John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

Julian stepped out onto the balcony and leaned over the gas cans. “Your father’s generator is like ours. It wouldn’t take more than eight gallons a day, even running constantly.”

Doug and Steve looked at each other. “So?”

“I see three empty twenty-gallon cans. He could not have used all that gasoline in three or four days.”

Doug’s Adam’s apple moved. “Then the cans couldn’t have been full when he started.”

“That would explain it.”

Once back on the sidewalk, Julian stepped up to examine the scrawled writing. He opened our car doors with the remote.

“Margo, the glove compartment. Get the flashlight and my kit from work.”

“Check.”

The “kit from work” is just a box with nothing in it but cotton swabs and a bottle of paint solvent. Julian opened the solvent, which smelled strong enough to make me dizzy even out in the fresh air, and addressed himself to the code on the door. I stepped back to the car as he dipped the swab in and applied it to the center of the “D” for “Dead.” He dabbed carefully in a tight circle and in less than a minute, a black smear emerged from beneath the white.

I held my breath and came in for a close look.

“That was the slanted center line of a zero!”

Julian heaved a sigh and knocked on the door twice, above the “1 D.” In a few seconds, we heard running footsteps. Doug pulled open the door, then saw Julian’s smear and gasped. Steve appeared behind his shoulder and went pale.

“We can reconstruct the events here.” Julian capped his bottle. “The Guardsmen came on September fifth, but Angus wouldn’t have let them rescue him in any case. When they rode their boat down this block, calling for survivors to carry to safety, he would have turned off his generator, hidden upstairs, and kept mum. The Guardsmen would mark the house empty and move on.”

Doug nodded slowly, as if in a trance.

“Your father was still alive when you got here a few days later. You killed him and left him in the water. Who would notice one more drowning victim during the greatest natural disaster in the country’s history?”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it as Julian continued.

“Crawford already had some white paint in the kitchen. You used some of it to paint over the line in the zero, which you turned into a ‘D,’ and wrote the number one beside it.”

“That was taking some chance, doing it out in the open,” I put in.

“The neighborhood was still troubled. The lights were all out and there was no one around to see them but maybe a cat.”

“It was me!” Steve stepped out on the porch. “I did it.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“No, Dougie. I want to tell the truth.” He beckoned us back into the vestibule and lowered his voice. “Please try to understand. We had been thirty hours without sleep, living on coffee and donuts, pulling people off their roofs and carrying them to dry land. I wanted to sack out, but Dougie just had to steer the boat over this way and make sure his father was all right. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Your old man doesn’t care if you live or die.’”

“I thought he would be proud of me. Everyone else told us we were heroes.” Doug rubbed his eyes. “We saw the code on the door, the zero meaning no one was inside. But I knew Dad was just hiding. He wouldn’t leave. So I used my old key to get in and he heard us and came down the stairs. I was so glad to see he was all right. I ran to him but...”

“He just started blasting at Doug.” Steve made two fists. “Got red in the face like a monster. Kept cursing and screaming how he was ashamed of his miserable excuse for a son. And poor Dougie was...”

“Yeah, I was breaking down,” Doug admitted weakly. “I was so exhausted, I could hardly stand up, and then I expected him to welcome me with open arms, but with all that...”

“Hollering filthy names at him, how he was praying to God that Dougie had drowned.”

“I had always told myself that my father really loved me no matter what. But now I knew...”

“I had the heavy police-issue flashlight we were using to search the houses,” Steve interrupted. “I just hit that vicious old man on the head with it, only to shut him up so he would stop hurting Dougie! That’s all I wanted to do, shut him up. But he fell like a stone.”

“Dead before he hit the water,” Doug said. “Whiting out the code on the door was my idea. I used Dad’s paint to cover the zero, then sprayed on the ‘1 D’.”

Then he began to cry. “I loved my father. Why did he hate me so much? What’s so terrible about me?”

His friend held him in a protective hug. Julian gave me the raised-eyebrows sign and we left them to assail their demons.

Getting back into the car, I asked, “Where are we headed now?”

“I could use a good night’s sleep.”

“Me too.”

Copyright © 2006 Tony Fennelly