The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

A Break in the Weather

Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1963.

Pearly Jenkins chose a cold, clear, brittle winter day to reveal his discovery — a day with the sky frozen to blue silence, a day when nothing should have happened.

I was at my desk catching up on paper work. I paused to load my pipe, and when I glanced up, I was startled to see Pearly standing patiently in the open doorway of my office.

A lean and grizzled old man, Pearly was dressed in his usual tattered and motley hand-me-downs. The cold, which he’d endured on his long trek down from Lake Poco, had given his face the appearance of a plum pudding with a cherry stuck in the middle.

His blue eyes had a quality in common with the cold sky outside. He took off his cap and shuffled into the office. “Good morning. Sheriff John.”

“How are you, Pearly?”

“At peace now,” he said. “I’m ready to confess and take my medicine.”

I was faintly irritated. In some ways Pearly has the mind of a ten-year-old. “I haven’t heard of any crimes might be laid at your door.”

“Oh, I done this in secret. Covered up the fact of a murder, I did.”

He was so woebegone it was hard to get really sore at him. “Come now, Pearly, these hills haven’t seen a killing in a long time.”

He stood blinking and frowning. “We’ve had one,” he said doggedly. “We’ve sure had one.” Sudden tears came to his eyes. “She’s so beautiful, Sheriff John, like a sleeping princess.”

“Who, Pearly?”

“Mavis. Mavis Worsham.”

He was the sort of old fellow who just naturally called on your more charitable instincts. Right now, my urge to comfort him was mingled with a desire to kick him out of the office.

“Pearly, why don’t you leave that lonely cabin and stay here in the county seat for a while? We’ll find something for you to do.”

“Don’t you believe me, Sheriff John?”

“I reckon I can’t. Mavis Worsham left here nearly three months ago. She was bored here. She told me herself it had been a mistake for her to return to her home town after living in the city so long. She got the yen for brighter lights and went to Scranton.”

He inched closer to my desk and said softly, “A tale to cover up her murder — that’s all it is, Sheriff John. She never got out of this county!”

He was chipping away at my patience. “She wrote a note back here after she reached Scranton, Pearly. Did you know that?”

His eyes were confused for a moment. “Who’d she write to?”

“Me, and I still have the letter kicking around here in my desk someplace. The cottage she rented belonged to summer people. She’d agreed to keep it through the winter. The rent was paid, everything in order. But leaving ahead of time, she asked me to keep an eye on the place until the summer folks returned.”

Pearly’s brow knotted. His eyes were full or pain as his mind worked. Then an inspiration lighted his furrowed face. “The note was a forgery — that’s what it was, Sheriff John!”

“You get hold of yourself, Pearly. The note was in Mavis’ own handwriting.”

“Then,” he said stubbornly, “the person who murdered her forced her to write the note — and after she was dead, he took it to Scranton and mailed it. A dad-burned slick and mean trick to make it look like she really left.”

I was now beginning to worry a little. Pearly had spent a short period in the state mental hospital several years ago, following the death of his wife.

I got up, moved over to him, took his arms, and eased him gently into the big old leather chair near my desk. “All right. Pearly. I guess we better talk this over. Who would want to kill a girl like Mavis?”

“There was talk about her. Sheriff John,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “Loose woman — men slipping in her back door — only there was good in her, I know it for a fact! She let me work for her, and paid me too.”

“Sure, Pearly. And don’t think about the gossip. There’s always talk about a girl like Mavis, beautiful, blonde, and different than most of the village women.”

“Lordy...” he groaned. “Beautiful as she was, there was truth in the gossip — first she got herself in a family way, and then she got herself killed.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Pearly!”

“Yes, I do, too. Day or two before she left — before she was murdered — I overheard her talking on the phone. She was telling some man she was going to have a baby. Must have been someone important, ’cause she said it was going to cost him plenty.”

Pearly raised his head, his eyes imploring me to believe him. Unaccountably, a shiver crossed my shoulders. I had a mental picture of our Main Street, snug and secure in its clean blanket of snow, where the important men in town were safe and comfortable in their shops and offices.

“Pearly, are you absolutely sure about this? Positive you didn’t imagine it up there in the loneliness of Poco?”

“I’m all the way positive,” he cried. “You see now why she was killed?”

“I can see why she might have been. But you haven’t told me why you think she was.”

He glanced spookily about the office. “I’ve got her up there. I slid her under the floor of the shack, because the sun don’t shine there.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn’t see at all. “You don’t want the sun shining on her?”

“Not the pale winter sun, Sheriff John. She’s beautiful, just like the day she died. Resting there and smiling at me, if I look real close. Dreamy and wavery, kind of, in the ice.”

“When did you find her, Pearly?”

“Three days ago. I went clear to the upper end of the lake and was about to chop a fishing hole in the ice when I felt like I wasn’t alone. She was friz there — friz in the ice. I went back to the cabin and fetched my sledge and a saw. I cut the ice around her, real careful-like, and the block floated free and easy while I put ropes around it and brought her out.”

He sat kneading his knuckles as the experience unfolded in his mind. “She had a little smile on her lips and the yellow hair like cobwebs around her face. I sat with her the rest of the afternoon.”

“What did you plan to do, Pearly?”

“Just have her around, I guess — somebody who’d trusted and liked me. I knowed what had happened to her. She had marks on her throat — made when she’d been strangled. Around her waist a piece of knotted leather strap. At the other end, I figured, somebody had put a heavyweight and dropped her in the lake, so’s the water creatures would devour the evidence before spring. Only a muskrat or a turtle had eat through the strap. She’d floated to the surface, where the freeze had protected her with ice.”

“I see,” I said, and this time I was beginning to.

“Long as the ice holds,” he said, “she’ll stay the same. But a break is coming in the weather. Yesterday I went to the valley below the dam. There were trickles in the low places, and green shoots in the ground. The change will climb higher — until it reaches the ice.”

His voice broke. His eyes beheld a private nightmare. Then he said, “I realized I done a bad thing. I knew I tampered with powers I oughtn’t to. I understood why she’d been put in the ice.”

“Why, Pearly?”

“So’s you can catch her murderer,” he said with utter simplicity.

I used a Jeep with four-wheeled drive for the trip up to Pearly’s squatter’s shack. When the Jeep could go no farther, we got out and walked the remaining three hundred yards to the tumble-down house where the keeper of the old dam had lived many years ago.

Wind had blown away the loose snow. The crust was firm underfoot. Evergreens stood tall and slim, and bluish-white hills rolled one behind the other to the darkening horizon. Below, the lake glittered, following the contours of the hills until it twisted out of sight.

Pearly didn’t seem to feel the sting of the cold wind that was stabbing across the peaks. He was running ahead of me now, his quick breath making little puffs of fog in the air.

“Foller me, Sheriff John!” he was yelling. “She’s right here. I’ll show you!”

The weathered old house with its crumbling chimney rested, without a cellar, on squat, low stone pillars. Pearly raced to the lower corner of the house, threw himself down, and wriggled underneath.

By the time I huffed up, he’d slid a block of ice out and was standing beside it, a sweat slick on his old face despite the cold.

“Now I guess you’ll believe me. Sheriff John!”

I looked down at the cake of ice. It was about two feet wide by six feet long. Carefully cut. Dragged here with great effort — and no small degree of danger, considering that Pearly might have fallen in or had the ice cave in under him.

I hardly knew how to say it to him. “Pearly... sometimes when even a good, gentle fellow like you is lonely and isolated for too long...”

He grabbed my arm and stared wildly into my eyes. Then he dropped beside the cake of ice and ran his hands up and down the surface as if he could straighten out the light waves.

“Sheriff John, she’s in there. I tell you! Look at the last light catching her hair...”

I took him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. “Take it easy, Pearly.”

“Damn you,” he shouted, “you look in there and see her!”

“I’ve looked, Pearly.”

An intense trembling passed through him. He turned without warning and started to run.

“Pearly!”

I lunged after him. I might not have caught him if he hadn’t slipped as he rounded the corner of the house.

He was almost on his feet when I reached him. But I was prepared for him now. I pushed him hard to the ground, smothering him with my weight.

He writhed and screamed and fought me viciously until, in the midst of our thrashing, I finally got the handcuffs on him. With the click of the steel he became suddenly calm.

Very quietly he began to sob...

Only a few lights showed in the village when we got back. I unlocked the county building and led him to my office. He had continued that subdued weeping all the way down from Poco.

Now he slumped in a chair, his shoulders twitching. His back looked more hunched, his bowed head more ancient than the aged, blue-white hills.

Looking at him, I felt heavy with sorrow. “Pearly, whatever am I going to do with you?”

“I don’t know.” He lifted his head “Please... don’t put me back in that hospital. I’ll die if I have to go back there. You don’t want me to die, do you?”

“No, Pearly — and I don’t think you’d harm anyone.”

“I never have. Sheriff John — you know I never did.”

“All right, Pearly, I’ll take a chance on you. You can work around my place for a while and we’ll see how things go.”

“You won’t be sorry, Sheriff John. Only...”

“Yes, Pearly?”

“You won’t tell folks about me cutting that cake of ice? The way they’d josh me...”

“Don’t worry about it, Pearly. We’ll forget the whole thing. I promise you, I’ll never give anyone in the village any reason for needling or hazing you.”

He wiped his nose, then smiled at me with gratitude. The feeling was, strangely enough, rather mutual. Old Pearly had come straight to me with his tall tale. Now I’d tuck him in a warm, comfortable cell for the night. It would give me plenty of time to return to Poco, melt the ice, and bury Mavis — this time permanently.