The man who opened the door of the large old-fashioned house was a nondescript person with thin brown hair pasted against his head and large brown eyes swimming behind thick lenses. He was dressed in slacks and a sweater, neither impressive, and carried a hatchet in a hand one finger of which was heavily bandaged. A honing stone had been tucked under his arm to allow him a free hand with the latch. He took the honing store from the pit of his arm and allowed the two implements to dangle; they seemed to weigh down his thin arms.
"Hello, Sergeant. What can I do for you?"
"Hello, Charley. Actually, it was your wife I´d hoped to see."
"Well you can´t," Crompton said apologetically. "She isn´t here. She´s gone away."
About the Book
What is Charley Crompton hiding? The police in a small town aren´t sure, but when he is reported digging in his garden in the middle of the night soon after his wife disappears, it seems like something is up. This is the intriguing premise for Robert L. Fish´s enigmatic, Edgar-award-winning short story "Moonlight Gardener."
When we meet him, Charley seems both crazy and evasive. Why does he answer the door holding a bloodstained hatchet? And do we believe him when he claims that he was only digging up his peach trees "to let the roots breathe"? The police investigation is both an inquiry into Mrs. Crompton´s disappearance and a look behind closed doors into the private life of the main suspect and his missing wife. Is Charley acting so strange because he is guilty, or did the severe and judgmental Mrs. Crompton decide she finally had enough of her strange husband? Or is something even stranger going on?
Police investigations routinely work by paying close attention to the norms of life, and finding cause for suspicion when those norms are violated. But what happens when a criminal inquiry meets genuine eccentricity? Do the police have sufficient imaginative resources to untangle the mystery of the moonlight gardener?
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