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

Still keeping hold of him, she led him across the patio and over a stretch of lawn to the tiled surround of the pool. She pointed into it.

A breeze was sending ripples across the surface and for a moment Mitch thought the body underneath was struggling. It was not. Sam Coldharbour, roped to the lounger, his face still covered by the oily rag, was motionless at the bottom. The water was only a metre or so in depth, but sufficient to have drowned him.

Mitch turned to look at Danny, his eyes huge with the horror of what was down there. “We only tied him up. We didn’t do that.”

“I know,” said Danny.

Mitch glanced down at the smooth surface of the tiled surround and saw how simple it must have been to push the lounger over the edge. He knew what Danny had done, and he knew why. But he stopped himself from speaking prematurely. He turned away from the pool, biting his lip. Finally he said in his usual considered way, “It must have moved because he was wriggling. He wriggled to try and get free and it sort of moved. He couldn’t see where it was going. It was an accident.”

His eyes glistened. He despised himself, even when Danny squeezed his arm.

Period of Mourning

by Donald Olson

Whimsical is the word that jumps to mind when I think about Olivia. Whimsical in speech, in attitude, and in the way she dressed...

* * *

I first met Olivia Crackenthorpe when I rented a cottage in Ash Grove in hopes of finishing my novel away from the distractions of the city. One late summer afternoon I heard a voice at my open window, a voice that might easily have been mistaken for the twittering of some timid but excitable bird; going to the door, I found this extraordinary-looking woman holding up a finger wrapped in a soiled white handkerchief. With a trill of jingle-bell laughter she asked if I had any iodine.

“I just wish she would die. I know that’s a wicked thing to say but it’s true, my dear. Every time I come home I say to myself, ‘Oh, I do hope she’s died while I’ve been gone.’ ”

She was referring, it transpired, to her cat Perdita. With a childlike morbid delight she displayed two or three half-healed scratches on her tiny age-spotted hand inflicted by this apparently savage animal. I naturally assumed she had befriended some neighborhood stray. “How long has this cat been with you?” I asked.

“Twelve years.”

“Twelve years? And it’s always been that vicious?”

“Always. Although I have managed to teach her that it’s very, very naughty to bite. But, Lordy-Lord, those sharp little claws.”

When I asked her why she hadn’t got rid of the beast, she replied with a forlorn smile that one does have one’s duty to family, even to the black sheep members.

I soon learned all about Olivia. Now in her seventies (from a distance her pert figure and gold-dyed hair were deceptive), she’d lived alone in the red-brick house next door ever since her husband Monty had lost his money in the stock market and taken off for parts unknown.

Whimsical is the word that jumps to mind when I think about Olivia. Whimsical in speech, in attitude, and in the way she dressed. From her long-ago travels she had brought back an exotic collection of colorful accessories: serapes, turbans, sashes, shawls, and mantillas. I would see her leaving her house impeccably attired but flaunting some remarkable Eastern headgear, perhaps a plumed turban or tasseled fez.

Although no longer able to indulge her passion for travel, she liked to pretend to be always on the brink of departure, holding endless consultations with her friends at the travel bureau about fares and tours and itineraries. Then, with a wistful regret, she would look at me over the garden fence and say something like: “I’ve been obliged to cancel my plans for Egypt. It was to have been the most divine trip down the Nile. I’m quite heartbroken, my dear. Seems there’s arisen some tiresome problem with the State Department about my passport. Monty’s no help at all. But then he hates for me to fly off and leave him alone.”

Now it was here, in regard to Monty, that Olivia’s whimsy surpassed oddness and achieved eccentricity. I made this discovery the first time she invited me to tea. I’d wondered why Olivia’s manner was so unnaturally subdued until she said, tiptoeing about the room: “Monty’s busy in the study. He always reads the financial journals at this time of day.”

As I knew Monty Crackenthorpe had flown the coop some twenty years earlier, this news left me somewhat agog. Olivia brought in the tea things: badly tarnished silver and chinaware far from spotless.

A mahogany library table overflowed with a clutter of maps, steamship and airline schedules, guidebooks and colorful brochures.