Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (21 page)

And she left the room and the house with a merry wave of her hand. The two men hurried after her and Samantha followed them, and we passed all four a few minutes later along Caves Pathway, arguing and jesticulating. Mum didn’t honour them with so much as a glance. She and I were usually together on these walks because we are the slowest. This year we were in front, and well in front too.

“Are they coming?” Mum asked after a bit. I looked round.

“Yes, but quite slowly. They’re still arguing.”

“They would be, wouldn’t they? When is it any different on these reunion days? I could murder Bernard.”

“Well, we’ve come to the right place,” I said, but seriously, not waggish at all. “Sheer drop at several points. Hardly a soul around.”

“True,” said my mother, also treating the question seriously. “But murder is too good for him. I should leave him alive, to moulder in his horrible skin, with his horrible self and his awful little talent.”

“I think murder would be better.”

At this point in his writing, Morgan laid down his pen. Had he overdone it in directing suspicion on himself? It was a common ploy in crime fiction he had read. Probably it mirrored reality—policemen are really thick and do get it wrong, in all probability. If a reader took it too seriously he had only to read on to change his opinion.

He took up his pen again.

“You’re probably right,” said my mother. “But do you think I’m the murdering type?”

“You’re the Agatha Christie type: least likely suspect.”

“I’m not sure the police would take that line. I don’t get the impression they read Christie.”

“It’s about half an hour to Trevelyan’s Cave. Sheer drop from there. Half the suicides’ bodies are never recovered.”

“Little monster. Have you been planning this? How did you know that?”

“The South Devon Chronicle.”

“Shame on them. . . . I was telling the truth when I said I could murder him. . . . Taking up with that whore, twelve years after he ditched her for me.”

“I thought she ditched him for Uncle Tim, and you got him instead.”

“No . . . Well, have it your own way if you like . . . To go back to her, have regular . . . meetings in gungy hotel rooms—”

“Sex. It’s called sex, Mum.”

“I know, cheeky. Or I remember . . . Well, that’s the end, murder or no murder—and I think I can restrain myself from slortering him.”

I was afraid that was true. But when we got to Trevelyan Cave I was relieved that she went into the dirty little hole and sat down among the rocks. I stood outside where I had a spectacular view of the deadly rocks on Westcot Cove, and also of the path, winding its vert-something-or-other way up to the cave. I was looking for a little party of four, but I soon saw I was mistaken: the party had broken up, with Deirdre, Tim, and Samantha probably going back to the village and then back to their Manor home which one day may be mine. There was one solitary trousered figure trailing his way up to us. All he needed was a nap-sack on his back and he’d be one of your typical boring-as-hell walkers.

“Here comes Dad,” I said. Mum elbowed her way to the front of the cave and I took over the shadows. “He’s going to beg you to take him back,” I said, in case he did.

“He’s got a nerve,” muttered my mother.

But he didn’t do anything of the sort.

“I’m not stopping,” he panted, in the misstatement of the century. “I just wanted to say goodbye. You always knew Deirdre was the one, didn’t you? You always knew I was imagining her when we were . . . you know. It makes me sound a jerk, I know.”

“Not just sound,” said Mum.

“All right, all right. But I’m going to win her back. I’m going to go to her. Tim knows he’s lost her, and I’m not sure he’ll care all that much. He’s told me he always loved you, Morgan—Oh, like a father, you know. I told him to keep his hands off you because we don’t want his bloody Brideshead—”

I shot out of the cave, and the sentence was only completed with an “AAAAHHH.” When I was capable of taking my eyes away from the prospect at the bottom of the cliffs Lois was looking around—up, down, and towards the edge—with a gaze of total bewilderment on her face. I felt almost sorry for her.

“Congratulations, Mum. You did it.”

“But I didn’t. I mean I can’t remember that I . . . Did I? Morgan, DID I? Oh my God, I must have. What are we going to do?”

“Go home. Tell people Bernard’s been called away.”

My mother put her hand to her face.

“Australia! He was thinking of going to Australia. He’s writing some material for Dame Edna.”

“Was writing,” I said. “Of course the body might be found.”

“But nothing to connect him to us. It would be much more likely that he committed suicide, or just missed his footing. There’s been no one on the path to say that he ever got as high as Trevelyan Cave.”

“And no one to say we were here. Come on, Mum: Let’s get back home. I think Dad’s going to like Australia so much he’s going to be there for a very long time.”

Morgan stopped writing. He wondered whether it was totally clear what he wanted the reader to think. Well—not totally clear: This was a literary exercise, but one which could result in his being parentless and ripe for adoption. For a literary exercise, it was surely a lot more exciting than most.

When Morgan was called into Miss Trim’s office he knew exactly what he was going to say. The end of his father had been to a degree impovised, as he called it, but the broad outlines had been with him (as a fantasy hardening to a project) for some time. He could cope with the likes of Miss Trim.

“I must say, Morgan, that your essay bewildered me, even shocked me.”

“Oh? Why was that, Miss Trim?”

“I expected it to be a factual, that means truthful, account of what you did on the last day of your holiday.”

“You didn’t say that, Miss Trim. And I expect you know that my father is an imaginative writer.”

“Well, your father wasn’t—”

“He makes it up. I find it runs in the family. I get to a certain point and then my imagination takes over.”

“Ah!” It was a sigh of relief. “So you made a little play out of your day, so to speak?”

“A little story, Miss Trim. A play would be all dialogue and stage directions. I hope you enjoyed the story.”

“Oh, I did,” said Miss Trim untruthfully. “But of course it made me uneasy, since all the others were truthful accounts of their day.”

“They’re not a very imaginative lot, 6A.”

“Tell me, Morgan, why did you decide to write a story in which your father got . . . well, killed?”

Morgan shrugged.

“Well, it’s just one sort of story, isn’t it? They call it a whodunit. You don’t know till towards the end who did it. My father’s never had much time for me. Oh, he’s there if I need him, but he hopes and prays I don’t need him too much. Same with my mother. He cares more about the characters in his piffling plays. He’ll pack a few things and take off at the drop of a hat. You wouldn’t know this, Miss Trim, because he never comes to parents’ days or anything like that. Doesn’t care.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does. Some people find emotional things very difficult. Well, I think that was all. You’ve cleared up things nicely. I think I’d better ring your mother in case she hears rumours—gossip from your classmates or their parents.”

“They wouldn’t know fact from fiction,” said Morgan contemptuously. He got up and walked towards the door. “Thank you for being so understanding, Miss Trim.”

As he opened the door he saw her hand straying towards the telephone. His face was suffused with an expression of sublime self-congratulation. He stood outside the door, his ear close to it.

“Mrs. Fairclough? Oh, it’s Edith Trim, from Westward School. I’ve just been talking to Morgan, always a pleasure. Sophisticated without being, well, snooty with it. He’s written this essay about the last days of the school holidays, and he turned it into a really promising little story—he must be reading Agatha Christie and writers like that . . . Oh, he is! I guessed well. Now, there’s a murder, of course, and it’s quite intriguing and exciting, but I just wanted to tell you, in case rumours come back to you that he is writing gruesome stories which gave kids sleepless nights and all that. Parents tell all sorts of silly tales about any child who makes up stories. It’s really not that sort of story at all . . . I hope you can make it to the next parents’ evening, Mrs. Fairclough. We could have a good talk. And do try to bring your husband. I know Morgan would appreciate his being there. Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh, Australia. I see. Well, I’m sorry. We’ll hope to see him next term.”

Morgan heard the receiver being put down. He started walking along the corridor, the smug expression still suffusing his face. This was going to be one of those sub-genre stories, in this case one of those in which the wrong suspect is fitted up for a murder he, or in fact she, didn’t do. And it was going to be one in which the murderer is the one telling the story. Morgan was enormously pleased with himself for thinking of that. It was exceptionally clever, and something he was quite sure would never occur to a pedestrian mind like Agatha Christie’s.

Copyright © 2011 by Robert Barnard

Previous Article 
 Next Article

Previous Article 
 Next Article

Fiction

No Mystery

by Terence Faherty

Terence Faherty has three series currently running in
EQMM
: that to which this new story belongs, following a
Star Republic
reporter; the tales featuring post-WWII Hollywood P.I. Scott Elliott; and the series that launched his career, starring former seminary student and sometime sleuth Owen Keane. The first Keane novel,
Deadstick,
was translated into Italian in 2009. In 2011, there will be two new Scott Elliott novels:
Dance in the Dark (Five Star Press) and The Hollywood Op
(Perfect Crime Books).

That the story of the levitating rocks in Yellowwood State Forest had been reported first by a Bloomington paper, the
Herald,
didn’t bother E.N. Boxleiter, my editor. He considered our employer, the
Star Republic,
to be Indiana’s newspaper of record. Nothing that happened in the state, not even a gubernatorial election, was really official until the
Star Republic
mentioned it, in Boxleiter’s view. Other papers’ headlines were only slightly better than anonymous notes.

The headline from the
Herald
was a simple one: “The Yellowwood Mystery.” The accompanying story was a little more complex. It described how a man named Gordon Guilford, who was hunting deep in the Brown County woods, had discovered a large “boulder” high in a chestnut tree. Forty-five feet off the ground, in fact. This had aroused the hunter’s curiosity, naturally enough, and he’d returned with friends the next weekend. They’d located the original stone and while getting slightly lost on the way back to their car, they’d stumbled across a second example, this one in a sycamore tree. Since then, a search of the area by state conservation personnel had turned up three more high-rise rocks, for a total of five.

A Department of Natural Resources spokesman was quoted as estimating the average weight of the stones to be four hundred pounds. He also insisted, a little defensively, that the stones had been placed very recently. Otherwise, the forest’s civil-service caretakers would certainly have noticed them first.

The article was accompanied by a photograph that clearly showed a large rock high in a tree. The photo’s caption, like the story, called the rock a boulder, but it was actually a flat slab wedged into the tree at the point where the trunk split into multiple branches. The slab sat perpendicular to the trunk, giving it the look of a crow’s nest on a sailing ship.

Several explanations for the phenomenon were given, ranging from the impossible—that the trees had lifted the rocks as they grew—to the highly unlikely—that the slabs had been blown into the trees by a passing tornado. UFOs were mentioned, if only to be dismissed. The dismissing was done by the Brown County sheriff, who thought the flying stones were more likely the work of “kids mixed with beer.” Though why they’d done it and how they’d done it the sheriff couldn’t say.

His scepticism was seconded by a professor from Indiana University, Kevin Karnes, who was described as a “hoax buster” by the
Herald
’s reporter. Karnes scoffed at the idea that the rock placements were supernatural or extraterrestrial. He went on to predict that the hoaxers, whoever they were, would be “caught and soon. The mystery will turn out to be no mystery at all.”

Professor Karnes was the man Boxleiter had arranged for me to interview. I gathered that my editor was at least as intrigued by the hoax buster as he was by the Yellowwood mystery. “Get his autograph,” was how Boxleiter expressed it.

I visited the IU campus at Bloomington on a mild day in early December. Karnes’s office was in the Physical Sciences Building, which was on the same hill as the massive football stadium and built of the same brown concrete. The professor’s second-floor office had a poster taped to the front of its open door. It featured a flying saucer with a line drawn through it below three large letter A’s. Beneath the saucer were the words “Alien Abductees Anonymous.”

I found Karnes seated at a desk in the comfortable space beyond the open door. He was reviewing some papers while a dark-haired young woman in a wildly oversized sweatshirt stood at his elbow. She looked up at me, smiled, and nudged the reading man. He looked up, too, processed the information, and said, “You’re the reporter.”

When he stood to shake my hand, I was surprised by his height or lack thereof. I’d been deceived by the size of his head, which wouldn’t have been out of proportion on a basketball center. His regular features were handsome enough to remind me of Boxleiter’s joke about the autograph.

Karnes introduced the woman who now stood a respectful step behind him as his graduate assistant, Gennetta Jones. Jones wasn’t given any lines in the scene. I soon learned that, around Karnes, few people were.

“The Yellowwood business is on the Internet already, did you know that? A UFO website, of course. Encounters close dot com, or something like that. It’s listed right after a story on strange cases of dog amnesia in Wisconsin. And there’s a link to a site that claims the pyramids were built using a ‘lost science’ of levitation. I’ve personally participated in several demonstrations showing how large stone blocks can be moved around using a whole lot of manpower and ropes and pulleys. We conducted one at a limestone quarry over in Bedford last year. Last May, wasn’t it, Gennetta?”

The dark-haired woman, whose striking eyes were also very dark, nodded, though Karnes hadn’t paused for a reply.

“But people still cling to mumbo jumbo like levitation. They think that just because a task seems difficult to them, it must be impossible to accomplish without supernatural aid. Now they’re talking about levitation in connection with these tree stones. I guess some Egyptian priests wandered into the Yellowwood Forest.”

Before we wandered into the forest ourselves, I wanted to know how Karnes had gotten into hoax busting. I was just able to squeeze the question in.

“Via Egypt, coincidentally,” he said. “You’re about the right age. Do you remember all the pyramid nonsense that was going around back in the seventies? Not just levitation, but how the Egyptians had selected the pyramid shape because it focused mystical energy. How you could sharpen an old razor blade by leaving it in a pyramid overnight. That kind of thing.

“When I was an undergraduate, I had a roommate who accepted all that manure uncritically, just because it was in a book. It showed me how vulnerable people are to cons like that, especially people who aren’t trained in the sciences. It’s almost as though the human race has a genetic flaw, a fatal weakness for mystery. I’ve dedicated my life to attacking that weakness head-on.”

The woman behind him stirred slightly. She didn’t cough or look at her watch, but Karnes got the message.

“Right, Gennetta. We have to go if we’re going to visit the forest and get back in time for my two o’clock lecture. But before we head out, take a look at this map.”

He pointed to a cork board that hung on one wall of the office. Pinned to it was a large map of Yellowwood Forest with such notable landmarks as Scarce of Fat Ridge and Sour Water Creek prominently identified. Three red pins had been stuck in the map just above Yellowwood Lake. They formed a straight line running due north.

“The red pins show the first three stones they found,” Karnes said. “We call them the red line. Just to the east is an incomplete second line, the green line.”

He indicated two green pins to the right of the red ones. One was due east of the northernmost pin in the red line. The other was across from the southernmost red pin.

“You can see that the middle pin in the green line is missing. That should be where the rock lifters perform their next feat of prestidigitation, assuming they haven’t been scared off by all the publicity. The need to complete a pattern is a common weakness of hoaxers. It’s what will trip up these rock people. We’d better head out now. Who’s going to drive?”

We decided that I’d follow Karnes’s Range Rover in my Chevy, in case I wanted to head straight back to Indianapolis. I said goodbye to Gennetta Jones, who was minding the store, and we set out on the short drive northeast to the forest.

Another advantage of driving two vehicles was the break I got from Karnes’s voice. Unfortunately, we still had a hike ahead of us after we’d parked near Yellowwood Lake. It gave the professor plenty of time to tell me about his most recent triumph. He had investigated some crop circles that had appeared in a field of winter wheat near Hopewell. I remembered the case, though I hadn’t had a chance to check out the circles myself. I even remembered the solution, but that didn’t stop Karnes from describing it proudly.

“It turned out to be the work of the farmers who owned the field, two brothers named Happe. Alonzo and Albert. They’d read about the crop circles in England and decided to fake their own. So they could bilk gullible tourists, probably. It doesn’t matter how many of those crop circles are exposed as fakes; people still want to believe in them. Even some so-called scientists. There were a couple of guys from Ball State who were convinced they were detecting electromagnetic abnormalities in the Happes’s field.

“Electromagnetic abnormalities,” he repeated with disdain. “You can find those anywhere if you look hard enough. They’re the scientific equivalent of staring at a bowl of pudding so long you think you see the Virgin Mary.

“I came down pretty hard on the Happes. Did my best to humiliate them. To serve notice that their kind of fakery won’t be tolerated in
my
part of Indiana.”

If I’d had a map handy, I would have asked Karnes to point out his part of Indiana, perhaps using colored pins. He descended a little from his pedestal without my prodding.

“Not that I really accomplished very much,” he said. “The faithful are always ready to stream to the site of any new miracle. Look at this path we’re following. It wasn’t here the first time I came out. It’s been worn since by the curious and the credulous. There’s the first rock, about fifty yards dead ahead.”

I could just make it out through the leafless trees. At that distance, the brown slab looked like one of the wooden platforms placed in trees for deer hunting, though this would have been an unusually tall tree stand. As we drew closer, I saw that it would also have been an unusually thick one. In shape, the flat stone resembled an arrowhead, its two long sides about four feet in length and the shorter base three. It looked to be four to five inches thick. It had been placed so that each side was supported by a healthy branch.

“They matched the stone to the tree with some care, but as you can see, there’s no shortage of sandstone rocks lying around. Or of suitable trees, of course.”

Getting one of the plentiful rocks into one of the convenient trees had still been an impressive feat. I asked Karnes how he thought it had been done.

“With an old-fashioned block and tackle, it wouldn’t be as hard as you might think. A hundred years ago, every Hoosier farm boy knew how a block and tackle worked. Now that knowledge is lost, at least as far as the average undergraduate on my campus is concerned. Thanks to television, they know more about tractor beams and magic crystals. A bad education is a kind of slavery.”

I flirted with the ranks of the disenfranchised then by saying something admiring about the way the stone lifters had managed to form one perfectly straight line and part of another.

“No great trick,” Karnes said dismissively. “Not with GPS, the Global Positioning System. With a hand-held GPS, you can make any pattern you want. The urge to form a pattern is what always trips these bozos up.”

He’d said something similar back in his office. I asked him what he meant.

“It’s not enough for the average hoaxer to do this stuff randomly. They have to impose a pattern. That tells me that the motive isn’t just to baffle people. It’s to suggest that there’s an underlying intelligence behind these phenomena and, by extension, behind the universe itself. The need to believe in something big is a fixation for these guys. Their anti-rational cast of mind makes them the natural prey of a scientist like me.

“And as I said earlier, their pattern, whatever it is, is also the hoaxers’ Achilles’ heel. It suggests where they’ll strike next, like the gap our guys have left in the green line.”

I asked him if he had the gap under surveillance.

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t answer that,” he said. “I don’t want my arrangements to end up in the
Star Republic.”

Karnes offered to show me one of the other rocks, but I’d seen enough. Neither of us said much on the march back to the cars. He was saving his voice for his afternoon lecture, and I was thinking about my next stop.

It turned out to be Hopewell, a small farming town just far enough south of Indianapolis to have been spared the promotion to bedroom community. Something about the way the rock mystery had been more or less laid on Karnes’s doorstep made me think the people behind it might have a bone to pick with the professor. That made me think in turn of the Happes, the notorious crop-circle forgers. The men Karnes had gone out of his way to humiliate.

I located the Happe farm without too much trouble. I found the brothers in the shadow of a barn, changing a tire on a pickup. They were both big men, both in their sixties, both dressed in heavy boots and overalls and canvas jackets. The one who answered to Alonzo wore a brown ball cap on what appeared to be a hairless head. Albert, who must have been the family fashion plate, sported a hat of red and black plaid. They both looked down at their muddy boots when I mentioned Karnes.

“That guy,” Alonzo said. “He said we did the crop circles to cheat people out of money.”

“We didn’t,” Albert clarified.