EQMM, December 2006
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ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE
December 2006
Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784
Dell Magazines
475 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016
Edition Copyright © 2006 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications
Ellery Queen is a registered trademark of the Estate of Ellery Queen. All rights reserved worldwide.
All stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are fiction. Any similarities are coincidental.
ISSN 0013-6328 published monthly except for double-issues of March/April and September/October.
Cover illustration by Barry Waldman.
CONTENTS
FICTION
The Richard Parker Coincidence BY NANCY PICKARD
Dead Even BY CLARK HOWARD
A Convergence of Clerics BY EDWARD D. HOCH
The Perfect Beach BY JEFF WILLIAMSON
The Happening BY EDDIE NEWTON
At Willow-Walk-Behind BY JAMES POWELL
Devil's Brew BY BILL PRONZINI
SPECIAL FEATURES
EQMM Readers Award Ballot
Index to Volumes 127 and 128
POETRY
Empathy BY BUZZ MAURO
REVIEWS
The Jury Box BY JON L. BREEN
PASSPORT TO CRIME
The Copyist BY PAUL LASCAUX, STEFAN SLUPETZKY, ANKE GEBERT, RICHARD LIFKA, THOMAS PRZYBILKA, & CHRISTOPH SPIELBERG
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
Murder at the Butt End of Nowhere BY MEREDITH ANTHONY
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
THE RICHARD PARKER COINCIDENCE by Nancy Pickard
DEAD EVEN by Clark Howard
MURDER AT THE BUTT END OF NOWHERE by Meredith Anthony
A CONVERGENCE OF CLERICS by Edward D. Hoch
THE PERFECT BEACH by Jeff Williamson
THE HAPPENING by Eddie Newton
AT WILLOW-WALK-BEHIND by James Powell
Empathy by Buzz Mauro
THE COPYIST by Paul Lascaux, Stefan Slupetzky, Anke Gebert, Richard Lifka, Thomas Przybilka, & Christoph Spielberg
THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen
DEVIL'S BREW by Bill Pronzini
NEXT ISSUE...
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THE RICHARD PARKER COINCIDENCE by Nancy Pickard
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Art by Mark Evan Walker
Nancy Pickard's recent EQMM stories are making a splash! “There Is No Crime on Easter Island” (9-10/'05) is currently nominated for three awards for best short story: the Macavity, from Mystery Readers International; Deadly Pleasures magazine's Barry Award; and the Bouchercon Convention's Anthony Award. “The Book of Truth” (9-10-06) will appear in a best-of-the-year anthology.
Lenore Lowery heard her husband let out a whoop of joy. Before she could even put her finger in her book and turn around to see what Charles was so excited about, she felt his presence behind her.
A heavy magazine landed with a plop on top of the novel in her lap.
"Charles! You could have made me lose my place."
"I've found it, Lenore!"
"Found what?"
"Our place. Our boat. I can retire, and we can sail away, and you can read all the time for the rest of your life. It's the perfect boat for us."
"No boat is perfect for me,” she snapped, “and any boat will do for you. And which of these boats are you talking about, anyway?"
"Look at them!"
She felt him bend down over the back of the armchair she was sitting in, felt his face beside hers, smelled liver and onions on his breath, saw and felt the forefinger he jabbed into the pages of boat photos in the magazine on her lap. They had been married for five years, he a literature professor with a passion for Edgar Allan Poe and a dream of sailing around the world, and she his former student. The deep voice that still could thrill her when he read poetry to her now spoke enthusiastically at her shoulder, releasing another repellent cloud of liver and onions. She had never dreamed that her romantic professor could ever like something so icky and prosaic as that, much less want her to cook it for him once a week.
"Just look at the pictures, Lenore. You'll recognize it the moment you spot it, as I did."
Reluctantly, she perused the pages, knowing he wouldn't give up until she found “it,” whatever it was—
Her heart sank.
"This one,” she said, putting her own right forefinger onto a particular black-and-white picture of a cabin cruiser. When Charles used the word “sail,” it was only in the generic sense of moving across water. In fact, he was a “stinkpot” sailor, a devotee of engines and speed, the bigger and faster, the better.
"It's this one, isn't it, Charles?"
It wasn't the configuration or appointments of the boat in question that gave her the clue. It wasn't that the boat for sale was a thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser with a raised aft deck that allowed it a full master stateroom below decks. It wasn't that it had a galley-down layout with wraparound salon windows and “excellent storage.” It wasn't the GM6-71N diesel engines that let it cruise at sixteen to seventeen knots and reach a top speed of around twenty knots. It wasn't the breathtaking price that was about equal to half of what they would get if they sold their home to buy this boat.
It was the name of this particular boat.
"The Nevermore," she said, reading the word across the back of it, pronouncing it in a dirgelike tone that was appropriate to a certain poem by Edgar Allan Poe. To the original owners of this boat that name might have symbolized no more working for a living, or no more house payments, or who knew what? But to Charles Lowery it could only conjure up “The Raven,” Poe's most famous poem, about a monstrous bird who kept yapping, Nevermore, nevermore, neverdamnmore.
"Yes!” Charles said, behind her. “We have to have it."
"Just like you had to have me?"
"Lenore! I didn't marry you for your name, for heaven's sake."
Another of Poe's poems was called “Lenore,” about a woman who also made an appearance in “The Raven."
"Yeah, well, you didn't not marry me for it, either,” she grumbled.
"Whatever that means. Lenore, look at this beauty! We can be totally self-sufficient on it for weeks at a time. We can go anywhere we want to go. The South Seas. The Mediterranean. The Caribbean!"
"Anywhere you want to go, you mean. It makes me seasick just to look at it."
"You know what motion sickness signifies psychologically, don't you? The fear of losing control. You need to let go! There are some things you can't control, my dear, no matter how hard you try."
"That's ridiculous."
"No, it all fits together,” he claimed, sounding happy about it. “It's fate, and you can't fight fate, Lenore. Just ask Edgar Allan Poe."
"He's dead."
"Once I get you out on our boat, floating peacefully for days on end, reading all the novels you've ever wanted to read, you'll relax and thank me."
"I can read all the books I want to right here in this chair, Charles. This chair doesn't get rained on. This chair doesn't leave me sunburned and throwing up. This chair doesn't rock back and
forth."
She pushed herself up out of the chair in question, making her husband rear back to avoid knocking heads with her. The boating magazine fell to the carpet.
"Hey,” he objected. “You've made me lose my place."
"Your place is exactly right,” Lenore said heatedly, turning around to glare at him. “This is all about you and what you want, and anything I want be damned. Talk about control freaks!” She started to stomp out of their living room.
"Where are you going?” he called after her.
"To my book club! If it's liver and onions, it must be Thursday."
"Oh, right. What bit of fluff are you reading this month?"
She whirled around and stuck the book out—in lieu of hurling it at him—so he could see the jacket.
"Life of Pi? Why are you reading a math book?"
It wasn't a book about mathematics. It was a beautifully written, wildly imaginative, smart novel that also just happened to be at the top of the bestseller lists, not that he would ever know that, since he never recognized the worth of any novel written after nineteen hundred. “Because I've always been able to tell when things add up,” Lenore shot back at him as she departed the room. To herself, she added, “And when they don't."
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The women at the book club that night all professed to love Life of Pi, which was a fantastical story about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Lenore laughed out loud the first time somebody said the name aloud. “It's such a funny name for a tiger,” she said.
A few of the other women also laughed and shook their heads, sharing her puzzled amusement, but she noticed that others seemed to be looking at her ... or at one another ... with odd expressions, as if she had said something surprising or, worse, stupid. “What?” Lenore said, looking at the night's discussion leader. They all sat on couches or chairs their hostess had pulled into a circle in her living room. The women's laps held plates full of homemade molasses cookies and lemon-raspberry cake. Cups of coffee or tea sat on tables in front of them or beside them.
Each woman had a copy of the same book tucked nearby for ready reference.
"What did I say?” Lenore asked, her heart already beating faster.
The discussion leader smiled in the kind of pleased, condescending way that Lenore associated with people who worked at the university with Charles. “Why, Lenore! You mean to say your own husband is one of the world's experts on Edgar Allan Poe and you don't know that spooky story?"
With a sinking feeling, Lenore realized she had stepped in it again. It was one of those moments when she revealed her total ignorance and lack of interest in the passion that had made her husband better known than tenure ever would. It didn't help that he had left his first wife, whom most of these women had known, to marry his undergraduate student, Lenore. The first wife shared his passion for Poe—or pretended to, Lenore thought—even going so far as to fashion a Poe costume for the great man to wear when he lectured on the greater man. Lectures and conventions still took Charles out of town many nights and weekends a year, though his second wife never accompanied him unless she just couldn't think up a good enough excuse to avoid it. Sometimes Lenore wished Edgar Allan Poe were still alive so she could personally strangle him. Maybe she'd let a raven peck his eyes out.
"Which one?” she countered.
"Which one?” the discussion leader asked, with excessive politeness.
"Which spooky story?"
It wasn't as if she didn't know anything about Poe. She knew all about the raven and Lenore poems, after all, enough to know that Charles had taken “Nevermore” as a sign that they should buy the boat with that name. Charles was big on “signs.” When the “signs” were right, he did things; when they weren't, he refused to do whatever it was they mysteriously portended. At first, that trait of Charles's had seemed romantic to Lenore, especially when it pointed him toward her. Anymore, though, when it more often pointed him away from anything she wanted to do, it drove her crazy. “Your behavior is a sign of lunacy,” she liked to tell him. The other thing she knew about Poe was that if he was known for anything—besides being a hopeless addict and drunk—he was known for writing spooky stories. Attempting to wipe the smug smiles off certain faces, she said, “'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'? ‘The Pit and the Pendulum'? ‘The Masque of the Red Death'?"
There, she thought, that ought to show them.
"Oh, it's not only a story he wrote," the discussion leader said, in a way that made Lenore flush with instant humiliation. “It's the story of something spooky that really happened in regard to Poe. And,” she added with a mischievous smile for the others in the room who were in the know, “to the real Richard Parker. You should ask Charles about it."
"Why don't you just tell all of us who aren't familiar with it,” Lenore said, with a smile so gracious it made her jaws ache.
"All right.” The discussion leader matched her smile for smile. “I will. As you no doubt know...” There was a slight pause. “...Poe wrote only one novel in his lifetime. It is called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and it's about four men who get marooned at sea. Three of them survive by killing and eating the other one. The name of the one they eat is ... Richard Parker."
She dropped it dramatically, as if they'd all gasp, but Lenore didn't quite get it.
"That's where the author of this book...” She held up her copy of Life of Pi. “...got his name for the tiger? Because he was a man-eater?"
The discussion leader's laugh was a delighted trill that sent a vicious electrical charge through Lenore's stomach, which was already upset from the liver and onions. “Oh, that's only half of the story! That's not even the spookiest part, Lenore. Almost fifty years later ... this is true! ... four men got marooned at sea and three of them survived by eating the fourth one, and his name was ... Richard Parker!"
"No!” somebody else exclaimed. “That didn't really happen!"
Lenore was pleased that someone else was willing to look dumb.
"Oh yes, it did,” the discussion leader said. “You can check the newspapers of the day. It caused quite a stir on its own, but you can imagine the excitement when somebody made the connection between the real-life event and Poe's novel from fifty years earlier. And ever since then, there have been reports of strange and terrible things happening to anybody with the name Richard Parker. For instance...” She checked her notes. Their discussion leaders were expected to research the books and authors they discussed. “There was another ship that went down, in eighteen forty-six. There were deaths and cannibalism aboard, and one of the victims was a man named Richard Parker."
This time, several women did gasp.
"Well, that settles it,” Lenore said.
"Settles what?” one of the university women said.
"Settles an argument that I'm having with Charles! He wants to buy a boat and retire on it and sail around the world, and I don't want to."
Too late, she realized she had stepped in it yet again. From the looks on several faces she could see that she had once again proved herself to be an insufficient spouse for the great Poe expert: Not only was she ignorant of his field of expertise, but she was also so selfish that she wouldn't let him take his dream retirement. She knew what they were thinking: His first wife would never have been so mean.
For just an instant, Lenore got a glimpse of herself that made her wonder if she might actually be as selfish as other people thought she was. She quickly sloughed off that thought, however. She wasn't the selfish one, he was! Maybe she had stopped supporting his obsessions, but hadn't he done the same to her interests? Once he had waxed enthusiastic about the possibility that she might one day teach at the university, but where was all that cheerleading now?
Lenore sulked silently for the rest of the evening, even though she really loved the book they were discussing. She wasn't a dunce, she told herself. If they hadn't squashed her, she could have talked about it as brilliantly as any of them were doi
ng all around her now.
Just as he often did, Edgar Allan Poe had managed to step into her life and mess it up.
As she sat barely listening to the lively discussion of Life of Pi by Yann Martel, she thought about her own existence, which had somehow mysteriously turned into keeping house for Charles. She vowed to herself that was going to end; she would go back to class, she would finish her dissertation. Well, start it, at least. But to do any of that, she was going to have to keep Charles off that boat. And that meant she was going to have to be more subtle, subtle enough so that when her husband changed his mind about his retirement, everybody would believe it was entirely his decision and that she had not stood in his way at all.
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"What are you doing up there, Lenore?"
She whirled around, after quickly pushing back into the bookshelf a copy of Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “Oh! You startled me, Charles.” She was up on a library ladder and she held out her right hand so he could guide her back down to the carpet where he stood staring at her.
"Not as much as you startled me by looking at my Poe books."
His tone was wryly amused, but also a little sad, she thought.
"Oh, Charles.” Upon reaching the floor, Lenore wrapped her arms around him and gave her husband the warmest hug he had received from her in a long while. “I'm an idiot, and I'm so sorry.” She pulled away just enough to be able to look into his face. “I resist everything you love to do. I make fun of things that are important to you. I don't know why I do it, but I have realized I do, and I'm not going to do that anymore. I love you. I want to share your interests. I want to enjoy Poe as much as you do."
His face was softening, his eyes were damp as he gazed into her own.
Lenore gave him a loving, apologetic smile. “And if other people can take Dramamine, or wear a patch for seasickness, then so can I."
"Lenore ... !"
She placed a finger gently against his lips.