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

He almost ran out onto the pond, but knew the ice was too thin. Instead, he searched for some rocks. The soil was sandy and not frozen, but there were no throwing-size rocks readily visible. He dug about with the toe of his boot and managed to dislodge a few stones the size of a walnut. When he had accumulated nearly a dozen, he set them aside and carefully launched each one at the bottle. He threw as hard as he could, wanting each stone to be deadly and purposeful, to shatter the bottle into a thousand pieces. The shattering of the bottle was important and would prove something, would relieve him of his sorrow and pain. It made sense to him in a way that none of the rest of it did. His arm grew sore before he made it through the dozen rocks. None of his throws so much as threatened the bottle.

He started back home, walking with his head down, trying to imagine the embryos of spring flowers beneath the slimy, mucky mud along the trail. He let his shoes get covered with the brown mud as he continued down the middle of the trail right through the worst part, since he didn’t want to damage any of those flower embryos. It was something like empathy for the flowers, as if he was another unbloomed, frozen thing, imprisoned in a cold place.

He was looking down like that when he saw the thing stuck in the cold ground. At first he thought it might be the tip of an arrow. It was pointed enough to have stuck into the ground, but it came out easily when he reached to retrieve it. He spun it around with his fingertips to see if he could tell what it was. It was gray with oxidation at the top, but was shiny and worn on the very tip. It had a round, cylindrical head with an opening that looked as if something had been inside, because it was not as tarnished as the rest of it. The other head of the cylinder had a spike on the end of it, long and square with a dull, rounded point. It was the tip of something all right, but it was too large to have been on an arrow. He put it in his pocket and continued on.

When he crossed the bridge again and came to the paved part of the trail, he stopped for a minute and used the pointed object to scrape the mud from his shoes. Up ahead, at the parking lot, he saw the woman letting the dog into the backseat of a small blue car. She walked carefully around to the other side, put the walking stick in ahead of her, got into the car herself, and then slowly drove away.

Watching her leave, Gene felt a great hopelessness, as if the old woman’s leaving was symbolic of his never getting back together with Vicky. The hopelessness made his feet stick to the walkway and he had to drag himself toward home. At the door, he fumbled for his keys and came upon the object and suddenly realized what it was. It had to be the end to the woman’s cane. That was what it had to be. And the fact that he had found it when he felt so low and that it came from the beautiful old woman made him realize that he shouldn’t feel so gloomy. This had to be a sign of good luck. He took it as a symbol of hope and resolved that he would try one more time to convince Vicky. He fondled the small hard object and knew he would find a way.

He tried to be cagey about timing his call to her, so he could catch her when she might answer reflexively and not filter the call through her answering machine. He spent the night turning the light beside his bed on and off as he kept thinking of things to tell her, reaching for the message pad on his nightstand to record the thoughts. The minute he put pencil to paper, his thoughts lost their coherence. At five A.M. Gene got up, put on his sweats, and jogged up to the 7-Eleven for a coffee and an apple fritter.

The phone trembled in his hands when he finally decided to dial her number at six-fifteen. She would be getting up to let in her cat and take a shower and might be groggy enough to simply pick up and not think about it. Gene held the notebook in his hand. The flimsy pages trembled and he knew the coffee had been a bad idea. He punched the numbers, all but the last digit. He looked at what he had written and decided it was worthless, decided to let it go. Somehow his finger hit the seven anyway.

It rang only once before she answered in a wholly awake voice that startled him with its cheerfulness. He had expected to have the upper hand, catching her groggy and unalert, but it was he who listened to her say “Hello” three times before he even responded, and then only to grunt out a “Vicky” which sounded as if he was trying to disguise his voice.

“Gene,” she said quickly, amazing him with her instant recognition of his voice.

“I just wanted to see how you’ve been getting along,” he said. “It’s been so long since we’ve spoken.”

“You know, I’m thinking about changing my phone number. I can’t have you leaving all of those messages and tying up my machine.”

“I only want to let you know that I’m thinking about you. There’s nothing sinister about it. You don’t need to change your phone number.”