Miss Evangeline said, “If the legends are true, Mr. Mayor, it also provided a hiding place for retreating Confederate soldiers on more than one occasion.”
“We’ll emphasize that fact in our press release about the house.” He went on to explain to Miss Evangeline that her property would be tax-exempt from now on as a result of the executive order he had issued. He explained that her telephone would be reconnected and paid for, of course, by the city, as befitted her home’s newly-declared status. He told her that she would be appointed official caretaker of the newly-created city landmark and that she would be paid a modest but, he hoped, a satisfactory monthly salary, quite in keeping with the latest cost-of-living index issued by the federal government.
He was so kind and the room was so pleasant and MacReynolds and Carson were so full of smiles Miss Evangeline simply could not resist making the most of her opportunity. She leaned over and whispered something to the mayor.
His eyes widened, then narrowed. He started to smile and then thought better of it. “MacReynolds!” he said in his mayor’s voice. “Miss Evangeline has just given me a report on what she calls the Mulberry Mall Monster. It seems that it is some sort of... of—”
“Sea serpent,” Miss Evangeline supplied helpfully. “I’ve seen it twice in our river next to the mall. Most unsightly, especially considering the neighborhood.”
“A sea serpent!” Carson spluttered. “She couldn’t have seen a sea serpent! Not in our river!”
MacReynolds silenced him with a fierce glance.
“Patrolman Carson,” said the mayor solemnly, “Miss Evangeline’s keen perceptions are what led to the capture of the kidnappers of Sonny Emory—”
“And the dognappers of Mitzi,” Miss Evangeline reminded him gently.
“Yes. Of course. So under the circumstances, an investigation of the Mulberry Mall Monster would seem to be definitely in order.”
“Definitely,” said MacReynolds.
“I’ll expect a full report,” the mayor said.
MacReynolds and Carson left the room.
Miss Evangeline sipped her tea and found it sweet.
Fifth Time Dead
by John Paxton Sheriff
They brought the sheriff and the procurator-fiscal over from mainland Scotland for the Serious Accident Enquiry, but it was midwinter and blowing a gale and they stumbled over the step into that hastily prepared room in Tobermory still looking green and shaken from the ferry trip. And that just about set the pattern. There were a lot of disgruntled faces, and I drew some black looks, but I’d heard enough gossip to know why. It was unnecessary, they argued; legal procedure should be adhered to, right enough, but it had been an accident, so what the hell.
So in that bare, cold room on the Isle of Mull, with its crude wooden benches and iron-legged tables, I listened with the sour taste of fury in my mouth as big, bearded Dougail Gaunt told them what they wanted to hear with soft words and a twisted tongue. And long, long before he’d finished I was outside, leaning into the wind as I stumped disgustedly towards my car through the salt spray whipping in from the harbor.
It was twenty miles of single-track, twisting coastal road to Craignure. In the deepening gloom of that winter evening I drove blind with rage, and poor, dead Jamie was with me all the way. Jamie, and the hypocrisy of Dougail Gaunt’s words.
He’d been on his way back to his motel, he’d told them, fighting the wheel of his old truck as it bucked and slewed in the wind swirling across that icy, pitted road. He must have nudged Jamie’s Land Rover as the lad tried to go past at Wilson’s Gap, he said, and his heavy brows lowered over black eyes narrowing at painful memories. Aye, he said, he’d have stopped, had he known. But in that shrieking, westerly gale he’d heard nothing...
I’d turned away then, gazing in mute fury towards the high white windows, because back there in the night Jamie had bitten through his lower lip in agony and, pinned beneath tom and twisted metal, had bled his life away into the purple heather of Glen More.
That last bit was mine, and true, and all the rest was lies. Jamie had died, whisky-swilling Doug Gaunt had killed him, and it had been no accident. But the verdict was there in all their faces, and I’d left before the end because I didn’t think I could listen to it without the anger spilling over.
I drove home like a madman, with a dead boy’s ghost at my shoulder and the echoes of a murderer’s voice all around. At Craignure I roared up the hill and onto the forecourt of the filling station and repair shop I owned, and I sat for a while, gripping the wheel to still the trembling. When I got out and limped towards the office, Frank was in the workshop doorway, wiping his hands on an oily rag.
“How’d it go?” he called.
“Accident,” I mumbled, the word lost in the wind. I went inside and slumped behind the desk, and in a surge of fury I swept vehicle parts, books and old invoices, and chewed pens to the floor and reached for the telephone.
She’d been with him three weeks. This was the first time I’d called her.
“He got off,” I said when she answered. Her voice was husky, her breath so close to my ear my skin tingled all the way down to my hip. “They called it an accident, so now he’s taken my girl and killed my brother and got away with it both times.”
There was a silence while she thought that over. Her heady perfume was there, in my nostrils, and I could picture her, blonde hair brushing the shoulders of the flame housecoat I’d given her, hip thrusting and a half smile on her full lips as she closed her eyes and waited for him to come through the door.
“I’m glad for him, Will, and sorry for you, truly I am. But word got around, there were rumors you and Jamie were about to do something because of me, and if you put Jamie up to some trickery on that wicked night...”
“If we were going to put the fear of God into Dougail, that’s one thing; knocking the lad clear off the side of a mountain is something else again,” I gritted, almost choking with fury and grief. “He must have seen him, it had to be deliberate, coldblooded...”
“It was an accident,” she cut in, and for a moment there was nothing but the whisper of her breathing. “You know that truck, Will. It’s like riding inside a tin can full of rocks, and on a dark night with that wing mirror flopping around...”
“Then get it fixed,” I said stupidly.
“Coming from you, Will McGair, that’s priceless, you pushing grease into the truck and fixing all the broken bits on Fridays when he’s playing cards. The mirror’s your concern, not his.”
I sat gripping the phone and watching my knuckles whiten, because cards had been the beginning and before he’d taken my girl he’d taken my money. Yet as I listened to the breathless way she used words, and remembered the whiteness of her body in the warm darkness, I knew I had to have her.
“When are you coming back to me, Chrissie?”
“Give me one good reason, Will, I’ll come running.”
“I’m reason enough,” I said hoarsely. “You can’t be enjoying life at that fleabitten motel he runs. And besides,” I added desperately, “what good is a man who’s drunk most of the week and a hungover wreck the rest?”
She chuckled, a wicked gurgle that made my throat ache. “Look around you, Will. What’s so cosy about a poky room over a filthy garage? Doug Gaunt’s got an acre and a half down here at Pennyghael, and this time of the year, guests all gone, there’s a different bedroom for every night of the week. And he’s all man, Will, so if you want me, come and get me...”
I cut her off, putting the phone down with a gentle click to avoid smashing it in my rage.
Because that last, vicious taunt was a cruel reference to the twisted left leg I drag around, a legacy of one afternoon’s lobstering when frantic haste to haul in the pots had seen me caught astride the gunwale of the crazily rocking boat and dragged bloodily across the jagged rocks. Dougail Gaunt’s pots, I remembered. We’d been hauling them up, Jamie and I, because in his habitual alcoholic haze Gaunt had dropped them into deep water and they’d drifted across ours, tangling lines and dragging buoys — but all I’d got for my pains had been half a dozen of his derelict pots, three months in hospital, and a leg so shortened it needed a wooden block to depress the clutch pedal of a truck and could do precious little else.