Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Jillian Wayne jumped forward, then wheeled on me. “What are you doing here?”

“Figured I’d do some scouting of storage facilities, since everybody I spoke with seemed way too smart to leave in their own dwellings any — what would you call them? ‘Artifacts of an Alpha Wolf’?”

Her face flushing, Wayne didn’t even try the sly/coy smile. “Get out of here. This is my personal property.”

I put my foot between the open locker door and its jamb. “From this hallway I can see pretty clearly it used to be Brant Sinclair’s personal property, which for some reason you stole and feel a need to visit.”

Prints and statuary of wolves were displayed on a shelf, a herringbone gray three-piece suit on a wooden hanger itself hanging from a nail. And, woven through a buttonhole of the vest, a short bronze chain with a memorial fob attached at its end.

“This is an outrage. No court will—”

“Actually, I’m not an agent of the police in particular nor the state in general. As a private citizen working for another, anything I see is admissible in evidence. At your trial for murder.”

The color that had risen so recently to her cheeks drained as quickly. “No. No, it... it wasn’t...”

“Then tell me in your own words.”

Wayne looked down at her hands. “Brant and I... After his son committed suicide, Brant was truly upset. He knew his daughter was a lesbian and didn’t plan on having any children.” Wayne lifted her chin now, defiant again. “And even if Tammy did get impregnated somehow, she wasn’t the kind of stock to produce an alpha offspring.”

“But you believed you were?”

“Brant believed, and yes, so did I. So we tried. For years. Fertility tests, fertility drugs. But it wasn’t him. It was... me. I just couldn’t conceive. We hadn’t given up, only then, this semester...”

“Enter Leah Nordstrom.”

Through clenched teeth, “Yes. Eager, fertile, and... younger, too. Which an alpha male would want. Could... demand. Our Ms. Nordstrom sensed that. And seized her opportunity, getting pregnant by him.” You could feel the glow of blood passion come off Wayne now. “Only Brant forgot one important aspect of the ‘alpha’ concept.”

“Being?”

Wayne drew herself up, straight and resolute. “That every pack has an alpha female, too. And she doesn’t easily let go of her status, either.”

Picturing Leah Nordstrom and taking out my cell phone, I didn’t think Brant Sinclair had forgotten that aspect at all. But I did let Jillian Wayne cling to her own “aura” for the twenty additional minutes it took the police to arrive.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Jeremiah Healy.

Rave reviews for Mr. Barnard’s novel The Graveyard Position (Scribner). PW says: “Fans of classic murder puzzles will be delighted by the careful hiding of clues in plain sight. Few writers of contemporary mysteries can equal Barnard’s ability to meld a clever fair-play plot with satire.” Booklist adds: “exhibiting all the author’s greatly appreciated traits, including charm, wit, and excellent pacing.”

The Walthamstow locals were unanimous when Harriet Blackstone died. Standing in the doorways of Gladstone Road (the renamed o’connor Street), watching the police horse and cart clip-clopping away to the morgue, they looked at each other, and either said it or left it unsaid but understood: “She asked for it.”

It was, in truth, only what they had been saying about Mrs. Blackstone for years. When they saw her cleaning her attic-floor windows on long ladders borrowed from Mr. Dean the builder (what had she got on him? they asked themselves), when they saw her sharpening her kitchen knives at the front door, saw her buying arsenic (for the rats) and cyanide (for the wasps) at the chemist’s or the general stores, they always looked on these habits as hubristic, without ever using the word. “She’s asking for it,” they had said, shaking their heads. Now there was the satisfaction of seeing their prophecies come true, as well as a more general satisfaction. That night they had a street party, with Eccles cakes and muffins, and bottles left over from the Diamond Jubilee. Everyone came except Harriet’s daughter Sylvia, and she seemed regretful at missing the fun.

“Don’t get many chances for a good knees-up,” said Mr. Rowlands at number twenty. “Won’t be decent when the old Queen goes.”

“Not decent at all,” said Mrs. Whitchurch, his neighbour. “Mind you, after that there’ll be the Coronation...”

And the thought of the first coronation for sixty-odd years gave an added zest to the evening.

Harriet Blackstone had married beneath her, after some years of trying for someone above or on a level with her. Her father had run a failing ironmonger’s in Deptford, and her husband had peddled insurance in the poorer areas of cockney London. “Poor blighter,” everyone said about him when she made him the happiest of men. Nine years later he had gone to his well-deserved rest, having fathered a sickly but determined little girl. The neighbours suggested “For this relief much thanks” as an appropriate inscription for his gravestone, but the one Harriet had erected merely said “Sacred to the memory of” and left room for two more names. Harriet did not intend Sylvia to marry. She was needed for the heavy work.

“All men are good for nothing,” she told her daughter, but Sylvia had heard about one or two things that they were good for, and began marking out potential husbands from an early age. They represented not only satisfactions of an earthly kind, but escape as well. So when the jollifications were going on down in the street below, Sylvia watched them from behind the curtains of her cramped little two-up-two-down, wishing she could go down and have a dance and a glass of something nice. She sighed, but she felt it would not do, and soon she went back to bed with her plasterer husband, and had a giggle and a good time with him.

Relations with her mother had, in fact, been resumed two months before. The marriage had been marked by Mrs. Blackstone only by curtains drawn as for a funeral, but some weeks later she had sprained her ankle while unblocking a drain, and had sent one of the neighbouring boys with a note to her daughter, rewarding him with a ha’penny (half the going rate). The note had simply said, “Sprained ankle. Come.” When Sylvia came round she had finished unblocking the drain, peeled a few potatoes, cut a few slices of cold meat, and then left. All this had been done to a continual ground bass of complaint and criticism not one whit lessened by the fact that her daughter was doing her a favour.

“I could forgive the treachery,” Mrs. Blackstone said at one point, “I could forgive the disobedience and the loose morals — because what had been going on before the wedding I shudder to think — but what I cannot forgive is my daughter taking her sheets to the Communal Wash House to be boiled. The shame of that will be with me to my dying day.”

Sylvia had said nothing and left. But she went back at least once a day during the next week, and now and then thereafter when the ankle had recovered. “Blood is thicker than water,” she said when the neighbours commented. Behind her back they nodded sagely.

“Who else is there to leave the house to?” they asked each other. When such remarks were repeated to Charlie Paxman, Sylvia’s husband, he licked the foam off his lips and said:

“Silly old buzzard will probably leave it to the Primitive Methodists.” So far, at any rate, she had not. All the neighbourhood would have known if she had taken the momentous step of going to a solicitor’s.