Now we bring you a new story by Bruce M. Fisher, one written unequivocally in the deductive-detective tradition but with a strong vein of human interest as well...
Janet Morlin laid the bolt of her single-shot .22 caliber rifle aside and smiled at her plump little husband across the table corner. He was mumbling again. He had been mumbling like that ever since her sister Carmel, a professional model, had made those oh-so-correct television commercials for Wetherson’s. Not that there was anything between Ben and Carmel, though it helped to pretend that there was. “What did you say, dear?” she asked.
For a moment the pale blue eyes in his pale round face were blank, then his fatuous smile reflected the love of five happy years of marriage. “I said ‘a penny for your thoughts.’ I do believe you’ve oiled that bolt three times since we started cleaning the guns.”
“Have I?” She shook black shoulder-length hair and wriggled her shapely body in the enticing way that delighted him. “It’s just that I’m so happy with you, Ben. Sometimes I can hardly stand it. If anything happened to you, I’d just die. I know I would.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said. “Foresight is my guardian angel. I see things coming before they happen. But in any case, you’re well provided for.”
He couldn’t know, of course. No more than he could realize the chance warning his words conveyed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” she said, reaching for the cleaning rod. “As if money was all that mattered.”
“It matters a great deal.” He wiped pieces of his slide-action .22 repeater with a dry cloth. “While you’re alive, that is. It gets you what you want. But when you’re dead — well, you can’t take it with you.”
No, you can’t, she agreed silently, her heart-shaped face angelically smooth as she returned to the ever-increasing puzzle of sending him on his way.
It had to be a hunting accident. That way, the police might suspect murder done but they could never know. If she carried it off flawlessly, she might even gain sympathy from it, because it was an accident and everybody makes mistakes. Also, accidental death would double the amount she would gain from his life insurance by virtue of the double-indemnity clause.
And this fine suburban house with its lush carpets, cut-stone fireplace, spacious rooms, and polished woodwork was worth over $60,000 alone. There was Ben’s savings in cash and bonds, no small amount. The expensive furniture, all the house contained. Hers, if she could carry it off.
But how in the world could she rig a foolproof hunting accident when the law stated that all hunters must wear blaze-orange vests while in the woods?
It was a color that did not appear naturally in the wild. It was light-reflecting, brilliant, unmistakable. Ben never went hunting without his orange vest and always insisted that she wear hers too. To shoot him while he was wearing it was practically a confession of murder. Accidents happened, but to “trip” and shoot him dead would make a mighty thin story indeed.
Was there no way to nullify that glaring vest which distinguished living man from all other objects in the autumn woods? She had racked her brain for weeks and hadn’t found the answer.
“It was a pleasant surprise, your cousin Wilfred asking us out to the farm tomorrow,” she said.
Studiously, Ben reassembled his rifle. “I was pretty surprised myself, but the outing will do us good. You’ve been looking a trifle peaked lately.”
“Oh?” She lowered her long lashes. Ben hadn’t suspected a thing last year when, at her suggestion that small-game hunting might prove a good relaxation for them, he had bought the rifles.
Divorce was out of the question. Ben would simply kick her out at the mention of it, without a cent, without alimony, without anger. Disgust, perhaps, but no anger. Twenty years in Wetherson’s, staid importers of teas, spices, and other commodities, had taught him a remarkable degree of composure and self-reliance. He was a hard decisive man under that exterior, and nobody’s fool.
Yet she must have, above all else, freedom. She was sick of Ben’s soft middle-aged body, so unlike the few lean, hard, passionate young men she had known before marriage. She was sick of the theater, of hearing music she didn’t understand, when her soul craved a rousing, reckless movie; of conversing with a select group of friends on subjects beyond her comprehension when she yearned for livelier companionship; of the tedious little parties she hostessed for Ben in their home; of the housework, everything, even the wretched credit cards and the tiny runabout car.
“It will be lovely out in the country now,” she said, putting her rifle in its case. “I especially like the view across the hills from that height of land behind Wilfred’s fields. I feel like an eagle standing there, so free and unrestrained—” She stopped, not wanting to give the wrong impression.
“It makes me feel like an eagle too,” he said. “The sense of power, the mastery—”
He tightened the screws of the slide-action grip. “To each his own. I daresay that Cousin Wilfred, if he looks at all, is content merely to admire the beauty of the view. That’s why he dreams his life away on thirty cleared acres of land in the bush while I sit on the board at Wetherson’s.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “To each his own.”
Ben zipped his rifle case shut with a tearing sound that almost made her jump. “Have you any cartridges, dear?” he mumbled. “I find I’m completely out.”
She had forgotten them while shopping, of course! How stupid of her. Had a guilty conscience made her forgetful? He couldn’t go hunting without shells. “I’ve only got ten,” she said. “Bream’s. Bream’s will be open yet, I imagine.”
He glanced at his watch and sighed. “Possibly. But they stock very limited ammunition.” He rose, put a cap on his head, and went out to the car, a stuffy self-important little man with a dignified stride.
She put the gun-cleaning equipment away, wiped the table top, and sat down to coffee and a cigarette, thinking.
If she could put a knoll or a ferny hummock between them to hide that orange vest, could she mistake his thinning brown hair for a rabbit hopping through the brush? No, he’d be wearing that bright-red hunting cap. How about shooting him in the woods and taking his cap and vest back to Wilfred’s house as if he hadn’t worn them? No, that wouldn’t do either...
Her thoughts ran in circles as she stared blindly at the pale-green kitchen wall. Her cigarette burned to ash in the bronze tray and her coffee grew cold; she hardly noticed when Ben returned and put a weighty little box into the pocket of his gun case.
“I should have got them uptown at noon,” he mumbled. “Bream’s had nothing but hollow point in long rifle size. I don’t like them in the repeater. The only solid bullets they had were .22 shorts, and shorts aren’t powerful enough.” He stepped toward her. “I wish you’d listen, sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She looked up, smiling. “What did you say?”
“I said— Never mind, it doesn’t make much difference. Is there any more coffee?”
But next morning, driving the forty miles from the city to Wilfred’s place, Ben seemed unusually quiet and preoccupied. After several attempts to make conversation, Janet gave up and watched the autumn scenery. It was a perfect October day, still, sun-drenched, silent — and all the more so when they arrived at Wilfred’s farm. Just the kind of place you might expect ten miles from the highway, at the end of a gravelly road through the bush: piles of firewood, logs, and pulpwood between the old house and the weatherbeaten barn; a few cattle grazing in the fields; the forest flaunting autumn whichever way you turned; the solitude pressing on you, enhanced by the feeble plume of wood smoke rising from the chimney into the clean still air.