The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
Page 28
“Well there you go,” Huffman said.
Huffman Family Day at the Harvest Senior Center was somber if not downright glum. It was supposed to be somber anyways, commemorating a grave miscarriage of justice, but it was supposed to be a feel-good kind of thing, too, recognizing the injustice for what it was, putting it on the record, trying to do something toward setting it right. The feel-good part was missing. We’ve had more people than what showed up that evening show up for the potluck lunches, and the Mayor, who doesn’t exactly socialize with the likes of us anyway, looked around the room like he smelled a gas leak, read his Proclamation, and got the hell out of Dodge. Elva Plotner read the Borough Council’s Resolution herself, and Harry Jameson got up and said he’d filed a writ or some such of a thing down at the Court House to try and get that posthumous pardon for Oscar Huffman rolling. Big, dumb Oscar Huffman himself stared out over the room in his bib overalls, a lost look on his face, wondering what the hell was going on, just like he did on the day he was arrested, the day the picture was taken. Earl Radaker stood up and showed everybody the fancy new Orvis rod and reel we pitched in and bought for Henry, said he’d take it up and give it to him tomorrow morning, while Buster Clover snapped a bunch of pictures for the paper. A lot of us couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like if Huffman and Gracie had showed up, if there mightn’t have been a little less gloom, maybe even a little magic. Then somebody turned on the record player and put on a Bette Midler record, and everybody sat down and had some coffee and pie.
Clover’s story ran the next Thursday, and we figured that was probably pretty much the end of it. Most of us figured we’d be dead before Oscar Huffman’s pardon ever came through, if it ever did at all, and we wondered if it made any damn difference anyways. He’d still be just as dead. The town settled back down to its normal sleepy ways, and chatter about the Huffmans—Oscar, George, Henry—and Gracie Wolfgang began to die out, and the mother in the picture, Elsie Huffman, who’d run away all those years before, who was all but forgot about in the first place, drifted even further away with all the rest of it. That came to an abrupt end a couple of months later—it was a little bit before Christmas—when a hot spot flared up. The hot spot flared up when Elva Plotner spotted Gracie Wolfgang in the Golden Dawn Supermarket. She was there shopping for her groceries with Henry Huffman.
Huffman had reached out to her, and they’d got back together on their own.
Elva and Gracie hugged. Elva scolded her for not letting her know. Gracie said she was sorry, she just hadn’t had the time, it was a whirlwind, and at her age—they’d just got hitched and she was still moving her things up from Cranberry. Elva thought she looked as happy as she could be—but at the same time she looked paler and frailer than ever. She was walking with a cane. Earl Radaker didn’t know about them getting together either. They’d kept it to themselves. Radaker found out about it when he stopped up one afternoon with a box of chocolate chip cookies he’d bought—it was buy one, get one free—that he thought Huffman might be able to put to good use. Gracie answered the damn door.
For a while then, through most of the winter anyhow, a lot of the chatter at the Harvest Senior Center—all around town, for that matter—was about Huffman and Gracie sightings. There was a little bit of magic after all, especially there around Christmas time. A couple of us invited them to stop down and join us at the senior center, and they said they would, but they never did get around to it. For a while Gracie went out a few times in the early morning with Huffman on his walks, but the walks were a lot shorter and slower—Gracie with her cane—and then the big snows came, and by spring the walks had stopped altogether. By spring he was pushing her around in a wheelchair, Huffman was, when they ever got around at all.
Then came another fire. The morning of the Fourth of July, Independence Day, in the middle of the night, Huffman’s house up on Hastings went up in flames again, same as it had forty years before. That time it had killed George. This time it killed his son, Henry. Smoke inhalation, the coroner said. Gracie’s body was found snuggled up next to Henry’s, but she was already dead—heart failure—before the fire ever got started. How it got started they couldn’t say for sure, but of course we all knew.
Huffman left a will. He’d gone down to a firm in Pittsburgh to have it made out. In it were real plain and simple instructions to dig up the floor in his cellar and it even said exactly where to dig, right underneath his fly-tying table. Then, in the next paragraph, it said he wanted his mother buried in the plot that he’d bought a long time ago, the plot right next to his. That big-city lawyer down in Pittsburgh had no way of knowing of course that the two paragraphs were related. He might have wondered why the damn fool would want to go and have his cellar floor dug up after he was dead—maybe he figured there was buried treasure there or something—but he had no way of knowing that the buried treasure was his mother’s bones, the bones he wanted buried next to his.
How’d she get there in the first place? When? The coroner said it was probably around the time she disappeared. Didn’t take no genius to figure out ol’ Ace Barnini—that was the barnstorming pilot’s name—didn’t have nothing to do with it. Only two people who could have: George Huffman—all of sudden his old nickname, Killer George, took on a whole new light—or his boy, Henry. Or maybe the both of them.
A lot of people got to feeling put out. They got to feeling they’d been snookered. Maybe it wasn’t no Huffman that killed Lucy Wilson, but it sure as hell was one that killed Elsie. Coroner said she’d died of a blow to the skull. The kind of blow an iron skillet would make.
Huffman Damn Family Day.
* The nineteen stories that make up my two published collections, Jimtown Road and Hart’s Grove, are set in the fictional western Pennsylvania town of Hartsgrove (based on my hometown, Brookville) and are interrelated. Each collection is a novel-in-stories. While Hart’s Grove revealed the circumstances surrounding the mysterious disappearance and murder of a popular high school cheerleader, Jimtown Road unveiled the fate of two little girls who vanished into the woods, never to be seen again.
Why stop there? A third collection didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
This collection (working title: The Signal Tower: A Mystery in Stories) consists of ten additional interrelated tales (also set in Hartsgrove, and also linked, in many instances, to the stories in the first two collections) that unravel Hartsgrove’s “crime of the century,” the rape and murder of a middle-aged lady in an isolated railroad yard, and all that was left in its wake. “The Truth About Lucy” is the tenth and final installment of that new collection and, being equally a final chapter and a stand-alone story, it presented unique advantages and challenges different from the normal process of crafting short fiction.
On the one hand, most of the heavy lifting that goes into characterization, the creating of living, breathing people, was already done—all the Huffmans (Henry, George, Elsie, and Oscar), Elva Plotner, Earl Radaker, Gracie Wolfgang, Smokey Bowersox, Edna Harriger, nearly all the characters with a speaking role in “The Truth About Lucy” (and even a few of the cameos) were already alive and kicking, inhabiting the previous nine stories. About all that was left was to invent a Greek chorus of old fogies to keep an eye on the fresh goings-on.
On the other hand, the storyline was a bit trickier. After all, these folks weren’t just sitting on their hands in the earlier stories, twiddling their thumbs and whistling “Dixie.” They were up to their ears, acting and reacting, scheming and plotting, loving and living. In those earlier stories, Lucy was murdered and Oscar was arrested and walked his last mile; Elsie brained George with an iron skillet and split for parts unknown; the star-crossed love affair of Henry and Gracie went down in flames; Smokey got himself baked in a meatloaf by Edna, and passed all around. All manner of assorted vicissitudes took place. This all had to be accounted for in the grand finale. Not only accounted for, but woven into a neat little tapestry and hung on the wall.
Moreover, t
he mystery that was hatched in story number one, the mystery that shouted and whispered and tiptoed and barged and stalked and lurked here and there, behind this corner and that, down through all the subsequent tales, had to be resolved in “The Truth About Lucy.” It was a lot of fun. I’m thinking about a fourth.
David Marcum is the author of nearly eighty published Sherlockian pastiches, appearing in various anthologies, magazines, and his own books, which include The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, Sherlock Holmes—Tangled Skeins, and The Papers of Solar Pons. He has also edited over sixty books, many of which are traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (featured in Publishers Weekly), which he created in 2015. The royalties for this collection, now up to twenty-four volumes and over six hundred new stories (with more in preparation) go to the Stepping Stones School for special needs students at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. Marcum has contributed numerous essays to various publications and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer and lives in Tennessee with his wife and son.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE HOME OFFICE BABY
David Marcum
The occasion of my marriage had in no way served to effectively diminish contact with my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. A few months before the happy event, I had been fortunate enough to locate a medical practice in the Paddington district, only a few blocks east of the great station itself. Though quite modest, it was well established by a doctor quite respected in the neighborhood, and he was generous enough to allow me to work alongside him during the gradual transition, in order that his patients might come to know and trust me, before he took himself off to a well-deserved retirement on the southeast coast.
The practice itself, on the Edgware Road end of Praed Street, also served as the newlywed home for Mary and myself, and she set about making a wonderful residence for us upstairs while I labored on the ground floor.
Through careful organization, I was able to both build the practice and also find time to assist Holmes in a number of investigations, including that of the Sixth Finger, which so terrified a pair of spinster sisters, and the incredible discovery in the Iron Age fort near Llandysul, which must remain unknown except to scholars, until such time as its implications can be determined. (Heaven help us if word should ever surface, but I do have permission from Holmes to make a record of it, to be stored away in the tin dispatch box that I keep at Cox and Company for just such cases that should not be forgotten, no matter the risk.)
That box contains the records of a number of other unique circumstances, including this particular narrative, which will be placed there when I have finished preparing it. I was reminded of it by a recent article that appeared in the popular press detailing the unexpected death of the principal figure involved, and while the specifics can never be published, I’m moved to record this, a true account of the additional and unknown facts.
It was in late November of 1889 when I found myself passing through Baker Street. My feet knew the way quite well, and I nodded to a number of acquaintances, shopkeepers and mothers, landladies and cabbies, who made up that little community of which I had been a part for so long. I had known them well before marrying and moving elsewhere earlier that year, and old friendships were not quickly forgotten simply because I now resided in a different part of the city.
It had been a dark overcast morning when I reached the door of 221, but the fog was lifting and the morning light quickly waxing. I used my old key to enter, as it had been made clear to me, both by Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, that the simple fact of no longer lodging there did not mean that my right to enter was in any way diminished, and I was grateful for it.
Calling out as I entered, I was gratified to hear Mrs. Hudson make her way from the back of the house, wiping her hands. I could smell something baking, and her pleasure at seeing me was matched by mine at seeing her, as well as knowing that something pleasant would soon be pulled from her oven. My timing, indeed, was serendipitous.
Informed that Holmes had just come in, I climbed the steps, irritated that I could no longer avoid counting them. A year or so earlier, Holmes had pointed out, as an example of the observational mind, that I had previously climbed those steps thousands of times without making note of their number. He, of course, knew exactly how many there were. I saw his point, but unfortunately, I now logged each step nearly every time that I ascended to the sitting room. Often I found myself doing the same upon other stairways as well—which had surprisingly been of use during the unfortunate affair of the greedy minister and the four bags, in which it will be remembered that Holmes broke the man’s alibi because it wouldn’t have been possible for him to make the number of trips up and down the stairs with his burdens in the time that he testified—a small fact, but it was the thread that unraveled his entire story.
“Come in, Watson!” cried Holmes, whom I found standing by the mantel. He was holding a cup, and he turned it up and finished its contents with several swallows. “You are just in time. Tea?”
“Just in time for tea? It’s a bit early, isn’t it?”
“When you’ve been out all night as I have, picking up the last pieces of the Brune Street killing from under Athelney Jones’s nose, there is no right or wrong time. And by ‘in time,’ I meant that you are in time for my expected visitor.”
Holmes stepped to the table, where a tray held a pot and several clean cups, and poured for me while I shed my coat, hanging it upon one of the pegs behind the door alongside his Inverness and fore-and-aft cap. I accepted the cup and crossed the room toward my old chair by the fireplace, clearing my throat to ask the particulars of his involvement in the case that was on the front pages of every newspaper, but in vain, for even then the doorbell rang. In just a moment, I heard voices, and then steady footsteps climbing to the sitting room from more than one person—too jumbled to accurately count to seventeen when each one landed. Setting down my cup, I stood and turned toward the door, only to see a young lady enter, followed by our old friend, Inspector Lestrade, who complimented Holmes on identifying the murderer earlier that morning—a story whose details had still eluded me. Did this new visitor have relevant information? I wondered. I was soon to learn that she was there regarding an entirely different affair.
Mrs. Hudson followed the two visitors almost immediately with the product of her baking, a fine mound of scones, along with another fresh pot of tea. As everyone was settled and served, I had a chance to observe our visitor. She was in her midtwenties, tall with dark brown hair. She had a wide forehead with striking blue eyes, and a small but rather distinctive mole about an inch to the left of her mouth. Later I would see that, when she spoke, it seemed to vanish within a dimple. She appeared to be a bit nervous, but that was typical of many visitors to that sitting room. Still, she seemed as if she did not want to be there. I could see that her simple outfit was of fine quality, although not expensive, and several years out of style. It was still serviceable, however, and would be of use for many a year to come if she chose to retain it, even as fashion changed.
“Mrs. Aiken,” said Holmes, gesturing for her to take the basket chair, usually claimed by Lestrade. He didn’t seem to mind, finding a place on the nearby settee. I sat down, curious as to what we would hear.
“The inspector’s note indicated that you had presented an interesting problem,” Holmes continued, “and fortunately I have recently returned from another investigation.” Then he glanced my way. “But the poor doctor is in the dark, as he arrived unexpectedly just a moment before you did. Please, Mrs. Aiken—relate your story.” And then he dropped into his chair, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes while steepling his fingers before his face.
The young lady looked surprised, a pair of attractive vertical lines forming on her forehead between her eyes. She looked to Lestrade for guidance. He nodded and said, “Perhaps I should speak first.” Holmes, eyes
still closed, waved a hand in acknowledgment, and the inspector began, although looking at me as he spoke.
“Doctor, what do you recall of the Home Office Baby?”
I frowned, having some vague recollection of it. Without opening his eyes, and as if sensing my puzzlement, Holmes murmured, “Check the index, Watson.”
I rose and moved behind my chair to the shelves that held Holmes’s scrapbooks. Since long before I’d met him, he had maintained these repositories of information related to past cases, as well as facts concerning people or events that might be useful in the future. His collection was a long row of books, each fat with pasted-in clippings or loose items such as theater programs, train tickets, handwritten notes, telegrams, sketches, and the occasional obscurely purposed object like a bird feather or a small envelope filled with a pinch of sand, cryptically labeled “Pagham—November ’78.”
Holmes’s filing system might charitably be called “eccentric,” but I gambled upon the simplest of choices and pulled out the H volume, finding—without too much time wasted—his notes upon the incident. I carried the book with me back to my fireside chair, sat down, and summarized the facts aloud.
“In 1884,” I stated, “a Reverend Mirehouse of Colsterworth, in Lincolnshire, wound up in a dispute that went all the way to Gladstone’s Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt. It seems that a local graveyard had been proposed for closure without making a new cemetery available for the parish, and there were difficulties in finding designated and consecrated grounds in which to bury the bodies.”
Seeing what came next, I glanced up at Mrs. Aiken, but she seemed to be made of sturdy stuff, and unlikely to be shocked—especially if her business somehow related to this affair. “In early November,” I continued, “Reverend Mirehouse, in protest, sent through the mail the body of a stillborn infant, packed in a starch box without telling the family what he had done. He marked it ‘Perishable.’ It set off quite a tempest. There was an inquest, and the coroner, Mr. Braxton Hicks, thought it to be incredibly indecent, and that the minister ought to be reprobated, but Judge Phillimore was of the opinion that no known canon law was violated, and that Reverend Mirehouse could not be punished. Still, he was severely censured, in spite of his full apology, and he was forced to pay the expenses for his journey, as well as that of his witnesses, up to London for the inquiry.” There was nothing further, and I started to close the book, but Holmes opened his eyes and motioned for me to hand it to him. He glanced over what I had read and then set it beside his chair before looking expectantly back toward the inspector.