I felt as if the spirit had drained out of me. “And for the first time since coming to Northmont I’ve got a mystery I can’t explain.”
It nagged at me, in the office and at home with Annabel. “You’ve got to get it off your mind, Sam,” she told me a few days later. “Think about becoming a father.”
She was right, of course, but the following morning I decided on one more visit to the sheriff’s office. “What’s up, Doc?” he asked, imitating a popular movie cartoon character.
“Please, Sheriff.”
“Just joking a bit. What can I do for you?”
“Do you still have Julius Finesaw’s ring, the one that makes him invisible?”
“Sure do. If the case goes to trial, the district attorney might need it, but for now it’s still in my file.”
He slid it from an envelope onto his desk and I studied it carefully. “It doesn’t look particularly ancient or valuable.”
“It’s not. They sell ones like it at Ross Jewelers for nineteen ninety-five. I checked.”
“And yet something convinced him it was like the shepherd’s ring of Gyges, described in Book Two of Plato’s—” I froze in mid sentence.
“What is it, Doc?”
“That’s it, Sheriff! That’s the answer! Come on, I’ll explain on the way.”
We took the sheriff’s car and as he drove I talked. “Where would a man like Julius Finesaw, a farmer with mental problems, who didn’t know enough to keep a tractor off a steep hillside, come across a book like Plato’s Republic? Certainly not in his house, where the bookshelves were filled with plants and china figurines, and the only reading matter in his bedroom was a Sears catalogue.”
“What are you saying, Doc?”
“The books were down the road in the other house, Ralph Cedric’s house. Remember how some of them were pulled from their shelves during the killing?”
We turned onto Chestnut Hill Road. “Is that where we’re going now?”
“No. We’ll stop first at the Finesaw house.”
It was a lucky choice. Millie and June were having morning coffee together. “What is it?” Millie asked, meeting us at the door with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“There’s been a new development,” I said.
“Join us. I’ll get two more cups.”
“What is it?” June Cedric asked. “Bad news?”
“In a way. I want to tell you both a story. It’s about two women, neighbors, who desperately wanted to get rid of their husbands.”
The coffee cup slipped from Millie’s hand. “Oh my God!”
“Don’t say anything,” June warned her.
“She doesn’t have to,” I told them. “I’ll do the talking. The idea probably came to you when Julius broke his leg in the tractor accident and threatened to kill Ralph for selling him a defective machine. Over coffee one morning you must have decided that would be the perfect solution to your problems — if Julius killed Ralph and ended up in a mental hospital. Julius’s mental condition was already so bad that you thought he could be goaded into making good on his threat. It must have been you, June, who remembered reading about the shepherd’s ring and its powers of invisibility. You even found a ring that Millie could use to convince him of its power.”
“How could I ever convince him of that?” Millie asked.
“He was taking painkillers for his leg and they left him muddled. Added to his existing mental problems, it wasn’t hard to convince him he was invisible when he turned the ring a certain way. The killing was set for that certain midnight, only when the time neared it became clear Julius might have been mentally willing to commit murder but wasn’t physically able. You switched to plan two. While Julius stayed in bed with an extra dose of mind-numbing painkillers, June did the job for him and bludgeoned her husband to death.”
“Wait a second, Doc,” the sheriff interrupted. “You’re forgetting he was killed with Finesaw’s walking stick. How did it get over there?”
“We witnessed its arrival, Sheriff, in that cotton-ball snowman Millie made. It was about the same height as the walking stick, which must have served as the anchor for those big balls of cotton. That was why the snowman had to be ripped apart, and why the other damage was done, to make it less obvious.”
“You’re saying it was June that I saw entering her own house?”
“It had to be, Sheriff. Millie was too short to pass for her husband, but June was taller. She wore the hooded jacket, a duplicate of Julius’s own coat, wrapped a piece of white paper around her leg to pass for a cast, and limped along on the cane. She’d gone out the back door of the house and walked around the far side to the front, which was why the figure seemed to appear out of nowhere in front of the house.”
But the sheriff had another objection. “I thought we ruled that out earlier, Doc. She wouldn’t have had time to kill him, bust up the place, and appear in the doorway almost instantly.”
“She killed him first, Sheriff. She did it all first. When she approached her front door and smashed the glass, he was already dead on the kitchen floor. She only had to toss the jacket and paper into the mess, drop the cane near his body, and return screaming to the front door.”
“What was Millie doing all this time?”
“Talking to Julius in his crazy drugged state, telling him exactly what he’d done, how he’d become invisible, crossed the street, broken the glass, and killed Cedric with his walking stick. She even dirtied the bottoms of his slippers to add to the story. Ralph Cedric was dead and Julius Finesaw admitted to killing him. You had witnessed part of it yourself, Sheriff. It had to be true, only when they changed their plan June and Millie here neglected to work out a way in which Julius could have returned home. It left the invisibility part in place without any alternative.”
They were both held on suspicion of murder, and it only took a day before Millie cracked and confirmed everything I’d said. It was sometime later that Sheriff Lens said to me, “You know, Doc, maybe the ring could have made him invisible. Did you ever consider that?”
“We live in a rational world, but there are times when even I must consider the irrational. Remember when I checked the pulse on Finesaw’s right wrist? I twisted the ring so the stone was inside. It didn’t make him invisible.”
Copyright © 2006 Edward D. Hoch
Lost Luggage
by Mick Herron
Mick Herron grew up in Newcastle and attended Oxford University. He continues to live in Oxford, where his series of “literary” private eye novels are set. The first book in the series, Down Cemetery Road, is not yet available in the U.S., but the second and third, The Last Voice You Hear (10/04) and Why We Die (8/06) have been published by Carroll & Graf.
Her name was Jane Carpenter, she worked at an estate agent’s, and she’d been taken at 7:26 that morning as she cut across the playing field behind the secondary school to reach her bus stop on the other side. She was twenty-three. She had wavy brown hair with fresh blond highlights. Maybe she would, but probably she wouldn’t, go to Malta with her sister this summer; she had hopes her boyfriend Brendan would suggest they go somewhere together instead. These and other details still fizzed through her subconsciousness, but mostly what she was now was a machine for not dying: an unwilled continuation of heart, lung, and nervous system that pumped away, undeterred by the narcotics in her system, the ropes binding her ankles and wrists, the gag, the blindfold, the car boot’s lock.