Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004
Dream of Murder
by Ruth Francisco
Ruth Francisco worked in the film industry for fifteen years before the publication of her first novel, Confessions of a Deathmaiden, in 2003. An expanded version of “Dream of Murder” forms the first chapter of her new novel, Good Morning, Darkness, which is due from Mysterious Press this September. The following is the author’s first published short fiction — a superb debut that EQMM is proud to bring its readers!
I found the first arm. The second one washed up on Malibu beach seven miles north of here. The rest of the body must’ve gotten eaten by sharks.
The newspapers gave credit to a jogger who came by later and that’s okay by me. I’m legal and everything. I was born here. But that doesn’t mean I want to talk to cops.
Two or three times a week, I get up at four-thirty and take my beat-up Toyota truck down Washington Boulevard to the beach. I go to fish. They say the fish are too polluted to eat, but it tastes better than what you can buy at the store and it’s free. In the two hours before work, I catch enough bonito or barracuda to feed my family and my neighbors for a few days. When I snag a halibut, I give some to Consuello Rosa, my landlady, and she lets the rent slide awhile.
Usually I fish off the jetty in Marina del Rey at the end of the channel because it’s quiet and beautiful. That’s the real reason I fish. My younger kids prefer to eat hot dogs, and the fourteen-year-old won’t eat nothing her mother cooks, period. So I fish for myself.
On the morning I found the arm, it was still dark when I got to the beach. The moon was setting over the ocean, cutting a white path to the horizon. I threaded leftover chorizo on my fishing lines for bait. I like to think that it’s like home-cooking for the fish who got spawned down in Baja. I don’t want them to forget where they come from. I threw in three lines, then unscrewed my thermos and poured myself some coffee. I was leaning on my el-bows, not thinking about much, watching the black night fade to gray and the low mist pulling back from the shore like a puddle drying up on hot asphalt.
Then I saw the arm.
It lay on the sand about twenty feet from the water where the beach is hard and smooth. The tide must’ve brought it in and left it.
At first I thought it was a piece of rain gutter like I bought from Home Depot the other day for a job. I climbed down from the jetty to take a closer look. I didn’t have to get close to know it wasn’t plastic. It was a left arm. It didn’t smell like the seals I’ve found on the beach or the whale from a few years back. That you could smell for a mile. But then the morning was still cool. I could tell it was a woman’s arm, white with fine hair. The fingers had chipped pearl and clear nail polish, which, ’cause I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, I knew was called a French manicure. There was a pretty ring on her third finger.
I probably would’ve taken the ring if her fingers hadn’t been so swollen. I looked to make sure no one else was around, then squatted by the arm. I touched the skin; it didn’t bounce back. It felt like a mushroom — fragile and a little slippery. I wasn’t repulsed, but maybe a little sad, like when you stop to move roadkill to the side of the highway and realize it’s an animal you don’t see much anymore, like a silver fox or a bobcat.
As I stood up, the waves pushed a white rose onto the beach. Most of its petals were gone, and it had a long stem like the expensive kind people buy to throw off their sailboats along with someone’s ashes.
The sun was beginning to come up; and it was going to be one of those hot spring mornings that acts like summer is in a hurry. I knew someone else would come by, so I went back to my fishing poles and kept an eye on it. In a half-hour a jogger found it, a white man in his forties running on the beach. He was working at it like his lower back hurt, and I bet he was glad when he saw the arm and had an excuse to stop. He touched it with the toe of his sneaker like he thought it might still be alive. That made me laugh. He reached into his pocket and whipped out a cell phone.
From then on, it was his arm.
A lady with a couple of dogs walked toward him and he yelled at her to put them on a leash. She looked pissed until she saw what he was fussing about. By the time the cops showed up there was a ring of people and dogs around the arm. Plainclothes detectives and the coroner showed up twenty minutes later. They spent an hour poking at it, taking its temperature, snapping photos. I even saw one of the detectives bend down and sniff it. Finally, they put the arm in a blue plastic bag and drove off with it.
It wasn’t until that evening, after I told the kids and the wife about it, and the neighbors on both sides, and my cousin Paco who dropped by just in time for dinner, after the house finally got quiet and I was drinking a glass of tequila behind the garage on the brick patio I’ll finish one of these days, that I thought about the woman the arm belonged to, of what she must’ve looked like.
That was when I realized I knew who she was.
Laura Finnegan woke with a start, her heart pounding, her white tank top sweaty, clinging to her breasts, the sheets twisted around her ankles. She let her head fall back onto the pillow, exhaling with a bleating sound. She could feel the blood throbbing in her neck, and she imagined her heart and its network of veins and arteries as an octopus caught in a trap, convulsing, thrashing its arms. A dull headache began above her eyebrows. She wiped the pools of sweat from under her arms with the bottom of her shirt.
What a horrible dream.
As soon as she was awake enough to command her muscles, she propped herself up on her elbows and turned her head.
Scott lay sleeping beside her, soundless, oblivious. He never seemed to wake up gradually to morning sounds — birds, traffic, garbage trucks — but slept deeply until the alarm went off, like a child dead to the world. The top sheet, white with blue cornflowers, curtained over his shoulder and tucked under his chin. She found it odd that it had never before occurred to her that sheets with flower prints were meant to give you the impression of sleeping in a field of blossoms. She squinted, blurring her focus, and imaged a boy napping on the hindquarter of his dog in a meadow of wildflowers. He looked so sweet, so harmless.
She shuddered, remembering him in her dream. Her terror lingered, leaving her drained, her stomach raw and nauseated.
Slowly she pulled the sheet off his body, admiring his shoulders, his chest, his muscular thighs and calves.
He slept on his right side, facing her, his right arm draped over the pillow, his left thigh at a forty-five-degree angle as if he were climbing. He had a long face with a squared-off chin, tanned skin, and a mop of straight blond hair. She noticed faint wrinkles on his neck and at the corners of his eyes, which were set a little too close. He was a perfect L.A. boy-man.
As if pricked, she jerked her hand back to touch her neck. Never had she been so frightened by a dream. Never had a dream felt so real. She seldom remembered her dreams, but this dream she could still smell — the stench of red tide at dawn, decaying fish, rancid seaweed. Even with her eyes open, faint images, black, white, and red, flashed like danger signs over her irises. She could see the coldness in his eyes and an odd twist in his mouth, like when he was close to coming.
Yet here he was, nuzzling the pillow, sweet as a toddler.
Scott was a generous man, an enthusiastic although not a particularly adventurous lover. He claimed to adore her. He was handsome, athletic, attentive, and funny. He acted as if she were the first and only girl he’d ever loved. Her girlfriends told her that when he asked — for there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would ask — she should agree to marry him. When they said this, they looked invariably wistful, yet happy for her at the same time, as if she’d won the lottery, as if having a guy like this be nuts about you happened only to the lucky few.