Double, Double

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Ellery had thought he was through with Wrightsville. He had even developed a nostalgia about it, like the man who looks back on his boyhood home through the filtering lens of a sentimental eye. He liked to say that, although he was born in New York City, Wrightsville was his spiritual birthplace — a town of complacent elms, wandering cobbles, and crooked sidestreets nestled in the lap of a farmers’ valley and leaning against the motherly abdomen of one of New England’s most matriarchal mountain ranges. Here it was always forest green or immaculate with snow. Orderly fields to look at, spiced air to breathe, the unfolding satisfaction of the hills. The whole place glittered in his memory like a diamond, or an emerald.

Never a ruby, because the blood color was uncomfortably close to the mark.

The envelope cast a ruby glow.

Ellery examined it again, not touching its contents.

It was a long envelope of flawed slick bluish paper, the correspondence offering of every five-and-ten cent store in America. This one, he felt sure, came from the stationery counter of the High Village Five-and-Dime. A few doors away dozed J. C. Pettigrew, Real Estate, and at the Five-and-Dime’s Upper Whistling side glared Miss Sally’s Tea Roome, where the ladies of Wrightsville’s haut monde forgathered daily to sample Miss Sally’s celebrated caloric specialty, Pineapple Marshmallow Nut Mousse. O Wrightsville!

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