Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12

by Dell Magazines

  I lift my own hands to touch the panel on the other side. But once my palm is raised, I pull back. The watching guard calls time; Dearbhla takes up her handbag and turns away towards the rush hour outside.

  My father married her, of course, when a suitable period of time had elapsed. There was the funeral and the period of mourning to be observed. But somehow that all faded away pretty fast. Mother belonged to half-memories, a childhood buried beyond retrieval. The odd flashes of reminiscence would come, but they were less frequent. Dearbhla’s was the domain of reality, homework monitoring, meal preparation, discipline. Thinking back, I saw that it was a role for which she had probably been ill prepared. But, Dearbhla being Dearbhla, she threw herself into it with all the energy she could. Nor did she stop playing. The one row she and my father always had was the one where she wanted to go away on extended concert trips and my father was unwilling to let her.

  The truth was, he had never known how to talk to me and was afraid of our being left alone. Dearbhla made most of the effort. She even tried to teach me the piano: For my tenth birthday I received the gift of a Hanon exercise book, endless streams of notes going up and down the C scale. I got to a point where I rather enjoyed them. I could bash them out without paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. Besides, there was a certain pleasure in playing Dearbhla’s Yamaha upright in itself. The shiny ebony lid had to be lifted, the red cloth respectfully removed, a light puff to take the dust off the keys, then the final touch of finger on ivory. Inevitably, after a half-hour of me foostering about the keys, Dearbhla would succumb to the temptation to play herself and entertain me for hours.

  It could have gone on forever. Thinking back, we were happy. Or at least I thought I was, which is surely the same thing. After I grew older and went to college in the city, I could have gone back at weekends to visit Dearbhla and my father, loafing about in the study. You can live a perfectly satisfying life and never need to disturb the past.

  Then Dearbhla spoiled everything.

  The judge at my trial told me, in front of the assembled jury, lawyers, and public gallery (my case had attracted considerable interest), that my crime had been a dreadful one. What had possessed me to inflict such horrific punishment on the man who had brought me up, fed, clothed, educated, and cherished me? And then what I visited on my father’s wife, a talented musician who would never play again. What had driven me to it? I had indeed taken everything from her.

  Bright-eyed court reporters were scribbling it all down. Ryder kept them stoked with a steady supply of melodrama.

  I admit I harmed the woman when I slammed that old rosewood lid down on her knuckles, once, sharply. I believe I managed to sever her tendons as well as shattering her fingers. And never did I claim insanity: I knew exactly what I was doing. It gave me a blood rush to see her scream, her face growing ever more foreign to me until I saw the face of one younger than she, hair in a ponytail, smiling beatifically through the agonised mask. And then, by chance, my father turned up.

  His reaction to the tableau before him was rather comical. His face contracted into an n shape at first, then he turned upon me a look of murderous anger. In that brief second, I realised that despite his learning he was as stupid as he was unforgiving. His reaction was not one of shock, but dumb, animal rage at this assault on his little kingdom. I saw he was capable of nothing more than that, and I hated him for it. I could see hatred in his eyes too. He was making for me; he would kill me without remorse, I could tell. I had to defend myself.

  And so, instinct-driven, I flung the top piano lid open, my hand searching for and finding the taut metal wires that Dearbhla’s playing had sounded out so recently. I set my fist around them. They were almost intractable but with a supreme effort, I wrenched them out. The strings beside them groaned in sympathy as I roared. Oh God, the pain. I nearly tore the skin off my fingers. I’ve never felt anything like it since.

  A fistful of bass notes, like wiry flowers. I did not dishonour her memory by missing a single one. The D, the E, perhaps even the A. Not a single one missed, Judge, on my honour.

  But then, Mr. Justice Ryder thundered, then the defendant made for the victim, Dr. David Lukeman, and wrapped the piano wire around the said Dr. Lukeman’s neck, pulling so tightly that his vocal cords were severed on the first tug. But wait! Even with my stepmother watching, I did not stop there, indeed when I had finished with Dr. Lukeman, the victim’s neck was severed half the way through—the man was virtually decapitated. At the word decapitated, the reporters all bent to their notebooks as one, like a well-conducted choir.

  The jury would be well advised to consider the nature of the killing, the judge added, before returning their verdict. Et voilà, here I am.

  It is the hour before the evening meal, where prisoners are allowed to visit each other, wander in and out of each other’s cells or gather downstairs to watch TV and smoke, which they all do. I think about Dearbhla’s last visit, when she made a special request. The panel between us was removed and I was held in her clasp, my head lost in the blanket folds of her expensive cloak. When it was time for her to leave, she kissed me on the cheek and held me for a long time, not letting me go even when I tried to withdraw. They had to part us. The perfume was the same as the one she wore the first day we met, that stuff that managed to smell fresh, yet overpowering. I remember the smell, but cannot put a name to it.

  The letter is in my hands, the thread of the envelope soft as a blanket, wherein will be contained a message on plain white paper which I can read cross-legged in my bed. My brief, weekly oasis in the midst of hell.

  But I am interrupted by a tapping at my door. “Hey, Wirey,” a guard calls out to me. Wirey is short for Piano Wire, a nickname bestowed on me at the beginning of my sentence, which has degraded over the years to Wirey. (It is by no means an insult: My crime still elicits certain awe among some of my fellow prisoners.)

  “Yes?”

  “Peterson wants you in his office.”

  Peterson is the screw I tolerate best. Thanks to him, I got a room to myself after two years, even if it did have the wall view. He is a confident, heavyset man, but in his small cubicle, he looks oversized and awkward.

  “I’ve some bad news for you.” His fingers wiggle on the desk, beating out a little Hanon of their own. “That lady who comes to visit you—Dearbhla McKernan—she was found last night.”

  She was found. I know what he means. Immediately my body responds: the coldness, the sweat prickling under the skin.

  “Started the car in the garage and just sat in it, apparently. She looked perfectly peaceful.”

  I nod.

  “So obviously you won’t be seeing her tomorrow.”

  Although on the surface it seems a stupid thing to say, I can tell that Peterson is trying to get through to me, past the fog of shock, get me to accept the truth in installments. He is being kind, kinder to me than my father had ever been.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  His beating fingers stop their rhythm, spreading flat on the table. “I’m very sorry.”

  I rise to leave and he stretches his hand toward my shoulder. For a moment I fear he will embrace me—his sweat is rancid in my nostrils—but he thinks better of it and moves back. I am brought to my cell once more, where all is undisturbed. The letter is still lying on the bed for me to pick up. For a moment I hold it still, then I tear it open, ripping both envelope and paper in my frenzy.

  My dear child (for you still stay that way for me)

  Forgive me my cowardice. I thought that I could live out my karma in this life with acceptance but I could not. I broke up a family to be with David because I loved him with a passion beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I thought that this passion was enough to sustain me through any loss, any punishment. When you damaged my hands, in a strange way I accepted it. I always knew that my love for David would carry a price and I resolved to have the courage to pay that price and not surrender to despair. I just wanted him to lov
e me. That was all, and that was granted to me. He gave me as much as he could possibly give and I could not ask for more.

  Ah but it gets so hard. The music never leaves me, the memory of fingering stays with me every day, yet half of my fingers can’t move and the rest of them are crippled in pain. My colleagues I have not seen for a long time. They are afraid of me because I remind them of what they stand to lose. I cannot love, since I lost David, nor can I play, since I lost the use of my fingers. But the thing is, you may stop being a musician in your hands, but you never stop being a musician in your mind, and the one consolation I might have had for losing love has been denied me.

  But my child, please don’t feel guilty. You did what you did because you were on to me that day. I was the one who suggested playing Lily’s old rosewood piano again, not your father. I framed it as a surprise for you when you came back that evening. And yes, I even chose the Gymnopédie. Why did I do it? Jealousy, pure and simple. Even after thirteen years of marriage I was never sure that I could take Lily’s place in your father’s heart. I was desperately jealous of the one unassailable place she held there, those first years in which I played no part. I sought to eradicate it completely by restaging her actions. I did not see what was wrong until I looked up and that terrible, terrible anger was on your face. After all, I was so much her superior musically. (How I missed the point!)

  I destroyed your mother’s lize—I’ve always carried the guilt—and she, in her own way, has returned to destroy mine. Did I tell you I saw someone who looked like her on the street the other day? I am haunted by her image, time after time. Lily, Lily, Lily—I cannot get her name out of my mind, it repeats like a mantra. I have nothing left now to distract me and as the years progress her call becomes louder rather than otherwise. You may understand me. We both betrayed her, didn’t we, for love?

  I am gabbling now so I must draw to a close. Please know that I tried to love you and I believe I achieved something close. And I loved your father beyond all reason and to this day I regret none of it, except for hurting you.

  Your loving stepmother

  Dearbhla McKernan

  I fold up the letter and put it away. Now grief should arrive—I have nobody in the world left to care for me—but it will not come, even though I repeat out loud: She’s gone, Dearbhla’s gone. Yes, I am still full of what passes for normal thought here: Is cabbage on for dinner again tonight? Should I go out for exercise tomorrow? It does not hit me, this new reality.

  All the pieces Dearbhla played for me were beautiful: nocturnes, mazurkas, the Moonlight Sonata, a waltz called “Adieu” which Chopin wrote when he was dying of tuberculosis. But force myself as I may, I cannot recall any of them. Another piece intercedes, yes, that broken piece again, the Gymnopédie, replete with mistakes and laughter and sunset on the pedals. Dearbhla is overshadowed, just as she feared. She should never have played that piece, not even once.

  Haven’t we both betrayed her for love? My mother plays on, her eyes shut and a little smile on her face. Nothing complex, nothing overwhelming. No cross-signatures or bombast. Just her playing, done for love. All of it done for love.

  People like my father have it easy. They get rid of people the way balloons lose ballast, slowly chucking each one out until they can float free. They are never without somebody to want and need them—but are never truly happy until solitary and rid of all encumbrances. We had all given him so much, even I who killed him. I freed him from life’s inconveniences, from people’s needs. He would never have been content had he lived.

  And Dearbhla is dead. But grief still isn’t breaking through, why should it, when she is nothing to me by blood? That tranquil Gymnopédie bars me from feeling. The best I can do is try to understand how she felt. Dearbhla’s pain is my mother’s pain, is my own. The pain of knowing that you have loved one person all your life and he does not give this love back, in full or at all. No—he frowns, forbids, withholds. He is always the person who has the last word; no logic can contradict him. The dancing feet are stilled; the piano wrapped up and sent to storage. My childhood is over. Mama gone.

  The walls of my cell brighten: another sunset. Oh, I remember it all now. I have all the time in the world to do nothing else but remember.

  Copyright © 2012 by Susan Lanigan

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  FICTION

  SKYLER HOBBS AND THE GARDEN GNOME BANDIT

  by Evan Lewis

  Evan Lewis’s story “Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man,” which appeared in our Department of First Stories in February 2010, won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for best short story by a new writer. Since then, the Oregon writer’s work has appeared in the Western anthology A Fistful of Legends, in the BEAT to a PULP print anthology, and in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (see May 2012’s “Mr. Crockett and the Bear”). He returns to EQMM with another humorous case starring Holmes adherent Skyler Hobbs.

  Skyler Hobbs, his eyes bright as diamonds, thrust a page of The Oregonian at me.

  The headline said Garden Gnome Bandit Strikes Again.

  I said, “So?”

  The story hardly qualified as news. The spate of garden-gnome thefts in the Southeast Portland area had been the darling of TV newscasters for the past month, always with much grinning and rolling of eyes. One local wag had even filmed an interview with a talkative gnome who had seen several friends spirited away by a hooded figure on a bicycle.

  Hobbs looked down his long, thin nose at me. “Surely, Watson, you recall the affair of the Six Napoleons.”

  “Wilder,” I said with a sigh. “Jason Wilder.” I’d been renting a room from him here at 221B SE Baker Street for a year now, and he still couldn’t remember my name. “Now what’s this about Napoleons?”

  “You wrote a quite sensationalized version of the tale for The Strand, did you not? Or rather, Watson did.” He added this last bit with a broad wink.

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “The crux of the matter was that an otherwise sane fellow was going about smashing busts of Napoleon, and no one had the slightest idea why.”

  “Except,” I said, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  He nodded. Modestly. “It developed that one of the busts contained the black pearl of the Borgias, and he was determined to get it. In the end, all he got was a room in the jail.”

  “Thanks to Holmes, of course.”

  He shrugged. Modestly.

  “So you think the Garden Gnome Bandit is seeking a rare jewel.”

  “Not particularly. But perhaps he does believe something is concealed inside one.”

  I flipped through the paper. “Look, there are plenty of real crimes to choose from. Man Killed in Convenience Store Robbery. Arson Suspected in Church Fire. Even this one, Bike Theft Statistics Mount. Why not investigate something that matters?”

  Hobbs regarded me over steepled fingers. “I fear, Doctor, that you simply do not understand.”

  He was wrong. I understood all too well. My friend Skyler Hobbs, you see, believes himself to be the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, and considers such mundane crimes beneath his notice. He craves the unusual, the outrageous, and sometimes the ridiculous. And I, the man he believes heaven-sent to be his Watson, am powerless to dissuade him.

  In a sane world, a footloose bachelor like myself would spend Friday night on a hot date, or with a group of buddies at a tavern. But in this world, the one I shared with Mr. Skyler Hobbs, I sat at a picnic table at Cartopia, Portland’s hippest food-cart court, at the corner of SE 12th and Hawthorne. It was nearly midnight, but the place was just coming alive, and hummed to a crowd of hipsters and slumming yuppies. There were plenty of girls here, and tasty dishes of all varieties. But as Hobbs kept reminding me, we were not here to enjoy ourselves. We were here to catch the Garden Gnome Bandit.

  Still, I was feeling pretty good. I was scarfing down an order of poutine—a mound of french fri
es smothered in cheese curds and gravy—from the Potato Champion cart and considering which place to try next. At the moment, it was a tossup between El Brasero (rumored to serve the messiest burrito in town) or Bubba Bernie’s, whose chicken jambalaya had become legendary.

  Hobbs got a beef-brisket turnover (being the closest he could find to steak and kidney) from Whiffies Fried Pies, but forgot it after the first bite. His attention was focused on a garden gnome on a table near Perierra Crêperie. The gnome belonged to Hobbs, and he had placed it there himself as bait.

  “No one’s going to steal it in front of all these witnesses,” I said.

  “I do not expect them to,” Hobbs said. “But it is quite possible someone will display an undue interest in the little fellow. At the very least, he may provoke comment, and I shall be listening.”

  His reasoning was not altogether bad. Cartopia was in the very neighborhood where most of the garden-gnome thefts had occurred, and the court was a favorite hangout for denizens of the night. If anyone had knowledge of the Bandit, it would be folks like these. It was even likely the bandit, himself a denizen of the night, would pay occasional visits to this mecca of comfort food.

  Cartopia was aptly named. Each of these eateries was actually a small trailer, and they now circled the corner lot like a wagon train under siege. Because this was Portland, a variety of canvas, metal, and plastic tents stood ready to shield patrons from occasional showers.

  We had been here the better part of an hour, and while the gnome had drawn curious glances and colorful jokes, it had yet to ferret out a suspect or clue. Which was fine by me. I was enjoying the poutine and the view.

  At the table with Hobbs’s gnome, a group of young women chattered and picked at their crepes, watching the crowd and watching the crowd watch them. I was watching one girl in particular, a slim, blue-eyed minx whose hair was the color of carrots.