The World's Finest Mystery Part 12

His mouth wore its characteristic one-sided smile when she hurried out to greet him.

"Surprised, Amelia? You shouldn't be. Don't you remember where I'm from?"

"Kansas, but-"

"Spale, Kansas." His tone implied that she ought to have known, and Amelia felt instantly humiliated. She also felt resentful, because how was she supposed to have known something that she had never heard or seen mentioned before? In fact, she specifically recalled hearing that he was from Kansas City. She was rebelliously tempted to answer his contempt with her own sarcastic, So?

"I didn't know," she said instead. "But still, why-"

"Because I knew them. Brenda and Tom. We were best friends."

Her eyes widened. "Oh, Dan! Gosh, I'm-"

"Sorry? So will he be, when we're finished with him. He's going to wish he'd stayed in prison."

"But Dan, Thomas Rogers may not be here," she said, and felt a petty satisfaction that this time she had managed to shock him. "He may not even be alive." Amelia told her boss what she had witnessed from her window.

Hale looked confused, disturbed. He said, "That's impossible."

Amelia didn't see why. It seemed horribly possible, even probable, to her.

"Stay here," he commanded her. "I'm going down into the tunnels to find him."

He left Amelia standing by herself at the edge of town, sweating in the warm prairie wind that was blowing dust from one side of the abandoned town to the other and then back again. She waited for more than half an hour, coughing now and then and thinking, Well, at least there's one good thing about Dan showing up. He knows how to get in and out of the tunnels. But when forty-five minutes had pa.s.sed, she began to worry about him and to fear that she was going to have to go down to look for him.

Still, she waited, hot, exhausted, frightened of many things.

What if something fell on him? she thought. What if he's been injured?

But he emerged from a decrepit storefront- different from the one he had entered- and walked toward her. For once, Dan Hale was smiling fully.

"He's down there, all right," he told her.

"He is?"

"Go on down and interview him, Amelia. He's waiting for you. Don't worry. He's harmless now. You don't have anything to fear from Tom Rogers."

When she hesitated, he grasped her elbow and pulled her along, saying rea.s.suringly, "Don't worry! I'll be right behind you."

"But the dark-"

"It's not dark. He's got an old generator up and running, so there's even electric light."

Amelia thought that if Dan told her one more time, "Don't worry," she would hit him. Reluctantly, unhappily, she let herself be led into one of the old buildings, through a door in the floor, and down a wooden ladder into a cool, earthen chamber. He had told the truth; it was lighted, if dimly.

Amelia relaxed a little.

She could stand anything, she thought, if there was light.

"Dan?" she asked in a low voice. "How'd you ever get out of Spale?"

Behind her, he answered in a normal voice, as if he didn't care what Thomas Rogers heard them saying. "I got her scholarship. Brenda's. They couldn't very well give it to Tom." His chuckle was a warm breath on her neck. "I never looked back."

They reached an open door with a sign still visible beside it: "Barber Shop."

"Go on," he urged her. "Tom's in the last chair. He'll tell you the whole story." Hale thrust something warm into her hands: a trim black gun. "Here. If it helps you feel safer."

Amelia stepped inside the barber shop.

Amelia recognized the dead man in the chair from his recent photograph in the local newspaper: Thomas Rogers.

Feeling overwhelmed by the tragedy of all of their lives, she had turned and also recognized the face of the man in the doorway: Dan Hale. He broke the light chain, slammed the bar across the door, and left her there in the utter darkness with a corpse. Before the light went out, she saw that Tom Rogers had been shot several times. As she screamed and screamed, the warm gun in Amelia's hands slid to the floor.

The darkness felt eternal.

She knew she would lose her mind before she died.

Amelia's brain played those two messages over and over, and it seemed an eternity, indeed, before another thought could fight its way past the terror: Dan had gone in one store and come out another.

Two tunnel exits. At least two, maybe more.

In the nightmare that had become her life, Amelia found the slimy walls and felt her way entirely around her burial chamber. There was no other exit, no other way out. By feel, she located one of the other old barber chairs and sank into it. She thought about the endless time that lay ahead of her. And then she remembered the gun, and she realized that she could kill herself now and foreshorten her own suffering. Frantically, she found her way to the floor and felt around until metal touched her fingers.

The end of the gun barrel was resting inside her right ear when she changed her mind.

Slowly, in the dark, Amelia brought the gun down and placed it gently, lovingly, in her lap.

In case there was even the slightest chance that she would be found, she must stay alive to clear the innocent name of Sandy's father, to give the girl the final peace of knowing that her father had not killed her mother. It seemed clear to Amelia that Dan Hale had killed them both. The one for a scholarship that was his exit to a grander world. The other for his silence. She couldn't imagine why Tom Rogers had never told the truth, if that was it.

Amelia wept and cursed her own conscience.

What good would it do to stay alive if she was out of her mind with horror when they found her- if they ever did? She started screaming again. Please, somebody, hear me!

A sound awakened her.

A rat? A ghost?

Amelia screamed again.

Someone yelled back at her. And soon she heard a thud, and then the door opened, and Brenda Rogers's little brother stood there in the doorway, holding a huge flashlight. The beam paused on her face, and he said, "Thank G.o.d!" Then it pa.s.sed over onto the face of the dead man, and the little brother... the young brother-in-law... the grown-up veterinarian... came over to Amelia, collapsed to his knees, dropped his head in her lap, and began to cry.

"Dan Hale killed sis for the scholarship."

Amelia, Jim, and Sandy were huddled on hay bales in a corner of the barn, while two young black llamas sniffed around their feet and knees. Jim was explaining to Amelia, while he kept an arm wrapped around his pale, sad niece. "Then he threatened Sandy's life. He told Tom that he had to confess to the crime. Dan said that he'd kill Tom's baby girl unless Tom took the rap for him. And Tom was young and scared and didn't know what else to do."

"How'd you find out all this?"

"Tom wrote to me from prison and told me to take care of Sandy for him. And he told me the truth, and also why we couldn't reveal it, not even to my parents. They raised Sandy, and when they died, I asked her to stay on the farm with me. Dan still could have killed her, at any time, and he was very powerful by then."

"You believed him?"

"Oh, yes. I knew them both very well. I knew what they were capable of. I'd never liked or trusted Dan Hale, and I'd always loved Tom." He smiled wryly. "Little brothers know these things. What broke everybody's heart was that Brenda died, and also that we couldn't believe Tom would do that. And yet he claimed steadfastly that he did. If you knew what it did to his parents..." Jim Kopecki closed his mouth and shook his head. After a moment, he continued, "When he told me the truth, I knew it was true."

"You saved all those articles-"

"So we wouldn't forget him. I told Sandy the truth, when she was old enough to contain it. I wanted her to be able to love her father."

Amelia reached out to grasp one of the girl's hands.

Over Sandy's bowed head, the adults looked at each other.

Sandy whispered, "I was so excited to meet him. We fixed up a room here, for him to live. He was going to hide out in Spale until the publicity went away, and then we were going to try to sneak him onto the farm and make like he was just a hired hand so he could be with us."

"It might not have worked," Jim admitted.

"Because of Dan Hale?" Amelia asked, and he nodded. She didn't say so, but it sounded to her as if Tom Rogers might have had a miserable existence if he had lived, although at least he would have had the comfort of the love of his daughter and his brother-in-law. What she did say, to Jim, was, "No wonder you hated me."

"Not you. Dan Hale."

"He was using me as bait."

"Yeah."

"If anybody ever found me, they'd say that Tom Rogers had trapped me in the tunnels, probably attacked me, I'd shot him in self-defense, and then killed myself when I found I couldn't get out."

Jim looked horrified at the idea of it. "Amelia, would you have-"

"I don't know. Maybe, eventually. Wouldn't you?"

He thought a moment, then sighed. "Yes."

Later, when it was just the two of them, she told Jim about how desperately she had wanted to be a vet herself. About her straight A's and about the woman-hating professor who had blamed a stable fire on her.

"Three calves died. The professor had been smoking in there, but he said it was me, and who was I against his word?"

"But now you love being a journalist."

"I hate it!"

He laughed in surprise.

She whispered, "Tell you a secret? I'm a rotten reporter. I hate to hurt people's feelings!"

Impulsively, Jim hugged her, and impulsively she returned it, and suddenly it became an embrace that turned into a kiss, which lasted and lasted and then repeated itself again and again.

Much later, Amelia sighed. "I wonder what I'm going to do for a job now."

"Stay here, of course."

She stared at him, holding her breath.

"Room and board," he said, smiling at her hopefully, "and a small salary, and all the hay you can lift. Do you want to, Amelia?"

She read between the lines, looking into his eyes, and said, "I do."

"I do, too," Dr. James Kopecki told his new stable hand and future wife.

Gillian Linscott.

For All the Saints.

GILLIAN LINSCOTT'S story we've chosen for inclusion, "For All the Saints," which first appeared in the anthology Crimes Through Time III, was short-listed for the Crime Writer's a.s.sociation Golden Dagger Award. Her first mystery series was about Birdie Linnet, an ex-cop turned fitness trainer. The scene was contemporary England. The second series, about the wonderfully named Nell Bray, a British suffragist, gives us a look at the London of early in the last century. If you haven't picked up the Bray series yet, you're missing one of the best mystery stylists writing today. Adept at any historical period, from the medieval to the modern day, her voice keeps gaining distinction and poise with each amazing new short story and novel.

For All the Saints.

Gillian Linscott.

Saint Catherine was late. Ten o'clock was when Trillow had told her to get there, so as not to waste any of the March morning light. Ella was kneeling to put k.n.o.bs of coal on the back of the fire in the studio because the saints needed warmth. Trillow had taken the hearth brush and was using it on an old broken-spoked cart wheel he'd borrowed from the coalman and propped up against the chaise-longue on the model's dais. Coal dust and flakes of black paint were scattered around it, sheets of screwed up drawing paper and charcoal sticks that had got broken and trodden into the boards.

"Ella, come over here, would you."

She stood up at once. Trillow always talked to her like a brother to a younger sister. There were three of them in the household: Trillow the artist, his friend Ned, the engraver, and Ned's sister Ella. It wasn't a conventional arrangement, but Ned and Ella's mother had died three years ago, when Ella was thirteen, and it had either been move in with Ned and Trillow or go into service among strangers. They'd taken three rooms together in a tall house in Pimlico. Trillow had his studio on the first floor, Ned his print-making room upstairs, next to the kitchen where they ate, and Ella attended to the housekeeping and slept in a cupboard-bed alongside the fire. She was almost entirely happy. There was very little money to spare, but she knew all the saints watched over them. The saints paid the coal bills, kept bread on the table, provided Trillow's sticks of best quality charcoal and Ned's plates of shining copper and cakes of yellow beeswax. She put down the fire tongs and went obediently up to the dais. Trillow signed to her to stand alongside the coal-cart wheel, took her arm and draped it over the rim. She stood ecstatic, not moving a muscle, as he went over to his board and started drawing with quick strokes. Ella knew Saint Catherine had been martyred on a wheel, although she wasn't entirely sure how. When she was much younger she'd imagined her going slowly around and around on the wheel of the grocer's cart, gold hair trailing in the mud, and a.s.sumed she'd died from humiliation and dizziness. But the how didn't matter. Saints in Triumph were what Ned and Trillow depicted, like Saint Catherine after martyrdom, radiant in virgin white, one arm resting on the transcended wheel, the other hand holding a palm frond. Children were given them as certificates for regular attendance at Sunday school. It was her dream that Trillow would ask her to model for one of the saints.

A knock on the front door one floor below, the confident knock of somebody who didn't expect to be kept waiting. Trillow sighed with relief and threw down his charcoal.

"Her at last. Go down and let her in, Ella."

On her way out, she glanced at his drawing board. Only a hand on a wheel, that was all. She'd half hoped- more than half hoped- that a miracle would have happened and Trillow would have bestowed sainthood on her. As she went downstairs, the segs of her boots tapping on the uncarpeted boards, she tried to crush down her disappointment. Her face was too angular, body too thin, hair too ordinarily brown to make her a saint. Saints Triumphant had smooth faces, rounded bodies under their white draperies, swathes of black or golden hair.

Saint Catherine was waiting impatiently on the step. She was wearing a black velvet jacket over a skirt of yellow and black tartan, draggled with mud at the hem. A red shawl covered her head and the fringe that frizzed out of it at the front was as gold as fried egg yolk. She pushed past Ella without saying anything and went upstairs trailing a smell behind her. It was a warm, sourish smell, the sort you got when you knelt down to watch the mother cat feeding her kittens on the old blanket in the corner of the kitchen. As soon as Saint Catherine set foot on the landing the door to Trillow's studio opened. She went inside. The door shut.