EQMM 1996-09-10 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Sleepwalker

by Donald Olson

© 1996 by Donald Olson

In this age of the personal computer few authors remain who still work on a typewriter. When EQMM asked Donald Olson for a computer disk and an extra “hard copy” of his latest story, we discovered that the author works on the machine he’s been using for decades and keeps only a carbon copy of the work. It seems fitting that Mr. Olson should do so, for his stories have an old-world charm.

❖

Lyman Fox is dead. As I read his lengthy obituary in the Times, replete with fulsome testimonials to his worthiness, I recalled with a mix of emotions our last visit together.

“You’re looking well, James,” he’d said, and might have added, as the less tactful often do, “for your age.”

I’d been an occasional patient of Lyman’s for about two years, having sought him out for some trifling ailment. I’d cultivated his friendship and shared the infrequent drink or dinner whenever I was in town and he could spare the time from his busy practice and active social life.

I’d invited Lyman to dinner at a little Italian restaurant not far from his office, and once seated I said, “There’s something I’d like to show you, but first, if it won’t bore you too much, I’d like to tell you a little story from my past.”

Lyman Fox had a confident, incisive way of speaking that went with his mature good looks and faultless grooming. “Bore me? No chance, old boy. I know hardly anything about you. Most of my patients can’t wait to tell me their life stories, often at grueling length.”

“I’ll spare you that,” I promised. It was true, Lyman knew little about me aside from my being a retired college professor who spent most of my time at my cottage upstate. I hadn’t wanted to say anything about the subject that had occupied my mind for so long until I felt certain I wasn’t riding a lame hobbyhorse; it now seemed pointless to delay any longer.

I proceeded to tell him about my family, who had been very poor indeed, with little time or inclination for anything beyond the struggle to make ends meet, especially at the tail end of the Depression, the period of which I was speaking; circumstances being as they were, I’d had no hope whatsoever of realizing my ambition to go to college. At that time scholarships were not so readily available as they are now.

“One summer day,” I said, “soon after my high school graduation, a big black car — Packard, as I recall — pulled up in front of our little house on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. The chauffeur opened the door for a tiny gray-haired lady who marched up onto the porch where I was helping my mother shell peas for our supper. I can still remember the lilac pattern of the woman’s dress and her wide-brimmed white straw hat. She introduced herself and told us why she was calling.

“ ‘As you may know,’ she said, ‘I’m on the school board.

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