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

By day an English professor at a western Kentucky college, Tim L. Williams still manages to find time to turn out a large number of topnotch stories in both the literary and mystery fields. His work has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin, and has appeared in many magazines besides EQMM. His most recent work in the crime genre appeared in Murdaland. He is currently at work on a new novel featuring the hero of this story, Charlie Raines.

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Five days after her daughter jumped from a fourth-floor balcony, Cheryl Washburn was back behind the bar at the Refugee Lounge. We gave her sympathetic smiles and larger than average tips and whispered that she was holding up all right. Of course the cliché about regulars in low-rent, dimly lit bars like the Refugee is that they form a patch-quilt family, and, like most cliches, it’s a lie. We worried about Cheryl because she was one of us but were secretly thankful that this time misfortune had found someone else. Hardcore drinkers aren’t family. They’re more like army buddies tying to survive a protracted guerrilla war without even the hope of a ceasefire.

I caught her watching me a few times, brow furrowed, eyes searching for something she wasn’t going to find in my booze-bloated face. Cheryl was an attractive woman, not pretty exactly but attractive. At thirty-seven, with a body that looked twenty-five and a face that was pushing fifty, she was no one’s idea of a traffic stopper, but when you looked at her in the right light, you could still see the girl who had turned heads before life, hard work, and even harder drinking had gotten the best of her. A couple of years ago we’d shared a bed. It was okay. Neither of us fell in love, but neither of us ended the evening by weeping. When you’re forty-five, single, and without any illusions about your desirability as either a life partner or a one-night stand, “okay” is a successful evening.

“You got a minute, Charlie?” she asked just before her shift ended.

I drained the last of my beer, did my best to smile. “Just a couple and then I’ve got to catch a flight to the French Riviera.”

She forced herself to laugh as she climbed onto the empty stool next to me. I knew she didn’t want my time, my lame jokes, or my condolences. When your twenty-year-old daughter, an honor student at the University of Memphis, gets loaded on booze and downers and jumps from a fourth-floor balcony, you want answers more than you want comfort. Most days I like my job, or at least pretend I do so that I don’t have to face the fact that I’m middle-aged and don’t know any other way to make a living. Chasing bail skips, running background checks, working mall security, and repossessing cars are all fine with me. But I hate it when things get complicated — when people in pain or trouble hire me with the expectation that I can help.

“You met her once,” Cheryl said. “She came here to pick me up, and you loaned her fifty cents for the jukebox.”

I didn’t remember that, didn’t even remember Cheryl’s daughter’s name. I recalled a few stories that Cheryl had told about her over the years: her daughter making the honor roll in high school; her daughter winning an academic scholarship to the University of Memphis; her daughter intending to study political science and pre-law. Cheryl was proud of her kid, and she had a right to be. A single mother who struggled to pay the rent and keep food in the fridge on minimum wage plus tips, Cheryl raised a kid who not only survived high school without getting hooked, arrested, or pregnant, but actually achieved something.

“None of it makes sense, Charlie.” She peeled open a pack of Doral 100s, her hands shaking like those of a very old man with a bad case of palsy. “Lea had her head on straight. She knew what she wanted, knew she had to work to get it. Then this happens.” She tilted her head and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. “It’s just not fair.”

Cheryl sat silent for a moment, smoking and staring at the tip of her cigarette as if she might find the answers she needed in the fire. I glanced around the Refugee. A few regulars were watching us, their heads properly lowered with a mixture of embarrassment and respect. For the first time all day, the jukebox had fallen silent, and no one seemed willing or capable of dropping a couple of quarters to start it up again. Outside of the clinking of glasses and a stray cough or two, the bar was as silent as a Baptist church on a Monday morning.