The Mysteries Read Free

all her usual haunts and hangouts, nowhere more than Sydenham Hill Woods. I'd felt instinctively that it was significant, so I'd kept going back. I must have come within a few feet, if not inches, of her body, without knowing.
    I'd failed before. I don't mean to imply that I was such a hotshot investigator that I'd found everybody I went looking for, because I certainly hadn't. Observational skills, intuition, dogged persistence all played a part in my success, but so did serendipity, and you couldn't count on that. Normally when I drew a blank, I just moved on to the next problem. The unsolved case remained open in my mind, a burden I would always carry with me, but it didn't stop me from taking on more. But somehow this failure felt different, and weighed more heavily. Maybe it was just the timing, because over the past year there had been a string of cases I couldn't solve, people I couldn't find, and it was making me reassess my whole career.
    Maybe, after all, I wasn't any good at it. Maybe, for the better part of a decade, I'd been coasting along on luck, not skill, and now that luck had run out.
    It didn't help that I was flat broke, and suddenly aware of middle age staring me in the face. I'd had a good, long run at my fantasy of being a great detective—with a base in London, no less!—but maybe fantasy was all it had ever been. I'd never made any real money out of it; it was more like a self-sustaining hobby. Maybe it was finally time to give it up, grow up, and find a new line of work.
    I was distracted from my gloomy thoughts by a familiar soft, pattering sound, followed by a sharp metallic slap. I looked up in time to see the postman, transformed by the thick, frosted glass to a blurry grey ghost, bobbing away from my door.
    The surge of hope that sent me bouncing up out of my chair to get my mail was irrational, but as inevitable as the tides. Even though these days I did most of my business by phone or e-mail, the regular morning arrival of the mail set off an anachronistic flutter in my chest, the feeling that my whole life could be about to change. Unfortunately, the positive feeling rarely lasted long.
    That morning, the most interesting envelope came from my publishers, Wellhead Books.
    This turned out to contain a short letter, signed by someone I'd never heard of, informing me that as sales of
Taken!
had slowed to a trickle, they'd decided to remainder all unsold stock. They were offering me the first chance to buy all or some of the copies at an 80 percent discount. Orders in multiples of twenty, please, and kindly let them know how many were required before the end of the month.
    The news was not exactly a shock; I knew I was lucky my book had survived for as long as it had. Most books these days are allowed only a few months of shelf life before they disappear forever, and mine had been published nearly six years ago. Wellhead had been a small firm with an old-fashioned approach (small advances; personal relationships with authors; keeping books in print forever), but last year they'd been bought out and turned into an imprint of a much bigger media corporation. I couldn't blame them for wanting to dump me; I'd never managed to deliver a second book to my long-suffering editor. My career as an author had been even shorter and more inglorious than my life as a private eye.
    I set aside the monthly bank statement unopened and tossed all offers of loans, credit cards, and private financial services onto the pile on the couch awaiting my next trip to the paper-recycling bin. That left only a Lands' End catalog and a pale blue envelope postmarked Milwaukee, WI.
    I knew before I opened it what it would be, and at the sight of the card my spirits plunged even lower.

    Happy Birthday, Son.

    Another unnecessary reminder that I was no longer young. Two weeks early. Inside the card my mother had sent a check for five hundred dollars. The sight of it made me feel both relief and guilt. Relief, because now I