Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

The moment Monica fell in love with him (it was love at first sight), he was in a tree. He wasn’t sure which tree, or even which day. Not long after he’d started working for Jesse’s Tree Service, they were trimming trees on a property at the other end of Perth Road from where she lived, though Donnie didn’t know this at the time. At the time, he didn’t even know Monica.

He thought about it later. That he was walking around in the world for three or four or five days completely unaware that there was someone, someone he didn’t remember ever having laid his eyes on, who loved him. Not often had life treated him so grandly.

When he went into Stewart’s for his coffee one morning, she said, “I saw you up in that tree over at Gilday’s — my God, you’re brave.” Her shy smile, her adoring eyes — what he could see of them behind the smeared lenses — made it love at first sight on his part too. He was nineteen. He had skin like sandpaper and a lopsided face, as if God couldn’t decide where to put his second cheekbone and had just slapped it on any old place. Rosemary, his sister, had long since convinced him how ugly he was. She’d also brought up his bravery (foolhardiness, she called it) in trees, though without an ounce of admiration. Live fast, die young, be a pretty corpse, he’d told her. She’d corrected him: Live dumb, die stupid, be an ugly corpse, in your case. Jesse, his boss, had chided him too for taking too many chances up high, and Donnie had told him he was part monkey. Truth was, he didn’t feel particularly brave, nor that he was taking risks. He felt natural up there. It was easy. Of course he wasn’t about to tell Rosemary he was part monkey, and give her more fodder.

Nor would he tell Monica. He was content to let her believe he was the bravest man in the world, which was the way she made him feel. In fact, he’d begun to believe it himself, though that particular belief took a hit that night in his dream.

Even after they’d made love, distracted and unreal given the circumstances, he had trouble falling asleep — given the circumstances. Random raindrops falling from the trees onto the tin roof of the trailer soothed him some, and he’d finally fallen into a deep sleep, where he’d dreamed he was watching a surveillance video. The video was playing on a screen in a darkened room, and other men were watching with him — cops, detectives, he imagined, inspired by Law & Order or any of the hundreds of cops shows he’d seen in his life. It was a grainy picture, dim and murky, hard to make out. It was apparently the interior of a store (Matson’s no doubt, though nothing looked familiar), a figure milling suspiciously about the aisles, a tall figure. He and the detectives stared hard, transfixed, trying to make out the identity of the mysterious man, Donnie holding his breath, looking for the telltale cheekbone, waiting for the detectives to recognize him, turn around, see him there. But it didn’t happen. They stared and stared, to no avail, staring even harder, Donnie staring right along with them, face glued to the screen, holding his breath, feeling a cold sweat. It was almost boring. They were starting to lose interest, drift away, then, just before that could happen, up popped the scary face, a horrible, dead, zombie face suddenly filling the screen. But in this case, unlike the other scary-face pop-ups he’d seen in real life, the dead, horrible face was entirely recognizable: Andrea.