Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Up ahead, Bullock saw Miss Bright turn into a drugstore. He followed after her, humming casually, and locating her head above the display counters in the far corner, he drifted toward the humorous greeting cards, meaning to wait for her over a chuckle or two. But he’d scarcely begun to browse when there was a flash of light from Miss Bright’s direction. Bullock looked up to find a few wisps of smoke where her head had been. Bullock shouldered his way through the customers stampeding for the door and reached her aisle. It was empty. But on the floor in front of the antacid section he found a small cone of smoking ashes and the charred remains of a green raincoat. He poked through the ashes with his pencil, uncovering part of a brown shopping-bag handle and what looked like the metal clasp of Miss Bright’s purse. Bullock scratched his head. Then he shook it. No, by godfrey, he couldn’t buy spontaneous combustion. It was a trick to throw him off her track. Bullock ran out onto the street. But Miss Bright was long gone. With good old Mavis’s money. Bullock took out the envelope and ripped it open, meaning to curse the worthless contents. But the envelope was filled with bank notes, his twenty thousand and Miss Bright’s thirty! He blinked and rushed back to the pile of smoking ashes. Good godfrey, was this really the poor woman’s earthly remains? Had she really been as old as she’d said? Did the Blue Bread of Happiness really work?

By identifying himself, Bullock got the worried young woman at the register to give him a broom, dust pan, and a large paper bag. Then he swept what was left of Miss Bright into the bag. Any official report he made on this right now would get him laughed off the force. He was lucky there was a technician at Forensics who owed him a favor.

When he left Forensics, Bullock continued on out of town to the Mountie retirement home. Horseman’s End stood in a quiet pine forest, a collection of peeled log buildings on whose broad verandas, snow or shine, the old-timers rocked, argued loudly, and swapped exaggerations about the bygone days. Bullock parked and hurried inside the community house. From the first-floor auditorium the bingo caller announced a number and, immediately, a quavering voice that once might have cowed a whole camp of rioting miners shouted the name of the game. Shaking his head, Bullock took the stairs up to the library.

Sergeant Wesley Noonan, called the Sage of Horseman’s End, had spent twenty-five years at Cape Despondency, the most godforsaken outpost in Mountie jurisdiction, with nothing between himself and stark madness but an old ten-volume encyclopedia in the bookcase by the wood stove. He had read the set from cover to cover many times before reaching retirement. He returned home so happy to fill in the gaps in his relatives’ knowledge of the days before television that they were soon wondering out loud during the commercial breaks if he might not be more at home at Horseman’s End.

Bullock found Noonan, spare and pale, clear-eyed, beard like driven snow, sitting at the library checkout desk with stamp and stamp pad at the ready, his back to one of those roll-down oilcloth maps of the world Bullock remembered from grade school, with the British Empire in red and assorted Neilson’s chocolate bars floating like flat tops in the corner seas.

“Spontaneous combustion,” said Bullock.

Noonan’s eyelids dipped. He raised the ball of his thumb to his lips and used it to page the air. When he stopped, his lips began to move as though reading. After a moment, he looked at Bullock. “Dickens speaks of it, of course,” he said. “Dombey and Son. His English contemporaries claimed it came from overeating Tansy Brand Potted Prunes Jubilee. But the Continent believed fat people got it by drinking brandy near open fires. Leibig thought otherwise, and with him I once again concur.” Noonan fingered his beard as wise men do. “It so happened that the phenomenon figured in my last case here in Ottawa before my Cape Despondency assignment. Yes, sir, people were disappearing in droves that winter. Nothing left but smoking galoshes in the snow. Some said ‘polar bears,’ recalling those rumors the Tories spread during the winter by-election in eighteen ninety to keep the voters away from the polls. But that didn’t explain the smoke. I saw at once that we were dealing with the old fire-insurance scam. Yes, believe it or not, back in those days you could still find insurance companies offering double indemnity for spontaneous combustion. All a man had to do was take out a policy on himself naming a phony beneficiary. Then he torches his galoshes, slaps on a wig, and waltzes down to the insurance company to claim double indemnity.

“I was writing my report when a Professor Biggins showed up in a loud green-and-purple tie, claiming people were bursting into flame as an aftereffect of eating Dr. Athanatos’s Loaf of Longevity. Athanatos the Eternal as he was known locally.”