Lisa Atkinson - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

“Your son cheated on his essay. That will be brought up to the dean and then duly recorded on his record. No college will admit him. Med school later? I don’t think so.”

Jay had to grit his teeth to staunch his fury. “That was the ace up your sleeve.”

“That was the royal flush up my sleeve.” Smile number two.

“And if I subsidize your sabbatical I guess that will be just the never-ending start of the money flow — in your direction.”

Haviland took his time clearing away the scattered Chinese debris. “Think what you want.”

Fuming, Jay left.

He sat in his car in the parking lot until the cleaning crew turned out most of the remaining lights in the building and left. There was only one other car in the lot: It had to be the teacher’s.

When he saw the thin figure come from the building and walk slowly over to the car, he scraped his mind clean of any thoughts as he turned on the motor, but not his lights. The car roared forth and struck the man head-on, his briefcase flying off into the night. Jay never looked at his dashboard display on the way home.

Two days later, in the holding cell, his lawyer and his ex gave him a grim good morning. The police had found his name in Haviland’s book as his last appointment and when they had gone to Jay’s house to question him they had spotted his damaged car. And the workman who’d been buffing the floor when he entered the school identified him.

“Vehicular homicide,” his lawyer said. “It’s a damn serious charge. Jesus, Jay, why the hell would you drive away from an accident?”

When the lawyer left, Jay spoke to Lynne, told her exactly what had happened, his voice hoarse, halting. She stared at him, grief-stricken, and took his hands through the bars.

There were tears in her eyes but she managed to smile.

“You’re a lousy murderer, Jay, but you sure as hell turned into a good father.”

© 2008 by William Link

Larry D. Sweazy won the WWA Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005, and was nominated for a Derringer award in 2007. His stories have appeared in The Adventure of the Missing Detective: And 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, Boy’s Life, and Hardboiled, and have been featured on Amazon Shorts. He is the owner of Word Wise Publishing Services, and also works as a freelance indexer.

I suppose it is the time in my life for regret, for the secrets I have held so deep inside me to metastasize into cancer. Like my father, I’m a doctor, or was. Now I’m just a patient with IVs snaking into my arm, dripping morphine venom into my veins. I know by the smiles, by the ticks on my chart, that my time is short. And I’ve been thinking a lot about Teg Saidlow recently.

I know more about Teg Saidlow than I have a right to. But then again, I figure we’ve all seen people like Teg once or twice in our lives — I just couldn’t gawk for a minute, turn away, and walk on by him. Things would’ve been easier, especially with Teg dead and buried for so many years now, if I would have.

A lot of people around Harlow thought Teg was just a freak of a boy who read a lot of books and had green teeth, but I thought he was a magician. For one brief summer, sticks became swords, Ivanhoe and Don Quixote quested through the woods and ravines, hills became mountains full of gold, and my imagination was born in the sound of Teg’s storytelling voice. But, by the end, Teg was like a mouse trapped in a maze that didn’t have any cheese in it. Every which way he turned there was just another hardwood wall. And no matter how hard I fought, I couldn’t conquer the dragons that came after him.

Teg had a rough way to go from the start. He never knew his real daddy. Things got even worse when his mother married the marshal of our town when he was twelve. Now I’ll tell you, it’s hard to speak ill of her, but Teg’s momma had a real mean streak in her. I saw her kick a cat more than once, and rumor had it that she took a shovel to her neighbor’s dog for waking her up from a nap. Bad thing was, she was a looker, had legs looked like they were carved of marble, and always wore clothes that looked more like skin than cotton. She could go from a mean middle-aged woman to a smiling schoolgirl in less than two seconds.

Teg was my best friend, really the only friend I had when I was growing up. I can almost reach out and touch Teg, smell the clean summer air, and taste my momma’s homemade ice cream. I know it’s the drugs and the pain, but the funny thing is, I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. Life’s kinda funny that way, always flipping things around, tricking your senses and tearing at your heart, promising you the past. When in truth, there’s nothing but quiet darkness waiting for you at the fork in the road.

The first time I saw Teg Saidlow he was stepping off the bus with his mother in front of the Rexall drugstore. She had on a tight black skirt, high heels, and a white blouse so thin you could see the lace on her bra straps. It was the middle of July, and the woman didn’t have one bead of sweat on her skin. Her luggage looked expensive, all shiny brown with stickers pasted all over the front. My father had a similar suitcase that my mother got from the S&H Green Stamp catalog. Teg, on the other hand, carried a grocery sack that looked like it was about to bust open at the seams. His pants were too short and his hair was cut all jaggedy, like someone had taken a pair of pinking shears to his bangs. I knew right then he was going to be a bull’s-eye for Big Mike Bowman, the marshal’s nephew, if they planned on staying around Harlow very long.

Not many new people came to Harlow, and when they did, well, the tongues got to wagging. Teg’s mother’s name was Loreen McCall, and that started things off right away, considering Teg’s last name was different. The only thing worse than being black in Harlow was being different. I was a couple of years older than Teg when he arrived, but I was old enough to know trouble when I saw it. My mother and father didn’t outwardly tolerate gossip, but there was nothing they could do to stop my sister, Pearl, and her wildfire tongue when they were out of earshot. Pearl knew everything that went on in town. Some girls collected dolls; Pearl collected stories about people and then added twists and turns of her own. I know now she was just bored. Being in Harlow was like living on a desert island to her. When she grew up, Pearl went on to be a newspaper editor in Chicago. No small feat in her day and age, let me tell you, but after all that happened in Harlow, she had a mission to tell everyone the truth. It was that way with her until the day she died, except for one thing: She never told anybody our secret about Teg Saidlow.

Teg and his momma set up house in the trailer behind Miss Molly Chad’s restaurant, The Blue Moon, and it wasn’t long before Loreen McCall was waiting tables and flipping her eyelashes at the marshal. Loreen had a way of winning people over with her soft voice and the way she’d look at you out of the corner of her eye. Like I said, the questions did arise, and the women folk weren’t as taken with her as the men were. I heard my own mother whispering to Dad one night that Maggie the Cat had come to town in the form of Loreen McCall, and he’d better keep his distance. Which would have been difficult, in any case, being as he was the only doctor in the county. He said he knew how to handle stray cats and began to tickle Mother.

No one quite knew where Loreen and Teg came from, she was kind of wishy-washy on that issue, but somehow, she bewitched most people into forgetting she hadn’t been born and raised in Harlow.

Teg kept a low profile right from the start. I only saw him twice before school started that year, and both times he was taking out the trash from The Blue Moon. I really didn’t think too much about him that summer other than the occasional story Pearl reported to anybody who’d listen on the front porch. Most of her stories had to do with Big Mike tracking down the new boy, breaking his glasses, and setting fire to his books.