The road was steeply inclined, and Sandra quickly ran through her bicycle’s handful of gears. On either side of the narrow pavement was a forest where trees competed for space with scattered boulders. Sandra felt a tremendous sense of isolation, wonderful after the crowds in the town and at the hotel, off-season though it was.
Eventually, she had to give up riding and walk her bike. She marveled at the discipline and determination it must have taken to drag cannon and shot and powder up that hill. And to do it in the dark. That was where the real battle for the island had been fought, on that hill, and with ropes and hand spikes. The subsequent taking of the fort had been a mere epilogue.
Sandra was so pleased with that thought that she stopped to write it down in her notebook for use in a future article. At the same time, she took photographs of the tangled forest on either hand. Then she trudged onward.
And upward, the road growing steeper, it seemed, with every step. Finally, she reached a comparative plateau, and breaks appeared in the trees to her right. Sandra saw a tiny red flag fluttering on a grassy mound and knew that she’d reached the golf course. Not the newer one on the hotel grounds—that someone she wouldn’t name had played—but the original 1901 course, the site of a battle in 1814.
Sandra pictured the Americans, after the humiliation of losing the fort and the island, sneaking back using the Britishers’ landing place and dragging their own cannon up that same steep slope. Their plan had been to capture the same heights the British had used to threaten the fort. Unfortunately that high ground had been garrisoned and ready for them. Sandra could see the redcoats marching out to meet the invaders in that sunlit, buzzing pasture, where golfers now wandered in twos and threes. Meeting them and driving them off the island.
To reinforce these images in her memory, Sandra took a series of photographs. There then remained one stop on her program, the high ground that had served the British so well and on which they’d thrown up an earthwork fort, Fort Holmes. According to her map, the earthworks were reached by a turning to the left. She found it clearly marked, a sharply rising lane overhung by a canopy of trees.
At its foot, Sandra paused to catch her breath but discovered instead that her breathing was growing more and more shallow and that her heart was racing. She knew the reason at once. The little lane was an almost the exact duplicate of the one on which James had lost control of his car. The place where she stood, breathless and trembling, was the very double of the spot where he’d died.
And where the woman had died. Ambushed and defenseless now, Sandra could not prevent the name from entering her head: Peggy Asbery. She even pictured the graduate student against her will. Not beautiful, but pretty certainly and young. So very young.
When Asbery had been found dead in the car beside James, the college gossips had all claimed prior knowledge of the affair—and it had been an affair, the police had found ample evidence of that. But Sandra herself had not known, had not had any idea that her comfortable, well-ordered life was a house of cards and that she would go overnight from a figure of respect to one of derision and—after her breakdown—of pity.
The only thing missing to make this lonely spot identical to the one where her real life had ended was a steady rain. Sandra found that she was supplying that deficiency with her own tears.
“James,” she said aloud. “How could you have done this to me?
How could you have done it to yourself?”
Change the ending! He’d certainly rewritten his own life by changing the ending everyone had expected for him. And rewritten her life as well.
She was aware again of her complete isolation on that lonely road, but this time the awareness frightened her. She was cut off from other people, cut off even from the safe past of dates and battles by a more recent past she couldn’t control.
At once she gave up the climb to Fort Holmes—who knew what trap awaited her there?—and hurried down the road that led to town.
FOUR
Sandra’s only thought as she descended into the back streets of the town was to find people, living people who didn’t know her story, and to lose herself among them. At the first block of shops, she leaned her bicycle against a lamppost and forgot it. She moved from one store to another, scanning shelves and counters, filling her mind with an avalanche of bright and empty images and with the faces of strangers. Eventually, she was calm enough to walk along the brick sidewalk, examining the windows of the shops but not going in. Toward the end of the block, she came to a store that had photographs in its window. They were from that awful movie, Somewhere in Time. The shop was featured in all the photos, and Sandra realized that it must have been a location for the film. Of all the ridiculous things to be proud of!
Though, she conceded, the association might attract a certain class of customer. The Lola Maes of the world.
Just thinking of the woman from the ferry was like an unlucky charm, for there she was, crossing the street and calling out, her white hair tucked beneath a ball cap and a plastic shopping bag in each hand. “Hello, Sandra! Hello! I was hoping I’d run into you. I wanted
to show you those photos. And here you are, right in front of them.”
“You wanted to show me these?” Sandra asked, so surprised that she
didn’t even think of getting away. “Why?”
“Because it’s you. It’s your story. I don’t know why I didn’t think of Somewhere in Time on the boat, when you told me you’re a widow and that you’d been here to Mackinac with your husband. But when I was on this street yesterday and I saw that display, it came to me in a flash: What you’re doing is exactly what Christopher Reeve does in the movie. He wills himself into the past so he can be with Jane Seymour. And you’re revisiting the past so you can be with your husband again. What was his name?”
“James. But—”
“So you can be with James. It’s so romantic. Even the ending is the same. I mean, it will be the same. In the movie, the young man from the present can’t really be reunited with his love from the past until he dies. That’s the same as you and James, too. Not that I’m rushing you along, darlin’. I’m just saying that everything will work out in the end. You two will be together again!
“Oh, wow, is that the time? I’m supposed to be on a sunset cocktail cruise. You want to go with? No? Well, I’ll run into you again.”
FIVE
As she watched the retreating Lola Mae, Sandra tried to feel anger, tried to get herself to call the other woman back so she could repeat the arguments she’d made to Dr. Naismith and to her friends. She’d not come to Mackinac to relive the dead past. She’d come to prove to herself and to everyone else that it was truly dead.
Sandra didn’t call out to Lola Mae or follow her. She knew she would never convince her, not when Lola Mae was armed with an unshakable faith in a silly movie. Not when Sandra herself secretly feared that Lola Mae was right. James had been a presence for her ever since she’d boarded the ferry. She’d pushed him away again and again for form’s sake but she’d always known that he remained somewhere nearby, as she had in the lost days when she’d heard the drone of his mower on a summer afternoon or some piece by Fauré coming through the wall of his study or when she’d listened to his steady breathing in the last hour before dawn. For all her show of independence, the only time she’d really been free of him was on that lonely road above the fort when she’d been forced to accept that he was gone forever. And her reaction had been panic.
Sandra started out for her hotel, but took turnings at random and found herself instead at a little park next to the marina. It was a place for the very wealthy who came to Mackinac by yacht to picnic and to walk their dogs. The afternoon was giving way to evening, and the park was deserted. Sandra sat down on a bench that overlooked the harbor.
So she’d come to Mackinac to relive the past. Pitiful. Lola Mae ,the remorseless romantic, was right about that. But she was wrong about something else. Sandra would never be reunited with James in any af
terlife. His mistress, the eternally youthful Peggy, was there already. Sandra would be as unwanted beyond the grave as she had been in life. Twice pitiful.
For the first time since the days just after the accident, Sandra began to think of taking her own life. She’d been stopped then by Dr. Naismith—not by any of his talk or nostrums but by her own stubborn determination to deny his concerns. Nor had she wanted to give the campus wags one last reason to wink and nod their heads. None of that mattered to her now. She only had to think of a way.
She could climb to the pavilion atop the Grand Hotel and jump. But she might only cripple herself. Worse, Lola Mae might tell her story and Sandra’s photograph might end up as part of the lobby shrine to Somewhere in Time. She could wait until dark and slip into the water at the end of one of the floating docks. The cold of that water would finish her soon enough. But to drown…
If only she hadn’t stubbornly refused all of Dr. Naismith’s pills. If only there was some way to change the immutable past, to erase the embarrassment of these last days on the island and of every day since the accident.
Then Sandra felt James’ presence one last time, and her eyes welled up with tears. And she heard him quite plainly whisper the answer in her ear.
SIX
The next morning, Sandra stood with a small group of early risers, awaiting the arrival of the day’s first ferry. The water of the harbor was glittering almost painfully, but Sandra couldn’t get enough of the view. On a nearby piling, a cormorant was drying its wings. Sandra removed her camera from its belt pack and focused on the bird, which turned its long beak at the last second, giving her a beautiful profile shot.
Beside her, a woman said, “They think she was drunk.”
The cormorant hopped around on its perch, presenting its brown back. Sandra’s camera snapped again.
“Drunk?” a second woman asked. “Why do they think that?”
“She’d just come off a sunset cocktail cruise. I guess there were
more cocktails than sunsets.”
“She was young then.”
“Oh no, honey. Our age. White hair and everything. Old enough to know how to say when.”
“Old enough to know how to swim.”
“They say she hit her head when she fell in. She could’ve been Esther Williams after that, and it wouldn’t have done her any good.”
“Maybe somebody hit her on the head and pushed her in.”
“Bite your tongue, honey. If they decide it was murder, they’ll keep us here for a week.”
“Like women our age go around killing strangers.”
“We don’t go around blowing up airplanes, either, honey, but that doesn’t save me from being frisked in airports.”
The cormorant flew off, and Sandra moved a little way apart from the other passengers. Again, her eye was drawn to the glittering water. Always so mesmerizing, the sun on water. Like a fire or a roiling thunderhead.
James had been right after all. One could change a story, however long, simply by changing its ending. One could change history. She would never again think of Mackinac Island as a place where she’d been with James, never remember it as a place where she’d gone in weakness and distress to hide herself away in the past. Those memories were completely overlaid now. Redacted with a broad black stroke.
In a sense, James had sacrificed himself for her, since, in giving her this relief, he’d ended his career as a living force in her life. At least on this one island.
The little ferry boat rounded the breakwater, and at that moment, Sandra had an epiphany. She could use the same method to erase the memory of James from every place they’d ever visited, to expunge him from the world.
Her heart, already buoyant, rose higher at the prospect. Where to go next?
READER, I BURIED THEM
by Peter Lovesey
Little did the notorious murderers Crippen and Landru realise when they faced execution that their names would grace a prestigious American publishing imprint in the next century. I sometimes wonder how Douglas and Sandi Greene settled on these two as their brand identity when they started up in 1994.Why not a pair of killers closer to home, like Sacco and Vanzetti or Leopold and Loeb? Whatever the reason, their choices worked. Crippen & Landru have become bywords for single author collections of short stories published to the highest standard. Enlightened readers of mystery fiction rejoice each time a fresh set of killings is announced.
For 25 years a steady supply of elegant books has appeared from this small but distinguished press in Norfolk,Virginia. The care that goes into the process of publication never ceases to delight. A note appears in each volume about the typeface and the paper used, the cover artist and designer and the number of copies printed in hardback, sewn in cloth and signed and numbered by the author (if the author hasn’t long since written the last chapter and gone to the reading room in the sky), for these are collectors’ items. Devotees look for the gallows trademark always hidden somewhere in the cover illustration. Often, as an extra treat, there is an insert, a specially printed pamphlet with a contribution from the author.
More than most, I have reason to celebrate the first 25 years, for I’m lucky enough to have been reader, author, editor, and subject matter of books with the Crippen & Landru imprint. My friendship with Doug Greene goes back a long way, certainly longer than the quarter of a century of Crippen & Landru. His authoritative biography, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, is one of the most frequently consulted books on my shelves. While researching Carr, Doug became an authority on the early history of the Detection Club, of which Carr was secretary at a critical time in its existence. Doug’s speech at the annual dinner at the Ritz in 2006 was a revelation to all present, for it was stunningly clear that he knew more about the history of the club than any of the members.That same evening we man-
aged to surprise the club president, H.R.F.Keating, with The Verdict of us All, a collection of stories I had edited in a secret collaboration with Doug to mark Harry’s eightieth birthday and published by Crippen & Landru.
The club honoured me when I got to eighty with a festschrift entitled Motives for Murder, edited by Martin Edwards, and the US edition was published by Crippen & Landru – who else? I was particularly touched that Doug travelled to London again for the presentation. He has now handed over the reins as publisher to Jeff Marks, while retaining an active interest as Series Editor.
The story that follows is about a small, well-established community with pride in doing everything to the highest possible standard, even when faced with a change.
Yes, I was the gravedigger, but my main job was overseeing the wildflower meadow. I’d better correct that. My main reason for being there was to worship the Lord and most of my hours were spent in prayer and study. However, we monks all had tasks that contributed to the running of the place and I was fortunate enough to have been chosen long ago to be the meadow man. If that sounds a soft number, I must tell you it isn’t. Wildflower meadows need as much care as any garden, and this was a famous meadow, being situated at the back of a Georgian crescent in the centre of London. The monastery had once been three private houses. The gardens had been combined to make the two acres people came from far and wide to admire. My meadow had been photographed, filmed and celebrated in magazines. Often they wanted to include me in their reports and I had to be cautious of self-aggrandisement. I had no desire for celebrity. It would have been counter to the vows I took when I joined the brotherhood.
Closest to the monastery I grew rows of vegetables, but nobody except Brother Barry, the cook, was interested in them. My spectacular meadow stretched away beyond, dissected by a winding, mown-grass path. In the month of May we were treated to a medieval jousting tournament, the spring breezes sending the flagged wild irises towards the spikes of purple helmeted monkshood, cheered on by lilies of the valley and banks of primroses. Summer was the season of carnival, poppies in profusion, tufted vetch, ox-eye daisies, field scabious and foxgloves al
ong the borders. Even as we approached September, the white campion, teazle, borage and wild carrot were still dancing for me. At the far end was the shed where my tools were kept and where, occasionally, I allowed myself a break from meadow management and did some contemplation instead. To the left of the shed was the apiary.
If you have a wildflower meadow you really ought to keep bees as well. And to the right were the graves where I buried our brothers who had crossed the River Jordan. When their time had come I dug the graves and after our Father Superior had led us in prayer, I filled them in and marked each one with a simple wooden cross. You couldn’t wish for a more peaceful place to be interred.
And that was my way of glorifying God. The others all had their own tasks. Barry, I have mentioned, was our cook, and had only learned the skill after taking his vows. A straight-speaking man, easy to take offence (and therefore easy to tease), he had done some time in prison before seeing the light. Between ourselves, the meals he served were unadventurous, to put it mildly, heavily based on stew, sardines, baked beans and boiled potatoes, with curry once a week. Although my stomach complained, I got on better with Barry than any of the others.
A far more scholarly and serious man, Brother Alfred, was known as the procurer, ordering all our provisions by phone or the internet, including my seed and tools. Being computer-literate, he also communicated with the outside world when it became necessary.
Brother Luke was the physician, having been in practice as a doctor before he took holy orders. A socialist by conviction, he combined this responsibility with humbly washing the dishes and sweeping the floors.
Then there was Brother Vincent, a commercial artist in the secular life, who was painstakingly restoring a fourteenth century psalter much damaged by the years. Between sessions with the quills and brushes, he also looked after the library.
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