The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman: Further Fairmount Manor Mysteries

By Mel Anastasiou

Replete with packet chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese, Stella Ryman paused just outside Fairmount Manor’s dining room, where she used the sleeve of her fleece warm-up suit to wipe the condensation from the streaked and fog-edged windows along the corridor.  There was so much springtime glory outside Fairmount — although

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pulp Literature Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988865126

Mel Anastasiou

Mel Anastasiou writes the Fairmount Manor Mysteries, the Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries, and the Monument Studios Mysteries. Winner of a Literary Titan Gold award and longlisted for the Leacock Medal, Mel is also the author of two illustrated thirty-day workbooks on story structure: the steampunk-themed The Writer's Boon Companion and The Writer's Friend and Confidante. For news on published and upcoming new works, visit her website, melanastasiou.wordpress.com.

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cover-image, The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman

Praise for Mel Anastasiou’s Stella Ryman Mysteries

Longlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour in Literature, and winner of a Literary Titan Award, Mel Anastasiou’s Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries continues to be a reader favourite.

Far from simply being Christie-esque, Anastasiou’s protagonist is not only funny but finds the funny in a warehouse of the death expectant. – Daniel C Goodwin

Delightfully different, gently humorous exploration of sleuthing with a touch of senior citizen fogginess and intrepid zeal for the quest. Stella’s life is as motivated by her passion as Sherlock Holme’s ever was and her mental health as dependent on keeping some game afoot. Author Anastasiou paints a respectfully sympathetic picture of the challenges of old folks in a seniors’ home without pulling her punches or passing up a good chuckle by creating a character with enough spunk to carry the reader safely through. I’m not a lover of mysteries as a rule. But I do like to see genuinely novel looks at the human experience through the lens of established genres.

– Lynda Williams, Reality-Skimming Press (5-star review on Goodreads)

An excellent read, full of colorful characters. Stella Ryman, as a character, is quintessentially heroic — in the classic sense. – Literary Titan

I LOVE STELLA. I met Stella Ryman a few years ago by way of a series of novellas published in PULP Literature — a fabulous quarterly journal of genre busting fiction. It’s a great joy to see these stories gathered between the covers of this Fairmount Manor Mysteries collection. It’s now so easy to share the love! Stella is not an outrageous genius (Sherlock Holmes) nor a well-connected socialite (Phryne Fisher) nor a caricature British spinster (Miss Marple). She’s your sometimes addled and always endearing great aunt — the one you want over for tea because she’s kind and curiou and has great stories to tell. Mel Anastasiou has crafted a character to love, nestled in the mystery novel equivalent of comfort food. Enjoy!

– Sandra Vander Schaaf, author of The Passionate Embrace: Faith, Flesh, and Tango

Stella Ryman is my new hero! I love the way the very observant author has woven dementia and lucidity and humour together. – Susan Lefeaux

I fell in love with Stella reading her stories in Pulp Literature magazine. This feisty lady who changes her mind from being ready to die to being a nursing home sleuth is so human. She wants to help people, and has a passion for right and wrong. Her frail old body and mind occasionally fail her, but she uses her past experience as a teacher librarian to keep herself on track, standing up to bullies of all kinds. She is delightfully flawed and delightfully sweet, and I look forward to more of her stories. – Krista Wallace (Goodreads review)

Mel Anastasiou’s prose isn’t just elegant and witty; it’s also warm, compassionate, and insightful. The endearing Stella Ryman is a character who is brave, intelligent, wise, and stubborn — but also trapped. Stuck in a care home, limited by physical frailty, and at the mercy of her less-than-reliable memory, Stella is nonetheless a warrior, seeking justice for the powerless within the walls of the Fairmount Manor care home. While the context is mundane and the situations treated with gentle humour, the sharp and compassionate writing makes us care about defending the defenceless and righting the wrongs of the nursing home as much as Stella does.

– JM Landels, author of Allaigna’s Song: Overture

Clever, oh so clever. And poignant. Did I mention well written? Literary sleuthing that only a woman could write. – Susan Pieters (Goodreads review)

This book is a treat. Compassion, intelligence, and wit prevail in a home that’s essentially ‘heaven’s waiting room’.

– Kathy Tyers, author of the Firebird Trilogy and Star Wars: Balance Point

Stella’s world is an engaging read. – Mary Morris

Stella wins! Carefully written and a rewarding read. Stella is an unlikely sleuth, like Precious Ramotswe, facing obstacles with courage. A good read for thoughtful people. – S Peterson

I absolutely loved the character Stella, and this was beautifully written with humour, grace, and suspense. Have just purchased the others in the series, which I can’t wait to read and would highly recommend! – Kirsty Favell

I love how Anastasiou is taking pulp conventions and using them to tell the relatively ‘mundane’ story of a woman’s final years (months? days?) in a nursing home … complete with hair’s-breadth escapes and tall drinks of water and arch enemies. – Theric Jepson, thmazing.blogspot.ca

I love Stella. – Karen Cowper

Also by Mel Anastasiou

Stella Ryman and the Fairmount Manor Mysteries

The Hertfordshire Pub Mysteries

The Extra: A Monument Studios Mystery

Non-fiction

The Writer’s Boon Companion: Thirty Days Towards and Extraordinary Volume

The Writer’s Friend and Confidante: A Thirty-day Workbook

The Labours of Mrs Stella Ryman

Further Fairmount Manor Mysteries

Mel Anastasiou

Pulp Literature Press

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COPYRIGHT © 2019 MEL ANASTASIOU

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of copyright law.

Pulp Mystery is an imprint of Pulp Literature Press.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

ISBN: 978-1-988865-11-9 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-988865-12-6 (ebook)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Material in this novel was originally published serially in Pulp Literature magazine © 2016 - 2018 Pulp Literature Press, as ‘Stella Ryman and the Thief Named Edge’, Spring 2016, ‘Stella Ryman and the Man with the Gun’, Autumn 2016, ‘Stella Ryman and the Case of the Fallen Crusader’, Spring 2017, ‘Stella Ryman and the Ghost at the End of the Bed’, Autumn 2017, and ‘Stella Ryman and the Mystery of the Mah-Jongg Box’, Spring 2018.

Cover by Kate Landels from a drawing by Kris Sayer.

Interior design: Amanda Bidnall

Interior illustrations: Mel Anastasiou

Published in Canada by Pulp Literature Press

www.pulpliterature.com

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For my sons John May and Jary May.

Ever the best sons ever.

Author’s Note

Stella Ryman walked into my life one April afternoon as I was hanging about in a nursing home corridor, waiting to help move an enormous television into an elderly acquaintance’s new bedroom. I liked the staff and the elderly women who sat in the corridor, chatting just as if it were a park. Corridor Park.

I asked myself, What if I lived here? What on earth would I do with myself? How do you wake up every morning, knowing that people are responsible for you but that you are responsible for nothing but agreeable behaviour? (There seemed to be some possibilities for rebellion here.) We all need a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. What would that be? Television? Hell no. Complaining about the food? Possibly. But Stella Ryman would have a better idea. And so she becomes … (tag line approaching) … an amateur sleuth, trapped in a down-at-heel care home.

You’d be cranky, too.

The Thief Named Edge

Chapter One

Mrs Stella Ryman stood guard outside the Chrysanthemum Corridor bathing facility at eleven in the morning. She was up to her ears in danger, and all on account of Thelma Hu.

Fairmount Manor residents were not permitted to bathe without supervision. And Thelma desired to bathe alone.

Stella supported the eighty-eight-year-old blind woman’s wish. It was a perilous stand to take in an inflexible institutional setting like Fairmount Manor Care Home, with her own personal liberty at risk, but Stella retained the moral strength and expansiveness of thought earned over her forty-year career as an elementary school librarian. In addition, she had over the past months gained a new and surprisingly pugnacious talent for ripping through strangling institutional red tape, in her work as an unsung adventurer and amateur sleuth at Fairmount.

Stella tried not to look sideways at the sign above the bathroom door handle. She had always been a reader, though, so she couldn’t help reading the top line now: This door must be locked at all times when not in use. Signed, Mrs Perdita Warren, Director of Fairmount Manor.

Mrs Warren. Stella called her the Warden, and for good reason. The Director had far too much control over Stella’s freedom and happiness. And enjoyed exerting it.

But Stella and Thelma had chosen their mutinous moment well. Eleven was the Hour of the Talk Show, so that the larger number of residents and staff were off in the activities hall, feeding their judgment centres with rich servings of luminary gossip. It was also the Hour of the Mall Trip, when most of the remaining residents were off site. And just to be sure of secrecy, Stella had mounded up Thelma’s bedclothes over a pillow in her room across the corridor and turned the sound on her television up high.

From inside the bathroom door, Stella heard a single thump. Water gushed. Stella looked both ways along the corridor. The doors to the residents’ rooms stood open or shut, but there was no stir of activity that she could make out.

She reached behind her and rapped with her knuckles on the bathroom door. Thelma! Are you in the bath yet?

The sound of running water stopped. There followed a quivering pause. Then, Thelma’s voice: Whoever you are, go away!

It was not like Thelma to be so forgetful.

It’s just me. Stella felt, as always, the error in grammar. But she could never bring herself say a teacherly It is I. Remember, I’m guarding the door so you can take a bath. All by yourself. Unsupervised.

Is it too much at my age to ask for a little dignity?

You don’t have to convince me, Stella said grimly.

It was lucky that traffic was always fairly light in Chrysanthemum, possibly because the corridors were sinuous down this end of Fairmount. Just now the only person in sight was a teenager in a hoodie, hunching his way along the corridor, no doubt on the way to visit his grandma — or great-grandma. He was acting mysteriously, hunching over and looking away from her, as if pretending that Stella didn’t exist, which was fine with Stella, who returned it in spades. Her long career as a school librarian had taught her never to judge a young person by his or her cover, but it was amazing how negative — and even threatened — one felt in the presence of a lad who walked about with his face covered in that surreptitious manner. He shoved through the doorway into one of the nearby residents’ rooms and disappeared.

Thelma said from inside the bathroom, Oh, drat.

Stella tensed. Are you all right?

When Thelma didn’t respond, it came to Stella, as it must come to all subversive agents from time to time, maybe even to Lawrence of Arabia and the Scarlet Pimpernel, that perhaps this mission was a mistake.

The door cracked open, and Thelma’s wizened, clever face scowled up at her. Why are you asking me questions when I’m in my naked strip?

I just wanted to know whether you want some help.

I don’t want help in the bathroom. That’s the whole point, Thelma said. You’re not doing much out there, are you?

I’m your sentinel, Stella told her.

Well, use your time and figure out how to solve the mystery of my stolen money box like you told me you would. Did you forget?

No. Yes. The door snapped shut, leaving Stella alone in the corridor again, scowling and wishing she would stop making foolish promises and then forgetting all about them. She should never have committed herself to sleuthing for the black lacquer mah-jongg box Thelma lost at Fairmount Manor ten years ago, with all Thelma’s money in it. Ten years! A cold case indeed. The thing was impossible.

But maybe this bathing success would pay for all, and Thelma would release Stella from her foolish promise.

There arose from within the bathroom the sudden uproar of crashing waves. Mission accomplished, Stella thought with satisfaction. Against all the odds, Fairmount Manor red tape is breached and Thelma gets her wish to bathe in dignity alone. Lawrence of Arabia and the Scarlet Pimpernel could take a lesson in subterfuge from us two old ladies.

A moment later, she remembered that it did not do to celebrate a victory too soon — not until all troops and civilians had sailed home, or, in the present case, not until Thelma was safely out, dried, dressed, and sitting innocently alongside the Greek Chorus in Corridor Park. For now, advancing toward Stella, was a smiling middle-aged woman in a puce care worker’s smock.

Behind Stella, the sound of Thelma bathing had settled from storm-on-open-ocean to a sort of satisfied churning.

The approaching care worker — not Cheryl, Reliza, or Ollie, but one of the Nameless Dears who called you loving names they did not mean — was still thirty paces away when, in a signal previously arranged, Stella jiggled the door handle slightly. All splashes stopped. In the silence, all one could hear was the innocent buzz of a nearby television and the padding of the nameless care worker’s soft-soled shoes as she neared Stella.

Stella shoved her hands deeper into the pockets of her fleece jacket to hide their trembling. She slouched against the wall beside the door and studied her own shoes. In this posture, she felt exactly like a teenaged juvenile delinquent. It was not a bad way to feel at eighty-two.

The care worker drew level with her and stopped. Hello, dear. Are you all right? What are you doing here?

I’m quite fine, thank you, Stella answered.

"I see. But you do realize, don’t you, that you don’t belong in Chrysanthemum Corridor?

Are you lost, you poor old thing? The unasked question hung in the air like a shadow in a sunny room. Resentment rose inside Stella. For once, she was not lost. It ought to be easy to get rid of such a silly care worker.

Stella had gone to some trouble to obtain a key — no, let us be frank: to steal a key — but this Nameless Dear surely had a staff key to the bathroom. If Stella walked off, the care worker would probably follow her, but then Thelma, blind, naked, and hors des regles, would be vulnerable to discovery by the next care worker who came along. Stella reminded herself that the Scarlet Pimpernel and Lawrence of Arabia would have kept cool in similar circumstances, and so would she. She answered the care worker’s earlier question, feeling lucky that she did not, like the Pimpernel or El Oranz, have to answer in French or Arabic, employing regional idioms.

Stella said, I am standing here trying to understand why this orange-painted corridor is called Chrysanthemum.

The care worker nodded. Well, all these areas are named for flowers, aren’t they? To give a garden feel. Everybody loves flowers, don’t they, dear?

Of course, Stella said. But then why paint Chrysanthemum Corridor orange?

The care worker said, Well, dear, Rose Corridor is pink, and Hyacinth Corridor is blue …

Yes. Stella curbed her impatience with this mistress of the obvious. But chrysanthemums come in so many colours — pale yellow, maroon, pink, gold, and that magical lemony green.

The woman took a step closer. Are you waiting for a care worker to help you with your bath, dear? I can get you started, if you like. She put her hand into her smock pocket and Stella heard the jingle of keys.

Inspiration, like the unreliable sidekick it was, deserted Stella. Her high hopes of boring the younger woman into leaving her alone collapsed. And two small noises sounded from the other side of the bath facility door.

Splish.

And splash.

Chapter Two

In the silence that followed, the orange-sponged corridor walls seemed to lean inward over Stella and the nameless care worker. There was nothing for it but to place her hopes in deus ex machina, although Stella had always considered it an unreliable way for the playwrights of ancient Greece to get their heroes out of trouble. Perhaps Mediterranean skies, a wine-dark sea, and the best cold-pressed olive oil three times a day resulted in a certain sunny narrative optimism. Stella herself was more of the Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers philosophy of problem solving, but there was no time for anything but deus ex machina now. If only the lunch tone would sound, or Ollie would appear and distract attention from Thelma’s splashing by noisily swabbing the corridor with his grey, odoriferous mop. She wished for anything at all to prevent discovery, a walk of shame to the Warden’s office, a quelling lecture, and the removal of further freedoms and privileges.

Any second now, Thelma was certain to splash again.

Just across the corridor, somebody opened a door, and the television inside let out a splash-masking swell of audience applause. This door-opening agent of deus ex machina turned out to be the same hooded teenager Stella had seen earlier. He ran past Stella and the nameless care worker.

The care worker asked, What is that boy doing here?

Stella replied, Running like that, he must be up to no good. Shouldn’t somebody go after him? This was not the moment to say what she really thought, that the boy