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

“That’s hardly possible, as you can see for yourself,” the boy said crossly. “He always took at least these eight with him up there every summer. But they were here the day he died. I put them out on the shelves again so his sister could see them.”

She could look at them no longer. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She stumbled from the house. When she got to her car, she looked back. The boy was watching her.

She sat on her stepsister’s inexpensive couch. Books and papers littered the coffee table. Her stepsister, divorced, had a fellowship and was teaching a writing class in the evening to help support herself and her children.

One of the children approached Dana shyly with a riddle. “How can you tell if a glass is half full or half empty?”

She shook her head.

“It depends,” he said importantly, “on if you’re filling or emptying the glass. If you’re filling it, it’s half full. If you’re emptying it, it’s half empty—”

“The optimist,” his mother pointed out, eager to impart a precept, “would say it was half full, the pessimist, half empty.”

The child, suddenly bored, darted away.

“He was almost hostile,” Dana said, resuming the conversation the child had interrupted.

“Geoffrey, you mean?” Jane lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away. “Well, the rumor had him head over heels in love with Keller, and more than a little jealous. That probably explains it.”

For a moment she wondered if Keller had reciprocated the boy’s feelings, shared the attachment. She supposed he had. The boy did live with him.

“I met Keller the day of the fire up at the cabin, and I’m certain I saw those books there. Why weren’t they burned in the fire?”

“Immortal works, right?” Her stepsister chuckled. “Okay, obviously they were taken from the cabin after you saw them but before the fire started. He must have taken them back to the house after you had gone, although that really doesn’t make much sense. Whenever Keller moved, he always took the gems of the collection with him. Everybody knew that.”

There wasn’t time for him to take them back to town and then come back to die, Dana thought, but did not say so to Jane.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she agreed.

Later that day, at the university, again without warning — she was sure she had not been thinking of him — Dana thought she saw Keller in the parking lot. She only caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, but she had the breathless certainty that it was he. By the time she could make herself follow him, he had vanished in the jumble of cars. The incident left her perplexed and uneasy. She was afraid that her grasp on reality, ever tenuous, was weakening.

She drove with her usual care up the steep mountain road, but in her eagerness to put the blackened ruin of Keller’s cabin behind her, she took the curve beyond it too quickly. When she tried to slow down, the brake pedal went all the way to the floor without any effect. As the car started to skid across the road, she panicked and turned the steering wheel hard away from the steep drop. The rear end broke free, spinning the car around, and slamming it into the side of the mountain.

She was unhurt. She had not been going very fast. She sat with her forehead against the steering wheel and tried to catch her breath and slow the beating of her heart. She got shakily out of the car to survey the damage. The left rear fender had been badly dented by the impact. The familiar self-loathing seized her. Now she had wrecked the car.

She left the car facing the wrong way, crumpled against the road-cut, and walked the distance remaining to her cabin, where she found that the telephone book was five years old, and partly as a consequence, she had to make four calls before she got someone to agree to tow the car to town. She then went back to the car to wait for the tow truck. While she waited, she wondered what would have happened if the brakes had quit on her way down the mountain.

After a long forty minutes, the man from the garage arrived with a tow truck, crawled under her car, said her brake line was damaged as well as the rear fender, and he didn’t know what else. He said he would have their mechanic call her with an estimate in the morning.

As she watched the car being towed away from her down the mountain and the shadows deepening along the road, she felt herself begin that mindless slide into the anxiety she wanted so to control. The mundane activities of contacting the garage and dealing with the tow truck operator had preoccupied her, but now she was alone again and unable to stop the conviction that was growing within her: He had tried to kill her.

Jane would now be teaching her evening class, but she had to tell someone. It occurred to her that she knew almost no one in the town. She needed to talk to someone who had known Keller. Either the dental records were wrong and he was still alive, or there was some thing that was stalking her.

“I think I saw Keller today,” she said into the telephone.

There was a silence at the other end.