Нэнси Пикард - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

“Oh, hello. Come in. What can I do for the famous private detective today?”

“Famous, I’m not,” Brad said. “But hungry I am. May I take you to dinner?”

She gave him that tentative smile of hers. “I hadn’t really planned to take a break today,” she said, and continued checking invoices and receipts, initialing them, spiking them on an old-fashioned spindle. “I’m afraid I’ve let my paperwork pile up—”

Brad glanced around the little workroom she had fashioned for herself, the little sanctuary from, he guessed, the lonely nights that were the curse of a small-town unmarried woman probably pushing forty. He stepped behind her chair and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Please,” he said. “Look, I just spent some time with Diane King and I need to work her out of my mind with someone like you.”

Hannah paused in her work. “What does that mean, ‘someone like me’?”

“Someone appealing. And decent.”

She looked up over her shoulder at him, an odd, almost puzzled expression on her face. “All right.” She put one more piece of paper on the spindle and stood up. “I know a nice little place out of town, on the river.”

They drove several miles to a little cafe built partly on pilings out over the Yazoo River, and ordered fried catfish sandwiches and a pitcher of iced sun tea. Their table was next to an open wall, and the river slapped lightly against the pilings under them. In a nearby moss tree growing out of the water, a bluejay quarreled noisily and chased some wrens from their limb.

“How long have you been the county librarian?” Brad asked.

“About a hundred years,” Hannah replied wryly. “Seems like, anyway.”

“You must love it.”

“Must I?”

“Do I detect some dissatisfaction with life, Miss Greer?”

Hannah shrugged. “I suppose it’s just life’s rut. That limbo state of mind that most people sooner or later fall into. It’s that state where our lives aren’t good enough for us to be really happy, but not bad enough for us to make a drastic change. It’s a neutral existence where most days are like most other days. There’s no excitement, no challenge, nothing to make your blood rush. It’s a life where you never sweat. You perspire, of course, but you don’t sweat.” Pausing, she looked down at the table for a moment, as if embarrassed. Then, to cover it, she asked, “What did you think of Diane King?”

Brad looked out at the greenish river water. “Shallow. Unhappy. A little lost, maybe. But she didn’t kill her husband.”

Hannah frowned. “Did you think that she had?”

“Edward Bliss says she did.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I wasn’t sure. I had to find out.”

Their food came and they began to eat. Hannah studied Lon Bradford.

“You analyzed Diane King a moment ago,” she said. “Analyze me now.”

“Analyze you?”

“Yes. You’ve already said that I was appealing. And decent. What else have you surmised, Mr. Private Detective?”

“Well, let’s see,” Brad said thoughtfully. “You’re probably a Temple town girl who went to the nearest college you could find, got your degree, then came back home to eventually run the local library. Your parents are probably dead, and I’d guess you live in the same house where you were born. You’ve never married, live alone, probably have two or three cats, and...” His words trailed off.

“Go on,” she said evenly, “finish it.”

Brad remained silent.

“And I’m going to become the town spinster, right? I’m already a dried-up, nearly forty-year-old virgin, is that what you think?” A low fire began to show in her eyes. “Is it?”

Brad looked at her bare arms, at a bed of freckles just below her throat, at the full lower lip that sometimes gave her an artificial pout. He did not answer her.

“Well, let’s see whether we’re right or wrong, shall we? Let’s see just how good a detective you are. Cocktails and supper tonight, at my house. Two hundred South Elm. As soon as it gets dark.” Her words were clearly provocative. And her already throaty voice had become huskier. Brad felt his spine grow warm.

“All right,” he agreed. “Cocktails and supper tonight. Your house. When it gets dark.”

They finished lunch. Brad walked close to her on the way out. He caught a trace of fragrance from her.

“I like your perfume,” he said.

“It isn’t perfume, it’s bath oil, but it lingers. It’s my favorite — jasmine.”

The warmth Brad felt in his spine suddenly turned cold.

Later that afternoon, Brad walked over to the courthouse and sat down on one of several very old public benches that were placed every few yards along the sidewalk that surrounded the building. Slouching down, hands shoved into his pockets, he stared out at nothing and thought about Hannah Greer. Hannah, with her sensuous arms and dusty freckles and almost raspy voice, who had stirred up old feelings in him: warm, liquid feelings, the kind he had frequently known as a much younger man, but had experienced less and less often as he matured and learned more about the underbelly of the world and those who peopled it.

Letting his chin slump down to his chest, Brad mused about how unpredictable life was. He had come to Yoakum County simply out of curiosity about the unusual letter he had received from Edward Bliss. Now he was about to become involved with a lady librarian. And there was no doubt in his mind that there would be an involvement. No doubt in hers, either, he was just as certain about that. When their eyes met over the table in that catfish cafe, they had communicated more in a split instant than some couples do in a lifetime. One fleeting moment and they had registered an intimacy of each other that cried out for fulfillment. A fulfillment that would be consummated that night in her home, her bed, her body.

And the fact that she used jasmine bath oil was nothing more than a coincidence.

Had to be.

After sitting on the bench for an hour, he went back to his room at the motor court to shower and clean up.

And wait until dark.

At ten the next morning, Lon Bradford managed to sit up on the side of his motor-court bed. Eyes red and swollen, his head had a giant pulse in it, and his body felt as if an elevator had dropped on it. He was sure he would never be able to get into a kneeling position again.

It was the absinthe, he remembered. Hannah had prepared it using an absinthe spoon, which was slotted and fit over the top of her crystal absinthe tumblers. Already in the tumblers was a quantity of the green herbal liqueur made from anise, fennel, hyssop, angelica, and the sometimes, in too much quantity, deadly wormwood. It was powerful stuff — “One hundred thirty-six proof,” Hannah had said, smiling. “Think you can handle that, Mr. Bradford?”

“Call me Brad,” he replied. “And I can handle anything that pours.”

He had watched as she put a cube of sugar onto the slotted spoon and slowly dribbled ice water over it until it dissolved and turned the absinthe into a milky greenish-white color.

“This is called louche,” she had told him. “It means ‘clouding.’ First we cloud the absinthe, then we drink the absinthe to cloud our minds.”

Hannah had served ordinary gin martinis before supper, then a 1939 St. Emilion Bordeaux with the succulent baby back ribs, white corn, and fried okra she had prepared for their meal. Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, hand-churned in a wooden bucket, topped with homemade peach preserves from a Mason jar. It was the best meal Brad had eaten since his own grandmother had died.

It was after supper that the absinthe was brought out.

All during the evening, Hannah had been wearing a flowing Oriental gown of some kind, exotically flowered in greens, golds, and reds. It was obvious when she moved that there was nothing underneath. And during the entire evening, she was barefooted. “I love the feeling of these old wooden floors,” she said. “The soles of my feet are very sensitive.”