![]() That evening, Minnie tells Sophie about her investigation and what she discovered. Before she goes to the police, she decides that she must tell Sophie, so that the young woman can "face life with more common sense." The reporter tells the reader, "It was a bad mistake. Minnie understands the confidence game now and how Sophie was led astray. Like Sophie, the woman is convinced that the swami carries messages from her dead fiance. She shows Minnie a photograph of the man and Minnie recognizes him as Keith Holloway. The young woman tells a tale of heartbreak, involving a Bolivian mining engineer whom she agreed to marry but who was killed in a mining accident. Minnie decides to investigate and watches people come and go from the building where the swami is staying, until she selects an unhappy young woman and approaches her. Minnie is skeptical, especially when Sophie announces that she plans to spend all of her fortune to finance a temple for the swami. She returns home from the meeting convinced that he gave her messages from her dead lover. She thinks it's a message from Keith, attends the swami's lecture, and makes an appointment for a private meeting with him. Interpreting the quotation as a premonition, Sophie settles into the quiet life of a spinster with Minnie until, one evening, she reads in the newspaper an advertisement for a talk by Swami Avranyakananda, who uses the same quotation in the ad. She pores over his past letters and fixates on a quotation from the poem cited above: "'Beyond the sea of death Love lies for ever, yesterday, today.'" ![]() Sophie's joy comes to an abrupt end when she receives a letter telling her that Keith was killed in a mine explosion. He returns to Bolivia and his letters to Sophie are filled with plans for their future together. Keith is not concerned, so she brings him home to meet Minnie, her surrogate mother. She hides her wealth and large home from him, but when he proposes marriage, she confesses that she is rich and had a prior husband. Keith arrives and he and Sophie are inseparable. They exchange photos and he writes that he's coming to America for a visit and wants to see her. She conceals her wealth from him and finds that they have much in common he is also an orphan who lives with an elderly friend. Time passes, and one day Sophie answers an ad in a literary magazine and begins corresponding with Keith Holloway, an American engineer living in Bolivia. Sophie bought a gun to protect herself if he should return and became convinced that no man would ever love her for anything but her money. Briggs "cherished her with a maternal passion" and was crestfallen when Sophie eloped with the family's chauffeur.Īfter two years of unhappiness, they were divorced and he was paid $50,000 to disappear. Not pretty, she was shy and awkward she was raised by Minnie Briggs, who evolved from Sophie's nurse to her governess, her chaperone and, finally, her adult companion. Sophie's mother died when she was born and she inherited a fortune when her father died. The identity of her victim is not disclosed at first, and the reporter is determined to examine her motive. In "Beyond the Sea of Death" by Miriam Allen deFord, which was first published in the May 1949 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and which won a fourth prize in the magazine's story competition that year, an unnamed reporter narrates the tale of Sophie Renford, "a rich young woman" convicted of murder.
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