The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  The Letters

  Sally sat cross-legged in her sock feet on the green brocade coverlet of Antonia’s bed. Her thwarted determination not to come back here had been the dying flare of her energy. Too keyed up to rest, she stared at the shifting patterns the sunlight, reflected off the Grand Canal, made on the walls.

  She contemplated Brian dead, his beautiful face ruined. She had looked only a second, half a second, when she identified him for the police, but the terrible image hung inside her eyelids. His face an unnameable color, his features seeming slightly off center, he had looked worse than any Medusa.

  She hadn’t loved Brian, she saw that now, and he hadn’t loved her. She had married him because— well, because he was handsome, and he’d asked her, and it seemed to be time. She could guess at why he had married her. He must have been trying to deny his true self, and Sally was the closest thing to an escape route he could find.

  There was a painting on the wall of a bowl of fruit and a pitcher. The light danced over a lemon, then an apple, then back to the lemon.

  Sally wondered who had killed Brian and why. She herself, she thought uneasily, had a strong motive as the humiliated wife. Did one of his friends in the group hate him enough to want him dead? Or had it been a chance meeting, a quarrel with a stranger? Or, since Brian had been disguised, was his murder a grotesque case of mistaken identity, his killer after someone else, not Brian at all? Sally thought of the black figure with the flashing mirror-face. She drew her knees up and hugged them to her chest.

  She hadn’t loved Brian, and he had treated her badly, but he hadn’t deserved to die like that, to suffer obscenely and leave behind only a jumble of clothes in a suitcase.

  The jumble began to prey on Sally’s mind. She had wadded his clothes, shoved them into the suitcase every which way. His mother might open it and see them in a mess. Out of respect for Brian, and his mother, too, Sally would straighten and fold them nicely.

  Relieved to have something to do, Sally took Brian’s suitcase out of the closet and put it on the bed. She braced herself against the sight of his things, but having a purpose, a goal, steadied her. She emptied the suitcase and began to repack it— shaking out, smoothing, folding, stacking. The simple rhythm of the task was calming.

  She did feel a pang, and the sting of tears, when she picked up his running shoes. He’d had them since long before she’d known him. Once brilliant blue, they were faded and grimy now, nearly worn out. She straightened the dingy laces.

  Nobody would want them, not even Goodwill. On one of the shoes, she noticed, the innersole was coming loose. Sally pulled at it, to see if it was still connected at all, and it came out in her hand. Left in the shoe, pressed down to conform to its shape, was an envelope.

  Sally wished desperately that she could replace the innersole and forget about the envelope. She hadn’t seen it. She didn’t want it. She had had enough, and more than enough.

  She pulled the envelope out of the shoe and found another beneath it. There were four in all— small, flimsy ones. She recognized them as the letters that had disturbed Brian when he received them in Paris. They were addressed in a hand she didn’t recognize, and were postmarked Paris, four or five days apart.

  Each envelope contained a sheet of thin paper, folded once. In the middle of each sheet, in the same handwriting as the address, a short sentence was written. There was no salutation, no signature. In date order, the messages read:

  Desire is defined as trouble.

  Fear is a flight; it is a fainting.

  Slime is the agony of water.

  To be dead is to be a prey for the living.

  Chills prickled at Sally’s body despite her sweater, despite the fact that the room had seemed plenty warm a few minutes ago. She replaced the letters in their envelopes. She stuffed them into the bottom of her tapestry drawstring handbag, and pulled the drawstrings tight.

  As she finished packing Brian’s suitcase, she began to shiver. She turned back the brocade bedspread, crawled in under the blankets, and lay there watching the play of the light on the wall.

  Brian

  If the dead could see and hear, Brian would see colors shifting, bodies moving. He would hear the comically off-key music played by an oompah band of clowns on the Calle Larga 22 Marzo. The clowns danced as they played, the trombonist kicking his feet, the clarinetist shuffling heel-and-toe. The bass drummer’s drumsticks swirled with multicolored ribbons as he flourished them between beats.

  Because Brian was dead, he saw past those clowns to the clowns within them, and past the inner, private clowns to cold nothingness. He heard past the music to profound, insupportable silence. He saw ribbons of air around the colored ribbons. If dead people could dance, he might have danced with the clowns, but rage never stops to dance.

  In the Campo San Maurizio the mask makers had spread their wares on canopied tables. Chaste skulls represented death, but Brian could have told them death was nowhere near as clean as that. What could a skull, severely beautiful, express about vile, slimy fluids and matter that was spongy with putrefaction?

  Masks lay on the tables, noses pointing upward, like half-submerged heads. Others hung from the canopy supports and gazed down with immobile, hollow-eyed disdain. Among the golden lions with swirling manes, the sharp-beaked birds, the expressionless doll-faces painted with flames or flowers, would be a mask for a dead person to wear. He only had to find it.

  Brian drifted through the world of masks. He had no need of horror. Once he was past the chilly barriers, horror became the element he moved in. Pain was irrelevant. All that remained was the idea that he shouldn’t be dead.

  The mask nodded at him from the nail where it hung by one eye. Brian and the mask recognized one another.

  Brian was washed away from the mask market. He flowed out of the Campo San Maurizio. The mask would hold up this putrid, slippery collapse, support the repugnant jelly he was becoming. It would take him where he had to go.

  Confrontation

  Sally thought she had slept a little. She had, in any case, closed her eyes and later opened them with the conviction that she must take the letters she had found to the police. The letters weren’t exactly threats, but they were creepy, and obviously they had worried Brian. He had hidden them in his shoe, Sally guessed, because he’d wanted to have them handy but didn’t want anyone else to see them.

  It occurred to her that somebody might try to get them back.

  Sally brushed her hair, splashed water on her face, and put on her jacket. When she opened the door she half expected to find Michèle, but the hall was empty, the house quiet. The police had not told her she couldn’t leave the house by herself in broad daylight. And she would welcome another meeting with them, this time without Michèle present. Her handbag slung over her shoulder and anchored firmly with her elbow, she walked down the hall and descended the staircase.

  The long ground-floor room seemed deserted, and the garden door stood ajar. She was halfway across the room when a man wearing a light blue smock walked in from the garden and said, “Signorina?”

  Sally should have known. She’d even seen the man before, she remembered, when Michèle had first brought her here. He was a member of Michèle’s staff.

  She pointed to the door that led to the garden. “I’m going out.” The man gazed at her benignly. She raised her voice. “Out.” She took a step.

  “Momento, Signorina” he said. “Stay there, please.”

  The man in the smock went through the door into the house. In the doorway, he turned and made a patting motion with his hands, as if to hold her in place. Then he disappeared inside.

  Sally hurried to the door and slipped out into the chilly garden. She made her way briskly down the path and passed through the ornamental iron gate, latching the gate behind her. Now there was nothing to do except carry out her plan and take the letters to the police. She had made sure she knew the way. As the policeman had said, it was not far.

  She felt stronger as
she walked. The sun was still bright, although a few clouds scudded overhead. She was doing the right thing, at least she knew that. The messages in the letters drummed in her head, making a rhythm to accompany her steps: Desire is defined as trouble. Fear is a flight; it is a fainting. Slime is the agony of water. To be dead is to be a prey for the living.

  She had moved from the dead-end lane that led to Michèle’s palazzo into a more populated street. A small crowd had gathered to watch a young man with a painted face playing a trumpet, using a foot pedal to pound a drum, and manipulating a marionette all at once. Seeing the happy, marveling faces of his audience, Sally felt cut off. Those people didn’t have to think about murder and going to the police. They weren’t worried about desire and fear and slime and death. She trudged on.

  The next corner was where she was supposed to turn. She looked around to reassure herself of the route. Her eyes slid over, then returned to, a figure standing in an arched doorway a few yards away. It wore a white robe, a blank, expressionless white mask, a headdress of bobbing appendages.

  Sally stared. Surely it was a Medusa.

  The costume wasn’t the same as Brian’s, not even close. The snakes were lengths of springy coils of white cord that swung and dipped crazily, but the effect, for Sally, was horrifying. The Medusa was looking at Sally. Its gaze felt like an assault.

  Even as Sally’s mind told her Medusa was a legitimate mythological costume, that there could be many Medusas at Carnival, that this crazy-looking ghost-Medusa had nothing to do with Brian, she was backing away. The Medusa took a step toward her.

  Sally panicked, fleeing blindly, pushing her way past anyone in her path. She wouldn’t look back. She couldn’t bear to see the crazily waving headdress behind her.

  People were laughing and pointing. Sally realized, with deepening terror, that she and the Medusa had been taken for participants in some sort of antic street theater. The Medusa, for them, was a comic monster, and Sally’s flight was part of the comedy. She wanted to scream the truth, beg for help, but she knew, with nightmare certainty, that they’d believe her fear was part of the act.

  She might have gotten away had it not been for a group of laughing dogs, one of whom jumped into her path and caught her neatly, his brown plush paws closing on her upper arms.

  “No!” Sally screamed. The eyes looking at her from over the protruding muzzle were mirthful. His companion dogs cheered.

  The dog turned her around and presented her ceremoniously to the waiting Medusa. Sally saw hate in the Medusa’s eyes. She pulled back, prompting guffaws from the dogs. “No!” she cried again as the Medusa gave a slight bow of thanks and led her, accompanied by scattered applause, into a side passage.

  The passage was empty except for a crumpled sheet of newspaper blowing toward them. Sally took a breath to scream but the Medusa’s gloved hand fastened over her mouth, pulling her head back so far she nearly gagged. Trying to free herself, she thrashed her arms and legs and felt her handbag slip, heard it fall with a soft plop to the pavement despite her belated effort to arrest its slide.

  The Medusa marched her forward. She knew the eyes, she thought, even though she’d seen them so briefly. She wrenched away, contorting her body, stumbling. She reached the end of the passage and dodged around the corner, but she was off balance and hadn’t regained full speed and the Medusa caught her again.

  This time she did scream, but her “Help!” was quickly cut off when the Medusa’s hands closed around her throat. Her head snapped back and hit the stone wall behind her. Jarred to the teeth, she scrabbled at the Medusa’s hands, feeling saliva flood her mouth.

  Intent on the struggle, Sally was unaware of Michèle until he was tearing at the Medusa’s robe, pulling the Medusa away.

  At the sight of Michèle, the Medusa seemed to hesitate in surprise. Then it turned and ran the way the two of them had come, disappearing around the corner.

  Michèle said, “Sally, are you all right? Sandro told me you’d gone. I heard noise, laughing. People said a girl was running from a Medusa.”

  “Go after it,” Sally gasped, and Michèle darted away.

  The moment he disappeared, Sally was overtaken by abject fear. She shrank against the wall, terrified of seeing again the macabre head with its dancing snakes, the expressionless white mask, the poisonous eyes of the ghost-Medusa. It could circle around and approach her, emerge from a doorway, appear like her worst fears realized in a bad dream.

  Finally, Michèle returned. He was carrying her handbag. “I couldn’t see even a trace,” he said. “Once the headdress was taken off, it would be very hard to find in a crowd. I’m sorry.” He handed her the bag. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

  She pulled it open and looked inside. The letters were gone.

  Michèle was watching her. “Something is missing?”

  Sally shook her head. It hurt to shake her head. “Nothing special,” she said.

  Neither of them spoke. Then Sally said, “You saw it. A Medusa.”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  They started back to the palazzo.

  A Visit From Michèle

  Francine had just gotten out of the shower when she heard a light tapping on the door of her room. She pulled on her bathrobe, black satin printed with scarlet poppies. To her curt demand, in English, to know who was there, the response came, “Please open the door. I’d like to talk with you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of friends of yours.”

  Francine opened the door a crack and peered out. Standing in the hall was a slim man with neatly barbered brown hair. He wore a gray suit with a yellow rosebud in the buttonhole and carried an overcoat on his arm. His face, with its light brown eyes and straight nose, was conventional, safe-looking, not very interesting. There was something extremely familiar about him.

  “Who are you?” she said again.

  “A friend of Brian’s,” the man said.

  Francine stood completely still. The man put out a hand and pushed gently on the door. “May I come in?”

  Francine stepped back and he entered the room, closing the door behind him. She pulled her robe closer around her. The man stood looking at her, a pleasant expression on his unremarkable face.

  Francine sat down on the bed. “Are you from the police?”

  He hesitated before answering, “No, I’m not. Although I expect they will be here shortly.”

  “Perhaps.” She took a cigarette from a pack on the bedside table and lit it.

  The man put his overcoat on a chair. “You know, then, that Brian has been murdered.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a challenge in the monosyllable, and the man took it up. “You don’t seem sad.”

  She lifted one shoulder. “Brian was an ignoramus and a troublemaker. I don’t pretend to feel what I don’t feel.”

  “You are brave. If you speak that way to the police, they may believe you killed him yourself.”

  She said nothing. He leaned closer. “Did you?”

  She laughed harshly. “Do you expect me to say yes?”

  “Only if it’s the truth. I see you are a woman committed to the truth.”

  “Yes, I am. And you?”

  “I am committed to the false. It’s a Venetian characteristic. We paint wood to look like gold, and paper to look like marble. And the wellheads you see in the campos? You thought, I suppose, there were wells beneath them. Not at all. They are simply the tops of columns stolen from elsewhere by marauding Venetians, brought back and set up to look like wells.”

  The man had a triumphant air, as if he had proved an important point.

  Francine said, “That’s disgusting.”

  “Not at all,” said the man earnestly. “If Brian’s killer had tried to knock him down a well, instead of into a canal, Brian would still be alive.”

  Francine studied this familiar, ordinary-looking man. She wanted to dismiss him as an idiot, but in fact she was intrigued. “Who are you? Were you really Brian�
�s friend, or did you say that as part of your commitment to the false?”

  He smiled. “You are clever. No, I was not Brian’s friend, any more than you were yourself.”

  Francine said, “I hate to be mocked.”

  He pulled an exaggerated long face. “Then we won’t get along very well together.”

  “Brian mocked me. He dressed as Medusa. It was intended as a mockery.”

  “A mockery of—”

  “A mockery of Jean-Paul Sartre and of those who admire his ideas.” Francine took a furious drag on her cigarette and expelled the smoke sharply toward the buttons on the man’s jacket.

  The man seemed to be thinking. At last he said, “I saw you in the Piazza yesterday. Sartre.”

  Francine didn’t answer.

  “That’s who you were. Sartre,” he said. He sounded very pleased with himself. “You weren’t a troll at all.”

  Francine winced. “I certainly was not a troll. I was Jean-Paul Sartre,” she said.

  He crossed to the bed and sat next to Francine. He took her hand. “How interesting it must be to talk with you!” he said excitedly.

  Francine burst into loud sobs. She burrowed her head against the man’s neck. He removed the cigarette from her clutching fingers and put it out in the ashtray. Then he smoothed and patted Francine’s back, murmuring, “My poor girl.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” cried Francine. She grasped his lapels, dislodging his rosebud. “To be possessed, completely possessed by his ideas, and nobody—”

  “Poor thing,” he said. He brushed some of Francine’s hair out of her eyes and kissed her forehead. “I kiss all those ideas,” he said.

  Francine held on to him, her body heaving. At last the tears subsided and she rested, sniffling, with her head on his chest. “It is interesting to talk with me,” she said.