Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Dream of Murder by Ruth Francisco

Ruth Francisco worked in the film industry for fifteen years before the publication of her first novel, Confessions of a Deathmaiden, in 2003. An expanded version of “Dream of Murder” forms the first chapter of her new novel, Good Morning, Darkness, which is due from Mysterious Press this September. The following is the author’s first published short fiction — a superb debut that EQMM is proud to bring its readers!

* * *

I found the first arm. The second one washed up on Malibu beach seven miles north of here. The rest of the body must’ve gotten eaten by sharks.

The newspapers gave credit to a jogger who came by later and that’s okay by me. I’m legal and everything. I was born here. But that doesn’t mean I want to talk to cops.

Two or three times a week, I get up at four-thirty and take my beat-up Toyota truck down Washington Boulevard to the beach. I go to fish. They say the fish are too polluted to eat, but it tastes better than what you can buy at the store and it’s free. In the two hours before work, I catch enough bonito or barracuda to feed my family and my neighbors for a few days. When I snag a halibut, I give some to Consuello Rosa, my landlady, and she lets the rent slide awhile.

Usually I fish off the jetty in Marina del Rey at the end of the channel because it’s quiet and beautiful. That’s the real reason I fish. My younger kids prefer to eat hot dogs, and the fourteen-year-old won’t eat nothing her mother cooks, period. So I fish for myself.

On the morning I found the arm, it was still dark when I got to the beach. The moon was setting over the ocean, cutting a white path to the horizon. I threaded leftover chorizo on my fishing lines for bait. I like to think that it’s like home-cooking for the fish who got spawned down in Baja. I don’t want them to forget where they come from. I threw in three lines, then unscrewed my thermos and poured myself some coffee. I was leaning on my el-bows, not thinking about much, watching the black night fade to gray and the low mist pulling back from the shore like a puddle drying up on hot asphalt.

Then I saw the arm.

It lay on the sand about twenty feet from the water where the beach is hard and smooth. The tide must’ve brought it in and left it.

At first I thought it was a piece of rain gutter like I bought from Home Depot the other day for a job. I climbed down from the jetty to take a closer look. I didn’t have to get close to know it wasn’t plastic. It was a left arm. It didn’t smell like the seals I’ve found on the beach or the whale from a few years back. That you could smell for a mile. But then the morning was still cool. I could tell it was a woman’s arm, white with fine hair. The fingers had chipped pearl and clear nail polish, which, ’cause I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, I knew was called a French manicure. There was a pretty ring on her third finger.

I probably would’ve taken the ring if her fingers hadn’t been so swollen. I looked to make sure no one else was around, then squatted by the arm. I touched the skin; it didn’t bounce back. It felt like a mushroom — fragile and a little slippery. I wasn’t repulsed, but maybe a little sad, like when you stop to move roadkill to the side of the highway and realize it’s an animal you don’t see much anymore, like a silver fox or a bobcat.

As I stood up, the waves pushed a white rose onto the beach. Most of its petals were gone, and it had a long stem like the expensive kind people buy to throw off their sailboats along with someone’s ashes.

The sun was beginning to come up; and it was going to be one of those hot spring mornings that acts like summer is in a hurry. I knew someone else would come by, so I went back to my fishing poles and kept an eye on it. In a half-hour a jogger found it, a white man in his forties running on the beach. He was working at it like his lower back hurt, and I bet he was glad when he saw the arm and had an excuse to stop. He touched it with the toe of his sneaker like he thought it might still be alive. That made me laugh. He reached into his pocket and whipped out a cell phone.

From then on, it was his arm.