Агата Кристи - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 53, No. 12, December 2008

I looked to Lord William and he nodded curtly. I made the sign of the cross and kicked the stool out from beneath Peta. She fell heavily, the rope cutting off her cry but failing to break her neck. Her bound hands twisted terribly in a futile effort to reach the strangling cord.

Poor Anna screamed again, as did several of the children.

Others in the village freely wept.

Peta hung struggling, swinging, twisting, gurgling in a most ghastly fashion until the strength finally left her body and her spirit ebbed.

When her bladder finally voided, I knew she was truly dead. We left her hanging on the green — a terrible warning to all who would break the king’s peace of the consequence of their action.

Lord William placed a hand on my shoulder, and it took all of my force of will to smother the impulse to shake it off.

His voice was a single notch above a whisper. “Thank you,” he said.

The gesture was so unusual that I turned to face him.

The expressionless mask on Lord William’s face was still mostly intact, but there was just a hint of emotion peeking out from beneath it, a tightness in the crow’s feet to either side of his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, leaving it to him to decide what it was that I regretted.

We never spoke of Alving again.

Copyright ©2008 Gilbert M. Stack

I’d jogged an easy warm-up pace past all the wharves converted into condos along Atlantic Ave, eased into a full run as I rounded the south end of Columbus Park, and was pounding back up Atlantic to my loft on Jackson when my cell phone rang.

“Dymond here.”

“Valerie, is that you?” A man’s voice. Hushed. Almost a whisper. “You sound so gruff.”

Caller ID on the screen said: UNKNOWN NUMBER — UNKNOWN NAME. I slowed my pace and strained to recognize the voice. “Who is this?”

“Oh, don’t slow down, Val,” he said in the same hushed whisper. “You were just reaching your stride.”

I did a quick check of the pedestrians around me. Back at Long Wharf, the seven fifteen from Quincy had just docked, and commuters were streaming through Columbus Park and pouring out across Atlantic Avenue. And almost all of them, it seemed, had a cell phone jammed against their head or tucked into their shoulder. But none of them showed any interest in me.

I picked up my pace again and spoke into the phone. “Okay, who is this? What’s the gag?”

“No gag, Valerie. Been away for a while, just got back. Thought I’d give you a call. You look fantastic, by the way. I haven’t seen you since the funeral.”

Despite the warmth of the morning sun, a tingling dread at the nape of my neck turned cold and crawled down my spine. My father’s funeral was the last one I’d attended, and that had been two years ago.

For half a minute there was silence on the line, then he spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. “Why so quiet, Val? I know you’re there. I can see you’re still holding the phone. And I can hear you breathing.”

“This is getting kind of old,” I said. “I don’t hear a name in the next three seconds, I’m signing off. One...”

“Now, Val, there’s no need to get so testy. That lawyer must be working you too hard. Maybe you should have stayed on the police force.”

“Two...”

“All right, Val, if that’s the way you want it, bye-bye for now, but I’ll be seeing you.”

The way he whispered, “I’ll be seeing you,” sent another shiver down my spine. If the creep was trying to give me goose bumps, he’d succeeded. And I could still feel him out there somewhere, watching.

I snapped my head around to scan the buildings across the street, but all the windows were a blinding gold reflection of the early morning sun.

What the hell’s the matter with you, girl? Getting spooked by some whispering weirdo on the phone who knows your name. I shook my head, picked up my pace, and concentrated on my breathing.

I got my rhythm back and started thinking. I had just cleared Columbus Park when he said he hadn’t seen me since the funeral. And by the time he told me that he could see I still had the phone in my hand and could hear my breathing, I was almost back to Battery Wharf. To keep me in sight for that distance, he had to be running along behind me.

Or following in a car.

I spun around, running backwards, and checked the street behind me. No one, running or otherwise, was there. But I caught a glimpse of the tail end of an electric blue Dodge Neon as it turned off Atlantic Ave at Hanover and disappeared around the corner.

Fed up with the politics, the good-old-boy network, and the testosterone-laden air, I’d quit the Boston Police Department six years ago and gone to work as a part-time investigator, full-time secretary/receptionist, and all-around runner of errands for an ambulance-chasing attorney on State Street. And in three short years — along with more insight into sue-an’-settle litigation than you’d ever get in law school — I’d satisfied the State’s requirement of “not less than three years as an investigator” and applied for my own license. That was also the year my dad retired from the police department.

He took early retirement eleven months after Sebastian Cass, a small-time drug dealer he had arrested, got shanked by another prisoner in county lockup while awaiting trial. With his sobbing wife Maria, who swore he was innocent, his sixteen-year-old son Angelo, who screamed police brutality, and a three-network media contingency at his side, Sebastian Cass died a week later.

There had been two other police-related deaths that summer — bungled arrests that ended with the suspects being shot — and the mayor, the media, and all five gubernatorial hopefuls in that year’s election were pointing fingers and hollering reform.

For Dad, the incidents themselves were bad enough, but the daily hounding on TV and in the papers was more than he could stand. Disheartened, he retired.

Being on the job had always been Dad’s reason for getting out of bed each day. And when he quit the force, he lost his sense of purpose and sank into depression. He caught a cold he couldn’t shake that winter and wound up in Mass General with pneumonia. And not quite thirteen months into his retirement, Dad died.

I didn’t give my whispering weirdo much thought again until late the next afternoon on my way to a strip club with the subtle name of Bottoms Up. I had a subpoena tucked in my bag for a no-show witness named Ezekiel Jones, and I’d spent the better part of an increasingly overcast day trudging in and out of a dozen dingy strip joints looking for him.

The way he whispered, “I’ll be seeing you,” sent a shiver down my spine.

I’d picked up a tip that Ezekiel liked to spend a lot of time watching the ladies undress, so I’d gone online and put together a list of all the titty bars and strip joints I could find in the Greater Boston area. Bottoms Up was the last one on my list. It shared space with a cut-rate package store in an other-wise abandoned shopping mall tucked into a corner somewhere near the border of Everett, Revere, and Chelsea.

I’d crossed high over the Mystic River on the Tobin Bridge, and as I descended into Chelsea, I looked out across the rooftops down a line of stubby chimneys sprouting from the tar-and-gravel roofs like a row of tombstones, and remembered where I’d first served papers on the elusive Ezekiel Jones.

I try to go through the Globe and the Herald front to back every day, and I’d thought I was one sharp lady P.I. the morning I’d spotted Ezekiel’s name as the sole surviving son in his father’s obituary. On the day of the service, I parked outside the funeral parlor, followed the procession to the cemetery, and bagged Ezekiel as he and his mother were leaving.