Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Lorna, Lorna, Lorna. The contempt in her glazed eyes that last time, when I told her life wasn’t like writing songs. You can’t keep changing partners. Nicotine-stained fingers jabbed into my gut as she told me to get out. No one ever dumped her, she said, no one. And certainly not a two-bit rhymester like Steve Jackson.

I could have killed her right then. Oh God, how I wanted to.

Patty arrived an hour later. All the time I’ve been in this place, she’s never missed a day. Her love for me has never skipped a beat. She’s been so faithful.

When I’d finished telling her about my conversations with Alice and the doctor, she took my hand. Hers was knobbly, deformed by the disease in her joints. I closed my eyes, recalling the smoothness of her skin when she was twenty-one.

“So she has her scoop, something to help sell her book? Lorna Key wasn’t killed by her husband but by her lover, Steve Jackson?”

“By the time she publishes, I’ll be dead and buried. She’s made sure of that by taking a good look at me and having a few words with the doctor. No need for her to worry. A corpse can’t sue for libel.”

Patty squeezed my hand tighter. “I won’t let her do it. I won’t let you do it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I may be losing you, but not for long. I still have those pills I told you about. You must tell her the truth.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the one who always had a way with words.”

“Lorna deserved to die.”

“No, she didn’t,” Patty said. “I was just a jealous bitch who killed another woman because I was afraid she’d wreck our marriage.”

Funny, she’d never talked about it before. And I’d never asked; there was no need. I’d guessed her secret as soon as she came home that night, the stench of Lorna’s Lucky Strikes clinging to her clothes, to her hair, to her skin. She’d never meant it to happen, I always told myself. Lorna was just killed by an unlucky strike.

“She didn’t succeed, did she?”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek. “No, darling. No one could ever tear us apart.”

So there it is, Alice. How wrong you were. This isn’t a murder mystery at all. It’s just like one of those trite old lyrics of mine, you see. A tearjerker, a heartbreaker. A story about love.

The Forest Forge by Beatrix Kramlovsky

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert and Beatrix M. Kramlovsky.

Passport to Crime

Author of five books (two crime novels, a drama, a surreal novel, and a collection of stories), Austrian Beatrix Kramlovsky had an artistic profession prior to writing. She began drawing and painting at the age of three and became an exhibited artist (despite a prohibition against the display of her work) during the several years in which she and her husband lived in East Berlin. Since the family’s return to Austria in 1991, she has worked as an artist, writer, and teacher.

* * *

The clear light was like a promise, magic in its tenderness. Decades ago she would have loved it, sure of a bright future. But all that was past.

Her swollen feet carried her to the kitchen window. She looked over the garden, her fields. The freshly planted pear trees did nothing to soften her anger; they merely added fuel to her mean-spirited moaning about the mistakes of the young. She wasn’t able to admit, even to herself, that when she had ordered it long ago, in her harshest voice, she was enthusiastic about the felling of her eighty-four cider-apple trees. And now, as a chorus of humming arose from the season’s first swarm of bees, hungry after the long winter, it was as if she were hearing the noise of the cider fermenting, the whispering and bubbling of the barrels. Disgusted, she shut the window with an emphatic bang.

The telephone rang. She shuffled slowly to the table, shooed the cat from the armchair, and picked up the receiver. An unfamiliar voice trickled into her ear, adding to her indignation, and she was on the point of hanging up when a question made her pause, make connections, draw upon memory to produce the correct face. Wasn’t he ashamed of himself after all this time? That little boy, sweet and far too loud, his dirty soft fingers in her hand...

But that would be fine, she told him, the door was never locked during the day, he should just make sure he was loud when he came in so that he didn’t startle her. What did he want, anyway?