The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Read online

  Praise for Amanda Cross and The Collected Stories

  “No one has a sharper eye than Amanda Cross.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Amanda Cross writes wonderfully witty mysteries full of well-developed characters and insights on modern foibles.”

  —United Press International

  “For more than twenty-five years Amanda Cross has been blazing a trail for the rest of us to follow.”

  —Sara Paretsky

  “[The Collected Stories] deftly demonstrates Cross’s mastery of the nonviolent, literary puzzler.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “These stories … ought to intrigue anyone interested in real life.”

  —The Boston Globe

  ALSO BY AMANDA CROSS

  In the Last Analysis

  The James Joyce Murder

  Poetic Justice

  The Theban Mysteries

  The Question of Max

  Death in a Tenured Position

  Sweet Death, Kind Death

  No Word from Winifred

  A Trap for Fools

  The Players Come Again

  An Imperfect Spy

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1997 by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  The stories in this work were originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and in the following books: Malice Domestic 2 (Pocket Books), Reader, I Murdered Him (The Women’s Press), Reader, I Murdered Him, Too (The Women’s Press), A Woman’s Eye (Delacorte), A Woman’s Eye: Second Glance (Delacorte).

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-93906

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80340-5

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  TANIA’S NOWHERE

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  ARRIE AND JASPER

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GREAT AUNT FLAVIA

  MURDER WITHOUT A TEXT

  WHO SHOT MRS. BYRON BOYD?

  THE PROPOSITION

  THE GEORGE ELIOT PLAY

  THE BARONESS

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1987, I had faithfully promised the publisher of a Carolyn Heilbrun book that I would not work on another Kate Fansler novel until I had finished the nonfiction work then edging toward completion. The promise was made in all sincerity, but Kate Fansler, who rather resented being ignored for too long, was putting up a certain amount of fuss. I had not published a novel about her since 1986, and that one was written before 1985; she was growing restless. To those who have never created a series detective this may sound a bit mad; to those who have, however, it will hardly raise an eyebrow. Simenon reported how Maigret would intercept him if too long ignored; likewise Kate Fansler, who is inclined to hover when disregarded. Still, I had promised not to work on a novel.

  It was then that the thought of a story about Kate Fansler came to me. I had, in fact, before the prohibition, been wondering intermittently if I might not use Fansler’s niece, Leighton Fansler (introduced in Death in a Tenured Position), as a sort of Watson–an idea that occurred to Leighton herself. And the next thing I knew, Leighton was reporting on Kate Fansler’s search for Tania. Once started, I wrote two more stories in this mode after “Tania’s Nowhere”: “Once Upon a Time” and “Arrie and Jasper,” and all were sold to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. By this time my Carolyn Heilbrun manuscript–it was Writing a Woman’s Life–had been completed and I was again able to contemplate my detective in a book-length adventure.

  The next four stories and the last story, “The Baroness,” were each written in later years at the request of someone who was editing an anthology. In only one of them, “The Disappearance of Great Aunt Flavia,” does Leighton Fansler serve as narrator. “The George Eliot Play” is, however, the only story included here that has not previously been published; it was written especially for this collection and is entirely accurate in all its George Eliot facts.

  The last story in this collection, “The Baroness,” is not a Kate Fansler story. This in no way indicates an intention to desert her or, worse, to allow her to desert me. It happened that at the moment when Sara Paretsky asked for a story to go into her second collection of the adventures of women private eyes and amateur detectives, I was intrigued with the idea of the relationship between two Englishwomen who had been friends from girlhood, but one of whom had moved, upon marriage, to America. I therefore used the American friend as the narrator in the only first-person story or novel I have ever written.

  I am not a particular devotee of the detective short story, much preferring novel-length mysteries. I have noticed that I tend to read stories when an author’s longer works have captured my attention, when I find I like a certain author’s style of writing, and, most compellingly, when my interest in her or his detective urges me to search out more adventures in that fictional life. Thus, for example, I have read Dorothy Sayers’s short stories about Peter Wimsey, and even those about her wine salesman, Montague Egg, but her stories without either detective appeal less to me. I mention this predilection of mine to explain why I thought these stories might be of interest to some readers who had found themselves attracted to Kate Fansler and the life she leads and has led.

  Something else about them occurred to me as I read over these stories. They suggest that Kate has dabbled–a verb she would resent–in more cases than the novels comprehend. In all of them, however, she is absolutely the amateur, not only without pay and without any of the clout of a professional detective, but also involved only in cases where her sympathies, her knowledge of literature and the academic world, and her sense of rightness are caught. In each case, it is highly unlikely that anyone else would have been in a position to work on the puzzles, or to have been called upon by those in need of Kate’s ministrations. She is, in each case, the only one who could, without question, understand what the “fuss” was all about. This is also true, of course, of the American woman in the “The Baroness.”

  I have always been unsettled by the television stories about Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury. The character and the actress are both appealing, but the fact that everywhere Fletcher goes someone is brutally murdered does give one pause–at least it does me. Private eyes, policepersons, and other detectives are called upon when their singular talents are needed. Jessica Fletcher, on the contrary, seems not only to invite the murders she solves, but to engage with murders in unimaginably different settings. Why anyone ever allows her to visit is the deepest mystery of all.

  Although Kate Fansler, like Jessica Fletcher, is an amateur, helping those who know her and who realize that her special talents and training can serve them, she does not live amid multiple murders. Indeed, she has been criticized, not always kindly, for not tripping over enough bodies. There are fewer bodies than there are novels, if truth be told.

  In only two of these stories is there a body: I am more interested in what I guess can be defined and condemned as intellectual mysteries, that is, stories where one mind must outwit or outguess another. There is a chance for the reader, like Kate, if not to unravel one of life’s minor mysteries, at least to recognize the rich variety of human motives. Neither Kate nor I believe that any hu
man condition, individual or collective, is rectified easily or by drastic action. Revolution, revenge, and self-protectiveness almost always outrun the intentions of their instigators. Kate Fansler’s way is to aid justice where she can, and if she is involved in the punishment of a criminal, it is only because he has been tempted to betray himself. When Kate is finished with a case, a small degree of order has been restored, a few people are happier, or at least more knowledgeable, but no institution has been profoundly changed.

  Kate has never fired a gun or been beaten up in the course of her work, although, like any city dweller, she might be shot or beaten up in the streets any day now. Within the narratives that compose her life, she likes conversation, courtesy, and knowledge. She is drawn to those for whom hatred or reform of others is not a goal. Mysteries intrigue her, arrogance depresses her, and she enjoys a drink rather oftener than a doctor might recommend. She is given to occasional bouts of acedia, a sin not encountered in the Ten Commandments; the purpose of life now and then evades her grasp. She finds some men more attractive than is altogether comfortable in the light of her happy marriage.

  As her creator, I cannot claim to be like Kate in any particular respect, but she does represent a commitment to truth and friendship–and a kind of crazy courage–that I admire but can only aspire to. She is richer than I am, thinner, braver, and a more devoted drinker. As with all fictional detectives, she represents a fantasy, but, I hope, not a malignant or violent one. My major wish for her is that some people might enjoy her company and seek it out.

  –AMANDA CROSS

  TANIA’S NOWHERE

  My name is Leighton Fansler. I have long wanted to publish some of the cases of my aunt, Kate Fansler, who, while never a private investigator in any professional sense–she certainly never had a license nor was she paid–took on, like Sherlock Holmes and Peter Wimsey, many interesting cases. She has been adamant until now about her refusal to let me tell the stories of any of her cases, and no one can be more adamant than Kate Fansler. I finally got her to admit, however, that this case was an exception. All those intimately concerned with it are now dead, and no harm could be done to anyone in the telling of it. Indeed, she mused, it might be of help to some.

  WHAT WAS CLEAR to Kate at the very beginning of the case was that, by the time Tania Finship was sixty-two and almost the oldest member of the faculty in her department, or anywhere else, she had become beloved. After her disappearance, it became clear that, in the opinion of her colleagues and students, she had not known this. She had done her job efficiently, curtly, honorably, and without notable tact, and had undoubtedly considered, if she reflected on the matter at all, that the outrage and anger she heard from students who had not done well in her courses represented the general opinion. As is, alas, so often the case among human beings–who tend, whatever their profession, to substitute tardy regret for timely expressions of appreciation–Tania Finship was gone before anyone had told her that they loved her.

  If she was dead, there was no evidence to say so. Had her husband wished to claim her savings and remarry, he would have been hard put to do so before the statutory seven years. As it was, he mourned her, having always loved her and made his affection clear, if unspoken. She may have kept her professorship through tenure, as many disgruntled younger professors had been heard to mutter, but she kept her marriage because it suited them both: in the United States in those years one did not stay married unless one chose. Her children, grown and moved away, had come east when she disappeared, and finally returned to the West Coast, keeping in close touch with their father. As to her savings, all she and Tom, her husband, owned they had owned jointly. It was already his, but, as he often made clear after the disappearance, sharing it once again with her was his only, his fervent wish.

  No one could imagine what had become of her. The police were as puzzled as the FBI and the CIA, who had entered the case on the thinnest of suspicions that she had been part of a spy ring. Her parents had been Marxists and Trotskyites in the Twenties and Thirties, and one never knew for sure that they had not become Stalinists and planted Tania for future spying at birth. Unlikely, but the CIA is nothing if not expert at the unlikely. She might have waited all those years, until her children were grown, and then taken off with her ill-gotten information. What information a professor of Russian literature could have acquired in a blameless life was at best unclear, at worst nonsense. Still, she did read and speak Russian, and what is more, had been clearly heard to say critical things about the United States Government. Anything might be suspected of someone as profoundly antinuclear and antiwar as Tania.

  “Which,” as Fred Monson said to Kate Fansler, “is just the problem. The CIA has got this ridiculous bee in their bonnet, but the result is everyone has just decided she’s in Russia and stopped looking–everyone who had the ghost of a chance of finding her, that is. And the students are getting restless. They’ve heard her hold forth, and they’re perfectly sure leaving this country or even her penthouse for more than a few hours was the last thing she wanted. If Tania had ever had any wanderlust, she had long since lost it, or so the students and her husband reported. The point is, can you help us? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “What do you think happened?” Kate Fansler asked.

  Fred Monson heaved a great sigh. “I try not to think,” he said. “The fact is, Tania was a bit of a burden in the department. Conscientious, heavens yes, and hardworking, and highly intelligent. But she had taken to cultivating a crusty manner that was as hard on her colleagues as it was on her students. You want an example? All right: at a meeting of the curriculum committee some weeks ago, when we were discussing next year’s catalog, I had to report that some man who had promised to teach the survey course was now refusing to do so. Tania was in charge of survey courses, and was considerably annoyed, as anyone would be at that news that late. What she said was: ‘Couldn’t we just tell him to go pee up a rope?’ ”

  “I see what you mean,” Kate said. “You’re not suggesting that the man in question heard about it and abducted her?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything–certainly not that. But it’s hard enough to run a language department. They’re the worst kind: for some reason those who teach languages become ornery from the moment they learn about inflected nouns, without having them talk nothing but mayhem, kidnapping, and worse. Find out what happened to her, please, for the sake of the academic world and my sanity. The department has discretionary funds, and the university will help, all on the q.t., of course. The university position is that she needed an emergency operation, and doesn’t want anyone to know. They may have to admit a scandal, but not before it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “I should think,” Kate Fansler said, “that the feelings of the university were not anyone’s prime concern. They certainly wouldn’t be mine. You’ve checked the hospitals?”

  “Everything has been checked,” Fred Monson said. “Everything. When my mother used to lose things, she always said they had disappeared into thin air. Of course, they always turned up fifteen minutes later. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s clichés enacting themselves. Tania’s nowhere, Goddamn it. Nowhere.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Kate Fansler said. “I’ll let you know my decision in a few days. Meanwhile, may I talk to Tania’s husband? Will he see me?”

  “I’ll damn well make sure he’ll see you,” Fred Monson said. Kate could not but reflect that, chancy as the Chair’s disposition clearly was, this disappearance had done nothing to improve it. Could Tania have simply decided to vanish for the sheer joy of ruining Fred Monson’s life and temper? Or could the husband, however devoted he was reported to be, also have inspired such retribution?

  One hour with Tom Finship proved that speculation as unsubstantial as all the others had been. He greeted Kate in the penthouse on Riverside Drive he had long shared with his vanished wife. They had bought it many years ago, for a now (given the state of New York City real estate) ridiculousl
y low sum. As their penthouse had risen in value they had always talked of selling it and buying a house in the country where their gardening joys might really have scope. But the moment had never arrived. The terraces on the penthouse were large, and while Kate Fansler could scarcely tell a lilac from a rhododendron, there was no question even to her ignorant eye that this was an extraordinary rooftop garden. “The house in the country never quite worked out,” Tom said when they were once again seated on the terrace after the tour. Kate, looking over the Hudson River to New Jersey, and sipping the iced tea that Tania’s husband had served them, did not try to hide her scrutiny of him. Tom was in that state of calm which follows upon terrible news, but also in the state where talk is necessary and all but ceaseless. Kate, glad to serve as an audience to one who would be helped simply by talking, also needed to learn all he could tell her, which was the story of his and Tania’s life.

  “We would have had to trade this”–his arm swept to indicate the whole terrace with its rich plant life–“for a small apartment and a house, and somehow the whole thing never fell into place. God knows we had great offers for this place, but when we looked at the small apartments we could by then afford, we began to feel cabined, cribbed, and confined, as Hamlet said, before we had even tried it out. And with a house in the country, Tania would have been there only weekends and in the summer. So we just kept talking about it. Now, without her …” He did not complete the sentence.

  “It was Macbeth,” Kate said. “Hamlet talked about being bounded in a nutshell. When did you retire?”

  “Five years ago,” Tom said. “I was a professor at City College, and I just couldn’t take it anymore, teaching remedial English and being mugged in the parking lot. A lot of us took early retirement when the system, in order to get rid of us, made it especially attractive. And it wasn’t really the remedial English and the parking lot, it was just that I’d been at the same game too long. As you can see, I’ve even forgotten my Shakespeare–not that I’ve taught him since open admissions.”