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:
“They might have,” Jenny retorted. “But you’re not to. It’s very steep and you might slip and fall down onto the rocks. You could even get yourself killed.”
“But I want to!” I said.
“You’re not to go climbing up there now,” Jenny said even more crossly. It was all so unlike her. Then her brown eyes seemed to soften as she added sadly, “What would I do if anything ever happened to my little honeybunch?”
She was touching her necklace again. At the foot of Danagher’s it was more secluded, because swimming from the barrier was dangerous. Jenny hadn’t stopped looking over her shoulder, perhaps both hopeful and fearful that her boyfriend had followed her and might suddenly appear from nowhere.
There’s no doubt that Jenny was unlike herself that day. I was already more than halfway up the craggy face of the cliff when I heard her cry out from below. She called out I was to stay where I was, that she was coming for me. I continued to climb. I felt no fear, I wouldn’t fall, nothing could happen to me. I felt secure as a spider that can go anywhere it likes, my stick-thin arms and legs moving steadily. I heard Jenny’s voice getting closer and closer; she kept repeating I mustn’t move until she reached me, I mustn’t move.
“Please don’t move, please don’t move,” she kept saying. I looked down. She was a little below me, her beautiful face upturned, her lips moving all the time, coaxing, urging, soothing. I was glad she seemed to have forgotten her boyfriend, that now all her concern seemed only for me.
It’s hard to describe what happened next. Each time I remember a different version of those dreadful moments. I can still feel the pitted rock under my fingers, then the sudden hurting dazzle of the sun as I neared the summit. It seemed to me as Jenny reached my side and stretched out her hand to me, that her expression changed. But had it really? Had Jenny’s brown eyes seemed strange and unfamiliar because I was blinded by the sudden dazzle? And had the silent shadow that loomed over us been just a passing cloud? Or someone standing among the pink and white sea flowers, leaning over and staring down with ill intent as we clung to the rock face looking blindly up?
I often wonder about the silent shadow that had startled Jenny. The devil, I used to think, because the evening before she disappeared she had blessed herself with her left hand, Beelzebub’s hand. I worried too that I had put an evil spell on her because I had coveted the necklace, but as the years went by and Jenny still didn’t return, I evolved more rational theories.
Perhaps the shadow had been my father, concerned for Jenny’s safety and looking forward to an eternal search for shirt-collar studs. Or Jenny’s criminal boyfriend, angry for the lost night of love. Or Sergeant Monaghan, who hoped to keep Jenny all to himself. Or my mother, who had seized the moment to harm Jenny, afraid her circle of friends might start gossiping about her husband’s infatuation with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. I even considered moody Philomena struck by a sudden rage, although she rarely left the house and, unlike my mother, I had never known her to walk as far as Danagher’s Head.
My father fell ill when I was eighteen and before he died he gave me his Panama hat. “It is my favourite hat,” he said, “and I should like you to have it.” As he spoke, I wondered if he was thinking of Jenny and the number of times he had raised that same hat to her.
My mother’s health deteriorated when I was in my forties and I left my job with a pictorial artists’ supply firm to look after her. My mother and I never spoke very much. Once, I asked her if she knew what had happened to Jenny, but she pretended not to remember the name and drifted off into a doze. It seemed a mercy to keep my mother supplied with gin and vodka; the clear, innocent-looking liquid went a long way towards easing whatever pain it was that had always tormented her. For what troubled her worn body she had other therapies that worked less effectively.
When she died, I sold the house in Roscrea and settled in Kilcurtan to be near the place where I had last seen Jenny. Sporadic pilgrimages when I could get someone to stay with my mother were never enough.
What is time? Time is that which has turned an unsightly child, girl, woman into an ageless crone, hard and sinewy as a whip. Winter and summer, I set myself up with my easel on the barrier of rocks at the foot of Danagher’s Head, overlooking the hollow where I had last seen Jenny.
I probably never will know who loomed over us the day Jenny disappeared. Perhaps it was only a passing cloud. Perhaps, had I kept looking upwards, the dazzle might have lessened and I would have seen if someone had really been there. In any case, Jenny, who must have kicked off her white high heels to climb after me, was beside me by then and as she reached out her hand — I am certain it was to help me down to safety, not because she was angry with me for the missed date with her boyfriend — but when I reached out my hand it was to grab for her necklace. Jenny’s outstretched hand flew to her throat as the string snapped and the pearls flew like magic dew-drops around in the air and she uttered a small cry, like a seagull lost at sea. Then she floated like a bird away from the cliff, down, down, down into the sandy hollow below.
I have never learned to paint. My pictures are just coloured copybook daubs, but the easel is my rationale to come here to this place where I last saw Jenny. I set aside palette and paintbrush, remove my father’s Panama hat, place a stone on the shredded brim so the breeze won’t carry it away. I look up at the craggy face of the cliff and start to climb. I feel as steady and fearless as I was on the day Jenny disappeared, all those years ago. I have searched for Jenny in her poky room, in the carnival field, in the cinema, until it was knocked down, in the town, for Sergeant Monaghan’s secret cellar. I have searched for Jenny among the pink and white sea flowers, on the curving beach, among the rocks where we used to play hide-and-seek, in the sandy hollow where I had seen her last. Perhaps I will find her here, close to the summit of Danagher’s Head, still wearing her pearly necklace, still clinging with one hand to the pitted rock, her other hand outstretched towards me, caught in the evermore, seconds before she fell.
© 2018 by O. A. Tynan
Where the Red Lines Meet
by John H. Dirckx
A doctor who lias teen widely published in the medical field, John H. Dirckx has teen writing mystery short stories for EQMM and AHMM for many years. The tales are mostly whodunits, but with realistically rendered (sometimes “mean street”) settings and sharp observations of society. His series detective is Lt. Cyrus Auburn, who narrowly escaped death in his last case for us!
Another scorcher, and still not a whisper of breeze.
At high noon the south-facing billboard didn’t offer a single square foot of shade. Working in the steel compartment of the cherry picker felt to Tadmore like being slowly and evenly broiled in a microwave.
But then, he reflected, mounting a one-piece vinyl sign with a modern cable system was a piece of cake compared to the way he’d worked in the old days, teetering on a ladder and posting paper bills in segments with a bucket of paste and a twelve-foot brush.
After releasing the tension on the cable and unclamping all four edges of the old sign, he glanced down for the first time to see where it would fall if he just let it drop. Forty feet below him sprawled the usual array of roofs, chimneys, garbage cans, garbage outside of cans...
In an instant he had his cell phone in his hand. Should he call 911 immediately, or take some aerial shots of the body first?