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

Nancy Pickard’s recent EQMM stories are making a splash! “There Is No Crime on Easter Island” (9-10/’05) is currently nominated for three awards for best short story: the Macavity, from Mystery Readers International; Deadly Pleasures magazine’s Barry Award; and the Bouchercon Convention’s Anthony Award. “The Book of Truth” (9-10/’06) will appear in a best-of-the-year anthology.

Lenore Lowery heard her husband let out a whoop of joy. Before she could even put her finger in her book and turn around to see what Charles was so excited about, she felt his presence behind her.

A heavy magazine landed with a plop on top of the novel in her lap.

“Charles! You could have made me lose my place.”

“I’ve found it, Lenore!”

“Found what?”

“Our place. Our boat. I can retire, and we can sail away, and you can read all the time for the rest of your life. It’s the perfect boat for us.”

“No boat is perfect for me,” she snapped, “and any boat will do for you. And which of these boats are you talking about, anyway?”

“Look at them!”

She felt him bend down over the back of the armchair she was sitting in, felt his face beside hers, smelled liver and onions on his breath, saw and felt the forefinger he jabbed into the pages of boat photos in the magazine on her lap. They had been married for five years, he a literature professor with a passion for Edgar Allan Poe and a dream of sailing around the world, and she his former student. The deep voice that still could thrill her when he read poetry to her now spoke enthusiastically at her shoulder, releasing another repellent cloud of liver and onions. She had never dreamed that her romantic professor could ever like something so icky and prosaic as that, much less want her to cook it for him once a week.

“Just look at the pictures, Lenore. You’ll recognize it the moment you spot it, as I did.”

Reluctantly, she perused the pages, knowing he wouldn’t give up until she found “it,” whatever it was—

Her heart sank.

“This one,” she said, putting her own right forefinger onto a particular black-and-white picture of a cabin cruiser. When Charles used the word “sail,” it was only in the generic sense of moving across water. In fact, he was a “stinkpot” sailor, a devotee of engines and speed, the bigger and faster, the better.

“It’s this one, isn’t it, Charles?”

It wasn’t the configuration or appointments of the boat in question that gave her the clue. It wasn’t that the boat for sale was a thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser with a raised aft deck that allowed it a full master stateroom below decks. It wasn’t that it had a galley-down layout with wraparound salon windows and “excellent storage.” It wasn’t the GM6-71N diesel engines that let it cruise at sixteen to seventeen knots and reach a top speed of around twenty knots. It wasn’t the breathtaking price that was about equal to half of what they would get if they sold their home to buy this boat.

It was the name of this particular boat.

“The Nevermore,” she said, reading the word across the back of it, pronouncing it in a dirgelike tone that was appropriate to a certain poem by Edgar Allan Poe. To the original owners of this boat that name might have symbolized no more working for a living, or no more house payments, or who knew what? But to Charles Lowery it could only conjure up “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem, about a monstrous bird who kept yapping, Nevermore, nevermore, never damn more.

“Yes!” Charles said, behind her. “We have to have it.”

“Just like you had to have me?”

“Lenore! I didn’t marry you for your name, for heaven’s sake.”

Another of Poe’s poems was called “Lenore,” about a woman who also made an appearance in “The Raven.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t not marry me for it, either,” she grumbled.

“Whatever that means. Lenore, look at this beauty! We can be totally self-sufficient on it for weeks at a time. We can go anywhere we want to go. The South Seas. The Mediterranean. The Caribbean!”

“Anywhere you want to go, you mean. It makes me seasick just to look at it.”

“You know what motion sickness signifies psychologically, don’t you? The fear of losing control. You need to let go! There are some things you can’t control, my dear, no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it all fits together,” he claimed, sounding happy about it. “It’s fate, and you can’t fight fate, Lenore. Just ask Edgar Allan Poe.”

“He’s dead.”

“Once I get you out on our boat, floating peacefully for days on end, reading all the novels you’ve ever wanted to read, you’ll relax and thank me.”

“I can read all the books I want to right here in this chair, Charles. This chair doesn’t get rained on. This chair doesn’t leave me sunburned and throwing up. This chair doesn’t rock back and forth.”

She pushed herself up out of the chair in question, making her husband rear back to avoid knocking heads with her. The boating magazine fell to the carpet.

“Hey,” he objected. “You’ve made me lose my place.”

“Your place is exactly right,” Lenore said heatedly, turning around to glare at him. “This is all about you and what you want, and anything I want be damned. Talk about control freaks!” She started to stomp out of their living room.

“Where are you going?” he called after her.

“To my book club! If it’s liver and onions, it must be Thursday.”

“Oh, right. What bit of fluff are you reading this month?”

She whirled around and stuck the book out — in lieu of hurling it at him — so he could see the jacket.

“ Life of Pi ? Why are you reading a math book?”

It wasn’t a book about mathematics. It was a beautifully written, wildly imaginative, smart novel that also just happened to be at the top of the bestseller lists, not that he would ever know that, since he never recognized the worth of any novel written after nineteen hundred. “Because I’ve always been able to tell when things add up,” Lenore shot back at him as she departed the room. To herself, she added, “And when they don’t.”

The women at the book club that night all professed to love Life of Pi, which was a fantastical story about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Lenore laughed out loud the first time somebody said the name aloud. “It’s such a funny name for a tiger,” she said.

A few of the other women also laughed and shook their heads, sharing her puzzled amusement, but she noticed that others seemed to be looking at her... or at one another... with odd expressions, as if she had said something surprising or, worse, stupid. “What?” Lenore said, looking at the night’s discussion leader. They all sat on couches or chairs their hostess had pulled into a circle in her living room. The women’s laps held plates full of homemade molasses cookies and lemon-raspberry cake. Cups of coffee or tea sat on tables in front of them or beside them.