Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Newspaper clippings, badly yellowed, some of them spliced together with aged cellophane tape—

WELLINGTON, VT. MAN SHOOTS WIFE, SELF SUICIDE ATTEMPT FAILS

AREA MAN KILLS WIFE IN JULY 4 QUARREL ATTEMPTS SUICIDE ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN

GEORGE CONTE, 31, ARRESTED FOR MURDER WELLINGTON LAWYER HELD IN SHOOTING DEATH OF WIFE, 26

CONTE TRIAL BEGINS PROSECUTION CHARGES PREMEDITATION

Family Members Testify

So Sybil Blake learned, in the space of less than sixty seconds, the nature of the tragedy from which her Aunt Lora had shielded her for nearly fifteen years.

Her father was indeed a man named George Conte, and this man had shot her mother Melanie to death, in their speedboat on Lake Champlain, and pushed her body overboard. He had tried to kill himself too but had only critically wounded himself with a shot to the head. He’d undergone emergency neurosurgery, and recovered; he was arrested, tried, and convicted of second-degree murder; and sentenced to between twelve and nineteen years in prison, at the Hartshill State Prison in northern Vermont.

Sybil sifted through the clippings, her fingers numb. So this was it! This! Murder, attempted suicide! — not mere drunkenness and an “accident” on the lake.

Aunt Lora seemed to have stuffed the clippings in an envelope in haste, or in revulsion; with some, photographs had been torn off, leaving only their captions — “Melanie and George Conte, 1975,” “Prosecution witness Lora Dell Blake leaving courthouse.” Those photographs of George Conte showed a man who surely did resemble “Mr. Starr”: younger, dark-haired, with a face heavier in the jaws and an air of youthful self-assurance and expectation. There. Your father. “Mr. Starr.” The missing person.

There were several photographs too of Melanie Conte, including one taken for her high-school yearbook, and one of her in a long, formal gown with her hair glamorously upswept — “Wellington woman killed by jealous husband.” There was a wedding photograph of the couple looking very young, attractive, and happy; a photograph of the “Conte family at their summer home”; a photograph of “George Conte, lawyer, after 2nd-degree murder verdict” — the convicted man, stunned, down-looking, being taken away handcuffed between two grim sheriff’s men. Sybil understood that the terrible thing that had happened in her family had been of enormous public interest in Wellington, Vermont, and that this was part of its terribleness, its shame.

What had Aunt Lora said? — she’d been in therapy for some time afterward, thus did not want to relive those memories.

And she’d said, It all happened a long time ago.

But she’d lied, too. She had looked Sybil full in the face and lied, lied. Insisting that Sybil’s father was dead when she knew he was alive.

When Sybil herself had reason to believe he was alive.

My name is Starr! Don’t judge me too quickly!

Sybil read, and reread, the aged clippings. There were perhaps twenty of them. She gathered two general things: that her father George Conte was from a locally prominent family, and that he’d had a very capable attorney to defend him at his trial; and that the community had greatly enjoyed the scandal, though, no doubt, offering condolences to the grieving Blake family. The spectacle of a beautiful young wife murdered by her “jealous” young husband, her body pushed from an expensive speedboat to sink in Lake Champlain — who could resist? The media had surely exploited this tragedy to its fullest.

Now you see, don’t you, why your name had to be changed. Not “Conte,” the murderer, but “Blake,” the victim, is your parent.

Sybil was filled with a child’s rage, a child’s inarticulate grief— Why, why! This man named George Conte had, by a violent act, ruined everything!