Katherine Brooks - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

Eco and I saw out the rest of our visit, but the days that followed Antonia’s departure were melancholy. Lucius was moody. The slaves, always superstitious about any death, were restless. Davia was still shaken, and her cooking suffered. The sun was as bright as when we arrived, the flowers as fragrant, the stream as sparkling, but the tragedy cast a pall over everything. When the day came for our departure, I was ready for the forgetful hustle and bustle of the city. And what a story I would have to tell Bethesda!

Before we left, I paid a visit to Ursus and took a last look at the hives down in the glen.

“Have you ever been stung by a bee yourself, Ursus?”

“Oh yes, many times.”

“It must hurt.”

“It smarts.”

“But not too terribly, I suppose. Otherwise you’d stop being a beekeeper.”

Ursus grinned. “Yes, bees can sting. But so can love. I always say that beekeeping is like loving a woman. You get stung every so often, but you keep coming back for more, because the honey is always worth it.”

“Oh, not always, Ursus,” I sighed. “Not always.”

© 1995 by David Delman

David Delman’s interests as an author are not limited to crime fiction. He has written novels about subjects as diverse as British tennis and the American Civil War, and even his mystery stories for EQMM could almost he classified as mainstream. Mr. Delman’s most recently published crime novel is The Last Gambit (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

When the phone rings at two in the morning the caller figures to be a caller you wish was calling someone else. The caller was my cousin LaMar. The above applies.

“You awake, Roy?”

“I’m always awake at two A.M. It’s my favorite time.”

“Sheriff Foxx has disappeared.”

That caused me to blink rapidly a few times and clear my throat once or twice before saying, “What exactly do you mean, disappeared?”

“I mean no one’s seen him for two whole days. Not his wife, not his deputy, not his dentist—”

“His what?”

“Which is where he was supposed to be going, only he never got there. Where have you been, Roy?”

“Campaigning, of course. Where would I be with the election the day after tomorrow.”

“The thing is, that deputy of his, Sam Bethune, you know who I mean?”

“Tub of lard. Mean eyes. One of those who isn’t his nephew.”

“That’s Bethune. He’s spent most of the day in Minnie O’s saying you had something to do with how the sheriffs gone missing.”

“Something like what?”

“He’s not being real specific about that part, Roy — where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling for two days.”

“Are you deaf, LaMar? I just told you — on the stump. Got in around midnight.”

“Don’t you listen to your messages?”

“Well, that time of night I hoped they’d keep.”

“Roy, tell me true. Did you and Felix Foxx cross paths somewhere near Galway?”

“That’s the part Bethune’s being specific about, I take it.”

“Yeah.”

“When was it supposed to have happened?”

“Day before yesterday. He says about eleven P.M., just where Route 40 runs into Bedford Pike, you and Felix had a near head-on, only Felix swerved at the last minute and dinged your right rear instead. After which you both emerged from your vehicles, had words, came to blows, and you got decked in front of two witnesses.”

“Pretty funny story.”

“Funny? I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s on its way to scary.”

“Is Bethune being specific about who those witnesses are?”

“Uh-uh. He says they’re a couple of country boys who got in a brawl of their own, and Felix was taking them in to cool them off. They were locked in the back of his wagon so that you couldn’t see them. Which is why Bethune won’t reveal their identities. He’s got to protect them from you, he says.”

“Funnier and funnier.”

“Is it? How come I’m not doubled over?”

“And the rest of what he’s being non-specific about pertains to what I’m supposed to have done to Felix, causing him to disappear?”

“Roy...”

“Still here.”

“Bethune spent three full hours in Minnie’s last night haranguing whoever came by. And you know what — nobody was laughing.”

I sighed, thinking about Felix Foxx, thinking about the town I live in, thinking about how dumb it was to underestimate the sheriffs grip on his constituency, and said, “Well, maybe funny wasn’t the right word.”

“Put some coffee on. I’m coming over.”

He hung up. I got into jeans and a wool sweater — gets coolish at night here in Blue Ridge country come mid-September — and went into the kitchen to do as LaMar had told me. Too often, I do what LaMar Hunnicut tells me, a habit I got into because he’s six months the older. LaMar says that so-called habit is a nonexistent habit, claimed by me whenever it’s convenient to wriggle out from under.

Anyway, his ma and mine were sisters. He’s not only kin, he bills himself as my best friend, and I guess he is if you’ll allow the term a certain elasticity. He’s also editor and publisher of the Black Rock Gazette , the weekly cash cow that’s kept Hunnicuts comfortable upwards of seventy-five years. LaMar and I have been around for thirty-four of them, him those six months longer.

Despite what he says, LaMar’s got this rapid-fire mouth, which he’s used more times than I like to remember to talk me into follies of one sort or another. Back when we were freshmen at the university, for instance, he made me believe Dean Howard’s wife would... And she didn’t. And I almost didn’t get to be a sophomore.

LaMar says that then as always I believed what I wanted to believe.

When the coffee was ready I poured a cup and took it over to the window. Staring out, I found myself thinking of Fay Carteret Loomis, a subject tangential to follies. Our marriage was taking on the aspect of one, I decided glumly. Damn the woman. Maybe she was Black Rock’s quintessential beauty over the last half century — LaMar’s claim for her — but she had absolutely no tolerance for human frailty.

All the Carterets are strait-laced, and Fay Carteret Loomis, flesh of their flesh, wouldn’t cut an inch of slack for a blind man balancing on an airplane wing. I mean, one extra beer at an old friend’s bachelor party, and it’s like the second coming of Benedict Arnold.

All right, maybe two extra beers, maybe even three. And what if I did miss the Carteret family barbecue that night due to a perfectly understandable lapse of memory.

“Lapse nothing. You were drunk as a skunk, and I wouldn’t even mind that so much except you just used it as an excuse. The fact is, you don’t like my family.”

“I do like your family, in bits and pieces, but when they come at you in battalion strength...”

“Oh, how you can twist things, Roy Loomis. Everybody thinks it’s LaMar who’s the song-and-dancer, but it’s really you. You, Roy Loomis, have an honest face and a deceitful nature.”

And with that she packed two bags and flounced off. River’s Edge is where she came to earth, of course — the Carteret compound where all hurt Carterets go to lick their wounds.

That was five weeks ago.

Till then we’d never been apart more than a few days in four years of marriage. According to LaMar, we’re a pair of stubborn jackasses, but the fact is I didn’t desert her in the middle of a political campaign.

True, when she left, none of us (except LaMar maybe) knew there was going to be a campaign, but how much does that change things? She knows now, doesn’t she?