Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

“ ‘Picked’ is not the right word. But that’s another story. We were talking about Mark. He was seventeen when he disappeared. True, the danger years, but there was no sign ever.”

“But you must understand,” Michael said. “The night awash in beer, rivalry, anger, a sudden violence—”

“And my son was killed,” she said in a cold voice.

“There was blood,” Michael admitted; he sounded surprised. Yes, there had been blood. “Even in midsummer, it is very cold there in the morning. The light is bluish and the mountains are the color of lead. You can wake up there and see the very shape of your fears lying in a pool of blood.”

“You had killed...”

“Let me give you the situation, all right? This guy was in the camp. A stranger passing through. He joined the party that night. He made a pass at Judy, picked a fight. In the morning, he was lying dead in the tent, and the others were gone.”

“They would have had ordinary fears,” she observed, not unsympathetically.

“They bugged out. Mark had no head for alcohol. By the time he came to, everyone else was gone. He was left to... clean up.”

“The lake,” she suggested.

“The lake is very deep,” Michael agreed.

“But not as deep as deception.”

“Nor as madness. There was the proof, wasn’t there? Proof of what he’d always wanted not to know. Proof of the rumors about crazy Uncle Ben, who’d done something terrible, who was locked up far away, who could never, ever be released.”

“You knew all this and yet you left him,” she said, her voice dangerous again.

“I’m trying to give you the situation.” ‘

“The situation in which he died or in which he ‘disappeared’?” She began fumbling in her purse and Michael stood up.

“It was Uncle Ben, wasn’t it?” he demanded. “Mark’s father was loony Uncle Ben?”

“You see,” she said softly, “why it was better not to tell him. You see how much I had to protect him from. You do see that, don’t you?”

“Maybe you can see why he had to protect you, too.” Michael’s whole body pounded with his heart like a great resonating chamber, and a gray morning light suffused the Cafe Visconti, bringing with it the inescapable awkwardness of death. “Why life was impossible for him. How could he have told you, for God’s sake!”

“He would have told me in the end,” she said calmly. “We were very close. I can’t expect you to understand that, but he would never have left me wondering and grieving for twenty years. Never. You had an ordinary life, a conventional home. You have no idea.” A little black snub-nosed pistol peeked out over the top of her purse. “You are the very last,” she said. “After twenty years.” She raised the pistol, and, full of anger and regret and fear, Michael leaped back from the table and broke for the street. His bad leg slowed him, and she saw that the instant before she saw the car. She jumped up and shouted his name, and he glanced back — she would remember that he did glance back — but he had hidden too well, the past was too terrible, and all alternative futures too full of regrets and recriminations. He was still running when he hit the street.

The squeal of brakes and the thump transfixed her heart and turned her nerves to thorns. After a few seconds, she sat back down and laid the child’s pistol on the table. When the caribinière arrived, the pistol would be lying there, a harmless toy, and she would be staring toward the dark street behind her tinted glasses. She knew what she would say, something about a present for a friend’s child, a misunderstanding, a curiously unstable stranger. She knew she would say those things, though she was not sure why she should bother, for now she was not convinced that she had not, after all, made a terrible mistake.

The Mathematics of Murder by Michael Gilbert

Legal settings often enter into Michael Gilbert’s crime fiction, and it is a profession the author, himself a London solicitor, knows well. Mr. Gilbert was a writer, however, long before he became a lawyer. His first book was completed in 1930 (though not published until much later) and he was one of the founding members of the Crime Writers Association of Britain. His new story for us introduces a senior managing clerk to a firm of London solicitors who seems to know, or be able to figure out, just about anything...

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