Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 817 & 818, September/October 2009

Don’t Ax Me Why by Maurissa Guibord

Maurissa Guibord got her start in our Department of First Stories in 2006. Since then, she’s been at work on a book, which she recently sold to Delacorte Press. The young adult novel of paranormal romance and adventure (entitled Warped) will appear in the spring of 2011. The Scarborough, Maine, author is also working on a young adult mystery novel. But she makes time for adult short stories too, like this colorful tale of a reporter looking for ideas for a piece on Halloween.

When did Halloween become such a big deal? I pondered this question as I checked the price tags on some of the costumes at Big Willie’s Discount. No way was I going to pay sixty bucks to look like either a polyester Elvira knockoff or (the only other one that fit) Raggedy Ann on growth hormones. But I still had plenty of time to come up with something; the party wasn’t until the following week. What I didn’t have time for was writing my column. My boss had given one of his usual, vaguely terrifying suggestions for my piece. “Halloween,” he barked. “What’s it all about anyway?”

Sometimes he acts like most of our readership has just woken from a lengthy coma and our job at the Witka Leader is their mass reindoctrination to society. That and selling advertising, of course.

I could do the historical angle; I recalled reading about how jack-o’-lanterns originated in Ireland, where people carved out turnips and used them as lanterns with the purpose of warding off evil spirits on Allhallows Eve. But I didn’t have time to worry about it; my phone was ringing when I got home.

“Are you that reporter for the Leader? That Jung woman?” a female voice asked. She sounded breathless, as if she had been running.

I told her I was.

“This is Marilyn Doughty out on Little Brook Lane. Number Forty-two. It’s my neighbor Everett Halsey. I want you to come over here right away and see what he’s doing.”

“Is Mr. Halsey disturbing you?”

“Disturbing me? I’ll say he’s disturbing me. I’m afraid to go outside. He’s gone demented. He’s got an ax and he’s carving up a woman right out there in the yard!”

She hung up.

Now most normal people at this point would have been dialing 911. But I had lived in Witka and been on the wrong end of “See news? Call 1-800-NUTBALL” for too long to get greatly excited. Besides, it was just around the corner. So I picked up my gear and headed out. It was a beautiful day; the leaves were falling in windswept spirals and the air had the cold, sweet tang of a New England autumn. Little Brook Lane was a winding residential street, checkered with small, well-kept houses, many of them decorated for Halloween with pumpkins, cornstalks, and scarecrows tied to lampposts.

The scene of the crime wasn’t hard to find. Marilyn Doughty had been right. In the yard of number 44, along with a mirrored ball on a pedestal and a leering ceramic lawn gnome, there was a man with an ax. But from what I could see, Everett Halsey wasn’t cutting up a woman.

He was cutting out a woman.

Halsey was middle-aged looking, with wispy ginger-colored hair and a slightly stooped posture, dressed in a flannel shirt, blue workman’s pants, and half-laced work boots. He stood before a roughly six-foot-high, barrel-thick stump of a pine tree in the middle of his property. He was carving the stump into the crude, angular shape of a woman’s torso, using an ax.

The rest of the felled tree lay strewn across the lawn, in haphazard piles of roughly cut logs and twisted branches among the autumn leaves. Halsey didn’t seem to notice as I parked in the driveway of his next-door neighbor. He continued to work slowly, methodically, hacking at the form in front of him with a small red-handled ax. Each blow sent chips of white piney flesh arcing through the air. Thtt... thtt... thtt. His motions weren’t particularly violent, but I jumped a little every time the ax struck the figure. As I watched, he stopped to dislodge the blade from where it had wedged in too deep in the waist area. He stepped back and I got a good look at what he had done.

The figure had no arms, two massive breasts, and a deeply cleft “Y” to outline her private parts. The body was the pale creamy yellow color of fresh-cut wood, except for where the bark was left on, in two spots — delineating a grey, rugose nipple at the end of each torpedo-shaped breast. Oh, and unless Halsey was planning to add another chunk of wood up top, there was no head.

I wasn’t surprised that Marilyn Doughty was afraid to leave her house. I was still in my car.

I sat and watched for a few moments as the man worked on the bizarre wooden figure. It was definitely odd. And more than a little offensive. I just wasn’t sure it was news. So I called in.

“ ‘Course it’s news!” grunted Boss Hogg after I had told him what was going on. “Local color. Get the story. Get a decent photo this time.”

I sighed as I hung up and decided to get the neighbor’s story first, mostly because she had the attractive feature of not currently holding an ax.

Marilyn Doughty flung her door open as soon as I knocked and dragged me into her small, neat kitchen. She was a chubby woman with features that seemed too sharp for the round, puffy face nature had given her.

“You see?” she jutted a pointed chin toward the kitchen window, toward her neighbor, who was still chopping. We could both hear it. “What did I tell you?” she gasped, still in that breathless, runaway voice I had heard on the phone. “I’m living right next to a homicidal maniac. All these years, acting so quiet, so normal. I knew it. I knew he would finally lose it.”

“Well, it does seem sort of odd...” I peered out. Everett Halsey was setting down his ax. He took out a handkerchief and patted his balding head, blew his nose. He went inside his house.

I studied the carved woman-stump which stood, raw and upright, amongst the debris of limbs and leaves. The figure did look bizarre. Almost unreal, I thought, like some sort of ancient totem plunked out here in the middle of Maine. The crude, almost savage way the figure was cut added to the macabre look.

“Maybe he’s taken up sculpture,” I offered.

Marilyn Doughty gave me a blank look.

“You know, art.”

She frowned. “That’s crazy talk.” She leaned forward and held up a chubby finger. “It’s murder,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “And if you want the truth, I think he’s been planning it for years. Oh, everything looked fine between him and Sheila but I could tell.”

“Who’s Sheila?”

“Sheila is — was,” she corrected herself with emphasis, “Everett’s wife. He’s killed her.”

I looked at her in blank surprise. “How do you know that?”

The woman didn’t answer but looked out the window, her eyes directed at the wooden stump outside. Her head turned back toward me before her gaze did, as if she couldn’t tear her eyes away. “She’s gone,” she said softly. “Her car is still here, that little Subaru in the drive. But there’s been no sign of her for the past three days and she wasn’t at the fire station craft and bake sale.” She raised an eyebrow. “Which she never misses. Not in thirteen years.” Marilyn Doughty folded her arms, tucking them up under the shelf of her broad chest. It was a stance of conviction.

Missing a bake sale, I thought. Carving a tree stump. This was the kind of high-profile criminal activity that journalistic dreams are made of here in Witka. It would be right up there with the big story of who switched the magnetic letters on the sign in front of Gillespie’s package store from “Buck-Off Fall Specials” to read, well, something else.

“Did you ask Mr. Halsey where his wife is?” I asked.

Marilyn Doughty shook her head at me in a pitying way. “What do you think a murderer would say?” she retorted. “Says she’s gone off for a little vacation. A retreat. To some yoga place in Nashua.” Marilyn Doughty let out one of those little pshaw sounds of disbelief — sounding like a popped tire. “Who goes to New Hampshire for vacation?” she demanded. Luckily, it was rhetorical, and she went on, “I called the police. But they haven’t done anything. He hasn’t committed any crime, they say. And as far as public indecency — it has to go through channels.” Marilyn Doughty’s expression left little doubt about her view of such bureaucracy. “If that ain’t indecent,” she jabbed a finger through her country-kitchen curtains at Halsey’s yard, “I don’t know what is. And I’ll bet we never see poor Sheila again,” she added.

I wondered which was stronger, Marilyn Doughty’s concern for Sheila Halsey or her outrage over the piney pinup girl in the yard.

“If Mr. Halsey did anything to his wife,” I pointed out, “surely the last thing he’d want is to call attention to himself with this kind of, um, display.”

“Murderers aren’t always logical,” said Marilyn Doughty with complacent assurance, due, no doubt, to many hours of television crime-show watching.

She narrowed her eyes and stared at the carved stump outside. “There’s your evidence,” she said in dramatic tones. “It’s as plain a confession as I ever saw.”

I sighed. I didn’t blame the woman for being upset. I certainly wouldn’t want to look up from my kitchen sink and see that every morning. It was pretty creepy. But that didn’t mean that Halsey was a murderer. No wonder the police didn’t bite. But like it or not, I was going to have to go over and get the story. And a picture.

Just as I came out, Everett Halsey was emerging from his own door. He had put on a weathered barn jacket and was getting into the Subaru. The other vehicle in his drive was a battered Ford pickup with a bumper sticker that read: “Welcome to Maine. Now Go Home.”

“Mr. Halsey,” I called out.

If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. Without looking up, he started the car, backed out, and drove off down the street. Darn it. Listening to Marilyn Doughty’s rant, I’d lost my chance to talk to Halsey. But I could still take some pictures.

The low afternoon sun sent glancing shafts of warmth and light through the trees and the smell of fresh-cut pine hung sweet in the still air. It felt weird being here alone, so close to the stump. I went closer, feeling uncomfortable, as if I was trespassing on a scene of intimacy. Despite how crude it looked, there was something about it that drew the eye. I walked around it slowly. The legs rose up from the ground in two sturdy columns, a shallow dimple hacked in each to indicate the knee. One leg was more in front, as if striding forward. Above the legs the figure flared out in the back and in the front — making protuberant female buttocks and belly. The waist was cut in deeply and the upper part of the body was angled, one shoulder slightly dropped — in a pose that was almost graceful. The arms seemed to be stretching backwards, but they ended abruptly, sawn off. I circled to the front and gave a grimace. It was those huge jutting breasts that were really distracting. And the bark. Yikes.

I took a number of shots from different angles — even a closeup that showed the pale rings of growth in one cross-sectioned plane.

Finished, I looked around. I didn’t really want to sit around and wait for Halsey to return. I wondered what the other neighbors thought of his... handiwork.

I didn’t have to wonder long. As I was putting away my camera, a minivan screeched to a halt at the curb. A tall woman in a purple velour sweat suit slammed the door and strode across the lawn, kicking branches out of her way.

“Are you here to do something about this?” she demanded.

“Uh, hello. No, not really. I was taking some pictures. For the paper,” I clarified. “Are you a neighbor?”

“I’m Evelyn Wyatt Szymanski,” the woman announced, not looking at me but glaring at the tree stump, as if she was addressing it. She was blond, in her late twenties, maybe, and her clingy sportswear showed off her figure well. “I live down at the corner there.” She turned and waved one hand toward a large house, only the roof of which I could see from this distance. As she gestured, something struck me as faintly familiar. I frowned, trying to pin it down, but she kept talking and I lost the thread. “This — thing is disgusting,” she yelled, “and I think the town should do something about it!”

I didn’t point out that the only way she could possibly see Halsey’s yard from her house was with binoculars. Instead I asked, “Have you talked to Mr. Halsey?”

“Certainly not,” she said with an expression of disgust, as she circled around the stump. “I’m not going anywhere near that pervert! Can you imagine the kind of twisted mind that would make something like that?” She let out a huff of breath and eyed the carving with compressed lips. “There are children on this street, you know. Impressionable young minds.”

As if to demonstrate her point, a little girl slipped out the side door of the minivan and calmly walked up to stand next to her. The woman gave no notice, but kept talking. The girl, the woman’s daughter, I assumed, was very pretty, maybe about five years old, with pale blond hair in a scrunchy-held ponytail. She looked up at me with wide-set blue eyes and I couldn’t help but notice the birthmark that marred her skin — an irregular, violently red splotch that covered her left cheek from her ear to the corner of her mouth. I smiled at her.

“—example of pornographic, misogynistic symbolism that I’ve ever seen. Right out here in the open!” Evelyn Wyatt Szymanski was saying as I turned back. “There must be some kind of ordinance or obscenity law or something,” she finished and, finally, drew a breath. Suddenly her eyes went wide. “Janie. Don’t!”

I whirled around. Little Janie had walked up next to the carving. She turned to her mother, one dimpled hand raised. “She’s pretty,” the girl said softly. She smiled, turned, and patted the stump figure on one luxuriant, bark-nippled boob.

The woman gasped and dove forward to snatch her daughter’s hand away, as if she were dunking it in hydrochloric acid.

“You tell that Mr. Halsey that we want this abomination removed,” she yelled over her shoulder as she hustled the little girl back into the car. “It’s a public disgrace.”

Actually, from what I could tell, Mr. Halsey’s figure was becoming something of a local scenic attraction. During the woman’s neighborly visit, a handful of cars had passed by, including one full of teenaged boys. Each and every one of them slowed down long enough to give the passengers a good eyeful. I was pretty sure that the traffic was more than usual for this street, this time of day. Word was getting around.

I decided to talk to another neighbor. Maybe one of them knew something more about Halsey’s project.

There was no answer to my knock, and no car in the drive at number 41, across the street. The yard here was decked out for Halloween, complete with a scattering of realistic-looking tombstones, one of which had a human foot sticking out coyly from the ground in front. Fake cobwebs drifted from the trees and a hooded figure of Death holding a bloody, raised scythe towered over the path to the door. Apparently the Uber-mom I had just met didn’t have any problem with this yard; it seemed Gothic horror was perfectly okay for impressionable young minds.

From there I walked over to the small blue Cape diagonally across from Halsey, number 43. I knocked on the door. There was silence for a minute or two, but then from the corner of my eye I saw a slight flutter of the curtains at the bay window. The door opened.

A man answered. He was tall, perhaps mid thirties, with dark, tousled hair and a shadow of stubble on his chin. He was wearing a rumpled green T-shirt and drawstring sleep pants with a pattern of Irish beer logos on them.

“Hi, sorry to bother you,” I began.

“S’okay.” He gave me a lopsided smile and ran a hand through his curly dark hair.

I introduced myself. He told me he was Drew Richards. He looked down at his state of attire and said, with a rueful smile, “Sorry I’m kind of a mess. I work nights. You caught me sleeping.”

“I’m sorry. I was just wondering what you thought of your neighbor’s new landscaping.” I said it with a smile and angled away from him to indicate the Halsey yard.

Drew Richards laughed and kept his eyes on my face. He had very nice eyes, I noticed, with long, dark lashes. “Oh, that?” He gave a shrug. “Yeah, it’s kind of weird.”

“Did Mr. Halsey say anything to you about it?”

Richards frowned faintly. “Nope. Should he?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Neighbors talk to each other.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He shrugged. “Well, I just moved here not too long ago.” He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “Been here a couple of weeks. What with working nights and all, I don’t know many of the neighbors yet.”

I nodded toward Halsey’s yard again. “It doesn’t bother you?”

Drew Richards smiled at me and shook his head. It was a nice smile. Under the stubble and dressed, I realized, he would be very good-looking. Who was I kidding? Stubbled and undressed worked fine, too.

“Hey, it’s no business of mine,” he murmured. “In fact, it could have been a lot worse.” He twitched his eyebrows and widened his eyes in mock alarm. “It could have been some of those pink plastic flamingos.”

We both laughed.

“Right. It’s probably more of a woman thing,” I said. That sounded stupid. I cleared my throat and tried to concentrate on not thinking about not blushing. “Mrs. Doughty over there is pretty upset,” I said. “She thinks something may have happened to Sheila Halsey.”

“Really?” Drew Richards’s face sobered. “Wow. I did see the police over there earlier. I hope she’s okay.”

“I’m sure she is. Apparently she’s gone away for a few days. Well, thanks for talking with me.” I shook his hand, appreciating, as I did, the view of well-muscled arm.

“No problem.”

I walked back to my car, thinking about the fact that my husband had been dead for three years now and I was only just starting to notice again that there was an opposite sex. But that was something I didn’t want to think about. Instead, I focused on the story.

Story? Oh please. I grabbed my notebook from my backpack and flipped to a clean page to write a few notes. It would be one photo, small-font caption, probably on page seven, under “Witka Happenings,” next to the church bean-supper schedule.

Still, it was interesting, the variety of reactions that Halsey’s stump had gotten from the different neighbors. Differences. And similarities. I frowned, remembering my encounter with each of them. Something was bothering me about one of them, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

And where was Sheila Halsey? It shouldn’t be too hard to confirm her whereabouts if, as Halsey had told his neighbor, she was at a retreat. I figured the police probably would check up on that, if only to shut Marilyn Doughty up. I knew someone, Hughie, down at the station. I would call him and check it out later.

If and when she came back, I thought to myself, what on earth would Sheila Halsey think about the little arts-and-crafts project on her front lawn?

It was getting late. I’d have to come back the following day to talk to Halsey. It was possible that he had figured out that I was coming to interview him and high-tailed it out of there to avoid me. Suspicious? Yes, but not criminal.

As it turned out, I was wrong. There was indeed a criminal.

That evening, around eleven p.m., Everett Halsey was shot. The bullet went through the plate-glass window of his front room and hit him in the chest. He had been in the living room, having just gotten up from his recliner in order to shut off the floor lamp and go to bed.

Luckily, Halsey survived. It was Marilyn Doughty who got to him first. After hearing the shot, she ran over and unlocked the side door with the key she had noticed the couple always left under the mat. She went in and found Halsey on the floor of the darkened living room, in a widening pool of blood. Marilyn called 911 and stayed with her neighbor all the way to the hospital. Halsey was bleeding fast, and the doctors said he might have died if she hadn’t known where to find the key and gotten in so quickly. It was probably the one time her snoopiness had done some good.

The bullet had hit high, missing Halsey’s heart and major vessels. And because he was hit just as he turned out the light, the would-be killer couldn’t see to get in another shot. The next day Halsey was awake and recovering in a hospital room at Maine Medical Center.

The police interviewed the victim as soon as he was able to talk. Everett Halsey insisted he had no idea who fired the shot or even who might have wanted to harm him. Sheila Halsey was contacted in New Hampshire, where she was indeed attending a yoga retreat. She returned immediately. She had gone with a friend who drove, and she had any number of witnesses able to confirm that she never left the facility until she heard of the attack on her husband.

In fact, the only thing that made the shooting more than a random attack was the stump that Halsey had carved out in his front yard. But who would possibly resort to murder over something like that?

After they finished with Halsey and his wife the police started questioning the neighbors. I was questioned, too, Marilyn Doughty having informed them of my presence in the neighborhood the day before.

I described my conversations with each of the three neighbors. I also told the police something else, about the thing that had been bothering me. I remembered it now and told Lieutenant Marchand, who was leading the investigation. It might have been nothing, but it was strange.

Some hours later, I was allowed to talk to Everett Halsey. He was in a hospital bed with oxygen tubing in his nose, a large plastic chest tube coming out of his left side, and a variety of other tubes and monitor wires attached to various spots. His ginger-colored hair was damp and askew but he seemed alert.

Up close, Halsey was a big man, with a long, taciturn face and a prominent bony nose. His eyes were deep-set and of a pale, blood-shot blue.

“Saw you drive up yesterday,” he said in a low, raspy voice after I introduced myself.

“One of your neighbors called me,” I said. “About the... thing you were working on.”

He looked away. “Marilyn Doughty, I s’pose. Busybody old maid,” he muttered.

“Yes.”

He turned back and said sharply, “She saved my life, you know,” as if warning me off the idea that being a busybody was in any way a bad thing. I told him I had heard about his good luck.

“It hardly seems important now,” I went on, “but yesterday I was interested in the, um, work that you’re doing out there in your yard.”

“Oh,” Everett Halsey said with a wave of his big, calloused hand. “That.”

“It’s very unusual.”

“Uh-huh.”

He was silent. There was going to be no way around it. I cleared my throat. “Why did you carve a naked woman out of a tree in your yard, Mr. Halsey?”

Halsey chuckled, then winced. “Well,” he rasped, “that pine had to come down. It was too big. Sheila said it made the front of the house too dark. Gloomy. You know?”

Sure, I thought. As opposed to the bright, cheerful mood a bit of lewd whittling always brings. “Okay,” I nodded my understanding. “But why the... you know.” I waved an hourglass shape in the air with my hands.

Halsey let out a deep sigh. “It’s hard to explain. I was gonna cut down the stump, but all of a sudden I started to see her. There, in the wood.”

“See her?” I repeated.

Halsey shrugged. “I’m no artist, but the feeling came over me to make something. Something beautiful.” His voice lowered with apparent embarrassment at the words. “My wife Sheila and I — we aren’t too much alike. She likes art and books and culture... you know. Me, I’ve always been just a plain person. Retired last year from Bath Iron Works. Anyway, now that I’ve been home a lot, seems like Sheila and I — we don’t have too much in common. But yesterday I was working out there and it kind of came over me. Inspiration. I worked all day, skipped lunch and never even missed it.”

“But you said ‘I saw her.’ What do you mean by that?” I asked. Something about his words was jangling a memory.

Halsey frowned. “The shape. It started to remind me of a picture I saw in one of Sheila’s books. It was about all the paintings and sculptures they have there in—” He frowned, and snapped his fingers with the effort of remembering. “What’s that big museum in Paris?”

“The Louvre,” I said absently. “You saw her in the wood,” I repeated. I pictured it — the upper torso slightly turned, the graceful droop of one shoulder... Then it hit me. What the thing out on the lawn was — what that splintered, sappy piece of pine stump was. I recognized it.

“It’s Winged Victory,” I exclaimed.

Everett Halsey smiled, a smile of real sweetness that transformed his long face. He slapped a hand on the side bar of his hospital bed. “That’s the one,” he said, nodding. He was an artist, pleased that his work had been appreciated. “Something about how that stump was curved... I just saw it. I started chipping away and couldn’t seem to stop. It was relaxing. It doesn’t have the wings, of course,” he admitted.

“Of course,” I agreed. “The stump’s not wide enough.” Now that I thought about it — the resemblance was obvious. The posture of Evelyn Wyatt Szymanski, pointing back to her house, had reminded me of it, too. The angled upper torso with the gracefully arched back, the stance, one leg slightly forward. Everything except — I glanced at Everett Halsey and frowned. “It’s a little more... endowed, up top, than the Greek one,” I said delicately.

“Well,” Halsey said, with a self-deprecating little shrug and a smile. His pride was evident.

So one small mystery was solved: Why Halsey carved the stump. But it left the bigger question. Who would shoot him over it? As it turned out, the information I gave the police led them to the guilty party. This was to the great delight of Boss Hogg, who insists on calling me his “little investigative reporter” now. It makes me want to smack him, but the moniker came with a raise, so I rein myself in.

It was Drew Richards. When the police went to Richards’ house to interview him they did exactly as I suggested and asked Richards to step outside. They walked him across the street and stood directly in front of Halsey’s wooden carving.

According to the lieutenant, Richards basically lost it right there. He started shaking and sweating and began rambling about how Halsey was out to get him. Halsey was trying to trick him. Into confessing.

Which is exactly what he did. It turns out that when Drew Richards looked at that headless, armless pine stump of a woman he was reminded of someone, too. Only it wasn’t a famous Greek statue. It was his girlfriend. Richards had moved to Witka from Lewiston, arriving on Little Brook Lane with a moving van and all his worldly possessions, among which was a large, commercial-grade plastic container that he buried in the backyard shortly after moving in. Later, the dismembered remains of his former girlfriend, Amanda Deveraux, were discovered inside.

And what was it that I had told the police? Just this: Drew Richards had been the only person that day who would not look at the stump. Everyone else, complain as they did, couldn’t seem to look at it enough. Richards couldn’t bear to.

So everything was back to normal in Witka, or at least as close as we get. Sheila Halsey made Everett cut down the stump after he recovered. Halsey was horrified to hear that some folks thought it was indecent, especially when “folks in France pay to see the same darn thing.” It’s funny, though, people here in Witka still remember Halsey’s statue and go over to Little Brook Lane to see it once in a while. Everett has it in the shed out back. The visitors include Evelyn Wyatt Szymanski. According to her, her daughter Janie’s birthmark began to disappear shortly after she touched “the wood lady.” It’s gone completely now. Evelyn, to this day, swears it was some kind of miracle. But I don’t know; they say those things just disappear on their own sometimes.

I do know that as I carved a pumpkin for my front step that Halloween I thought about the power of objects and images. That is what Halloween’s about, after all. The power of ghoulish images to frighten away evil spirits, to exorcise demons. Everett Halsey created such an object, one that spoke to each person differently. To some it was an artistic inspiration revealed, to others an expression of guilt, or a sick fantasy, and in the end, maybe even a miracle. And to Drew Richards? It was an accusation. One that his own conscience couldn’t live with.

Chalk up one evil spirit, chased out of Witka.

Copyright © 2009 Maurissa Guibord