Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (18 page)

 
Later that afternoon I wandered into the kitchen and saw through the
window that Dave was talking with John Daws, who had a two-man crew out securing
the construction site. I wondered what would become of Noland’s company.

Beth was at the table and I cringed when I saw she was on another crying jag. But
she’d already seen me and it was too late to escape, so I sat beside her and
tried to comfort her as best I could.

“I’m sorry,” she said, between sniffles. “I feel like my whole world’s falling
apart. First Darby, now Kyle. That deputy questioned him; did you know that?
Kyle won’t talk to me. He says he’s done something awful, but he won’t tell me
what. He’s clammed up and locked himself in his room.”

I felt my stomach lurch. Bad as I’d wanted to find something to free Darby, I
hadn’t wanted to sacrifice the kid. If he’d gotten mixed up in something that
led to a man’s death it would destroy his family.

“Beth—” I began in a whisper. But I didn’t have a clue where to go from there.
“Just stay strong, try not to worry,” I said, finally, hearing how lame it
sounded.

Beth slammed both palms down on the table and practically spat, “I’m sick of
everybody telling me that. How can I not worry? I can’t be Little Miss Sunshine
right now, I
am
down, Session. Down in a deep, dark funk, and I’ve got
a right to cry my eyes out if that’s what I need to do.”

I recoiled and stared at her a long time. I was surprised by the outburst, but it
had started something percolating in my brain. “You’re right,” I said, finally.
“You’ve got every right to be in a funk—a grand funk.” I ran over everything in
my mind, double-checking myself.
“Un-be-lievable,”
I whispered.

I went outside to call Sheriff Pierce, wondering if he’d dismiss me as a
conspiracy nut.

 
It was near nightfall when Dave found me and handed me his cell.
“Your Uncle Sheriff wants to talk to you.”

“Since you’ve been so helpful in this case, I thought you and Dave might like to
be here when we bring the suspect in,” Sheriff Pierce said. “Your call.”

Part of me definitely did
not
want to be there, but I felt I had to.

When we got to the station I was thrilled to learn that all the charges against
Darby had been dismissed and he was being processed out, but I felt ill about
what I knew was about to happen.

The door opened and Jared—Deputy Fowler—came into the room with two more officers
close behind him. He nodded to me as he came closer, but the smile was long
gone. He lifted his cuffed hands as if rebuking me. “So this is your doing?
You’re nuts, you know that? Why are you accusing me?”

“The gold record,” I said. “The Grand Funk Railroad. It wasn’t on the original
list of albums I gave you. Only the three of us were there when Darby gave it to
Noland. Noland’s gone and Darby has no memory of that day. I’d forgotten about
it myself, actually. I never mentioned it to you, the sheriff, or anyone
else.”

He laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “This is never gonna stick, you know.
Albums are untraceable, remember? And I am
not
a neophyte. Darby and I
listened to each other’s albums all the time so fingerprints aren’t going to
tell you anything. I haven’t done anything wrong.” He curled his lip in an
Elvis-worthy smirk. “Hey, listen, could I call you once I get kicked free? Maybe
we could get some dinner or something—listen to some
tunes,”
he said,
drawing out the last word.

I could hear Dave cracking his knuckles behind me.

As the deputies carted Fowler away to booking, the sheriff crossed his arms and
glared after him. “Never was any kind of deputy,” he scoffed. “Politics I had to
take him in the first place. We found the albums at his place. He’s so arrogant
he didn’t even hide them. But he’s right about one thing; we’ve got no way to
prove they were Darby’s. I suppose if he gets a good lawyer he could get away
with it.”

I smiled. “I’m going to break a confidence, Sheriff Pierce. I don’t think Darby
will mind. He puts a sticky note way back inside each record jacket documenting
when and where he got the record. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you were
looking for it. Normally, he takes them out when he sells the record, but he was
planning to sell those to me and he knows I like to see where they came from.
I’m betting they’re still in there.”

The sheriff smiled broadly. “Good to know,” he said.

“Can you tell us what happened now?” Dave asked.

He motioned us to sit. “Darby was acting strange when we picked him up and Beth
swore there was no way he’d been drinking,” he said. “She set in on me that
morning and hectored me into having him tested for GHB—the date-rape drug. She
had a friend in college who got dosed at a party. Next morning the girl was
talking gibberish and didn’t remember a thing, just like Darby. Beth wouldn’t
let it alone until I had the doc run the test and sure enough—”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

“Sorry, that didn’t segue, did it?” the sheriff said, running his hands through
his close-cropped gray hair.

“Segue”? Who was this guy?

“Okay, from the beginning,” he said. “Fowler ran into someone in town that night,
most likely Ted Mayhall, who told him about the row Darby and Noland had gotten
into about those records. He decided to drive on out there and see what was
what, maybe horn in on the deal himself. He always liked hanging out with rich
guys but at the same time he resented them. Anyway, he’d just come from a sweep
of one of the downtown trouble-spot bars, where he’d confiscated a vial of GHB.
Phone records show Darby was on the phone with one of his business interests in
China around that time, so he was likely in his office in the bedroom wing when
Fowler arrived, leaving Fowler alone in the atrium with Noland. We don’t know
what transpired between the two of them, but some kind of argument blew up and
Fowler ended up grabbing the first thing he could put his hands on and cracking
Noland in the head with it. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill him; Fowler’s not
evil, he’s just—worthless. But whatever his intentions, Noland’s not any less
dead.”

“And then he drugged Darby?” Dave asked. “How?”

“The theory is, Fowler heard Darby coming and dragged Noland’s body into the
record room. Maybe Darby looks around for Noland and decides he’s in the
bathroom, whatever. He sets down a glass of juice he’s brought in with him and
goes off to find Noland and it’s then that Fowler remembers the GHB in his
pocket and gets a bright idea. He spikes the drink and waits. Darby comes back,
has a few sips, and is out cold. Fowler was smart enough to take the drinking
glass with him, but not smart enough to get rid of it. We found it at his place
too. We’re testing it now. We think he dragged the body back out, put a stack of
records on the changer so it would sound to anyone wandering by like they were
still listening to music, staged the scene by dousing them to make it look like
they’d been drinking heavily—then on the way out decided to scoop up the stack
of records for his trouble.”

“I’m Deputy Fowler,” Dave whispered into my ear, “but you can call me plain ol’
scumbag.”

 
Back at Darby’s the celebration was in full swing. The man of the
hour was taking a shower, “washing the jail off himself,” as Nadine reported.
Everyone else was gathered in the kitchen, where the table was fast filling with
food as Nadine ferried things from the refrigerator. Beth tried to help, but
Nadine shooed her away.

“Nadine!” Beth said, squeezing her hands into fists. “I want to help you. Look,
Nadine, I don’t know how to be a rich man’s wife. I don’t know how I’m supposed
to act or how to do things. I just want to be a regular person. I want us to be
friends, family even, not—whatever we are now. Can’t we, please, work on
that?”

Nadine stared at her for a long moment and I saw her face soften. “Yeah, we can,”
she said finally. “’Course we can.”

Kyle was stuffing finger foods into his mouth at a rate so accelerated it was
clear he hadn’t had the foresight to stock in food for his self-imposed
confinement. His eyes—well, eye—was red rimmed and looked like he’d been crying.
Beth pulled me aside to tell me that he’d finally confessed to her he’d planned
to steal some of the expensive jewelry Darby had given her. He’d gotten as far
as taking it from her dressing room and squirreling it away, but when the time
came to give it to the fence he couldn’t go through with it.

“We’ve got lots of things to work through, but we
are
talking now at
least,” she said with a wan smile.

Darby came into the room to our hoots, hollers, and hugs. Then, as if the thought
had come to all of us at the same moment, we fell silent, remembering that
Noland Nicholson wasn’t going to be celebrating anything ever again.

“Awful quiet in there,” came a deep voice from the doorway and we turned as one
to see John Daws standing on the porch. His work clothes had been replaced with
pressed chinos and a crisp white shirt. Nadine looked undone, but motioned him
in. “Darby,” she said, then cleared her throat. “John is, well, he’s—”

“I’m her boyfriend,” Daws cut in, and for the first time he smiled. “And how
silly does that sound? We’re way too old to be sneaking around. She wouldn’t
even let me pick her up for a date. Had to meet me at the movies or go to the
next town over to have supper together. That’s not right. We like each other. I
want to keep seeing her. You got any problems with it?” he asked Darby.

“No—well, no,” Darby said, looking as if he’d been hit by a stun gun.
“That’s—that’s great.”

“Told ya,” Daws said, nudging Nadine, who was blushing like a schoolgirl.

 
“You haven’t spoken for forty miles, you okay?” Dave asked as we
sped down I-40 back to Raleigh the next night. It was late and traffic was
sparse.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “just trying to process it all. It’s so sad about Noland. And I
can’t believe how Fowler snowed me. I thought I had better cretin radar than
that.”

“That’s why you got me,” Dave said. “For backup. Besides, you weren’t so blinded
by his charm you didn’t pick up the clue that broke the case.”

“I can thank Beth for that. She was telling me, rather emphatically, how she had
the right to be in a funk if she felt like it and I suddenly remembered about
the Grand Funk record. It was Beth who made sure he got tested for GHB too. I
think I’ve underestimated her. I should’ve tried to get to know her better.”

“Plenty of time yet,” Dave said. “Darby invited us out again next week. Beth’s
doing a cleansing ceremony for the atrium; Daws and Nadine are helping her plan
it. Burn sage, chant, all that. Get rid of the bad vibes. Then we’ll listen to
music as a memorial to Noland. Darby’s already busy putting the playlist
together.”

We rode in silence for a while.

“Seems fitting,” I said.

I gazed into the sky. There was an autumn moon—not pink, but an awesome warm
gold.

Copyright © 2012 by Brynn Bonner

 
Val McDermid has become a bestselling author through books
like the recent
The Retribution
(2011), in which crime profiler Tony
Hill and Chief Inspector Carol Jordan are pitted against a serial killer.
PW
said of the book: “Superb. . . . The emotional wedge that the
sadistic Jacko is able to drive between Tony and Carol makes this one of
McDermid’s strongest efforts.” But the author sometimes writes in a lighter vein
too. This year, her first children’s book,
My Granny Is a Pirate,
came
out from Orchard.
 

 
When the phone rings at seven minutes past two in the morning, I
know I have to behave as if it’s just woken me. That’s what humans do. Because
they sleep. “Whassup?” I grunt.

The voice on the other end is familiar. “It’s DCI Scott. Sorry to wake you, Doc.
But I know how you like a fresh crime scene.”

He’s right, of course. The fresher the crime scene, the easier it is for me to
backtrack to the moment of the crime. That’s how I come up with the information
that will help DCI Scott and his team to nail the killer. I’m a criminal
profiler, you see. Once I realised my physical body was stuck in this place and
time, it seemed like an occupation that would be interesting as well as socially
useful. It has the added advantage of having slightly vague qualifications and
antecedents. And as long as I do the business, nobody enquires too closely about
where I went to school.

I tell him I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I could make it a lot sooner, not
least because I’m already dressed. But the last thing I want is to be too
astonishing. I need to survive until I can resolve my situation. And that means
not arousing suspicion.

When I arrive, the usual crime-scene slo-mo bustle is under way. Forensic rituals
round the back of an out-of-town strip mall. Tonight, for one night only, it’s a
theatre of the macabre.

The body’s a pitifully young male, barely out of his twenties, I’d guess. He’s
dressed in black, Goth hair to match. Silver in his ears and on his fingers.
He’s pale as paper and it takes me a moment to realise that’s not
makeup. It’s because he’s bled out from the two puncture marks on his neck.

“Vampires don’t exist, right?” Scott says gruffly. “That’s what I keep telling my
girls. All that
Twilight
garbage.”

“This isn’t the first?”

“The third this year. We’ve kept the lid on it so far, but that’s not going to
last forever.”

That’s when I notice the writing on the wall. It’s scrawled almost at ground
level, but I can tell instantly it’s written in blood. It’ll take the
technicians longer to confirm it, but I know I’m right. I crouch down for a
closer look, earning a grumpy mutter from the photographer I displace.
“Darkling,” it says.

I step back, shocked. “Is this a first?” I point to the tiny scribble. “Was there
something like that at the other scenes?”

“Nobody spotted it,” Scott says. “I’ll get someone to go over the crime-scene
pics.”

I don’t need them to do that. I know already it’ll be there. I know because it’s
a message for me. Darkling is where I am, where I’ve been since I found myself
trapped in this place, this time, this body. Darkling. In the dark. A creature
of the dark. But now I’ve had a message from my own side.

And now I understand how to fight my enemy. I need to erase this darkling
existence. If I can wipe the word from human consciousness, I’ll be free again.
Free to move through time and space in my full grace and glory, not the pale
shadow existence I’ve had since I was jailed in this form. The murders will stop
too. The three that have already happened will be undone, their victims back in
their proper place in the world. That’s an unintended consequence, but a good
one nevertheless.

I say something, I don’t know what, to get myself off the hook with Scott and
melt into the night. I’m home in an instant, computer on, fingers flying over
the keys. First recorded instance . . . Shakespeare. I can’t help but smile in
spite of the seriousness of my plight. Shakespeare. How bloody predictable is
that? I take a deep breath, spread my fingers against the side of my head, and
will the transference.

The room is small, lit by a trio of tapers. In the flutter of light, I see a man
in his late thirties hunched over a small wooden table. There’s a stack of thick
paper to one side of him. His sharpened quill is poised above the ink pot, his
dark eyes on the middle distance, a frown line between the fine arches of his
brows. His lips are moving.

“The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

That it’s had it head bit off by it young.

So out went the candle, and we were left darkling,” he mutters.

If I were in my pomp, it would be no problem. Being physically present would
offer all sorts of options for change and deletion. In extremis, I could kill.
But I can only manifest as a voice. He’ll think it’s his own interior voice, or
he’ll think he’s going mad. Either way should serve.

“Not darkling,” I say. “Sans light. It’s the Fool speaking. Sans light, that’s
what he’d say.”

He pauses, uncertain. “We were left sans light?” he says.

“Sans light,” I say. “Sans light.”

He twists his mouth to one side. “Not darkling. I cannot make a poet of the Fool.
Sans light.”

He dips the quill and scratches out the word and I dissolve back into my body.
I’m amazed. Who knew it would be so easy to edit the great bard of Avon?

Next up, John Milton and
Paradise Lost.
My consciousness emerges in a
sunlit garden where the great man is declaiming. There’s no other word for it.
But the poet is not alone. Of course he’s not alone. He’s blind. Somebody else
has to write it down for him. There’s a younger man scrawling as he speaks. I
need to move fast. We’re coming up to the line. Yes, here we go.

“As the wakeful bird sings darkling.” Milton gives himself a congratulatory
smile.

“Birds don’t sing in the dark,” I say. The scribe looks around wildly, wondering
if he’s just spoken out loud.

“Darkling,” Milton says, a stubborn set to his mouth.

“They sing at dusk or at dawn. Not darkling. Do you really want people thinking
you’re an ignoramus? Think how it undermines the burden of your poem if the
details are inaccurate. At dusk or at dawn, surely?”

“A correction,” he says. “As the wakeful bird sings at dusk.”

Two for two! I dissolve back into my body. These shifts out of body are
exhausting. But now I’ve started I can’t stop. The promise of being myself again
is too powerful. And so I continue. Keats and his nightingale—“Darkling I
listen” becomes, “Obscured I listen.” Matthew Arnold’s darkling plain becomes “a
twilight plain” and Hardy’s darkling thrush becomes “dark-bound thrush.”
Star Trek: Voyager
now has an episode called “Gloaming.”

It’s almost dawn and I’m almost drained. Darkling, I only have one more to go. Dr
Samuel Johnson, the great wordsmith, the dictionary man. If I can remove the
word from his dictionary, it will disappear for good.

I generate my final focus and emerge by the side of a fat man with a cat and a
pile of manuscript paper by his side. I can read the words he has written.
“Darkling [a participle, as it seems, from
darkle
which yet I have
never found; or perhaps a kind of diminutive from dark, as
young,
youngling].
Being in the dark. Being without light. A word, merely
poetical.”

Then his eyes fix on where I would be if I were corporeal. “I’ve been expecting
you,” he says in his sonorous growly voice.

“You can see me?”

He laughs. “I was the doctor long before you aspired to the mantle, sirrah. And I
will be the doctor again. You’re trapped in a human life and when that body
dies, so will you. I have fashioned darkling to hold you.”

But as he speaks, the ink on the page starts to fade. The word and its definition
are disappearing before our eyes. “Not for much longer. There are no citations.
It doesn’t exist anymore.”

He glances at the page. I expect fear or rage, but I get a great guffaw of
laughter. “But
darkle
does. The back-formation comes into being in the
next century. Already, other poets have formed darkling and employed it in their
verse. There is no escape from the power of the word. Did you really think it
would be so easy? Darkling has taken you, boy. You are darkling forever.”

Copyright © 2012 by Val McDermid