Doug Allyn: v108 n03-04_1996-09-10

“Was she? Did you actually check her story out, Stan?”

“No, I didn’t,” the sheriff said slowly. “I had no reason to. Until now.”

David was in his kitchen making a cup of midnight cocoa when he heard the crunch of tires on the driveway. He poured a second cup as Stan Wolinski eased quietly in the back door.

“Thanks, Doc,” Stan said, gratefully accepting the steaming cup. “Thought you might be waiting up for news. I’ve arrested Cindy Meyers. She claims it was a mercy killing. Says poor Inga was suffering and she only wanted to put an end to it.”

“Maybe that’s how it was,” David said, waving Stan to a seat at the kitchen table.

“She’ll have a tough time making that fly,” Stan said. “She arranged an alibi for herself and forged that death note to frame her uncle. I doubt a judge will buy the idea that she did Inga in out of the goodness of her heart. The friend Cindy claimed she stayed with in Alma folded like an accordion when she learned it was a murder case. She admitted Cindy’d told her she was seeing someone secretly and borrowed her car to drive back here.”

“A secret lover? Maybe she got that idea from Ted.”

“Possibly, although she’s certainly sly enough to have thought of it on her own. She stuck to her story about being out of town until I hit her with the phone record.”

“Phone record?”

“Sure. The thing is, Cindy knew about Ted’s little midnight visits and she wanted to be sure the EMT guys would find Inga’s respirator unplugged and Ted gone. So I figured she must have made a call to wake Clare on the way back to her friend’s place. I checked the records, and there was a call from a gas station pay phone just outside of Algoma to the Crane home. Cindy even used her credit card.”

“Not very clever of her.”

“She didn’t have any change,” Stan said wryly. “And she didn’t want to ask the attendant for any. She was afraid he might remember her. And now I’ve got a question for you, Doc. Something’s been bothering me all day. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Maybe I won’t,” David said. “What is it?”

“This morning at the Crane place when I asked you about the tooth marks on that plug? I got the feeling you had some doubts.”

“No, they were tooth marks all right.”

“I’m not saying you lied about anything, only that you might have had some doubts.”

“It did seem awfully... convenient,” David conceded. “There were several cords back there and Hector’d chewed on all of them. It seemed odd that the only one he unplugged was the one that really mattered.”

“But you didn’t say anything.”

“No. It was early in the morning and I hadn’t had time to think. It occurred to me that Crane might have pulled the plug, but if so, I wasn’t sure I should point the finger at him.”

“Why not?”

“Because Inga was my friend and she was in a lot of pain,” David said evenly. “It cost her every time she drew a breath. To be honest, I’d thought about pulling that plug myself more than once.”

“I see. But later, when Cindy asked for your help in implicating Ted, you went along.”

“I’d thought things through by then,” David said with a shrug. “And I realized that if Inga wanted to end things, she could have done so anytime just by leaving her mask off. But she didn’t. I think she intended to live long enough to see Hector healthy and strong and able to stand on his own. Maybe it was a foolish idea, but no one had the right to take it from her, not her friends, nor her family. Only Inga.”

“That’s straight enough,” Stan said, rising. “But next time, if you have any doubts, you tell me about ’em, okay?”

“I hope to God there won’t be a next time,” David said. “At least not like this one.”

“It came down pretty hard, I’ll admit,” Stan said, pausing in the doorway. “But at least one good thing came out of it. Your friend was in a lot of pain, and now it’s over.”

David nodded without answering. But he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t over. Not yet.

Four days after Inga’s funeral, Hector died. At the end, David eased his passing with an injection. The pup wouldn’t accept food from anyone but Inga and he was wasting away. David decided against trying to anesthetize Hector in order to force-feed him. It would only have prolonged the inevitable, and he couldn’t find it in his heart to compel Hector to abide in this world when he so clearly wanted to be gone.

Later that afternoon, David placed the pup’s small body in the Crawford furnace behind his office and cremated it. His ashes barely filled an envelope.

Dusk was falling and a hint of rain was in the air as David drove his Jeep through the gates of Holy Cross Cemetery. He parked near the entrance, then followed the tiled walkway to Inga’s grave. Her resting place seemed more final somehow than it had the day of her funeral. The flowers were gone now and fresh strips of green sod had been neatly laid down over the mound of raw earth.

He knelt in the grass beside her grave for a moment. He didn’t pray. He’d never been a religious man and it would have seemed hypocritical. After a few moments, he glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being observed. No one was near. The cemetery stretched away to the foothills beyond. The only other mourner in view was an elderly woman in a dark raincoat and she was far off and lost in her own thoughts.

David carefully raised the corner of a sod strip and slid the small envelope of ashes into the soil beneath, then gently patted the grass back into place. He wasn’t sure if what he was doing made any sense, even to himself. But he hoped that it might mean something to Inga.

He lingered as the shadows lengthened, waiting in silence for... something. Anything, really. A sign, perhaps. Some indication that he’d done the right thing. But nothing happened, nothing changed. He’d thought that burying Hector’s ashes here might give him a sense of closure. It didn’t. It felt like an empty, futile gesture. Maybe the cynics are right. Maybe the grave is truly the end of things after all. Eventually he tired of waiting, and rose on stiffened knees. But he hesitated. Something in the distance caught his eye. A movement. Probably just the wind in the trees. The Algoma hills rolled away into the dusky distance like shadowy waves, bathed in the blaze of the lowering sun. And in the dying light, the hills seemed to glow from within, as though they were being magically transmuted into gold, like the hills of Oz or...

Puppyland. That’s what Inga’d said those hills meant to her when she was a child. And perhaps that was why he felt no sense of her presence at the grave. She wasn’t here anymore. If she was anywhere, she would be there, in those shining hills, running free. Breathing free. But not alone. Hector had been so eager to follow her, surely he must be with her now. Perhaps he’d gone to show her the way back to the place he’d come from. Puppyland. Where the air is sweet, and the hills are so lush and lovely that puppies are born dreaming of them.

© 1996 by Michael Gilbert

A London solicitor whose crime fiction was inspired by the work of the British barrister-crime writer Cyril Hare, Michael Gilbert has been entertaining American readers since the 1950s when his short stories first began appearing in EQMM . Unlike most other successful novelists, Mr. Gilbert has developed several sets of series characters for use only in his short fiction.

Stan Meldrum, night duty sergeant at Compton Green Police Station, was not an inspired performer, but he knew the ropes. After replacing the receiver he sat for a full ten seconds. Eleven o’clock. He was balancing the possibilities that Detective Inspector Rayburn was at home in bed, or playing bridge at his club. He thought that bridge was more likely; a correct guess.