Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

Ellen’s hands were shaking too hard to dial the first time she tried. She took a deep breath, and this time placed the call. Then she dug in her purse for her small address book and found the number for the McMinnville library and dialed. Patty Westwood answered.

“They found some bones,” Ellen whispered hoarsely. “With his ring. The sheriff’s on his way here. Patty, I’ll have to tell him about that night.”

“For God’s sake! Ellen? Is that you? What are you talking about?” Patty’s voice sounded distant and strange.

Ellen started over. “I’m at Jordan’s, in his trailer. I just called the sheriff. Jordan and Will uncovered bones, a finger bone with Philip’s ring. I saw it, Patty! Philip’s ring! They’ll ask questions.”

There was a pause, and when Patty’s voice was back it was cool and forceful. “Listen to me, Ellen. Get out of there. Go home. I’ll come over as soon as I can — fifteen minutes. Don’t wait for the sheriff, just go on home.”

Ellen nodded. “All right. But hurry, Patty. Please. I saw the finger, just a bone, with his ring on it!” She was shaking again; she hung up and stood watching the nearly spastic movements of her hands for a second or two before she hurried out to her car and started back to town, five miles away. In her mind’s eye she saw the finger bone and the ring with the emerald eyes and the darting ruby tongue.

Suddenly the bone was flesh and blood, and there was another hand with an identical ring, both hands moving back and forth over a shallow pottery bowl, and above the hypnotic motions of the hands, a bare torso with snakes painted on it and a gold necklace made of twined snakes with raised heads, emerald eyes, long red tongues. The gold and the gemstones caught the flashing firelight and gleamed, came alive, writhing...

She felt her car swerve, planing, and fought to hold it on the wet road. With the car under control again, she drove more slowly, paying attention now. She entered Crystal Falls on a back street and drove to her apartment, parked, and ran inside.

Her apartment was the ground floor of a three-story house, once an elegant private residence, now three apartments. Inside her door was a foyer with a large mirror on the wall, a closet opposite it. She took off her jacket and hung it up; when she turned she was stopped by her reflection in the mirror. She was ashen, with staring eyes. She hurried to the kitchen, found a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet, and poured some, added water, and drank it down.

After that, she sat at the dinette table and tried to think. It was Philip’s finger, she heard herself saying in her head. She could get no further than that. The doorbell rang, and she ran to admit Patty Westwood.

Patty was thirty-five, five years older than Ellen and twenty pounds heavier, a handsome woman with long black hair and brown eyes. Her normally ruddy face was pale; she looked cold. “Tell me,” she demanded, as she entered the foyer and pulled the door shut.

“I was out at Jordan’s. They’re clearing the upper section of the land, and Will found a bone, a finger bone, with a gold ring that’s like a snake. Philip’s ring.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s Philip’s ring,” Ellen repeated.

They had gone into the kitchen where Patty tossed her coat over a chair, went to the sink, and started to make coffee. She was within arm’s reach of Ellen at the table. The kitchen was small, a table and two chairs made it crowded; the other rooms were large and so sparsely furnished they looked barren.

“Look, Ellen, be reasonable,” Patty said, measuring coffee. “You can’t be sure. You saw something and got spooked. Maybe it isn’t even a bone.”

“We’ll have to tell them about that night,” Ellen whispered.

“You’re out of your mind!”

“He didn’t just leave.”

“Honey, sit down and listen to me.” Patty pushed Ellen into a chair and sat opposite her at the small table. “If you even mention that night, and if they really have found bones, and if they identify them as Philip’s bones, you’re as much as confessing that you know what happened to him. They’ll want to know what you were doing out there, what you did after you two left, where you went, everything.”

“I didn’t leave with him. He sent me away.”

“That’s not how we remember it,” Patty said harshly. “He took you away and never came back.”

Ellen shook her head. “He didn’t go with me. He gave me his keys and told me to go home, and I did.”

Patty stood up and turned back to the counter with the coffee maker; she tapped her fingers impatiently while the water trickled down. “Six people will swear he left with you,” she said.

Ellen stared at her in disbelief. She had known Patty all her life, they had worked together in the Blair farm and garden store when Ellen was in high school and Patty at Mount Crystal College. Philip had been one of Patty’s instructors, and she had fallen in love with him, just as Ellen had. They had talked about him for hours.

She remembered the first time she met him. No one ever had treated her the way he had, with respect, as if she were important; she had been sixteen. “Ms. Blair, I need a gift for a very special person, flowers, a blooming plant, something of that sort. What do you recommend?” He had been hired on a two-year contract at the college; everyone in town had known that. In a town of eighteen hundred people there were no secrets. He was rich, they said, and he was handsome, with black wavy hair, a moustache like Burt Reynolds’s, a blue and silver customized van. He had been around the world, they said. A doctorate in psychology by twenty-nine, brilliant. He had been thirty when he arrived to teach at the college, and two years later he had left.

Ellen remembered the afternoon Patty had come to the store, so excited she could hardly talk. She had just graduated from Mount Crystal, and Ellen from high school. “This Saturday night,” Patty had whispered, “Philip’s going to show some of us a Sacred Mushroom ritual!” Six students who had now graduated, she had continued. He had sworn them to secrecy; they were to meet up Crystal River at a campsite, take sleeping bags, be prepared to spend the night... Her voice had shaken with excitement.

Ellen had begged and pleaded until Patty had said she could come, too, but she had to stay way back and not make a sound.

Patty was still waiting for the coffee, getting out cups, half and half, sugar, and Ellen was back there, thirteen years ago.

Patty picked her up at her folks’ house; it was dusk when they reached the campgrounds. Two other cars were already there. They made their way to the clearing by the river where the others were nursing a small fire in a rock enclosure. The forest was dense and silent and little light filtered through; the rush of the river splashing against rocks was the only sound.

“Why’d you bring her?” John Le Croix demanded angrily, staring at Ellen.

“She’s okay,” Patty said. “She’ll stay back in the trees. I didn’t want to come alone.”

“Shit,” someone else muttered. “Anyone got any matches?”

Someone began to pass a roach around. John and Les Prell had beer, Burt Craxton and Sheila Baum were sharing a bottle, and Beverly was huddled in a blanket humming monotonously; slowly the darkness deepened until there was no light beyond the fire. The rush of water got louder as the night grew darker. Ellen didn’t know how long they had been there; they smoked and drank, some of them vanished into the woods, reappeared; there was giggling as they slipped in and out of sleeping bags. She watched the fire, frightened because it flared and roared, died to a spark, flared.

Then he was there. She had not seen him arrive, but suddenly he was standing at the far end of the group, a towering figure in a dark cloak that swept the ground. Silently he unfastened it at his neck and let it drop. She bit her thumb to keep from crying out. He was wearing a short skirt and sandals, and was covered with snakes, painted on his bare torso, on his thighs, his arms. Golden snakes gleamed on his chest, a necklace of twined snakes with emerald eyes that reflected the fire, scarlet tongues that caught and threw back flames. Golden snakes gleamed on his fingers; he was carrying a shallow bowl in both hands. She had never seen anyone so beautiful, or so terrifying.