A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  “Thought you folks’d be leaving,” he said.

  “We’re staying on another month,” Mrs. Allison said brightly. “The weather was so nice, and it seemed like—”

  “That’s what they told me,” the man said. “Can’t give you no oil, though.”

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Allison raised her eyebrows. “We’re just going to keep on with our regular—”

  “After Labor Day,” the man said. “I don’t get so much oil myself after Labor Day.”

  Mrs. Allison reminded herself, as she had frequently to do when in disagreement with her neighbors, that city manners were no

  good with country people; you could not expect to overrule a country employee as you could a city worker, and Mrs. Allison smiled engagingly as she said, “But can’t you get extra oil, at least while we stay?”

  “You see,” the man said. He tapped his finger exasperatingly against the car wheel as he spoke. “You see,” he said slowly, “I order this oil. I order it down from maybe fifty, fifty-five miles away. I order back in June, how much I’ll need for the summer. Then I order again…oh, about November. Round about now it’s starting to get pretty short.” As though the subject were closed, he stopped tapping his finger and tightened his hands on the wheel in preparation for departure.

  “But can’t you give us some?” Mrs. Allison said. “Isn’t there anyone else?”

  “Don’t know as you could get oil anywheres else right now,” the man said consideringly. “I can’t give you none.” Before Mrs. Allison could speak, the truck began to move; then it stopped for a minute and he looked at her through the back window of the cab. “Ice?” he called. “I could let you have some ice.”

  Mrs. Allison shook her head; they were not terribly low on ice, and she was angry. She ran a few steps to catch up with the truck, calling, “Will you try to get us some? Next week?”

  “Don’t see’s I can,” the man said. “After Labor Day, it’s harder.” The truck drove away, and Mrs. Allison, only comforted by the thought that she could probably get kerosene from Mr. Babcock or, at worst, the Halls, watched it go with anger. “Next summer,” she told herself, “just let him trying coming around next summer!”

  There was no mail again, only the paper, which seemed to be coming doggedly on time, and Mr. Allison was openly cross when he returned. When Mrs. Allison told him about the kerosene man he was not particularly impressed.

  “Probably keeping it all for a high price during the winter,” he commented. “What’s happened to Anne and Jerry, do you think?”

  Anne and Jerry were their son and daughter, both married, one living in Chicago, one in the far west; their dutiful weekly

  letters were late; so late, in fact, that Mr. Allison’s annoyance at the lack of mail was able to settle on a legitimate grievance. “Ought to realize how we wait for their letters,” he said. “Thoughtless, selfish children. Ought to know better.”

  “Well, dear,” Mrs. Allison said placatingly. Anger at Anne and Jerry would not relieve her emotions toward the kerosene man. After a few minutes she said, “Wishing won’t bring the mail, dear. I’m going to go call Mr. Babcock and tell him to send up some kerosene with my order.”

  “At least a postcard,” Mr. Allison said as she left.

  As with most of the cottage’s inconveniences, the Allisons no longer noticed the phone particularly, but yielded to its eccentricities without conscious complaint. It was a wall phone, of a type still seen in only few communities; in order to get the operator, Mrs. Allison had first to turn the side-crank and ring once. Usually it took two or three tries to force the operator to answer, and Mrs. Allison, making any kind of telephone call, approached the phone with resignation and a sort of desperate patience. She had to crank the phone three times this morning before the operator answered, and then it was still longer before Mr. Babcock picked up the receiver at his phone in the corner of the grocery behind the meat table. He said “Store?” with the rising inflection that seemed to indicate suspicion of anyone who tried to communicate with him by means of this unreliable instrument.

  “This is Mrs. Allison, Mr. Babcock. I thought I’d give you my order a day early because I wanted to be sure and get some—”

  “What say, Mrs. Allison?”

  Mrs. Allison raised her voice a little; she saw Mr. Allison, out on the lawn, turn in his chair and regard her sympathetically. “I said, Mr. Babcock, I thought I’d call in my order early so you could send me—”

  “Mrs. Allison?” Mr. Babcock said. “You’ll come and pick it up?”

  “Pick it up?” In her surprise Mrs. Allison let her voice drop back to its normal tone and Mr. Babcock said loudly, “What’s that, Mrs. Allison?”

  “I thought I’d have you send it out as usual,” Mrs. Allison said.

  “Well, Mrs. Allison,” Mr. Babcock said, and there was a pause while Mrs. Allison waited, staring past the phone over her husband’s head out into the sky. “Mrs. Allison,” Mr. Babcock went on finally, “I’ll tell you, my boy’s been working for me went back to school yesterday, and now I got no one to deliver. I only got a boy delivering summers, you see.”

  “I thought you always delivered,” Mrs. Allison said.

  “Not after Labor Day, Mrs. Allison,” Mr. Babcock said firmly, “you never been here after Labor Day before, so’s you wouldn’t know, of course.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Allison said helplessly. Far inside her mind she was saying, over and over, can’t use city manners on country folk, no use getting mad.

  “Are you sure?” she asked finally. “Couldn’t you just send out an order today, Mr. Babcock?”

  “Matter of fact,” Mr. Babcock said, “I guess I couldn’t, Mrs. Allison. It wouldn’t hardly pay, delivering, with no one else out at the lake.”

  “What about Mr. Hall?” Mrs. Allison asked suddenly, “the people who live about three miles away from us out here? Mr. Hall could bring it out when he comes.”

  “Hall?” Mr. Babcock said. “John Hall? They’ve gone to visit her folks upstate, Mrs. Allison.”

  “But they bring all our butter and eggs,” Mrs. Allison said, appalled.

  “Left yesterday,” Mr. Babcock said. “Probably didn’t think you folks would stay on up there.”

  “But I told Mr. Hall…” Mrs. Allison started to say, and then stopped. “I’ll send Mr. Allison in after some groceries tomorrow,” she said.

  “You got all you need till then,” Mr. Babcock said, satisfied; it was not a question, but a confirmation.

  After she hung up, Mrs. Allison went slowly out to sit again in her chair next to her husband. “He won’t deliver,” she said.

  “You’ll have to go in tomorrow. We’ve got just enough kerosene to

  last till you get back.”

  “He should have told us sooner,” Mr. Allison said.

  It was not possible to remain troubled long in the face of the day; the country had never seemed more inviting, and the lake moved quietly below them, among the trees, with the almost incredible softness of a summer picture. Mrs. Allison sighed deeply, in the pleasure of possessing for themselves that sight of the lake, with the distant green hills beyond, the gentleness of the small wind through the trees.

  The weather continued fair; the next morning Mr. Allison, duly armed with a list of groceries, with “kerosene” in large letters at the top, went down the path to the garage, and Mrs. Allison began another pie in her new baking dishes. She had mixed the crust and was starting to pare the apples when Mr. Allison came rapidly up the path and flung open the screen door into the kitchen.

  “Damn car won’t start,” he announced, with the end-of-the-tether voice of a man who depends on a car as he depends on his right arm.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Mrs. Allison demanded, stopping with the paring knife in one hand and an apple in the other. “It was all right on Tuesday.”

  “Well,” Mr. Allison said between his teeth, “it’s not all right on Friday.”

  “Can you fix i
t?” Mrs. Allison asked.

  “No,” Mr. Allison said, “I can not. Got to call someone, I guess.”

  “Who?” Mrs. Allison asked.

  “Man runs the filling station, I guess.” Mr. Allison moved purposefully toward the phone. “He fixed it last summer one time.”

  A little apprehensive, Mrs. Allison went on paring apples absentmindedly, while she listened to Mr. Allison with the phone, ringing, waiting, ringing, waiting, finally giving the number to the operator, then waiting again and giving the number again, giving the number a third time, and then slamming down the receiver.

  “No one there,” he announced as he came into the kitchen.

  “He’s probably gone out for a minute,” Mrs. Allison said nervously; she was not quite sure what made her so nervous, unless it was the probability of her husband’s losing his temper completely. “He’s there alone, I imagine, so if he goes out there’s no one to answer the phone.”

  “That must be it,” Mr. Allison said with heavy irony. He slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and watched Mrs. Allison paring apples. After a minute, Mrs. Allison said soothingly, “Why don’t you go down and get the mail and then call him again?”

  Mr. Allison debated and then said, “Guess I might as well.” He rose heavily and when he got to the kitchen door he turned and said, “But if there’s no mail—” and leaving an awful silence behind him, he went off down the path.

  Mrs. Allison hurried with her pie. Twice she went to the window to glance at the sky to see if there were clouds coming up. The room seemed unexpectedly dark, and she herself felt in the state of tension that precedes a thunderstorm, but both times when she looked the sky was clear and serene, smiling indifferently down on the Allisons’ summer cottage as well as on the rest of the world. When Mrs. Allison, her pie ready for the oven, went a third time to look outside, she saw her husband coming up the path; he seemed more cheerful, and when he saw her, he waved eagerly and held a letter in the air.

  “From Jerry,” he called as soon as he was close enough for her to hear him, “at last—a letter!” Mrs. Allison noticed with concern that he was no longer able to get up the gentle slope of the path without breathing heavily; but then he was in the doorway, holding out the letter. “I saved it till I got here,” he said.

  Mrs. Allison looked with an eagerness that surprised her on the familiar handwriting of her son; she could not imagine why the letter excited her so, except that it was the first they had received in so long, it would be a pleasant, dutiful letter, full of the doings of Alice and the children, reporting progress with his job, commenting on the recent weather in Chicago, closing with

  love from all; both Mr. and Mrs. Allison could, if they wished, recite a pattern letter from either of their children.

  Mr. Allison slit the letter open with great deliberation, and then he spread it out on the kitchen table and they leaned down and read it together.

  “Dear Mother and Dad,” it began, in Jerry’s familiar, rather childish handwriting, “Am glad this goes to the lake as usual, we always thought you came back too soon and ought to stay up there as long as you could. Alice says that now that you’re not as young as you used to be and have no demands on your time, fewer friends, etc., in the city, you ought to get what fun you can while you can. Since you two are both happy up there, it’s a good idea for you to stay.”

  Uneasily Mrs. Allison glanced sideways at her husband; he was reading intently, and she reached out and picked up the empty envelope, not knowing exactly what she wanted from it. It was addressed quite as usual, in Jerry’s handwriting, and was postmarked Chicago. Of course it’s postmarked Chicago, she thought quickly, why would they want to postmark it anywhere else? When she looked back down at the letter, her husband had turned the page, and she read on with him: “—and of course if they get measles, etc., now, they will be better off later. Alice is well, of course, me too. Been playing a lot of bridge lately with some people you don’t know, named Carruthers. Nice young couple, about our age. Well, will close now as I guess it bores you to hear about things so far away. Tell Dad old Dickson, in our Chicago office, died. He used to ask about Dad a lot. Have a good time up at the lake, and don’t bother about hurrying back. Love from all of us, Jerry.”

  “Funny,” Mr. Allison commented.

  “It doesn’t sound like Jerry,” Mrs. Allison said in a small voice. “He never wrote anything like…” she stopped.

  “Like what?” Mr. Allison demanded. “Never wrote anything like what?”

  Mrs. Allison turned the letter over, frowning. It was impossible to find any sentence, any word, even, that did not sound

  like Jerry’s regular letters. Perhaps it was only that the letter was so

  late, or the unusual number of dirty fingerprints on the envelope.

  “I don’t know,” she said impatiently.

  “Going to try that phone call again,” Mr. Allison said.

  Mrs. Allison read the letter twice more, trying to find a phrase that sounded wrong. Then Mr. Allison came back and said, very quietly, “Phone’s dead.”

  “What?” Mrs. Allison said, dropping the letter.

  “Phone’s dead,” Mr. Allison said.

  The rest of the day went quickly; after a lunch of crackers and milk, the Allisons went to sit outside on the lawn, but their afternoon was cut short by the gradually increasing storm clouds that came up over the lake to the cottage, so that it was as dark as evening by four o’clock. The storm delayed, however, as though in loving anticipation of the moment it would break over the summer cottage, and there was an occasional flash of lightning, but no rain. In the evening Mr. and Mrs. Allison, sitting close together inside their cottage, turned on the battery radio they had brought with them from New York. There were no lamps lighted in the cottage, and the only light came from the lightning outside and the small square glow from the dial of the radio.

  The slight framework of the cottage was not strong enough to withstand the city noises, the music and the voices, from the radio, and the Allisons could hear them far off echoing across the lake, the saxophones in the New York dance band wailing over the water, the flat voice of the girl vocalist going inexorably out into the clean country air. Even the announcer, speaking glowingly of the virtues of razor blades, was no more than an inhuman voice sounding out from the Allisons’ cottage and echoing back, as though the lake and the hills and the trees were returning it unwanted.

  During one pause between commercials, Mrs. Allison turned and smiled weakly at her husband. “I wonder if we’re supposed to…do anything,” she said.

  “No,” Mr. Allison said consideringly. “I don’t think so. Just wait.”

  Mrs. Allison caught her breath quickly, and Mr. Allison said, under the trivial melody of the dance band beginning again, “The car had been tampered with, you know. Even I could see that.”

  Mrs. Allison hesitated a minute and then said very softly, “I suppose the phone wires were cut.”

  “I imagine so,” Mr. Allison said.

  After a while, the dance music stopped and they listened attentively to a news broadcast, the announcer’s rich voice telling them breathlessly of a marriage in Hollywood, the latest baseball scores, the estimated rise in food prices during the coming week. He spoke to them, in the summer cottage, quite as though they still deserved to hear news of a world that no longer reached them except through the fallible batteries on the radio, which were already beginning to fade, almost as though they still belonged, however tenuously, to the rest of the world.

  Mrs. Allison glanced out the window at the smooth surface of the lake, the black masses of the trees, and the waiting storm, and said conversationally, “I feel better about that letter of Jerry’s.”

  “I knew when I saw the light down at the Hall place last night,” Mr. Allison said.

  The wind, coming up suddenly over the lake, swept around the summer cottage and slapped hard at the windows. Mr. and Mrs. Allison involuntarily moved closer together, and with the
first sudden crash of thunder, Mr. Allison reached out and took his wife’s hand. And then, while the lightning flashed outside, and the radio faded and sputtered, the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited.

  St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning

  CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG

  Charlotte Armstrong (1905-69) is one of a lustrous group of writers who give the lie to the revisionist history claim that American women mystery writers of the fifties and sixties were downtrodden and unappreciated victims of hardboiled masculine dominance. The Mystery Writers of America awarded her an Edgar for A Dram of Poison (1956), and her two 1967 titles, The Gift Shop and Lemon in the Basket, were best-novel nominees in the same year. At the height of her reputation, not even Cornell Woolrich was more celebrated as a purveyor of pure suspense.

  After a couple of unsuccessful (albeit New York-produced) plays and three relatively conventional detective novels featuring a character named MacDougall Duff, the Michigan-born Armstrong made a major impact and stirred controversy among fans and critics with The Unsuspected (1946). Howard Haycraft, traditionalist author of the standard history Murder for Pleasure (1941), admired the novel’s strengths but insisted it would have been even better had Armstrong concealed the identity of the villain in standard whodunnit fashion rather than letting the reader in on the secret. The novel was filmed in 1947, with a script by Armstrong, and she followed it with The Chocolate Cobweb (1948), Mischief (1950), The Black-Eyed Stranger (1951), and many more novels through the posthumously published The Protégé (1970).

  Armstrong was as effective at short-story as novel length. “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” demonstrates both her creation of reader anxiety and her strong sense of human interdependence

  and responsibility—plus the problems it can cause. It also shows her affinity to Woolrich in its unusual variant on one of his favorite situations (the lady vanishes) and to the theater—the main character is a playwright, and the story is easy to imagine as a play.