Four Past Midnight

John Shooter

General Delivery

Dellacourt, Mississippi

30 pages

Approximately 7500 words

Selling 1st serial rights, North America

SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN

By John Shooter

The manuscript had been typed on a good grade of bond paper, but the machine must have been a sad case - an old office model, from the look, and not very well maintained. Most of the letters were as crooked as an old man's teeth.

He read the first sentence, then the second, then the third, for a few moments clear thought ceased.

Todd Downey thought that a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a woman. He therefore decided to kill her. He would do it in the deep corner formed when the house and the barn came together at an extreme angle - he would do it where his wife kept her garden.

'Oh shit,' Mort said, and put the manuscript back down. His arm struck the Pepsi bottle. It overturned, foaming and fizzing across the counter and running down the cabinet facings. 'Oh SHIT!' he yelled.

Mrs Gavin came in a hurry, surveyed the situation, and said: 'Oh, that's nothing. I thought from the sound that maybe you'd cut your own throat. Move a little, can't you, Mr Rainey?'

He moved, and the first thing she did was to pick the sheaf of manuscript up off the counter and thrust it back into his hands. It was still okay; the soda had run the other way. He had once been a man with a fairly good sense of humor - he had always thought so, anyway - but as he looked down at the little pile of paper in his hands, the best he could manage was a sour sense of irony. It's like the cat in the nursery rhyme, he thought. The one that kept coming back.

'If you're trying to wreck that,' Mrs Gavin said, nodding at the manuscript as she got a dishrag from under the sink, 'you're on the right track.'

'It's not mine,' he said, but it was funny, wasn't it? Yesterday, when he had almost reached out and taken the script from the man who had brought it to him, he'd thought about what an accommodating beast a man was. Apparently that urge to accommodate stretched in all directions, because the first thing he'd felt when he read those three sentences was guilt ... and wasn't that just what Shooter (if that was really his name) had wanted him to feel? Of course it was. You stole my story, he'd said, and weren't thieves supposed to feel guilty?

'Pardon me, Mr Rainey,' Mrs Gavin said, holding up the dishrag.

He stepped aside so she could get at the spill. 'It's not mine,' he repeated - insisted, really.

'Oh,' she said, wiping up the spill on the counter and then stepping to the sink to wring out the cloth. 'I thought it was.'

'It says John Shooter,' he said, putting the title page back on top and turning it toward her. 'See?'

Mrs Gavin favored the title page with the shortest glance politeness would allow and then began wiping the cabinet faces. 'Thought it was one of those whatchacallums,' she said. 'Pseudonames. Or nyms. Whatever the word is names.'

'I don't use one,' he said. 'I never have.'

This time she favored him with a brief glance - country shrewd and slightly amused - before getting down on her knees to wipe up the puddle of Pepsi on the floor. 'Don't s'pose you'd tell me if you did,' she said.

'I'm sorry about the spill,' he said, edging toward the door.

'My job,' she said shortly. She didn't look up again. Mort took the hint and left.

He stood in the living room for a moment, looking at the abandoned vacuum cleaner in the middle of the rug. In his head he heard the man with the lined face saying patiently, This is between you and me. We don't need any outsiders, Mr Rainey. It is strictly between you and me.

Mort thought of that face, recalled it carefully to a mind which was trained to recall faces and actions, and thought: It wasn't just a momentary aberration, or a bizarre way to meet an author he may or may not consider famous. He will be back.

He suddenly headed back into his study, rolling the manuscript into a tube as he went.

4

Three of the four study walls were lined with bookshelves, and one of them had been set aside for the various editions, domestic and foreign, of his works. He had published six books in all: five novels and a collection of short stories. The book of short stories and his first two novels had been well received by his immediate family and a few friends. His third novel, The Organ-Grinder's Boy, had been an instant bestseller. The early works had been reissued after he became a success, and had done quite well, but they had never been as popular as his later books.

The short-story collection was called Everybody Drops the Dime, and most of the tales had originally been published in the men's magazines, sandwiched around pictures of women wearing lots of eye make-up and not much else. One of the stories, however, had been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It was called 'Sowing Season,' and it was to this story he now turned.

A woman who would steal your love when your love was all you had wasn't much of a woman - that, at least, was Tommy Havelock's opinion. He decided to kill her. He even knew the place he would do it, the exact place: the little patch of garden she kept in the extreme angle formed where the house and the barn came together.

Mort sat down and worked his way slowly through the two stories, reading back and forth. By the time he was halfway through, he understood he really didn't need to go any further. They varied in diction in some places; in many others even that was the same, word for word. Diction aside, they were exactly the same. In both of them, a man killed his wife. In both of them, the wife was a cold, loveless bitch who cared only for her garden and her canning. In both of them, the killer buried his spousal victim in her garden and then tended it, growing a really spectacular crop. In Morton Rainey's version, the crop was beans. In Shooter's, it was corn. In both versions, the killer eventually went crazy and was discovered by the police eating vast amounts of the vegetable in question and swearing he would be rid of her, that in the end he would finally be rid of her.

Mort had never considered himself much of a horror-story writer - and there was nothing supernatural about 'Sowing Season' - but it had been a creepy little piece of work all the same. Amy had finished it with a little shiver and said, 'I suppose it's good, but that man's mind ... God, Mort, what a can of worms.'

That had summed up his own feelings pretty well. The landscape of 'Sowing Season' wasn't one he would care to travel through often, and it was no 'Tell-Tale Heart,' but he thought he had done a fair job of painting Tom Havelock's homicidal breakdown. The editor at EQ had agreed, and so had the readers - the story had generated favorable mail. The editor had asked for more, but Mort had never come up with another story even remotely like 'Sowing Season.'

'I know I can do it,' Tod Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that in time all of her will be gone.'

That was how Shooter's ended.

'I am confident I can take care of this business,' Tom Havelock told them, and helped himself to another portion of beans from the brimming, steaming bowl. 'I'm sure that, in time, her