EQMM, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I try to speak. It doesn't come out right. I swallow. Try again. “That's your plan?"

  He cocks his head to one side.

  "To make out I did it? To kill her, and make out—"

  But that same head shakes in denial.

  "I think,” he says, “we need to clarify some issues."

  It is only now that I realise what that strange object behind Dennis is. It is a ladder. There is no door into this room; there is only a ladder out of it. This reaches up to a trap in the ceiling.

  And at almost the same time I realise that the room is part of a pair; that the shadow against one wall is actually a space leading somewhere else. And that somebody is hovering on that threshold.

  "I don't mean your wife,” Dennis goes on. “I mean mine."

  The somebody walks forward.

  Michelle says, “I found the locket."

  * * * *

  15.

  At last she nods. All this is fine. Barring one small detail.

  "We need to unwrap these bottles,” she says to Dennis Farlowe.

  "Because?"

  "So he can't stack them. Build a staircase."

  She looks up at the barred window, about the size of eight bricks laid side by side, containing no glass.

  "You think he can squeeze through that?"

  "We're leaving him a tin opener. He might hack a bigger hole."

  "He wants to treat that thing with care. If he doesn't want to starve to death.” But he concedes that she has a point. “You're right, though. We'll unwrap them."

  In fact, she does this after he leaves. Leaves to return home, to find out what David's up to. To give him a nudge in the direction of the postcard.

  Some things are best not left to chance.

  * * * *

  16.

  "I believed you,” she says. “For so long, I believed you. I mean, I always knew you had a thing for Jane—I'd have had to be blind not to—but I honestly, truly didn't think you'd killed her. Raped and killed her."

  I so much want to reply to this, to deliver a devastating refutation, but what can I say? What can I say? That I never wanted it to happen? That would sound lame, in the circumstances. Of course I never wanted it to happen. Look where it's left me.

  "But then I found her locket, where you'd kept it all these years. Behind that tile in the bathroom. Dear God, I thought. What's this? What's this?"

  Jane and I had grown close, and that's the truth of it. But there are missteps in any relationship, and it's possible that I misread certain signs. But I never wanted any of it to happen. Or have I already said that?

  "But Dennis recognised it."

  And there you go. What precisely is going on with you and Dennis? I should ask. Am I supposed to lie here while she reveals how close they've become? But lie here is all I can do. My limbs are like tree trunks. There is an itch at my neck, where Dennis stuck me with his needle.

  "And those other women,” she continues. “The way you made it look random—the way you killed them to make it look random. How can you live with yourself, David? How could I have lived with you? You know what everyone thinks when this happens. They always think the same thing—that she must have known. They'll think I must have known."

  So it's all about you, I want to tell her. But don't.

  "You told me you were at a conference."

  Well, I could hardly tell you where I really was. I was doing it for us, can't you see that? To take Jane's story and put it at a remove, so we could continue with our lives. Besides, I was at a conference. Or registered at one, anyway; was there enough to make my presence felt. It passed muster, didn't it? Or it did until Dennis came back and poured poison in your ear.

  Did you really just find the locket, Michelle? Or did you go looking for it? It was the one keepsake I allowed myself. Everything else, all those events of twelve years ago—my seven-year itch—they happened to somebody else. Or might as well have done.

  And I thought things were okay again. That's why I came looking for you. I didn't think your disappearance had anything to do with all that. All that was over long ago. And you said you loved me—in your note, you said I love you. Or was that just part of your trap?

  And now Dennis says, “She's right, you know. All this will reflect on her. It always does. And that's not right. You destroyed my life, you ended Jane's. You killed those other poor women. You can't destroy Michelle's, too. We won't let you."

  At last I find my voice again. “You're going to kill me."

  "No,” Dennis says. “We're going to leave you alone."

  And very soon afterwards, that's exactly what they do.

  * * * *

  I sometimes wonder whether anyone is looking for me, but not for long. They'll have parked my car far away, near an unpredictable body of water, the kind which rarely returns its victims. Besides, everyone I spoke to thought Michelle had disappeared of her own accord—only I believed otherwise; only I attached weight to the clue so carefully left me. I remember the conversation with her sister, and it occurs to me that of course Michelle had spoken to her—of course Elizabeth knew Michelle was fine. She had promised not to breathe a word to me, that was all. Just one more thing to be produced in evidence when Michelle returns, and I do not.

  She hadn't known I'd take it so hard, she'll say.

  I never imagined he'd take his own life—

  Meanwhile, I have drunk one hundred and three two-litre bottles of water, eaten eighty-nine tins of tuna fish, forty-seven of baked beans, ninety-four of corned beef. There are many hundreds left. Possibly thousands. I do not have the will to count them.

  I already know there's a lifetime's supply.

  Copyright © 2009 Mick Herron

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  Fiction: SEA CHANGE by Brynn Bonner

  In 2007, Brynn Bonner's story “Jangle,” the first outing for her series sleuth Session Seabolt, owner of a vintage vinyl record shop, made our readers’ top ten list in the EQMM Readers Award competition. Since then, the pseudonymous Bonner has begun work on a novel featuring the character, and she promises us more stories in the series soon. She lives in Cary, North Carolina, and began her writing career in our Department of Stories. She won the Robert L. Fish Award for her first short story.

  "You know that old expression Things could be worse?" I ask.

  "Yes,” Julia answers, hope radiating from her face—at least the parts the blindfold isn't covering.

  "Well, it doesn't apply here,” I tell her. One thing you should know about me right up front, I don't believe in sugar-coating things."

  "Very witty, Isabelle,” Julia shoots back, each word brittle as an icicle. “I'm scared, Izzy, stop being such a wiseass and tell me what you see."

  This is unusually snarky for Julia. She's normally a cupcake, but these aren't normal circumstances.

  "Okay,” I say, tilting my head so I can see out the slit I've worked clear of my own blindfold, “we're on a boat, we were right about that. But we're not tied up at a dock, so all our hysterical-woman screaming for the past hour has been for nothing. I think we're asea, nothing but water out this porthole. So that narrows it down. We're somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, or could be the Pacific, and we're off the coast of Argentina—or maybe Chile."

  "Why me?” Julia whimpers. This is Julia's go-to response. She is the center of every calamity. Which is okay, it's what makes her an asset to our business partnership. I can be a little brusque—or so I'm told—and Julia balances that out by being oh so very empathetic.

  In Julia's personal life, however, that trait doesn't serve her well. Her life is like an eight-track of country songs—a continuous loop of she's-a-good-woman-wasted-on-a-no-account-man—in all its variations. Which is one reason we'd ended up taking this case in the first place, now that I think of it. Her latest poor choice in men turned out to have a bad case of cheatin’ heart, not to mention more southerly latitudes of his anatomy. Julia had been heartbroken—again—and wanted to get as fa
r away from him as possible. So we'd accepted this case that took us out of the country, which we don't normally do seeing as how our foreign-language skills are limited to putting in a successful order at the Taco Bell drive-through.

  We're insurance investigators—private. We're good, but frankly we're sick of the job—have been for a while now. The potential payout for this job had been too much to resist, big enough to let us get out of the racket. So even without Julia's domestic drama, we'd probably have gone for it. And it didn't hurt that Neil Compton had been the one who'd made the call to request our services. Neil's an attorney with one of the insurance companies. He's drop-dead gorgeous—with a hundred-watt smile and a devilish wink. He's recently divorced, and he's been flirting with me outrageously lately—and I've been eating it up with a spoon. Julia tries to tell me he's on the rebound and that's he's not right for me. I tell her maybe he's not Mr. Right, but he'd make a truly fine Mr. Right-Now.

  All four insurance companies had offered a percentage of the recovery if we could track down Mrs. Verena Walters Maratea—recently deceased according to the authorities down here—and bring back solid evidence of her miraculous return to the land of the living. I have to admit, it was greed, the lure of great gobs of greenbacks, that was the real reason we were in this fix. We figured that with that kind of cash I could open the camera store I'd always dreamt of and Julia would get her bridal shop.

  From my current vantage point, however, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and apparently adrift at sea in a rusty tub, it seemed things hadn't worked out exactly as planned.

  "What else do you see, Izzy?” Julia asked with an urgency I knew would soon turn her end of the conversation into a chain-saw whine. “Can you tell where we are?"

  "Julia, I've only got one little peephole worked free, and that's taken me an hour of rubbing my face against this putrid carpeting, so don't start with me."

  Her reply was a tiny, strangled “Ooooh.” Here it came. “Why do you have to be so bitchy?” she wailed. “You know I was already in a tender place before we ever left North Carolina, and this is just the last straw. This is just too much. I don't think I can bear any more."

  I tilt my head so I can see out of the tiny opening and look around the cabin. It looks about like it smells. “What's your alternative, Julia?” I ask distractedly. “You can't even kill yourself in the predicament you're in right now, so just get a grip."

  Now I know that sounds harsh, but you'd have to know Julia. Everything with her is high opera. She's been that way since kindergarten. The only time I ever really worried about her was back when her first bad choice in men, Willy—the one she'd inexplicably paraded to the altar with—left her. He'd gone to the store for a pack of cigarettes and never come back—the man was a walking cliché.

  But Julia had been convinced he was being held hostage, enduring unimaginable torture as each day passed. That's what got us started in this business, actually. When the police gave up the search—which was pretty early in the game, since they see a good number of husbands go out shopping for that escape-hatch pack of smokes—we started our own investigation. We stumbled along at first, but we're quick studies and we dogged the trail all the way to Las Vegas, where we found Willy B. Underwood dealing blackjack in a run-down casino and shacked up with an equally run-down chorus girl.

  Julia was calm as a stone. I was truly afraid—not for Julia, but for Willy B. and that chorus girl. I clicked out four rolls of film documenting Willy's new lifestyle and got Julia on a plane back to North Carolina lickety-split to file her divorce papers. During that whole period Julia was quiet and subdued. I worried.

  It took time, but eventually her whine came back and she started going out with a new string of losers. She was herself again. I don't worry about Julia as long as she's fussing.

  We both grew up in the Piedmont of North Carolina, which is not an asset right now. As lifelong landlubbers, neither of us knows diddly-squat about boats.

  I angle my head this way and that like a lizard, scanning the room for something to cut us loose. “Julia, I see some cabinets on the other side of the compartment. If we can wiggle over and get the doors open, maybe we can rub the ropes against the door's edge."

  "Oh, Izzy, that'll take forever."

  "You rushing off somewhere?"

  "Fine,” she says with an exaggerated sigh. “But I don't know which way theother side is. I can't see a thing, remember?"

  "Right,” I say, plopping back down beside her. Above Julia's protests that the blindfold bandanas are icky, we start in with what surely would have looked like some primate grooming ritual if there'd been anyone there to see it. We use our teeth, biting at the blindfolds and pulling until we each have one eye completely exposed. With my short brown hair sticking up everywhere, Julia's long blond tresses matted and tangled, and our faces covered with grease and smut, we look like a couple of psychotic pirates. Another fifteen minutes of wiggling, writhing, and butt-bumping and we are in a semi-sitting position with our backs to the cabinets. We each get a door open and start what promises to be a long-term stint at rope-fraying.

  In the future, assuming we'll have one, we pledge we'll do more research before we say yes to a job. This offer had come up so quickly and the payoff was so startling, we'd had our bags packed while the question mark at the end of “Are you interested?” was still hanging in the air. And besides the money, I have to admit I'd wanted to impress Neil with our investigative prowess. Neil is always telling me how much he likes strong women and I want to show him I can be an Amazon.

  Who would have thought a place with a name like Tierra del Fuego would turn out to be like this? To my credit, I had looked it up on the Internet. But I've got a touch of attention-deficit disorder, so I get bored easily. As soon as I saw the name meant Land of Fire, I figured we were on our way to a tropical paradise and signed off the site. Big mistake. I really need to bone up on my world geography. I'd pictured us lounging at poolside, sipping something featuring rum and fruit, and possibly little paper umbrellas, brought to us by bare-chested waiters with six-pack abs and very white teeth. Not until we were on the plane, each of us with a suitcase full of resort-wear in the overhead compartment, did I realize we were going very nearly to the ends of the earth—the chilly end.

  I browsed the materials the travel agent had given us and realized I might have to adjust my expectations when the first photo in the pamphlet showed penguins waddling over an ice floe.

  "What kind of a woman,” I'd asked Julia, “would set up this elaborate insurance scam to run away to a place like that?"

  "A smart one?” Julia had offered. “Who'd look for her there?"

  According to the report, Verena, who prior to that time had regarded going to the end of the driveway to retrieve the newspaper as an outdoor adventure, had up and decided to go on a fifteen-day hiking excursion through Patagonia. This seemed odd to Verena's friends and acquaintances. “If she talked about wildlife at all,” said one coworker at the real-estate office where Verena worked, “she was talking about a hot club on a Saturday night, not anything feathered or furry!"

  Yet, there she'd been, hiking along with the booted and backpacked brigade, when on day nine she—or someone matching her description and using her name—had taken a fatal fall at Lake Grey Glacier. Or so four different insurance companies were informed by the family lawyer, who presented policies for two million each—with the accidental-death bonus—for a total of a cool ten mil. In corporate offices across the country, insurance executives’ ears pricked and they lifted their noses to the wind, detecting a whiff of something fishy in the air.

  The initial investigation found nothing amiss. There had been a body matching Verena's description, dental records, a death certificate—the whole nine yards. Still, two of the companies held out, risking a lawsuit, while they continued to investigate. The other two, including Secured Allied, Neil's company, had caved and released the money to the grieving widower, David Maratea. But they were not hap
py about it. They were hoping to reclaim the money if we could prove fraud. All four companies had pooled to pay our expenses. Neil had made the recommendation to pay up in his company, so he had a personal stake in this and was, naturally, following the case personally. Which meant we had a lot of contact, which was more than fine by me.

  David Maratea was an unlikely match for the flashy Verena. Serious and somewhat awkward, he was the service manager at the local Toyota dealership. Friends said his idea of a good time was to take his golden retriever, Ringo, to the park and throw slobbered-on tennis balls for the dog about a hundred times in a row, then come home and have a brew and watch a little baseball on the tube.

  A week ago, he too had taken off for Tierra del Fuego, and days later he'd transferred most of the insurance money to a bank in Ushuaia.

  I'm a good tracker, but I can't take much credit for this one. He left a trail worthy of Hansel and Gretel, his breadcrumbs consisting of credit-card receipts, phone calls, and reservations under his own name. He was either stupid or totally unaware that we were following him—the one not precluding the other.

  My arms are aching after ten minutes of sawing against the cabinet door. I need to slow down, get into a rhythm. I'm off balance. I'm hoping—really hoping—it's because the one eye is throwing my perspective off, but I fear it's because we are listing to port, or is it starboard? As I said, I don't know much about boats. Aching arms or no, I step up the pace. I don't share my thoughts with Julia because I don't want to listen to her whine go supersonic.

  "I still can't believe David did this to us,” Julia is lamenting.

  "Geez, Julia, he's our target, not a buddy. Don't call him David,” I say.

  "Well, what would you like me to call him?” she asks, and I note that she is not putting nearly enough energy into trying to fray her rope.

  "Call him something else; Satan has a nice ring to it,” I reply.

  "You are so judgmental, Izzy,” she scolds. “I mean, really, he seemed like such a nice guy. You heard his friends. He visits his mother in the nursing home every week and he loves his dog. He named the dog Ringo, Izzy. He's a Beatles fan, for heaven's sake."