The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 by Otto Penzler Read Free Book Online

as he tottered up the steps to his front door, Mickey only hoped it still worked.

PETER S. BEAGLE
The Bridge Partner
FROM
Sleight of Hand
    Â 
    I WILL KILL YOU
.
    The words were not spoken aloud, but silently mouthed across the card table at Mattie Whalen by her new partner, whose last name she had not quite caught when they were introduced. Olivia
Korhanen
or
Korhonen,
it was, something like that. She was blond and fortyish—Mattie was bad with ages, but the woman had to be somewhere near her own—and had joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group only a few weeks earlier. The members had chosen at the very beginning to call themselves a group rather than a club. As Eileen Berry, one of the two founders, along with Suzanne Grimes, had said at the time, “There’s an exclusivity thing about a club—a snobby, elitish sort of taste, if you know what I mean. A group just
feels
more democratic.” Everyone had agreed with Eileen, as people generally did.
    Which accounted, Mattie thought, for the brisk acceptance of the woman now sitting across from her, despite her odd name and unclassifiably foreign air. Mattie could detect only the faintest accent in her voice, and if her clothes plainly did not come from the discount outlet in the local mall, neither were they so aggressively chic as to offend or threaten. She had clear, pleasant blue eyes, excellent teeth, the delicately tanned skin of a tennis player—as opposed to a leathery beach bunny or an orange-hued tanning bed veteran—and was pleasant to everyone in a gently impersonal manner. Her playing style showed not only skill but grace, which Mattie noticed perhaps more poignantly than any other member of the Bridge Group, since the best that could have been said for Mattie was that she mostly managed to keep track of the trumps and the tricks. Still, she knew grace when she saw it.
    I will kill you.
    It made no possible sense—she must surely have misread both the somewhat long, quizzical lips and the intention in the bright eyes. No one else seemed to have heard or noticed anything at all unusual, and she really hadn’t played the last hand as badly as all that. Granted, doubling Rosemarie’s bid could be considered a mistake, but people make mistakes, and she
could
have pulled it off if Olivia Korhonen, or whoever, had held more than the one single miserable trump to back her up. You don’t
kill
somebody for doubling, or even threaten to kill them. Mattie smiled earnestly at her partner, and studied her cards.
    The rubber ended in total disaster, and Mattie apologized at some length to Olivia Korhonen afterward. “I’m not really a good player, I know that, but I’m not usually that awful, I promise. And now you’ll probably never want to play with me ever again, and I wouldn’t blame you.” Mattie had had a deal of practice at apologizing, over the years.
    To her pleasant surprise, Olivia Korhonen patted her arm reassuringly and shook her head. “I enjoyed the game greatly, even though we lost. I have not played in a long time, and you will have to make allowances until I start to catch up. We’ll beat them next time, in spite of me.”
    She patted Mattie again and turned elegantly away. But as she did so, the side of her mouth repeated, clearly but inaudibly—Mattie could not have been mistaken this time—
“I will kill you.”
Then the woman was gone, and Mattie sat down in the nearest folding chair.
    Her friend Virginia Schlossberg hurried over with a cup of tea, asking anxiously, “Are you all right? What is it? You look absolutely
ashen! 
” She touched Mattie’s cheek, and almost recoiled. “And you’re
freezing!
Go home and get into bed, and call a doctor! I
mean
it—you go home right now!” Virginia was a kind woman, but excitable. She had been the same when Mattie and she were in dancing school together.
    â€œI’m all right,”