Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005
- Автор: Купер Наташа, Майерс Эми
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
Ramona strove to compose herself, dabbing at her eyes and struggling to sit up, her two canes beside her.
“Tyler, dear, I told the nice policemen about the lovely time we were having, Henry and I, our little party of wine and cheese and reminiscences.” She picked up a photograph from the end table and held it in her lap, caressing it with puffy fingers. “I told them about our Hideaway from the World and how dear Henry wanted to carry me up there for old time’s sake. Spoofing, of course, he was. As if that sweet little man could have carried me. Ha ha. But he went up — wanted to see the room once more. And how I heard this — this noise. I won’t ever forget it. I called out. I went to the window. I saw his poor broken body. Awful. Just awful. I got to the phone quick as I could. ‘Ambulance! Ambulance! Hurry, hurry!’ But it was too late.”
At the time, Tyler attached no significance to the photograph Ramona kept stroking. He was too overcome by this frightful turn of events. The policeman moved his chair back, rose, and beckoned Tyler to follow him out of the room. The remains of Ramona’s party littered the dining room table along with two empty wine bottles.
“How long have you known Miss Lerch?” the officer asked.
Tyler, in a far from steady voice, explained about the blue leather wallet, the burying of the cat in the silver-chest coffin, and how Ramona had befriended him, come to rely upon him. And the story, as Ramona had told it, of her doomed love affair with Mr. Chambers.
“You hadn’t seen her at all today?”
“No. I usually come by late in the afternoon after finishing work at the Golden Griddle Café.”
“And you were there today?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now let me ask you something, as you seem to have known her better than anyone. Her condition and all, could she have gone upstairs?”
“Gosh, no. It was all she could do to hobble around down here. I had to do everything for her. She was pretty well helpless since her accident.”
“Thank you, son. Someone will no doubt question you again. One of the detectives.”
“Detectives?”
“In cases of accidental death a report must be made.”
It was that night when, sleepless on his bed at the rooming house, the image of Ramona weeping on the sofa, caressing the photograph in her lap, provoked a niggling uneasiness in his mind. Something about the photograph. Surely it was the same one he’d seen the day he’d ventured into the Hideaway from the World. He could see it in his mind’s eye sitting on the pine chest of drawers, that photograph of Ramona and Mr. Chambers in happier days.
How had it got downstairs? Or was it the same one? Was it even identical? He tried to dismiss the troubling thought, but it would not go away.
Although the following day Tyler was aware of a somber pall hanging over the house, he was glad to find Ramona much like her usual self and expressing a mild resentment over some of the questions the police had asked her.
“Harping on my condition, as if it wasn’t plain to see I could no more climb those stairs than I could turn a somersault backwards. If you don’t believe me, I said, you just ask my friend Tyler. He’ll tell you.”
“I told them just how helpless you are.”
Ramona sighed. “I suppose if they find out about the policy they might question me again.”
“Policy?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention that?” said Ramona as if it had not been worth mentioning. “There was this time when Mr. Chambers was involved in some sort of class-action lawsuit. All the litigants ended up not with a cash settlement but with a hundred-thousand-dollar accidental-death policy from the insurance company that lost the suit. Mr. Chambers made me the beneficiary of it. It’s still in my strongbox. As if it would ever do me any good. What was he going to do, get run over by a train or something? The old duck led a charmed life.”
“But he did die in an accident,” said Tyler.
“What you call irony, right? Poetic justice, I call it, after the way he treated me.”
After that, life went on as before the tragedy. Ramona’s condition remained the same. Tyler felt confident that any day now he would be able to say goodbye to the rooming house and move into the Hideaway from the World. He ventured discreet hints and waited for Ramona to make the suggestion. Days passed, grew shorter. Leaves began to turn, nights grew chilly. Tyler dreamed of winter evenings, blazing logs in the fireplace, hot chocolate with marshmallows.
And then, at the end of September, the most extraordinary thing happened, foretelling the end of his new life even before it began.
Tyler arrived at the house on a windy, rain-spattery Monday, removed the key from beneath the flowerpot as was his custom, and entered the house, which seemed unnaturally still. No response to his greeting. No sound of a soap opera on television, one dim light in the hall.
He found a letter addressed to him on the kitchen table. His hand trembled as he read it for the second and third time, leaving him as bewildered as if it were written in a foreign language.
Dear Tyler, Please forgive my hasty departure. I cannot bear to stay in this house with the ghost of Mr. Chambers forever hovering over my shoulder. I can never thank you enough for all your kindnesses. Maybe someday we shall meet again. God bless you and goodbye. Your friend Ramona.
Why did she go? How did she go? Tyler wandered through the rooms with a numbness in his breast. Only when he went into Ramona’s bedroom and saw her two canes propped against the wall in the closet and what seemed most of her clothes missing did bewilderment gradually change to the most dreadful of speculations. Her departure could not have been a spur-of-the-moment decision. Careful planning must have preceded it.
He thought of remaining in the house overnight but its ghost-ridden silence frightened him. He left hurriedly and returned to the rooming house, where that night he tossed and turned in his bed, his mind a prey to suspicions which by dawn had acquired an appalling significance.
Was it all a hoax? Had she befriended him with no other purpose than to make certain there was one person to verify her physical helplessness, caused by a fall when she tripped over her cat?
Such an elaborate pretext, yet what other explanation made any more sense? Had a sort of madness grown out of her sense of betrayal and festered in her brain until a plan for revenge had lodged there, waiting for the right person to come along who could lend credence to her bogus physical infirmity?
Not every day, but at least two or three times a week Tyler would ride his bike past the house in Stoneham Avenue Villas, half believing that Ramona might have returned, that she was in there watching her favorite soap operas. Until one day he saw a For Sale sign in front of the house. He would have ridden past, but then, with no clear idea of his intention, turned into the driveway and coasted around to the back of the house.
As he’d done on the day he buried Pussky, he fetched the spade from the toolshed, knowing there was no one to observe him, and proceeded to open the grave under the catalpa tree.
He lifted out the silver-chest coffin, untied the faded pink ribbon, and opened the lid. He was not surprised to discover that the chest contained nothing but what it was intended to hold. Silver flatware wrapped in gray velvet.
Copyright (c); 2005 by Donald Olson.