Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
“You were going to keep your boyfriend a secret from me, weren’t you?” I said.
She hesitated. “If the mistress ever found out...”
“Jenny! You don’t think I’d tell my mother on you.”
“Sure, don’t I know you wouldn’t. It’s not that at all.”
“What is it, then?”
Jenny’s smooth forehead wrinkled in a small, worried frown. “The Lord save us, I don’t know who to be more frightened of, your Ma or me boyfriend! He said I was to swear never to tell a soul about the pair of us.”
There were times Jenny lapsed into her country brogue and we usually giggled together over that. But not now.
“Jimmy’s after havin’ a little trouble with the police,” Jenny went on, “but it wasn’t his fault at all, he explained all that to me, they had it in for him. But if the mistress ever found out about him, she’d march the pair of us down to the police station and then sure wouldn’t he kill me stone dead!”
“Is he tall, dark, and handsome?”
“Is he handsome?” Jenny’s eyes sparkled. “Sure, isn’t he just like a Hollywood fillum star!”
I was eaten up with jealousy, but also thrilled that Jenny was being courted by someone who looked exactly like a film star and what was more, someone innocently in trouble with the police.
“So you’re going to meet him tonight,” I said, having understood the significance of the perfume and that she was changing into her Sunday best, her blue flared dress and white high heels.
Jenny nodded happily. “We’re going to meet on top of Danagher’s Head. He said he’d something very important to ask me, so I mustn’t be late.”
I looked up at Jenny. She was again touching the necklace.
“Can I try it on?” I asked.
“Of course you can.”
Jenny went to the trouble of removing the necklace and clasping it around my neck. Even standing on my toes, it was difficult to see the effect properly in the rusted mirror, and I gave the necklace back to her reluctantly.
“I know what I’ll do,” she said, smiling. “I’ll leave it to you in my will.”
“Does that mean that one day the necklace will be mine?”
“All yours, honeybunch. Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said, making the well-known gesture of sworn promises, as binding as any oath on the Bible.
Jenny raised her brown waves and clipped the necklace on again. Then she took my hand and led me off to bed. I was close to tears. I couldn’t have Jenny’s necklace and Jenny dying was something I couldn’t bear to think about. But that same evening, Jenny had blessed herself with her left hand and less than sixteen hours later, she was lying unconscious in the sandy hollow at the foot of Danagher’s Head.
The morning after Jenny disappeared, I was sent back to Roscrea by train. Just before dawn, I had tiptoed to Jenny’s poky room for a last time, wary of Philomena, who slept near the kitchen too and was a light sleeper.
But Jenny still hadn’t returned. Instead, I found her rickety bed stripped, the mattress rolled up, the dresser drawers emptied, Jenny’s few garments removed from their wire hangers which hung askew on the back of the door. The little room was bare of her presence but for the chocolate-box lid, a snowy corner of which I spotted protruding from under the dresser. I searched the little room again, but the rest of the box and its precious contents had vanished into thin air.
My parents left for the Continent and I remained in Roscrea. When my parents returned, my mother engaged a new governess who looked nothing like Jenny. I never stopped thinking about Jenny. I dreamed of her almost every night. Sometimes the dreams were nightmares. Jenny’s hair would be damp and straggled by the tide, her mouth silently agape, her nylon stockings tom, her toes bleeding, her white high heels gone, her necklace gone. There were times I smelled violets, as though Jenny stood behind me, but when I turned, she would not be there. I considered running away from home and taking the train to Kilcurtan to look for Jenny, but my mother would inevitably find out and send me to a reform school where they kept you forever if your wickedness knew no bounds.
Children are strange; they form strange ideas. When I think of myself as a child all those years ago, I see another person acting with an illogical childish logic. We are joined only by our sad memories of Jenny and the unsolved mystery of her disappearance.
That last evening, the evening I first saw Jenny’s necklace, we met my father in the corridor as Jenny led me off to bed. He bowed and complimented her, as he always did, on the way she starched and ironed his collars and shirts, and helped him find the shirt-collar studs he was constantly losing. He held her hand and patted it sadly, and I remember thinking it was because someone else had given her the necklace. As an afterthought, my father wished me pleasant dreams. Before Jenny came, I rarely saw my father, although when we happened to meet, he always had a kind word for me and when, ten years later, he died from pneumonia, he wished me to have his Panama hat.
“I’ll stay with you for a little while,” Jenny said as she arranged the bedcovers about me. “I’ll stay with you till you get to sleep.”
Jenny, sweet gentle Jenny, had realized I was still upset she couldn’t give me the necklace, and didn’t have the heart to rush away to meet her boyfriend until she was sure I had fallen asleep. But how cruel children can be. I can’t bear to remember how cruel I was. That evening sleep eluded me. I was wakeful and fretful and clung to Jenny’s hand as though I might die without her. When she tried to slip her hand away from mine, I gripped her fingers tighter. I heard the clock in the sitting room chime midnight, twelve slow notes. Jenny removed her blue dress to avoid crushing it, but not the necklace, and lay beside me. That was how Jenny passed the night — lying beside a fractious nine-year-old child who refused to sleep.
The following morning was warm and sunny. After ten-o’clock Mass, Jenny suggested we might take a stroll along the promenade in the direction of Danagher’s Head. She looked thoughtful and subdued. Because it was Sunday, she was wearing her Sunday best. And her new pearly necklace. She was fingering it every now and then and pausing to look anxiously over her shoulder. Perhaps she was thinking of her boyfriend and of how angry he would be because of the missed date. The “something very important” was surely a proposal of marriage. He would have gone down on bended knee, opened a small velvet box to reveal a sparkling engagement ring, and asked Jenny to do him the honour of becoming his wife.
I glanced at Jenny. Her cheeks were pale. I thought that if she sat on a rock with her legs folded under her, wearing the pearly necklace and singing a mournful song, she could be mistaken for a mermaid. She had the faraway look mermaids usually wore when they were sad or lovelorn.
When we came close to Danagher’s Head, Jenny wanted to take the path up to the summit, but I wanted to go down onto the beach instead and from there, climb onto the barrier of rocks at the foot of the cliff. A purple sea urchin we had captured a few days before had died, and I wanted to look for another among the rock pools. Jenny agreed halfheartedly, but by the time we had tramped over the sand and clambered onto the barrier, I had developed a sulk and told her I didn’t want the sea urchin anymore, that I wanted to climb to the top of Danagher’s instead.
“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” Jenny said, looking up at the summit. “It’s very steep. If you want to get to the top we must take the path.” Jenny hadn’t removed her white high heels or nylons for clambering onto the rocks, and I wondered if it was because she still hoped to meet her boyfriend.
“I don’t want to go all the way back,” I said. It wouldn’t have taken us long, but I wasn’t going to be crossed. “Besides, it’s not all that high and I’m sure lots of people have climbed up from here before.”