Артур Порджес - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

Gavin opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, but she wouldn’t let him. She wanted to get through this as quickly as possible.

“You’ll need to cash the check this afternoon,” she said. “I’ve taken it from our joint account, and I suspect that the moment Rick knows I’m gone, he’ll try to empty the accounts himself. So please—”

“I will. I’ll do everything you need.” Gavin folded his hands across his lap. “You’re planning to leave?”

She nodded. “I can’t stay here. Not when it comes out.”

“You’ll be the person who stopped him,” Gavin said.

Ada shook her head. “I’m the person who enabled him, all these years.”

“You had no idea how far he was going to take his obsession,” Gavin said.

“No,” she said. “But I should have.”

Gavin promised to handle her case, to make certain the police did not charge her when they went after Rick, and to make certain the Urbanicks’ financial reputation was restored. Gavin had her sign an official form, asking that the charges against Urbanick be dropped.

Ada left his office, knowing she had done everything she could.

When she reached the elevator banks, her cell phone started to ring. For a moment, she debated whether or not to answer, then pulled the phone out of her purse.

She answered as she got onto the elevator, riding it down to the parking garage.

“Ada?” Rick sounded panicked. “There’s something wrong with our account.”

Her heart pounded. “Our account?”

“The business account. I was going to move some funds—”

“You were going to move funds?” she blurted, the anger she’d been repressing all day slipping past her defenses. “What for?”

“That doesn’t matter, babe,” he said, just as he always had in cases like this. “What matters is that the bank tells me we’re short. You know anything about this?”

A lot, she wanted to say. But she had to remain silent. She didn’t want to tip Rick off. Gavin needed time to get the police involved.

“No.” She hoped the anger now sounded like panic. “You want me to go to the bank and check?”

“Could you?” Rick asked. “I’ve got a few things to do here.”

As if she were at his beck and call, as if the business she had just closed — the dreams she had just abandoned — were his and not hers.

“I’ll check,” she said, and hung up. She was shaking. He had no reason to move money from the business account.

But there had been a lot less in it than she had thought there should be, and their savings had seemed low, too. Her fault, for leaving the money in his hands. Her fault for trusting him.

From now on, she would trust only herself.

She reached her car, got in, and leaned against the steering wheel. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to continue. It would be so much easier to go home and let the events fall where they might.

But she had already started the ball rolling. And if she stayed, she would be blamed as much as Rick. Who would believe, in this day and age, that a businesswoman had closed her eyes to everything financial, had let a man ruin her life — and so many others — so effortlessly?

People would say that anyway, but she wouldn’t be around to hear it. And she would do her best to make restitution, returning to testify if she needed to.

She took a deep breath and realized that the shaking had stopped.

Progress. She was making a lot of progress.

She started the car and drove out of the parking garage. Her last stop was nearby, and then she was done.

One afternoon’s worth of work, and her life would be different forever.

Ada sold her car — their car — to a used-car dealer for a fistful of cash. She toyed with getting a new one, one that would be completely hers, but she didn’t want to put herself in any kind of debt, not when her future was so uncertain.

She wasn’t even sure she would go back to interior decorating. She might take a new job in her new home — wherever that would be. She was getting tired of improving the appearance of things without solving the problems underneath.

After she finished at the car dealership, she took a bus to the train station and bought a ticket with cash. She didn’t know how long it would take Rick to be arrested, and she didn’t want him to trace her.

For a while, she wanted to be completely on her own.

When they started calling her train, she grabbed her purse and her laptop and headed for the tracks. Halfway there, she stopped. She rummaged inside her purse for her cell phone and studied it for a moment.

It was her last link. More than the wedding ring she still wore on her left hand, it was the thing that bound her to Rick. Conversations she didn’t want, irritations she didn’t need, requests that were so inappropriate, she couldn’t believe he’d made them — or that she’d listened.

She threw the phone into a nearby trash bin and boarded the train, feeling lighter than she had in years.

Her ticket was coach, but she had the double seat to herself. As she stretched out on it, trying to keep her legs covered with the blanket she bought in the snack bar, she planned her next move.

She’d get off the train at the first interesting stop. Maybe she’d stay there, maybe she wouldn’t. She’d look around, though, and see if she liked what she saw.

Once she found a suitable home, she’d use the last of her business funds to rent a place, get a job, and figure out how to live her life with her eyes open instead of closed.

She’d keep expenses low. She’d still need money to send back to Gavin. She had a hunch the divorce would be complicated, and she wasn’t sure how the Urbanicks would react to her admission of what Rick had done.

It wouldn’t surprise her if they sued. She had to be prepared for everything, and she would face it all when the time came.

So would Rick. A jury was going to send him to the home he deserved — a place filled with nasty neighbors, constant noise, and lights that burned long into the endless prison night.

And there would be nothing he could do about any of it.

He wouldn’t even be able to move away.

Ada sighed. She was the one who was moving. For the very last time. She would find a place she liked and stay there until she was an old woman.

She would become a fixture in her neighborhood, a friendly woman who tolerated her neighbors’ idiosyncrasies the way they tolerated hers.

Voices echoed in the darkness behind her, and a conductor came by, checking on passengers in the middle of the night. Ada closed her eyes and listened to the clack-clack of the train moving along the track, the wail of a baby three rows back, and the short grunting snores of a man across the aisle.

The sound of people living their lives.

Enjoying their lives.

Just like she planned to enjoy hers.

Copyright © 2002 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

This is not the first time Arthur Porges has provided a delightful parody for the yearly issue in which we join the Baker Street Irregulars, the world’s oldest Sherlockian organization, in honoring history’s most popular detective. On Twelfth Night, the day they assert is Holmes’s birthday, the BSI will hold its annual dinner in New York. Members of the organization claim that Holmes is living in retirement in Sussex, England. Certainly he lives on in the minds of writers and readers.

No one is totally immune to the more subtle effects of ageing. Not even my old friend and — I must say it, although we Sikhs are fiercely independent — patron, Stately Homes (of England).