Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

Killing Kevin by Marilyn Todd

Marilyn Todd has penned sixteen novel-length historical thrillers, thirteen in a series set in Ancient Rome, three in a series set in Ancient Greece. She is also a prolific short-story writer and many of her short works also have historical settings. This one is contemporary; instead of taking us to a different time, it takes us around the globe!

Cathy never really wanted much out of life. Good health. Good legs. A good man to love, and who would love her in return. Okay, maybe a few other things too, like good wine, good skin, good weather, and, of course, a good book to curl up with on the sofa would round it off nicely. As would the time to sit down and write novels. Thrillers. All right, maybe not thrillers, but suspense, though. Something with a bit of a — you know. Bite.

She most certainly didn’t hanker after Versace, Louis Vuitton, or Jimmy Choo, any more than she needed yachts or mansions or first-class Virgin flights to the Caribbean to make her happy, although she wouldn’t have turned her nose up at any of those. No way, José. Uh-uh. But comfort, oh yes, comfort would be nice, ditto a career that didn’t involve any of the suffocating restrictions imposed on civil servants.

“Interfacing with the public’s great,” she’d tell her friends. “The job’s secure, the hours are fine, and I can’t complain about the salary.”

“But...?”

“But nothing,” she would lie. “It’s brilliant.”

Brilliant, providing you like having your initiative stifled twenty times an hour. Even better, if you enjoy working in the kind of silence that makes libraries rowdy in comparison. And absolutely dazzling, if you’re the sort who enjoys repetition, because there’s nothing like working in the County Records Office when it comes to repetition. Births, deaths, and marriages. Not a lot of room for manoeuvre there, where even the ink to sign the certificates is a special nonfade blend.

“What you need, Cath, is excitement.”

“Adventure.”

“A hot, passionate romance.”

Prosecco is famous for giving wise counsel.

“And where exactly will I find excitement, adventure, and a hot, passionate lover?” she laughed. “Not with a father registering his daughter’s birth, thank you very much! Or some old man, his shaking hand clutching the form from the hospital where his wife passed away. Or would you girls have me snogging the groom at the back of the Register Office?”

“Try Internet dating.”

“Cruise the supermarket aisles on a Friday after work.”

“If the old man was rolling in it, I’d say give it a go.”

The second bottle of Prosecco tends to lack the same wisdom, the third even more so, but we shall skip over that. The point is that, as spring turned into summer then faded to autumn, Cathriona’s wish list grew fatter, rather than longer.

Good health still topped the list, but for the first time, she’d begun to notice that when work colleagues fell ill, quick treatment became crucial in fighting disease, and that kind of response only came through private health coverage. Good wine had become subtly defined by vintages that were always ten pounds a bottle ahead of her budget, no matter how much she paid. While good legs, even at the ripe old age of thirty-six, needed cash thrown at them, either from bronzing or waxing or sessions at the gym, and the same applied to maintaining a healthy complexion. Bottom line: The money just didn’t go as far as it used to.

And while she had ample time (way too much time, actually) to curl up on the sofa with the latest bestseller, any attempts at novel writing fell flat. The plots were limp, the characters lifeless. What was needed was indepth research of her exotic settings to make the damn things jump off the page. To travel business — no, first class! — the way her protagonists did. What a pity luxury wasn’t compatible with a civil-service pay grade.

“You need a sugar daddy, Cath.”

“Or a hot date.”

“Or a cat to wrap round your neck, purr on your pillow, and weave in and out of your ankles.”

“Two’s better, then they’ll have some kitty companionship.”

“Make that three.”

“Okay, but four at the most.”

See what I mean about that last bottle of Prosecco? In fact, Cathriona was still smiling the following morning, when Kevin came to register his addict brother’s death, and boy, was he easy to talk to. As an only child, she knew what it was like to be an orphan, completely alone in the world. He was glad someone else understood. Working in contract law for a company that built food-processing plants, he knew all about rules and regulations, stifled initiative, the straitjacket constraints of a job in which no i’s were more dotted, no t’s ever more crossed. One date rolled into many.

Even so, it was awhile before she told her friends about Kevin.

“Is he hot?”

“Is he witty?”

“Is he rich?”

Hot wasn’t the word that instantly sprang to mind. Average height, average build, hair neither light nor dark, neither curly nor straight, clothes neither trendy nor stuffy.

“He has this cute little dimple in his chin,” Cathriona told them. “And you know that song by the Pointer Sisters? I want a man with a slow hand...?”

Cue a predictable chorus of oohs and aahs, and you lucky cow, followed, of course, by another bottle of fizz.

“What about the witty bit?”

“He’s caring,” Cathy said. “Compassionate. Thoughtful.”

One of the first things he said to her was Tell me the things you hate about yourself, so I can start loving them.

“Never mind all that stuff, is he RICH?”

“Most definitely not,” she said firmly. But he could be. Oh yes, how he could be...

And from that moment on, Cathriona made sure her friends knew exactly how devoted she was, how deeply in love. Every time they met up, she gushed about the birdhouse he built for her, the meals he cooked, the way he always opened the car door for her. His eyes were the greenest, his laughter infectious, and—

“—you should hear his Clint Eastwood go ahead, make my day impression!”

It was important, correction, it was critical, that they knew she was ape-shit crazy for him. Couldn’t imagine life without this man in it.

So it was a little surprising, given all the gushing, that it wasn’t until her wedding day (after the Dirty Harry go ahead, make my day impression) that her friends learned of Kevin’s penchant for extreme sports.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” they cried.

“Laugh and the world laughs with you,” she said. “Worry, and you bring everyone down.”

Bungee jumping, paragliding, free diving, and motocross were oxygen to her husband. Ice climbing, when rock climbing wasn’t enough of a rush. Show him a kayak and a stretch of boiling rapids, and he was orgasmic.

“But these are dangerous sports,” her friends cried out in horror.

Tell her something she didn’t already know.

“We should take out life insurance,” Cathriona announced, during their honeymoon.

Two warm, sunny weeks in north-central Florida, which he spent cave diving and she spent next to a sparkling blue pool writing about a filthy-rich socialite being terrorized by her neighbour, in a bid to drive her insane so she could claim the husband for herself. (Good weather, remember, was also on Cathriona’s want list).

“Life insurance? What on earth for?” Kevin laughed off the notion. “Don’t you think I can still cut it at thirty-six?”

At which point he pounded his rock-solid abs, yodelled like Tarzan, and promptly carried her off to the bedroom.

A month after coming home, though, having been bombarded with statistics (“Every year, darling, in every one of these sports, there are over a hundred fatalities”), he finally agreed it made sense. Even so—

“How much?” Green eyes stood out on stalks when she showed him the contracts. “Jeez, Cath, if anything happens, you’ll be the richest widow in history!”

“Or you’ll be the richest widower.”

An unlikely scenario.

Extreme spell-checking still hadn’t caught on.

Still. Love, as they keep telling us, is a many-splendoured thing, so it was no great surprise that Cathriona should want to bone up on her husband’s energetic pursuits. All right, Paragliding Weekly was strictly for nerds, but The Only Way Is Ice wasn’t too stodgy, and Rock On! was a lot better than its covers suggested. But it was Down & Dirty, a twice-monthly cave-diving magazine, that really caught her attention.

Three times she read the article all the way through. Pored over the photos of Gabriel Field, a tall, bronzed man in his forties, geography teacher by profession, marathon runner for charity, with several hundred dives under his belt. Gabriel Field had a wife and three children, and the images of their empty faces at his memorial service would haunt Cathriona for months.

Memorial service, for the simple reason they never recovered his body.

According to Down & Dirty, there’s no place on the planet with as many underwater caves as the Yucatan Peninsula. Over a hundred different cave entrances, leading to mile upon mile of tunnels, each adorned with spectacular stalactites, stalagmites, and columns. To a geography teacher, this would have been catnip.

Gabriel’s dive buddy, his face wracked with pain, explained how they’d been laying a line to guide themselves out when the reel jammed. As always in situations like this, you turn back straightaway, and Gabriel indicated that he was behind him. The trouble was, the caves of the Yucatan are shallow in comparison to what he was used to in Florida and although he was experienced, his knowledge of caverns was thin. To make matters worse, his primary light failed.

“I did the one thing a diver must never do,” he told the magazine. “I panicked.”

He didn’t stop to consider that, if his backup light failed this deep into the underground system, Gabriel had both primary and backup lights, and they would be safe. Panic invariably overrides logic, and consequently, instead of using finning techniques that would have prevented the fine silt on the floor from swirling up, he swam as fast as he could to safety. It was only when he reached the cave mouth that he realized the reason he couldn’t see Gabriel behind him had nothing to do with the haziness of the water, and after a few minutes, he began to get worried.

“I mean, really worried, man.”

He checked his air supply and noticed it was getting low. Which meant Gabriel’s would have been too.

Having screwed up once, he was determined not to panic a second time. Fully equipped, and with a spare tank for Gabriel, the dive buddy followed the line back into the caves. Swirling sediment or not, Gabriel was experienced enough to be able to track the line home. What went wrong?

The general consensus was catnip. That, as a geography teacher, he had been so taken by the beauty of these watery tunnels that he had fallen victim to the same compulsion that drives most of us. The desire to see what’s round the next corner. Just the next one, the next one, just one more, then—

There’s a saying, the magazine article said, that watching your air pressure drop to zero is no way to spend the rest of your life.

Yet it would appear that was exactly what happened to Gabriel Field. He became lost in the labyrinth, and his air ran out long before he found the line laid by their reel. His body was never found.

Cave diving in Mexico is not like cave diving in Florida, the magazine said. For one thing, forget four-wheel drives, you need burros. You’re tracking a long way through jungle, and even with maps, it’s hard to know how far to go or where to turn. Many sites are difficult to find, few of the cave entrances have signs, and those that do are often misleading. Unless you speak fluent Spanish, you won’t just be in for a rude awakening. You’re risking your life, and those of others.

Cathriona looked over to where her husband was watching the rugby, England v. Wales in the finals.

“How do you fancy a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, Kevin?”

Cathy’s friends were not remotely surprised when she quit her job after her husband’s death, upped sticks, and moved to Australia. Sydney was as far removed from her old life as it was possible to get, both geographically and in the way of life there. They wished her nothing but luck.

All she’d ever wanted, they said, was a good man to love, and to be loved in return.

Not entirely.

She’d wanted good health. Check. Good legs. Check. Good weather, check, check check, and dear God, wines don’t come much better than Barossa Valley, especially the ’99, ’98, and ’96 vintage.

Sitting by the pool — her own pool — overlooking Sanctuary Island in the Narrabeen Lakes, and just metres away from the ocean, Cathriona leaned back in her chair and stretched.

“Novel going well, love?”

“Zipping along,” she said, which it was. Sod those ridiculous socialites being slowly driven insane. She always said she’d wanted to write something with a bit of bite, and nothing bit quite like rampant werewolves and naked vampires. Publishers couldn’t get enough of her erotic romances; this was already her fifth bestseller, and climbing.

She couldn’t have done any of this, if she hadn’t killed Kevin.

If they hadn’t killed Kevin.

Her eyes ran over his rippling muscles as he towelled himself dry. “You want me to read you this latest chapter?”

Green eyes danced.

“Go ahead, make my day.”

Yes, she’d wanted all those other things, but at the top of her list was a good man to love, and to be loved in return. From the moment they met, Kevin was that man, and together, they hatched a plan.

Theoretically, “Kevin” was dead. Lost in a watery labyrinth below the Yucatan jungle, a tragedy of unimaginable proportions for the wife who loved him with all her heart. But though they both now called him Adam, that dimple in his chin remained unbearably sexy, those green eyes still sparkled with mischief, and Sydney offered all the surfing a man could ever need.

In the background the Pointer Sisters played.

“I want a man with a slow hand...”

On her lap, a cat purred contentedly, while another wove in and out of her ankles.