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

“The little woman,” Kroll had said, as if the likes of Durkin would attract only the kind of mousy, vapid, workaday wife that trite expression anticipated.

“She will join us at supper. Right now, it’s siesta time for her.”

The whole station, in fact, was asleep: Felicia, the two stolid male Bororo Indians (Durkin thought they were Bororos, but in a country that had encouraged racial intermarriage for decades, it was hard to be precise), the pair of equally impassive middle-aged Indian females, and Agata, the younger, almost pretty, Bororo girl in her twenties, the best worker of the five.

Employer to employee, Durkin showed Kroll to his barren quarters, pointed out the screened-off wooden tank that served as their bathtub when the run-off from the roof was enough to fill it, and left the man to settle in until suppertime.

“I thought I heard the steamer leaving,” Felicia murmured sleepily from inside the mosquito netting tent over her cot. “Is he here?”

“He’s here.”

“Is he what you expected?”

“Exactly.” Durkin sat back in one of their creaky wooden chairs and watched her doze again. When he had literally run into her at the University of Florida during his graduate studies, she had looked like an English Lit major — which she had turned out to be, with an IQ way up there. That had appealed to him only minutes after they had clashed cafeteria trays. He saw right past the beesting breasts and bony hips beneath her bag of a dress. He liked her for her brain, which electrified her. And which was why, when he asked her two months later to marry him, she breathed a fervent, “Oh, yes!”

Intimacy was new to Durkin, and he liked its novelty, but not all the mental strain that went with it. Felicia Noonan Durkin was not an easy coupler. She wanted her moments of culmination to be bracketed by persuasive forehappenings and lengthy afterglows. All of which seriously paled for Durkin after a few months. He loved her, sure, but... He was aware that she lamented the fast fade of their initial bliss.

Then, one year to the day from the date of their marriage, they found themselves up the Amazon. Literally. Five hundred miles from the northeast coast.

“And six hundred miles south of Paramaribo. A thousand miles from Rio,” she had lamented when the asthmatic river steamer had bumped them ashore. The research station’s frame structures would have failed the lowest of Pocono Mountain summer camp standards. The five Indian assistants were day workers who had the good sense to return to their own no doubt more comfortable village a mile southward, along a rank path Durkin was never to have the slightest impulse to explore.

The Durkins replaced a scraggly, bearded skeleton named Warnowski, a wreck of a Ph.D. who had been sent here by the foundation the year before. His specialty was supposed to have been the freshwater stingray, but observation told Durkin it now was the pinch-bottle. Not long after the steamer, with Warnowski aboard, chugged out of sight around the sharp bend to the east, they found an unopened bottle of Haig & Haig behind the tattered linens in the residency cupboard. Durkin poured the Scotch onto the spongy ground behind the building.

A year here had changed them both. With little to do in the oppressive climate, Felicia grew lethargic, but at the same time she blossomed like a lush, tropical flower. The bony hips filled out. The pathetic little breast buds blossomed. Unexpectedly, Durkin found himself drawn to a soft, warm, compelling female. He liked the surprising excitement of that, and he liked his work for the foundation. After he learned something of the ways of the Bororos, he liked them, too. Everything here had fallen satisfyingly into place for him.

Now the heavy hand of nepotism in far-off Pennsylvania threatened to, well, screw it up with the mandated arrival of Alexander Kroll.

The big man from Philadelphia ambled into the mess hut fifteen minutes after Agata, slender and sleek in brightly dyed homespun, had served a thin fish soup.

“I thought in South America, you ate late,” were his first words.

“We eat early so the Indians can get to their village before dark,” Durkin informed him. But Kroll was not listening.

“So this

is the missus. Well, well, well. A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Durkin.”

“Please, Felicia, Mr. Kroll.”

“And I will be most happy if you will call me Alex.” He seemed to be undergoing a transition to smooth civility as Durkin watched.

“The menu for tonight?” Kroll asked her.

“Fish broth and—” She spoke with the hovering Agata in rapid Portuguese, which she had picked up with little trouble, then turned back to Kroll. “Roast pork and manioc. With papaya for dessert.”

“Impressive, here in the middle of nowhere.”

Felicia smiled at Kroll’s compliment, obviously enjoying her unaccustomed gracious hostess role. “Agata spent a few years in Manaus. She was a chef’s assistant at the Restaurante Palhoca. We’re very fortunate.”