Dale Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134 & 135, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 817 & 818, September/October 2009

Yellich sat at home with his son, Jeremy, aged twelve. Jeremy was making excellent progress. His wife found him tiring, but he was “getting there” and could now identify each letter of the alphabet and do simple division.

Wednesday

“He said that they would not come.” The young woman held the plastic cup in her hands. “We were not very close, but I know that I’m going to miss him. He’s already a significant event in my life and I just know he’ll become of even greater significance in the years to come. He hurt, each day he hurt, deep inside.”

“How did you meet?” Hennessey thought her a sincere young woman.

“At a church social. He didn’t attend often, but he came to a social we had.” Hennessey and Yellich and the woman sat in the dining room of Redmill House. The residents were at their afternoon therapy; behind them the canteen staff sang as they rattled tureens and cutlery, clearing up after lunch. “He was older than me, in his mid forties. I’m in my mid twenties. He really just wanted someone to talk to.”

“And did he? Talk to you? Tell you his story?”

“Not in one go, but I was able to get the gist of it together over the months. Matthew was a very private person and the first impression I had of him was that he was resigned to something. He’d got past being frightened and had become calm and accepting. He knew he hadn’t long to live. Before he came to York he was in London, but he said he knew he couldn’t hide and he’d got tired of running, so he came north to where his roots are, bought a house close to where he was born, not the same street, but the same estate. He said that that was neater.”

“Who was he running from?”

“Organised crime. ‘The mob,’ as he called it. The story was that he’d gone to visit relatives in the States, he got into a ruction in a bar, hotfooted it, and by jumping in and out of taxis ran rings around the police, bribing taxi drivers to tell their control that they’d dropped him off two miles from where they really were, things like that. He and his cousin sent convoys of police cars chasing off in the wrong direction. Unknown to him, his cousin was a ‘gofer’ for the mob, the mob heard about Matthew running rings round the police and they ‘recruited’ him. ‘Work for us or we’ll shoot you.’”

“Some choice.”

“So his six weeks’ holiday extended to fifteen years. He was a pressed man, but pressed or volunteer, you only leave the mob feet first. He did some things he wasn’t proud of.”

“This he told you?”

“Over time. There was nothing between us. I was his ‘confidant.’”

“I see.”

“But he left. He just slipped away, deserted. Got a flight back to the U.K. He’d had enough. He was a good man, trapped in a bad set of circumstances. But the mob’s violence is cool, detached, surgical, and he knew they were coming. ‘They’ll come tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or in twelve months’ time, or five years’ time, but they’ll come.’ All he could do was wait, dig his garden, grow living things; he planted trees in the countryside. He knew he wasn’t going to leave anything else behind him. And he went to the pub and sometimes he came to our church.”

“Had he stolen from the mob?”

“No. He deserted. He was a loose cannon. He had information that could put the mob leaders away for a long time. He said that just as the long arm of the law can reach across the Atlantic, so can the long arm of the mob. It was just a question of time.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Turnbull

Maurissa Guibord got her start in our Department of First Stories in 2006. Since then, she’s been at work on a book, which she recently sold to Delacorte Press. The young adult novel of paranormal romance and adventure (entitled Warped) will appear in the spring of 2011. The Scarborough, Maine, author is also working on a young adult mystery novel. But she makes time for adult short stories too, like this colorful tale of a reporter looking for ideas for a piece on Halloween.

When did Halloween become such a big deal? I pondered this question as I checked the price tags on some of the costumes at Big Willie’s Discount. No way was I going to pay sixty bucks to look like either a polyester Elvira knockoff or (the only other one that fit) Raggedy Ann on growth hormones. But I still had plenty of time to come up with something; the party wasn’t until the following week. What I didn’t have time for was writing my column. My boss had given one of his usual, vaguely terrifying suggestions for my piece. “Halloween,” he barked. “What’s it all about anyway?”

Sometimes he acts like most of our readership has just woken from a lengthy coma and our job at the Witka Leader is their mass reindoctrination to society. That and selling advertising, of course.

I could do the historical angle; I recalled reading about how jack-o’-lanterns originated in Ireland, where people carved out turnips and used them as lanterns with the purpose of warding off evil spirits on Allhallows Eve. But I didn’t have time to worry about it; my phone was ringing when I got home.

“Are you that reporter for the Leader ? That Jung woman?” a female voice asked. She sounded breathless, as if she had been running.

I told her I was.

“This is Marilyn Doughty out on Little Brook Lane. Number Forty-two. It’s my neighbor Everett Halsey. I want you to come over here right away and see what he’s doing.”

“Is Mr. Halsey disturbing you?”

“Disturbing me? I’ll say he’s disturbing me. I’m afraid to go outside. He’s gone demented. He’s got an ax and he’s carving up a woman right out there in the yard!”

She hung up.

Now most normal people at this point would have been dialing 911. But I had lived in Witka and been on the wrong end of “See news? Call 1-800-NUTBALL” for too long to get greatly excited. Besides, it was just around the corner. So I picked up my gear and headed out. It was a beautiful day; the leaves were falling in windswept spirals and the air had the cold, sweet tang of a New England autumn. Little Brook Lane was a winding residential street, checkered with small, well-kept houses, many of them decorated for Halloween with pumpkins, cornstalks, and scarecrows tied to lampposts.

The scene of the crime wasn’t hard to find. Marilyn Doughty had been right. In the yard of number 44, along with a mirrored ball on a pedestal and a leering ceramic lawn gnome, there was a man with an ax. But from what I could see, Everett Halsey wasn’t cutting up a woman.

He was cutting out a woman.

Halsey was middle-aged looking, with wispy ginger-colored hair and a slightly stooped posture, dressed in a flannel shirt, blue workman’s pants, and half-laced work boots. He stood before a roughly six-foot-high, barrel-thick stump of a pine tree in the middle of his property. He was carving the stump into the crude, angular shape of a woman’s torso, using an ax.

The rest of the felled tree lay strewn across the lawn, in haphazard piles of roughly cut logs and twisted branches among the autumn leaves. Halsey didn’t seem to notice as I parked in the driveway of his next-door neighbor. He continued to work slowly, methodically, hacking at the form in front of him with a small red-handled ax. Each blow sent chips of white piney flesh arcing through the air. Thtt... thtt... thtt . His motions weren’t particularly violent, but I jumped a little every time the ax struck the figure. As I watched, he stopped to dislodge the blade from where it had wedged in too deep in the waist area. He stepped back and I got a good look at what he had done.