“You’ll leave as soon as the police get here,” warned Dorothy. “Now close that door and sit down before I lose my temper.”
Elvira obeyed with reluctance. bThere was a steely quality about her landlady that she had never seen before, and an authority in her voice that was unsettling. Elvira had been caught, after all.
“How do you know?” she asked, slumping into a chair.
“Because I watched everything when I’d taken my bath,” explained the other. “My television set has a security camera fitted to it, you see. It records all that happens in that bedroom while I’m away.”
Elvira gulped. “All of it?”
“Yes, Miss Coyne. After I’d watched you stealing my jewelry, I saw Mr. Waller and Mrs. Mead taking advantage of my spare key as well. They’ve been doing it for weeks, you know. I have to admire their stamina,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “It revived so many happy memories for me.”
“And Mr. Villiers?”
“He was the first to discover where I concealed the key. Every Friday afternoon, he watches my television and drinks my gin. It was an expensive hobby for him,” she went on. “I’m trebling his rent.”
“What about the others?”
“Their rent has been trebled as well, Miss Coyne. After a spate of blustering denials, Mr. Waller and Mrs. Mead eventually saw sense. They had no wish for me to pass on the video tape to Mrs. Waller or Mr. Mead.” She gave a laugh. “I don’t think that either of the spouses would be quite as entertained by the bedroom gymnastics as I was. But,” she said, “enough is enough. I’m calling a halt to their antics. They abused my hospitality in the most blatant way and they must pay for it. So must Mr.Villiers.” She pointed a skeletal finger. “And so, Miss Coyne, must you.”
Elvira was in despair. The three minutes she intended to spend in Dorothy’s apartment had turned into three grueling hours, and there had been unforeseen consequences. After being forced to return the stolen jewelry to its owner, she had to sign a punitive rental agreement and was condemned to remain in an apartment block with an adulterous City analyst and an unfaithful wife, both of whom treated Elvira as a laughing stock. The alcoholic Religious Correspondent would also bump into her from time to time, another victim of the landlady’s
security camera. Life in the block was going to be like residing in the seventh circle of hell.
“There’s one compensation,” said Dorothy, cheerily. “At least, you now have a title for your next book.”
“Do I?” asked Elvira, wondering if she would ever write again.
“Yes, Miss Coyne. You can call it The Cat Burglar Confounded.” She got up and walked to the door. “Oh, by the way,” she said with a saccharine smile, “the spare key is no longer behind the fire extinguisher. I’ve attached it to Pancho’s collar. Nobody would dare to borrow it from there.”
Dorothy Fielding made a graceful exit from the room and left her lodger distraught. Elvira’s bold venture into the criminal world had been a disaster. She had lost her nerve and her respectability. Nothing had been gained in return. It was enough to make a cat laugh. One thing was certain. Somewhere up in heaven, Isobel Nolan was shaking with mirth.
CHANGE THE ENDING
by Terence Faherty
I believe I was introduced to Doug Greene by Janet Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, at an Edgar dinner. That would have been back in the late nineties. Shortly after that, Michael Lewin, who had published a short story collection with Crippen & Landru and who had helped me get my first Owen Keane novel, Deadstick, published, suggested that I approach Doug about doing a book of Keane stories. I think Mike actually dragged me over to pitch the collection to Doug in person at a Bouchercon somewhere. I remember that Doug was very gracious about it, and we ended up doing The Confessions of Owen Keane in 2005. As was always the case with Crippen & Landru books, The Confessions was a handsome volume, and I’m still very proud of it.
ONE
Sandra Magerum knew she was not a danger to herself. Dr. Naismith was mistaken about that. There was nothing at all wrong with her mentally. She’d experienced a period of mourning, deep mourning, which was a condition of the soul, not the mind, and as far outside Dr. Naismith’s purview as particle physics. In any case, that period, that episode, was now closed.
Certainly no one with lingering mental problems could have organized this trip so efficiently. And Sandra was a woman who knew and prized efficiency. She’d selected the ferry operator on whose dock she now stood not because it was the company she and her husband had used ten years earlier but because on that occasion it had performed like the Swiss Guard.
Today was no different. She’d left her car at the valet parking sign and within five minutes a team of young men and women—so like her students at the college—had taken her bag from the trunk and checked her in for the short trip to Mackinac Island. By the time she’d joined a group of passengers huddling under the gangway’s bright blue awning to escape a light rain, their ferry had been entering the little harbor.
Sandra remembered a larger boat and wondered if that could be a trick of her memory. Perhaps the ferry had simply seemed larger and safer because James had been along, his hand on her back as they’d descended the aluminum gangway and holding her elbow as they’d stepped through the opening in the ship’s rail. Theirs had been more than a marriage. It had also been a long friendship. That was the point she’d tried to impress upon Dr. Naismith, though without success. She’d lost a soul mate, not merely a spouse.
Once she was on board the ferry and it had started out into the straits, Sandra was sure she had been wrong. This was certainly the type of boat they’d taken ten years earlier if not the very craft. She clearly remembered the long rows of bench seats—so like church pews—in the main cabin, remembered that every seat in that moving chapel had been occupied on their July trip, at the height of the island’s season. Now, in September, Sandra had a long seat to herself.
Almost to herself. Just as a young crewmember began addressing the passengers, a woman moved forward from the rear of the cabin and sat beside her. From old habit, Sandra made a rapid inventory of the newcomer: medium height, stout, short hair uniformly white, black eyeglasses sequined. Sandra turned away from the woman’s open ing smile and saw her own reflection in the cabin window. She made another inventory: small, dark, prematurely stooped, haunted eyes.
The crewman’s welcome was really a sales pitch for a guidebook to Mackinac. The woman in the sequined glasses bought a copy so quickly that Sandra toyed with the idea she might be a shill, planted in the audience to jumpstart sales, a conceit the woman fell in with by holding up her copy for Sandra to examine.
“Don’t need one,” Sandra said. “I’ve been here before.”
“By yourself?”
“No, with my husband. My late husband.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sandra nodded, pleased with the matter-of-fact way she’d said the words “late husband.” Her friends had questioned the wisdom of choosing for this trial vacation a place where she and James had been together. But Sandra had been insistent, not because they’d traveled so much that she had had few alternatives, though that was true, and not because it was easier to plan a trip to a familiar place. She wanted this to be a real test. She wanted to prove to Dr. Naismith what she believed in her heart: James and all he represented were now part of the past.
“My name is Lola Mae,” the woman beside her said.
Her voice reminded Sarah of that irritating woman on the cooking channel who pronounced “oil” as though it had three syllables. Sandra gave her own first name, reluctantly.
“Is it true there aren’t any cars or trucks on Mackinac?”
“No private cars,” Sandra said. “I believe there are fire trucks and an ambulance, though I never saw them.”
“So everyone travels by bicycle?”
“Or by horse and buggy. And all the businesses use horse-drawn wagons.”
Lola Ma
e was beaming. “It’s just like stepping into the past.”
“Stepping into the past” was an innocent enough expression, but it still rankled. Sandra had been a professional historian for thirty years and she detested the modern tendency to see the past as something living or, worse, something pliable, something to be reshaped to fit the latest political or ideological whim. It could be reinterpreted, certainly, or illuminated by some new discovery, but its basic landscape was as fixed as any painting. And one could no more step into it than into an old master.
Sandra realized that she had drifted off and looked to see if Lola Mae had noticed. Luckily, the other woman was trying to photograph, through the rain-spattered windows of the cabin, the giant suspension bridge that connected Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.
Sandra was free to return to her mental essay on the immutability of the past. Perhaps inevitably, she thought of her theory’s greatest critic, James. To be fair, James had been no great believer in the immutability of anything. A professor of English literature, he had delighted in every new theory in his own field that called for the deconstruction and reshaping of books and poems.
He’d had a favorite game he would play with his freshman students, which he’d called “Change the Ending.” He’d maintained that any work of literature could be completely transformed simply by changing the ending. If Hamlet doesn’t end with the death of the prince, it ceases to be a tragedy and becomes a coming-of-age story. If Huckleberry Finn ends with Jim, the runaway slave, being condemned to a plantation, it ceases to be a coming-of-age story and becomes a tragedy. James had even predicted that future “artists” would rewrite the last few pages of classic books and reissue the complete texts as their own work.
Sandra considered that hypothetical “art form” vandalism and the discussion of it a waste of good classroom time. She had often told James—
“There it is,” Lola Mae broke in. “There’s Mackinac.”
TWO
The little island was more crowded than Sandra remembered. And a more homogenous green, though even at a distance she could clearly see the long white walls of the fort that stood guard above the little harbor. They’d be within cannon range in a very few minutes. She could make out individual cottages now and, to the left of the fort and more hidden in the trees, the colonnade of the Grand Hotel. Lola Mae asked her to point out the hotel, and she did so, though with a feeling of dread. It was a large establishment, but was it large enough to share with Lola Mae?
To her relief, the other said, “Too expensive for me. I’m staying at the Harborside Bed and Breakfast. But I’d love to be a guest at the Grand Hotel. It’s where they filmed my favorite movie, Somewhere in Time.”
Sandra knew the name, knew she’d seen the film, though at that moment she couldn’t recall the plot. She put it from her mind as they entered the harbor.
The two women parted in a shelter open on one end to the ferry dock and on the other to the island’s main street. The people on that street were still wearing rain jackets, though those with umbrellas carried them furled under their arms. Even so, Sandra was grateful that the hotel’s omnibus—you could hardly call something built of gleaming wood and drawn by a pair horses a shuttle—was covered. By the time it reached the hotel, which, with its many columns and its shingled roof complete with crowning pavilion, looked to Sandra like a racetrack grandstand monstrously grown, the sun had broken through.
Hotel guests were starting out with golf clubs and tennis rackets, people James would have talked up in the hopes of finding a partner and a game. Sandra didn’t even nod hello to those she passed as she and her bag were escorted into the lobby, where the many irregularities of the floor were almost hidden by the plush wine carpet. She intended to explore the island’s history, something she’d been denied on her last stay. And it was an interesting history, sited as Mackinac was at a choke point for Great Lakes shipping and at the center of what had once been a thriving fur industry. There’d been two wartime invasions of the island and one pitched battle. They would be more than enough to fill the two days of her visit.
She unpacked quickly in her small room, strapped on her camera, and headed out. In the lobby, her eye was caught by a framed movie poster, by the name on that poster: Somewhere in Time. She crossed to it. The poster showed a full length drawing—or a photo massaged to look like a drawing—of a young man in contemporary dress. From behind him peeked the face of a beautiful woman, done in a much larger scale. On either side of the poster were framed photographs of the cast taken all around the hotel, making the wall a little shrine to the film.
She remembered it now. It had starred the unfortunate Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. The hotel had been showing the film during her previous visit, and James had insisted they see it. Then he’d laughed up his sleeve at the whole thing. Sandra remembered being mortified at first but soon giving up and laughing herself. The plot had been that absurd: A man on a visit to Mackinac sees an old photograph of a turn-of-the-century beauty and falls in love. More than that, through self-hypnosis he sends himself back into the past so he can consummate that love. Kitsch, James had called it. He could always—
Sandra started as though caught at something illicit. She wasn’t there to think about James. On the contrary, the point of the exercise was to be where he had been without thinking of him every minute of every day.
She set out from the hotel at a brisk pace, descending into the town proper and crossing it on the high street, Weldon Street, which ended at the park-like grounds of Fort Mackinac. Sandra paid for her admission and for a guidebook, though she was sure she could have written a more comprehensive one herself based on her recent research.
The fort had been built by the British in 1780 and it had passed to the United States by treaty after the War of Independence. Unfortunately, the fort had been incorrectly sited, a problem the British knew all about, having created it themselves. There was higher land directly behind the fort and commanding it. During the War of 1812, the British had landed at night on the far side of the island and approached the fort overland. When the Americans had awakened the next morning, they’d found the guns of the British looking down at them from the heights. Exit the Americans, for a time.
Sandra spent a happy hour examining the foundations of the outer wall and touring the restored buildings behind it, the barracks and infirmary and the officers’ quarters, judging the reconstructions to be too pristine but otherwise accurate. Then she attended a demonstration cannon firing, standing apart from the tourists but jumping as they did when the gun went off.
Afterward, she treated herself to a pot of tea and a piece of blueberry pie at the fort’s café, which overlooked the harbor. The café had been the only part of the grounds James would enter, though he’d loved their table’s view of the yacht basin and had pronounced the pie the best he’d ever eaten.
Sitting in the warm sunlight, Sandra was overcome by a choking sense of injustice. She shouldn’t have been there alone. She shouldn’t have been facing the rest of her life alone. She wouldn’t have been, but for a dangerous hill and a bit of wet pavement and a hairpin turn. But for James being James.
“How could you have—” she began before she realized she was addressing the empty chair beside her. She dropped some bills on the table and hurried away.
THREE
The fine weather continued the next day. After breakfast, Sandra went down into the town and rented a bicycle whose basket and balloon tires reminded her of the Schwinn that had been the centerpiece of her happiest Christmas morning. After stopping to buy her lunch at a grocery with a deli counter in back, she set out, heading east.
The island was circled by a fairly flat coast road, which offered impressive views of Lake Huron at almost every point. Sandra knew the eight-mile circuit, having ridden it with James. She knew she would have to be on her guard for memories of him, as she’d been the night before, when she dined at the Grand Hotel’s formal restaurant. She’d been sea
ted next to a couple from Cleveland—a dentist (tall, crew-cut) and his wife (buxom, freckled)—and had managed to have a long conversation without mentioning James once. Today she lacked the distraction of strangers, but she had a specific plan in mind for losing her unwelcome shadow.
The water to her right was an almost Caribbean blue. Sandra could still see the rocky bottom a hundred feet from shore. She enjoyed the novelty of riding down the road without a thought to traffic, though the constant calls of “On your left!” as one bicycle after another whizzed past her grew irritating. Once out of town, she entered one of the island’s many nature preserves, land protected from development. It would have been impossible to build in any case, the narrow road being the only flat land between the shingle beach and great cliffs of stone.
At one point, she saw a lone picnic table, remembered it is a place where she and James had lunched, and pedaled on resolutely. “You don’t ambush me that easily, James Magerum,” she muttered between breaths. “You’ll never ambush me again.”
Mackinac, Sandra knew, was shaped like an irregular arrowhead, with the harbor and the town at its base. Just beyond the arrowhead’s point, opposite the town, was the site of the successful British invasion of 1812 and the unsuccessful American one from two years later. It was now the home of a picnic ground, where, with a few other bicyclists, Sandra ate her lunch. Then, with one glance back at the tourists pedaling along Lakeshore Drive, she struck off inland on British Landing Road.
That parting glance had contained a mental wave of her hand to James. She pictured him surprised and disconcerted by her change of tactics. Like the British, she was using this overland route, on which James had never tread, to defeat her enemy. Though in her case, rather than approaching that enemy stealthily, she was leaving him behind.
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