Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems for Dr. Sam Hawthorne

by Hoch Edward D.

  Copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990

  by Edward D. Hoch

  This edition copyright © 2014 by Patricia M. Hoch

  Cover Design by Gail Cross

  ISBN (limited clothbound edition): 978-1-936363-03-2

  ISBN (trade softcover edition): 978-1-936363-03-24-9

  FIRST EDITION

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  P. O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505

  USA

  Email: crippenlandru@earthlink.net

  Web: www.crippenlandru.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Janet Hutchings

  The Problem of the Graveyard Picnic

  The Problem of the Crying Room

  The Problem of the Fatal Fireworks

  The Problem of the Unfinished Painting

  The Problem of the Sealed Bottle

  The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat

  The Problem of the Curing Barn

  The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin

  The Problem of the Thunder Room

  The Problem of the Black Roadster

  The Problem of the Two Birthmarks

  The Problem of the Dying Patient

  The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse

  The Problem of the Haunted Tepee

  The Problem of the Blue Bicycle

  A Dr. Sam Hawthorne Checklist

  INTRODUCTION

  Over the seventeen years I worked with Edward D. Hoch at Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I had the pleasure of editing twelve of his long-running series. And that was less than half of his output for EQMM, where he had a thirty-four-year unbroken streak of publication in every monthly issue of the magazine.

  My favorite of all of his excellent series was that starring Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Many fans of this series, which began in 1974, cite its locked-room and impossible-crime puzzles as what chiefly attracts them to the stories. In the Hawthorne tales one finds some of the best Hoch plots, perhaps because he liked to save the most difficult kind of puzzle, that of the locked-room, for his country doctor.

  As brilliant as the plots of the Hawthorne stories are, however, they are only a part of the magic the series has for me. Ed Hoch had many exceptional talents beyond plotting. One of them was the ability to create a milieu that readers could look forward to returning to again and again. Set in the New England town of Northmont in the 1920s through ’40s, the Hawthorne stories have a certain parallel to the Miss Marple stories and novels of Agatha Christie, whose early cases were set in roughly the same period of time, in the English village of St. Mary Mead. The settings of both series are relatively self-contained; both create ambiances in which the occurrence of crime should be an anomaly; and both include some returning supporting characters. But Northmont has always felt to me a more real and vital place than St. Mary Mead, and I think that may be partly because, unlike Miss Marple, Dr. Sam Hawthorne is not primarily an observer of his town—he’s an active participant in all that goes on.

  As a young, single doctor, Dr. Sam is involved in all sorts of relationships—personal, professional, and civic—with characters who turn out to be suspects, victims, and witnesses. He has a stake in what happens that goes beyond achieving justice, and his supporting characters become more important, as the series progresses, than they ever could be were his primary role that of observer. The supporting characters of Northmont are part of Dr. Sam’s personal story—a story that, spun out over some seventy adventures, provides as compelling a reason to continue reading the stories, for many readers (myself included), as are the astonishingly clever puzzles each story contains.

  You have in your hand a volume from the second of more than three decades of the Hawthorne series. If you’ve read collections of the earlier stories, you won’t find the good doctor the same in this one, because this is one fictional series that progresses in something like real time. Hawthorne moves on, and so do the times. With each case told as a reminiscence, we’re guided by an elderly Dr. Sam through the decades of his youth, with all of the attendant changes to Northmont, the country, and the world. Part of the pleasant expectation with which I used to open the manuscript of a new Hawthorne story was that of seeing how the milieu, and the characters, had changed. And Ed Hoch always delivered. One of the things being his editor for so many years proved to me is that he was a scrupulous researcher. Using primarily his own extensive personal library, he brought to bear the kind of detail that made his settings places I felt I could walk right into. And I can honestly say that I never detected a historical error in any of his stories.

  If you are newly making Hawthorne’s acquaintance, there’s a respect in which I envy you: You don’t know yet how Sam’s life turned out. Although his creator died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2008, he had revealed, only a short time earlier, answers to two of the key questions that had kept readers going over the decades: Did Northmont’s most eligible bachelor ever marry? And how old is the retired Dr. Sam who narrates the tales? I won’t chance spoiling your reading of future collections by answering those questions for you. I think the author himself had some reservations about resolving all of that. Although he believed that Nick Velvet—an eccentric and endearing thief who became the subject of a French television series—was his most popular sleuth, he too seems to have believed that Hawthorne was one of his most important creations.

  I’d like to add one final, more personal, note about this remarkable series: Into Sam Hawthorne Ed Hoch infused the qualities of character for which he himself was best known: kindness, decency, and compassion. He, like Hawthorne, always had a ready smile and a willingness to forgive. He is an author whose work should not be forgotten, and a person who never will be forgotten by those, like me, who counted him a good friend.

  Janet Hutchings

  Editor

  Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  THE PROBLEM OF THE GRAVEYARD PICNIC

  “This time I promised you a graveyard story,” Dr. Sam Hawthorne said as he poured a little brandy all around. “But one without ghosts or thunder or dark of night. It all took place in the daylight—but that didn’t make it any less mysterious . . .”

  The spring of 1932 was a depressing time for everyone (Dr. Sam continued), with people out of work and businesses failing. There was some wild talk of revolution as the presidential election neared. Northmont was little better off than the rest of the country, but we were cutting back in just about every way we could, and even I was affected.

  After ten years at our little office near the center of town, my nurse April and I were packing up to move. Northmont’s Pilgrim Memorial Hospital, an eighty-bed facility opened with much fanfare in 1929, had proven far too large for the town’s needs. As a result, one whole wing—some thirty beds—was being converted to professional offices. The hospital’s governing board had offered me attractive rent for the first year, and with patients behind in their bills and my own debts beginning to rise, I was in no position to refuse.

  April was excited because the new office nearly doubled our floor space, but I was dubious. “We’ll be two miles from town. What about the patients who can’t drive out to see us or are too elderly for a horse and buggy?”

  “Most of them had to make the trip into town anyway, or else you had to go see them. And it’ll be a lot easier for you to make your hospital calls.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I agreed reluctantly.

  On the warm April morning we moved in, Dr. Fenshaw, one of the hospital administrators, was there to greet us. “Newly painted, Sam, just as you wanted.” He was a
short man with a squeaky voice and a nervous manner better suited to hospital boardrooms than to bedside care.

  “Thanks, Dave. It looks fine. The van with my office furniture should be right along.”

  “Nice view out the window,” he commented.

  I couldn’t resist a bit of sarcasm at that. “Nice if you like cemeteries. Some of my patients may not like the reminder.”

  “Spring Glen is more like a park than a cemetery,” Fenshaw argued, and I had to admit he was right. The place even attracted occasional picnickers. From my window I saw only one small group of headstones along the trees and ­winding paths. The glen that gave the place its name had a small spring-fed creek running along the rocky edge. This time of year, when there was still melting snow on Cobble Mountain to the north, the creek was wider and deeper than usual. It rushed through Spring Glen like a miniature river.

  We spent the rest of the day moving furniture and getting settled. April worked a few extra hours so we’d be ready for patients in the morning. Sheriff Lens even came by to see us in our new quarters, bringing a basket of ­flowers from his wife. “The town’s really gettin’ spruced up for this summer’s centennial,” he told us.

  “We celebrated our three hundredth anniversary five years ago, Sheriff. How can they have a centennial this year?”

  “That other was the pilgrim thing. This is the official founding of Northmont.”

  “I’ll think about it when it gets closer.”

  He gave one of his typical grunts. “You goin’ to Matt Xavier’s funeral in the mornin’?”

  “I can’t get away on my first day here, but if things are slow I’ll walk over to the cemetery around noon.” Xavier was one of Fenshaw’s patients, a 92-year-old man who’d finally released his stranglehold on life.

  Things were slow in the morning, with more inquiries about our new location than actual patient calls. A little before noon I saw the funeral procession turn into the cemetery and decided to walk over. Matt Xavier had been an important citizen and I had no wish to boycott his funeral just because he chose a different doctor to minister to his ills.

  The graveside service was brief, and as it ended the gravediggers—two ­brothers named Cedric and Teddy Bush—moved in with their shovels. Teddy Bush, the younger of the two and somewhat slow, saw me and waved. I waved back and strolled down a path to investigate my new surroundings.

  Ahead of me, just off the road under some budding willow trees, was a black Model-T Ford. I could see a couple picnicking on the grass about fifty feet away. It was a pleasant spot, as yet unused for burials, and I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the place. I could see they were young, about my age, and they were just finishing their sandwiches. But as I started toward them, the young woman suddenly rose with her back to me. She had black shoulder-length hair and was dressed in navy-blue slacks and a blue polka-dot blouse. Almost at once she started running away from me toward the path.

  The young man seemed agitated. He jumped to his feet and called after her, “Rose! Come back!”

  But she kept running, and something made me run after her. The path led to a stone footbridge about ten feet above the swollen creek. As she reached the center of it, she seemed to trip and toppled over the stone railing into the water. Her sudden terrified scream was cut short by her gasping impact with the rushing creek. I watched helpless as she was swept downstream by the savage current, vanishing from sight before I ever thought of diving in after her.

  “What happened here?” Sheriff Lens asked, lumbering along the path twenty minutes later in answer to my urgent summons. I’d sent the young woman’s distraught husband to telephone him while I worked my way downstream in an effort to locate her.

  “Woman fell off the bridge,” I called back to him.

  “Is she a good swimmer? She might be taking a swim.”

  “Rose can’t swim at all,” her husband said, hurrying along behind the sheriff.

  “I’ll drive farther along in my car,” the sheriff said grimly. “I know a place we might find her. There’s a dead tree across the creek down there.”

  “Come on,” I told the husband. “Let’s go with him.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m a doctor,” I told the curly-haired young man as we hurried to the sheriff’s car. “Sam Hawthorne.”

  “Bob Duprey, from Shinn Corners.” It was a town about twenty miles away. “My God, if Rose is dead I want to die, too! We’ve only been married for three years—”

  “We’ll find her,” Sheriff Lens promised as he started the car, not bothering to speculate on her probable condition.

  We passed the grave of the recently deceased Matt Xavier, and I noticed only one of the Bush brothers was there digging. Teddy had gone off somewhere, maybe for coffee. The sheriff negotiated the rutted road with skill. Bob Duprey was silent until we reached the fallen tree at the edge of the graveyard.

  “There she is!” he shouted. “I see her!”

  I saw her, too—the black hair and polka-dot blouse caught among the tree’s dead limbs. Duprey cried out as I left the car and ran forward. I was the first one into the chilly water, clinging to the dead tree as I worked my way toward the body. The other two were right behind me and somehow we managed to rip the blouse free of the tree and get her to the grassy bank of the swollen creek.

  I worked over her for twenty minutes, trying to pump the water from her lungs and replace it with air, but I knew it was too late. Finally, as Sheriff Lens stood silently by and her husband sat against a tree, sobbing, I pronounced the terrible words. “It’s no use. She’s gone.”

  “If she’d made it past the tree she might have been O.K.,” the sheriff said to me. “The creek flows into Duck Pond and loses its force.”

  Behind us, Bob Duprey was repeating her name softly to himself.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” I asked him. For a long time he simply stared at her, wiping the tears from his face.

  Finally, when Sheriff Lens repeated the question, he replied, “I don’t know. She wanted to come on a picnic. I lost my job last month and she thought it might cheer me up. We drove over from Shinn Corners and got here about eleven, I guess.”

  “Which of you suggested having the picnic here in the cemetery?” I asked, while the sheriff got a blanket from the car to cover the body.

  “Rose did. Some friend told us how nice it is. God—”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Sheriff Lens said.

  “We were talking and eating when suddenly she stood up. Something seemed to have alarmed her and she started running away down the trail. The only person in sight was Dr. Hawthorne here. All I could think at the time was that she took him to be a cemetery employee come to chase us away—but that doesn’t explain her running like that.”

  The sheriff turned to me. “What did you see, Doc?”

  I described it as accurately as I could. “She just seemed to trip and fall over the side. But there was nothing to trip on. The path up there is smooth. I ran onto the bridge myself and if there was a wire or something like that I’d have seen or felt it.”

  “Did your wife ever have dizzy spells, Mr. Duprey?”

  “Nothing like that, Sheriff. She’s never even fainted so far as I know.”

  “How about enemies?” I asked. “A jealous suitor?”

  “Of course not! Why are you asking that? No one caused her death!”

  Sheriff Lens beckoned me aside. “He’s right. Doc. It’s an accident. You can’t make anything else out of it.”

  “The whole thing is very strange,” I insisted.

  “Look, it’s bad enough I have to put up with that nutty nephew of Xavier’s who keeps saying his uncle was murdered!”

  “All right,” I said, not wanting to hear about Xavier’s death just then. I looked down at Mrs. Duprey’s blanket-covered body, knowing I’d witnessed either a tragic accident or an impossible murder, but for the life of me not knowing which of the two it was.

  Sheriff
Lens came to see me at my new office the following morning. “Did you get the autopsy report on Rose Duprey yet?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I asked for a copy just now. There’s nothing at all unusual. Death by drowning. No other injuries except one or two bruises from the fall and being swept downstream.”

  “Could she have been drugged somehow?”

  “Now you’re sounding like me, Sheriff. No, her stomach was empty and there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in her bloodstream. She was a perfectly normal young woman.—In fact, the autopsy shows she was about two months pregnant.”

  “Pregnant!”

  “It does happen to married couples, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Did her husband know about it?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. Does she have any other family?”

  “Parents and a brother. They’re pretty broken up.”

  Something else occurred to me. “You said Xavier’s nephew thinks he was murdered.”

  Sheriff Lens nodded. “The nephew is Scott Xavier. You know him, don’t you?”

  “I think I met him once at a Grange meeting.”

  “Well, Scott says his uncle was murdered and Doc Fenshaw is covering it up.”

  “What does Fenshaw say?”

  “That Xavier died of old age and Scott is off his rocker.”

  “What do you think, Sheriff?”

  “Scott’s off his rocker, all right. Everyone knows that.”

  “Maybe I’ll go see him.”

  “You really want to find a murder, don’t you, Doc?”

  “Only if there’s one to be found,” I assured him.

  Scott Xavier was a grey-haired man in his early fifties who’d farmed some land outside of town until he lost it at the beginning of the Depression. That had seemed to unbalance him somewhat, making him see plots where none existed. When I found him later that morning he was down at the courthouse, arguing to have his uncle’s just-buried body exhumed.

  I rested a reassuring hand gently on his shoulder. “Remember me, Scott? Dr. Sam Hawthorne?”