Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

The woman seemed to want to talk to him further, but a gust of frigid air drove her scuttling back to the warmth of the house, and he gratefully slipped back behind the wheel.

He was puzzled and a little angry. Margaret Detweiler had lied on her application for employment. She had listed no address previous to the one in San Angelo. He’d have to talk to Mac about her when he got back.

A week later he was sitting across from her.

“And I’m telling you I don’t feel so good these days, Paul, and I doubt you’ve got time to replace Maggie.”

“Oh, come on, Mac. She lied. For all you know she’s a serial killer, a felon wanted in three states.”

“Or maybe her ex-husband is harassing her,” Mac said. “There are all kinds of reasons why she might not want to be entirely candid. She did use the same name—”

“I don’t believe this,” he said irritably. “Just look at the way she dresses. That was a cashmere sweater she had on this morning. Those clothes are expensive.”

“So they are, but they’re not new.”

“They were new once! She’s hardly your average office worker.”

“Well, neither am I. It seems to me she’s just someone fallen on hard times, and hasn’t given you the satisfaction of complaining about them. I like the woman, apart from the fact that she drinks more coffee than all the rest of us put together, and I’m not having you roar back in here with a burr under your blanket and run her off!”

“Burr under—”

“Oh, it’s the unwholesome influence of working around a Texan. You know what I mean. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Why don’t you just ask her when she comes back from making the deposit instead of being sulky?”

“I intend to.”

“Do it by yourself then. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, and I’ve got to get out of here. But I don’t want to come in tomorrow morning and find this desk empty. You be nice!”

Mac then left, less because she wanted to be early for her appointment, he decided, than to avoid being in on the interview with Margaret Detweiler. Which was not like Mac, who usually thrived on confrontation.

The drivers and loaders had also departed. The afternoon was snowy and further work could be put off until tomorrow when it was supposed to be sunny and mild.

He asked Maggie to come in and sit in the chair across the desk from him.

He told her about going through San Angelo on his trip to Texas. She said nothing, gazing with her wonderful eyes out the window at the empty yard in which new snow was being whirled about in a gusty wind.

When she continued to say nothing as he went over the importance of a work history, or failing that, a personal history, he became irritated. “So you admit you lied? You hadn’t lived in San Angelo forever—”

She looked at him then. “Who lives anywhere forever?”

“I mean, where did you live before?” He felt he was losing his concentration and control of the conversation.

“That is not relevant to my working here,” she said softly. “I am no criminal. I am fleeing no bench warrant.”

He felt helpless in the face of her implacability.

Then she looked unhappy and seemed to regret his distress. She rose and came around the desk. She looked down at him and took his hand as though he were the one at a disadvantage, the one who needed comfort.

“You have been very kind to me,” she said and held the back of his rough hand against the softness of her sweater.

After a moment he got to his feet, pulled down the shade, and locked the door.

Later, after she had gone, he realized that he had done one of the monumentally stupid things in his life, and he thought he surely was going to be made to regret it.

Though he dreaded seeing her the next morning at work, she was as collected and impersonal as ever. And Mac was delighted with him on finding that she was still there.

He left work that afternoon thinking he had gotten away with one and was very pleased with himself. He fed Willie, fielded a couple of messages from Sandy that said she would be in touch, turned on the television, and then felt very much alone. He felt his loneliness as though it was so much empty space stretching away on all sides of him. It made him unhappy and restless.

He drove by the house in which Margaret Detweiler said she had taken a room, then stopped and asked her to dinner. Afterwards he took her back to his house, where he ignored other messages from Sandy. Maggie said she had paid for her room until the end of the month, but seemed pleased that he had asked her to stay with him. She said that she thought there would be fewer complications if she did not.

He had to leave the Porsche off for servicing after his trip to Texas and asked her to give him a ride to and from work the next day. Mac wouldn’t be coming in again. She said she was due at any moment, and even the short ride out of town to the plant, she asserted, could be hazardous to herself and her incipient offspring. Maggie was now in charge, although Mac’s help was only a telephone call away.

Maggie picked him up at the service center in her old car, which was very clean inside and uncluttered except for a cheap plastic holder for cups which straddled the hump of the transmission. She confessed that she drank coffee constantly, continually, as much and as often as she could afford. Free coffee at work was a substantial benefit as far as she was concerned, though it didn’t obviate the need for making a pot as soon as she got up.

The day was as warm and sunny as predicted, and as was predictable, they passed a number of cyclists on their way to work, even though it was only a little before nine in the morning. They saw one in an orange jersey pulling away from a pack of five.

“The orange flash on the zebra-striped bike,” Paul said. “You can almost set your watch by him. Out in the morning, back by three.”

“So Mac has said. I guess the racers have to take advantage of what good weather they have. You wonder how they earn a living.”

“That particular guy is a semi-pro,” Paul said, “and still in school, I think. He was written up a few months back in one of the national magazines. Prototype of the new American cyclist. A good bet to make the 7-Eleven team.”

She nodded and sipped her coffee, putting the cup into its holder with a graceful motion as they swung into the plant. He had never seen her make an awkward move after that first day in the parking lot.

Later in the day, she asked if they might leave a bit earlier than they had planned to pick up his car. She said she had some errands she had to run. Dick Hanson, Paul’s foreman, said he’d lock up the office for her.

So they left the plant a few minutes before three. He teased her about the omnipresent cup in her hand, and she told him that certainly she was an addict, but that except for increasing the risk of pancreatic cancer, it was a relatively harmless vice.

She seemed very gay to him that afternoon, very lighthearted, and it pleased him to be with her.

It was a wonderful day to live in Boulder. The sun was bright on the snowy fields, the sky was clear and very blue, the road was dry. Ahead of them, slowly pumping up the hill, was the cyclist in the orange jersey. It was perfect Boulder, he thought. They could put it on a calendar.

Maggie was drinking her coffee. As she reached down to place the cup in the holder, it toppled to the side. She gave a cry as the coffee spilled across his feet and grabbed for the cup, wrenching the steering wheel with her other hand as she ducked her head.

What happened next was very clear to him, although he didn’t remember the sound the cyclist made as the car struck him at fifty miles per hour. Paul saw a flash of orange, the windshield shatter, then saw the cyclist cartwheeling down the slope, feet still in their metal shells, locked onto the pedals, until he and his bicycle slammed into the barbed-wire fence at the bottom.