Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

He had the money he’d drawn out of the bank, and when that gave out he worked, sometimes as dishwasher, sometimes as farmhand, doing anything he could find to do. And he was happy all the time because Frieda was easy-going and good-natured.

He spoke about her as if she wasn’t dead at all. Sometimes he was jealous of her, and once or twice they’d quarreled when she spoke to a man younger than himself.

It seemed he was frightened of younger men. He knew that he was getting old and that some day he’d lose her to a younger man because she was still young. It got to be a kind of obsession with him.

And finally they came to that little town in Missouri, and nobody found them out. He had a job checking off grain bags and hogs at the river landing and it looked as if they were going to be safe and happy at last, because there weren’t even any men in the place more vigorous than himself.

They had a little house and were furnishing it from a furniture catalogue. And then one day he came home when she was out and found a letter addressed to “Miss Frieda Hemyers care of Mrs. John Slade,” which was the name they were living under.

It was postmarked “Appleton, Wisconsin,” and when he asked her about it she said it was from the boy who’d wrestled the baggage at the hotel in La Vallette, the same one he’d seen with her among the dunes. Later, when he asked her what was in it, she said she’d burned it and told him there was nothing in it — the fellow only wanted to know how she was.

But the thing stuck in Homer’s brain. It wasn’t, he said, that he was jealous. He had a kind of funny affection for the boy, even though he’d never spoken to him.

He kind of felt that Frieda really belonged to the boy if he wanted her. It was all mixed up in his head and he kept trying to think it out.

And then one day the river boat was a day late and he went back to the house an hour or two after he’d left it. He opened the back door but there wasn’t anybody in and when he called Frieda’s name she didn’t answer, so he went to their bedroom and found the door was locked, and all at once he knew what had happened.

For a moment he just stood still, feeling that he was going to die. He turned cold all over, and then for a moment he couldn’t see. It seemed to him that it was the end of everything, because he’d got to feel that all his life that went before was nothing at all and that he’d been alive only since he ran off with Frieda.

In his brain the thought was born that the only thing to do was to finish it then and there, and to finish it, he’d have to kill Frieda and the man who was in there with her, and then himself.

The funny thing was how clearly he remembered it all, because he was certainly insane at that moment. He took a chair and smashed down the door, and then, with a revolver, he just fired blindly into the dark room until the revolver clicked empty. And when he tried to shoot himself there wasn’t any bullet left.

It was an awful moment when he stood there in the doorway. The emptiness of the pistol seemed to bring, him to himself, and suddenly, because he was really a good man, he wanted to save them both.

But it was too late. Frieda was unconscious and dying, and the man was dead.

It was only then that he discovered it was the boy who had wrestled the baggage at La Vallette. He’d come all the way to Missouri to find her and run off with her.

It made him sick, and the funny thing was that the remorse he felt wasn’t so great because he’d killed two people, but because the two people were Frieda and the boy. If he’d known that Frieda had the boy with her, he’d have gone away quietly and left them together forever.

They were young and love belonged to them. He was old and finished, and he was left alive. And it was terrible, too, that he’d killed the two people who had set him free. They were the two who had given him life and he’d killed them. For a moment he said he had a horrible feeling that instead of killing the boy, he shot himself as he was 30 years before.

After a long time he got up and laid the two bodies on the bed and covered them with a sheet, and then went into the kitchen and put his head into the oven of the stove and turned on the gas. One of the neighbors who ran in to borrow some eggs from Frieda found him there.

He wasn’t dead yet. They dragged him out and brought him to and then found the bodies.

I stayed with him up to the end.

He didn’t make the least effort to save himself. If Frieda had been his wife they’d have let him off maybe with manslaughter, but of course, all their story came out at the trial and he didn’t have a chance.

But Homer didn’t give them any satisfaction. He was sorry he’d killed Frieda and the boy, but he wasn’t repentant about anything else, and he was glad of the two years of happiness he’d had with Frieda. He just sort of smiled when the judge sentenced him.