and clutched his side. Sabina saw the dip’s right hand move to his inner pocket; she was quick, and the man’s purse was soon in her grasp.
But not soon enough to make her escape.
Sabina grasped the woman’s right hand, which held the purse, and pinned the dip’s arm behind her back. The pickpocket struggled, and Sabina pulled the arm higher until she cried out, and then was still.
The victim had recovered from his pain. He stared at Sabina, then at the thief. Sabina reached down and wrested the blue-and-gold Charles Horner hatpin from the woman’s hand.
“And that,” John Quincannon said, “was the last of the Carville Ghost.” He looked pleased with himself, sitting at his desk, smiling and stroking his freebooter’s beard-a feature that made him appear rakish and dangerous. He fancied himself the world’s finest detective and he always preened a bit when he brought an investigation to a successful conclusion. “And,” he added, “I have collected the fee. A not inconsiderable twenty-five hundred dollars. I would say that justifies dinner for two at Marchand’s and perhaps…”
Sabina interrupted his description of his evening’s plans for them. “I, too, have collected a handsome fee. From Charles Ackerman.”
“Ah, you solved the pickpocketing case.”
“Yes.” She proceeded to tell him about it, finishing: “I thought the woman…Sarah Wilds…was preying upon infirm men, perhaps men in gastric distress. It turned out she was stealing from perfectly healthy men, stabbing them in the side with her needle-thin hatpin to distract them while she picked their pockets.”
“Needle-thin?” John frowned. “I presented you with a silver-and-coral Charles Horner hatpin on your last birthday. As I recall, it was fairly thick.”
“Sarah Wilds had altered hers, so the pin would pass through clothing and flesh, but not cause the victim to bleed much, if at all. Just a painful prick, and she’d withdraw it while reaching for her victim’s valuables.”
“But the man who died…Harry Holbrooke?”
“Henry. The police assume he was unlucky. The pin went in too deeply, punctured an organ, and caused bleeding and an infection. You must remember…Sarah Wilds was using the same pin over and over. Think of the bacteria it carried.”
John nodded. “Another job well done, my dear. Now, about Marchand’s and perhaps…”
“I accept your invitation upon one condition.”
“And that is?”
“You will pay for your evening from the proceeds of your Carville investigation, and I will pay for mine from my proceeds.”
John, as Sabina had known he would, bristled. “A lady paying her own way on a celebratory evening… unthinkable!”
“You had best think about it, because those are my terms.”
He sighed-a long exhalation-and scowled fiercely. But as she knew he would, he said: “An evening out with you, my dear, is acceptable under any terms or conditions.”
As was an evening out with him.
The Dying Time
Melissa
Autumn leaves skittered along the narrow main street of the small town in California’s gold country. They leaped the high curb, rattled down the board sidewalk, and drifted against the bench where I sat dying.
Was this where it was to end-Murphys, population around 300? A hard, wooden-slatted bench my last resting place in this life? Tricked-up shops and polyester-clad tourists my last sight? What was I doing here, anyway? Traveling aimlessly, as my husband and I had done over the past five years, possessed of more time and money than purposes and enthusiasms.
The pain was growing stronger now; if I had any chance to survive, I had better do something soon. But I felt curiously lethargic and resigned. Even the prospect of a painful death didn’t seem to bother me.
It had been a good life up until this past year. I’d accomplished most of the modest things I’d set out to do, had visited most of the places I wanted to see. Of course there were loose ends, but didn’t everyone leave a few of those? There was the emptiness of the past few years, but what were a few out of many? And then there were the events of September and my growing suspicions about the terrible way Jake Hollis had died…
I didn’t want to think about Jake. That was in the past, over now. All over. As my life soon would be.
Strange. I hadn’t expected to feel such detachment at the end. I seemed as little a part of the dying woman on the bench as the leaves that drifted at her feet. They were dying, too, torn by the wind from the trees that had sustained them through the sudden rainstorms of spring, the blistering heat of summer, the first frosts of autumn. Dying like…
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Slowly I looked up. My husband Ray had returned from the used-book shop with a package under his arm. A handsome man yet, blond and tanned and fit, dressed in a new brown cashmere sweater and cords. Handsome as the day I’d met him at the sorority open house twenty-six years ago. A quarter century of marriage, so long that I could scarcely remember a time when he wasn’t there. Always there, yet so often absent even when physically present.
I should have sensed that quality even before we were married. The way his eyes kept moving restlessly as he pretended interest in what I was saying. The way he replied with nods and utterances that were mere reaction to my tone of voice, rather than my words’ content. But I was twenty years old; what did I know of a man for whom the real world was never quite enough? A man who sought elusive fulfillment in the new and strange and different, as if he might then enter another dimension that would measure up to his expectations.
Nothing had ever measured up. Nothing. Not a stellar career that began with the glimmerings of what the media now called the Information Age and culminated in the sale of the last of three computer software firms he’d founded-a sale unprecedented in financial annals that ensured the security of our children and their heirs for generations to come. The children-Donna and Andrew-certainly hadn’t measured up; he’d given them scant attention, and now they had drifted away. There were the various pursuits, all dangerous-flying, mountain climbing, auto racing-and now all discarded. Even the latest passion, skydiving, was a thing of the past. I would be the last to go, the wife who had become nothing more than a good traveling companion.
The Caribbe an in winter, when rains soaked northern California. Paris in the springtime. Alaskan cruises to escape the heat of summer in the Napa Valley. African photo safaris, visits to Egypt’s pyramids, tours of China and Russia. Hawaii at the holidays when our children and their families failed to return home. We migrated like birds, but insulated from unpleasantness and with fewer surprises.
Until this past month.
“Melissa, I asked you, what’s the matter?” Feigned concern turned the fine lines at his eyes’ corners to furrows. With an effort I said: “I’m not feeling well.”
“I told you you shouldn’t have made that chicken pasta for lunch. It’s a warm day, and heavy food and wine…”
I nodded wearily. It wasn’t the pasta or the wine, but there was no point in arguing. The only point was in calling for help, trying to save myself. And I still couldn’t seem to care. I was dying, and Ray had poisoned me.
Ray
