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

Sarah wondered about Val, how come she’d never married. Not only was she attractive, but she had a sweet temperament, and she was smart. Tall and blond, she had a terrific figure and played tennis like a pro. She coached at the indoor court near Essex, where she’d worked before they opened the shop together. She was thirty-six.

Sarah was forty-three. Maybe her question about Val’s not marrying could be answered by her own seventeen-year marriage. It hadn’t been what she’d hoped for. Having the shop had finally given her the courage to end it. That was only two months ago, so she was still getting used to the idea, but at the same time she wished she hadn’t waited so long.

There were other things she had been slow at discovering — like herself. She knew that her hair was her best feature. “The color of polished chestnuts,” her father used to say. It had a wave to it, so with a good cut and a quick blow dry, she could look like she’d just left the beauty salon. Between that and the eye makeup Valerie had persuaded her to buy on their trip to New York, Sarah knew she looked better than she had in years.

She was thinking about that, and smiling to herself, as she looked out the window over the kitchen sink. She had just finished rinsing out the mixing bowl when she saw a police car slow down and pull up in front of her house. She wondered what that was all about. Maybe the alarm at the shop had gone off.

They introduced themselves as Detectives Kenneth Reid and Charlie Player, Cranford Police. They were wearing business suits. They showed her their badges.

“Are you Mrs. James Fullerton?” the older of the two asked.

“My husband and I are separated,” she said. “Sarah Fullerton is what I use now.” The older one had an interesting rugged face and soft gray eyes. The younger one was tall and lanky, and looked like he’d be a natural on a basketball court. He called the senior man Kentucky.

When she thought about it later, she was sure it must have happened differently, but the way she recalled it, Kentucky said they had come with some bad news. The next thing she heard was that Jim was dead.

Something else must have transpired, she was certain, but all she could remember was hearing herself say, “Come into the kitchen. I have a cake in the oven.”

The three of them were sitting at the kitchen table. She looked from one man to the other. Something in their expressions made her think they’d been sitting there for some time.

The windows were open, and she could hear the kids next door playing in the driveway. She’d started telling them about Cindy Clarke.

“She’s a flight attendant, and lives near the airport in Providence. Jim told me that’s where I could reach him. I’ve talked to him once, but I haven’t seen him since he left two months ago.”

Jim had given her Cindy Clarke’s address and phone number. In case of an emergency, is what he’d said.

“What kind of emergency did your husband have in mind?”

“Something like the furnace giving out, I suppose, but I wouldn’t have called him for that, not anymore.” It was Kentucky who had asked her that. She heard the soft accent in his voice now, and realized that he was from the South. The nickname suited him. “I’m sure Jim hadn’t thought about this kind of emergency.”

She knew she had begun to ramble, and that her voice sounded uneven, as though she were in a car going over a corrugated road. She pressed her lips together.

Kentucky shifted in his chair. “Mrs. Fullerton, how did you feel about your husband leaving you for another woman?”

She stared at him, trying to think of how she wanted to answer that. If she told him the truth, she would sound pathetic. Well, she had been. But she wasn’t now. “It wasn’t all that new.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Jim had a history of going with other women. He had a magic touch with women. He would listen to a woman and ask her questions and make her feel that what she said and thought were important. Most men don’t know how to do that, and a lot don’t care to. Combined with those blue eyes of his... well, it was hard for a woman not to fall for him.”

The younger detective made a kind of clicking sound with his tongue, and Sarah turned to look at him.

“Sorry, ma’am. That’s a bad habit I have.” He pushed his hair back off his forehead. “I was hearing what you said. That’s a lot to tolerate in a man. How did you manage it?”

She guessed it was a question a lot of people might ask.

“It wasn’t easy. But it was different after I opened my business. I don’t mean that Jim was different. I was. I had something else to occupy my mind, and his... his infidelity... didn’t bother me the way it had before.”

She looked away then and thought about the shop, and how important it had become to her. How exciting it was to unlock the door each morning and step inside, knowing that it was hers, something she had built from nothing. Of course, without Valerie it wouldn’t have happened. With Valerie’s encouragement she’d taken a wild idea and turned it into a successful business.