Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

Last year’s winner of the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American writer, for the EQMM Department of First Stories tale “Home,” Eddie Newton returns this month with a tongue-in-cheek cozy based on the world’s most famous mystery board game. Mr. Newton and his wife and children live in North Dakota.

1 It So Happens...

There was a mystery afoot. Or perhaps, more accurately, the foot was the mystery. It was Mystery Mansion Weekend, sponsored by former U.S. Senator Kent Powers. The family has more money than the U.S. Mint; Powers only hosts this community gathering as a way of attaching his name to something that makes the social elite of New England smile. Half the time, the patriarch of Massachusetts’s preeminent family doesn’t even bother making an appearance. He’s the golden child of New England celebrity. The Kennedys haven’t held a candle to the Powerses in decades, and they never hosted a bash like this.

The Powers mansion has a character all its own. It has three dozen rooms, a third of them bedrooms. The ballroom is as large as the average McDonald’s. Its nineteenth-century architect and decorator was a middle-aged bachelor from France named Charlemagne Haversham. He leveled everything within a square mile of the mansion’s foundation except for an old apple tree that had been there long before he ever set foot in Massachusetts. It took him ten years to build the mansion, starting in 1854. Every fall, on the anniversary of the groundbreaking, he would pick four ripe apples from the tree and bake a splendid apple pie, then ceremoniously sit and eat the entire confection in one helping. Legend has it that after the mansion was completed, he went out into the landscaped backyard and picked his apples just as he had for ten years. He baked his pie. It was still warm as he ate every last crumb. Then he climbed up on the tallest, sturdiest branch of the tree, with a rope and no further purpose in life. Old Charlie looped that noose around his neck and jumped, his pie-loaded belly bouncing when the rope drew taut.

The apple tree was gone, but the legend had stood as long as the house.

How morbid that an annual Murder Mystery Weekend is held on this very estate.

This year, old man Powers sent his son Oliver in his stead. Ollie was about as personable as a guy comes; he was immediately the life of the party. His syndicated radio show had been the most popular thing on AM for years now. The Voice of Choice, he was dubbed. Supposedly, he was the searcher after truth, he who deciphered the tangled political spin. He was credited with a large influence in getting his brother elected to the governorship in Massachusetts. There were “Ol lovers” who believed that every word that dripped from his golden tongue was truth itself. Right now, he was settling his considerable bulk down on a leather sofa. The only thing bigger than Oliver Powers’s mouth was Ollie himself.

Soon he was regaling a tiny woman in an even tinier dress with his theory of how extremist factions within the government secretly experiment on random small towns, infecting their drinking water with designer viruses in an effort to prepare the nation against biological attack by rogue nations, unbeknownst to the upper echelons of the three branches of government. The woman was listening with interest. Did she buy this garbage or was she amazed by his effortless fabrication?

The woman was wearing a stunning scarlet outfit. She was beautiful, but no older than her early twenties, easily half Oliver’s age. Her jet-black hair was shoulder length and perfectly framed her stunning face. She was a vision, and a paragon of politeness as she listened to Oliver’s bombastic diatribe. It was hard to tell whether the look on her face was accepting naiveté or intelligent discernment.

There were six players this year, and each had a role. Ollie was a professor and seemed to believe that giving long orations on tedious topics was a requirement for his part. Oliver Powers was paid to talk, and he appeared very adept at his job. He continued to batter the young woman in the tiny scarlet dress with facts pertaining to everything from the Civil War to the legitimacy of NASCAR as a sport. One man was staring at Ollie, amazed that anyone would listen to more than two words out of the overflowing mouth. He sat in his yellow jacket, as bright as a fresh daffodil, staring at Oliver Powers and seesawing from doubt to outright disbelief.

Detective Adam Jericho wasn’t buying Oliver Powers’s tall tales. He’d seen enough bull in his life to know the beef from the bouillon. He had effectively tuned out Ollie’s rants and he concentrated on the game. He solved real-life murders for a living, surely he could puzzle out this silly little game. He looked over his clues, and as with most games that mimic real life, nothing quite jelled for him. A manufactured mystery left no room for the quality that Jericho most depended on in his occupation: instinct. Logic was anathema to him. Like poker or Yahtzee, detecting was, he thought, two-thirds luck and one-third chance. Brains were extra baggage.

The corpse was missing a foot. What kind of murderer takes the foot? And why? A lunatic podiatrist? A maniac with a foot fetish? A diminutive psychopath who will do anything for an extra foot? This was Jericho’s first year at this little soiree. He’d earned his place here as a result of a high-publicity bust that had made him something of a celebrity in New England the past few weeks. He had personally tracked down serial killer Shane Richards and put the maniac behind bars. When the invitation came, he thought it might be fun. He had spent the better part of the last three decades tracking down serial murderers. It was his specialty. He was as good as they got. Surely, a little game like this would be nothing. But Adam Jericho had never gone up against someone with a predilection for severed feet.

Another player was an old woman with a hat that looked like a dead peacock. Her hair was an awful shade of blue. She swore up and down that she had solved the mystery, but the rules of the silly game stated that the solution would be revealed at dinner that night. That was three hours away yet. Three... very... long... hours... away.

There was a young girl in the group, the daughter of a rich oil magnate from down South. He sent his daughter to Massachusetts as his emissary, much as Kent Powers had sent his son in his place. The girl looked no older than sixteen and was unnaturally pale. One would imagine that a tanning booth was within the family budget? Or even a weekend on the beaches of Jamaica? Hair streaked red and held by little neon hair-ties stuck up in clumps all over her head. Her T-shirt had the charming epithet Drop Dead across the chest. She had been here when Jericho arrived, along with the woman in the small red dress.

Miss White stared blankly at the walls much of the time. She had set aside the material for the game moments after receiving the stacks of facts. She had either solved it instantly or had no interest in doing so.

An actress by the name of Kelly Greene was whisking around the room in a dress cut nearly to her navel, trying to be the center of attention. Someone ought to have informed her that she was about ten years and two tummy-tucks past being the center of anyone’s attention. She was being talked about for an Oscar this year for her work in All in Good Time. Her publicist insisted that she put on a show here at the mystery mansion, for there were powerful people about tonight. Word had it that the woman in the tiny scarlet dress that Ollie was drooling over had influence in Hollywood publishing. She would be a good person to have on your side in Tinseltown, especially around Oscar time.

Not one of these people seemed like the type to amputate feet. Not even Ms. Greene, who was overacting her part as a lustful maid. She added some character touches of her own, making the maid Southern, though the accent sounded more like an Irish nanny mimicking a German with a lisp. She also declared that the maid was an alcoholic; such was her excuse to down Southern Comfort as if it were water. She wasn’t the type who could hurt a fly. Detective Jericho was starting to seriously suspect himself, though he couldn’t find a spare limb anywhere amongst his belongings. The game was so contrived and generic that he’d have declared the butler did it, but no one was playing a butler.

What kind of murder mystery didn’t have a butler, anyway?

Supper drew nearer with such excruciating slowness that instead of the murderer, Jericho wondered if he would end up being the murderee for lack of sustenance. Finally the cook announced that the meal would be served in thirty minutes. Although Jericho’s belly rumbled in anticipation, all thoughts of food and solutions to silly made-up murders would be far from his mind when the thirty-minute mark arrived. He decided to follow the annoying Oliver Powers around after his lovely consort went upstairs to “wash up” for the meal. Ollie meandered through room after room, looking at the detailed architecture that had been designed by the suicidal Charlemagne well over a century ago as if he had never seen it before. Perhaps he had not. It must be a rough life if one has never laid eyes on one of one’s father’s mansions.

Aside from a short and rather confrontational conversation between Ollie and the old lady with blue hair, the next few minutes were uneventful. The old woman argued that late-night talk shows are subversive outlets for extremists who believe that all drugs should be legalized. Oliver countered that Letterman didn’t have a subversive bone in his body. As the old woman went on to assert that Letterman’s Top Ten List was a subliminal instrument for getting teens to smoke pot, Jericho made his way away from the nonsense.

Thinking that the dinner bell ought to be ringing any second, Jericho went out to the main ballroom with the others. Oliver and the old woman followed him, neither talking, both fuming. Everyone was gathered again but for the woman in the tiny red getup, the powerful publishing exec. Dinner was waiting on her. The ageing actress volunteered to get her. “Maybe she fell in the toilet,” she quipped as she bounced up the stairs, and everyone got to staring longingly at the table set with lavish china and expensive silverware. Jericho’s name was embroidered on a napkin at the foot of the table. That got him to thinking again about the foot... the mystery they were here to solve... And then he solved it. He knew the answer, without a doubt. He was fairly sure he was the only one who had puzzled out the correct solution. Detective Adam Jericho was once again going to dazzle the common folk with his breathtaking deductions.

Then there was a scream upstairs and all thoughts of dinner and missing feet left Jericho’s head. Here was something else to engage the sleuthing mind, something more than just a game. The over-the-hill actress appeared at the top of the staircase. She was sobbing theatrically. This was a scene that Adam Jericho had seen a hundred times before. It wasn’t the type of moment that could be acted, not even by De Niro or Streep. Certainly not by a woman who starred in such trash as Petty Cash and The Arkadelphia Conspiracy. This was a genuine moment. If the Academy were passing out trophies right now, Ms. Greene would be walking away with some gold.

“She’s dead,” she bawled. “She’s been murdered.”

2 What Happened?

The cops were immediately called, but this being an old mansion, and there being a murder and all, the night decided to erupt into a fantastic storm. The rains would prevent the police from coming for some while. Adam Jericho took charge of the crime scene, sifting through the evidence with a fine-tooth comb. A comb that revealed hairs that were definitely not the property of a woman in her twenties. The hairs were blue. Jericho bagged them with a suspicious glance at the old woman, who peeked through the doorway with the others. They were like vultures to carrion. Luckily the corpse was in the bathroom, away from prying eyes.

The woman who had been in the tiny red dress wasn’t wearing the dress anymore. A red towel was wrapped around her body, as if she’d been ready to take a shower. Her head was stuffed into the toilet bowl like so much excrement. Someone had held her head under the water until she drowned. Her hands were limp on either side of the bowl. If she’d given the murderer a fight, she had lost. What a shameful way to die. Jericho saw to it that no one saw the state of the corpse except for him (and Kelly Greene, who had seen too much already). He would not disturb the corpse before the tech boys showed up.

The others watched every move he was making as he examined the bedroom. This wasn’t some highway accident that you just couldn’t turn away from. They had all spent the afternoon with this woman. So he walked over and closed the door to cut off the gawkers’ view.

He found her journal. It was sitting beside a half-eaten bagel spread with cream cheese. She’d made an entry before she’d been stuffed into the toilet and drowned. “I think I’m in trouble” was all it said. Short, simple, and completely damning. If the girl in the scarlet dress was suspicious of one of the others in this mansion, surely she had confided in someone.

Someone had gone through her things. Her bureau drawers were all open and clothes were scattered about. What had they been looking for? Was it a robbery gone bad? Had a thief been caught with his hand in the cookie jar? The woman in scarlet was a powerful Hollywood executive. She’d been sporting fine jewelry all night. Had someone wanted her fine necklaces and bracelet so much that they resorted to murder? Or was it something more personal? Did someone in this mansion have a bone to pick with little miss tiny red dress?

Jericho came across a key to her door as he prowled about the room. He locked the scene of the crime up tight for the tech boys. They would arrive right after the storm let up, whenever that might be. The way the wind and sky were warring right now, it didn’t look as if that would be before morning. That gave Detective Jericho plenty of time to interrogate the people at this happening. He figured he might as well get some interviews in while the events were still fresh in everyone’s mind. He descended the steps. As he scanned the lobby full of distraught players of a game suddenly turned real, he saw immediately who he wanted to question first.

He escorted the sniffling Kelly Greene into the kitchen, despite the simmering glare he got from Oliver Powers. The radio personality seemed to distrust him, though he had never given the gargantuan man any reason to be suspicious. Jericho made note of his reaction. Perhaps the powerful Mr. Powers was trying to cover his own guilt by pretending to suspect Jericho of foul play. But Oliver would have to wait. He had to focus his attentions now on the woman who discovered the body.

Kelly Greene was sniffling still and Jericho couldn’t help but believe the tears were real. He’d seen a number of her films and was quite positive that she was not a good enough actress to manufacture such waterworks. But were they tears of shock and fear, or simply the reaction of a woman who had done a terrible thing and was having a hard time dealing with it? There are many people in this world who have murdered but are not natural killers. Most people don’t have the stomach for it. They might muster the drive to complete the act, but guilt gets them in the end. Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have closed half their cases if the killers hadn’t wanted to be caught.

Jericho took Ms. Greene’s hand gently in his. The personal touch. He was a friend. You could tell ole Adam anything. And Kelly Greene did tell him everything, precious little that it was. She had gone up to check on the woman in red. She had rapped on the door several times, and getting no response, had tried the doorknob. The door had been open. Kelly went inside, calling the woman’s name. No answer. Kelly admitted that she had started getting worried. She saw the drawers that looked like someone had gone through them. Then, entering the bathroom, she saw the woman in the red towel. That’s when she’d run downstairs, hysterical. She hadn’t seen anything else. She didn’t notice anyone acting suspicious.

“Has anyone talked to you about her jewelry?” Jericho asked.

Kelly Greene looked off into the distance, searching her memory. She came up with a little something. Yes, the pale teenager from the South had asked Kelly if she thought the jewels complemented the red dress. “Very pretty,” the girl had said, or so Kelly Greene recalled. Was the actress just trying to throw Jericho off the scent?

Jericho went upstairs again, to the scene of the murder. He wanted to verify that the woman in scarlet was no longer wearing the diamond jewelry. He carefully pulled her submerged head out of the toilet and looked inside the bowl in case something had slipped off. Nothing. Her ears were naked; her neck was bare; her wrists were empty of ornamentation. Jericho now had a solid motive for her murder. This wasn’t personal. It was pure greed. Or was Kelly Greene just making it look like that? He hadn’t made up his mind yet, but all signs right now pointed to the pale teenager.

The teenager’s name was Sally Freddins. She sat silently in the conservatory as Jericho circled her. He wanted to intimidate her a little, but the girl seemed to live on a planet all her own. No, she didn’t know the woman in red. No, she hadn’t thought about anyone, including herself, stealing the jewels. No, she hadn’t paid any attention to the woman’s necklace or bracelet or earrings. No, she didn’t give one hoot or holler what Jericho “suspected” or what he found missing in the scarlet-toweled corpse’s room, or that Detective Adam Jericho had put sixteen murderers behind bars in his long and illustrious career. Sally Freddins just wanted to go back to Texas.

Jericho finally excused her after she ducked more than a dozen questions, answering without more than a mumble. He did notice the cut on the side of her head, though. Had the demure albino been in a tussle? Had the poor victim in the scarlet dress put up a fight, trying to defend herself against a lunatic kleptomaniac teen who was holding her head in the toilet? Jericho watched the antisocial girl leave and wondered just what she was doing at this little party when she so obviously detested companionship. Was she here merely to rob other rich snobs? Sally was at the top of Jericho’s list.

The old woman with the blue hair was named Margaret Painsbum and she soon became a veritable pain in Detective Jericho’s bum. Jericho managed to ask her only one question before she turned the tables on him, interrogating him like a CIA agent with a Communist mole in the hot seat. Jericho actually found himself sweating inside that sunshine-yellow coat, feeling like he was under a hot lamp, though the library to which they’d retreated was shadowy and cool. He wondered if the old hag might have been a cruel librarian or maybe a prison guard before she married Gene Painsbum of Painsbum Enterprises a century or so ago. “Do you have an alibi for the time the victim was attacked and killed?” she demanded. “You’re the only one of us who is not independently wealthy, so isn’t it logical that you would most desire the valuable jewels? I noticed you eyeing the woman earlier tonight; did she spurn your romantic advances and you reacted violently? Just what did you learn from all those psychopaths you tracked down?”

Jericho finally let her go after almost half an hour (or was it Mrs. Painsbum who let the detective go?). But not before he noticed that she had a slight tear in the brim of her peacock hat. Had she been in a struggle? Surely someone so regal would never prance around in such shabby headdress. Unless she did not want to draw attention to the ostentatious hat’s absence if she’d tried to get rid of the torn evidence. Jericho’s gut now made him suspect the old woman of foul play.

He knew that talking with Oliver Powers was going to be a treat. The massive man was parked in the large easy chair in the study. There was a smug upturn to each of his doughy cheeks, a cocky smirk that mocked Jericho’s authority. Ollie was one of those guys who thought that everyone in leadership was inept at everything they did: cops, teachers, other news folk, politicians (especially the politicians). No one knew anything in the whole wide world except the egotist himself.

“Shouldn’t we be waiting for the police to start this whole process?”

Jericho assured him that he was a cop, after all.

“I’d rather wait for the local authorities.”

Jericho knew that Oliver did not like celebrity cops. But Jericho’s fame had been hard won. He’d caught the notorious murderess Danielle Kohl when he was barely a kid! And that was just for starters. Oliver’s digs at his qualifications were getting to him. Just as Oliver Powers wanted. Why was he pushing Jericho? Was he trying to throw him off, afraid that Jericho’s superior detective skills might smoke out the murderer before the locals arrived? Maybe Ollie had a very good reason to try to stop this investigation.

Jericho let Oliver go, but he did note that the man had a white smudge on his left sleeve. It looked like cream cheese, possibly from a bagel — maybe the bagel that was sitting beside the journal of the woman in scarlet. Jericho did not recall seeing another such bagel anywhere in the mansion tonight. Another strange coincidence? There were a lot of odd parallels here. Too many. Some of those connections were not just chance.

Jericho gathered the guests together in the living room. It was time that he solved this murder.

3 What Might Have Happened

Oliver Powers sat on the davenport, engulfing nearly half of the large piece of furniture. He glared at Jericho with a look that was half amusement, as if he were a barker at a carnival sideshow, and half disdain, as if he’d have preferred to get right up and sit on Adam Jericho’s brilliant little head. On the other end of the grand sofa sat Kelly Greene, keeping up the appearance of being distraught, although her performance was starting to flag. Sally Freddins was curled into a high-back leather chair with hand-carved birch legs turned in ornate shapes and stained as dark as Sally was pale. The chair huddled in the shadows and Sally seemed to blanket herself in the darkness, almost disappearing into the sliver of night. Margaret Painsbum looked as if being relegated to the audience — the subject of speculation instead of the purveyor of questioning — was pure torture. She stared out of withered eyes as Jericho began to outline the events of the night.

It started as the woman in the red dress ascended the steps to retire to her room before dinner. Jericho had been there when Oliver bade her goodbye. They had all seen Kelly and the woman go their separate ways at the top of the stairs, after a short conversation in which they had briefly discussed the possibility that the killer in the game was the woman in scarlet. The lady in red had answered Kelly with a sly smile. She went to her room alone, though she was not alone for long. Jericho whirled around and glared at Margaret Painsbum, who was still staring at him like a hungry vulture. He was holding the Ziploc bag that contained her hair.

“You were in that room,” he accused the old woman.

She sat still, unblinking. She was not rattled at all. Either she hid her guilt well, or she was not the murderer. Jericho still wasn’t positive, but this was the process that all great detectives went through to solve the case: Poirot, Holmes, Frank and Joe Hardy.

Mrs. Painsbum did not deny it. In fact, she nodded her head once, slowly. She admitted to being there! Jericho found it very suspicious that she had not mentioned this before. A wide smile spread across his face.

But then the old woman asserted that she had been invited to stop by the room of the woman in the red dress. When Jericho pressed her for an explanation another look flickered across her eye: something that wasn’t stubborn superiority. It looked more like shame.

“Fine. You need proof of my innocence...” She reached up and lifted off her hat. Her blue hair came with it. She was bald beneath the camouflage of hat and hair. “She said she had a comb that could loosen some of the snarls in this thing. Wigs get so tangled, you see. I even tore my hat with the comb, pulling the snarls out. Said she’d help me stitch the hat. Tomorrow. Never, I guess. Nice girl. Didn’t ask a thing about the cancer. Didn’t have pity. Just wanted to help me look nice.” Her voice trailed off. Did Jericho hear it crack at the end? Was it in sorrow at the passing of a kind stranger, or was she so humiliated that her concrete countenance had crumbled?

Moving on...

He had all but eliminated Margaret Painsbum. She could be lying, but he didn’t think so. Besides, he had other suspects. He turned to Oliver Powers and looked down his nose at the mountain of opinionated flesh. He hoped with all his heart that Powers was the killer. “You shared a bagel with the deceased!” For dramatic effect, Jericho thrust his finger in Oliver’s face. He pulled it back when it looked as if Powers was considering biting the extremity right off. “Explain that stain on your shirt sleeve!”

Oliver, too, had an explanation. One that was also less than flattering. This interrogation was turning into an exercise in embarrassment.

“I went to her room. I brought her a bagel. More original than flowers, I thought. I asked her if she’d care to see me after this game was over. She... wasn’t interested. I told her to keep the bagel. No hard feelings. A guy like me can get girls whenever he wants. It wasn’t a big deal.” He faltered in the middle, but by the end of his statement, the Powers attitude was back in full force. Humiliation was a state seldom visited by a Powers, and one they were quick to recover from. Jericho felt some smug satisfaction at the fact that Ollie had been turned down by the woman in red.

It was the other girl’s turn, little Sally from Texas, who looked more like death than the corpse upstairs. He walked right up to her and leaned into the chair in which she was trying to disappear. Her pale face glowed in the thick shadow. “And where did you get that cut?” he said. Sally’s hand went up to her head, almost as if she’d forgotten about it, a guilty reminder of a terrible sin, like an adulterer who forgets his mistress’s lipstick smeared across his neck. Jericho enjoyed watching the rich little girl squirm. Her life of convenience was over. This quiet little thief-turned-murderer was going to jail.

She looked confused, almost as if she’d just woken up. Jericho wondered if she’d only just realized that this wasn’t a part of the game. There was a real dead person upstairs. There was an honest-to-goodness punishment for such a transgression. There was a great detective present who was going to solve this terrible crime, and the guilty party was going to jail. This wasn’t some little rich girl’s world where money buys freedom. “The scratch... I didn’t. It wasn’t her. It was her.” Sally pointed across the room at Kelly Greene.

From her seat on the davenport the actress gaped wide-eyed at her pale accuser. “I... It was an accident. I brushed her temple with a serving tray while we were preparing for dinner.” The actress. Of course! She had been the one who told Jericho that the girl had admired the dead woman’s jewelry. She had put the scrape on Sally’s head to cause suspicion, to cause Jericho to envision some sort of struggle with the deceased, a superficial injury that might have been incurred during the tussle before the murder was complete.

Jericho crossed the room toward the guilty thespian at a brisk pace. If he’d had his handcuffs with him, he’d have been slapping them on her right then and there.

“Wait, wait,” she said, sinking back into the sofa, clearly fearful of the charging cop. No doubt she would try to come up with something, anything, that might clear her name. How clever that she had “volunteered” to find the body. Certainly it made her seem less suspicious. But she had not anticipated the presence of a world-class detective in the house. None of these pompous elitists had realized what Adam Jericho was capable of before the murder. He’d hoped his name might make someone slip up and reveal themselves. A story that fooled the locals would not be able to trick the great Adam Jericho.

But then Kelly Greene did something that made it all click. She reached up and tugged her ear, fiddling with the gold heart that was stabbed through her left lobe. It was a nervous gesture, completely unconscious, but it caused one of those revelations in Jericho: like at the end of a great Scooby-Doo mystery when the caretaker at the cemetery sneezes and reveals himself as the monster who’s been chasing the Scooby gang around the haunted graveyard for the last half-hour. Everything fell into place. There was suddenly a piece of incontrovertible evidence that wasn’t going to be easily explained. Someone in this room had slipped up.

“Tell us, Sally,” he said. “Why did you kill her?”

4 The Way It Happened

Sally looked even more pale than she had before, if pure white can get any whiter. She sat there, stunned. Jericho didn’t rush at her as he had Kelly. He didn’t want to frighten her. She was the killer. He had no doubt. “Where are the jewels, Sally?” If she gave them up, he’d have hard evidence. Sure, he’d put it all together. But she was rich. He needed to catch her red-handed if he was going to avoid public embarrassment. He needed the diamonds. Jericho knew she had them. Sally did not reply.

He walked around the room. Outside, the thunder rumbled, enhancing the dramatic mood in the mystery mansion. It was time to reveal what exactly had happened upstairs this evening. “This is the way it happened...” he said.

“The woman in the red dress went upstairs about the same time Kelly did. Not long after she retired to her room, after a short debate with Oliver and me, Mrs. Painsbum went to the victim’s room for help with her wig. Not long after Mrs. Painsbum left, Oliver made a brief visit with his request for a date, and was shot down. Sometime after that you came along, Miss Freddins.”

The pale girl was shaking her head, but did not speak. The others were listening with only a modicum of interest, for Jericho had accused almost everyone and had not yet provided them with a shred of evidence. He alone knew that he had Sally Freddins in the bag. And the terrified look on Sally’s face suggested that she knew that she was busted. But there was nowhere to run.

“What exactly happened when Sally knocked on the door to the woman’s room? I suppose we won’t know for sure unless Sally cares to enlighten us. Nevertheless, I can guess. The woman let you in without suspicion, Sally. Maybe because you’re the only one here who was around her own age. Whatever her motivation, she did not suspect you when she let you in. She certainly didn’t know what was coming when you grabbed her from behind.

“She knew you liked her jewels, though. And maybe she caught on a bit when you were using the bathroom in her room. Maybe it wasn’t you she was writing about, but you saw her journal. She wrote ‘I think I’m in trouble.’ Did that make you scared? Was that what made you decide you had to kill her to get the jewels? You couldn’t steal them if she’d already noticed you eyeing them, could you, Sally?”

At that point, Oliver Powers spoke up, a liberal mastermind who always came rushing to the defense of the guilty, willing to let murderers back on the streets, ready to fill the world with compassion and weakness. “What kind of evidence do you have, Jericho?”

The masterstroke. Jericho savored it. He made his dramatic pause. He wanted this climax to last as long as possible.

“It was the woman in the red dress’s hair,” he said. “It hung down on each side of her face in a perfect frame of her head. When everyone else talked about her jewels, it was the ones that we could see. You could see her bracelet and you could see her necklace, but no one had been able to see her earrings. Her hair completely covered the woman’s ears. But Sally said that she hadn’t even paid any attention to the girl’s earrings. How could she know that the woman had earrings unless she herself took them out of her ears?!”

The whole group gasped. Jericho grinned triumphantly. Of course, they were all thinking. It made perfect sense. She was as guilty as sin.

Sally leapt from the chair, tears trailing a river down her alabaster cheeks. She looked like an albino tiger loosed from its cage. Her teeth were bared. “Those were my jewels!”

She further damned herself with her outburst. Were all rich people so demented as to believe that all pretty things were their own? Jericho was thankful he wasn’t wearing a Gucci belt or she might have slain him, too, just to hitch up her jeans.

Jericho advanced on her, and Sally slowly retreated, crying hysterically. The detective drew his gun.

“Did you hold her head down while she drowned?” he taunted her. “Did you watch her choke on the water, drinking it, filling her lungs with it? How long did she take to die, Sally? Did you take off her jewelry afterward, pull it off her corpse, or had she already removed it for a shower? Did you have to pluck the earrings off of her cold, lifeless ears? Or were they already out and hidden? Is that why you ransacked the room, looking for them? Or was that just another distraction? How long were you planning this, Miss Freddins?”

The girl tripped over a step, then backed into the large table that was still set for their long-postponed game. The props for the game were all strewn about in disarray. Sally’s hand fell on the pipe. (Not the lead pipe of fame. This is the age of lead-poisoning. This one was made of good old American steel.) She grabbed the primitive weapon. If it was good enough for Colonel Mustard in the conservatory, it was good enough for her.

“Stay back,” Sally warned. Jericho kept advancing on her. She was backing toward the front door, waving the pipe in front of her. “You’re nuts.” Everyone is always crazy, Jericho thought, except for the loonies themselves. He told her to stop.

“Maybe you’re the murderer,” she said. “How do I know you won’t shoot me whether I stop or go?” The others watched the standoff between cop and criminal. The pipe was no threat to anyone but Sally herself. It certainly couldn’t stop a bullet. She opened the door and backed outside. The rain was wild and burst through the doorway. The night was chaos. Sally backed out into the storm, brandishing her pipe. She was still yelling, but no one could hear her over the thunder. Jericho kept his gun trained on her, but still she retreated. He could not bring himself to shoot the girl. She was not threatening him or anyone with that pipe. But he couldn’t very well let her get away. He lowered his aim to her left thigh at the same time a bolt of lightning crashed out of the sky and struck the steel pipe that Sally was holding like a baseball bat.

Both of her shoes exploded like firecrackers. She might have been screaming, but it couldn’t be heard over the crackling of the superheated electrical fire that scorched her skin and clothing to a charred crust in mere seconds. When her corpse cooled enough for Jericho to get a good look, he saw that her left foot was completely gone and her hands were melted around the steel pipe as if it had always been a part of her body. There was a hole in her skull the size of a lemon where the lightning blew her boiling brains out like buckshot. Justice is served hot, Jericho thought. A murderer sent to God’s version of the electric chair before the lawyers had a chance to muck it up.

Epilogue What Really Happened

Monica Wheeler just had to get out of the little scarlet dress. The thing was too tiny. She’d been hoping there might be a cute guy or two here who also happened to be rich, and perhaps even single. But the only bloke who showed the least interest was a man old enough to be her father and fat enough to be her father, mother, and two brothers rolled into one. Since the only other choice was a stuck-up guy in a tacky yellow coat, she was eager for this little escape. A half-hour until dinner. A half-hour before she had to resume this tired little game. She was going to kill her boss for sending her on this publicity stunt.

Kelly Greene walked her upstairs and asked her for the fifth time if she was the murderer. Monica didn’t even know, or care. It was a stupid game about a fake murder. Now, if there was a real body without a foot down there, then things might be a little fun. But this was like playing a game about skydiving: Some things you can pretend, and other things have just got to be for real. She told Kelly that she really didn’t know. Kelly seemed to think it was she. Monica went to her room and wrote in her journal. She figured that Kelly was going to point her out as the murderer so she wrote “I think I’m in trouble.” She wasn’t really sad that she was going to lose this stupid game.

She needed to find something more comfortable to wear to dinner. She was tired of Oliver Powers gawking at her legs, which were showing way too much in this little red dress. She went through her drawers and dug out a more comfortable and conser-vative scarlet pantsuit. She laid out the outfit on her bed. Now she was craving a relaxing shower. She still had almost twenty-five minutes before she had to be back to the group.

There was a knock on the door. It was the old woman from downstairs. Monica had invited her up. She’d spotted a terrible snarl in the old woman’s hair and offered to give her a hand. She had this comb that could work magic with even synthetic hair. The two fought the stubborn tangle and finally worked it loose. They put a tear in Margaret’s beautiful peacock hat, though. “I can sew that later, if you like,” Monica said. Her mother had passed on from cancer years ago. She had recognized the stubborn sadness in the woman’s eyes when she first arrived. Monica immediately had a soft spot for the vulnerable curmudgeon.

She headed for the bathroom, ready to finally get out of the little scarlet number. She was stripped down and ready for the hot water when there was another knock at the door. Was it Sally? She was expecting the girl to stop by. She quickly grabbed the towel off of the sink as she headed for the door, wrapping herself in it as she went.

It was Oliver. He offered her a bagel and asked her out. Charming, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off what her towel wasn’t hiding. Not in a million years would she let Ollie get a look underneath that towel. She politely declined and he left her with the bagel. He took her decline graciously. She gobbled a bite and set the remains beside her journal, then walked toward the bathroom. She wondered again if Sally was going to stop by. And the name stopped her dead in her tracks. She stared at the mirror in front of her. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail. There were no earrings in her ears. Her neck was bare. She’d taken off the jewelry by habit, preparing for the shower. But she didn’t recall at all where she’d put them. She had a moment of panic and then she turned and went back to her dresser where she’d selected her outfit for dinner.

She yanked out random clothes in alarm as she tried to remember where she’d left the expensive diamonds. She just couldn’t have misplaced them! Sally would kill her. The girl had lent them to her when Monica first arrived at the mystery mansion. “Gosh, those are beautiful,” Monica had said after Sally had introduced herself. The bracelet and necklace and earrings were all of a set. Sally told her that they would go great with her red dress. Monica just had to wear them, she insisted. Monica sensed that the girl was trying to befriend her. She must be used to having to buy her friends. Rather than hurt the girl’s feelings, she accepted.

But now she’d lost the bloody things! She’d had them ten minutes ago. But where? Her mother always said she’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached. Where had she left them? Where? Then the memory welled in her mind. She recalled setting them on the bathroom sink, right between the toilet and the tub. Right on top of the red towel that she was now wearing. Then where were they now? She ran into the bathroom. There was nothing on the sink! Had she been robbed?! What would she tell Sally? But no, she saw them. They twinkled like ice in the harsh winter sun. They had dropped into the toilet when she yanked up the red towel after Oliver had knocked on her door. She even vaguely recalled hearing the splash. She grinned, relieved. Easy enough to fish out.

She took one step onto the tiled floor of the regal bathroom. The jewelry had splashed just enough water from the toilet to make a decent slippery spot right under where Monica’s foot landed. She fell straight forward and her head went right into the porcelain bowl, her face plunging into the toilet’s water and banging hard against the bottom of the bowl. She saw stars. Reflexively, she gulped in a big mouthful of water, choking. She almost swallowed an earring, just inches from her face. She pulled back her head and her skull caught on the underside of the toilet’s rim, making the stars she was seeing double up. Dizzy, she tried to get a footing to shift her weight to lift her face out of the water, but her foot just slipped again, and she went down once more.

She was drowning and she was too disoriented to get her face out of the toilet. Flailing, panicking, she reached up and managed to pull the handle, and the toilet flushed. Water escaped down the drain, giving her a second of succulent air. The bracelet and necklace and earrings chased the water. The jewels were gone. Monica didn’t even notice because the water quickly rose again, burying her face before she even caught a breath. She had just one chance. She reached up and up, trying to grab the toilet handle again, flailing around for the flipper. One more try. One last attempt. She wasn’t going to die in a toilet. She just couldn’t let it end this way.

Copyright © 2006 Eddie Newton