Dangerous Women by Otto Penzler (ed)

Author:Otto Penzler (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: mystery, detective, anthology
ISBN: 9780892960040
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 2005-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

That evening, for want of something better to do, I went to the library of the house. Norton Hall had been put on the market by some sister of the late Mr. Ellis, and the library and most of its furnishings were part of the sale. Mr. Ellis appeared to have met a bad end: According to local gossip, his wife left him and, in a fit of depression, he shot himself in a hotel room in London. His wife did not even turn up for his service, poor beggar. Actually, there was still some speculation among our more fanciful neighbors that Mr. Ellis had done away with his good lady wife, although the police were never able to pin anything on him. Whenever a particularly likely set of bones turned up on waste ground, or was found buried near a riverbank by an inquisitive dog, Mr. Ellis and his missing wife tended to receive a mention in the local newspaper reports, even though twenty years had passed since his death. A more superstitious man might have balked at buying Norton Hall under such circumstances, but I was not such a man. In any case, from what I knew of Mr. Ellis he appeared to have been an intelligent man and, therefore, if he had killed his wife he was unlikely to have left her remains lying about the house where someone might trip over them and think, “Hullo, that’s not right.”

I had only visited the library once or twice-I’m not much of a man for books, truth be told-and had done little more than glance at the titles and blow dust and cobwebs from the older volumes. It was a surprise to me, then, to find a book sitting on a small table by an armchair. I thought at first that Eleanor might have left it there, but she was even less of a reader than I was. I picked it up and opened it at random, revealing a page covered in elegant, closely written script. I flicked back to the title page and found the inscription: A Middle-Eastern Journey by J. F. Gray. A small, tattered photograph marked the page and, as I looked at it, I couldn’t help but feel a nasty chill down my spine. The man in the photograph, obviously the titular J. F. Gray, looked uncannily like the chap who had been wandering around the grounds offering unsought-for advice about the folly. But that couldn’t be possible, I thought: After all, Gray had been dead for almost fifty years now and probably had other things on his mind, like choirs eternal or heat rash, depending on the life that he had led on earth. I put the thought to the back of my mind and returned my attention to the book. It was, it emerged, much more than a journal of Gray’s trip to the Middle East.

It was, in effect, a confession.

It seemed that, on a trip to Syria in 1900, John Frederick Gray had acquired, through theft, the bones of a woman believed to be Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

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