Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Kentucky resident Gwen Davenport has produced several appealingly offbeat short stories for EQMM over the past few years. It is our good fortune that she seems to be concentrating on short story writing these days, but she is, of course, the author of many novels for Doubleday, at least one of which was made into a Hollywood movie.

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Hamilton Stone had been missing from home for two weeks before anyone I even noticed. He lived with his wife, Olive, in a mid-size city in a mid-South state, where he worked as a pharmacist in the largest hospital. They had a ranch-style house in a commonplace suburb and a male golden retriever on which, being childless, they both doted. He was forty-two when he disappeared and she thirty-nine. They had been married for fifteen years, during which they had developed a real hatred for one another — quite understandably, as each brought out the worst in the other: He was always punctual, she invariably late; he liked meals to be served on time and well cooked; she picked up takeout food and ate when she felt like it, which was throughout the day plus a midnight snack. Constant conflicts and quarrels served to intensify each spouse’s individual proclivities until, gradually, habits had become obsessions and airing of grievances had developed into temper tantrums. The little eccentricities and mannerisms that become endearing when the spouse is beloved were irritants that could start full-fledged fights. Since the Stones had no children and no immediate family except Olive’s mother, Mrs. Edna Treadle, Olive was overly attached to that lady, who had always spoiled her.

Ham Stone had sought solace in his hobby, which was model railroads. The elaborate scale model of a mountain railroad was his pride and joy. He had built it over the years on a platform which took up the whole basement, a space fifty by thirty feet. The three diesel locomotives and a log loader were bought complete; everything else he had either scratch-built or assembled from kits: depots, water towers, passenger coaches, freight cars, track-inspection sheds. On one end, on a spur at the entrance to a national park, he had opened a miniature railroad museum, displaying outdated narrow-gauge pieces like steam locomotives and refrigerator cars.

It was an expensive hobby, and a time-consuming one. Olive understandably resented the money and hours it required. Even Ham’s weekends and vacations had been given to the railroad as he attended model shows and conventions of model owners all over the country.

Sometimes while running his trains — through tunnels, across switches, over bridges, along riverbeds, into stations — Ham had imagined himself a passenger, traveling far from the basement room and from the sound of Olive’s voice into a world of his own, where he, Ham Stone, would disappear and become an eternal passenger, borne away on never-ending tracks. Alas, the tracks did not, in fact, end, but always returned to the starting point in the basement.

Nevertheless, Ham’s harmless dream of riding away for good on some future day enabled him to bear his present situation. Over the years he had carefully planned his imagined disappearance. A search through the hospital’s personnel records had rewarded him with a possible new identity: Frank Johnston, deceased, who had worked as a hospital security officer for fifteen years before his recent death at the age of forty-five. Frank’s whole life was there, laid out, every detail: date and place of birth, names of parents and grandparents, graduation from Central High, marriage date with name of bride. An identification badge was easy to come by, and Ham’s picture substituted on it in place of Frank Johnston’s.

Ham opened a savings account in the name of Frank Johnston and began making regular deposits, starting with the money he and Olive had been saving to pay off the mortgage on the house. Small but regular weekly deposits from his pay followed, until, over the years, he had accumulated about eleven thousand dollars. He was not a reckless or adventuresome person; he had no real intention of disappearing into the void of Frank Johnston’s identity, but the possibility of doing so, the knowledge that he had this tremendous secret from Olive, made life with her more nearly bearable.