Блейк Крауч - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

We’d earned our nightcaps, and they sat on the hardwood before us, a Gibson for me and a Gimlet for Marion. She was ignoring hers to gaze into my steely blue eyes, which gave me a dilemma. Not concerning what her gaze meant or where we were heading. I wasn’t that wet behind the ears. I was wondering how I’d break the news to Paddy that I’d won an in at MGM and would be returning to my old profession.

I’d already turned down one job offer since they’d put the cuffs on Beeler and Sebastian. That had come from Sam Truax on behalf of the Transcontinental Detective Agency, and it had been easy to refuse. If I had to be a babysitter for the Dabneys and Lantrips of this world, I preferred to work for a firm with Hollywood in its title, not one whose name threatened a transfer to Tacoma or Topeka or Trenton.

A chance to crash MGM was another matter entirely. So I was wording my resignation and feeling a little regret over it, now that I’d glimpsed my job’s more exciting possibilities. Then Marion rendered the question moot in the extreme.

Her exact words were: “Want to help me say goodbye to Hollywood, Scotty?”

“Goodbye?”

“Yes. I’m heading east, maybe after I have a farewell toot, like that little friend of yours.”

“What about your job?”

“Gone. Guy fired me, the goat. I called Malibu from the ladies’ room back at Nick’s. I wanted to let Evelyn know she needed a good divorce lawyer. Guy canned me before my first nickel ran out. Said I’d never work in this town again, the plagiarist.”

“He’ll apologize,” I said.

“He’ll have to do it long distance. I’ve got a standing offer from a typewriter company in Ohio. My old man runs it. Someday I will. You’re looking at the first female president of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce.”

I controlled an impulse to down my Gibson and raised it to her instead. “Good luck with that,” I said.

“You should think about getting out, too, Scotty. Guy and all the other vest-pocket Napoleons in this burg are living on borrowed time. They think things are going to go back to the way they were before the war, but those days are gone forever. The future’s waiting to do to Hollywood what the flood did to Johnstown.”

She was just blowing off steam, but her prediction still gave me a chill. Not that I let on. I knew that much about playing a gumshoe.

In my best offhand delivery, I said, “Sounds like I’d better hang around and make sure everything turns out okay.”

Marion raised her drink to me. “Good luck with that,” she said, and we clinked our glasses on it.

©2009 by Terence Faherty

Caroline Benton’s novel The Path of the Dead was published by Constable, in the U.K., in 2006. She is currently at work on a follow-up novel, which she expects to complete early in 2009. She has also been producing a lot of short stories, mostly in the crime genre, but also some tales of the supernatural and women’s fiction, which she has sold in the U.K. and Scandinavia. She previously appeared in EQMM in 1/09.

I laughed when Gabrielle told me Le Coisel was haunted. Ghouls and ghosts are not part of our modern vocabulary, except as ingredients of a particular genre of movie intended to scare, and more recently of emotive love stories intended to cause weeping. I expected Gabrielle to laugh with me, but her face remained solemn.

“I know what I know,” she said cryptically.

I smiled. “And what do you know, Gabrielle?”

But she was not to be drawn. She snatched up her duster and told me she was too busy to talk.

Gabrielle is Le Coisel’s femme de menage , the daily help. It was she who held the keys to the house after the death of the previous owner, and she who, when we first discovered it, silently showed us around. She lives with her farm-labourer husband, Jacques Prudence, in a one-storey maison rustique a kilometer from here, where the track from Le Coisel meets the small country road. They are the nearest neighbours.

Like most of the farming community in this quiet area of Normandy, Gabrielle speaks not a word of English. Never a problem for my wife, a fluent speaker of French, but frequently one for me, though on this occasion I was sure I had not misunderstood her. Back in my study I checked the dictionary to make sure. No, no mistake. Hante — haunted. I smiled at the credulity of countryfolk.

Her revelation had come as a result of my request for help the following Friday evening when we were to give our first small dinner party. We had met an English couple the previous weekend in the paint section of the local brico , and had pounced on each other as only expats can. Already we were missing our native tongue.

Neil and Penny Morgan had a house twenty kilometers to the northeast in the area of Calvados known as the Bessin, and had been permanent residents for two years. The countryside around them was flat, they told us, but coming from Norfolk, they were used to that. They were a little vague as to how they were surviving. He mentioned doing building work for other Brits — of which, it seems, there are many — and she enthused wildly about “running chambres d’hotes ” when their own renovation was completed, which I gathered was a long way into the future. They seemed envious of my writing, though more for my ability to generate income in a foreign country than from any literary kudos I might have acquired. They had not (apologies all round) read any of my books.

We asked them what they missed most about England. Cheddar cheese, they said, and bacon, and cream that isn’t sour, at which point my wife — who, forewarned, had a quantity of cheddar still in the deep-freeze — invited them to dinner. They were an odd-looking pair, younger than us and a trifle “New Age“: he tall, spare, and bearded, she with long braided auburn hair and voluminous skirts. I suspected we would have little in common other than language.

Le Coisel is a haven for a writer. There is nothing exceptional about the house itself. It is typical of the area — large, sturdy, built of the local stone beneath a steeply pitched slate roof, although it does have a rather ornate central dormer of carved stone which gives it an air of rural grandeur. It was the situation rather than the house that we fell in love with.

One thinks of Normandy as a vast tract of horizontal dullness, and indeed much of it is, but the area of southern Calvados known as the Bocage is more engaging, with gently rolling hills and lush valleys, a rich farming land not unlike the Gloucestershire countryside where I grew up. Le Coisel is situated where Bocage and Bessin meet, not far from...

But forgive me if I do not reveal its exact location. I bought it for peace and seclusion and have no wish to be overrun by people deeming to satisfy a morbid curiosity. Suffice it to say, Le Coisel faces south along a wood-enclosed valley from which no human habitation can be seen, and through which runs the gentle Ruisseau de la Vierge on its way to meet the Drome.

It was summer when we first saw it, one of those glorious hot weeks in July. The sun had turned the car into a furnace, so the tree-shaded track offered a welcome relief. Before even entering the house we walked down to the stream and stood in quiet contemplation amongst a carpet of bog iris, their yellow heads thigh-high, holding out our bare arms to let damsel flies in iridescent blues and greens alight upon our hands, whilst at our feet the water burbled and the hot air pulsated with the songs of birds. Paradise. The pressures of London seemed as remote as Mars and we did not need to speak to know we would buy it.