The Persistence of Illusion

by Bond Elam

About the Author: Bond Elam has written and published science fiction for the past ten years. This is his first mystery publication. He currently lives and writes in southwest Ohio.

Excerpt

Many years later, as he gazed into the muzzle of Professor Garrison’s pistol, Detective Harry Sturgis was to remember the hot summer afternoon his father had first taken him to the beach. Harry had been standing waist-deep in the surf, watching his mother mediated an argument between his two older sisters over a brown bottle of suntan lotion. Nearby, his father lounged under a striped red and yellow beach umbrella, reading the morning paper. A portly man with a pale white belly that swelled out over the elastic waist of his purple bathing trunks, he had just turned a page, his eyes lifting over the top of the paper as a large wave washed over Harry from behind. For an instant, the world seemed to disappear in a swirl of translucent green water and glittering bits of sand. Then the water washed away as suddenly as it had risen, and Harry again found himself looking at the beach. In the instant that the wave passed, the sun had broken through the clouds, bathing the sand, the striped umbrella, even his sisters’ blue and green one-piece bathing suits, in an intensity of color so bright that Harry felt as though the world itself had changed—as though reality had somehow shifted, leaving him on a different beach, under a different sky.

In the years that followed, this same sense of dislocation, of events unexpectedly reorienting themselves as reality washed over him, returned on more than one occasion, becoming a component of Harry’s perception of the world around him. As a result, his murder, though unexpected, did not come as a complete surprise.

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