She could see her shadow on the grass, cast with the clarity of a cloud's shadow on dry land. And then she saw another shadow. And a hand touched the small of her back.
She surfaced with him. Smiling broadly—he really did look like Tom Cruise when he smiled—he held up out of the water four fat fish, a delicately pink color, their fins a deeper shade, almost red.
"Snapper,” he said. “We're going to have one fine déjeuner this après-midi."
"Mmmnh,” she said, imagining them sizzling fragrantly on the hotel stove. Then she imagined drinking wine with them and feeling a little drunk, and a warm, liquid feeling spread within her. And when Mike Godchaux threw the fish and his spear gun in the canoe and paddled back to her, she reached out and put her hands on his broad, muscled shoulders and allowed him to pull her, like a tugboat, back to the boat, into which they both threw their masks, snorkels, and fins. And as they floated in the warm water, she lifted the straps of the bathing suit he had given her from her own shoulders and allowed him to complete the job of pulling the stretchy maillot down off her body. And he shucked his trunks and they floated in the clear water, and she looked at his nakedness for a long, hungry moment before they fitted their bodies together.
* * * *
They were both back in the boat and she was toweling her hair, when Mike said: “Well, you sure gave me a surprise."
She twisted the towel around her hair and lifted her chin. “What do you mean?"
"Well, me and Bébé, when we saw you yesterday, we thought for sure you were trolling for dark meat."
"Excuse me?” She frowned—impossible that she had heard what she thought she had heard.
"You know, a little dark island rhythm to liven up the old white clapboard house?"
He was smiling again, like Tom Cruise still, but with a cocked eyebrow. An insinuating, amused eyebrow.
Her back stiffened, and a hot pain shot up between her shoulder blades.
"Lotta girls do that, you know,” he said. “Want to try that devil's food just once before they settle down to life with Mr. White Bread. When you had lunch with that trucker yesterday, I said to Bébé, watch if they don't take a room. And when you did, I said to myself, ‘Well, there's one girl who's not going to be interested in this white Southern boy.’”
Her entire back was in spasm now, the pain shrilling through her muscles and bones. She imagined the fish that he had caught must have felt like this when the barbed end of the spear had slammed through their sides.
"Tell you the truth, I was pretty pleased when you had that little argument and he headed off. I'm glad it worked out like this. Aren't you?"
* * * *
It took Mike Godchaux five minutes to get the ancient, coverless outboard started. Staring at the tanned wedge of his back, watching him pull again and again on the cord, each time the muscles on the backs of his upper arms tensing into crisp ropes, she went a little mad for the second time. She saw herself back at the hotel, on the terrace where they dined, and all around people laughing at her. Bébé. Gerard. Mike Godchaux. Etienne Dalhousie. The woman to whom she'd addressed the question about sewage on the beach. The vendors whose awning she'd knocked over. Her coworkers back in New York, especially the poisonous Marta. Her sister and her sister's lover. Her parents. All laughing, all amused at this woman who had reached thirty-three years of age without, evidently, learning anything about the basic process of connecting with other human beings.
Unbelievably, the spasm that had speared her back grew worse, the pain shrieking up to her neck and down to the bottoms of her legs, filling her eyes with tears, compressing her lips, turning the skin around them white. Unable to speak, nearly paralyzed, it took her forever to reach down and grab the cocked spear gun from the bottom of the canoe. She put the stock to her shoulder, touched her finger to the trigger, and aimed it at the center of Mike's back.
The engine started and then almost died. Mike played with the throttle, twisting it back and forth, and coaxed it to life. When it was running smoothly, he turned around.
His instinctive reaction when he saw the spear gun pointed at him was to smile that Tom Cruise smile. At the joke she was surely playing. She realized then that there was no malice in him, no desire to humiliate her. He was an innocent, happy in his bright and easy world, totally ignorant of the hard and painful landscape of hers. The realization stopped her from sending the spear through his chest, splitting the breastbone, puncturing his heart. She lowered the gun several inches and pulled the trigger.
The spear passed through the flesh on the inside of his right thigh and buried itself in the wooden plank he was sitting on. He bellowed in shock and pain, doubling over and grabbing his leg.
Her back spasm disappeared. It was as if the spear had taken all her pain and transferred it to Mike.
She threw the spear gun overboard and put on her fins and her mask and snorkel.
"What are you doing?” he screamed. “What have you done?” There was a good deal of blood flowing from his leg, spreading out on the seat, and dripping onto the bottom of the canoe. A lot of blood, but it didn't appear that any vital artery or vein had been cut.
"You're crazy!” he screamed. “You're insane! Help me get this thing out! I'm stuck! Can't you see I'm pinned here?"
She could see, and she counted it as a piece of good luck. The only problem facing her now was the outboard. She solved that by pulling the rubber hose out of the orange gas tank that was under her seat in the bow. The engine sputtered and died. She lifted up the gas can and threw it overboard. He wouldn't be following her now. Especially when she cut the anchor line and the boat began drifting toward the reef. He would have his hands full just getting himself free and stopping the advance of the boat. But there was a paddle on board, and he was strong. He would be okay.
"What are you doing?! What in Christ's name are you doing? What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?"
His shout was the last thing she heard before she threw herself backward over the gunwale of the canoe.
She swam hard away from the boat, away from the direction of the reef, toward the open Atlantic. When she surfaced, sputtering, in the trough of a wave, she was unable to see the canoe, unable to see anything other than the steep blue hills of water on either side of her and the pale sky above. But when she rose up, she spotted the canoe. Already a hundred feet away and increasing in distance as she watched. Mike was still struggling in the stern—it was not clear whether he had freed himself yet. But he would. He was too competent to do otherwise.
She adjusted the straps of her face mask, straightened the snorkel tube, and then put her face down in the water and began swimming steadily away. After a while she slowed her pace and gave herself back to the waves and water. A vast, liquid relaxation spread through her, seemed almost to dissolve the boundary between her and the water in which she floated.
She felt free. She felt alive. She felt happy. She felt grateful that she had at last found contentment and she promised herself she would keep her heart and mind and all her senses open until the current dragged her back and the last beautiful soaring wave rose up high over the reef, revealing the perfect crescent of the beach, the perfect blue of the bay, the perfect white of the town and the emerald hills behind it—and then smashed her down on the sharp coral, bringing to all the lonely, clenched years of her existence the grace of a courageous end.
Copyright (c) 2006 Jeff Williamson
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THE HAPPENING by Eddie Newton
Last year's winner of the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American writer, for the EQMM Department of First Stories tale “Home,” Eddie Newton returns this month with a tongue-in-cheek cozy based on the world's most famous mystery board game. Mr. Newton and his wife and children live in North Dakota.
1.
It So Happens...
There was a mystery afoot. Or perhaps, more accurately, the foot was the mystery. It was Mystery Mansion Weekend, spo
nsored by former U.S. Senator Kent Powers. The family has more money than the U.S. Mint; Powers only hosts this community gathering as a way of attaching his name to something that makes the social elite of New England smile. Half the time, the patriarch of Massachusetts's preeminent family doesn't even bother making an appearance. He's the golden child of New England celebrity. The Kennedys haven't held a candle to the Powerses in decades, and they never hosted a bash like this.
The Powers mansion has a character all its own. It has three dozen rooms, a third of them bedrooms. The ballroom is as large as the average McDonald's. Its nineteenth-century architect and decorator was a middle-aged bachelor from France named Charlemagne Haversham. He leveled everything within a square mile of the mansion's foundation except for an old apple tree that had been there long before he ever set foot in Massachusetts. It took him ten years to build the mansion, starting in 1854. Every fall, on the anniversary of the groundbreaking, he would pick four ripe apples from the tree and bake a splendid apple pie, then ceremoniously sit and eat the entire confection in one helping. Legend has it that after the mansion was completed, he went out into the landscaped backyard and picked his apples just as he had for ten years. He baked his pie. It was still warm as he ate every last crumb. Then he climbed up on the tallest, sturdiest branch of the tree, with a rope and no further purpose in life. Old Charlie looped that noose around his neck and jumped, his pie-loaded belly bouncing when the rope drew taut.
The apple tree was gone, but the legend had stood as long as the house.
How morbid that an annual Murder Mystery Weekend is held on this very estate.
This year, old man Powers sent his son Oliver in his stead. Ollie was about as personable as a guy comes; he was immediately the life of the party. His syndicated radio show had been the most popular thing on AM for years now. The Voice of Choice, he was dubbed. Supposedly, he was the searcher after truth, he who deciphered the tangled political spin. He was credited with a large influence in getting his brother elected to the governorship in Massachusetts. There were “Ol lovers” who believed that every word that dripped from his golden tongue was truth itself. Right now, he was settling his considerable bulk down on a leather sofa. The only thing bigger than Oliver Powers's mouth was Ollie himself.
Soon he was regaling a tiny woman in an even tinier dress with his theory of how extremist factions within the government secretly experiment on random small towns, infecting their drinking water with designer viruses in an effort to prepare the nation against biological attack by rogue nations, unbeknownst to the upper echelons of the three branches of government. The woman was listening with interest. Did she buy this garbage or was she amazed by his effortless fabrication?
The woman was wearing a stunning scarlet outfit. She was beautiful, but no older than her early twenties, easily half Oliver's age. Her jet-black hair was shoulder length and perfectly framed her stunning face. She was a vision, and a paragon of politeness as she listened to Oliver's bombastic diatribe. It was hard to tell whether the look on her face was accepting naiveté or intelligent discernment.
There were six players this year, and each had a role. Ollie was a professor and seemed to believe that giving long orations on tedious topics was a requirement for his part. Oliver Powers was paid to talk, and he appeared very adept at his job. He continued to batter the young woman in the tiny scarlet dress with facts pertaining to everything from the Civil War to the legitimacy of NASCAR as a sport. One man was staring at Ollie, amazed that anyone would listen to more than two words out of the overflowing mouth. He sat in his yellow jacket, as bright as a fresh daffodil, staring at Oliver Powers and seesawing from doubt to outright disbelief.
Detective Adam Jericho wasn't buying Oliver Powers's tall tales. He'd seen enough bull in his life to know the beef from the bouillon. He had effectively tuned out Ollie's rants and he concentrated on the game. He solved real-life murders for a living, surely he could puzzle out this silly little game. He looked over his clues, and as with most games that mimic real life, nothing quite jelled for him. A manufactured mystery left no room for the quality that Jericho most depended on in his occupation: instinct. Logic was anathema to him. Like poker or Yahtzee, detecting was, he thought, two-thirds luck and one-third chance. Brains were extra baggage.
The corpse was missing a foot. What kind of murderer takes the foot? And why? A lunatic podiatrist? A maniac with a foot fetish? A diminutive psychopath who will do anything for an extra foot? This was Jericho's first year at this little soiree. He'd earned his place here as a result of a high-publicity bust that had made him something of a celebrity in New England the past few weeks. He had personally tracked down serial killer Shane Richards and put the maniac behind bars. When the invitation came, he thought it might be fun. He had spent the better part of the last three decades tracking down serial murderers. It was his specialty. He was as good as they got. Surely, a little game like this would be nothing. But Adam Jericho had never gone up against someone with a predilection for severed feet.
Another player was an old woman with a hat that looked like a dead peacock. Her hair was an awful shade of blue. She swore up and down that she had solved the mystery, but the rules of the silly game stated that the solution would be revealed at dinner that night. That was three hours away yet. Three ... very ... long ... hours ... away.
There was a young girl in the group, the daughter of a rich oil magnate from down South. He sent his daughter to Massachusetts as his emissary, much as Kent Powers had sent his son in his place. The girl looked no older than sixteen and was unnaturally pale. One would imagine that a tanning booth was within the family budget? Or even a weekend on the beaches of Jamaica? Hair streaked red and held by little neon hair-ties stuck up in clumps all over her head. Her T-shirt had the charming epithet Drop Dead across the chest. She had been here when Jericho arrived, along with the woman in the small red dress.
Miss White stared blankly at the walls much of the time. She had set aside the material for the game moments after receiving the stacks of facts. She had either solved it instantly or had no interest in doing so.
An actress by the name of Kelly Greene was whisking around the room in a dress cut nearly to her navel, trying to be the center of attention. Someone ought to have informed her that she was about ten years and two tummy-tucks past being the center of anyone's attention. She was being talked about for an Oscar this year for her work in All in Good Time. Her publicist insisted that she put on a show here at the mystery mansion, for there were powerful people about tonight. Word had it that the woman in the tiny scarlet dress that Ollie was drooling over had influence in Hollywood publishing. She would be a good person to have on your side in Tinseltown, especially around Oscar time.
Not one of these people seemed like the type to amputate feet. Not even Ms. Greene, who was overacting her part as a lustful maid. She added some character touches of her own, making the maid Southern, though the accent sounded more like an Irish nanny mimicking a German with a lisp. She also declared that the maid was an alcoholic; such was her excuse to down Southern Comfort as if it were water. She wasn't the type who could hurt a fly. Detective Jericho was starting to seriously suspect himself, though he couldn't find a spare limb anywhere amongst his belongings. The game was so contrived and generic that he'd have declared the butler did it, but no one was playing a butler.
What kind of murder mystery didn't have a butler, anyway?
Supper drew nearer with such excruciating slowness that instead of the murderer, Jericho wondered if he would end up being the murderee for lack of sustenance. Finally the cook announced that the meal would be served in thirty minutes. Although Jericho's belly rumbled in anticipation, all thoughts of food and solutions to silly made-up murders would be far from his mind when the thirty-minute mark arrived. He decided to follow the annoying Oliver Powers around after his lovely consort went upstairs to “wash up” for the meal. Ollie meandered through room after room, looking at the detailed architecture
that had been designed by the suicidal Charlemagne well over a century ago as if he had never seen it before. Perhaps he had not. It must be a rough life if one has never laid eyes on one of one's father's mansions.
Aside from a short and rather confrontational conversation between Ollie and the old lady with blue hair, the next few minutes were uneventful. The old woman argued that late-night talk shows are subversive outlets for extremists who believe that all drugs should be legalized. Oliver countered that Letterman didn't have a subversive bone in his body. As the old woman went on to assert that Letterman's Top Ten List was a subliminal instrument for getting teens to smoke pot, Jericho made his way away from the nonsense.
Thinking that the dinner bell ought to be ringing any second, Jericho went out to the main ballroom with the others. Oliver and the old woman followed him, neither talking, both fuming. Everyone was gathered again but for the woman in the tiny red getup, the powerful publishing exec. Dinner was waiting on her. The ageing actress volunteered to get her. “Maybe she fell in the toilet,” she quipped as she bounced up the stairs, and everyone got to staring longingly at the table set with lavish china and expensive silverware. Jericho's name was embroidered on a napkin at the foot of the table. That got him to thinking again about the foot ... the mystery they were here to solve.... And then he solved it. He knew the answer, without a doubt. He was fairly sure he was the only one who had puzzled out the correct solution. Detective Adam Jericho was once again going to dazzle the common folk with his breathtaking deductions.
Then there was a scream upstairs and all thoughts of dinner and missing feet left Jericho's head. Here was something else to engage the sleuthing mind, something more than just a game. The over-the-hill actress appeared at the top of the staircase. She was sobbing theatrically. This was a scene that Adam Jericho had seen a hundred times before. It wasn't the type of moment that could be acted, not even by De Niro or Streep. Certainly not by a woman who starred in such trash as Petty Cash and The Arkadelphia Conspiracy. This was a genuine moment. If the Academy were passing out trophies right now, Ms. Greene would be walking away with some gold.
EQMM, December 2006 Page 11