Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 030111 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines [Magazines, Dell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2011-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

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Fiction

Lie Like a Rug

by Margaret Maron

Margaret Maron is the winner of several major American mystery awards: the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity. She is the author of twenty-five novels and the New York Times has said: “Every Margaret Maron is a celebration of something remarkable.” The sixteenth entry in her Judge Deborah Knott series, Christmas Mourning (11/10) is no exception. Readers who crave more of the author’s short fiction should check out her pod cast of her story “Virgo in Sapphires” (www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm).

One of the last to see Felicia Hernandez Parker before she disappeared from her home near Raleigh was a woman who came by to deliver a bushel of tomatoes that Mack Parker had bought at her roadside vegetable stand on his way to work that morning. She was a stranger to both Parkers and when the case came to trial, her testimony was dispassionate and objective.

“I saw her black eye when she came out to the truck to get the tomatoes. She asked me how to can them. She’d never canned anything before, but her husband wanted tomato vegetable soup like his mother makes. I suggested that she call her mother-in-law and ask her, but she said that her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with his family. They didn’t approve of the marriage and he wasn’t one to take criticism.”

“Objection!” said the defense attorney. “Hearsay.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Isn’t it true that you dated Felicia Hernandez first?” asked the defense attorney on cross-examination. “And that you resented her for dumping you for your brother?”

“Not a bit,” said Randy Parker. “Yeah, Felicia and me, we went out a couple of times, but I wasn’t gonna marry a Mexican, no matter how hot she was.”

“The rest of your family had cut him off, yet you continued to visit him at his house?”

“Me and Mack’ve always been tight, so yeah.”

“Even after he punched you in the nose for trying to kiss his wife earlier that week?”

“He didn’t mean to hurt me. Mack’s always had a hot temper, and Felicia knew how to keep him on a boil.”

“You’re saying she came on to you?”

“Yeah.”

“So why did she tell her husband that you initiated that kiss?”

“Guess she didn’t want another tail-whupping.”

“Instead, you got a broken nose. Did you resent her for that?”

“The way my nose hurt? Damn straight.”

“What happened to her, Mr. Parker?”

“How should I know?”

“About six months before she disappeared, she came in bleeding heavily,” the emergency room nurse testified. “She had a bruise as big as a dinner plate on her abdomen. We couldn’t save the fetus.”

“Did she say what caused the bruise?”

“No, sir. We asked if her husband had hit her there, but she said no. She said she had fallen. Most falls don’t leave a round bruise. Fists do.”

“Objection!” said the defense attorney. “Conclusion.”

“Which this witness is qualified to make,” the prosecutor argued.

“Overruled,” the judge agreed.

“Yeah,” said a stockman who worked for Mack Parker at a hardware chain store in Raleigh. “He’s got a short fuse, and he’d go off like a rocket if Felicia ever answered him back.

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