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

She would have to drive it somewhere and ditch it. Eleanor sighed and got the cleaning supplies back out.

“A woman’s work is never done,” she heard her mother say. Wasn’t that the truth.

Eleanor decided she would ditch the vehicle halfway home and walk from there. The car was a cheap rental that Lenny had somehow managed to get under false ID, and it could probably never be traced to him. That was harder than most people thought; Eleanor had learned this from Columbo.

Eleanor gathered the duffel, her knapsack, and the bag of garbage from the motel room. She wrapped the knife in a tea towel and shoved it in her knapsack to get rid of later. She rinsed out her mother’s good black dress, rolled it up in a towel, and put that in her knapsack as well. Standing in her crisp kilt and blouse again, Eleanor looked around the freshly cleaned motel room and thought the maid would thank her.

Satisfied that the car would yield nothing to the crime techs at the police impound lot, and still wearing the rubber dish gloves, Eleanor drove through the waning night to a quiet side street halfway to her home. She set the seat farther back and adjusted the mirrors for a taller person. Hah.

From the backseat she retrieved the garbage, duffel, and her knapsack.

Two blocks later she dropped the garbage bag and rubber gloves into a dumpster and cut through a road allowance back to the river. A dirt path ran along this side for miles and she could follow it all the way to her house. The sky was starting to lighten and the air was damp and cold near the water. She opened the duffel and looked inside. Even in the murky dawn the jewels glowed with an otherworldly radiance, and Eleanor recognized that this was the moment that separated the getaways from the convicts.

“Don’t go casting pearls before swine,” Eleanor heard her mother say as she threw the first handful of jewels across the deep river. They landed on the slick surface like a spatter of raindrops and were gone. The water ate the remaining gems and looked no less hungry for its million-dollar meal.

Just before her own house, Eleanor loaded the duffel with rocks and watched the river suck that into its murk as well. She could practically write the next script for Blue Murder.

She dunked her shoes in the river and wiped them as clean as she could in the flattened grass beside the path. She trod lightly across the grass, looking behind to see if she had left any footsteps. The sun was glaring across the field that stretched up to the back of her house now and Eleanor could see no tracks. Just to be safe, she stayed off the dirt path and kept to the scrub grass on the sides, right into her own yard and its cracked cement walkway.

Lights were on both upstairs and down, and Eleanor wondered if there was any chance she could slip inside without her mother noticing. Her mother always got up early, even on her days off, and no doubt had been up for at least an hour by now. Eleanor slipped into the garage. She dried her shoes thoroughly and set them on the rubber mat. She wiped the knife again and hid it down deep in the middle of the garbage, careful not to touch it with her fingers.

Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. It was as spotless as always, and devoid of her mother. Eleanor heard water running upstairs and realized her mother was having her usual shower following her morning walk. Whew. Eleanor ran upstairs, past the bathroom, where she could hear the shower hissing and the water pipes groaning, and into her mother’s room. Quickly she took the good black dress from her knapsack, shook it out, and hung it back in the closet. It didn’t look good. Eleanor bit her lip and nearly whimpered. Nothing on television had provided her with the information necessary to deal with this. If only she’d watched Martha Stewart once in a while.

Back in her room Eleanor looked at her bed with longing. She was so tired she could die, but there was just no way her mother was going to let her sleep. “You are not going to waste your life lolling about in bed in the middle of the day. Up, missy. Now.” That was how her mother referred to eight o’clock in the friggin’ morning — the middle of the day. Eleanor sighed and took her schoolbooks out of the knapsack.

When she heard her mother leave the bathroom, Eleanor waited until her mother’s door clapped shut. She hurried into the bathroom and checked herself out in the mirror. Her shower back at the motel had removed any traces of blood — or worse, makeup. Her hair was back in its two stubby braids, the Peter Pan collar of her blouse was white, her dental retainer was in place, and she looked like the most absolute dweeb on the face of the earth. Eleanor scowled in disgust and cursed her mother, though it was only lip-synched at the mirror. Bitch.

“What are you doing in there?” Her mother’s voice pried through the door as she rattled the doorknob.

“Nothing.”

“Well then, come out and do something useful.”