The Sixth Mystery

by Lee Semsen

“It’s still early,” Inch said. “Plenty of time to enjoy a three-day holiday.” When she hesitated again, Inch added, “It would be better if we went inside, don’t you think?”

  After a few more seconds she turned and went back up the walk, leaving the bag sitting where she had dropped it. Inch followed her through the door and into the living room, where she sat down heavily in a chair. She didn’t take off her coat.

  “Well,” she said, “tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “Maybe your husband ought to hear it, too.”

  “He’s hunting. He won’t be back until Sunday.”

  “All right,” said Inch. “I assume Roger Crain called you last night.”

  “He did. What a pleasant surprise.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That you’d been to see him,” she said. “That he’d told you everything.”

  “I don’t think he told me everything,” said Inch.

  “Neither do I.”

  “I’d like to hear the rest of it,” said Inch.

  She shrugged. “What else is there to say? Are you wondering what kind of woman can’t wait to send her daughter off to school so she can go screw her friend’s husband? A woman with a dead fish for a husband who one day happened to start a conversation with a man with a bitch for a wife.”

  “He told me that,” Inch said. “Part of it. The rest I was able to figure out for myself.”

  “Then you met the wife,” she said. “Maybe you’re wondering what sort of woman runs over her own child and doesn’t even stop to see if she’s hurt.”

  “Maybe I am,” said Inch. “Tell me.”

  “I never saw her. She shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t know I’d hit anything until I felt a bump. Then I looked in the mirror and saw a heap of clothes. I couldn’t tell who or what it was. I didn’t know it was my daughter until I went home two hours later and the police were there.”

  “You didn’t stop to see what you’d hit,” said Inch.

  “No, I didn’t. So judge me.”

  “That’s not my job,” said Inch. “Did Roger Crain judge you?”

  “He wanted to go back and see if anyone was hurt. He said it was the right thing to do. But I told him I couldn’t do it.”

  “It bothered him, didn’t it,” said Inch. “Enough that he finally had to tell somebody about it.”

  “It bothered him so much that he waited ten years,” she said. “I wouldn’t say he was overwhelmed with guilt.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone?” said Inch. “Your husband, for instance?”

  “Darren?” She laughed, not pleasantly. “Don’t kid me.”

  “I meant your current husband.”

  “Leonard and I don’t talk about my life in Walla Walla. We don’t talk about the past.”

  “I think the past has caught up with you, Mrs. Campbell.”

  “Has it?” she said.

  “What did you tell Sheriff Evans?” said Inch.

  “Charlie Evans. Such a nice old man.” She said it as if she meant just the opposite. “Did you know he was going to leave me everything in his will? He said it wouldn’t make up for my loss, but it was all he could do.”

  “I know he changed his mind six months ago,” said Inch.

  “Did he? He never told me that, but I’m not surprised.”

  “What did he say to you, then?”

  “He called me the day after Roger talked to him. He wanted me to turn myself in.”

  “And you refused,” Inch said.

  “I asked him what good would it do after all these years, and he said it probably wouldn’t do anybody any good, but I should do it, anyway. I told him I needed to think about it.”

  “He accepted that?” said Inch.

  “He said he’d give me six months – I suppose he thought he was being generous – and then he’d have to inform the police himself. I said okay, and we left it at that.”

  “What else did you talk about?”

  “Nothing. It wasn’t a long conversation.”

  “How about on the 12th of October, when you went to Walla Walla to see him?” said Inch.

  She hesitated a second too long. “What makes you think I did that?”

  “The six months were up. You weren’t planning to turn yourself in, and you didn’t want Charles Evans to turn you in, either.”

  “So you think I drove all the way to Walla Walla to try to talk him out of it?”

  “Or to kill him.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that, and you can’t prove that I did.”

  “Did your husband know that you were gone?”

  “He was hunting. He hunts every weekend this time of year.”

  “You must have bought gas for your van,” said Inch. “It’s a 900-mile round trip.”

  “I always pay cash.”

  “Somebody will remember you,” said Inch. “Someone between here and Walla Walla. You bought gas, you bought coffee, you asked for the key to the rest room. We’ll find the evidence we need.”

  She stared at him, completely without expression. For a moment she held herself still, and then she sagged, sinking deeper into the chair. “I could see it in his face as soon as he opened the door,” she said. “He was going to ruin my life over something that happened so long ago that it didn’t even matter anymore. I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “His own daughter died in a hit-and-run accident,” said Inch.

  “Uh-huh. And because he couldn’t get over it, the rest of the world has to suffer along with him. No one should have to live like that. Especially me.”

  “Is that what you told him?” said Inch.

  “He said he was disappointed in me.” She had stopped looking at Inch; her eyes no longer seemed focused on anything in the room. “I told him he had no right to say that. No right to pass judgment on me.” Her face was turning red, but it wasn’t from anger; she was having trouble breathing. “And … the way … he glared at me –” the words came out between gasps – “no one looks at me –”

  “Are you ill, Mrs. Campbell?” Inch said. “Should I call an ambulance?”

  She shook her head. “Asthma. My medicine –” She jumped up and ran toward the hall.

  Inch stood in the middle of the living room, debating whether or not he should follow her, and then he heard a click. Not the clatter of somebody digging frantically through a medicine cabinet, but the sound of a deadbolt being released. And then the creak of a hinge. She’d gone out the back door.

  Inch ran outside but she was already in the van, starting the engine, backing out of the driveway so heedlessly that she bounced off the opposite curb, hurtling down the street with tires spinning. By the time Inch reached his car she was blocks away, almost out of sight. And then he heard a horn and the squeal of brakes, and a crash. Then all was quiet again.

  “So all of the mysteries are solved.” It was Saturday afternoon, and Inch was back at his desk in Walla Walla. Driscoll was home for the weekend, Esther was visiting a friend in Yakima, and Robbie Robertson had gone to Wallula to report on a sewage spill at the paper plant. Inch had called Gregory Luke to let him know that he’d found Charles Evans’s murderer.

  “It isn’t very satisfying, though, when she plays you for a fool and runs away and gets killed by a bus.”

  “The asthma attack might have killed her instead,” said Luke. “You were right not to stop her.”

  “Her husband has asthma,” said Inch. “Not her. She just knew how to fake the symptoms.”

  “But the case is closed now, isn’t it?” said Luke.

  “Yes,” said Inch. “The case is closed.”

  But it wasn’t, not quite. William Cooper, Junior filed suit against the former county commissioners, and on January 2nd of the following year, the Walla Walla District Court ordered Roderick Fowler, Eugene Alderson, and the estate of Edward Dubois to pay Mr. Cooper $6,000,000 in restitution. Fowler vowed to appeal, and named Gerald Toll
iver, former Walla Walla County Attorney, and – to Inch’s great surprise – Jason Moore, former reporter for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, as parties to what he called the “transaction,” claiming that Tolliver had been paid $500,000 for legal advice and Moore had been given $100,000 to “inform his editor that a story he had written about the commission was rife with errors and should not be published.” Fowler also vowed to “devote all of his energy to fighting this injustice, and in order that the town of Bandon not be burdened with a mayor who could not give all of his time to his administrative duties,” resigned the office that he’d won in a narrow victory two months earlier.

  His term as mayor was the shortest in Oregon history: two hours and 27 minutes.

  The End