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

As it turned out, I was wrong. There was indeed a criminal.

That evening, around eleven p.m., Everett Halsey was shot. The bullet went through the plate-glass window of his front room and hit him in the chest. He had been in the living room, having just gotten up from his recliner in order to shut off the floor lamp and go to bed.

Luckily, Halsey survived. It was Marilyn Doughty who got to him first. After hearing the shot, she ran over and unlocked the side door with the key she had noticed the couple always left under the mat. She went in and found Halsey on the floor of the darkened living room, in a widening pool of blood. Marilyn called 911 and stayed with her neighbor all the way to the hospital. Halsey was bleeding fast, and the doctors said he might have died if she hadn’t known where to find the key and gotten in so quickly. It was probably the one time her snoopiness had done some good.

The bullet had hit high, missing Halsey’s heart and major vessels. And because he was hit just as he turned out the light, the would-be killer couldn’t see to get in another shot. The next day Halsey was awake and recovering in a hospital room at Maine Medical Center.

The police interviewed the victim as soon as he was able to talk. Everett Halsey insisted he had no idea who fired the shot or even who might have wanted to harm him. Sheila Halsey was contacted in New Hampshire, where she was indeed attending a yoga retreat. She returned immediately. She had gone with a friend who drove, and she had any number of witnesses able to confirm that she never left the facility until she heard of the attack on her husband.

In fact, the only thing that made the shooting more than a random attack was the stump that Halsey had carved out in his front yard. But who would possibly resort to murder over something like that?

After they finished with Halsey and his wife the police started questioning the neighbors. I was questioned, too, Marilyn Doughty having informed them of my presence in the neighborhood the day before.

I described my conversations with each of the three neighbors. I also told the police something else, about the thing that had been bothering me. I remembered it now and told Lieutenant Marchand, who was leading the investigation. It might have been nothing, but it was strange.

Some hours later, I was allowed to talk to Everett Halsey. He was in a hospital bed with oxygen tubing in his nose, a large plastic chest tube coming out of his left side, and a variety of other tubes and monitor wires attached to various spots. His ginger-colored hair was damp and askew but he seemed alert.

Up close, Halsey was a big man, with a long, taciturn face and a prominent bony nose. His eyes were deep-set and of a pale, blood-shot blue.

“Saw you drive up yesterday,” he said in a low, raspy voice after I introduced myself.

“One of your neighbors called me,” I said. “About the... thing you were working on.”

He looked away. “Marilyn Doughty, I s’pose. Busybody old maid,” he muttered.

“Yes.”

He turned back and said sharply, “She saved my life, you know,” as if warning me off the idea that being a busybody was in any way a bad thing. I told him I had heard about his good luck.

“It hardly seems important now,” I went on, “but yesterday I was interested in the, um, work that you’re doing out there in your yard.”

“Oh,” Everett Halsey said with a wave of his big, calloused hand. “That.”

“It’s very unusual.”

“Uh-huh.”

He was silent. There was going to be no way around it. I cleared my throat. “Why did you carve a naked woman out of a tree in your yard, Mr. Halsey?”

Halsey chuckled, then winced. “Well,” he rasped, “that pine had to come down. It was too big. Sheila said it made the front of the house too dark. Gloomy. You know?”

Sure, I thought. As opposed to the bright, cheerful mood a bit of lewd whittling always brings. “Okay,” I nodded my understanding. “But why the... you know.” I waved an hourglass shape in the air with my hands.

Halsey let out a deep sigh. “It’s hard to explain. I was gonna cut down the stump, but all of a sudden I started to see her. There, in the wood.”

“See her?” I repeated.

Halsey shrugged. “I’m no artist, but the feeling came over me to make something. Something beautiful.” His voice lowered with apparent embarrassment at the words. “My wife Sheila and I — we aren’t too much alike. She likes art and books and culture... you know. Me, I’ve always been just a plain person. Retired last year from Bath Iron Works. Anyway, now that I’ve been home a lot, seems like Sheila and I — we don’t have too much in common. But yesterday I was working out there and it kind of came over me. Inspiration. I worked all day, skipped lunch and never even missed it.”

“But you said ‘I saw her.’ What do you mean by that?” I asked. Something about his words was jangling a memory.

Halsey frowned. “The shape. It started to remind me of a picture I saw in one of Sheila’s books. It was about all the paintings and sculptures they have there in—” He frowned, and snapped his fingers with the effort of remembering. “What’s that big museum in Paris?”

“The Louvre,” I said absently. “You saw her in the wood,” I repeated. I pictured it — the upper torso slightly turned, the graceful droop of one shoulder... Then it hit me. What the thing out on the lawn was — what that splintered, sappy piece of pine stump was. I recognized it.

“It’s Winged Victory,” I exclaimed.

Everett Halsey smiled, a smile of real sweetness that transformed his long face. He slapped a hand on the side bar of his hospital bed. “That’s the one,” he said, nodding. He was an artist, pleased that his work had been appreciated. “Something about how that stump was curved... I just saw it. I started chipping away and couldn’t seem to stop. It was relaxing. It doesn’t have the wings, of course,” he admitted.

“Of course,” I agreed. “The stump’s not wide enough.” Now that I thought about it — the resemblance was obvious. The posture of Evelyn Wyatt Szymanski, pointing back to her house, had reminded me of it, too. The angled upper torso with the gracefully arched back, the stance, one leg slightly forward. Everything except — I glanced at Everett Halsey and frowned. “It’s a little more... endowed, up top, than the Greek one,” I said delicately.

“Well,” Halsey said, with a self-deprecating little shrug and a smile. His pride was evident.

So one small mystery was solved: Why Halsey carved the stump. But it left the bigger question. Who would shoot him over it? As it turned out, the information I gave the police led them to the guilty party. This was to the great delight of Boss Hogg, who insists on calling me his “little investigative reporter” now. It makes me want to smack him, but the moniker came with a raise, so I rein myself in.

It was Drew Richards. When the police went to Richards’ house to interview him they did exactly as I suggested and asked Richards to step outside. They walked him across the street and stood directly in front of Halsey’s wooden carving.

According to the lieutenant, Richards basically lost it right there. He started shaking and sweating and began rambling about how Halsey was out to get him. Halsey was trying to trick him. Into confessing.

Which is exactly what he did. It turns out that when Drew Richards looked at that headless, armless pine stump of a woman he was reminded of someone, too. Only it wasn’t a famous Greek statue. It was his girlfriend. Richards had moved to Witka from Lewiston, arriving on Little Brook Lane with a moving van and all his worldly possessions, among which was a large, commercial-grade plastic container that he buried in the backyard shortly after moving in. Later, the dismembered remains of his former girlfriend, Amanda Deveraux, were discovered inside.