Penzler, Otto Ed v2

by Murder For Revenge

  Something strange flashed across her face. “In the basement?” she said softly.

  “No, down by the creek under a big tree. Tomorrow I’m going to dig it up and give you a chest filled with gold doubloons.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, helping him on with his coat.

  After they left, I settled Amy at the kitchen table with her geography workbook and a gnawed pencil. Most of the time I sat with her to make sure she didn’t start doodling, but that evening I was too distracted to stay put.

  When my daughter finally came home, I went into my bedroom and lay down, wondering just what Sarah might have in mind.

  Jem Wafford should have been doing the same.

  What she did a few nights later was so peculiar I almost went across the street to make sure she wasn’t drunk. I was in the front room when I noticed Gerald was back. He was getting to be a familiar figure in his overcoat, his hands in his pockets, his bald head reminding me of a full moon. I glanced at the upstairs windows to see if Sarah was there, but the shades were drawn.

  I stayed where I was, my fingers crossed in hopes she hadn’t gone out and bought a gun. Gerald may have frightened her, but she’d have a hard time convincing a jury she’d shot him in self-defence.

  I was beginning to feel relieved when her front porch light went on and she came outside. Her hands were blessedly empty, and she was dressed only in jeans and a thin T-shirt. I expected her to start cursing at Gerald, but she went down the steps and across the yard to join him. He retreated, but she kept smiling and talking like he was a neighbour from down the street. Pretty soon he stopped edging away from her and began to bobble his head. I couldn’t see if he was saying anything in response—I’d have been surprised if he had—but Sarah didn’t seem to notice. After a moment, she put her hand on his arm and led him toward her house. He moved reluctantly, but she kept her grip on him. Before long, they were inside and the front door was closed.

  My heart was pounding so hard that I sat down in the rocking chair and forced myself to take a couple of slow breaths. I’d been the one swearing that Gerald wouldn’t hurt anyone, but I had no way of knowing how his mother’s death might have affected him deep down inside. Staring at the house was one thing; actually being inside it might set off all kinds of raw emotions.

  I waited twenty minutes, then broke down and dialled Sarah’s telephone number. I didn’t know what I was going to do if she didn’t answer, but she picked up the receiver.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice so Amy wouldn’t get alarmed.

  “Everything’s fine, Deanna. Gerald and I are having a nice talk about when he and his mother lived here.”

  “I just thought I’d better...”

  “I know,” she said. “I’d do the same thing if the situation was reversed. I need to get back to my guest now. Don’t worry about us.”

  All the same, I stayed by the window until I saw Gerald leave, and I made sure I got a good look at Sarah standing in the doorway. Rather than scared, she had a funny smile on her face. Smug.

  “I saw you and your mother had company last night,” I said to Cody the following afternoon after I’d softened him up with ice cream and cookies.

  “Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm. “She made me turn off the television and go upstairs, even though I already did my homework.”

  “So you didn’t hear what they were saying?”

  “No. May I please have some more ice cream?”

  Amy snickered. “Pirates don’t eat ice cream unless it’s got blood and bones mixed in it.”

  “Says who?” he retorted, baring his teeth.

  She obligingly squealed and ran out the back door, with Cody on her heels. My attempt to play private detective had flopped like a bad movie, I thought, as I set their bowls in the sink and turned on the water.

  And I had a feeling I wouldn’t do much better with Sarah.

  Gerald appeared several times over the next few weeks, and each time Sarah went outside and escorted him into the house. Cody let drop one afternoon that Gerald had eaten supper with them the previous night and, for some reason that he wouldn’t explain, solemnly swore that Gerald was descended from real pirates. Sarah smiled and waved when I saw her in her driveway, but she stopped coming over to have coffee before she fetched Cody. Some days I wanted to go across the street, grab her shoulders, and shake the truth out of her. I didn’t do anything, though, except weasel what I could out of Cody while we walked home from the bus stop.

  One afternoon while I was waiting for them, Jem Wafford’s Cadillac swung around the corner and sped down the street. Years ago he’d given up trying to persuade me to sell, so he didn’t bother to nod at me. As soon as Cody and Amy climbed off the bus, I hustled them to the house. Wafford was sitting in his car in Sarah’s driveway. I told the children to make themselves peanut butter sandwiches, then crossed the street and waited until he climbed out.

  “Mrs. James,” he said, pretending he hadn’t left me in a cloud of dust minutes earlier, “how are you doing? Your back any better these days?”

  “My back is none of your business,” I said. “Are you looking for Sarah? She usually doesn’t get home till six o’clock.”

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck. “I dropped by on the chance I’d catch her on her day off.”

  “She doesn’t have a day off. She’s a full-time student and puts in thirty hours a week at a preschool. Weekends, she studies and does housework.”

  “You’ve got to admire that kind of determination,” he said, beaming at me like he and I were the proud parents of a prodigy. “A single woman with a child, struggling to put herself through school so she can—“

  “What do you want, Wafford?” I said bluntly.

  “Is she still having trouble with Gerald?”

  “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  Wafford leaned his bulk against the Cadillac and gazed up at the second-story windows. “What about you, Mrs. James? Have you talked to Gerald recently?”

  My curiosity got the better of me, so instead of stomping off, I said, “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “At his request, I stopped by the group home where he lives. We had a real interesting talk. I’m just wondering”—he tapped his temple—“how reliable he is.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “He’s been out here quite a bit, hasn’t he?”

  “What if he has?” I shot back.

  “He told me that his mother was a miser, that she squirreled away a good deal of cash before she died.” Wafford looked at me, his mouth curled in a smile but his eyes slitted like a snake’s. “You ever get the idea she was putting away cash for a rainy day?”

  Something was going on. I didn’t know what, and if somebody’d offered me a million dollars, I couldn’t have come up with the right answer.

  “Maybe,” I said cautiously. “She stayed to herself.”

  “Gerald seems to think she did,” he said, “but he’s not the most reliable witness, considering.”

  “Considering,” I echoed. To this day I can’t explain why I added, “But he’s not the kind who tells tales. His imagination was never a strong point.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be,” Wafford said with a snicker. “Mr. Sticklemann’s family owned all the land out this way once upon a time. They sold it off part and parcel over the years, most likely for cash. Folks like that didn’t trust real-estate brokers and bankers.”

  “I don’t suppose so,” I said, still feeling like I had a role in a play. I could almost hear Sarah coaching me from the wings, but my script was too blurry to read. “Mrs. Sticklemann wasn’t the kind to deal with bankers. She was real independent.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Wafford took another swipe at his neck, then stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket.

  “She sure didn’t squander any of it. She had that ancient Pontiac when she died, and heaven knows she never took a vacation or had repairs
done to the house.”

  Just then Sarah drove up. I was waiting for her to snarl at him, so I was a little bewildered when she asked me to watch Cody for a while longer and invited Wafford to go inside for iced tea.

  Wafford’s car was still in the driveway long after Cody’d gone home and Amy had eaten supper. I was reluctant to do any more than watch from behind the curtain in the front-room window, and that’s what I was doing when Sarah came walking across the street for what turned out to be the last time.

  I opened the front door as she came onto the porch. “Everything all right?” I demanded.

  “Wafford has offered to buy back the house for what I have in it and more. We agreed that I’d move out tonight and collect my furniture later. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done, Deanna. I’ll write once Cody, Gerald, and I have a new address.”

  “Gerald?”

  “I’ve agreed to take him with us to be my resident baby-sitter and handyman. He did me a favour and I owe him big. I’ll swing by the home and pick him up on my way out of town.”

  I was afraid to go into it any further. “What about your classes?”

  “I’m not sure I want to be a teacher,” she said with a wry grin. “I may decide to go into real estate. I’ve learned quite a bit over the last few months.”

  “What about Wafford?”

  “He’s inspecting the property to make sure it’s in the same condition as it was when I bought it. He’ll leave before too long.”

  She hugged me, then turned around and went home. Over the next hour, she and Cody loaded the car with suitcases and boxes. Wafford’s Cadillac was in the shadows at the far end of the driveway, but he never emerged with an armload of anything. Not that he was the kind to help anybody.

  Amy finally started nagging me to help her with her homework, so I abandoned my vigil and went into the kitchen. After she’d finished and gone to bed, I went back to the front room. Sarah’s car was gone. Wafford’s car was still there, and a light was on in the back of the house. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. It was none of my business, so I made myself some popcorn and turned on a movie.

  The next morning I noticed Wafford’s car was gone too. I fixed pancakes, then listened to my daughter gripe about her boss before she gulped down a cup of coffee and shooed Amy out the door to drive her to school.

  The ritual was familiar, but not comforting. Once I had the house to myself, I tidied up and started a load of laundry, but the window in the front room was a magnet. Why had Sarah befriended Gerald, of all people? Even odder, why had Wafford agreed to buy back the house? He’d always circled like a vulture, waiting to foreclose on hapless widows and families whose breadwinners had been fired or become disabled.

  I hadn’t received any great insights by three o’clock, when it was time to walk to the bus stop. I was almost there when Mr. Perniski came outside, dressed in his customary cardigan sweater and khaki pants.

  “What’s going on at the end of the road?” he said. “That young woman was acting mighty peculiar last night.”

  “Sarah?”

  “You betcha. She pulled into the driveway over there”—he pointed at our neighbourhood drug dealer’s establishment—“and gave that one with the beard what looked like a key. Long about midnight, he went sneaking down the road toward her house. The last thing we need out here is another criminal. My grandson found a hypodermic needle in the ditch last summer. We have to—“

  “Sarah and Cody moved out last night,” I said, cutting him off. “Are you sure she gave him a key?”

  “Hell, I ain’t sure about nothing,” Perniski muttered, then wandered away.

  I thought about all this while I waited for the school bus, and I hadn’t made much progress by the time Amy was occupied with a bag of cookies and old sitcoms on television. I finally slipped out and went across the street to what had been Sarah’s house. The doors were locked, so all I could do was peer through windows at unoccupied rooms.

  The police did not arrive for more than two days, and my instinctive response was to tell them nothing. After a moment, though, churchgoing woman that I am, I murmured something about the basement door, its shiny new bolt, and the possibility that Wafford’s Cadillac was in a chop shop in the next county. As for Sarah Benston, I’ve never heard from her. I’m not real worried; as she said, she learned a lot about real estate during her brief stay across the street.

  She can take care of herself.

  Judith Kelman

  Judith Kelman shares with her friend Mary Higgins Clark the ability to walk us gently to the edge of a well-manicured lawn where just beyond yawns a terrifying abyss. Her popular novels, which include ‘Hush Little Darlings’, ‘The House on the Hill’, and ‘Fly Away Home’, are quite brilliant at turning seemingly secure suburban neighbourhoods into bedroom communities for hell. It is not difficult to see how well earned is Kelman’s success: she truly gets us where we live.

  Sometimes, however, writers just want to have fun. Here, in a story that positively drips gleeful venom, Kelman takes a new route through her usual territory. How does one imagine afresh version of the familiar heroine-as-victim? Think high-school reunion and a moment, decades after the original adolescent humiliations, when justice is finally served... and found to be deliciously lethal.

  Homo Horriibilus

  Carlotta peered in her mailbox and froze. Twenty years had passed, but she recognised his handwriting at once: sharp hooks and vicious slashes; whimsical flourishes, meant to deceive.

  Everything about the man was a nasty game of deceit, even his name. The return address read: ‘Chervil Lattimore, 14 Bismarck Circle, Rockville Centre, New York.’ Chervil, indeed, Carlotta huffed. She remembered elementary school, when he’d sometimes passed himself off as Basil. Later, for a time, he went by Sage. In high school, it was Lovage or Borage or Valerian. He claimed all variations on his real name, which was Herb.

  Herbert Alton Lattimore IV. Thinking of the man made Carlotta furious. The nerve of him to invade her world after all this time! Wasn’t it enough that he’d been the source of all her childhood misery? Wasn’t it sufficient that he’d knocked her life off its intended course? What more could that hideous creature possibly want from her?

  Carlotta considered several satisfying ways to dispense with this unthinkable intrusion. She could crumple the letter and toss it in the trash. She could burn it or tear it apart, as Herb had done to her. But, in the end, she yielded to the pull of curiosity. Surely, she would be consumed with questions if she didn’t find out what the letter said. The last thing she could afford right now was a foolish distraction. Carlotta had to be in peak form for tomorrow’s CPA exam.

  In six attempts during the past five years, Carlotta had failed the Auditing section of the test. After the last time, Mr. Detuzzi from Human Resources had laid it on the line. If Carlotta flunked again, she would be dropped from all future consideration for an accounting position at the Carswell Communications Corporation, Inc., her sole place of employment since graduation.

  Carlotta would be forced to spend the rest of her working days in the dreary bookkeeping department, where she had to endure the company of Martha Siwicki, the human hyena, and dumpy Irwin Draper, who mined his nose as if it held a mother lode of gold. As if the tedious job and her unseemly colleagues weren’t bad enough, the bookkeeping office adjoined the company kitchen, so Carlotta’s clothing, not to mention her hair, held the permanent stench of institutional gravy.

  Carlotta had to get out. And this time, she was fully prepared to do so. She had enrolled in the Becker review course and studied several hours every day. To silence her strident inner doubts, she had entered into therapy with Dr. Friedrich Hume himself at Peoria’s famed Hume Institute for Personal Enrichment. Nothing would stand in the way of her success, especially not some poisonous little Herb. She resolved to read the silly letter, toss it out, and be done with it.

  Carlotta found her reading glasses on the desk beside a sepia wedding port
rait of her parents, Rose and Sam. She cast a wistful glance at the young, loving pair. If only they were alive to see her now. For once, they would have reason to be proud of their only offspring. So what if she’d inherited her father’s lacklustre face and fireplug physique? Fiddle de dee that she tended to be a teensy bit high strung and hypersensitive like her mother. No biggie wiggy that she’d never married or had children or distinguished herself in any particular way. Carlotta Little was about to grab the gold ring, hit the heights, soar to the pinnacle: accounting.

  She slashed the envelope and plucked out the lone vellum sheet. “My dearest Carlotta,” the letter began. “I’m writing in the heartfelt hope that you can find some way to forgive me. No words can express how deeply sorry I am for the pain and distress I’ve surely caused you. These past few years cruel fate has forced me to reappraise my life and recognise what is truly important. Having known the agony of loss, I’ve come to treasure precious people such as you who have touched my life.”

  As she read, Carlotta’s sod-coloured eyes filled with tears. Herb’s two-year-old son, conceived after years of excruciating infertility treatments, had drowned in the family pool during a valiant attempt to rescue his beloved Barney. The child’s nanny was absorbed in a particularly compelling episode of General Hospital at the time.

  Herb’s wife, suicidal over the tragedy, had been committed to the Happy Hollows Sanatorium. Several months later, Giselle had appeared so improved, her doctor allowed her out on a day pass. She lunched with a friend, went shopping at Loehmann’s, then hurled herself under the wheels of the four thirty-five express bus to Manhattan.

  Carlotta shook her head in rueful empathy. Loehmann’s could do that to a person.

  Herb’s horrendous misfortune did not stop there. His house had burned down, taking with it all precious mementos of his beloved wife and son. His family business, the venerable Lattimore Fidelity Fund, tottered at the brink of ruin following several years of lacklustre performance. In a desperate effort to save the firm, Herb had taken a huge position in the EasySlim Corporation, manufacturers of a caplet designed to liquefy body fat, so it could be redistributed from, say, thighs to breasts. Unfortunately, the FDA had banned the highly touted drug after tests found that it caused an alarming incidence of clinical consternation in laboratory rats.