by locals black and white and a few slumming tourists, on the southeastern tip of St. John, the smallest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The road that loops around from Coral Bay ends fifty yards from Jocko’s dirt parking lot. End of the line.

The building is two-storied, made of pink stucco, and flanked by palmettos and elephant’s-ears; bar and food service downstairs, Jocko’s quarters upstairs. The pocked-plaster walls are festooned with nautical paintings, none of them very good, and dozens of snapshots of customers with and without Jocko. The furniture is old and mismatched. There are a couple of ceiling fans, a bleached steer head mounted above the bar, a dartboard, and a blackboard with the daily menu chalked on it. Today’s specials are every day’s specials — conch chowder and callaloo, a pair of West Indian dishes.

That’s because Jocko is West Indian, a native of St. Croix. Plump, hairless, skin as sleek and shiny as a seal’s. In one ear he wears a big gold hoop that gives him a lopsided appearance. He smiles a lot, laughs often — a happy man.

The open-air window frames a view of the narrow inlet and the broad expanse of Round Bay beyond, and if you sit at the table in its exact center you can also see much of the far shore — the villa-spotted hills above Coral Bay, and the jungly slopes of Bordeaux Mountain, the highest point on St. John at 1,277 feet. That table and chair are mine by tacit agreement. On the rare occasions when I’m not in the cafe, Jocko refuses to let anybody else sit there. My seat, my window, my view.

On the scarred tabletop was my usual glass of Arundel Cane Rum. Arundel Estate is the oldest continuously operated distillery in the eastern Caribbean, and the only one that makes rum directly from sugar-cane juice. I won’t drink anything else. Jocko imports it for me from Tortola, once the largest pirate community in the neighboring British Virgins. He does it because he likes me. And he likes me for the same reason he reserves my table: I’m his best customer.

We were the only occupants when the man in the yachting cap came in. He’d been in a couple of times before, once to eat lunch and once to drink a beer and give me a couple of curious looks. Big man in white slacks and a patterned island shirt, with a rough-textured face like something sculpted out of wet sand. The yachting cap didn’t mean anything; he wasn’t off any of the pleasure craft anchored out on Round Bay. One of the slumming tourists from Cruz Bay or Coral Bay.

This time he didn’t sit at the bar. Thirty seconds after he walked in, he was standing between me and the window, looking down and smiling in a tentative way.

I said, “You’re blocking my view.”

“Oh, sorry.” He gestured at one of the empty chairs. “Mind if I join you?”

“Why?”

“No particular reason. I’ve seen you here before — always alone. I thought you might like some company.”

“As long as you don’t block the view.”

He positioned the chair carefully to my left, sat down, and fanned himself with his hand. “Hot.”

“Not so bad today. You should be here in July and August.”

“I’d rather not, thanks. My name’s Talley, John Talley.”

“Paul Anderson.”

“Buy you a drink, Paul?”

“I wouldn’t say no. Arundel Cane Rum, neat.”

“I’ll just have a cold beer. Too hot for rum.” He called out the order to Jocko. “I’m a writer,” he said to me.

“Is that right?”

“Books, stories, magazine articles. Down here from New York to look for material, soak up a little local color.”

“And you think I might qualify in the color department. Rumpled, unshaven, rum-soaked — a character.”

“Well, I’ll admit you interest me.”

Jocko brought the drinks and I had some of mine.

“I’m staying up at Coral Bay,” Talley said. “I like St. John better than St. Thomas and this side of the island better than Cruz Bay. Fewer people, none of the conventional tourist atmosphere.”

“So do I. For the same reasons.”

“Been in the Virgins long?”

“Twenty years. Almost twenty-one.”

“Practically a native. You live out here on the tip?”

I nodded. “Saltbox up by Hansen’s Bay.”

“What’s a saltbox?”

“Small square house. Cheap rent.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I don’t do anything,” I said.

“You mean you’re out of work?”

“No. I mean I don’t do anything. Except come here to Jocko’s every day.”

“Retired?”

“No.”

“Independent means?”

“No.”

“Then how do you make ends meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I emptied my glass, watching the pleasure boats. Catamarans, mostly. Ketches, sloops, a couple of yawls. A big motor-sailer flying a British flag was making down around the point from Hurricane Hole. It’d be cool out there on her foredeck. The trades were blowing soft today.

“Sorry if I seem nosy,” Talley said. “Writers tend to be that way. Nature of the beast.”

“You really want to know how I make ends meet?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“I stole some money once,” I said.

“You... what?”

“Embezzled it, to be exact. There’s still a little left. That’s what I live on.”

Talley moved in his chair, making it scrape on the rough tile floor. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel the pressure of his eyes.

He said, “Are you serious?”

“I’m always serious.”

“How much money did you embezzle?”

“Nearly half a million dollars.”

“My God! You actually got away with that much?”

“That’s right.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Twenty-one years.”

“And you were never caught?”

“Never close to being caught.”

“How did you do it? Where?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “And talking’s thirsty work.”

He signaled to Jocko.

I didn’t say anything until I had a fresh glass in front of me. Then I said, “I was an accountant for an engineering firm in San Francisco, one of the largest in the west. I worked there for ten years. Lived a quiet life alone in a furnished apartment. No vices. Exemplary record. Completely trustworthy employee.”

“What changed you into an embezzler?”

“Combination of things. A woman I wanted and couldn’t have without a lot of money. Dreams of living a life of luxury in the tropics, never having to work anymore. The realization of how easy it would be, given my position with the firm. The challenge of planning it, setting it up, getting away with it.”

“How did you go about it?”

“My job was in accounts payable,” I said, “authorizing the payment of invoices from the firm’s various subcontractors. I set up several dummy companies and arranged for the submission of monthly invoices of small to moderate sums, never more than a few thousand dollars, and authorized payment into dummy bank accounts. Then I opened a private account in the Cayman Islands and funneled the money into it a little at a time. I went about it all very carefully, very methodically. It took me a year to embezzle a total of $480,000. And to establish an untraceable new identity and make the necessary arrangements to disappear, so I would be free to spend it. When the time came, the Friday afternoon before the annual audit was scheduled, I left San Francisco and spent nearly two months traveling across country by car, train, bus, and plane, using assumed names and different disguises. Then I used my new identity to get to St. Thomas — no trouble at all. Annalise had already been in Charlotte Amalie a month by then—”

“Annalise? Oh, the woman. She was in on it, then?”

“Oh yes. From the first. She found the project as exciting as I did.”

“Project. That’s a nice way of putting it.”

I shrugged. “She rented a villa, a large one at Limetree Beach, and let it be known that her husband would be joining her shortly. By the time I arrived she’d made several friends in the community — she had that knack. I was accepted immediately, without question.”

“You never came under any kind of scrutiny?”

“No. Annalise and I did nothing to call undue attention to ourselves. And I was thinner than I’d been in San Francisco, I’d let my hair grow long and wore a moustache — I looked nothing at all like the embezzling accountant. We had no difficulty settling into the luxury lifestyle I’d always coveted — parties, fine dining, catering servants. I bought an old yawl and learned to sail, and we visited some of the other Caribbean islands, alone and with other couples. I had everything I ever wanted. I thought I had the world by the tail.”

“But then the money ran out, is that it?”

“No. We spent a lot, yes, but I’d also invested a third of the original sum — wisely enough so that we had a steady supplementary income.”

“Then what did happen?” Talley asked.

“For a long time nothing happened. That was the problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

I said, “You can change your financial status, your environment, your lifestyle, but you can’t change your basic nature. You’re still the same person. I led a dull, conservative life in San Francisco. Once the newness and the excitement wore off, I led a dull, conservative life in Charlotte Amalie. Even with the investments, we couldn’t afford to live as we were indefinitely; I began to worry enough to start cutting back. Over a period of time we stopped traveling, stopped giving parties and being invited to parties, stopped going out to restaurants and clubs. The friends we’d made drifted away one by one. I lost interest in sailing and sold the yawl. I had no other hobbies or interests and neither did Annalise. After the sixth year all we were doing was staying home by ourselves, drinking too much and watching the sunsets.”

“How did Annalise deal with that?”

“She hated it. We were barely communicating by then.”

“I suppose eventually she left you.”

“I knew she would. She started going out by herself every night, staying out late, and I just let her do it. One night she didn’t come home at all. I never saw her again.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard rumors that she went to Martinique with the owner of a yacht brokerage.”

“But you didn’t bother to find out.”

“There didn’t seem to be any reason to.”

“What did you do after she left?”

“Nothing for a time. But the villa was too big and too expensive for one person, so I moved to a smaller place. The owner raised the rent after the first year and I moved again, an even smaller place near Frenchtown.”

“Still alone?”

“Yes. There has been no one else in my life since Annalise.”

“How long did you stay on St. Thomas?”

“Another two years. The tourist explosion had started by then and prices had skyrocketed. So I left the island for good.”

“And came over to St. John?”

“No. St. Croix first. But my cottage there was burglarized one night, everything of value I had left stolen — everything except my bank books, which were hidden. That was when I moved to St. John. A bungalow in Coral Bay, then the saltbox at Hansen’s.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A little over four years.”

“End of the line.”

“That’s right,” I said. “End of the line.”

Flies circled listlessly in the hot breeze. Talley made wet circles on the tabletop with his sweating beer bottle.

“That’s quite a story,” he said.

“Meaning you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know if I do or not. You could have made it all up as a way to cadge free drinks. For all I know you tell it to every tourist who comes in here.”

“Not every tourist. Only the willing listeners and free spenders.”

“So it is just a story.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“All right,” Talley said, “for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true, all of it or some of it. You must know I could turn you in to the FBI. This is federal territory, you’re an interstate fugitive, and there’s no statute of limitation on federal crimes — you’d probably still go to prison. There might be a reward of some kind, too, even after twenty years. In any case, I could buy myself a lot of free publicity and an article assignment if not a book contract. I told you I was a writer — why open up to me?”

“Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I don’t care anymore.”

“Uh-huh. ‘The Perfect Crime that Wasn’t.’ Not a bad title.”

“But not accurate. The crime was perfect.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes. It was, but I’m not. That’s the only flaw.”

“Then let me ask you a hypothetical question,” Talley said. “If you had it to do over again, would you still embezzle that money?”

I said without hesitation, “Yes.”

“Even if you knew how things were going to turn out?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I got away with stealing close to half a million dollars. For a while I had everything I ever wanted. Would I have been any better off in a dead-end corporate job all those years, living in a furnished apartment in San Francisco?”

“You wouldn’t have ended up an alcoholic fugitive in a place like this.”

“One’s no worse than the other, from my perspective.”

We were silent for a time. Then Talley said, “Well,” and pushed back his chair. “I’d better be moving along.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One more question before I go. What’s your real name?”

“The one I gave you. Paul Anderson.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I might like to talk to you again, Paul. Take some notes.”

“Any time. You know where to find me.”

He went away.

I drank and watched the sunlight sparkle on Round Bay, throw sharp glints off the brightwork on the pleasure craft. After a while Jocko came over and blocked my view.

“You tell that mon how you steal all that money in San Francisco?”

“I told him.”

Big grin. “Beautiful wife, fancy villa in Charlotte Amalie, rich mon’s life before it all go away and you end up here.”

“The whole story.”

“What he say?”

“I don’t think he believed it.”

“Somebody might, someday,” Jocko said. “Wrong mon think you still got plenty money left, he try to steal it from you.”

“Or the law might come and take me away to jail.”

“I don’t like to see that hoppen.”

“Of course not. Then you’d go out of business.”

He laughed

I laughed, too.

The fan hummed, the flies circled. Clouds were beginning to pile up along the crest of Bordeaux Mountain; there might be some rain later on. A sleek blue-and-white yawl came gliding in from the sea. From a distance she looked like the Annalise — a thirty-footer with a clipper bow and enough beam to handle weather in blue water. I watched her for a time, but not very long.

I wondered where Annalise was now, what she was doing. But I didn’t really care.

I wondered how much money I had left. I could look at my bank book when I got back to the saltbox, but I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t really care.

I wondered if Talley would come back. I wondered if he would contact my old firm in San Francisco, turn me in to the FBI. I hoped he would, but I didn’t really care.

I sat there.

Would I really do it over again if I had the chance? I’d been telling myself I would for so long that saying it out loud to somebody else had become second nature. But it was a lie. And so was the conceit that I had committed a perfect crime. Two more lies in the fabric of falsehoods and deceptions that made up my life.

Jocko brought me another rum. Arundel Cane Rum, the best in the Caribbean, the only kind I would drink. I caught up the glass, emptied it.

“World by the tail, eh, mon?” Jocko said.

“This is my world now,” I said. “Jocko’s Cafe and Arundel rum and what I can see through this window.”

He laughed.

This time I didn’t laugh with him.

Celebrated Canadian crime writer Eric Wright was born in London and emigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-two. For his novels and stories in the mystery genre he has won numerous awards, including the Arthur Ellis Award and the Derrick Murdoch Award for Lifetime Achievement. His latest tale for us involves a mystery of sorts, but whether there’s a crime, we’ll leave up to you.

I ran into Billy one afternoon at Sandown Park between races, in the tea lineup in the refreshment room. It took a long time to find the name to put to the face, but I was well past the point where I could be mistaken, and he didn’t look away. Afterwards, I wondered how long he’d been seeing me before I noticed him. He was a couple of people ahead in the line, and when we were sure of the eye contact, he moved back to where I was. “Stan?” he asked. “Stan Collier, isn’t it?”

“Billy Sutton,” I said, and we shook hands.

It occurred to me afterwards that we shook hands that day for the first time ever, as far as I could remember, even though we’d been together from the beginning. We joined up together and stayed together all through Dunkirk. Actually, for us it was Le Havre, not Dunkirk. Billy and I were picked up off the beach by one of the navy rowboats which took us out to their ship, the last one still waiting for survivors. We had a bit of an argument on the beach, because Billy said he couldn’t swim in his boots, and I said I couldn’t walk out across the pebbles without mine. We’d been retreating for a week and my feet were so sore I was afraid that only my boots were holding them together. In the end we compromised by walking out in our boots until the water was up to our waists, then kicking them off and trying to swim a bit. It was a good thing the sailors got to us right away, because neither of us could do much more than the dog paddle we’d learned on holidays at the seaside. After we landed, I had to wear slippers for a week until I could get my boots on again.

After Le Havre we stayed together in the same mob, the Royal Army Service Corps, in a supply battalion at a depot up in Yorkshire near Catterick racecourse, until we were fit to go again.

As soon as we could march, we were shipped off to Greece to help out with the Italian invasion. I understand we coped pretty well with the Eyeties at first — our army, I mean — and then Jerry arrived to help out his ally, and we were in retreat again.

We regrouped and crossed to Crete just in time to get the order to retreat. Billy and I walked for two nights across Crete, one canteen of water between the two of us, and on the third night we were sucking the biscuit crumbs out of the linings of our trouser pockets. Dozens of us, probably hundreds, if you could see them, shuffled through the dark, many in pairs, one helping out the other who had gone lame, stopping sometimes to retie their boots or just to have a rest. One soldier was sitting by the roadside alongside his mate who was sleeping and he waved us down to get a mouthful of water for his friend. When we got close, we saw his friend was dead, and we told him to come along with us, but he only shook his head. He’d come to the end of the road. We saw two or three like that, stopped, waiting for Jerry to come along and take them prisoner, or shoot them. During the third night I lost Billy, and didn’t see him again until after the fourth race at Sandown, twenty years later.

Sandown was the one place where I was likely to bump into him, and if I hadn’t thought he had gone for good that night in Crete, “missing in action,” I might have had my antennae tuned in for an encounter. As it was, I first wondered where I had once seen that face, now ten feet away — perhaps in the paper, or on the telly, and then it became more personal, a neighbour perhaps, as he returned the look I was giving him and I tried to sort him out. And then who it was announced itself, still without a name until he spoke mine, and then it was Billy.

We collected our tea and confirmed by individual observation that each of us was on his own, and we walked over to a vacant table and sat down.

The way we were, you’d think we were two brothers, living in different parts of the world, not communicating much if at all over the years, come together at a funeral, say, arriving early before anyone else turned up, wondering where to start. “Why didn’t you write?” would be the first question, followed by, “Why didn’t you?”

We sipped our tea and waited to see who would find the right button.

“Thought you were a ghost at first,” he said. He didn’t smile.

“Twenty years,” I said, eventually. “Maybe I am.”

“Twenty-two.”

I don’t think he meant it as a challenge, though that’s what it sounded like.

But it was too soon to get into it. “Fancy anything for the next race?” I asked.

He looked at his newspaper, marked up before he left home, probably. “This one belongs to Piggott, I reckon,” he said.

I thought so, too. “Got your money on yet?”

He nodded.

“Wait here, then, while I put a bet on. I want to watch this one from the rail, so if we miss each other, I’ll meet you back here after the race.”

“How long should I wait?” He leaned back, watching me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. But I knew what he meant.

“You might get detained,” he said.

There was no mistaking his meaning now, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. “I’ll be here,” I said.

The crowd was thick that afternoon, so when I went back after the fifth, and again after the sixth, and there was no sign of him, I let it go. I knew I would see him again soon.

He was there at the next race meeting, two weeks later, waiting at the same table with his tea before the first race. I wondered if he had gone through the same process that I had. Missing him had been no accident. I’d gone back after the sixth race, all right, but I didn’t wait when he wasn’t there right away.

But not to go to the next meeting would have been unnatural for me, as would not buying a cup of tea before the first race to study the form with.

I said, “I did come back after the last race but there was no sign of you.”

“I picked the last winner and there was a lineup at the tote.”

“I always bet with the bookies on the last race. That way you get paid off quick and you don’t have to wait around.”

“That what you did?”

“I didn’t have a bet on the last. I just made sure you weren’t here, then I left.”

“I was here. You must have gone already.”

“I hung on for a few minutes.”

He waited to see if I was finished. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Another time. What do you fancy for the first?”

“Sunny Jim,” I said. “He got off to a bad start last time out, but he still only got beaten by a short head. I’ve been waiting for him to reappear.”

“Do you still transfer to Tattersall’s if you win the first?” he asked.

“Did I tell you that?”

“Your dad used to do it. Have a big bet on the first and if it comes in, buy yourself a seat in the stands. I always remembered that. You told me about it while we were in that ditch, the first night in Crete. We were waiting for it to get dark enough to make a move.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I do. I dozed off, but when I woke up you were still talking, about the times you’d watched the Derby, that sort of thing.”

“That was the idea, wasn’t it? Stay awake?”

“Until we realised that we should sleep in shifts so as to be ready for the night march.”

“Right. You come to every meeting here?”

“I will now. I worked up north for a long time. Leeds.”

“Doing what?”

“Commercial traveller. For Crosse & Blackwell’s. When I had enough seniority I put in for a transfer. I’m here for good now. But this is only the second time I’ve been to Sandown since the war.”

“You married?” I asked.

“Twice. First wife died of cancer. Angel, she was. Then I got lucky, found another angel two years ago. Friend of my first wife’s, actually. What about you?”

“Married once, then divorced. Nobody’s fault. We couldn’t get along. Fact is, we weren’t suited. But we still have a drink together, now and then.”

I found it very strange, catching up on the missing twenty years, and at the same time falling into our old way with each other immediately. In some ways, nothing had changed. He was wearing his hair longer, of course; we both were. And we were in civvies, which showed up the little differences which uniforms hide. He was one of those blokes who dress to disappear, who think if anyone notices what they are wearing then there’s something wrong. But I was still trying to impress women, as well as look good on the job. I worked for a travel agent in Kensington. That day I was wearing my new duffel coat, an Austrian loden coat, actually. Dark green.

The horses moved on to the course for the next race, and paraded in front of the stands. “You doing this one?” Billy asked.

“I haven’t found anything to fancy yet.”

“What about Last Call?”

“I’d noticed that. Might be a possibility.”

He had been doing what I was, what everybody does sometimes, not finding a horse he fancied, so falling back on the jockey on the grounds that good jockeys like good horses. Apart from that, it was just a matter of fancying a name. For some reason, Last Call, a useless twenty-to-one shot, had caught his eye. He stood up. “See you back here?”

It was a test again, a little challenge: Did I plan to come back after the race?

I felt in my watch pocket for the fiver I kept for emergencies. “Let’s have it each way,” I said, holding out the note.

He looked in his wallet to find a fiver to go with it. “We’re on,” he said, and disappeared towards the line of bookies.

While he was gone, I tried to pick my way across the minefield that lay between us, going over again in my mind the events of that night in Crete.

We had been walking for two nights, hiding from Stukas during the day as we made our way to the coast. We had lost touch with the rest of our unit when the retreat turned into a shambles. Billy and I weren’t part of the regular infantry; the Service Corps was what its name says, the backup brigade. We had rifles, of course, until we threw them away, but that wasn’t our function; our job was to move supplies — ammunition, equipment, and so on — to where they were needed, to get them to the troops who were doing the actual fighting. Billy and I were left in charge of a small dump of supplies — rations, mostly — protecting them from the local population. Then one morning everything went quiet and we waited for a messenger with some orders, but he never appeared. Then Billy pointed and said, “We’d better scarper if we can.” A couple of furlongs away, a Jerry bicycle platoon appeared, not coming towards us but crossing at right angles to us, four of them. Our front line had gone and these Jerries were the sign that we had been overrun.

When we had retreated in France, we knew where we were most of the time. You could hear and feel Jerry advancing as all round us our own soldiers were grouping and regrouping, fighting a rearguard action. This, now, was a bit eerie, just four cyclists in uniform looking as if they were out for a ride.

“Where’s our mob?” I wondered.

Billy said, “They haven’t passed us, and I don’t hear them in the distance. I reckon there’s been an order to cease fire and no one has told us.”

I thought Billy had probably guessed right. “Shall we chuck it in, then? Wait for them?” I pointed to the cyclists in the distance. “Standing orders says we have to destroy our weapons.”

Our Lee Enfield rifles leaned against the wall of the hut we were sleeping in. “That’s easy,” Billy said. He slid the bolts out of the rifles and threw them into the irrigation ditch. “What about the ammo?”

We gathered together the few hundred rounds of ammunition and the hand grenades and dropped them into the field latrine.

“Bayonets?” Billy asked.

I shook my head. “We might need a tin-opener. Bloody hell! Get your head down!”

One of the cyclists had returned and was now no more than fifty yards away. But it wasn’t us he was looking for, and he got back on his bike and rode off.

“I gather we’re not surrendering,” Billy said. “So what did we destroy the rifles for?”

“Makes us lighter on our feet,” I said. “No. This could go on for years with us in a Jerry prison camp living on black bread and potatoes, if we’re lucky. I’m for trying to get out of here. On our own.”

Billy nodded. “One last go.”

Two more helmets appeared across the field. “Now,” I said.

We made a run for it through the olive trees and then across a stony field, past a dead goat still tied to a post, running until we couldn’t see the cyclists, and then started to walk, south to the sea, we hoped.