Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

Mr. Anonymous by Lika Van Ness{© 1971 by Lika Van Ness.}

This is the 362nd “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine… a subtle, tantalizing story that clutches you at the end, won’t let you go, won’t let you pull away…

The author, Lika Van Ness, has not told us much about herself. She is a New York journalist whose off-work hours are spent exploring the city, seeing new movies, cooking, reading, writing — and “wondering where the time went.”

Some of the time, we hope, will go into writing more short stories…

Wednesday: Jerry’s left for the office and I can breathe. I wish I could sleep late and avoid these breakfast squabbles, but I can’t — and I won’t pretend to either. The only silver lining to insomnia is seeing the sun come up and I’m not about to deny myself that or the first cup of coffee from the pot, or first look at The Times. The skyline this morning was like an overexposed photograph, the buildings charcoal-green against the first light. But dawn in New York is always breathtaking. It’s my favorite time of day. Immediately followed by my least favorite: breakfast with my husband.

His putdown this morning was you, Diary. Why would a grown woman confide in a book instead of a friend? Why don’t I discuss more with him if I have so much to say? Well, I’d much rather discuss things with you than with him, and friends are hooey. And of course there are things I can share with you that I can’t with him or with anyone. You’re my seventh veil.

Well, I’m not going to let it ruin my day. Life is too short and there are wonders to enjoy. I’m meeting Stephen at the museum at 11:00. Now that it’s summer I don’t have to work at the gallery on Wednesdays or Fridays. I wish it would stay July forever. I love everything about summer — fewer clothes, fewer working hours, fewer people in the city. Alex, dearly as I love him, off to camp. The hum of the air conditioners. Walking where I want to go instead of depending on the miserable transportation in this city. The trees green, the air heavy and sweet, everyone rested and healthy and expectant. The freedom. The possibilities.

Friday: Jerry and I are going to Montauk for the weekend. To his surprise I agreed with him at breakfast that we should get off together and try to recapture what we seem to be losing. And why not? Stephen has gone to New Jersey on some marksmen’s convention or other. His preoccupation with guns is the only thing about him that disturbs me. I’m jealous, I suppose. But better guns than another woman.

Sunday: Montauk is a disaster. The inn is full of lovers and last night Jerry and I sat like wooden Indians over the candlelit mousse while seduction bloomed all around us. But this morning I got chills in my stomach watching the surf and then I took a lovely long walk down the beach. The huddled vegetation, the piny smoke, the cold sea air. If I were really free I’d have a house on a beach someplace where it’s always summer.

Returning to the inn I noticed a large family group picnicking behind a sand dune under a purple umbrella. Everyone in the group, young and old, wore a different kind of hat. They were like something out of Juliet of the Spirits. I had an urge to paint them but lost it when I spotted Jerry walking toward me from the inn. He too had seen the family and had such a soupy expression on his face that I just couldn’t bear it. How quickly he would have us raising a family that size and moving to St. Louis to be near his parents. He never misses an opportunity to get the message across.

I walked back here with him in silence and immediately reached for you. Until then he hadn’t known I’d brought you along. He turned pale and left. I hope I won’t see him again until it’s time to leave.

Tuesday: I thought Jerry would be more quarrelsome than ever after his failed weekend, but he has been very quiet at breakfast. At dinner, too. I found myself tonight making small talk to fill in the silence, but I’m not going to do it again. Let him be uncomfortable. Let him stew.

Wednesday: I had a vile phone call this morning just after Jerry left for the office. It was more threatening than obscene and I hung up immediately, but I had the impression it was someone I know — or someone I have known. But who would get any kick out of threatening me? I mind my own business — when people let me.

Thursday: Stephen didn’t show up at the museum yesterday. He’s usually waiting in the garden when I arrive, but he wasn’t there. I waited and searched until 1:00, then phoned his office — no answer — and his home, but the phone rang and rang. Ruth must have been out organizing another charity ball.

It must be terrible trying to fill your days when you’re too rich to work, especially when that’s what your husband married you for.

Friday: Still no word from Stephen, and I can’t reach him. I don’t know whether to be worried or furious. Could he have met with an accident last weekend? Why isn’t Ruth at home? Those wretched guns of his!

At the gallery yesterday the honorable and prim-seeming Mr. Plum was in a black mood about something. (You and I know better, don’t we, Diary, about how honorable Rafael Plum is when it comes to art dealers and how prim when it comes to his women employees.) Perhaps someone has beaten him at his own game. Whatever it is, I hope he is over it by Monday. It is no pleasure being there when he is like that, I assure you.

Monday: For the first time since we were married eight years ago, I wish Jerry and I had more friends to invite in. Superficial as friends are, they would fill this terrible silence he has been imposing on us for over a week now. Blessedly though, he is working late tonight and I won’t have to sit through a wordless dinner with him.

He went to the office early this morning to do some homework. I thought homework was work you did at home, but that’s what he called it.

There is still no answer at Stephen’s office or at his house, and no word from him. Could he have gone away on vacation without letting me know? Maybe he’s away on unexpected business.

Mr. Plum is still spreading a dark cloud, and his ill humor seems especially directed at me. Well, I don’t care. If he has a grievance he can tell me outright. Or doesn’t he dare?

It would be helpful to ask Myra or Jean if they know what’s behind it, but I’d rather die than go to them. I wonder if it’s in any way connected with Stephen, who usually comes by the gallery several times a week but to my knowledge hasn’t been in for two weeks.

Tuesday: I received another of those disgusting phone calls this morning. The caller is definitely a man and he gave me reason to believe he knows things about me that only someone who truly knows me would. I’d tell Jerry about him but the caller mentioned Stephen, and others besides Stephen.

Now I’ll worry every time Jerry answers the phone.

A second phone call, right on the heels of the first, was almost as disturbing but in a different way. It was Linda Hatfield, my roommate on East 66th Street, around the comer from the gallery, before Jerry and I were married. Since Jerry was dating her before he met me, it has been too awkward to keep up the acquaintance.

I don’t think she has ever married — she identified herself on the phone as Linda Hatfield. She probably hasn’t ever moved from the old apartment because I often run into her on my way to and from the gallery. I give her a cool reception, too, yet she called to ask me if I’d like to attend a matinee with her tomorrow afternoon. She has an extra ticket that her theater partner can’t use, and suddenly she thought to ask me. Isn’t that pathetic? Can you imagine anything more deadly than attending a matinee every week, come hell or high water? God, she must be lonely.

I told her that although I do have Wednesdays off, I couldn’t possibly get out of a previous commitment. She sounded disappointed. Oh, well, “Here’s to the ladies who lunch…”

Wednesday: It’s only midmorning and I’ve just hung up from the third anonymous phone call in an hour. It does no good to hang up and then not answer the inevitable ringing that follows — he would let it ring forever. These calls are the same as the others, only worse. His insinuating voice, the same recital of facts reminding me I’m not just a name in the phone book. Describing my addiction to objets d’art, expensive clothes, perfume, and gin. Repeating the details of my parents’ suicide, of my estrangement with my brother, Judge Peter W. Daniels of Denver, Colorado. He knows Jerry is a lawyer and that we have an eight-year-old son named Alex and no pets. That I was pregnant before Jerry and I were married.

Who could possibly know all these things — and who has nothing better to do than remind me of them? Who could be so cruel? Or so sick?

Linda Hatfield? But it’s a man. Maybe she has a sick boy friend and this is how they get their jollies.

Who else has a grudge against me? The TV repairman? Forget it, he couldn’t possibly know these things — unless he got a look at you, and that’s unlikely. It couldn’t be that insipid neighbor with the Tyrolean hat who has been flinging epithets at me ever since I sent him the cleaner’s bill for the dress his Weimaraner soiled on the elevator. Myra? Jean? No, if I read them correctly they’re too cool, too busy with their own lives. No, these people are too irrelevant. It’s somebody else. It’s somebody I know. Somebody I’m overlooking…

Thursday: Rafael Plum called me into his office this afternoon and asked for my resignation. After ten years! When I asked him why, he shrugged. The economy, he said with no particular effort to sound convincing. The bad times.

Let Myra go, I told him. Or Jean. They were both hired years after I was.

They’re indispensable, he said, and working full-time. Besides, he added, he has been receiving complaints from important clients about my rudeness and off-handedness. That’s a lie, of course. I bend over backwards to be charming and helpful to every one of our customers, whether they are important or not.

All right, I told him, for some reason you want me out. I don’t care about the job. I grew tired of it long ago and won’t have a moment’s trouble getting a better one within five blocks of here. But I’m amazed you think you can fire me. Some well chosen words from me and you will be out of business, in jail, explaining yourself to a long line of husbands, or all three! How can you possibly think you can fire me?

He looked at me for a long time through those blue-tinted glasses of his. All right, he said finally, we’ll talk about it again on Monday. Meantime he’d like to know — how much would I consider fair severance pay?

I told him to guess — to make it a careful guess, and to make it in cash.

Saturday: Alex just phoned from camp. He was crying and said he was going to run away. Jerry went to the office this morning on some important business, but I told Alex to sit tight and his father and I would be up to get him, by tomorrow noon at the very latest.

I phoned Jerry at the office and he’s not there. I tried to reach Mr. Crosscup, the director of the camp, and he and his assistant are out with the 8-10 year olds on an overnight hike. The secretary said that Alex is with them and they are beyond reach of a phone. I told her that couldn’t be strictly true because I had received a phone call from my son within the past five minutes. She said she would send one of the counselors after the group and will call me back when she has some word.

I’m not going to wait around forever to hear from her or from Jerry. If Jerry isn’t home in an hour, I’m going up there without him.

Monday: I drove up to Echo Lake without Jerry on Saturday. The counselor had caught up with the overnight group and Alex and the director came back with him to the camp. Alex looked at me as if he had never seen me before in his life. He insisted he had made no call and Mr. Crosscup assured me with infuriating courtesy that there was no possible way Alex could have got to a telephone from where they had been in the mountains. I told him I had never agreed that my child should be so far out of reach of civilization, whereupon he produced a paper Jerry had signed allowing Alex to go on overnight hikes and canoe trips no farther than twenty-four hours’ distance from modern communications.

Alex and I took a walk and I pleaded with him to return to New York with me, but he refused flat out. He doesn’t like Jerry and me, he said — he hates us. At first he wouldn’t tell me why. Then he did.

Did you call me all the way up here to say these terrible things, I asked him. I didn’t call you up here, he screamed, and ran away from me into the woods. I let him go. I’ve got to think before I try talking to him again. I hated my parents, but they gave me nothing. Jerry and I give Alex everything.

Could my son be insane, as my parents were? They say mental illness skips a generation. It certainly skipped ours. Peter has behaved hatefully toward me since we settled the estate but he’s a judge, after all, and what could be more stable?

I forgot to tell you on Saturday that Stephen called, right on the heels of the call from Alex, wanting to see me and explain his absence. I told him I was on my way upstate to see Alex and had no time to talk to him.

I didn’t go to the gallery today. Rafael will have to wait until tomorrow for our talk. But it won’t be pleasant, and I’m aching for a pleasant conversation with somebody.

Tuesday: Rafael and I have had our talk and I walked out with $5000. It’s a ridiculously small amount, but he knows very well that I will call on him when I am in need of more.

I took a long walk in the heat, away from the apartment — it is so morbidly silent these days except for that bitchy phone. I walked all the way from the gallery down to lower Broadway. It’s a long way but I’ve always been a great walker. By the time I realized where I was, I was thirsty and stopped at a bar. I forget its name, but I remember that it had a friendly old mirror over the bar and that I stayed for quite a while. It was dark when I returned to the apartment — dark and empty.

What is keeping Jerry so busy these days? He is never here for meals anymore and often he doesn’t even come home to sleep. I’d suspect an affair, but that would be impossible with Jerry. He’s too much of a family man at heart. Besides, he adores me. It’s a very cold proposition, adoration, but I will live with it until it suits me to move on.

Wednesday: The phone woke me before 5:00 this morning. Jerry wasn’t home yet and I thought it would be he, but it was Mr. Anonymous. When he started in about me I hung up and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. When the phone rang again, I let it ring until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to pick up the receiver.

Your husband wants a divorce, he said.

I’ll kill him first, I thought. How would you know? I asked him.

I know everything about you, he sneered. I know about your husband, who wants a divorce at any cost, and about Stephen, who means you no more good than you mean him, and about your brother who hates you and your son who hates you. I know that you have no friends, nor really any friendly acquaintances. I know that you’ve lost your job and have $5000 that you stupidly haven’t deposited in the bank.

That’s not true, I said.

It’s true, he assured me. I saw you at the bar yesterday. And you saw me. I learned several new things about you. I had known that you drink too much but I hadn’t yet realized that you talk too much to strangers and you wear too much perfume. Funny how when you get better acquainted with some women they lose their appeal.

I reached out to shut his voice off in a hurry. Don’t hang up! he commanded. That stopped me and I waited.

That’s better, he said.

I held my breath. He didn’t speak for more than two minutes by the wall clock.

Okay then, he said. I’ll be over.

And he hung up.

That was a half hour ago. I’ve packed a suitcase, which I’ve left open on the bed, with the money in it, and the small revolver Stephen gave me. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but it’s clear I can’t stay here. But where will I go? Oh, I need time. I need more time to think.

Who could it be? Who knows all these things about me? Who could hate me so much?