The World's Finest Mystery Part 34

"What about her?"

"She seemed worried about you. At the end of Martin Grist's talk, she asked why you hadn't been allowed to speak."

"That was a misunderstanding. I was taken ill at the last minute."

Suddenly, Jean doubted his words. "Did you cancel because you saw me in the audience?"

"No, no. I never looked at the audience. I just felt I couldn't go on."

"When did you develop this sudden interest in Haggard's books? I can't remember you being much of a reader."

"Dad didn't exactly encourage it, did he?"

She realized that his att.i.tude hadn't really changed with the years. "He was a fireman, for G.o.d's sake! He was out earning the bread for our table. And it killed him in the end. Do you resent that, too?"

Eugene shrugged. "They gave him a nice funeral."

"Do you ever talk to Mom in Florida?"

"I don't have her address or phone number."

"I can give you both of them."

He sighed. "What am I supposed to say to her after all these years?"

"More than you're saying to me, I hope. Eugene, you come back into my life after two years, and you don't ring my bell or knock on my door. You grab me in the hallway and scare me half to death!"

"I'm sorry about that, sis."

"What about Amanda Burke?" she asked. "You knew her, didn't you?"

"Yes," he admitted. "We'd been dating a bit."

"Living together?"

"Not formally."

"Was she murdered?"

He turned his eyes away. "I don't know what happened out there. Anything's possible."

"Is that why you sneaked into my building, so you wouldn't be seen?"

He took a sip of wine and said, "Look, sis, you've been asking too many questions. You were out to the Grists' house today, and I saw you come up here with that fellow who worked with Amanda."

"You know Mark?"

"I saw him a couple of times at the library." For a moment, his face took on an anxious expression. "This isn't about him, it's about you. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"Like what happened to Amanda Burke?"

"This is serious business. Stay away from the meeting on Thursday."

"Do you really expect that of me? You're my brother, for G.o.d's sake! If you're in trouble, I want to help you."

"There's nothing you can do." He finished his wine and stood up.

"Eugene-"

"Good night, sis. Be careful crossing streets."

As he was at the door, she said, "I'll be there Thursday night. There's no keeping me away."

"I suppose not."

"Tell me one thing. What is the Haggard Society?"

He hesitated and then said, "Ask me that question at the meeting on Thursday."

Jean didn't mention her brother's visit when she met Mark Jessup for lunch the following day. She especially didn't want to tell him about Eugene's grabbing her in the hallway of her building. It made him sound a bit weird, and maybe he was. Maybe that's why he'd stayed away from her so long. Mark had the evening s.h.i.+ft at the library that day, so she wouldn't be seeing him after work. Following a bit of casual banter, he asked, "Are you going to that meeting tomorrow night?"

"Of course. I have to see Eugene."

"I'm worried about you, Jean, after what happened to Amanda."

"I'll be careful crossing the street," she said with a smile, remembering her brother's warning.

"It's no joking matter. From what you've told me, I think her death is connected with your brother in some manner. You said she asked a question about him before she died, and now you've been asking questions about him. I'd feel better if I came with you tomorrow."

"All right," she agreed readily. She trusted Mark, and she was beginning to wonder about her brother.

"We can get something to eat after I finish work and then walk over to Fenley Hall together."

That night, when she arrived home from the station, Jean was careful to glance up and down her street, paying particular attention to parked cars. But they all seemed to be empty, and no one was lurking in doorways. She went upstairs to put a frozen dinner in the microwave.

Thursday was drizzly with rain, the sort of day Jean would rather have stayed in bed. Her clock radio was always tuned to the station for which she worked, and the first sounds she usually heard in the morning were the jovial banter of their weatherman and the news anchor at seven o'clock. This day was no different. The weather always came first in the morning, because they figured that was what people most wanted to know about at the beginning of the new day. Then there was the traffic report and finally the morning's top story, an overnight fire in a suburban strip mall. Jean slipped out from between the sheets and padded into the bathroom.

While she was brus.h.i.+ng her teeth, she suddenly remembered Eugene and the meeting of the Haggard Society that evening. Because she was meeting Mark for dinner first, she wore one of her better dresses, prompting Heather at the desk next to her to speculate, "Heavy date tonight?"

"I'm going to hear my brother speak at a literary society."

Heather groaned. "Sounds dull. What is it, the Jane Austen Society?"

"H. Rider Haggard."

"Does anyone still read the old boy?" she asked.

"Apparently. They loan out copies of his novels at each meeting."

Heather grunted. "What was that one where the woman burned to death at the end?"

"You probably mean She, but the flames simply withered her, destroying her immortality. I know because I just read it again."

She gave Jean a pitying look. "Well, enjoy yourself."

When she and Mark arrived at Fenley Hall around a quarter to eight, the place was already half full. Mrs. Grist was up front wearing a long black dress with wide, full sleeves. She was doing some early book collecting, and Jean returned her copy without comment. Some readers were continuing with the story, she noticed, borrowing copies of Ayesha, the first sequel to She. There was no sign of Eugene anywhere, and she settled down to wait.

This time, it was Martin Grist who strode to the podium promptly at eight o'clock. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this special meeting of the Haggard Society. Those of you who still have books to return or exchange can bring them up to my wife after our program. We're very pleased this evening to offer the delayed talk by Haggard expert Eugene Forsyth. Mr. Forsyth established the first Haggard site on the Internet. He'll tell us about that experience, as well as the joys and sorrows of reading and collecting the works of H. Rider Haggard. Please give a warm greeting to Eugene Forsyth."

For the occasion, Eugene had dressed in an open khaki jacket such as Haggard's hero Alan Quatermain might have worn while searching for King Solomon's mines. "Is that your brother?" Mark whispered beside her.

"That's him." Until this moment, she hadn't really expected him to appear. Now he seemed like a different person as he stood behind the lectern speaking of those century-old books.

"...Those of you who know Alan Quatermain only from King Solomon's Mines and its sequels may be surprised to learn that Haggard brought his two most famous creations together in the 1920 novel ent.i.tled She and Alan. This book is set shortly before the events recounted in She...." As he spoke, her mind flewback to childhood days, to the shock of their father's death. Perhaps he'd changed after that, but how? One of the great mysteries of recent years had been her inability to come to grips with the truth about Eugene. That, she supposed, was why he'd remained so distant from her. "...If Haggard was never truly a great novelist, he was certainly a great storyteller, making up for weak characterizations and an occasionally irritating style with authentic backgrounds and an exciting imagination...."

He told about his Haggard site on the Internet, which had brought him in contact with Martin and Antonia Grist. Then he concluded by saying, "I can take questions for fifteen or twenty minutes, if you care to ask any."

A man on the other side of the hall raised his hand and asked, "Is it true that Haggard was knighted in England for his adventure novels?"

Eugene smiled. "If only it were so! He received his knighthood for his studies of British agriculture and land utilization."

Jean raised her hand, but he called on someone else first. "What are you going to ask?" Mark whispered.

"You'll see."

This time, Eugene pointed to her. "The young lady there."

She stood up, making eye contact with him for the first time since he began his talk. "What is the Haggard Society?" she asked in a clear voice.

Eugene leaned both hands on the podium and smiled. It was as if he'd been waiting a long time for this moment. "The Haggard Society is a criminal conspiracy to provide arson for hire, using anonymous agents to carry out contracts arranged by Martin Grist and his wife."

Antonia Grist's hand appeared from the wide sleeve of her dress, holding a small automatic pistol. She raised it toward Eugene, but suddenly two men from the front row were upon her. Someone blew a police whistle, and all at once the Haggard Society was in the hands of its enemies.

It was a long night after that. When Eugene finally joined Jean and Mark at police headquarters, she almost sobbed with relief. "I thought-"

"I'm sorry to have made it all so mysterious, sis," he said as he hugged her. "It was important to get those people, especially after they killed Amanda. She thought they'd done something to me when I didn't speak at the last meeting. When she asked that question, it made Grist's wife nervous. As they were leaving in their car, they saw Amanda crossing the nearly deserted street, and Antonia ran her down. They claim it wasn't premeditated, but everything else they did was."

"Youp're with the police?" she asked.

Her brother nodded. "More or less. I'm an undercover arson investigator. It all started in Ohio when I took that year off from college. The Haggard Society was operating there at the time, and the police needed someone young to infiltrate them. I established the Haggard Internet site and tried to make myself visible enough so they'd contact me. It didn't work at first, because they were frightened off and moved here. Pretty soon, this city had a marked increase in arson fires, and the police asked me to keep up the Haggard business on the Internet. I finally managed to get a rise out of Grist. I came to see him, and the Ohio police loaned me out to the department here. At first, I still couldn't figure out exactly what was happening, except that a large number of fires were being triggered by identical incendiary devices."

"So the interest in Haggard was all a cover?" Mark asked.

"On their part and mine, too. I met Amanda one day while I was doing Haggard research at the library. I never thought I'd be putting her in any sort of danger. They must have started to suspect me, or they never would have killed her like that."

"But how was the society linked with the arsons?" Jean asked.

"They recruited a number of people willing to take part in the conspiracy. Most of them were arrested tonight. They attended the meetings, and if they were willing to earn money for starting a fire, they came up before or after the program and accepted a book from Mrs. Grist. Strangers got real books, conspirators received hollowed-out volumes containing an incendiary device, the address of the target, the best time for the job, and the necessary payment."

"They were paid before they did the job?"

"Oh, they went through with it, if they ever wanted another job. It was a perfect setup, really. The property owners, or whoever was paying for the arson, arranged for an alibi. They never knew who did it, and the actual arsonist didn't know who'd ordered the job. You know it was successful when you think about the number of fires this city's been having lately."

Jean remembered the television reports and the red skies in the nighttime. She even remembered Mrs. Grist lighting a candle before each meeting. It was all about fire, like the flame that destroyed She Who Must Be Obeyed. "Why did you cancel your talk two weeks ago?"

"I was going to use the talk to spring a trap on the conspirators, as I did tonight, catching as many as possible with the hollowed-out books. At the last minute, some lab work wasn't ready, and we weren't ready to make an arrest. Rather than give the speech, I postponed it a couple of weeks so we could follow through with the original plan. We had a dozen men scattered through the audience, with uniformed officers outside."

He walked outside with them and lingered for a moment with Jean. "Mark seems like a nice guy."

"He is." There was something else she had to ask Eugene. "This undercover work- it was all because of what happened to our father, wasn't it?"

"I suppose so. I didn't much like him, growing up, but he died in a fire. To me, fire has always been the enemy."

"It was the Grists who were the enemy." She gave him a hug. "It's good to have you back."

Stuart M. Kaminsky.

Scorpion's Kiss..

STUART M. KAMINSKY has juggled several series over the course of his long career, and juggled them well. From his dark, intense mysteries starring Porfiry Rostnikov, the Moscow police inspector who always solves the impossible cases a.s.signed to him by his superiors, to his funny-melancholy chase-mysteries with Toby Peters, a Hollywood P.I. in the 1940s, to his wry-solemn Abe Lieberman books about a Jewish detective in modern-day Chicago... all his series have one thing in common: the deft touch of a master craftsman. In "Scorpion's Kiss," first published in the German anthology Aszendent Mord, he proves once again that he's just as good at shorter lengths.

Scorpion's Kiss.

Stuart M. Kaminsky.

Ringerman was almost finished shaving when the doorbell rang. No one had rung his bell or come to his door in the three months he had lived here, but he wasn't surprised by this announcement of his first visitor.

He looked in the mirror. He had been through much in forty-six years. His face still looked youthful and smooth and there was no more than a little gray in his hair.

The doorbell rang again.

He had stepped out of the shower only minutes ago. He wanted to be ready for what he had to do this afternoon. Now he stood barefooted, s.h.i.+rtless. He wiped away the soap and washed his face with cold water. Then he dried.