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

Sheldon Blacklock had been sitting on top of the hay wagon for a good half-hour. It gave him the best view across the St. Lawrence River to the American town on the opposite shore and he saw Kit the instant she strolled across the main street and onto the big dock at Telegraph Point. Even with the quarter-mile of busy shipping channel between them, boats rushing across the border with lumber and grain and people, he was sure it was Kit. There wasn’t another woman for a hundred miles who wore a red dress on a Tuesday afternoon. Kit didn’t save colors for Saturday nights, she adorned her big curves with reds and purples and yellows like a crazy painting Sheldon had seen in a lawyer’s office in town. She would be extra dolled up today because of their plan, the rest of her beads and frippery packed for Syracuse and points south.

The furthest south Sheldon had ever been was the town he was looking at, Cape Vincent, New York, with its frame houses and hay dealers and grocers who could tell you the day the town got electric lights. His earliest memory was of standing here on Horne’s Point, the southernmost tip of the big Canadian island around which Lake Ontario spilled into the St. Lawrence River. Even then he dreamed of leaving the island for New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Miami, cities he read about in dime novels, where Prohibition made life even faster and things went on day and night. Where he was heading now that Kit had waved the go-ahead signal with one brash move, not repeated because she was sure he was looking. The sun glinted on her silver compact as she turned away to powder her nose.

“Put your eyes back in your head,” said Maddy. He had been looking at Kit so hard he scarcely heard his sister-in-law and his brother Everett pull up the buggy at the end of the island’s longest road.

“Just admiring the view,” said Sheldon, sliding from the top of the wagon, careful not to dislodge the well-packed bales. He was careful, too, of the loaded pistol in his jacket pocket, the one the man from Ogdensburg had given him the day they shot forty-two mallards.

“I know what you’re admiring,” said Maddy, “and I don’t know what you see in it.” She thought Kit was Jezebel, Salome, and Gloria Swanson rolled into one. All the island, even Everett, thought the same, but she was the only one who would say it. To think he had been half in love with Maddy, a slip of a thing with snapping blue eyes and a sharp tongue. He and Everett had taken turns dancing with her to Katie Greenwood’s victrola and partnering her at the euchre games at the church hall. Then Sheldon started guiding the Americans who came north looking for small-mouth bass and pike in the summer and Canada geese and wood duck in the fall. The hunters woke with a shot of whiskey and spent the day polishing off as much drink as wildlife and talking about the three things that mattered: guns, women, and whiskey. The Canadian sidewalks rolled up early and at night Sheldon ferried the Americans back to the Cape for poker and corn liquor, and he met Kit at The Anchor. She was nothing like Maddy. She had brass and laughed like a man while she matched him shot for shot of Jack Daniels, then used quick, wide slashes to replace her bright red Luxor lip pomade. Sheldon smuggled her bottles of Corby’s rye and Kit would laugh her man laugh and say she went for the strong Canadian stuff. Everybody knew she didn’t mean booze.

“When are you going to grow up, Sheldon?” Maddy scolded, the palm of her hand cupped over the swell of her belly where her first baby was growing. It was fine for his brother to settle down at twenty years of age, fenced in with a churchgoing wife and baby and thirty acres of passable pasture. Everett didn’t have the mind’s eye for anything bigger than an island eleven miles long. But Sheldon wouldn’t say that out loud, not in front of his brother.

“Shel, you should’ve waited for me to load the wagon,” said Everett, handing Maddy the lines and jumping off the bench seat, landing lightly on the balls of his feet. To do business in the Cape he wore his Sunday suit, the one Maddy handmade for him, even the tie, and his thick black hair was slicked down, making him look like a kid off to Sunday school.

“I needed to get moving,” said Sheldon. He’d loaded the big wagon before the crack of dawn and maybe he’d hitched the team too early, for the horses had picked up on his nerves and were fidgeting in the traces.

“We ought to make two trips, take the team and then the wagon,” said Everett, giving the horses a once-over, running his hands along the harness, careful not to get horse snot on his clothes. “Tony’s a little frisky.”