It is almost a year since EQMM lost one of the greatest mystery short story writers of all time, Edward D. Hoch. We have been publishing an assortment of remaining new Hoch stories and Hoch reprints since his death, in order to complete another full year in the unbroken streak of publication he’s had in this magazine since 1973. Fan Steve Steinbock suggested this story as a good way to conclude Ed Hoch’s 36-year streak. There will be periodic Hoch reprints in future.

Winterluck had been living with Von Baden for some five years before he ever raised the subject of the Heidelberg killing. It was on a mild April day — one of the first pleasant days of spring — and they were strolling around the big yard as they so often did when the weather was good. Overhead, the sky was blue with promise, and already the first small buds were clustering on branches.

“The German spring is a wonderful time,” Winterluck said that morning.

“Spring is always wonderful,” Von Baden said. “I remember only one bad spring — in ’forty-five, when it meant the Allies would begin their final drive along the western front. That year, I cursed the birds as they sang in the trees, and wished I could hold back the blossoms with my hands. But the snow melted, and the tanks rumbled on.”

“They would have come in any event,” Winterluck said. “Hitler was finished. We were all finished.” He stared for a time at the distant trees. “It was like some great tragedy by Shakespeare, though I suppose the other side didn’t see it that way.”

Von Baden nodded his balding head, and the light caught the curving scar on his left cheek. “Perhaps Hitler was a sort of Hamlet, at least to us. Perhaps he should have died by a poisoned sword.”

Winterluck was still staring at the trees. “That reminds me of the Heidelberg thing. Remember it?”

“How could I forget? I was there.”

“Cassan was a sort of Hamlet, and he was struck down by a poisoned sword.”

But Von Baden shook his head. “To borrow from our late enemies the English, he was much more a Jabberwock, struck down by a vorpal blade.”

“How did it happen?” Winterluck asked. “I never heard the full details.”

“Very few people did. The crime — if crime it was — happened at a time when young Cassan was the most hated, and feared, student in all of Heidelberg. No one very much wanted to see the boy who killed him punished. In those days, such things were easy to hush up, and after all, Cassan was not the first to die in the dueling clubs of Heidelberg. Or the last.”

“But some said he was murdered, killed by a poisoned sword. At least that was the talk at the time.”

“That was the talk, yes.” Von Baden’s eyes clouded, as if he were trying to remember the exact feeling of that day. “It was such a long time ago, a lifetime ago. The world has seen so much violence since, I wonder if what happened there could still have any importance.”

“It was important to Cassan. It was the end of his life.”

“Yes, yes,” Von Baden agreed, scratching the smooth skin of his aging head. “It was surely important to Cassan.”

Marilyn Todd currently sets her work in three different historical periods: Ancient Rome, where we find series heroine Claudia Seferius; Ancient Greece, in which the adventures of High Priestess Iliona unfold; and the 1950s, which the author has chosen for a just-completed novel and a variety of (so far) non-series stories, including last year’s Shamus Award nominee “Room for Improvement.” Her latest published novel is Blood Moon (Severn House), in the Iliona series.

“Georges, have you put those pillows in Number Twenty-two yet?”

Pillows. Pillows. Georges dragged his eyes away from the grebes out on the lake as he remembered the pile of goosedown in his arms.

“Doing it now, Mother.”

But it was so comical, the way they dived for fish. You watch them go down, follow the ripples on the surface, then pick a spot where you think they’ll come up. Except you’re wrong. Every time, it’s that much further from where you expect them to, and this time one of the grebes had caught a fish. A big one. Georges watched, fascinated by the contest between predator and prey. One false move and the fish was gone forever. Both sides fighting for survival.

“And don’t forget to unblock that drain in the second-floor bathroom while you’re up there, love.”

Drain? He looked at the spanner in his hand. Oh. Drain. “No, no,” he called down. “I won’t forget.”

Georges loved this lake. He loved the way the boats bobbed on smooth days as well as in rough weather, their yards clanking gentle lullabies, their hulls gleaming in the sun. He loved the way that spring dawns glimmered hazy and yellow on the surface, like melted Camembert. How fiery sunsets multiplied out and flickered on the water. How autumn mists swirled round the islands and then disappeared, as if by magic, and how the moon reflected double on the lake. And none of this would be possible, were it not for the pines that surrounded it, repelling the winds that drove in from the west, fending off the snows that swept up from the Pyrenees, thwarting the desiccating frosts that gripped the rest of France. In fact, he thought, if it wasn’t for the gulls, flapping round the perimeter in search of tiddlers in the shallows, you’d think the coast was a lot further than eight kilometres away.

Except not everyone enjoyed neat promenades that served up ice creams and carousels, or took pleasure in roasting themselves on broad, white sandy beaches that stretched to infinity in both directions. The people who holidayed at Georges’ lake were more discriminating. Not for them long treks through woods, laden with parasols and picnic hampers, just to then do battle with the highest dunes in Europe. Let others wrestle with deck chairs and drink lukewarm lemonade—

“Oh, Georgie!” His mother jerked the pillows from his arms with a good-natured, but nonetheless exasperated sigh. “Will you ever stop your silly daydreaming?” She gave his cheek an affectionate squeeze, before setting off down the corridor to give 22 their extra pillows. “But if you don’t mind, love. The drain?”

The what? Oh, that. Second floor. Blocked. At last, the grebe managed to turn the wriggling fish and gulp it down. Almost at once, it was diving back down for more.

“Now, if you wouldn’t mind.” She didn’t seem entirely surprised to find her son still staring out of the window when she returned. “Breakfast’ll be over any minute, and the guests are bound to need the bathroom.”

“Right-oh.”

He mightn’t have won any prizes for spelling, maths, or grammar, but Georges was handy with his hands. In no time at all, he’d unscrewed the waste and was flushing out the pipe, though he didn’t see what all the fuss was for. A few hairs, a bit of gunge, and bien sar, it would reduce the drainage to a trickle, but that was no reason to go grumbling to his mother. She went to a lot of trouble to make the guests feel welcome. She set vases of flowers in their rooms, left them boiled sweets on the dressing table, and placed mothballs in the drawers. The sheets always smelled crisp and clean and fresh.

But then, some folk were never satisfied, he thought, his big, strong hands spannering the pipes back into place. If they weren’t griping about lumpy mattresses, they were moaning because there wasn’t an ashtray, or could someone change their bedside lamp, it wasn’t bright enough to read by. Still. He mopped up the puddle of dirty water with a towel. Surrounded by such stunning scenery, people probably expected the same level of perfection from Les Pins. Most of the time, they blooming got it, too.

“I don’t believe it!” An hour must have passed before his mother came storming into the dining room, where he was cramming the last of the unwanted croissants in his mouth. “Look what you’ve done to Madame Fouquet’s towels!”

Eh?

She held up the filthy, sopping linen. “She’s absolutely livid, and quite frankly, so am I.”

Oh. Those towels. “Then she should have taken them back to her room,” he said, spraying crumbs over the table. “Instead of leaving them in the bathroom for anyone to use.”

“That’s still no excuse for you to use them as rags. And to just leave them lying there, as well, you lazy toad!”

“Sorry.”

It wasn’t often that he saw his mother angry, and it wasn’t simply because she had endless patience with him. She simply could not afford to lose control. Georges’ father, Marcel, was the chef, and since food was his passion as well as the foundation for his business, he was either shopping for it at the market or else creating magnificent works of art with it in the kitchen. The hotel management was Irene’s responsibility, something she accomplished with a combination of politeness, style, and military crispness, being just strict enough to keep the chambermaids on their toes, but not so tough that they looked for work elsewhere. Welcoming enough towards the guests, but not so sociable that they might be tempted to take advantage.

“Oh, Georgie, it’s not you,” she said, instantly calm again. “It’s that wretched bloody bathroom that’s got me so worked up.” She swiped her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m going to have to call a plumber out, and God knows how long that’ll take in August.”

“Why?” He might be big and slow and clumsy, but Georges took great pride in his work.

“Why?” Her voice rose. “Because that stupid, bloody washbasin’s blocked up again already—”

Wash... basin... “I’ll take another look.”

“Not sure there’s any point, you’ve only just been up there.”

“Yes, but I’ll check further down the pipes.” He turned away, so she wouldn’t see how red his cheeks had gone.

“Will you? Oh, you are an angel. And while you’re up there, would you put clean towels in Thirty-four for Madame Fouquet? I can hardly leave the poor woman with just a hand towel for her bath.”

“Right-oh.”

Washbasin. He wrote it on the back of his hand with a biro, so as not to forget. Second floor, he scribbled underneath. And towels.

Which was just as well, because by the time he’d brushed Minou the cat, topped up the birdbath, and then fed the ducks out on the lake, it was fast approaching midday. Four o’clock before he actually got round to fixing it.

Madame Fouquet never saw her towels.

After his graduation from college, Mike Wiecek spent a good part of ten years in Asia, mostly in Japan, where he began by teaching English and eventually found work in a publishing house where he was the only Westerner. His travels took him to many other parts of Asia, which may explain his comfort in employing a setting such as that of the following story. He is a Shamus and multiple Derringer award winner for his fiction, and someone to watch on the mystery scene.

At dawn, the monsoon rains eased, and the long shantytown of Bhatiary grumbled to life. Low voices in the hostels, feet slopping through mud, occasional clanks from teapots on firebrick, all subdued in the damp, heavy air. Trucks groaned along the frontage road. Later the clanging and shouting and commerce would raise a constant roar along the beach, overcome only by the heaviest lashings of rain. But for now, a certain peace.

Mohit Kadir walked lightly, cheerfully. He smiled at the murky sunrise; glanced affectionately at poisonously bright chemicals in the runoff ditches. A day or two longer as a gang laborer, and then he was out, advancing to apprentice cutter — a promotion so difficult and so rare that strangers had come up and murmured their envious congratulations. Today, Mohit felt like he could haul a ton of steel singlehanded and go back for more.

The foreman, Syed Abdul Farid, yawned at his door.

“As-salaamu alaykum, Mohit.” He had gray hair and the solid build of a more-than-adequate diet. “You appear happy this morning.”

“Yes, saheb.” Mohit felt himself grinning. “A fine day.”

They walked through the slum, collecting other members of the crew. Most lived together, six or seven men in scavenged huts. All came from the same town, Ghorarchar, in the far north of Bangladesh, a region of famine and desperate poverty. Mohit nodded greetings.

“Kamon achhen?”

“Bhalo achhi.”

The men wore similar lungis and cheap shirts, the thin garments uniformly tattered and stained, little more than rags. Their faces were gaunt, their arms thin to emaciation despite the appallingly heavy labor of their days. And they knew they were the lucky ones, the chosen. Ghorarchar offered nothing but slow starvation. Here on the long, trampled beach of Chittagong, they could earn sixty takas a day breaking ships, and be glad for it.

The ships! Five years since Mohit first saw them, colossal hulks of rust and steel, driven onto the strand and looming like mountains overhead. Half-dismembered, in the mist and rain of the monsoons, the dead ships seemed too massive, too huge to have ever been built by men. But now they were scrap, worth nothing but their metal, and other men were slowly taking them apart. For ten kilometers up and down the beach they sat one by the next, thirty at a time, slowly cut down with hand torches and carried away by barefoot gangs.

“How do you feel, Mohit?” Farid said as they crossed the frontage road, a brief pleasure of asphalt before their feet sank back into endless mud.

“Feel, bhaiya?” Mohit could be more familiar now, but Farid was still fifteen years older, and his boss.

“I’ll be sorry to lose you, my best of workers.”

“I will not lie.” Mohit raised his eyes to the hull before them, leaning his head so far back, to see the top of the forepeak, that he stopped walking. “Once I’m up there, my only memories will be of my friends. I am happy to leave this behind.”

“Cutting is dangerous work.”

Mohit laughed. Five years he had worked like a Gulf-states slave; five years he had painstakingly put aside fifteen takas a day; five years he had deprived himself of the occasional glass of tari, or carrom wager, or bit of meat. He had saved 25,000 takas, a fortune by anyone’s standards, all to buy his way into a cutter’s crew. Tomorrow he would be free of the mud, slung high among the beams and steel, with a torch, a tolerable wage — and a better life.

“Pay close attention to Hasan.” Farid was still in his role, father-figure to the young men of Ghorarchar. “He has agreed to take you as his apprentice, and he will teach, but you must learn. Remember, you want to drop the plates onto the beach — not onto your head.”

“Nor yours.”

Mohit, orphaned at three years old, could not say he’d been a lucky child. But unlike so many other men in Bhatiary, he did not have to send money home to his family, for he had none. As a boy he had not a single toy; as a youth he survived by catching small fish from the rice paddies. Conditions that destroyed so many others had somehow granted him, instead, a determination to better himself. Today he was almost there. He had a plan: the cutter’s job would let him save real money. Someday, by the will of God, he would have enough to buy a truck! — and then he would be a rich man, an independent operator ferrying scrap to the rolling mills. His cab would have the finest decorations, the best paint, the most brilliant chrome. Perhaps even... a house of his own. Such dreams were painful, and Mohit did not let himself imagine them often; but they drove him all the same.

Rain spattered lightly, pock-pock on the ship’s hull, a vast, riveted wall before them. The vessel had been driven aground three weeks earlier, and the scavenging crews were just finishing the easy salvage — furniture and fittings and anything loose they could find inside.

“Cables,” said Farid, and a sigh rustled through the men. Hauling the monstrously heavy steel plates, nearly a metric ton on fifteen shoulders, was hard enough. Dragging the metal hawsers up the beach, one man every four meters along the cables — which could be a kilometer long — was agony, as the sharp, pointy bits of galvanized wire shredded their skin.

“Soonest started, soonest done.” Farid began to chivvy them into a line, beginning where the first cable descended from far above, so distant it disappeared threadlike into the mist.

But Mohit’s mood could not be broken. He took his place cheerfully, glancing around while the others trudged into position.

Far down the ship’s length he saw a trio of cutters examining the base of the stern. Squinting in the rain, Mohit thought he recognized Hasan, which made sense. Before dismantling could begin, the enormous fuel tanks had to be vented. They’d been almost empty when the ship grounded, naturally, and reclamation crews had pumped out the remainder for recycling, but sludge remained. If the fumes weren’t released, someone’s torch would ignite an explosion.

Of course, the vents had to be opened somehow, and even chisels could strike a spark. The experienced cutters knew how to do so safely, their years of knowledge allowing them to avoid nooks and joints where the gas accumulated. Hasan was the best, the most skilled, so Mohit was not surprised to see him leading the task. He felt a surge of pride — he would be working with Hasan, working with the finest cutter in all Chittagong.

“Aste,” said Farid, calling from down the line, and Mohit bent to grasp the cable, ready to heave it up with the others. He shifted his feet in the mud, seeking stable purchase.

CRUNNK!

The blast sounded like the ship collapsing on itself, a hammer blow and a scream of metal. Voices cried out. Mohit spun around to see the dark hull buckle slightly, an enormous rent in the side. Torn steel gaped outward, a dark tangle littering the strand before it.

The cutters were gone, shredded in an instant. Mohit stared for a moment, before the shock hit him and he dropped to his knees and vomited into the mud.

Born and raised in California, Maynard Allington joined the air force after high school and served two tours in Vietnam. Later, he earned a degree in law enforcement, but for many years now he has devoted himself to writing both magazine articles and fiction. His three novels, The Grey Wolf, The Fox in the Field, and The Court of Blue Shadows were all published to acclaim, with the New York Times calling the last “a powerful examination of humanity at its worst and at its best.”

Around four A.M. I put on a beach shirt and bathing trunks and took the fire stairs down to the hotel pool. A breeze off the Atlantic stirred the fronds of palm trees lining the deck and I could feel the night dying overhead on the dimmed circuits of stars.

Even before I dropped into a deck chair, a sense that something wasn’t right crawled into my nerves and wouldn’t let go. For one thing, the pool light was out, leaving a logjam of shadows on the dark pit of water. I spotted a shape trapped among them at the deep end, like an abandoned pool toy, except they don’t make pool toys in human form. I swung out of the chair, looking around for the pool lamp switch. The instant I clicked it on, my nerves absorbed a shock.

The little girl, fully clothed in a pink pinafore, floated facedown in the clear light flooding the green water. Her long hair, yellow as sun on straw, fanned out on the surface, and her arms were spread out in a swan dive of arrested motion. Ribbons of blood lay suspended in the marine sparkle from the underwater floodlight, and in one horrific second I saw that they ran like party streamers from a cut throat. She was stone dead, and not by drowning.

James H. Cobb’s latest novel (from Grand Central Publishing, January 2009) forms part of a series that several thriller writers have contributed to, based on a concept of the late Robert Ludlum’s. Entitled Robert Ludlum’s (TM) The Infinity Affair, the novel centers on a crashed Soviet aircraft from the 1950s, discovered in the Arctic. For EQMM, Mr. Cobb puts on a very different hat, continuing his series of hot-rodder puzzle mysteries featuring the likeable Kevin Pulaski.

I was wandering around a swap meet with my friend and hot-rodding sage, Kevin Pulaski. As we poked around the displays of intriguing, obsolescent automotive junk, the topic turned to things that aren’t there anymore.

“There’s some things from the Fifties that I wish were still around,” the former L.A. County deputy said, “like Exner body designs and real chrome. But there’s a bunch of other stuff, like bias-ply tires, that’re no great loss to anybody.”

He paused before a tarp spread with old car parts. Among them was an odd-looking rusty cylinder with a set of mounting brackets and a louvered vent on its side. He tapped it with the toe of his boot and a reminiscent gleam came to his eye. “Yeah, my man, there are some things I definitely don’t miss.”

Ed Gorman’s March 1996 EQMM story “Out There in the Darkness” was later expanded by the author into a novel entitled The Poker Club, and will soon be released as a motion picture under the same title. Also coming out soon is a new Gorman novel, The Midnight Room. The following story will appear, at around the same time this issue goes on sale, in an anthology celebrating the work of author and screen writer Richard Matheson entitled He Is Legend.

The morning of the birthday bash this dude with hair plugs and a black camel’s hair coat and the imperious air only a big-time businessman exudes walks into Guitar City and starts looking around at all the instruments and amps.

A tourist. Most places you see a guy who looks like this you automatically think this is the ideal customer. But in the business of selling high-end guitars and amps you don’t want somebody who looks like he just drove over from the brokerage house in his Mercedes but will only spend a few hundred on his kid.

Some of my best sales have gone to guys who look like street trash. They know music.

I wandered over to him. I assumed he didn’t know what he was holding. The Gibson Custom Shop ’59 Les Paul cost a few thousand more than I make a month — and I do all right.

When he glanced up and saw me, he said, “Hey, you’re the guy I saw on the news this morning.”

I smiled. “My fifteen minutes finally arrived.”

“Well, you’re going to the big party and everything. Sounds like you’ll have some night. Nice that you all still get along.”

John Temple had returned to Chicago on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. This was at the end of his worldwide tour and his latest CD going double platinum. Some of the friends he’d met while on tour were flying in for the occasion. Names people around the world would recognize. “Too bad you had that falling-out with Temple, you and — What’s the other guy’s name?”

“McMurtin.”

“Right. Temple, McMurtin, and you. You’re Rafferty, right?”

“Right.”

“And you and McMurtin — went off on your own.”

He was polite enough not to finish the rest. The well-known tale of how John Temple decided four years ago that it was time he took his wounded voice out for a test run all by itself. Two double-platinum CDs later, Temple was returning home for a press orgy of adulation.

I was working here at Guitar City. Pete McMurtin was one of the ghosts you saw standing on the sidewalk outside rehab houses shakily smoking his cigarette.

Even though he’d brought up an unpleasant subject, he redeemed himself by saying, “My son’s graduating from Northwestern. He’s very serious about his little band. I was hoping he’d grow out of it by now, but no such luck. He’s coming into the firm but he also plans to keep playing on weekends. So I want something really special.”

“Well, this is really special.”

“Oh? What is it?”

I told him.

“So this is really upscale, huh?”

I smiled at his word. “Very upscale.”

“And he’ll need an amp. A good one.”

“A good one or a great one?”

“What’s a great one?”

“Well, you’ve got a great guitar so I’d go with a great amp — a Marshall. The Jimi Hendrix Reissue. Stack.”

He grinned. “This could all very well be bullshit.”

I grinned back. I knew he was going to go for it. “It could very well be. But it isn’t.”

“Well, I guess you know what you’re talking about. This is your fifteen minutes, after all.” He meant well but it was still painful. “So my son will know what this is and he’ll like it?”

“He’ll love it. He’ll think you’re the best old man a kid could have.”

A hint of pain in his eyes now. Maybe this present wasn’t just for graduation. Maybe this was a guilt present of some kind. “Then let’s do it.”

The author of four historical series under his pseudonym Edward Marston, Welshborn Keith Miles also writes many books and stories using his real name. This new story, set in the Middle Ages, features Gerald of Wales, a sleuth with an uncanny ability to sense the presence of evil. The latest Marston novel out in paperback, Soldier of Fortune, follows 17th-century soldier Daniel Rawson. And don’t miss Marston’s new hardcover, Murder on the Brighton Express.

1188

Of all the gifts with which I’ve been blessed by the Almighty, none is perhaps as striking as my ability to sense the presence of evil. It’s uncanny. I can detect venom behind a benign smile, lust in the loins of a virgin, and blackness in the heart of the outwardly virtuous. The first time I was acquainted with this strange power was when I was still a youth, studying in Paris. One of the many churches I visited harboured such a wondrous collection of holy relics that it had become a place of pilgrimage. Local people and visitors to the city flocked to view the sacred bones, leaving coins beside them as a mark of respect. One old woman, to whom my attention was drawn, came to the church every day to pay homage.

“She’s an example to us all,” I was told in a respectful whisper. “Though she’s seen seventy summers or more, she never misses her daily visit to the shrine. Behold her, Gerald.”

I did as I was bidden and watched her with care. After trudging down the aisle with the help of a stick, she lowered herself painfully to her ancient knees, dropped a coin onto the pile before her, then bent her head in prayer. There she stayed until the discomfort grew too great. Hauling herself to her feet, she genuflected before the altar, then struggled back down the aisle. It was a touching sight and I was duly moved — until, that is, she passed within a foot of me.

“Isn’t she remarkable?” said my companion.

“In some ways, she is,” I conceded.

“Such dedication is inspiring. Truly, she is a species of saint.”

I was blunt. “I don’t feel that she’s ready for canonisation yet.”

My comment was felt to be unkind, but I held my ground with characteristic tenacity. I knew something was amiss. Witnessed from a distance, the old woman’s commitment was stimulating. She herself had become an object of veneration. When she brushed past me, however, I caught a scent that was less than saintly. Keeping my thoughts to myself, I returned to my studies and lost myself in the beauty of the Scriptures.

On the following day, I made sure that I was in the same church at exactly the same time. The woman was punctual. Through the door she came as the bell of the nearby abbey was signalling tierce. I let her shuffle past me and make her way to the side chapel where the relics were housed. She was so preoccupied with the effort of lowering herself to her knees that she didn’t see me sink down a yard away from her. Like me, she deposited a small coin on the altar rail, then lowered her head in prayer. The difference between us was that I kept my eyes open so that I could watch her.

What I saw outraged me. Down went her head and up it came again in a movement so slight as to be invisible to anyone not right beside her. As it went down once more, her lips fastened upon a coin and lifted it up before dropping it into a fold in her gown. Instead of praying to her Maker, she was instead plundering the church. In place of the one coin she had deposited, I counted over a dozen that she took. She was nothing but a common thief. I reported what I’d seen and, though nobody believed me, it was agreed that the old woman would be kept under surveillance the next day. Almost twenty coins were filched by her greedy lips on that occasion. Arrest and retribution soon followed.

I was thanked and congratulated. “How on earth did you spy her out?” I was asked.

“It’s a gift from God,” I replied.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Gerald de Barri — though some call me Gerald of Wales.”

One of the genre’s most celebrated authors — an Edgar, Anthony, Shamus, and Macavity award winner for her novels and an Edgar winner for Best Short Story — S. J. Rozan came to fiction writing only after a successful career as an architect. At the same time this issue goes on sale, her publisher, St. Martin’s Press, will release a new novel in her popular Bill Smith/Lydia Chin series, The Shanghai Moon. It’s the first installment in the series since 2002’s Winter and Night.

“What kind of a fish is that, anyway?”

“What?”

“A silverfish. Is it, like, all silvery?”

Silverfish blew out a breath and tried to be patient. You had to be patient with Lady Mary. “Not a fish. It’s a bug.”

Lady Mary giggled. “You call yourself after a bug?” She checked her lipgloss once more and snapped her mirror away. “Must be a pretty bug.”

“It’s ugly. Lots of legs and it slithers.”

“Then why—”

“’Cause of my hair.”

Lady Mary didn’t say anything but Silverfish watched her blue eyes fill with doubt. Well, good. Silver-fish’s natural hair was brown, just like Lady Mary’s. She wore it short, spiked, and silver, but that was a choice, not something you’re stuck with and have to do your best about, like name yourself after. Silverfish had come into the life three years ago, at the same age Lady Mary was now, but she knew for a fact she’d never been as naive, as just plain street-dumb, as this kid. If Lady Mary didn’t wise up and stop believing everything people told her, she’d never survive.

Though if she stayed with that damn pimp of hers, she might not survive anyway.

“Your pimp calls himself after a bug, too,” she pointed out as she and Lady Mary left the gas-station bathroom. “A disgusting one. Ick.”

Lady Mary giggled again. “I know. And it’s so funny, because of how he hates dirt so much. I kinda think he should call himself, like, Clorox or something.”

All the girls in this part of town knew that: how Roach made his girls shower the minute they came in from the stroll, and he was always making them scrub the bathroom and the kitchen — even though he wouldn’t eat anywhere but his own place — and wash their clothes and dry-clean them. And he didn’t pay for it, either. Funny he ever laid a finger on them, if he thought they were so disgustingly dirty. Funny he was even in this business.

Roach was Lady Mary’s big mistake. He picked her up just a week after she hit the streets. That was before Silverfish knew her, or she’d have brought her right away to Jacky-boy. If you had to have a pimp — and in this dump of a town you did; it was too dangerous to work alone when you were young and skinny like Silverfish and Lady Mary — but if you had to, Jacky-boy was all right. He liked his girls to stay clean, too, but he wasn’t loony-tunes about it, and anyway it was mostly so johns wouldn’t be grossed out. The apartment was okay, a two-bedroom with just three girls to a room, each with a real bed, and they had video games, a DVD player, and an account at the pizza place and the Chinese, where they could order whatever they wanted and Jacky-boy covered it. He didn’t go through your stuff and he didn’t make you work when you were sick and he never raised a hand to you.

Not like Roach. Roach owned his girls in a different way. He wanted to know everything about them, where they went, who they talked to. He pawed through their purses sometimes, their closets, just to see. And Roach smacked his girls around. When Lady Mary first came on the scene, Silverfish thought that even small and eager to please like she was, it could only be a matter of time. And she was right: A month ago Lady Mary showed up on the corner with thick, heavy makeup around her eye that hid the bruise but not the swelling. It had happened another time since then, too. And it would keep happening, Silverfish knew. She thought about this as Lady Mary sashayed away. It would keep happening, and Lady Mary would stop giggling and get all hard on the inside. And all Silverfish could think to do was stand there and watch.

Trina Corey has made her living as a teacher for the past twenty years. When she decided to try writing fiction she chose as setting a place she’d traveled to in college, and came up with this atmospheric tale. She lives with her family in northern California, and is currently working on a story set in the nineteen thirties.

My ex-husband was dead, God rot him, and I had given our daughter all the solace I could (which was quite a lot, I am a very good mother). But I was tapped out, and after hugs and pats on the arm and “don’t worry”s from her and me, I had turned over Jenny’s grief support to my son-in-law, and was heading out of town. For deep in the corners of my only partly healed soul, I wanted to dance and sing and whoop to the sky that I had outlived the bastard.

The cover story was that I was going to look at the wildflowers which were having their bloom of the century after a winter of extraordinary rains. Since we were only eight years into the century, this didn’t do even partial justice to what was going on in the wilds. Seeds that had waited through two, three, or four decades were rooting and flowering. It made the papers. Crowds of people were thronging to see. I decided to say I was joining the throngs, and it was true, I’d look at the flowers. I love flowers. I know flowers. And if people saw me out there with a giddy look on my face, I didn’t need to tell them that it wasn’t because I’d seen my first trout lily, but because I was drawing breath, and Stephen never would again.

I headed for Death Valley because I’d never been there with him, and I had, most happily, been there with my first serious boyfriend. It had been a lovely trip, full of heat and life and, much to my surprise at that time, plants growing in what I’d believed to be an empty desert.

Though he was Dutch-born and his most popular detective fiction featured Grijpstra and de Gier, a pair of Amsterdam police officers, we never considered publishing Janwillem van de Wetering in our Passport to Crime department. That’s because the author was so fluent in English that he could write a story like the following in English, without any help from a translator or editor. Sadly, this longtime contributor to EQMM died several months ago. This may well be his last published story.

Let me introduce myself. Hi, I’m James. It’s too nice a name for me so I prefer to be called Vetty, short for “veteran.”

I got “veteran” on my license plate, too. As I swapped a leg for a medal, the pickup truck also sports one of those blue invalid cards.

Silly, I know. Like I want to advertise that there is something special about me, that I bravely fought for my country, losing a useful limb. That there is value to my being around here. While, in truth, I pride myself on my knowledge, okay, let’s say “strong suspicion,” that there is not.

I merely exist, I will tell the crowd at the Thirsty Dolphin. I am aimlessly adrift in the universe, on a desolate, but beautiful — especially now, because it’s the midst of winter — part of the Downeast Coast of the state of Maine, U.S.A.

Bunkport is my hometown. Small to middling, as Maine towns go. Fiercely Puritan once, but there’s been some intermingling with other tribes. An ongoing process that leads to exchange of ideas, differences in practice, adjustment of attitudes, that sort of thing.

The Thirsty Dolphin’s Bunkport’s only watering hole. Where the action is. The contemplation of action, rather. It is owned by Priscilla, a person of great wisdom and charm, weighing more than any human scale can measure. We all respect Priscilla, because she keeps an aluminum baseball bat under the counter and will not put up with either language, attitude, nudity, or violence that go beyond flexible local standards.

I’m not unhappily adrift, I tell my audience, who are willing to listen when I promise to pay for the next round of Priscilla’s cheaper draft. On the contrary, I tell them, I would be unhappy if I did have an aim. A purpose. A goal. You see, I figure that if I did want to get somewhere, reach some benchmark, I would be unhappy, miserable, outright depressed. Even, especially, if I crossed that line.

Then what?

Okay, enough of philosophy. This is a crime story; the publisher, who thinks I can write and occasionally commissions something specific, is into crime now. He is a moral man, but there is an off side to his goody-goody character and just to titillate himself, and his goody-goody readers, he told me he wanted me to write some real bad stuff this time.

“Like true crime?”

“Not too true,” the publisher said.

He is usually here for the summer. In wintertime, bothersome folks leave us in peace. They think we have weather here. Sure, we do have weather, very nice weather, too. Ice, sleet, freezing rain, blizzards, sea fog drifting in from the ocean, and very clear days when the water is almost unbearably blue, the chickadees are singing, and Priscilla has her big-bellied stove going and we all toss in maple logs, and beech, and oak, and apple-tree logs even, and have to peel ourselves out of our layers of jerseys and sheepskin vests and the younger women show their cleavages again. We exhibit some musical talents. Ex-Harvard graduate lobster-man Tom Tipper on keyboards; I work my snare drum and a minimal set of cymbals; and Doc Shanigan plays weird but acceptable bass. Priscilla plays trumpet. Usually softly, intricately, setting a theme and then improvising in unexpected ways, with us right behind her. One wouldn’t expect that a huge woman could be subtle. Sheriff hums, his wife Dolly sings scat.

Yes, crime stories. I know.

Bad stuff happens in picturesque Downeast Maine?

Define “bad.” You mean involving “blood and gore”?

Let me describe, for your amusement, in as much detail as strictly needed, some recent local tales incorporating blood and gore, perhaps, on occasion, even featuring me as a player. No confession on my part — please. None of this never happened. When pressed by the authorities, such as they are, I will suddenly know nothing. The double negatives used are correct language here, due to the many French-speaking folks in northern Maine, although right here, in Down East, we generally try to speak one of the many brands of English.

“Down” indicates that boats, when helpless due to torn sails or a gummed-up engine, are pushed by the prevailing winds to the lower east. Our clear blue sea hides razor-sharp cliffs, surrounded, right now, by ice floes rubbing each other with a silver sound. Some cliffs are pedestals to bizarre shapes sometimes. Right in front of Big Bitch Island you’ll see a rock formation that looks, from a certain angle, like a giant mother Labrador, howling at the moon. Her tits are swollen and two puppies gambol between her feet. Little Bitch Island just shows one puppy.

There is true danger down here. Freak high tides flood anchored boats, low tides make them rip their bottoms on gravel or bottom ice. Our powerful currents — well, you just can’t figure them out, they change at will. We have sudden strong wind falls, called “cat’s paws,” that tear at boats. If a vessel collects heavy snow on her superstructure she is likely to flip. Happens every winter a few times, always at night, and tends to annoy the insurance people, who tell us that their statistics show that snow-flipped boats are always old and only recently covered.

Yes sir, we love to suffer all kinds of impolite weather that the forecast fools forget to tell us about.

Down East is littered with sunken wrecks, hiding, waiting, desperately looking for company. Torn up themselves, they want to share their fate. Dead cargo boats from yesteryear, nineteenth-century tea clippers, hundred-year-old ferry boats out of Boston are marked on the charts with deadly crosses, but wrecks shift, and they stick you with a sharp mast, or throttle your boat inside their ribs sticking up from the slime.

“One dark, stormy winter night, driven toward an inhospitable coast, a cargo of chained young noblewomen prayed for mercy.” That’s one way seafaring crime tales like to start off. But our crime tale #1 started off on a bright winter morning. Everything was just right, until Elizabeth spotted the bleeding chair on top of a huge floating navigation marker. The sea, supporting this horror, except for slowly swirling currents and just a touch of ocean swell, was calm.

We were enjoying a day of Indian summer that warms our coast for a week or so that time of the year. We had stripped down to our long silk underwear, which looked good on my stern man. The dog Tillie preferred to melt close to the You Too cabin’s kerosene stove. Our shouts brought the little mongrel out reluctantly.

Tillie sniffed, then barked. “Fresh meat?”

She looks cute, but a dog is basically a wolf. She was soon scratching the gunwale, wanting to climb the marker and lick the blood off the chair.

We are lucky here. While the rest of the coast freezes up, Bunkport bay and harbor, and the sea around Bitch, Little Bitch, Shanigan, Squid, Snutty Nose, and Evergreen islands stays fairly liquid. There must be quite a few sea-bottom wells here, spouting hot water. I came close to one while diving for scallops and nearly got burned. And tell you what: I was sure that I was seeing big pink toothy worms down there, twisting toward me. The fear made me come up fast, contracting a case of the bends on the way, a diver’s affliction that can be fatal. Doc “Fastbuck Freddie” Shanigan flew me to Bangor and the treatment out there cost me a handful in copay, in spite of my veteran’s insurance.

Bad days, good days. The day I took Elizabeth out was perfect. Good-tempered harbor seals grunted at us from their rocks and herring gulls swished their wings as they came down behind us, assuming we were out fishing and wanting to share our catch.

Elizabeth kept pointing at the top of the buoy.

We were looking up at a giant marker, a channel buoy just off Bitch Island, a steel monster painted in garish colors. It comes with radar reflectors, a gong, lights that switch on at sunset — an impressive gadget at all times — and it was carrying a big easy chair, securely fastened by thin lobster-trap lines. Getting the chair up on a twenty-foot-tall buoy must have taken some doing. Elizabeth climbed the structure and shouted down that the chair appeared to be riddled by what could only be bullets. Bullets that hit their mark, for each hole was red-ringed.

Elizabeth, who usually doesn’t use language, shouting down at me now, used language.

“Beeping blood.” She tweaked her nostrils to keep the smell out. “Beeping feces.”

She was right. Beeping human fluids, for sure.

She climbed down, her silk bodysuit showing off her long legs, slender torso, and rippling muscles (she likes rock-wall climbing, and yoga, and that Chinese movement deal where you don’t move much but it generates lack of interest in selfish worries). She jumped into my boat, the You Too, and blew the stench out of her nose. She reported.

Whoever had sat in that chair, and got drilled by bullets, was tied down with strong ropes, bits and pieces of which were still there. Most likely the ropes were cut, when subject was dead, to allow the corpse to slide into the Atlantic. A human corpse, Elizabeth guessed. She didn’t think anybody, using block and tackle (for only apes and Tarzans could have lifted the object that high), had hauled a porpoise or a seal up there.

Like you, the puzzling reader, we tried to recreate a situation. We weren’t sure. We weren’t there when it happened.

“We” was me and my stern man. The stern man, this time, was a woman, but we don’t use the term “stern person” down here. We don’t talk politically correct much, either. “Stern man” it is, whatever the gender. Regular good-old-boys, gay people, a beautiful city-lady like Elizabeth, a teener going out on a first try, your grandpa, you; stern men they all are if they back up the captain. I, for as long as I am in charge of the vessel, am known as Skip.

Now who the hell would tie a live target to an easy chair, somehow get the load on top of a floating giant channel marker, and then shoot that body dead, and subsequently cut it loose, leaving chair, blood — and waste-stains — for visiting Elizabeth to discover?

Sadistic pirates?

Sure, we have pirates here (crime story # 2). Not flying the skull-and-bones flag no more, not using swords or muskets. Those wonderful days are gone, except on screen with Johnny Depp leading. Today’s pirates are sly. They became sly because of technology. Nowadays most vessels communicate via cell phones and radio. Any suspicious event will be promptly reported to law enforcement that, since 9/11, has become fast and nosy. Our part of the coast is patrolled by Coast Guard cutters; Sheriff, and his deputies Dog and Sycophant, are out too sometimes, using a confiscated speedboat. There are also military choppers and airplanes peering down. It won’t take long to catch pirates entering a vessel by force.

Give up adventuring on the high seas?

Hey, this is America. Now we have friendly young boating types who offer their services to the mega rich about to sail their multimillion-dollar — it’s only shareholders’ money — yachts out for a spell. Our betters know about embezzling, helping themselves to other people’s money, but they don’t know about sailing. If they go out on their own they’re accident-prone, which could make them look foolish.

The charming young boating types tell the make-believe commodore they’d like to come along, just for the ride, they don’t care about wages, all that’s wanted are board, a hammock below deck, a gratuity at the end of the trip, maybe. They’re young and carefree. A bottle of rum and Hi Diddle Doodle “and here we are, Admiral. At your service. Check that global positioning system, adjust that automatic pilot, swab your decks, untangle your lines.”

So owner and girlfriends cavort in mahogany- and teak-lined cabins and the charming young boating types run the equipment, swab the decks, polish the plastic, slave away, grinning and singing.

Yes?

No. Not for long, anyway.

Ah, can you hear the double-bass groan as this scenario unfolds? As soon as the yacht is out of sight of land the newfound friendly crew, eager to please, point out an imaginary albatross or a killer whale or some other oddity. “Look over there, sir,” Sir, and the girlfriends, get shot through their heads. The live-in pirates check the yacht’s depth meter, sail to where they have a good distance under the keel, take their victims’ jewelry (did you see the ads for $30,000 watches in Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair?), cash, credit cards, electronic devices (especially laptops that store double bookkeeping, hidden wealth, numbered bank accounts complete with passwords), driving licenses, and other identification for future use and reference, and heave-ho-overboard the suckers go. The pirates usually take the trouble to attach weights to their victims’ bodies. That way the corpses, once they balloon with intestinal gas, can’t pop up to cause trouble to the living. Once safely on the bottom something will eat them pretty quick. The pirates don’t like to worry, they’re busy right now. Hoist all sails and look sharp, dead south as she goes.

Deep waters are the habitat of dogfish.

Dogfish, that’s a kind of shark. We have lots of them in Downeast coastal waters. Nasty-looking creatures. They won’t go for the living so much but they sure cherish the dead. Lobsters like corpses, too. Ever eat a Maine lobster? Tasty, eh? I like lobster myself. Lobsters and crabs are recycled dead meat, but it doesn’t do to be picky. Dogfish meat is also good, but it’s a hassle to drag those big buggers across the gunwale. Lobsters I dive for, grab a few from where they wave their antennae between the seaweed. In winter I go down, too. I have a good dry-suit. It’s fun down there between the waving kelp, especially when the sunlight filters through marine foliage.

The pirated yacht, under new management, sets a course around Florida and is sold to a Venezuelan oil mogul or a Mexican police general or a Colombian drug lord who had been checking out some luxury harbors. The foreign visitor points his choice out to the charming young boating types he has been introduced to by his U.S. Organized Crime agent, a two-sided government mini-mogul, most likely. Ese bote me sirve, amigos, Don Ladron says and pays some cash up front, promises the balance on delivery in a Mexican harbor, and drives his rental limo to a private jet waiting at Bar Harbor airport.

Good business, also for the heirs of the dead owners who, in time, will collect some considerable insurance.

A couple of those charming young boating types did appear in Bunkport three summers ago, and, a few weeks later, a yacht owned by a former CEO (now “pursuing other interests,” he told us, buying drinks at the Thirsty Dolphin) got reported as missing, together with Moneybags and his ladies. The very same lads showed again last summer, but this time the situation was different. Both pirates were shot dead, the hired skipper and his wife were executed, and all four corpses were found on the yacht Take It Easy, so a Coast Guard lieutenant told us.

So what happened?

Here, I put together a script.

Crime story #3

A local one-legged Vietnam veteran is enjoying his therapy in his converted fishing boat. It’s autumn. He watches summer birds taking off for the south and winter birds coming in to replace them. The fellow suffers from a Multi Traumatic Disorder. The psychiatrist told him his best bet to stay normal would be, apart from taking his medication regularly, to do next to nothing.

Our protagonist feels it’s time to take a nap. He maneuvers his boat behind some huge rocks where it is protected from currents. He drops his anchor. Just as he wants to slip into the cabin he spots the top of a mainsail on the other side of the rocks. He claws himself onto the roof of his boat’s cabin and witnesses Dramatic Action.

What do you know? There are the two beach bums in designer jeans he remembers from their previous appearance at the Thirsty Dolphin, where Commodore Moneybags hired them to run his vessel. The Cloud Nine was presumed to be lost at sea with the commodore, passengers, and crew lost forever.

And here we go again. From what the veteran is witnessing from his vantage point between sheltering granite formations, the charming young men are about to take over another sea castle, the Take it Easy, a Walton Wharf creation with a price that takes awhile to write down due to a multitude of zeros.

A month before Elizabeth’s appearance I was listening to an older couple who recently sold their ancient wooden mini schooner after sailing her around the world. Not having gotten much for their worm-eaten vessel, they put an ad in the Down Easter Courier offering to take yachts from A to B, which was answered promptly by the owner of the Take It Easy. Would the couple take his brand-new multimillion dollar yacht from Bunkport, Maine to Mobile, Alabama?

Why, sure, sir.

The owners flew down, were impressed by the old weather-beaten couple; up-front cash appeared, hands were shaken.

“Godspeed and see you soon. If you need a crew, feel free to hire.”

Taking the Take It Easy out for trials, the couple (this hypothetical script has it) is approached by our killers, on one of Bunkport’s floating docks, unseen by our veteran.

Our veteran now sees the new victims, the old man in his weathered Greek sailing cap and worn U.S. Navy peacoat and his wife in an overall and a battered hat, kneeling on the boat’s deck, looking into the barrels of the pirates’ pistols. The young men bring back their guns’ hammers slowly — crrrack, crrrack — and lightly touch their triggers. The shots ring out loudly. The old folks are knocked over backward.

Amazing. Not so much the violence he observes but the veteran’s own reaction. He feels he is getting into a rage. The veteran hasn’t been that desperately angry in years, not since Viet Cong mortar splinters shredded his left leg. The Traumatic Syndrome is raising its ugly head. Our hero’s innate coolness is tested. Or so he hopes. (Maybe he has no innate coolness.)

This kind of mood shift has happened before, where he felt filled with cold, deadly rage, after he woke up in an empty trailer on a back road in inland Maine, about a hundred miles from Bunkport. The pre-veteran is now five years old. He is alone, even his dad’s bad dog is gone. Looks like nobody is aiming to return soon. Have the unemployment checks run out? No more food stamps and church handouts? Where are his parents’ clothes, guns, flashlights, the deer hanging upside down from the trees behind the trailer, the canned beans stacked under the sink? “Mom! Dad! Did you go to sell the empty beer cans?”

The pre-veteran charges about the empty trailer, kicking walls, until, crying, he falls back into his cot.

Jacko, his half-brother, happens to drop in and finds moldy bread and a dented can of sardines. Jacko says today is the day he has to surrender himself to jail. “Take care, kid,” Jacko says.

Jacko must have made a phone call in town (the trailer’s phone is dead), for a social worker in a minivan picks up the child and houses it in a shelter for the homeless. Uncle Joe, a small man with a weathered face and bright eyes under tufted eyebrows, picks me up. Me? I mean the pre-veteran.

“If you don’t give a shit,” Uncle Joe tells me, “it don’t matter.”

Uncle Joe would repeat that saying often, to himself mostly, in case things did seem to matter. It calmed him down, he told me. He wouldn’t be tempted to throw his tools around or hit me. In fact, he never hit me, all because of his magic mantra.

Jacko told me, when I asked him what the point of it all was (meaning him going back to jail a lot), that the point is something that depressed people worry about, the non-depressed don’t. Like him, Jacko, for instance. He just worked in the jail’s garden. During winter he read comic-strip books. “Me worry?” Jacko asked. Jacko didn’t look worried to me. He looked more like puzzled.

Tom Tipper, the ex-Harvard guy who escaped to Bunkport, my beer buddy at the Thirsty Dolphin counter, told me to reduce everything back to nothing. Everything comes from nothing anyway, and everything goes to nothing. “You can’t worry about nothing,” Tom said, “because there is nothing there to worry about.” He would drink more and say, “Essentially, of course.” He would drink more and say, “Of course, the exact opposite is also true.” He would drink more and say, “But then nothing is.” He would drink some more and say, “Get it?”

I would like to get it.

Sometimes I did, but not when the old seafaring couple got knocked over like tin soldiers hit by pebbles from a slingshot.

The military shrink, born in Laos, who looks like a late teener and is about half my size, the doctor I see every two months or so, told me to make a list of things I like to do and give him a copy. Whenever I see him he consults the list. Am I eating sliced radishes on sourdough toast? Go for walks with my dog? Go boating for no purpose? See that married woman? Quit after the fourth beer? Smoke a joint once a week? Try to read novels in Spanish with minimal use of my dictionary?

Maybe because I hadn’t seen Dolly for a while and was going slow on radishes on toast, I couldn’t help reaching for Uncle Joe’s deer rifle, checking the clip, arming the weapon, taking — using the scope attached to the barrel — meticulous aim, and pulling the trigger gently.

Twice.

The pirates, shot through the heads, hit the deck sideways. I cleaned the rifle, put it away, and lit a joint while the Take It Easy took it easy, drifting away erratically, vaguely aiming for open sea.

While, some hours later, I was ruminating, a chopper, alerted by a lobsterman checking his traps, who phoned the Coast Guard, dropped a crew to sail the yacht to their base at Southwest Harbor.

The next night a Guard lieutenant mentioned the event at the Thirsty Dolphin, after guzzling complimentary cold ones (support our troops) from patriotic Priscilla.

“We found four corpses,” the lieutenant told us: “Two perpetrators, two victims — it looked like to a state police detective we called in. Must have been a triple event. Crime andpunishment, for those who read Dostoyevsky. Amoral guys shooting immoral guys shooting a moral old man and his moral wife.”

The lieutenant is the head of the literary society that meets at the public library once in a while. He is smart.

“I would like to remind you,” the smart lieutenant said, “that justice carries a badge in our great country. Vigilantes will be arrested, prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” He pounded the bar. “We’ve got Homeland Security now.” He pounded the bar again. “Okay?”

We all pounded the bar. “Okay!”

“The victims,” the lieutenant continued, “were killed point-blank, with 9mm bullets fitting the pirates’ pistol barrels. According to the state police expert (he dropped his voice) who had the FBI looking in too, the pirates, in turn, got shot from some distance, say sixty feet. Bullets came from a rifle that we are now looking for.

“Who?” the lieutenant shouted.

“Who?” we shouted after him.

The lieutenant told us he supposed the shooter fired from an island, maybe. Or from another vessel, maybe. He was shouting again. “Are we dealing with an insurgent trying to save the world on his liberal own? Is anyone around here trying to think out of the box?” The lieutenant glared. “Would anyone in this town dare to believe there is no box?”

“A Che Guevara?” Tom, who wears a silk-screened Che Guevara T-shirt, asked.

The lieutenant glared at us through the righteous eyes of Fundamental Christianity. The sacred quest has started up again. Evil will be wiped out and replaced by A-1, one hundred percent, first-quality Good. This service will be rendered by uniforms, and suits with badges. Was he making himself clear?

We told him he was making himself clear.

Surprisingly, the lieutenant calmed down.

“Any of you ladies and gentlemen noticed anything remarkable relating, possibly, to this incident?” he asked us gently.

A sympathetic silence filled the Thirsty Dolphin.

“No?” he whispered.

We told the lieutenant that it is hard to notice much with all of those islands blocking the view, and there was some fog the day the yacht was found drifting, and being on the water is kind of fatiguing anyway. It’s the reflected sunlight that makes us extra tired. Hell, we are mostly working men (and in my case, crazy), we have no time to check on pleasure boaters. As the lieutenant said just now, interfering with pirates is government business, right?

The lieutenant asked Priscilla to pin his card on the big tamarack beam above the bar. In case some relevant detail ever came to mind. He also mentioned a reward. Ten thousand dollars, to be paid by one of the Take It Easy’s owner’s holding companies. Another ten thousand by the insurance people. Maybe more. There might be a Certificate of Reward, possibly issued by the governor, who knows? Otherwise by the Coast Guard. Signed in ink. Not stamped.

“Sure thing, Captain, when we hear something you’ll be the first to know,” Priscilla said, wiggling hippo hips and grinning helpfully. “Just leave it to us.”

Did I tell you I was in Vietnam?

I did?

Okay, there I was, on my fourth stretch out (I kept signing up, liking that harbor-master job at the officers’ club far away from the front lines), and one of the native masseuses introduced me to her grandpa. Old codger sat cross-legged in a cave in a hill overlooking my yacht-club harbor. Grandpa rather reminded me of my uncle Joe, partly morphed into the Dalai Lama. The hermit came out of the silence when I handed over greenbacks.

What Paleface wanted?

I asked for guidance. Why not? Old Silver Long-hair was right there and who knows what those holybolies discover in their, what is it again? Transmutations? And lo and behold, the hermit, in a croaky voice, smiling benevolently, did come up with a high-level tidbit. “Grandpa wants you to know that the unforeseeable invariably happens,” my masseuse translated, “but the predictable hardly ever occurs.” She smiled and patted my cheek, “Grandpa wants you take care now, you hear?”

Now ain’t what the hermit said the truth?

Next thing, just after I got back to the harbor, my right leg got shredded along with four of my buddies’ entire bodies. The masseuse (who used to sing love songs to me) and her psychic grandpa vanished.

Jet planes from a nearby carrier applied napalm to any habitation overlooking the harbor. Our patrol, checking out the area, reported finding parts of enemy kids, women, and farm animals but no traces of any military folks or the grenade-firing gadget that had interfered with our pleasures.

After amputation I got flown stateside, and the Veterans Administration equipped me with a technological leg. A chaplain told me that Uncle Joe, having slipped on the ice and broken his skull, was no longer living. A captain in dress uniform saluted and said he felt sorry for my loss. Once my new leg hurt less I got a seat on a military plane flying to Bangor. A jeep took me to Bunkport. I moved back into Uncle Joe’s cabin and Larry the lawyer had me sign a form that I accepted everything Uncle Joe left me. There were no taxes, as Uncle had Larry set up some kind of trust. I did have to pay Larry.

Before I became his ward I knew Uncle Joe from saying hi whenever we happened to see each other, and saying yes, I wanted a hamburger. And two hot dogs. And a shake. “Thank you.”

Once I moved in he made sure I went to school and took me “naturing and maturing” on weekends. I learned local navigation and general boat tending in the You Too. We kept up appearances by doing some line fishing and we kept a few lobster traps going, but fish wasn’t Uncle’s first interest. “Fishing is regular work,” he told me. “There ain’t no money in regular work.” He looked at me furiously. “No pleasure either.”

Uncle and I used his snowmobile to hunt our yearly deer without the costly license. Again, once a year, he set me up to shoot a moose to stock our freezer and sell the surplus meat for cheap to Thirsty Dolphin buddies. Uncle wouldn’t have no dealings with substances, but we brought in loads of Cuban cigars (although he didn’t care for Castro) and excise-free cigarettes from nearby Canada, to sell to truckers aiming for “all them other states.” If the winter sea got rough we hitched a trailer-sled to his snowmobile to keep the business going. Depending on the season we took tourists for rides on water or snow, preferably when there was a storm brewing so they could be thankful for our bringing them back alive and hand over big tips. Uncle might give me a fiver once in a while so I could smoke cigarettes and get sick with my buddies. He also got me a bicycle, so I didn’t have to wait for the summer school bus, paid for decent clothes, taught me to cook muffins and lobsters and some strange spinach-and-egg dish, and got me the dog Millie as company when he was out. Millie was a comfort, like her descendant Tillie is now.

Later, when puberty hit, I did some break-ins in rich folks’ summer cabins to pay for dope and booze. Uncle grumbled. When Jacko, in between jail time, gave me the use of what he called a “found” muscle car that he completed with stolen license plates, Uncle lost the vehicle and boarded me out at a school at the far side of the state. I had to do yard work and house cleaning for bus money so I could get back to him for holidays. He was changing then. Getting old, he even forgot to get drunk sometimes, the cabin was dirtying up, and the You Too needed painting and fussing with the electronics. I got so busy helping out that I had no time to tend to my bad habits. When school was done I moved back to Bunkport and took care of him. When I got drafted Priscilla had a state nursing service take over. Priscilla claims I loved Uncle Joe, and I wouldn’t argue with such a powerful personality, but I never figured out what “love” means.

Uncle would have agreed. “Care about nothing and nothing will take care of you very nicely.” He did want me to do a good job on anything that might come up. “Just for the hell of it, Jimbo.” Tom Tipper taught likewise but left out the “good job.” Tom definitely tended to overdo negation, to the point where nihilistic insights led to disorderly euphoria and Sheriff, on occasion, had to transport a handcuffed Tom to a Bangor crisis center.

Father Mikey, when stopping off at the Thirsty Dolphin between services, told us about love being the Mystery. The Mystery, by its very nature, could not, the father said, be explained.

“Anyone wants to fight the Mystery?”

Silence in the Dolphin.

“Then the Mystery has won.”

Another triumph for the noble priest.

Uncle Joe said that’s what he liked about the Church. “It goes every which way, Nephew.” He sometimes went to Mass. “To be with the Mystery.”

When I asked whether Uncle would be in hell now, Father Mikey smiled. “What if he is? A well-organized man, Vetty, and Joe was just that, will be comfortable anywhere.”

Ah well. Me worry? But just to be sure, every clear full moon, I float flowers (in winter cedar branches) just off Snutty Nose Island, where Uncle liked to fish for cod, and once in a while caught one, and, because it was endangered, put it back carefully.

We floated his hat when the current and the wind were outward, again behind Snutty Nose Ledge and the island.

Same place where Jacko, couple of weeks after Uncle died, in a rowboat that he actually paid for, successfully overdosed on whiskey and heroin, after mailing a note to Sheriff. The note said where to collect the boat.

Jacko left a note pinned to his chest:

The crime story? you ask.

Two dead pirates aren’t enough for you? And now a suicide? A suicide is not a crime, you say. Okay. Here we go.

Crime story #1 (continued)

I was happy in the cabin that I cleaned up after Uncle’s death. New oak floors, new roof, new plumbing. Coastal art on the whitewashed walls, by up-and-coming Maine artists. I linseed-oiled the hand-hewn posts and beams. I enjoyed the view from Uncle’s sturdy bed on wheels, that I moved about so Tillie, who slept in my arm, could enjoy the best views. I always spent more than my disablement check, filling the hole with cash I found under a loose board in a walk-in closet.

Uncle’s savings, even with inflation, could last me a lifetime.

“I got all my needs covered,” I declared on a fourth beer.

“Oh dear,” Priscilla said. “That means you haven’t.”

An Abinaki Native American further down the counter, raising a forbidding hand, agreed. He told me to be careful. Had I heard about the invisible ever-present Thunderbirds, who trap happy humans into learning situations until the goddess Manitou steps out of the woods and takes us away altogether?

“You must be getting bored,” Deputy Sheriff Sycophant said. Deputy Dog thought so too.

Everybody agreed that contentment equals depression. As I mentioned before, it’s a bad thing to be happy.

Stupid too. Tillie comforted me. Dolly was busy at that time.

“Breed koi,” Dr. Frederic J. Shanigan, MD, said. Koi are big carp that come in exotic colors. They freeze in their ponds in winter but thaw back to life in the spring. Dr. Shanigan breeds them for money on his island that none of us got invited to. Our medical recluse — who brags about his beautiful island home designed by an architect from far away, an Oriental who even created a Zen garden: artfully arranged rocks surrounded by white, carefully raked gravel — lives about ten miles out of Bunkport Harbor. He has a clinic in town that’s mostly run by Nurse, as Doc likes to travel. He uses his expensive powerboat as a ferry to the mainland, and a small but fast seaplane for getting further away. He is a sporty type who kayaks as well. Fastbuck Freddie heals for money only. No insurance, no treatment, unless there is top dollar in advance. Doc refers old people to out-of-the-way clinics because Medicare cuts into his bill. A pregnant homeless woman turned up with her baby stuck sideways. Doc sold her pain pills he got as samples. Priscilla, when she saw the woman collapse on her doormat, called the county helicopter service. By the time the chopper got to Bangor Hospital it carried a dead mother and a still-born baby.

But, you know, even Freddie Shanigan has different aspects. I had a splinter festering up my hand and Doc took it out for free. Priscilla broke out in shingles and Doc was right there with the injection and the ointment. Again: no charge. He treated Dolly, Sheriff’s wayward wife, for a fungus infection. Tom Tipper, treated free for side effects of alcoholism, claims Freddie sees us as members of his sacred inner circle.

I still won’t breed no koi or shoot, like Doc, the herons that sneak up into the pond to eat them.

“Learn to fly,” Sheriff, who used to be Air Force, said. That would be nice, but I get sleepy a lot. The boat can be anchored and the truck parked, but planes need somewhere where they can put themselves down. There are strips in Maine, but mostly they are private and the owners use trespassers for target practice.

I let that go, too.

Dolly smiled at me in her special way. In between lovers, was she? Beautiful woman, Dolly is.

Maybe Dolly wasn’t what I needed either.

Priscilla said we were getting close here. Female companionship would be the answer.

“Right,” Tom Tipper agreed. “I can come over for dinner.”

I said Tillie, sitting next to me on her own barstool, needed to go out, and please excuse us.

The subject came up again when the Big and Little Bitch Islanders, led by the Sisters, their lead lobstermen, showed up for refreshments.

The Sisters also suggested I should look for intimate company. “Be like us, get yourself a woman.” The Sisters are powerful personages, housed in powerful bodies, who use the young ladies they refer to as their “squeezes” as stern men. They own powerful fishing boats (Bad Cat is the leading vessel), and a refurbished WWII landing craft. The landing craft ferries their motorcycles and pickup trucks to the mainland and back. They stomp about armed.

“Get yourself a squeeze or two,” Big Sis told me.

“Sure thing,” I said.

I wasn’t too sure.

Shouldn’t I know better? There was the high-school teacher who got me to get her into trouble and we might have married if I hadn’t found a helpful medic. The Vietnam masseuse didn’t mean well, either. There was the one-night-stand in a Boston singles bar where lonely secretaries, nurses, some widows, maybe, a divorced woman or quietly dressed twenty- and thirty-pluses, in sensible shoes, toting handbags, looking through intellectual-looking paperbacks, glance at men shyly. The glancer I ended up with told me she was a biologist’s assistant, single, no complications, the last boyfriend was long gone. She preferred a motel until she got to know me well enough to invite me to her apartment. She had booze in her bag. I was alone when I woke up late the next morning. No wallet, no car keys, even my twenty-dollar watch was missing. No goodbye note, either.

The police reminded me we live in a bad, bad world. A fellow veteran lent me a Franklin to get me home.

Still. A woman. You never know. Someone from away, perhaps. A fleeting relationship. Or a long-time prostitute with manners. Some lady looking for a break.

I started thinking about the Sisters again.

I suppose, being a minority, the third gender has to prove superiority. Maybe the Sisters overdo their act a tad. The Sisters give me lobsters from time to time. They let me blunder about in their territory at will. They have me visit on their boat, and baby-talk to Tillie, who lets them hold her upside down and nuzzle her bare belly.

I advertised in the Washington Post, Tom Tipper’s hometown. He said government women get frustrated. He helped with the ad’s text; so did Dolly, who writes a supportive column in the Greater Bunkport American, a weekly. She also wrote a Harlequin novel. Larry the lawyer was the copyeditor. Doc Shanigan took digital pictures and created a Web site. I showed up as the kind, grizzly outdoorsman with his cute little doggie. The cabin and its neat interior, the boat and the pickup truck, both shiny in late sunlight, the snowmobile and the all-terrain vehicle, everything was there against a backdrop of islands and mountains in the distance. Odd man out, maybe, but a man of substance.

Tom Tipper told me to mention jazz. I visit his trailer to listen to the CDs he makes me order and we play duets. His keyboard blends with my sense of percussion. “Jazz attracts the sensitive, the intelligent, the spiritual, yet cool,” he whispered, “and the beautifully erotic.”

LOBSTER YACHT’S, named YOU TOO, OWNER/SKIPPER, MAINE COAST. VIRILE ONE-LEGGED VET MARINE. NO DEBT OR TV. SHORE CABIN WITH PLUMBING. IN NEED OF SINGLE WOMAN. AGE 30–40. LOG FIRES. THE CHICKADEES SING ALL WINTER.visit www.james.holbert.com for pictures and ‘contact me’

The Parson Pennywick of this story (and the previous EQMM tale “Parson Pennywick and the Whirligig,”) is only one of several historical characters created for her crime fiction by former publishing executive Amy Myers. She has also given us Victorian chef Auguste Didier, Victorian chimney sweep Tom Wasp, and her own rendering, in a detecting role, of the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. Ms. Myers’s latest novels are Tom Wasp and the Murdered Stunner (Five Star) and Murder in the Mist (Severn House).

“Something is amiss on the Walks, Caleb.”

Looking most agitated, Parson Jacob Dale came into his parlour, where I was taking my breakfast. My old friend and host had just returned from conducting the daily service in the church. He is an elderly man, of even greater years than mine own, and not in good health. “It requires your assistance,” he continued ominously.

“Of what nature?” I asked cautiously. My stay in his parsonage on Mount Pleasant in the delightful spa of Tunbridge Wells was a yearly delight, and I would help where I could, although the coffee and toast before me had greater appeal.

“I cannot say.” Jacob looked at me helplessly. “It centred on the bookseller’s store, so Lady Mopford informed me. A threat of death, she cried. Send for Parson Pennywick.”

I have some small local reputation for successful intervention in such situations, and unsought though that honour is, I find my services called upon from time to time. Lady Mopford, whom I knew from previous visits, was a better source of accurate information than the London Gazette.

“Threat to whom?” I asked.

“I do not know.”

Poor Jacob finds matters outside the daily norm distressing. He is more at ease with his learned books than with the problems of his flock, dearly though he would like to help.

“You could take the waters, Parson Pennywick,” Jacob’s delightful daughter Dorothea teased me, attracted by the unusual hullabaloo.

“Thank you, but I put my faith in rhubarb powder.”

Dorothea laughed, and I could not blame her. She is young and therefore all that is old and tried and true is of no value to her — yet. It is hard for me to change my ways, and I cannot believe that a glass of spring water taken in the Walks, popularly known as the Pantiles, would prove a tonic more beneficial than the fresh air of Mount Pleasant. For no one but Jacob and Dorothea would I go to the Walks during the fashionable hours. It was late in June and the high season was upon us. Earlier this century, the Wells would have been host to every person of fashion in London, but by this year of 1783 the delights of Brighton offer an alternative that it cannot match, particularly for the younger visitors. Nevertheless the spa is still crowded with its admirers.

With a wistful glance at Jacob settling down to my coffee and toast, I hastened to remove my cap and to seek wig, hat, and cane. I too must look my best, as Dorothea insisted on accompanying me.

“Make haste, Caleb,” Jacob urged me from the comforts of his own table.

“The spring will not run dry,” I assured him somewhat crossly, “and doubtless the threats of death will by now have cooled.” I was only reconciled to my fate by the thought of the wheatear pie, a Kentish delicacy that I had been promised for dinner that afternoon.

On the Upper Walk of the Pantiles a threat of death seemed as out of place as a Preventive Officer in a parsonage. I suspected Dorothea was less concerned about the fate of some unknown person than about missing the excitement of the day — which would doubtless be long over when we arrived. To enter the Upper Walk was like stepping onto the stage of Mr. Sheridan’s Drury Lane straight from the rainy muddy streets of London town. Gone are the dull cares of everyday and around one is a whirligig of colour, chatter, riches, and culture. Here one may take coffee, read newspapers and books, write letters, dance, play cards, buy Tunbridge Ware — and above all converse. Death does not usually dare speak its name. And yet today, according to Lady Mopford, it had.

How could death be contaminating such a paradise, I wondered? This was a paradise with strict social rules. By now, at well past ten o’clock, the Upper Walk should be all but deserted, as society would have returned to hotels and lodgings to “dress” for the day. Before then, the ladies appear here in dishabille with loose gowns and caps, and the gentlemen are unshaven, as they greet the day by taking the waters. After their departure they would not return until noon, by which time they are boned-and-strutting peacocks in silks and satins of every hue — a delightful spectacle for one whose calling demands more sober colours.

Today, however, I saw to my unease that a great many were still here. Something must indeed be amiss.

“There,” cried Dorothea. Her arm tensed in mine, but I did not need her guidance, for I could see the crowd outside Mr. Thomas’s bookstore and circulating library for myself. He caters for visitors who, having paid a subscription, may have such books as they choose delivered to their lodgings. Mr. Thomas’s shop is always well attended, but today it seemed all Tunbridge Wells wished to advance its knowledge of literature and science. As we pushed our way forward through the throng, Dorothea caught the vital words.

“The Book of Poets,” she exclaimed.

Even I had heard of this tradition — and indeed read the Book in the past with much amusement. For well over a hundred years, this weighty tome containing copies of lyrics from would-be poets had been displayed in the bookstore. At first, these verses had been of a saucy nature circulated amongst gentlemen in the Coffee House, but then they had been requested by a wider public. Ladies now read the love poems in the Book of Poets, each imagining herself the fair damsel addressed — fortunately in more tasteful terms than in earlier times. Nevertheless, the quality scarcely rivalled Dryden, nor their content John Milton.

Seeing Dorothea, who looked most attractive in her printed cotton morning gown, Mr. Edwin Thomas — a fine-looking man of perhaps thirty years — immediately hurried to her side.

“I’m honoured, Miss Dorothea.”

His wife did not look quite so honoured, but was preoccupied in appeasing the sensibilities of the elderly ladies clustered eagerly around the Book, which lay open on a table of its own. Dorothea was equally eager to view it, and so, with Jacob’s mission in mind, was I, as this could be the source of the threat.

Mr. Thomas cleared our path to the Book, after I had explained my presence. “Let me show you yesterday’s verse first, Parson Pennywick,” he said gravely.

A sheet was laid between two pages, and I read:

These most unmemorable lines were writ in a cultured hand, but lacked talent, however heartfelt the sentiment that lay behind them. It was the custom that the lady’s name should be anonymous, but not that of the author. Thus a bold Foppington,followed by a flourish of which only an English aristocrat would be capable, adorned the end of the poem.

Even I had heard of this fop, whose name was so well bestowed. Lord Foppington was the grandson of the Duke of Westshire, and prided himself on his reputation as the most fashionable macaroni in London society, clad in exquisite silks and satins.

“And now,” Mr. Thomas said even more gravely, “see today’s verse, in the same hand but hardly of the same nature or intent.” He turned the page, where I read on the next sheet:

“It is not the thing, sir; indeed it is not,” Mr. Thomas moaned.

“It is a jest,” Mrs. Thomas quavered. A slender woman of far less height than her husband, she was clearly indignant that the world had singled out her beloved spouse for such tribulation.

As indeed tribulation it was. I did not like this affair. I perceived that no name was attached to this verse, but it looked to be from the same hand as its predecessor. “How did it come?” I asked. “Did the poet bring it?”

“It was by our door this morning,” Mr. Thomas told me. “Many of our poets spend their evenings in the Rooms, either dancing or playing cards, according to the evening, and they pen their tributes during the midnight hours, leaving them by our door to find in the morning.”

By the cold light of day, I thought, many must rue their hot-headed declarations. No wonder the fashion for anonymity of the damsels so highly praised by the poets. Did the author of this last verse rue his violent declaration, or was it merely a lovers’ quarrel which time had solved? Somehow I did not think so. “Have you spoken to his lordship today?” I asked.

“Lord Foppington has not appeared this morning, and no wonder,” Mr. Thomas said in a tone of disgust. “Nor, fortunately, has the fair Miss Olivia Cherrington, whom all know to be the nymph he threatens.”

“He is coming,” squealed Mrs. Thomas, running to the window. “Husband, pray do something. Miss Cherrington accompanies him.”

There was a hush outside as all turned to the approaching couple, who seemed to take such attention as their rightful due. Her maid walked dutifully behind her. Both Lord Foppington and Miss Cherrington were in full dress, despite the early hour, he in beribboned breeches and elegant frock coat, she a delightful shepherdess with ornate polonaise drapery, white stockings peeping below the calf-length skirt, and her hair piled high on her head. They looked as though they indeed graced a stage.

“Mr. Thomas, Miss Cherrington is impatient to read my latest poem,” Lord Foppington drawled, seemingly unaware of the twittering disapproval around him.

“I would,” lisped Miss Cherrington. She looked a sweet child for all her affectation, although more a dainty automaton than a young lady with a mind of her own.

“Pray do not,” Mr. Thomas said anxiously.

“Why?” she asked indignantly, turning the fateful page to read it. I made no attempt to dissuade her. If this was a true threat against her life, she should know about it.

“Oh!” A gasp, then Miss Cherrington grew very white and swooned into Mr. Thomas’s arms. Mrs. Thomas hastened to bring salts, which, firmly removing the young lady from her husband’s arms, she applied to the victim’s nostrils with no immediate effect.

“This is your doing, my Lord,” Mr. Thomas said angrily.

Lord Foppington smiled. “She swoons for my love.”

I stepped forward. “She fears, my lord. You must assure her it is a jest.”

“Fears? A jest? Who are you, sir?” Lord Foppington eyed me querulously.

“Parson Pennywick of Cuckoo Leas. Miss Cherrington fears you wish to kill her.”

“Kill her?” Lord Foppington looked blank.

“Your poem threatens it, sir.”

He cast a look at the verse and looked up, frowning. “This is not my poem. I wrote of love, I wrote of her beauty — not this.”

Miss Cherrington quickly opened her eyes. “It is your hand, my Lord,” she snapped, and swooned again.

His lordship looked alarmed. “Fairest nymph, let me recite my poem for today. Hark—

Mr. Thomas had heard enough. “Do you deny you wrote this?” He pointed to the disputed verse.

“Certainly I do.”

Miss Cherrington, now fully awake, burst into tears. “You are a villain, my Lord.”

Lord Foppington dropped instantly upon one knee. “Fair lady, it is not my hand,” he pleaded. “Depend upon it, this is Percy’s doing.”

“Lord Foppington’s rival for her hand,” Dorothea whispered to me in excitement. “Mr. Percy Trott, younger son of the Earl of Laninton.”

“Of what am I guilty, pray?” The languid voice belonged to a full-bodied gentleman dressed a la mode, who was surveying the assembled company through an eyeglass without enthusiasm — until he spied Miss Cherrington.

A dozen voices enlightened him.

“You insult me, you mushroom,” Mr. Trott accused his lordship indignantly, then turning to Miss Cherrington: “Madam, pay no attention to this clunch, this clown.” And back to Lord Foppington: “At dawn tomorrow, my Lord, we shall meet. My seconds shall call upon you.”

Miss Cherrington’s recovery was now remarkable, and she beamed at the prospect of a duel. “I shall forgive you both,” she announced. “Whether alive or dead,” she added generously.

The three left their stage together, apparently all restored to good humour. Playacting? Perhaps. But plays only succeed if based on true emotions — and what those might be here, I could not guess. The crowd began to disperse, no doubt reminded that it was long past the hour when they should be seen in dishabille.

As for myself, Dorothea reminded me that I had apparently clamoured to take the waters, and docilely I agreed. Overhearing this exchange, Mr. Thomas immediately said he would accompany us to the spring, although Mrs. Thomas’s displeasure at having to remain in the store was obvious. The spring was at the end of the Upper Walk and it was the custom for visitors to the Wells to pay a subscription on leaving to one or other of the dippers for service during the course of their stay. This hardly applied to poor parsons, but it pleased Dorothea when I produced a halfpenny.

Most of the dippers were of mature years, with a practised eye for the richest visitors, but Miss Annie Bright was a merry-eyed girl. Annie, so Dorothea explained to me, was the niece of her father’s housekeeper, Mrs. Atkins, and so I acquired her services in filling the metal cup for me.

The pretty little hand closed around my halfpenny and its new owner gave me a merry smile — at which Mr. Thomas too decided to take the waters. Annie spun me a tale of the wondrous properties of the spring and insisted I drank not one but three cups. An even number of cups would bring ill fortune, she told me gravely, but an odd number would give speed to my legs, make my liver rejoice and my spirits rise. I felt neither of the first two effects, only the flat metallic taste of a chalybeate spring, but as for the third, my spirits did indeed rise, as she smiled at me.

But then I saw Lord Foppington chatting amiably to both Miss Cherrington and Mr. Trott, the threat of the poem forgotten. Except by Caleb Pennywick.

One of the most highly praised novelists to appear on the mystery scene over the past few years, Mick Herron is also a frequent contributor to this magazine. His EQMM fans should especially enjoy his latest novel, Smoke and Whispers, hailed by PW in its starred review as a “masterful thriller” and featuring characters he’s brought to EQMM.

If this were a fairy tale, it would read: A long time ago, in a cottage near the woods, lived a little old man. One day a big bad wolf came out of the woods and ate him up. The end. But it wasn’t long ago, and sixty-three isn’t old. The woods were woods, true, and you wouldn’t want to get lost in them after dark, but they’d not been home to anything fiercer than a badger in aeons. Wolves, anyway — we don’t worry about wolves. We worry about very bad men. As for the cottage, it was a little large to be described as such, and while it was certainly near those woods, it was only a hundred yards from its nearest neighbour, beyond which you were almost into the village. And besides, endings don’t arrive that abruptly. Things continue to happen. Wolves are despatched by woodcutters, and very bad men go to jail. Though sometimes they get out.

So, then: Reasonably recently, a hale and healthy sixty-three-year-old man named Martin Hudson lived alone in a medium-sized house in a rural area, until a very bad man came out of the woods and killed him.

It happened pretty much the way you’d expect.

By day an English professor at a western Kentucky college, Tim L. Williams still manages to find time to turn out a large number of topnotch stories in both the literary and mystery fields. His work has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin, and has appeared in many magazines besides EQMM. His most recent work in the crime genre appeared in Murdaland. He is currently at work on a new novel featuring the hero of this story, Charlie Raines.

Five days after her daughter jumped from a fourth-floor balcony, Cheryl Washburn was back behind the bar at the Refugee Lounge. We gave her sympathetic smiles and larger than average tips and whispered that she was holding up all right. Of course the cliché about regulars in low-rent, dimly lit bars like the Refugee is that they form a patch-quilt family, and, like most cliches, it’s a lie. We worried about Cheryl because she was one of us but were secretly thankful that this time misfortune had found someone else. Hardcore drinkers aren’t family. They’re more like army buddies tying to survive a protracted guerrilla war without even the hope of a ceasefire.

I caught her watching me a few times, brow furrowed, eyes searching for something she wasn’t going to find in my booze-bloated face. Cheryl was an attractive woman, not pretty exactly but attractive. At thirty-seven, with a body that looked twenty-five and a face that was pushing fifty, she was no one’s idea of a traffic stopper, but when you looked at her in the right light, you could still see the girl who had turned heads before life, hard work, and even harder drinking had gotten the best of her. A couple of years ago we’d shared a bed. It was okay. Neither of us fell in love, but neither of us ended the evening by weeping. When you’re forty-five, single, and without any illusions about your desirability as either a life partner or a one-night stand, “okay” is a successful evening.

“You got a minute, Charlie?” she asked just before her shift ended.

I drained the last of my beer, did my best to smile. “Just a couple and then I’ve got to catch a flight to the French Riviera.”

She forced herself to laugh as she climbed onto the empty stool next to me. I knew she didn’t want my time, my lame jokes, or my condolences. When your twenty-year-old daughter, an honor student at the University of Memphis, gets loaded on booze and downers and jumps from a fourth-floor balcony, you want answers more than you want comfort. Most days I like my job, or at least pretend I do so that I don’t have to face the fact that I’m middle-aged and don’t know any other way to make a living. Chasing bail skips, running background checks, working mall security, and repossessing cars are all fine with me. But I hate it when things get complicated — when people in pain or trouble hire me with the expectation that I can help.

“You met her once,” Cheryl said. “She came here to pick me up, and you loaned her fifty cents for the jukebox.”

I didn’t remember that, didn’t even remember Cheryl’s daughter’s name. I recalled a few stories that Cheryl had told about her over the years: her daughter making the honor roll in high school; her daughter winning an academic scholarship to the University of Memphis; her daughter intending to study political science and pre-law. Cheryl was proud of her kid, and she had a right to be. A single mother who struggled to pay the rent and keep food in the fridge on minimum wage plus tips, Cheryl raised a kid who not only survived high school without getting hooked, arrested, or pregnant, but actually achieved something.

“None of it makes sense, Charlie.” She peeled open a pack of Doral 100s, her hands shaking like those of a very old man with a bad case of palsy. “Lea had her head on straight. She knew what she wanted, knew she had to work to get it. Then this happens.” She tilted her head and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. “It’s just not fair.”

Cheryl sat silent for a moment, smoking and staring at the tip of her cigarette as if she might find the answers she needed in the fire. I glanced around the Refugee. A few regulars were watching us, their heads properly lowered with a mixture of embarrassment and respect. For the first time all day, the jukebox had fallen silent, and no one seemed willing or capable of dropping a couple of quarters to start it up again. Outside of the clinking of glasses and a stray cough or two, the bar was as silent as a Baptist church on a Monday morning.

I knew what I was going to say before I said it and was already cursing myself for my foolishness. “Look, if there’s anything I can do, anything you need, just let me know.”

She snubbed her cigarette, sat a little straighter on her stool. “I’ll pay you.”

“That isn’t necessary... I mean, there’s probably nothing...” I stopped myself before I said “I can do.” “I don’t mind doing a favor for a friend.”

“I was saving to buy Lea a car. She needed one real bad, and I meant to have one by her birthday.” She shrugged and her words trailed off. “I’ll pay you.”

“What do the police say?”

“She left a note.”

“You think that something happened, that someone else was involved,” I said, certain that she did or that she was trying desperately to believe it. “That’s what you want me to find out?”

Cheryl surprised me. “I don’t know, but if Lea killed herself, it means that my daughter was a stranger to me, that I didn’t know her at all.” She leaned her elbows on the bar and stared into the mirror at her haggard reflection. “I guess I want you to introduce me to my daughter.”

Just as this issue goes on sale a new Hennessey and Yellich novel by Peter Turnbull, Informed Consent (Severn House Publishers), will also be released. The series, says Booklist, “has a pair of protagonists who can play in the same league as any of Britain’s top cop duos... Recommend this... to fans of John Harvey and Ian Rankin.” EQMM will have more tales of Hennessey and Yellich later this year.

MONDAY

The man was about thirty years old; the woman, thought George Hennessey, was approximately the same age, perhaps a little younger. Both were slender, both athletic-looking, and they lay fully clothed side by side in the meadow, among the buttercups. Hennessey pondered their clothing. Both wore good-quality designer wear: She had a blouse and skirt and crocodile-skin shoes; he wore a safari jacket over a blue T-shirt and white trousers. Both had expensive wrist watches. She wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring, he wore a wedding ring only. And they looked like each other; in their feminine and masculine way, they looked similar, same balanced face. Hennessey could see the basis for mutual attraction: If they looked at each other they’d see the opposite-sex version of themselves. He took off his straw hat and brushed a troublesome fly from his face. He glanced around him: meadows, woods, and fields in every direction and above, a vast, near cloudless sky, scarred, it seemed to him, by the condensation trail of a high-flying airliner. KLM or Lufthansa, probably, flying westwards from continental Europe to North America. Then, nearer at hand, the blue-and-white police tape suspended from four metal posts which had been driven into the rock-hard soil, for this was mid June and the Vale of York baked under a relentless sun.

Dr. Louise D’Acre stood and glanced at Hennessey. “Well, all I can do is confirm Dr. Mann’s finding. Life is extinct. There is no obvious cause of death, not that I can see. They look as though they are sleeping, no putrefaction, just the hint of rigor, but they are definitely sleeping their final sleep. If you have done here, they can be removed to the York City Hospital for the postmortem.” Dr. D’Acre was a slim woman in her forties, close-cropped hair, a trace of lipstick, but very, very feminine. She held a momentary eye contact with George Hennessey and then turned away.

“Yellich.” Hennessey turned to his sergeant. “Have we? Finished here, photographs, fingerprints?”

“Yes, all done and dusted. Still to sweep the field, though.”

“Of course.” Hennessey turned to Louise D’Acre. “All done.”

“Good. I’ll have the bodies removed, then.” She placed a rectal thermometer inside her black bag. “As soon as they’ve been identified, I’ll see what I can find.”

“Identification won’t be a problem.”

“You think so?”

“Two people, young, wealthy, both married, probably to each other... they’ll be socially integrated and easily missed. It’s the down-and-outs, estranged from any kin, that take awhile to be identified.”

“I can imagine.”

“Nothing so useful as a handbag or a wallet to point us in the right direction. Strange, really. If they had been robbed, their watches would have gone.”

“There’s definitely the hand of another here, though.” Louise D’Acre spoke quietly. “What I can tell you is that they died at the same time, possibly within a few seconds of each other, as if in a suicide pact, but with such a pact, we would expect to see some evidence of suicide, a bottle of pills, a firearm. Death came from without, most definitely, by which I mean they didn’t die of natural causes. Two people, especially in the prime of life, do not die from natural causes at the same time in the same immediate, side-by-side proximity of each other. They just don’t. But I’ll get there.” She smiled and nodded and walked away across the meadow of green grass, ankle-high buttercups, and the occasional fluttering blue butterfly, to the road where her distinctive motorcar was parked beside a black, windowless mortuary van.

Doug Allyn is simply incredible. Hardly a year goes by when he isn’t nominated or claiming one of the mystery field’s major awards. In 2007, for instance, not only did the Michigan author win a third-place scroll in EQMM’s Readers Award Competition for “Stone Cold Christmas” (1/07), he also received a nomination for the Barry Award for Best Short Story for the EQMM tale “Dead as a Dog” (7/07). This new story is shorter than most of Mr. Allyn’s, but of the same high quality.

The jury wouldn’t look at us when they filed back in. Even the foreman, a rumpled old-timer who’d offered my mother sympathetic glances during the course of the trial, was avoiding our eyes now.

A bad sign. But I wasn’t really worried. The case was open and shut.

A rich playboy knocks up his girlfriend. He offered to pay for an abortion but she refused his money. She wanted the child whether he did or not. A week later, as she was walking home from work, my nineteen-year-old sister, Lisa Marie Canfield, was clipped by a hit-and-run driver who never even slowed down. Dead at the side of the road. Killed like a stray dog.

Police found traces of blood on the bumper of her boyfriend’s Cadillac SUV. Lisa’s blood. A simple, straightforward homicide. In Detroit. Or New York.

But Valhalla is a small, northern Michigan resort village and Lisa’s boyfriend, Mel Bennett, is a hometown hero here. A football star at Michigan State and later for the Detroit Lions, Mel owns the biggest Cadillac/GMC dealership in five counties.

Lisa, on the other hand, was only a shopgirl, a wistful little retro-hippie who sold candles and incense in one of the tourist traps on Lake Street. She was too young to get involved with a player like Mel. If I’d known she was seeing him... but I didn’t know. I’d been too wrapped up in my teaching career to pay much attention to my little sister’s life.

And now it was too late for brotherly advice. Or anything else. Only justice remained.

But Mel Bennett was a sympathetic figure on the witness stand. Tanned, tailored, and charismatic, Mel sheepishly admitted that my sister wasn’t his only girlfriend, he was dating several other women. And one of his lovers, Fawn Daniels, still had keys to his apartment. And to his car.

When Fawn took the stand, she refused to say where she was at the time of the killing. She took the Fifth Amendment instead, scowling at the jury, hard-eyed and defiant as a Mafia don.

And now the jury looked uneasy, even angry. Like they’d been arguing. Perhaps they’d settled on a charge less than murder. Manslaughter, maybe.

It never occurred to me they’d let the bastard walk.

But that’s exactly what they did.

The foreman read the verdict aloud from the verdict slip. “On the sole charge of murder in the second degree, we find the defendant, Mel Bennett, not guilty.” And the packed courtroom actually burst into applause.

Outside, on the courthouse steps, the foreman told a ring of reporters: “We thought Mr. Bennett was credible when he swore he cared for Lisa Canfield and would never harm her. And when his mistress, Fawn Daniels, refused to answer, many of us felt there was reasonable doubt. Maybe she—”

But he was talking to the air. Mel and his entourage swept out of the courthouse and the reporters flocked around them like gulls at a fish market.

Smiling for the cameras, Mel said he had no idea who’d killed poor Lisa, but he was sure the authorities would find the person responsible. He offered his sincerest condolences to her family.

“How does it feel to be a free man?” a reporter shouted.

“I was never worried,” Mel said solemnly. “I knew I could count on a Valhalla jury for a fair shake.”

Scrambling into a gleaming red Escalade, Mel roared away, waving to the crowd, grinning like he’d just scored the biggest touchdown of his life. Or gotten away with murder.

When the prosecutor was interviewed, he griped that Mel Bennett got a Valhalla verdict. A reporter asked him to explain, but he just shrugged and stalked off. Implication? What do you expect from a hick-town jury?

And he was right. Valhalla is a small town. By New York or even Detroit standards, most folks who live up north are hicks. More or less.

My extended family, Canfields and La Mottes, are redneck to the bone, and proud of it. My uncle Deke’s clan, the La Mottes, are the roughest of our bunch, jackpine savages who grow reefer and cook crystal meth in the trackless forests. The rest of us are solid, working-class citizens. Blue collar, for the most part.

All but me. I’m Paul Canfield, the first of my family to earn a bachelor’s degree. I teach political science at Valhalla High School. My relatives call me Professor. A compliment or an insult, depending on the tone.

After the trial, on a golden, autumn afternoon, our small clan assembled in my uncle Deke’s garage, still stunned by the verdict. We’d intended to hold a delayed wake in honor of my sister. Lisa Marie was dead, but at least the monster had been punished. Or so we’d expected.

Instead it felt like Lisa had been slaughtered all over again. Along with her unborn child. A Canfield baby none of us would ever hold.

But there was beer on ice, hot dogs and potato salad already laid out. And folks have to eat.

So we gathered around the banquet table in somber silence, Canfields and La Mottes, in-laws and cousins. But with none of the usual good-natured banter. No one spoke at all. Until my mother, Mabel Canfield, turned to me for an explanation.

“I don’t understand it, Paul,” she said simply. “How could this happen? Where’s the justice in it?”

“Justice doesn’t actually exist, Ma. It’s only a concept. An ideal.”

“I still don’t—”

“When people go to court, they expect to win because they’re in the right. But the truth is, every trial is a contest. Like a debating match between lawyers with a judge for a referee. The jury chooses the winning side and we call it justice. And usually, it works pretty well.”

“Not this time,” my cousin Bo La Motte snorted. “The jurors were morons.”

“No,” I said, “they were just home folks. Like us. Mel Bennett’s a professional salesman and that jury was just one more deal to close. He had a sharp lawyer and the prosecutor thought the case was a slam dunk—”

“It should have been!” Bo snapped. “Lisa’s blood was splattered all over Bennett’s damn car!”

“But the Daniels woman had keys to that car. When she took the Fifth and refused to say where she was at the time of Lisa’s death, the jury had reasonable doubts. And they gave Mel the benefit of those doubts.”

“Is there any chance at all that Daniels woman could actually have done this thing?” my mother asked.

“No,” Uncle Deke said quietly. “I had some people look into that. Word is, she was shooting pool at the Sailor’s Rest when Lisa was run down. She’ll probably claim she bought dope or committed some other petty crime to justify taking the Fifth, but her alibi is rock solid. She didn’t kill Lisa, Mel Bennett did. I expect Fawn collected a fat payoff to cover for him.”

“Then I say we should pop that bastard today,” Bo said. Burly and surly, my cousin Bo is the hothead of the family. He inherited his father’s straight dark hair, obsidian eyes, and black temper. But in school, nobody ever picked on me when my cousin Bo was around.

“Popping Bennett is a great idea, Cousin,” I said, “as long as you’ve got no plans for the rest of your natural life.”

“Bull! No jury in the world would convict me! They’d—”

“You just saw firsthand what a small-town jury can do! You’re already a two-time loser for weed and grand theft auto, Bo. Nobody’d give you the benefit of a doubt.”

“Then to hell with them! And to hell with you too, Professor!” Bo snapped. “If you got no belly for this, go back to school and leave the rat killin’ to men who ain’t afraid to—”

Whirling in her chair, my mother backhanded Bo across the mouth. Hard! Spilling him over backwards onto the garage floor.

He was up like a cat, fire in his eyes, his fist cocked — but of course he didn’t swing.

Instead, he shook his head to clear it, then gingerly touched his split lip with his fingertips. They came away dripping blood.

“Damn, Aunt May,” he groused, “most girls just slap my face.”

“Not Canfield girls,” my mother said. Uncle Deke chuckled, and gradually the rest of us joined in. It was a thin joke, but our family hadn’t done much laughing lately.

Uncle Deke tossed Bo a paper towel to mop up the blood and we all resumed our seats.

“All right, Professor,” the old man growled. “You’re the closest thing we got to a legal expert in this family. What are our options now? Is there any way to get justice for Lisa? If we dig up more evidence—?”

“I don’t think it would make any difference,” I said. “Now that Mel’s been found not guilty, he can’t be tried again, period. He could confess to killing Lisa in a church full of witnesses and the worst he could get is a perjury charge. A year or two, no more.”

“You’re saying the law can’t touch him?” Bo said dangerously. “Is that what you’re telling us?”

“Look, I’m only a teacher, Bo, not a lawyer. But I don’t believe there’s anything we can do. Legally, it’s over.”

“Except it ain’t,” Bo said.

“It is for now,” my mother said firmly, rising stiffly, looking up and down the banquet table. “Deacon, you’re my older brother and I love you, but you’ve got an evil temper and your three boys are no better. Lisa was my daughter, not yours. You missed most of her growing years while you were in prison. I absolutely forbid you to throw any more of your life away in some mad-dog quest for vengeance.”

“You forbid me, Mabel?” Deke echoed, with a faint smile.

“I swear to God, Deacon La Motte, if you or Bo go after Mel Bennett, I’ll cut you off. I’ll never speak to either of you again as long as I live, nor will any of my family. Ever.”

“That’s too hard, Sis,” Deke said, his smile fading. “That sonofabitch murdered your girl and her unborn child. I can’t let it pass.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m only saying we should wait. In six months—”

“Six months!” Bo interjected. “No way!”

“In six months we’ll all have cooler heads,” Mabel continued firmly. “Maybe we’ll feel differently. Maybe Bennett will get hit by a bus or someone else will settle his hash. If not, in six months, we’ll look at this again. But for now, I want your word, Deke, yours too, Bo, that you’ll stay away from him. We’ve already had a Valhalla verdict. We don’t need a La Motte verdict added on top of it.”

“That’s bullshit, Aunt May—” Bo began.

“Watch your mouth!” Uncle Deke barked, slamming the table with his fist, making the beer bottles jump. “Mabel’s right, as usual. If Mel Bennett gets struck by lightning or catches the flu, the police will be coming for us. Because they’ll know damned well we were involved. We’d best lay back in the weeds awhile, and cool off. Think things through. If anybody’s got a problem with that, he can step out back and talk it over. With me.”

Deke was glaring at Bo, his oldest boy. Uncle Deke is rawboned with thick wrists and scarred knuckles, dark hair hanging in his eyes, lanky as Johnny Cash back in his wilder days. Pushing fifty, though.

Twenty years younger and forty pounds heavier, Bo has a serious rep as a bad-ass barroom brawler.

But when we were boys, my uncle Deke shotgunned Bo’s mother and her lover in a local tavern. Then ordered up a beer and sipped it while he waited for the law to come for him.

Fourteen years in Jackson Prison, he never backed down from anybody and had the battle scars to prove it. None of us had any doubt how a scrap between Bo and Uncle Deke would come out.

Not even Bo.

“Whatever,” he muttered.

“Speak up, boy,” Deke said. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Whatever... you say. Sir,” Bo added, glaring at his father. Then at me for good measure.

“It’s settled then,” Deke nodded. “We wait six months.”

But he was dead wrong about that.

Sisters Mary and Pamela O’Shaughnessy first saw print (under their pseudonym Perri O’Shaughnessy) in the June 1995 EQMM, as the second-place winners in MWA’s 50th Anniversary Short Story Contest. They’d already sold a book by that time, and after 13 successful books in thirteen years, they decided to take a year off. Now they’re back, with Show No Fear (Pocket Books).

Aerial view: A yacht drifts in a vast turquoise sea speckled with small, distant islands.

Closer view: A man and a woman, both very good-looking, sparsely dressed, oiled with suntan lotion, sit together on plush cushions lining the deck of the yacht.

Even closer view:

“Where’s that go, Tom?” Carolina pointed at a trapdoor she had just noticed on the deck.

“Sail storage.”

She adjusted the strap on her swimsuit. “I guess you know boats. You were a Navy Seal, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, but not on ‘boats’ like this. This is a fifty-two foot Tanaya yacht. The brochure calls her an eye-stopper. And so she is.”

She smiled at him. “Two bedrooms below. Impressive.”

“You mean two staterooms.”

“I don’t know much about boats, or yachts, for that matter.”

“If you knew me well, you’d know that I know you know about yachts and boats and I’m guessing much more obscure things, too.”

She yawned. “Just trying to get a dialogue going.”

“Bored?”

“Funny, isn’t it? I mean, we’re in paradise. You see it on magazine covers, thinking, oh, that’s life worth living.”

He scanned the horizon. “It’s going to be a beautiful evening, and let me remind you, we’re deeply into the good life.”

Taking a deep breath and closing her eyes, Carolina relaxed her face in the long rays of the late afternoon sun. “Stopped in at the post office in Roadtown lately?”

“No.” He picked up binoculars and put them to his eyes.

“You know that wall where they post pictures of the families that have disappeared off their boats — yachts?”

He nodded.

“Well, they’ve updated it. There are new ones, recent ones. Photographs of tousle-haired kids, tanned parents. Grinning dogs. Imagine people taking their dogs on long boat trips. I mean, where do they poop?”

He laughed.

“Seriously. That’s some sad stuff.”

They sat in silence while Carolina leafed through a magazine and Tom continued his scrutiny of the empty horizon. After a while, she put the magazine down, put a white canvas hat on her head, and pulled her ponytail through the back. She squeezed some sunscreen from a soft plastic bottle and rubbed her stomach.

“Any good?” he asked, sniffing, setting aside the binoculars. “Smells nice.”

“SPF thirty-five. No worries, no burn, baby.”

“Make me hot, sweet thing. Call me names.”

Carolina punched his arm. “Pay attention, here. Grow up.”

He studied her. “I am paying attention, here. You in a bikini: brown and beautiful.”

She blushed. “You’re cute in those surfer shorts, too. It’s sure a different look for you.”

A few minutes passed in silence. Then Tom picked up the binoculars again.

A huge yacht skidded by. The wake rocked them.

Tom swerved his binoculars that way. “Gotta be sixty-five feet.”

“Here be rich folk,” Carolina said. “They devour catered strawberries and pineapple with whipped cream and jump into the sea looking monstrous, loaded with gear, never more than ten meters from yet another of the world’s most dazzling coral reefs.”

“Hey, you snorkeled yesterday. You thought that parrot fish making those nibbling sounds on the coral was awesome.”

“He looked like a rainbow.”

“Check this out.” He handed her the binoculars.

She took them and squinted. “Two people. A girl and a guy, I think.”

“In trouble?”

“Pretty long way off, but I’d say so.” She handed them back.

“A Boston Whaler.” He watched. “Engine sputtering.”

“If they need help, they’ll signal us somehow.”

“The guy’s looking at us through his binoculars.” He put his arm around her and held her close. “I say we ignore them until they let us know they want us involved. What do you think?”

“Maybe they’re waiting for help from someone they radioed already,” Carolina agreed. She popped open a couple of bottles, handed him one, and nuzzled his neck.

He set the powerful binoculars down and pulled her into a long, slow, showy kiss.

After they parted again, she drank from her bottle, turned away from the approaching boat, and made a face. “Ugh. What crap.” She set the bottle down.

“Won a prize in a blind taste test.”

“You mean a tasteless taste test.”

“We’ll crack out some champagne later, and that’s a promise.”

She ran fingers through the hair on his chest.

He nibbled her ear. “They’re heading our way. He’s pretty stuck on those binoculars. What a voyeur.”

She pushed in close to him.

“You’re trembling. Nervous?”

“Actually, I’m excited. Tired of sitting out here with nothing happening, no offense to you. You can be entertaining.”

He laughed, and kissed her again. “It’s just two kids on a rental boat that’s running out of gas or something.”

They watched the boat approach, its motor roaring intermittently. The pair chugging toward them in the boat, now more visible to the naked eye, appeared youngish, twenties.

“They need bailing.”

“The nearest island is Jost Van Dyck, and that’s got to be, um, seven miles away?” She accepted a long kiss, which took place more on her cheek than her mouth, and took the binoculars, studying the couple. “Tom, he’s got two arms up, trying to get our attention. They want help.”

Tom stepped up to the yacht’s shiny wooden wheel. He turned on the motor, and aimed for the Whaler.

A bead of sweat on Carolina’s forehead dribbled down her cheek. She brushed it away and turned her face into the wind, watching the little boat get bigger. Her hat flew off and she rushed to retrieve it before it went overboard.

“Careful there!” Tom said.

“Be right back,” she said, disappearing below. Moments later, she returned wearing a sarong high over her swimsuit.

“Hey, get over here. Snug your hot body closer,” said Tom.

“Stalker.” She nuzzled, then ruffled his hair, looking toward the little boat. “Better slow down.”

He nodded, slowing.

“Don’t want to drown them.”

Tom cut the engine. The small boat cautiously approached the yacht. The couple on board waved. Tom waved back.

“They were going toward Sandy Spit,” said Carolina.

“Lots of big yachts stop there.”

“But their engine’s failing and we’re closer.”

“And isolated,” said Tom, smelling the skin on her shoulder and sighing. “We could ignore them.”

“Don’t get weird on me, okay? That might make me nervous.”

“Too late.”

“Sorry for the grease,” she said, laughing as his fingers stalled in a tangle of her hair. “Three days at sea and everything goes to hell.”

“Speaking of that.” He squinted through the binoculars. “The sea’s rough right now. They’re rocking.”

“Closer, closer.”

“Drink,” he said, handing her another brown bottle, “then come back and cuddle. Keep in mind we’re on our honeymoon.”

Carolina tossed her old, half-finished bottle, then drank. Tom picked up a new bottle and drank, too.

Silvery-pink clouds blew in the western sky, the indigo sea churning below. The boat pulled up beside them so quickly that the pounding on the side of their yacht startled them both.

“Permission to climb aboard?” asked the muscular young man, smiling. “Always wanted to say that.”

“Sure,” said Tom. He hung a ladder down the side. The young man and his partner, a young woman in a bikini only partly covered by a shirt, grabbed the ladder and nimbly ascended.

“Got a cigarette?” the young man asked immediately upon dropping onto the deck. He wore a sleeveless tee over a pair of bulky, flowered Hawaiian trunks with multiple pockets that enhanced the fit legs that thrust out of them.

Carolina rummaged and extracted a lighter and a pack from a pocket in the bin beside her.

“Cool,” the young man said.

She threw the pack and lighter at him.

He caught with easy grace, lit his cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled. “Oh, what a killer.”

The girl sprawled against the rail beside him, her damp, white cotton shirt tied above a flat, pierced navel. Autumn gold hair floated around her head as light and thick as feathers. Her skin, rusty-over-beige, bore few traces of the sun they must have survived. She looked like a model, taller than most women, utterly at ease with her body. “Wow, thank you SO MUCH for picking us up. That was so scary.” She plunked a beach bag down beside herself.

Her boyfriend frowned slightly. “It’s not like we were going to drown.”

“We were an awful long way from another boat,” she said, pointing down at the Whaler, “to be carrying so much water. You take too many risks.”

“Jude,” the young man said suddenly, extending a hand, turning everyone’s attention away from the boat. He smiled again. Tom shook, then Carolina.

“Shauna,” said the girl, her eyes less friendly, her teeth less prominent than Jude’s, though no less bleached. They shook hands.

“Thirsty?” Carolina asked, after Jude and Tom tied the Whaler to the yacht.

“Got beer?” said Jude.

Carolina handed him one. Jude sipped, grimaced. “What is this?” He examined the label. “Hey!”

“Sorry,” Tom said, taking it from him. “I’m in recovery.” He found another, similar-looking bottle and handed it to Jude. “This will suit you better.”

Jude drank. “Recovery. No offense, but have you ever considered that that is a fad promoted by dull people to dull people down?”

“How ’bout you, Shauna?” Carolina asked before Tom had a chance to respond.

“Anything cold.”

Carolina handed her a beer.

“Where to?” Tom asked, starting up the yacht’s motor.

The two younger people looked at each other. “The dock at Cane Garden Bay. Imagine someone renting someone a leaky boat with a bad engine!” Jude said.

“Seems unusually stupid. You sure it’s leaking?” Tom asked.

“We don’t know that for sure, although the water got deeper, it seems to me.” Shauna adjusted the ties on her bikini. “See, the guy who rented it told us to let ’er rip if we wanted to reach the Spit in a small boat like that. So we were going fast, but Jude got distracted when this huge yacht breezed by us...”

“The engine sucked. Weak piece of crap.” Jude said.

“Jude says the engine got wet. Anyway, we lost power.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s what happened.”

“You didn’t call for help on the radio?” asked Carolina, looking over the side of the yacht into the small, swamped boat drifting astride.

“Of course. Bum radio. Big surprise,” Jude said.

“And forget mobile phones out here,” Shauna added. “No reception.”

The sky darkened suddenly, cotton-ball clouds fluffing over the sun.

“What time does your rental-man close?” Tom asked, hand over his eyes scanning the bumpy brown island in the distance.

Jude looked toward Tortola. “No rush. He lives right next to the dock. Someone can find him.” He leaned back, one hand stroking the cushion. “Let’s face it, your ride beats our ride.” He looked around. “Nice.”

“Ha,” Shauna said. “That’s for sure.” She finished her beer quickly. He finished his.

“Thanks for picking us up,” said Shauna.

“Where have you been staying?” Carolina asked.

“Smuggler’s Cove,” Jude said.

“Is that also on Tortola?”

“Right,” said Shauna. “The far side. Past Long Bay? We have friends there with a house. Not air-conditioned, if you can believe that. Hot. But there’s a teeny-weeny pool.”

“Which fruit bats love in the evenings,” said Jude.

“They swoop down to drink,” said Shauna.

“We’ll have to see it sometime.” Carolina squeezed Tom’s arm. “We don’t know that part of Tortola.”

“A hidden gem of the Caribbean, the travel writers say.” Shauna reflected Carolina’s motion, squeezing Jude’s arm.

“There used to be smugglers and pirates all over,” said Jude. “Norman’s Island? In those caves.” He moved away from Shauna, splashing fresh water from a jug over his sweating body. “They brought down European ships and stole their booty. They hid in the caves until the heat was off, then sailed away, totally rich.”

The conversation stalled. After Carolina offered him another beer and he took it, Jude sat down and lay back against the cushions, eyes closed, catching the last bit of sunlight.

“How ’bout some wine, Shauna? We have some cold white. California. Prize-winning,” Carolina said, with a private smile for Tom.

“Sounds good, but first, where’s the head?”

“Down the stairs to the right of the galley,” Tom said.

Carolina took her below, then rummaged around the galley. After Shauna finished, she returned to the deck and Carolina lingered below. Tom appeared. “You gave him near beer?”

“I stink as a host, yep.”

“Bad enough we drink the stuff,” Carolina muttered and put together a plate of goodies on a platter that resembled a big green leaf. “Shouldn’t you be steering?”

“Gave Jude a turn.”

“Is that wise?”

“Don’t worry.”

They returned to the deck. Tom and Carolina stayed close to each other, a lingering look or touch between them here and there. Tom took the wheel from Jude, who settled back beside Shauna.

“Honeymooners?” Shauna asked, looking first at Tom, then Carolina.

They nodded, tightening their grips on each other.

“Told you,” she said to Jude. The sun continued to sink; the deck darkened. Carolina lit night lights, which twinkled like the night sky, hugely, doubled by their reflections, across the windy sea and beyond.

“Why not switch to sail?” Jude asked. Islands twinkled in the distance, at least three close enough to shine crisply. Tortola, which had appeared so faraway, now loomed close and dark, with only a few spots with many lights. “Something wrong?”

Tom laughed. “Only that I’m a lazy sailor.”

Shauna refilled her wineglass for the third or fourth time, wobbling from the cooler to the bench.

“You cold?” Carolina asked.

“Yeah, but I’ve got a sweater.” She reached into her beach bag and found one.

The silvery gray sky wavered between day and night.

“A sunset to die for!” Shauna raised her wineglass to the ever-changing froths that lit the sky.

They all watched in awe as the sky trembled between red, peach, orange, gold, violet.

“Like flames.” Shauna settled herself against Jude, who put his arm around her.

“Not long, now,” Tom said.

Darkness, with the slim smile of a moon, starlight, and glowing sea, descended.

Suddenly, Jude sat up straight. A gun sprang from his pocket and into his hand.

Carolina and Tom blinked at the sight. “What have we here?” Carolina asked, the remaining half of her sandwich, chicken with avocado and a slice of tomato, in one hand, limp. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing personal,” said Jude, not high, not the least bit affected by the multiple alcoholic beverages he had previously appeared to suck down.

Shauna, a little less on the ball, eyes a bit blurred, stood up, knocking back her last glass of wine. She tapped the empty glass against a bench, then watched it break. “Sorry,” she said.

Carolina stood up.

“We’ll give you a fighting chance,” Shauna said. “Yours for ours.”

“You’d put us on that piece of junk?” Tom asked. “You survive and we drown?”

Jude said nothing, just nudged them to stand.

“We walk the plank and drown,” Carolina said. “You play pirates.”

“We do what we hafta,” Shauna said.

Walking Carolina toward the leaky, tethered Whaler, Jude pressed a gun to her back. A scrim of water shined in the bottom. “I’m grateful to people like you. Do-gooders.” After opening several bins and searching quickly, he found rope.

“Tie us up?” Carolina said. “You want us to die?”

“Here be dragons. I guess when you booked your honeymoon, you didn’t consider that.” Jude tried to wrap her wrists but since he was holding a gun, couldn’t. He motioned Shauna over to help.

“You’re smugglers. You steal boats. You kill people for drug money,” Carolina said.

“You have a fighting chance!” Shauna said.

Jude pushed the gun hard into her back. “Rich bitch.”

Shauna offered up an apologetic shrug, then looped nylon rope around Carolina’s wrists.

Carolina twisted quickly and kicked Shauna’s knee out from under her. Shauna fell.

Jude, startled, momentarily lost position, then aimed at Carolina. Behind him, Tom lunged. Smoothly, he grabbed the gun out of Jude’s hand and turned it on him.

Carolina wrestled free of the nylon ropes holding her wrists. She jumped up and pulled Shauna into a headlock.

“What the hell!” shouted Jude, staring down the barrel of his own gun, held by Tom, pointed at his face.

Sirens sounded.

Tom swiveled the younger man around, then pulled Jude’s hands behind his back, locking them in cuffs.

Shauna, quicker to recover than expected, stood, smacking Carolina’s head with a tightly balled fist. Then, while Carolina reeled, ignoring the gun pointed at Jude’s head, Shauna threw herself toward Tom.

Tom’s right arm struck her on the fly. She collapsed heavily onto the deck, panting, looking up at him, teary-eyed with pain.

Carolina jumped onto Shauna. Shauna wriggled and fought until Carolina pinned her like a wrestler to the deck. She cuffed her.

Tom and Carolina sat the two down on a bench a few feet apart from each other, where they drooped unhappily in the brilliant moonlight.

“Honeymooners?” Shauna frowned. Tom and Carolina faced the younger couple, each holding a gun, pointing steadily at their chests. “I could swear he French kissed you.”

Carolina didn’t react.

“I hope the money makes up for those ugly big, wet lips of his slobbering all over you.”

“Who are you people, anyway?” Jude asked, leaning against a cushion, legs shaking slightly, eyes narrowing. “You don’t sound local.”

“Special Ops,” Carolina said. “We’re out of St. Thomas, working along with the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force.”

“We hunt pirates,” Tom said.

Carolina picked up her fallen sarong and tied it around herself all the way up to her chest, the Caribbean’s version of New York City’s bulletproof vest.

Translated by Donald A. Yates

Luis Adrian Betancourt is one of Cuba’s best-known crime writers and critics, with many novels and stories in print. His first appearance in translation was “Guilty” (EQMM 3–4/ 04). Here he is with a contemporary police tale; private eye stories do not exist in Cuba, where all sleuthing is done by state agencies!

Sergeant Hector Marcos covered the cold, naked body of the woman in Apartment 5 with a white sheet. Some of the neighbors had told him that she was a little loose, but really a good person. According to others, she was a “decent” person, but a little loose. The “loose” side of Paula Ortiz’s character consisted of the way she dressed, her fondness for parties and dancing, and the fact that she lived alone in an apartment where occasionally she received visits that were considered inappropriate.

The night before, when Alma Corrado was closing her window prior to going to bed, she was not surprised to see a young man rapping at the door of the tenant across the way and calling to her to let him in. At first he seemed to be pleading, then he began to sound threatening. The broad shoulders of Isaac Reyes, one of Paula Ortiz’s not infrequent visitors, were shifting back and forth in the rhythm of a manageable but evident state of drunkenness.

“Come on, baby...” he was saying, together with other words that went from mumbled to slurred. “Don’t get me mad,” he kept repeating. The moment came when Alma thought she should call the police, and she was about to do so when Paula decided to let her friend in. In no time they were yelling at each other at the top of their voices. Even after she closed her window, Alma could hear Paula complaining that her visitor was drunk and that this wasn’t any time for her to be receiving company. Then there was a long silence, suggesting that they had made up. Alma went to bed and thought nothing more about it until the next morning, when she woke up to find her street filled with bystanders, police, journalists, and a vehicle from the coroner’s office. In Paula’s apartment, people were taking photographs, dusting for fingerprints, and a police lieutenant who identified himself as Luis Adan was asking questions and looking for witnesses.

Alma needed to take several sedative pills for her nerves. She was fifty years old, but had never been even remotely associated with anything of a criminal nature. The death of her neighbor was a shock. She could have avoided becoming involved just by not telling what she had seen. Like the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But the image of her friend lying on the floor of her living room, her empty gaze fixed on the ceiling above, compelled her to tell the police what she knew. She trembled as she described the visit of Isaac Reyes at the moment when, ready for bed, she took a last look outside before closing her window.

The little she had to say immediately resulted in an order to find Reyes. He was located in short order. That day he had not gone off to work, staying in bed to sleep off the effects of his overindulgence. He was taken away without any problem.

At the police station Alma, still trembling with emotion, was able to identify him from among the five men assembled behind the one-way glass. It was very simple, since she had seen him on many occasions. Moreover, to the astonishment of the authorities, Reyes wasted no time in admitting that he was guilty. Amidst curses and complaints, he gave an account of his doomed romance. There had been very few moments of real happiness. He was hopelessly in love with the woman, so he inevitably ended up begging for her attention. And on that night the effects of the alcohol allowed him to say things so terrible that there was no way to take them back. They struggled; he didn’t intend to harm her, but Paula lost her balance and fell over backwards, striking her head on the extended wing of a metallic swan figure on the floor. Her body went limp, dropping into a grotesque position, with a halo of blood beginning to circle her head.

“I knew I had killed her.”

“Did you wipe up the blood with her nightgown?”

“No. I was scared and I left.”

Reyes responded quickly and directly to the questions Lieutenant Adan was asking. Everything he said fitted the scene of the crime except for three points. In his account, Reyes failed to mention the moment when he pulled off the woman’s nightgown. He spoke of seeing a circle of blood by her head, but not of wiping it up, something that had probably been done with the nightgown. And he swore he had not drunk a single drop of liquor there, not even water, despite the evidence present of drinks having been served.

If Adan pressed him on these questions, he looked bewildered, as if he were straining, trying to remember something that had never happened. Adan was unable to understand these blank moments. His colleagues insisted: He was drunk, there was no way his memory could be perfectly clear. If you’ve got a confession, what more do you want? Close the case!

Alma’s testimony was decisive. Besides, the blood found beneath Paula Ortiz’s nails matched Reyes’s blood type. And unmistakeable scratch marks had been found on his arms.

“But I didn’t take off her nightgown,” Reyes insisted.

Adan laid a photograph of the crime scene before Reyes.

“Look at it carefully, and remember what happened.”

“No, I didn’t leave her like that. She was wearing her nightgown; there was blood...”

The photograph showed the torn nightgown alongside the naked body, there had been bloodstains that someone had wiped up.

“That’s not the way I remember it.”

Adan decided not to close the case despite the persuasive evidence that he had. Reyes’s confession would give the prosecution little work. But he saw that there were still pieces missing to fill in the puzzle.

“Come on, Adan,” his assistant said, “we’ve all got plenty of work to do. You’re wasting your time juggling details given by a guy with a poor memory, but who’s already confessed.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Adan replied.

Once again, he asked to hear Reyes’s story. As before, there were no contradictions of what he had already sworn. He simply repeated that when Paula fell to the floor and he saw the blood, he was terrified and left.

As the routine of the investigation played itself out, the police lab specialists examined the two glasses that had been found on a plastic tray on the table next to the body, together with a half-empty bottle of cognac. Doubtless, Reyes’s and the woman’s fingerprints would be found there, even though the former had insisted he hadn’t even had a harmless glass of water. That final scene, he indicated, didn’t lend itself to a friendly toast. On the contrary, Paula had criticized him for being drunk. She ended up saying, “There’s no use talking when you’re like this. Go home.”

If Reyes was lying, it would do him no good, because he had repeatedly said that he understood what he had done, that he should be punished for his crime, whether all of the details fitted or not.

Then astonishing news came from the laboratory: Reyes’s fingerprints were not on the glasses. Paula’s were, however, and another set clear enough to be identified. Someone, Adan considered, must have visited Paula before Reyes did. A check of the other prints revealed the identity of the other person, who turned out to be another friend of hers, a man named “Chapo” Gomez, a taxicab driver who for several weeks had been taking her out for lengthy joyrides. When they brought him in and showed him the evidence, he admitted that he had been in her apartment that night. But it had been after Reyes’s visit; he had crossed paths with Reyes as the other man was driving away from his frustrated encounter with Paula.

The cab driver began to sweat as he related what had happened.

“When she opened the door she was in her nightgown. She had hit her head somehow and was dizzy. I poured her and myself a cognac. She said she had slipped and fallen and cut her head.”

“‘You’re lying,’ I told her. ‘You were with that bastard.’”

Paula had admitted that she had had a very unpleasant scene with Reyes, that he was drunk and when he tried to get her into bed, they had struggled and she fell, hit her head, and lost consciousness. Reyes, she said, must have thought he had killed her. When she came to, he was gone.

Gomez had bought her story and suggested that he take her to bed. Paula had refused, saying she didn’t feel well. She asked him to come the next morning and take her to see a doctor. Her injury was slight, but her head hurt and she was bleeding. Gomez tried to insist. He told her that what had happened with Reyes was probably a lot different from what she had claimed.

For the second time that night Paula was faced with a passionate confrontation. It was the result of her living alone, she realized. She told Gomez she wanted nothing more to do with him. She was going to straighten out her life and find someone who would respect and take care of her. Gomez became outraged. He tore off her nightgown. They insulted each other. She said he was not man enough for her. That was all it took to loosen Paula’s grasp on her desperate situation. No one saw him leave. No one had seen him arrive.

And that was the end of the strange account of the naked woman.

When the lab results were confirmed, Isaac Reyes was notified of his innocence. He could not believe it when Lieutenant Adan said, “Go home.”

A recipient of the 2003 Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association, Robert Barnard continues to write at the top of his form. His latest novel to see print in the U.K. is The Killing in Jubilee Terrace (Allison & Busby, January). We have several more of his delightfully acerbic stories in inventory, for publication later this year, including a Mozart story from the series he writes as Bernard Bastable.

“You must be very worried,” said Inspector Paulson.

“Worried? ’Course I’m worried. Worried sick.” The elderly woman picked another Malteser from the bright red bag. “I was always telling her, but it made no difference. Just won’t listen, young people.”

“She surely knew that she ought to ring you and tell you where she was.”

“Oh, course she knew. Just didn’t think. Didn’t consider my feelings, and how I’d be worried out of my mind.”

Her eyes strained towards the clock on the mantelpiece. Inspector Paulson knew the signs. Neighbours would be on the telly in five minutes’ time.