“Oh, how very ironic,” Violet said sarcastically. “Très amusant.”
“Well, Sis, speaking of irony and amusement,” Sebastian said, “you do realize now, don’t you, that you actually had the solution at one time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember, right after you saw my body in the vinegar barrel? You said the murderer shared my sense of humour.”
“But I didn’t think that—”
“No, but you could have. You’re so stuffy and pinched-mouthed that it’s obvious that a sense of humour doesn’t run in our family. Therefore I had to get it from somewhere. Therefore I share it with the person who gave it to me. Therefore.…”
“He’s right, Violet,” Father Knox said. “Your author may not always have been completely forthright but, like Mrs. Argus, she never, ever lied.”
“No?” Violet said. “What about right after we found the Colonel? Cerise said that there must be a homicidal maniac on the loose. Then our dear author, in her own voice, said, ‘She wasn’t, as it turned out, far wrong.’ What about that?”
“Damned right!” the Colonel said. “What about that?”
Cerise looked at Sebastian, who indicated that she should field the question.
She shrugged. “How else would you describe someone who brutally and senselessly slaughters eleven more-or-less innocent people for no reason other than a perverse sense of humour, and to satisfy the desire to feel superior to those around her?”
“Superiority is precisely the right word,” Father Knox said. “And like other homicidal maniacs—Jack the Ripper, for instance—your author occasionally enjoyed demonstrating hers by taunting you, making tantalizing yet cryptic remarks, saying in effect, ‘Here I am, but you can’t see me.’ Violet, do you remember that in Chapter Eighteen you said that all the things that didn’t seem to make sense either would fit together if you found the right perspective from which to look at them, or were a smoke screen? Then your author smugly stated that you couldn’t have known that the alternatives you proposed were in no way mutually exclusive. Which, I assume you now see, they are not.”
“Oh, I suppose they’re not,” Violet grudgingly agreed. “But only if you look at it from the point of view of this laughing indifferent deity of yours. And I still say there was no reason to consider that possibility.”
“No?” Father Knox asked. “In that same Chapter Eighteen just a few pages further on, you—not unreasonably—noted that the delusion of invincibility and omnipotence was a common characteristic of the personality type you must be dealing with. Then your author commented parenthetically that it wasn’t precisely a delusion. If it wasn’t a delusion, that means the person you were after was invincible and omnipotent. I don’t see how it could be stated much more clearly than that.”
“Who the hell pays attention to remarks like that?”
“If you had, maybe you wouldn’t be so upset. As I said, your author was virtually shouting, ‘Here I am, here I am!’ And then once again, in Chapter Twenty-one, Violet, you say that everything has been either random, senseless slaughter, or it’s been motivated and purposeful. After which your author tauntingly and condescendingly remarks—and you can almost hear her giggling as she does so—that you really couldn’t be blamed for not perceiving that it could be both at the same time.”
“Oh, she’s really quite a card, isn’t she?” Violet said.
“Damned woman’s a menace!” the Colonel growled. “Needs a good thrashing.”
“He’s right,” Derrick said. “How come a woman like that is still running around loose?”
“Actually,” Father Knox said, “I believe the police are—or soon will be—on her trail.”
Suddenly Sebastian let out a whoop of laughter.
“What now?” Violet asked sourly.
“Sis, do you remember how this whole thing started?”
“No.”
“Sure you do. What was I doing?”
Violet glared at her brother for a minute, then reluctantly said, “You were reading from the back of that old-fashioned mystery.”
“That’s right. Then what did I do?”
Violet looked at him, then looked down, and mumbled something.
“What’d you say, Sis?”
She looked up at him and made a face. “I said, ‘You threw it away.’”
Cerise looked from Violet to Sebastian, then started to giggle.
“That’s right,” Sebastian said. “We were told right from the beginning how we should look at all this.”
“Yes, beginnings and endings can often be extremely significant,” Father Knox said. “And in fact, you were told even before that exactly how things stood.”
Sebastian looked puzzled for a minute, then snapped his fingers. “Of course! Golly! At one point, I even said we were dropping like flies.”
“That’s right, you did!” Cerise said, laughing again.
“What are you two talking about?” Violet grumbled.
“Never mind, Sis. You wouldn’t appreciate it.” He turned to the priest. “Have we missed anything?”
“Actually, there are a couple of small but not totally insignificant points to be mentioned. Did none of you wonder about the name of the island?”
“Komondor? It’s an Indian word, isn’t it?” Derrick said.
“Of course it’s not, you dope! Had anyone troubled to look it up in the dictionary, you would have found that it is a breed of Hungarian sheepdog. If there had also been a picture, you would have seen that the komondor is unquestionably one of the world’s shaggiest dogs.”
“Oh, dear,” Budgie said, and tittered.
“I say! The cairns!” Derrick said, sitting up straight.
“Yes?” the priest said.
“The house was built on the site of the ritual cairns. Besides being a ceremonial pile of stones, a cairn is a kind of terrier—a very long-haired, shaggy kind of terrier.”
“Right you are, and very good! Just a little late.”
Sebastian laughed. “Is this tale going to wag again?”
Father Knox smiled merrily and winked. “Well, there is one more item. Weren’t any of you curious about the name, Rosa Sill? What it meant?”
“Not really,” Violet said.
“Actually, Violet, if you had been, you might have saved yourself a lot of wasted effort. Names of characters can also be quite significant. ‘Sill’ is clearly a word from a European language, and equally clearly not one of the Romance languages. That means it’s from a northern European language. With that determination, it would require no great effort to discover that it is a Swedish word, and that it means ‘herring’.”
“Rosa! Red!” Sebastian shouted, clapping his hands.
“Christ!” Violet said. “First metaphysics and now linguistics! Impossible!”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Cerise said. “Remember, you were told that every member of the Sill family bears a fin-shaped strawberry birthmark.”
Mr. Drupe cleared his throat. “And it was clearly stated that old Augustus Sill began his career selling pickled fish out of a barrel.”
Sebastian laughed again.
“Still more, Sebastian?”
He smiled broadly at Violet. “Well, Sis, I was just thinking that, no matter what, you really can’t say that old Runa didn’t play Fairleigh.”
In that instant, Sebastian’s future was decided. Even before the groans died down, he was plucked from their midst and deposited into a place of eternal fire and darkness, inhabited solely by utterly solemn people who had no wit, no sense of humour or irony, and who regarded everything as deadly earnest and serious.
EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT
Constable Edward Atkins and Sergeant Horace Sutton were the two police officers who investigated the disappearance of Runa Fairleigh. As we know, the only things out of the ordinary that they found in the house were the manuscript of An Old-Fashioned Mystery and a note left in the typewriter.
Constable A
tkins found the note. He read the two short lines several times, but could make no sense of them. He removed the sheet from the roller and showed it to Sergeant Sutton.
“What do you make of this?” he said. “Suicide note?”
Sutton read it over, and shook his head. “No idea. It doesn’t sound like one, does it?”
“What do you think it means?”
“How should I know? I think it’s poetry. Shakespeare, or one of those guys.”
“Oh? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Look, Atkins, the only place things ever make sense is in books. Right? What we’ve got is a crazy old lady who vanished, leaving behind a crazy note. So why don’t you just put that note with those other papers over there, and let’s get out of here. We do have some real crime to investigate.”
Atkins did as his sergeant suggested. He placed the note with the stack of papers, putting it beneath what seemed to be a title page in order to keep it clean. He looked at the note once more, and again shook his head. What the hell does that mean, he wondered, and what does it have to do with anything? It was a real mystery, all right. He shook his head, and read the words yet one more time.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Runa Fairleigh
Introduction and postscript © 1983 by L.A. Morse
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
978-1-4976-0385-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
Introduction:The Mystery of Runa Fairleigh
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Epilogue: Conversation In Limbo
An Old-Fashioned Mystery Page 23