Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017
- Автор: Фузилли Джим, Харрис Шарлин
- Год: 2017
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017». Краткое содержание книги:
Entering the adjoining closet in which they’d plugged in a half-dead computer for scheduling household tasks and printing grocery lists, Arte balanced himself on the folding chair. After fifteen minutes of browsing the Internet, he managed to locate several couples surnamed Morphus, but none possessed the appropriate first initials. So he returned to his mug — the coffee was now cold, but at least Arte had established how he would go about finding the woman with whom he should have been paired: He would prepare a list of every woman with whom he was acquainted, including those where he worked and that cute blond hostess at the country club, and then Google each one of them. Scientifically speaking, it would be a very small sampling, but it would be a start, and his searches could be broadened as he proceeded. (He also made a mental note to check Facebook to see if any of his candidates had posted revealing photographs of themselves.)
More than an hour after he’d begun chasing these thoughts, Deme staggered into the kitchen in her satiny, coffee-stained robe. “What gets you up so early?”
“It’s past nine.”
When she glanced at the wall clock her bushy eyebrows jumped. “How come you aren’t at work?”
“Isn’t it Saturday?”
“If it’s Saturday, where are the kids?”
“I wondered about that.”
With a huff she said, “I’m getting this sick feeling it may be Friday.”
“If it’s Friday, the kids must be in school.”
“Okay, then how come I’m not at my desk in the County Republicans’ office?”
“And how come I’m not gathering reactions to Jazzy Pup at the agency?”
“Jazzy Pup?”
“It’s a new steroid-loaded chow for puppies.”
“What’ll the liberals think of next?”
“Please, I couldn’t take any politics this morning.”
A rare moment of silence engulfed them. While Deme was wondering how she’d come to marry a fool, Arte was thinking this exchange should have given his wife a hint that the gods had led them astray, and he hoped this revelation would save him from having to unload his nightmare on her.
“Last night I bagged pb&j sandwiches for Elly and Ollie,” she said. “Did you at least give them their lunches?”
“They weren’t here when I came down — must’ve grabbed their sandwiches out of the fridge and carried them on the bus.”
“Your children are so neglected.”
So are yours, he thought, and said: “I’d better call my office and tell them I had a life-altering stomachache.” But Arte was unable to scrape up the energy to stand and scoop his cell off the counter.
Surprising him with how long it had taken her to comment on the package, she said: “What’s that?”
“It was delivered as registered mail this morning, but it’s addressed to a couple named Morphus.”
“At this address?”
“They got the address right but the name wrong.”
“Why didn’t you give it back to the postman?”
“He took off before I noticed the mistake,” Arte said, clicking the ballpoint pen rapidly in his pocket.
“What’s that noise?”
Refusing to answer her, he said, “And the postman never bothered to check out my signature.”
This exchange struck him as additional proof Deme and he should have been living entirely different lives in different houses in other states or countries, with different partners and different kids, employed at different jobs — hopefully a job that didn’t require him to travel over two hours on a train and subway to reach.
After so many years together — regardless of whether their meeting at Saranac Lake had happened coincidentally or had been trumped up by the gods, Arte could envision only two options open to them: Do the best they could to trundle through the remainder of their bogus lives until strangers in dark suits shoveled dirt over their bodies, or chuck nearly two decades of cohabitation and make an audacious attempt, like Barb and Bobby kept doing, to get it right next time around. In America this meant hiring an ambulance chaser and citing “irreconcilable differences.” A very painful procedure, he acknowledged: ruthless haggling over division of property, alimony that would plunge him into poverty, limited visiting rights to his son and daughter, while mouthpieces stretched out the agony so they could pad their five-hundred-an-hour invoices. Of course he knew millions of Americans had been plowing through the heartaches of divorce ever since figuring out they’d gotten screwed by the gods. Only trouble was that Barb and Bobby, with five divorces between them, had never struck him as any happier. Quite the opposite! Hadn’t he also read that divorced couples lose several years in life expectancy?
Deme scooped the parcel off the table and began shaking it, causing it to rattle. “Sounds like it may be broken.”
“What does it matter? — it doesn’t belong to us.”
“Someone shipped it to our house, didn’t they?”
“Who says it’s our house?”
Deme stared at him confusedly, so Arte changed the subject: “I’ll have to phone the post office and let them know they’ve made another wrong delivery.”
“Since possession represents ninety percent of ownership, I think we should open it and see what’s inside.”
“That would be unethical, not to mention illegal.”
Shrugging her shoulders the way she had in accepting his invitation at Saranac Lake, Deme slid a long kitchen knife out of the table drawer and cut the strings around the brown paper.
When she looked away to set the knife aside he scooped up the package with both hands. “I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Since when did you become so self-righteous?”
“It would be the wrong thing to do.”
“As if you haven’t done plenty of wrong things in your life!” she snapped, quickly expanding the space between them by going to pour some melted pig iron into her Lake Placid mug.
Still clutching the package, he looked her over stealthily yet intimately — lackluster knotted hair, skin bunching up at the base of her neck, extra chin in its formative stage, red pimple on the tip of her nose. At the same time he couldn’t deny that her perfectly balanced oval face and alert eyes might’ve seemed somewhat attractive, even kindly to someone who didn’t know better, and this reminded him he hadn’t been annoyed, angry, or outraged with her every minute of every day during those years. Though perturbed by the sound of her nasal slurping of coffee, he came close to admitting that, despite being dreadfully mismatched, they had managed to scrape together a couple of spurts of what humanity calls happiness, especially in the early days when love was fresh and sex was still an option. Nevertheless, informed by his nightmare and the impending breakdown of her flesh, and because she seemed hell bent on opening a package that belonged to a couple who may have been living the lives intended for them, he had no doubt the road they’d been following could only lead to the dumps.
While Deme was continuing to make obscene slurping noises, Arte was thinking: If I’m going to undertake the challenge of searching for a life with my name on it, while helping Deme find hers, the smartest way to proceed would be to let her know what that vulture told me. To gauge her spirit of cooperation at the moment, and since she was still wandering glassy-eyed around the kitchen, he said: “While you’re up, would you mind refilling my mug?”
“Do you feel safe swallowing more of this gunk?”
“What’ve I got to lose?”
“I’m thinking your life.”
Without his asking for their help, the gods had provided an opening: “I’ve already lost my life.”