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

“Terrible,” Elizabeth said. “He could have gotten himself treated.” She shrugged. “Quit booze, swallow pills, what part of that is not to understand? But the Sisters went too far. Right, James?”

I huh-huh-ed.

“So you won’t do nothing either?” (Elizabeth had picked up our double-negating ways).

I hah-hah-ed.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t horrified by what I was pretty sure had happened. Blame the Sisters? What do I know? I’m no part of a minority. Male heterosexual whites have it easy in Maine. We just bumble along, no need for defense. If white males would go out of fashion in Maine I might become vicious too. (This is where crime story #4 starts). We have a summer camp for city girls behind Bunkport, in the woods — pretty out there: a brook for skinny-dipping, a glade between the maple trees for campfires, some low hills for enjoying the views, a landscaped moss-and-shrub garden, Chinese style. And there are some comfortable lodges that belong to a trust set up by a long-dead wealthy lady. City girls can let go there, have themselves a nice vacation. But some of our trailer-trash rednecks liked to bother the girls for being different. The machos set fire to a lodge, punctured some tires, tore up tents, then raped a few of the young and pretty. There were no charges pressed, but Sheriff stepped in anyway, making arrests for DUI, driving to endanger, assaulting a police officer, and managed to hand out jail time. Enraged, the boys tried again, but this time the summer ladies contacted the Sisters by cell phone and before you could say Jane Robinson big motorbikes cut the boys’ vehicles off the road. There was some gunfire but no one got hit by bullets. The leader-rapist drowned in a shallow pond — I heard a whisper that some heavy person had a foot on his head. State detectives found no witnesses. The Sisters smiled sweetly. Beat-up rednecks claimed they had been drinking and couldn’t remember having bothered no summer girls. Black eyes? They always had black eyes. Broken ribs? Same thing. People get careless with baseball bats. Who were swinging the bats? “Sorry, Detective, it was dark, I had two beers, you know how it goes.”

Sheriff wasn’t helpful either. Deputies Dog and Sycophant knew nothing neither. Tribal fights, liquor, minor bruises, boys will be boys, but no one died, except the drowned guy, but then, being no more, he couldn’t press charges. Autopsy showed lots of liquor in the boss fellow’s veins.

“Rape? Murder? Them are big words around here, Detective.”

I didn’t tell Elizabeth about all that, not then, but she kissed it out of me later. I didn’t want her to get mad at me. We were having a good time. Intimacy can certainly be all it is cracked up to be. Shared laughs. Sex, ah, sure, sex too, but there is a limit to that. It’s part of the thing, what with living in the same cabin and all. Good cooking. Tillie the dog took us for long walks. We hired a piloted airplane and I showed her the bays, islands, and coastal mountains. There were more warm and windless days, another brief Indian summer, and we lay about naked on my porch, sunning our scars.

Elizabeth had taken my truck to the Bangor mall to buy female stuff. I had gone boating. It so happened that Sheriff and I met on the water. Sheriff keeps rum on his boat, in case a hauled-out man-overboard needs warming up. There being a chill in the air again, we made some hot toddy.

Sheriff and I go back a ways. Back to when his wife got to knowing me a little bit better. Now that Elizabeth is in the way he no longer holds it against me.

In any case, the point was moot now that Dolly, having done with the departed dock builders, had gotten to know a Mexican landscape gardener who looked like, and was therefore named, King Carlos (of Spain). Sheriff told me he had found someone too, way out in Bangor. Which was good. A bit of distance makes the contact more exciting.

Sheriff, as I figured, knew about the bleeding chair on the channel marker. Eugene, our chief illegal clam digger, just wanted Sheriff to know. There was no dead body when he spotted the decorated marker, but another digger had heard shots earlier on that week. The other digger, having lost his license for working a closed area, hadn’t bothered to go nearer.

Sheriff went out to check the crime scene but the chair was gone. The night’s heavy rain and gale-force winds washed the marker clean.

“You didn’t see no body?” Sheriff asked me.

“Me?”

He stared at me.

“No,” I said. “Elizabeth saw no body either. Just blood, cut ropes.”

“She is going to talk to someone?”

“I hope not,” I said.

“And if she does?”

“I never saw nothing,” I said. “No chair either. Chair? What chair?”

We drank hot toddy.

“The victim is Tom, you know that,” Sheriff said. “Good riddance of good garbage. Pity. Right? Now how about perpetrators?”

“The Sisters?” I asked/told Sheriff.

“The Sisters?” he asked/told me.

Sheriff had checked on the whereabouts of Tom Tipper.