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

“Not very much,” I told her. “Ulrika was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for desecration of a grave and disturbing the funeral peace. The others got off with no more than a fright and a fine. According to the statute book, they could all have been given six months. The court obviously considered Laura to have provoked the crime, and they may therefore have found the circumstances somewhat extenuating. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“And that’s the end of the story?”

“Not at all. You see, the week after this ghastly occurrence took place, I, as usual, went for my evening stroll. I put on the jacket I wore the last time I visited Laura and I walked down to the shore. I sat down on a mole, contemplating. It was windy with scudding clouds. The sea ran high and the waves dashed in and flooded the shore over and over again. There were drops of rain and I regretted that I had not put on my rain suit and sou’wester. I was on the verge of returning home when I put my hand in the pocket of my jacket and felt something.”

“Of course! Laura had slipped the diamond into your pocket when you kissed her feverish forehead,” my neighbour whispered.

“That’s right.”

“Don’t tell me that you have the diamond here and will show it to me.”

I smiled at her. “You see, I stood there and I looked at the sea-gulls. They felt, as I did, the storm brewing. I walked out on the pier, and summoning all my strength I threw that calamitous thing worth a fortune as far away as I could into the sea.”

“Calamitous?”

“Yes, jewels such as Kohinoor and the Hope are not calamitous in themselves. But our greed makes them so.

“Anyhow, Laura had a strange sense of humour and she proved it with the last thing she did. She was right in what she said, too: There are no pockets in our graveclothes.”

Skippy by Derek Nikitas

When he is not at work on his own stories, Derek Nikitas teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Brockport. His work has appeared twice in the Ontario Review, and when we last heard from him he had had a story accepted by Chelsea. Mr. Nikitas’s first fiction for EQMM is also his debut crime story, though in 2001 he won the Elizabeth K. Daniels Mystery Writing Contest.

* * *

It’s cold enough to burn. It’ll scream against metal. Never, ever let the children touch. Careful! Watch them! Kids will try snatching those milky ice pebbles from the cooler where the ice cream is stacked frozen, the cooler secured in the pickup bed just behind the tailgate that’s all stickered with Blue Bunny varieties. Some kids will ride the fender; they’ll grab Creamsicles and that perilous dry ice will rain down on the summer pavement and their tender flesh.

Your average commission will be a hundred a day, under the table. Headquarters is three miles west of Hammersport on a back road lined with empty cabbage fields. It’s also the home of your employer, Gregor Havel — a singlewide trailer propped by cinder blocks on a treeless acre. Each morning at nine sharp you’ll arrive to find three Mazda trucks in the gravel drive with their whitewashed wooden truck caps needing a fresh coat of paint. The words Prince Ice Cream will be fading away. Gregor will emerge from his tin-roofed porch, squinting at the daylight, scrawny in his hide rough and gray as an elephant’s. He’ll slouch in a haze of cigarette smoke. Out here the crickets will screech incessantly.

On your first day, ask if this is “Skippy central.”

Gregor will answer in a gruff Dracula accent — Romania or Hungary or something, you’ll guess. “What is this name ‘Skippy’?” he’ll say, coughing.

One morning deep into July when the sun burns dew from the grass and cicadas drone, you’ll arrive at Gregor’s to find flimsy cardboard boxes dumped across the gravel, wrappers torn and skittering in the breeze, bright popsicle puddles seeping into the lawn. One cooler overturned and splashed with the gray sludge of a hundred thawed desserts. Gregor will stand above it, unshaven, pistol in hand as if primed to blast a dying fudge-pop from its misery.

“Go home!” he will demand. He will turn toward the fields to speak. “They come at night to steal and vandalize — three times already this summer. I remain awake as long as possible, but still I miss.”

Ask him who did this.

“I will catch them. But go home now — there is nothing to sell today. I will murder them many times in the face.” He’ll rattle the pistol as if it’s bucking in his grip. “Bang, bang, bang! Yes?”