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

Number 1622 Lindero Lane had a flat half-oval driveway enclosing a manicured lawn with a couple of jacaranda trees growing out of it. The house was of dark red brick with a pine-green composition roof and looked comfortable but forbidding, protecting an almost fanatic privacy. A Gothic arch led onto a little porch. The front door looked capable of withstanding siege.

Things had been simpler, Tom thought, when he was just the gardener’s son who came two times a week to help out, trimming borders and weeding flowerbeds and raking lawns and hauling sacks of garden litter. Now, more than twelve years later, a lean slatty young man with shaggy dark hair and watchful eyes, Tom Bell followed the others onto the porch, wondering about the future without Mac. He owed the McCauleys a lot; the Stanford law degree was only part of it.

The front door opened before they reached it. Felipe, the houseboy, stood back and bowed gravely.

“Oh, cheer up, Felipe,” Katherine said nastily.

“Tais-toi,” Charles snapped as they went inside. He began giving Felipe orders. Katherine stopped in front of the hall mirror to remove her lace mantilla.

“I’m going riding,” she said to no one in particular.

Charles and Alan Scherer crossed the hall to the library. Tom took the carpeted stairs to the second floor, where he had had a room since he was fourteen.

It was the first room of his own he’d ever had, small, with a bed, a window, a closet, some cheap bookcases he’d added over the years. It had never felt like home — Charles and Katherine had seen to that — but it had been his sanctuary. Gratitude to Mac continued as gratitude to the room.

He changed his yellow turtleneck for a clean gray one, pulled on a light sweater against the approaching cool of the autumn evening. Better go see what Charles wanted to talk to him about.

He met Katherine as she reached the top of the stairs. She gave him a withering look.

“What made you bring up that note?”

“Why’d you bring up the suicide?”

“I despise quitters.”

“Hell, you just didn’t like your grandfather.”

“That’s right.” She pushed past him. In the hall the front door chime sounded. “Better get that. Felipe’s in the kitchen fixing Alan something to eat and Father’s given everyone else the day off.”

Katherine’s room was across the hall. She disappeared inside it.

In a swamp of irritation, Tom thudded down the stairs. His shoes made a more satisfactory impact when he hit the hardwood floor of the hall. He saw Felipe emerging from the direction of the kitchen with a tray and waved for him to ignore the front door. Felipe thanked him, knocked, and went into the library.

Tom grabbed impatiently at the front door handle, thumbed the latch, pulled the door open, and stared, suddenly disoriented.

Looking up at him nervously, with the Gothic arch behind her framing the two jacarandas, was a young woman holding a torn-open business-size envelope. She was speaking but he didn’t hear a word. Involuntarily, he looked back toward the stairs, then back at the girl at the door.

Same eyes, same mouth, same coloring. The blond hair was longer, more casual, her face more carelessly tanned, with a sprinkling of impish light freckles across the nose. The only real difference was money. This girl was strictly counterculture in a cotton blouse, a denim maxiskirt, worn thong sandals. Katherine had just disappeared into her upstairs bedroom and hadn’t had time to change her clothes and makeup.

So there had to be two of them.

The one outside was Katherine’s double.

He floundered.

“Uh? Beg pardon?”

“Does Mr. Charles McCauley live here?”

“Yeah. Yes. He does.”

She stuck two fingers into the torn end of the envelope and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. She unfolded it and offered it to him. Her hands were not pampered.

He took the paper. It was a typed letter addressed to Ms. Shannon Fargo at an address in Topanga. The return address was 1622 Lindero Lane.

Dear Ms. Fargo:

If you will come to the above address and ask for Mr. Charles McCauley, Miss Katherine McCauley, or Mr. Tom Bell as soon as may be convenient for you after receiving this letter, you may learn something to your advantage.

Respectfully,

Michael J. McCauley.

He looked closely at the signature. It looked real, and as though written with a real fountain pen, one of Mac’s foibles.

The girl asked, “Are you Michael J. McCauley?”

He stared.

“Well,” she said with a small grin, “I could tell you weren’t Katherine.”

“No, hey, I’m sorry. I’m Tom Bell.” He gave her back the letter. “You mean you don’t know Michael J. McCauley?”

“No.”

Tom said without expression, “He died a few days ago.”

She became very still, then dropped her eyes, made a gesture of embarrassment.