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

“Why are you doing this?” Geoffrey asked.

She could hear the anger in the student’s voice.

“I think he must still be alive. There must have been some mistake in identifying his body. I think I have seen him twice, and he’s trying to kill me. He tampered with the brakes of my car.”

Her voice sounded high pitched and unconvincing even to her.

“There couldn’t have been any mistake. Jerry’s dead,” the boy said. “You think you’ve seen him?”

“I’ve seen someone — something — that looks like Keller. I’m not making this up. Someone did try to kill me — just now.”

She knew she was losing his willingness to believe in what she was telling him — however much he might want Keller to be alive. And what if he wasn’t alive?

“Can you come up here?” she pleaded. “I’m in the cabin just up from his, the one with the green roof. I’m afraid he’s coming after me.” She was unable to keep from adding, “What if he thinks I should have died with him in the fire?”

“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

“Please,” she said. She did not want to be alone after dark. “I’m frightened of him — of whatever it is. You were his friend—”

“I have a cousin in the sheriff’s office. He can stop you from harassing me—”

The police. She knew with a chilling certitude that they would think her mad. But she had hoped the boy, because he loved Keller, might listen to her. And perhaps he could stop whatever it was from killing her.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please come up here. See him for yourself—”

The line was dead in her hand, but he had not hung up. Something was wrong with the telephone. She stared at it in frustration. She had to make the boy understand. He had to understand. There wasn’t anybody else.

She went to the window, turning off the light so that she could better see out into the night to where the road ran beneath the pale moon. There was no wind, and it was very still. She could hear none of the sounds that had become so familiar to her during her sleepless nights. She thought the quiet unnatural as she watched the shadows mass along the road.

She made herself concentrate. Now she was afraid of those pills in her pocket. She had to think clearly. The compromises she was making between her perceptions and those of others were breaking down. The gulf between what was real to her and what was real to others seemed to her to be widening.

Still, real things, measurable events, were occurring and would continue to occur outside her mind, regardless of her perception of them. The brakes had been damaged. That was fact: objective, verifiable reality. She had run over nothing in the car that she could remember, no curb or stone. She could think of no way the brakes could have been damaged by accident.

Had she really seen Keller? She thought she had, but that was not a fact. Suppose she hadn’t seen Keller but had seen someone who looked very much like him. But why would this someone try to kill her?

She tried to calm herself to stop the awful pounding of her heart. She really did not believe in phantoms except those of her own making, her own imagination. What she had told the boy she knew was nonsense born of her desperation. She had seen no perturbed spirit. This was a creature capable of physical acts. A man then. A man who must have a very practical reason for wanting her dead.

She thought of the riddle. When is a box half empty or half full?

Then she knew. He had not been unpacking those books as she had assumed. He had been packing them.

There was a sound at the back of the house as the glass in the door gave way.

She could identify him. And she was bound to see him again. And again.

“I read somewhere that killing a person was far easier than killing a duck. I have not found it so.”

He switched on the lamp at the desk. It lit his face from below, distorting the fine cheekbones and throwing his eyes into shadow. “You’re hard to kill. Not like Keller. He was easy.”

She was almost relieved to see him, proving to herself that he was real and not some spectre of her mind. “You couldn’t bear to burn the books, could you? Dr. Bennett, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a thief or a vandal,” he said mildly. “Those books are irreplaceable. After I set the fire, I used Keller’s keys to let myself into his house in town and left them there on my way to the airport.” He stepped closer. In the light from the lamp she could see the old-fashioned straight razor in his hand.

“I thought you’d died in the fire, my dear. You should have, but when I returned from Italy, I discovered they had found only Keller’s body in the ashes. You were the only one who knew I was there that afternoon. Fortunately, you naturally assumed I was Keller. His body was in the other bedroom. Poor timing, my dear.” He smiled sadly, she thought. “You wouldn’t think you’d be so hard to kill...”

She felt a perverse pride in that, and it was that pride that impelled her past him.

He seized her before she could reach the door. He caught her about the waist and swung her toward the bathroom.