The Gnomes

by A.M. Porter

About the Author: A.M. Porter, a writer and journalist, has worked mostly in Latin America. She has published four books of non-fiction as well as several short stories, including in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Her mystery novel, The Swan Keeper's Wife, was long-listed for a Debut Dagger Award in 2017.

Excerpt

When Frank Blanchard committed suicide by drowning himself in his backyard swimming pool, he tied two garden gnomes around his body to ensure he’d succeed. Afterwards, his wife, Mae, put them back on the lawn in front of a tub of white and pink petunias.

Mae’s neighbours were suitably shocked, of course, even horrified. “What kind of person does that?” they asked, rhetorically, over dinner, or cocktails with friends on their backyard patios, or when they ran into each other at the Saturday farmers’ market.

“Poor Edna,” they might have added as an afterthought. Edna Purvis was the woman who lived right across the street from the Blanchards. Mid-fifties and never married, she had been good friends with Frank, and had only ever tolerated Mae. The presence of the gnomes could only sharpen her sense of loss—as well her dislike of Mae.

The first time Tamsin Bruce drove past the gnomes on her way to work, the sight of them naturally surprised her. Surprised and disturbed. As the pathologist’s assistant at the County Coroner’s office, she was the one who had given the items back to Mae once the Arden Police Department told her she might as well, since it was not a criminal case and there was no reason to keep them as evidence.

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