Rocket to the Morgue by F. Paul Wilson

Author:F. Paul Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Published: 2019-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE:

Sunday, November 2 to Thursday, November 6, 1941

URSULA MARSHALL, happily full of formula, kicked her chubby legs. It was a friendly and joyful gesture, but it did not help the process of changing her diaper.

Her four-year-old brother looked on wide-eyed. “That looks like fun maybe, daddy. Is it?”

Lieutenant Marshal said, “What do you think?”

Terry gave the problem due attention. “Maybe yes,” he announced. “Can I do it sometime, daddy?”

Marshall’s large hands moved with surprising deftness. “By the time you can reach on top of a bathinet, I hope your sister won’t be needing it”

“Then could I have another sister maybe?”

“We’ll see about that. Perhaps we ought to get you practised up for when you have one of your own. And when you do, Terry, remember these words of fatherly advice: The more you help your wife with being a mother, the more time and energy she’ll have for being a wife.”

“What’s energy?”

“Breakfast!” Leona called from the kitchen, thereby sparing her husband the grievous semantic problem of defining a term with no visible referend.

“You see, Terry?” he elucidated as they sat to table. “Because I got up and gave Ursula her early bottle, your mother had time” (he omitted the confusing new word) “to whip me up a buckwheat batter.”

“I want a buckwheat batter,” Terry announced inevitably.

“There dear,” said Leona soothingly. “You’ve got your nice mush.”

“Leona.” Marshall firmly overrode Terry’s outspoken comments on the nice mush. “Did you get anywhere sleeping on it?”

“Nowhere at all. That does usually work with mystery novels. I read them up to where the detective says, ‘All the clews are now in your hands, my dear Whozit,’ and then I go to sleep and in the morning I know the answer. But this didn’t work out. Maybe it’s because all the clews aren’t in our hands.”

“That’s just it. There aren’t any clews but a rosary and a photograph. Everything’s so god—”

Leona glanced sideways at their son. “Terence!”

“So terribly nebulous. And a corpse is a—a darn sight more cooperative than a living victim who sits calmly back swiddling his press notices and murmurs gently, ‘All right. Now you tell me who did it.’ ”

To most children a corpse at the breakfast table would be unbearably exciting. But Terry was too young yet to realize how romantically thrilling his father’s profession would seem to others. Murder and corpses were just funny things that his parents talked about a lot. He now barely heard the word and went right on with his mush, which he had remembered that he liked.

“What I keep coming back to,” Leona reflected, “is Sister Ursula’s reference to the Invisible Man. She doesn’t say things at random. So I reread that Chesterton story last night.”

“Does it help?”

“It’s the same moral as so many of his, of course: the easy danger of overlooking the obvious. The Invisible Man is the postman. All the witnesses swear that no one came near the house, and of course they never think of the man who comes and goes all the time.

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