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

“I’m her employer. I’m curious about her. She just appeared on our doorstep one day—”

Paul explained about his attending the conference in Houston, his free day, trying to make his inquiries sound as natural and casual as possible.

“Why did she leave Corpus?” Paul asked.

“Her daughter died.” The man looked at him as though he needed to have Paul understand. He made a steeple of his fingers. He had beautiful hands, long and well shaped. His nails were polished.

“Karen was in the hospital a long time, over eleven months. She was unconscious the whole time. The press called her the Sleeping Beauty, but she wasn’t; she wasn’t even pretty after a while. Her face had lost its character. Everyone told Margaret to let her go. But Margaret wouldn’t let her go. She went every day to the hospital. Every day for eleven months.” He paused, as if remembering.

“She divorced me because I didn’t share her obsession. I couldn’t. No one could. ‘She’s not your daughter,’ she would say. She wasn’t, but Karen was like my daughter. I married Margaret when Karen was twelve. Karen’s father had been a colonel in the army and died in Viet Nam. Colonel Jack Brand. Karen never forgot him even though she was only five when he was killed. Wouldn’t let me adopt her. Wouldn’t hear of it. Wanted to keep her own name and so forth. A stubborn girl, much like her mother.”

“What happened?” Paul asked. “Why was Karen in the hospital?”

He wondered how far he could go without exciting any hostility in the man, but Detweiler seemed willing enough to talk about his family’s tragedy to a stranger.

The man waved his hand. “Auto accident. She had been to a party. There had been a lot of drinking. Her date drove them from the party even though he probably shouldn’t have. She scarcely knew the boy. He said Karen made him pull over so that she could drive. Then they were going too fast for conditions. It had been raining. That’s what the report of the officer on the scene said. Hit a tree.”

He shrugged. “Karen becomes comatose, a vegetable, and this other kid walks away. It was terrible for Margaret. Then some idiot cop told her that he thought Karen had been the passenger in the car and not the driver, and that the boy had changed places with her and put her behind the wheel after they hit the tree. Because he had been drinking, you see. Thought so because of the nature of Karen’s injuries and so forth. Karen did have a broken neck and any movement might very well have severed her spine. Well, it was severed. But so what if it were true? There were no witnesses to the accident. There wasn’t any way to prove it. Do you think it made us feel better to suspect that the boy Karen was with might have aggravated her injuries? The police questioned him and let him go.”

Paul was cold. He thought the air conditioning must be on even though it was a blustery day in late February.

“Dumb cop.” Ed Detweiler pronounced sentence on the man.

“The insurance money ran out, Margaret paid out her own money until she didn’t have any left, then they moved Karen to a veteran’s hospital where she died a few days after she was taken off life support. Should have done it much earlier, but Margaret wouldn’t stand for it. She can be a very obstinate woman. Then it was out of her hands.”

“Margaret left Corpus?”

“Right after Karen’s funeral. Threw some things in a car and took off to I don’t know where.” He hunched forward as if he were pleading a case. “We all still care about Margaret, all her friends care what happens to her. But nobody here has heard from her.”

“And the boy? What was the name of the boy Karen was with in the accident?”

As if he didn’t know. But he had to hear it, didn’t he?

“Not likely to forget, am I? It was Cremmins. Bobby, I think. He’s a bicycle racer. Was a racer, I should say. I read the other day where he had gotten himself killed. Local paper carried the blurb. I think he still has an uncle who lives here.”

Paul thanked Ed Detweiler and drove back to Houston. He went through the motions of another day of the conference, collected all the collectibles, then took a Dramamine and flew back to Denver fortified with many scotches.

Maggie picked him up at ten o’clock that night at the Boulder motel where the shuttle from the Denver airport had deposited him. By then the things that had been so clear to him on the plane had become very confused. Sometimes he thought that she had used the time in San Angelo to put a buffer between herself and Corpus Christi. Probably to get a driver’s license with a San Angelo address, so that there would be no obvious connection between her and the cyclist. Or sometimes he thought that it could have been a place in which she meant to begin a new life. But then again, he was afraid that she had used him, had made him her witness, her accomplice to murder. Or had she? Could it have been an accident?

Before she undressed him and put him to bed he told her he had been to Corpus Christi and that they had to talk. But when he awoke the next morning feeling awful, mostly because of the drugs and drink, but partly because Willie was battering him in the forehead, she was gone. Her clothes were gone, her cosmetics were gone. There was no note.

She was not at the rooming house. She was not at the plant.

He remembered later that when he had returned home that day he had drawn himself into a ball in the middle of the living room, feeling the emptiness stretch out on all sides of him, seemingly forever. The sense of loss was crushing, the punishment completely out of proportion to his crime.

Which was what? He had gone to Corpus Christi.

She had spilled a cup of coffee.

It was almost a year later that the telephone rang sometime after midnight, creating the sense of alarm such calls always engender. It was he who answered it.

“I wanted you to know that I’m all right,” she said.

He fought off sleep. There were a hundred things he had dreamed he would say to her if he ever heard from her again. They vanished before the reality. He had worried about her. Worried that he would pick up the paper one day and read that another woman on the side of the road had fallen victim to some random predator. Or that she was injured and needed his help. Or wanted him and couldn’t reach him. Or—

“I did worry,” he said. “We never talked. You just left.”

“I either had to go or stay there forever,” she said. “Somehow, staying forever didn’t seem very fair. Anyway, I like it here even though it rains a lot. I’m with someone who is very kind to me. I just wanted you to know.”

He stared at the receiver after she had broken the connection.

“Who was that?” Sandy asked sleepily. “Was that her?”

He slid down beneath the covers but he was no longer sleepy. He put his hand over his wife’s abdomen where he could feel the baby move. Willie stirred irritably at the foot of the bed.

“Yes,” he said. “She’s all right. That’s why she called.”

“Good,” she said. “Finally.”

She said it as though she had been expecting the call, and he supposed she had. He had shared with her his concern for Maggie, the woman she had seen on that snowy day, and who had worked for him, had been in the accident, and then had disappeared. He sometimes wondered how much she had guessed about their relationship.

“I always wondered if she knew the guy.” He heard her yawn, her voice furry on the edge of sleep. “You know, the one that was killed? Even though it was an accident. They were both from Texas, and I thought maybe that’s why she left Boulder the way she did.”

He drew his wife to him and told her the lie he had practiced over and over during those nights in which he had felt the margins of the space around him spread out beyond imagination, and which he had come to believe.