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

Gerald Pearce was born in England and raised in the Middle East. At the age of ten, he discovered mystery fiction, including EQMM, which was then available on the newsstands in Baghdad, and started to write his own stories. After attending college in the United States, he wound up in Hollywood where he wrote teleplays for The Wonderful World of Disney and many distinguished science fiction and fantasy stories. His first novel-length mystery was published by Walker Books in 1990. He joins us now with an engrossing tale involving a question of identity...

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Old Mac was dead, and only Tom Bell grieved enough to wear old jeans and a yellow turtleneck to the funeral.

The one other break in the solemnity was provided by Mac’s granddaughter Katherine, who was sleekly elegant in a beige dress, no jewelry, a white lace mantilla over her pale thick hair. Tom Bell imagined sharp no-color eyes watching her out of gray faces. So right for a girl not yet nineteen. Black would have been... ostentatious. He also imagined those eyes on the heavy-framed black sunglasses Katherine had worn even in the church. Been crying her eyes out. Poor kid. Actually she’d worn them at her father’s insistence to hide not grief but indifference.

The cluster of people who had sat through the service in the church Mac had never attended now gathered at his graveside. Middle-aged or older, gray-faced, soberly dressed, faces congealed into masks of corporate gravity, they were there, Tom thought, to say goodbye to a pioneer of times past and to fix him firmly in a niche to match their needs, from which he could no longer bother them.

Mac had deserved better.

Even after it was over, it wasn’t over.

People clustered at the cars. Strangers murmured condolences and goodbyes. Someone vaguely familiar pumped Tom’s hand, asked if he were out of law school yet, and reminded him sternly what a good friend he’d lost. Everyone muttered banalities, until finally, miraculously, the last of the gray people trickled away, leaving the four of them alone by the Chrysler Imperial in the gentle early November afternoon: Tom, Katherine, her father Charles McCauley, and his friend and the family lawyer, Alan Scherer.

Katherine snatched off the dark glasses. Her eyes were sky-blue, angry.

“Thank God that farce is over.”

She wrenched open the passenger’s front door and climbed in. Charles got in the driver’s side. He was an unathletic man in his late forties, with thinning hair and blunt features and wide flat lips that gave the lower half of his face an anvil look that was harder to read than a clock without hands.

Alan Scherer and Tom climbed into the back. Charles started the car and swung it into the sweeping curve that led out of the cemetery and into the afternoon traffic. He had refused to ride in a chauffeured limo and had given his own driver the afternoon off to avoid more dutiful gloom.

Tom said, “Who were all those people?”

“Members of the board and their wives,” Charles said. “A few members of other boards, paying their respects to the McCauley name.”

“He had friends, you know.”

“The old-timers are either gone or too far away.”

“Present-day friends,” Tom insisted.

“We didn’t need a crowd of beach riffraff.”

“Katherine’s right. It was a farce.”

“Not for your reasons,” Katherine snapped.

“We should have had a wake. With rock music and Mozart and young people. We should have celebrated his life. Instead we ignored it.”

“He didn’t think his life was worth celebrating. He killed himself.”

“You read the note.”

Charles said sharply, “That’ll do.”

He talked the way he moved, without haste or wasted energy. It gave him the inexorable quality of a glacier. He could put iron into a casual remark.

“About the note,” he went on. “What note? There wasn’t one, and we don’t want anyone suggesting that there was. As to the rest, we can’t run our lives on feelings. None of us can. End of discussion.”

Tom found himself saying, “Yes, sir,” automatically, lapping over Katherine’s resigned, “Yes, father.”

“Tom, I want to talk to you when we get home.”

Tom almost said, “Yes, sir,” again but caught himself.

“Okay.”

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