Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

I put everything back in the wallet as he’d had it arranged. Put the wallet in his backpack and left it there by the side of the mine, as if he’d taken the pack off before looking down, ignoring the warning signs. I dropped his flashlight into the hole, heard it scrape against the rough walls and then land noisily. Anybody could drop a flashlight. I brushed out the drag marks with my jacket, but it wasn’t necessary.

The storm that came during the night struck hard. Watching out the window of the motel room where I’d gone for refuge, seeing the rain pour down, lit in green and yellow by the neon sign and the security lights, I knew the narrow canyons I’d walked in were flooding, and that my footprints and the other marks I’d left up in Chloride were washing away.

Halfway down the trail I’d stumbled, fallen. Then crawled over to a small-leaved bush and thrown up what was left of my breakfast. I was surprised there wasn’t any blood in it. It seemed like there should have been, like a payment of some kind. But I never did pay for that decision made before I was absolutely sure. I scraped dirt and stones over the vomit, pushed myself up to my feet, and got back to the car without seeing another soul.

When the police showed up weeks later, asking me if I had any information that would help in their investigation, I was able to convince them that the sum total of what I’d known about the man was that he liked flowers and was an oil-policy researcher. We’d taken a walk together, shared, as they knew from the waitresses, coffee one morning and dinner one evening, then gone our separate ways. He had mentioned he was going into the Panamints.

The detectives told me Frank “Reynolds” had been under suspicion for “situations” across the border in Nevada and that I’d been very lucky — that they were certainly glad I was all right. I assured them I was. Same as I told myself, every sleepless night.

The Bleeding Chair by Janwillem van de Wetering

Though he was Dutch-born and his most popular detective fiction featured Grijpstra and de Gier, a pair of Amsterdam police officers, we never considered publishing Janwillem van de Wetering in our Passport to Crime department. That’s because the author was so fluent in English that he could write a story like the following in English, without any help from a translator or editor. Sadly, this longtime contributor to EQMM died several months ago. This may well be his last published story.

* * *

Let me introduce myself. Hi, I’m James. It’s too nice a name for me so I prefer to be called Vetty, short for “veteran.”

I got “veteran” on my license plate, too. As I swapped a leg for a medal, the pickup truck also sports one of those blue invalid cards.

Silly, I know. Like I want to advertise that there is something special about me, that I bravely fought for my country, losing a useful limb. That there is value to my being around here. While, in truth, I pride myself on my knowledge, okay, let’s say “strong suspicion,” that there is not.

I merely exist, I will tell the crowd at the Thirsty Dolphin. I am aimlessly adrift in the universe, on a desolate, but beautiful — especially now, because it’s the midst of winter — part of the Downeast Coast of the state of Maine, U.S.A.

Bunkport is my hometown. Small to middling, as Maine towns go. Fiercely Puritan once, but there’s been some intermingling with other tribes. An ongoing process that leads to exchange of ideas, differences in practice, adjustment of attitudes, that sort of thing.

The Thirsty Dolphin’s Bunkport’s only watering hole. Where the action is. The contemplation of action, rather. It is owned by Priscilla, a person of great wisdom and charm, weighing more than any human scale can measure. We all respect Priscilla, because she keeps an aluminum baseball bat under the counter and will not put up with either language, attitude, nudity, or violence that go beyond flexible local standards.

I’m not unhappily adrift, I tell my audience, who are willing to listen when I promise to pay for the next round of Priscilla’s cheaper draft. On the contrary, I tell them, I would be unhappy if I did have an aim. A purpose. A goal. You see, I figure that if I did want to get somewhere, reach some benchmark, I would be unhappy, miserable, outright depressed. Even, especially, if I crossed that line.

Then what?