The Mystery Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Mystery Stories

by Talley, Marcia

  Arriving at destination.

  The BMW’s tires crunched on the gravel as I eased onto the shoulder and cut the engine. Just ahead, at the water’s edge, stood a cluster of summer cottages that had been converted into year-around homes. A child of perhaps three or four rode a tricycle around and around on the blacktopped driveway of a white clapboard rancher adjacent to the pier. I scrunched down in the driver’s seat and watched the kid pop wheelies, my head swimming. What the hell was going on?

  Almost immediately, the garage door yawned open and a woman appeared, her hair a nimbus of gold against the dark interior behind her. I scrunched down even further. When I dared to peek again, she had hustled the kid into a car seat and was backing her PT Cruiser out of the garage and down the drive.

  B&B Yachts? Hah! I knew what was going on. Stephen was leading a double life. He probably had mistresses, maybe even wives and children, scattered all across the city. The county. The state of Maryland. Maybe even the world!

  After all I’d done for the SOB! I watched the dust kicked up by his girlfriend’s tires swirl down the road behind me and remembered a moment just before our wedding, at the rehearsal dinner. I had been leaning over the sink in the ladies room, touching up my lip liner, when Mama took me aside and in one of those priceless mother-daughter moments, came the closest she ever came to discussing sex with me. “Remember, Marjorie Ann. Give a man steak at home, and he won’t go out for hamburger.” Well, I’d been giving Stephen filet mignon twice a week since our honeymoon, so what the hell was he going out for? Tenderloin?

  When the dust had settled, I climbed out of the car, hoping that a walk in the spring sunshine might clear the sick visions out of my head. I strolled to the end of the road and stepped onto the pier. To my left, three sailboats bobbed quietly, water chuckling softly along their sleek fiberglass hulls. To my right, a half dozen kayaks were lined up on a narrow strip of sand, each stern bearing a TWHA stencil to show that they belonged to the Truxton Woods Homeowners’ Association. If I took one out for a paddle, probably nobody would notice or care.

  I reached the end of the pier and sat down on the rough boards, dangling my feet over the water. A soft breeze lifted my hair and cooled the hot tears that streamed down my cheeks. I turned my face toward the afternoon sun. As far as I was concerned, Stephen could take a long walk off a short pier.

  I sat up straight. Where had that come from? Perhaps the snowy egret elegantly fishing in the shallows had whispered the suggestion into my ear. A long walk off a short pier. I scrambled to my feet, brushed off the seat of my slacks and hurried back to the car to fetch MM.

  With the MapMaster tucked under one arm, I returned to the beach and selected what appeared to be the most seaworthy kayak. I switched MM to battery power, then laid it carefully on the bottom of the boat. I plopped down on the sand, rolled up my pant legs, removed my shoes, and set them next to MM. When I was confident nobody was looking, I eased the kayak into the water, climbed aboard, and paddled to a spot about fifty feet off the end of the pier where I figured the water would be nice and deep. I balanced the paddle across the gunwales and lifted MM onto my lap, my thumbs hovering over her array of buttons.

  I had been half listening when Stephen showed me how to set a waypoint; I hoped I wouldn’t foul it up. Following his instructions as I remembered them, I punched the MARK button to capture my present location, somewhere in the middle of Calvert Creek. When MM asked me to, I used the rocker pad to scroll through the letters, carefully relabeling my new waypoint: “B&B Yachts” and obliterating the old one.

  When Stephen came home from Vegas on Friday it was all I could do to remain civil, wondering with whom he’d shared his king-sized bed at the Venetian, wondering who had been his lucky charm at the blackjack tables, wondering who had been his partner for the two-for-the-price-of-one buffet dinner special at The Mirage. I could hardly bear for Stephen to touch me, wondering as his fingers caressed my cheek exactly where those hands had been lately.

  Monday night, no surprise, Stephen called on his cell phone to say he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

  “Where are you now?” I asked.

  “Just leaving the gym and heading back to the office.”

  In the background, MM chimed in. In point three miles take ramp right.

  I paused, doing my own recalculation. Ramp right. From his gym to the office was a straight shot down Fairmont. No right ramps anywhere in that scenario. “I see,” I said, each word a frozen shard.

  “It’s tax season, Marjorie Ann. Need I remind you? I’m working late. I have a lot to do.”

  Drive one point three miles then exit left.

  Where had I seen an exit left recently? Ah, yes. On the way to whomever lived at “B&B Yachts.”

  Inside me, something snapped. “Lies, Stephen. All lies.”

  “What are you talking about, Marjorie Ann?”

  I held the receiver to my ear, silently seething, listening to Stephen pile excuse upon sorry excuse while in the background, turn by turn, MM was confirming what I already knew. In a few minutes, Stephen would be heading down a dark, dusty country road, where a beautiful blonde awaited him in a white clapboard rancher adjacent to a pier.

  “Marjorie Ann? You still there?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, Stephen, you can go straight to hell!”

  “You can’t …” Stephen began, followed by, “What the—?” and seconds later by the nearly simultaneous explosions of shattered glass and deploying airbags.

  And MM’s voice, softly reassuring. Arriving at destination.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of All Things Undying and eight previous mystery novels featuring survivor and sleuth, Hannah Ives. A Quiet Death, next in the series, will be published in May.

  Marcia is author/editor of two star-studded collaborative novels, Naked Came The Phoenix and I’d Kill For That set in a fashionable health spa and an exclusive gated community, respectively. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections. A recent story, “Can You Hear Me Now?” is featured in Two Of The Deadliest: New Tales Of Lust, Greed And Murder From Outstanding Women Of Mystery, edited by New York Times best-selling author, Elizabeth George.

  Marcia is immediate past President of Sisters in Crime, serves on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and is a member of the Authors’ Guild and the Crime Writers Association. She divides her time between Annapolis, Maryland and living aboard an antique sailboat in the Bahamas with a husband who loves to sail and a cat who doesn’t.

  THE BLUE CROSS, by G.K. Chesterton

  Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous—nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

  Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valen
tin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

  It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d’instruction upside down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind”; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people’s doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

  But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin’s ideas were still in process of settlement.

  There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin’s quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot. But all along his train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat could be a disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or on the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting. The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver “with blue stones” in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by telling everybody about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out steadily for anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above it.

  He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously secure that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in case of need; he then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this side was broken by one of London’s admirable accidents—a restaurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up to a first-floor window. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

  The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

  Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not “a thinking machine”; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first principles. Here he had no strong first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a naked state of nescience, Valentin had a view and a method of his own.

  In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of going to the right places—banks, police stations, rendezvous—he systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish, went round every crescent that led him uselessly out of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had no clue at all it was the best, because there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the detective’s rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the steps
, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of black coffee.

  It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted; the slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on the table to remind him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to his order, he proceeded musingly to shake some white sugar into his coffee, thinking all the time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once by a pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire; once by having to pay for an unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through a telescope at a comet that might destroy the world. He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal’s, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic,” he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.

  He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come; it was certainly a sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for sugar as a champagne-bottle for champagne. He wondered why they should keep salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more orthodox vessels. Yes; there were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there was some speciality in the condiment in the salt-cellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he looked round at the restaurant with a refreshed air of interest, to see if there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin. Except for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the bell for the waiter.