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

Unbelievably, the spasm that had speared her back grew worse, the pain shrieking up to her neck and down to the bottoms of her legs, filling her eyes with tears, compressing her lips, turning the skin around them white. Unable to speak, nearly paralyzed, it took her forever to reach down and grab the cocked spear gun from the bottom of the canoe. She put the stock to her shoulder, touched her finger to the trigger, and aimed it at the center of Mike’s back.

The engine started and then almost died. Mike played with the throttle, twisting it back and forth, and coaxed it to life. When it was running smoothly, he turned around.

His instinctive reaction when he saw the spear gun pointed at him was to smile that Tom Cruise smile. At the joke she was surely playing. She realized then that there was no malice in him, no desire to humiliate her. He was an innocent, happy in his bright and easy world, totally ignorant of the hard and painful landscape of hers. The realization stopped her from sending the spear through his chest, splitting the breastbone, puncturing his heart. She lowered the gun several inches and pulled the trigger.

The spear passed through the flesh on the inside of his right thigh and buried itself in the wooden plank he was sitting on. He bellowed in shock and pain, doubling over and grabbing his leg.

Her back spasm disappeared. It was as if the spear had taken all her pain and transferred it to Mike.

She threw the spear gun overboard and put on her fins and her mask and snorkel.

“What are you doing?” he screamed. “What have you done?” There was a good deal of blood flowing from his leg, spreading out on the seat, and dripping onto the bottom of the canoe. A lot of blood, but it didn’t appear that any vital artery or vein had been cut.

“You’re crazy!” he screamed. “You’re insane! Help me get this thing out! I’m stuck! Can’t you see I’m pinned here?”

She could see, and she counted it as a piece of good luck. The only problem facing her now was the outboard. She solved that by pulling the rubber hose out of the orange gas tank that was under her seat in the bow. The engine sputtered and died. She lifted up the gas can and threw it overboard. He wouldn’t be following her now. Especially when she cut the anchor line and the boat began drifting toward the reef. He would have his hands full just getting himself free and stopping the advance of the boat. But there was a paddle on board, and he was strong. He would be okay.

“What are you doing?! What in Christ’s name are you doing? What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?”

His shout was the last thing she heard before she threw herself backward over the gunwale of the canoe.

She swam hard away from the boat, away from the direction of the reef, toward the open Atlantic. When she surfaced, sputtering, in the trough of a wave, she was unable to see the canoe, unable to see anything other than the steep blue hills of water on either side of her and the pale sky above. But when she rose up, she spotted the canoe. Already a hundred feet away and increasing in distance as she watched. Mike was still struggling in the stern — it was not clear whether he had freed himself yet. But he would. He was too competent to do otherwise.

She adjusted the straps of her face mask, straightened the snorkel tube, and then put her face down in the water and began swimming steadily away. After a while she slowed her pace and gave herself back to the waves and water. A vast, liquid relaxation spread through her, seemed almost to dissolve the boundary between her and the water in which she floated.

She felt free. She felt alive. She felt happy. She felt grateful that she had at last found contentment and she promised herself she would keep her heart and mind and all her senses open until the current dragged her back and the last beautiful soaring wave rose up high over the reef, revealing the perfect crescent of the beach, the perfect blue of the bay, the perfect white of the town and the emerald hills behind it — and then smashed her down on the sharp coral, bringing to all the lonely, clenched years of her existence the grace of a courageous end.

Copyright © 2006 Jeff Williamson

Last year’s winner of the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American writer, for the EQMM Department of First Stories tale “Home,” Eddie Newton returns this month with a tongue-in-cheek cozy based on the world’s most famous mystery board game. Mr. Newton and his wife and children live in North Dakota.

There was a mystery afoot. Or perhaps, more accurately, the foot was the mystery. It was Mystery Mansion Weekend, sponsored by former U.S. Senator Kent Powers. The family has more money than the U.S. Mint; Powers only hosts this community gathering as a way of attaching his name to something that makes the social elite of New England smile. Half the time, the patriarch of Massachusetts’s preeminent family doesn’t even bother making an appearance. He’s the golden child of New England celebrity. The Kennedys haven’t held a candle to the Powerses in decades, and they never hosted a bash like this.

The Powers mansion has a character all its own. It has three dozen rooms, a third of them bedrooms. The ballroom is as large as the average McDonald’s. Its nineteenth-century architect and decorator was a middle-aged bachelor from France named Charlemagne Haversham. He leveled everything within a square mile of the mansion’s foundation except for an old apple tree that had been there long before he ever set foot in Massachusetts. It took him ten years to build the mansion, starting in 1854. Every fall, on the anniversary of the groundbreaking, he would pick four ripe apples from the tree and bake a splendid apple pie, then ceremoniously sit and eat the entire confection in one helping. Legend has it that after the mansion was completed, he went out into the landscaped backyard and picked his apples just as he had for ten years. He baked his pie. It was still warm as he ate every last crumb. Then he climbed up on the tallest, sturdiest branch of the tree, with a rope and no further purpose in life. Old Charlie looped that noose around his neck and jumped, his pie-loaded belly bouncing when the rope drew taut.

The apple tree was gone, but the legend had stood as long as the house.

How morbid that an annual Murder Mystery Weekend is held on this very estate.

This year, old man Powers sent his son Oliver in his stead. Ollie was about as personable as a guy comes; he was immediately the life of the party. His syndicated radio show had been the most popular thing on AM for years now. The Voice of Choice, he was dubbed. Supposedly, he was the searcher after truth, he who deciphered the tangled political spin. He was credited with a large influence in getting his brother elected to the governorship in Massachusetts. There were “Ol lovers” who believed that every word that dripped from his golden tongue was truth itself. Right now, he was settling his considerable bulk down on a leather sofa. The only thing bigger than Oliver Powers’s mouth was Ollie himself.

Soon he was regaling a tiny woman in an even tinier dress with his theory of how extremist factions within the government secretly experiment on random small towns, infecting their drinking water with designer viruses in an effort to prepare the nation against biological attack by rogue nations, unbeknownst to the upper echelons of the three branches of government. The woman was listening with interest. Did she buy this garbage or was she amazed by his effortless fabrication?

The woman was wearing a stunning scarlet outfit. She was beautiful, but no older than her early twenties, easily half Oliver’s age. Her jet-black hair was shoulder length and perfectly framed her stunning face. She was a vision, and a paragon of politeness as she listened to Oliver’s bombastic diatribe. It was hard to tell whether the look on her face was accepting naiveté or intelligent discernment.