“Max!” She was hurt and astonished at the same time. “Oh. You’re joking, I see. It’s not very funny to me, you know.”
“My dear, we’ve got to learn to laugh about it: it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to forgive ourselves for our terrible misjudgments.” He stepped over to put an arm around her. “Now where is this remarkable surprise you promised to show me.”
She shot him a look of pure mischief, Lotty on a dare as he first remembered meeting her at eighteen. His hold on her tightened and he followed her to her bedroom. In a glass case in the corner, complete with a humidity-control system, stood the Pietro Andromache.
Max looked at the beautiful, anguished face. I understand your sorrows, she seemed to say to him. I understand your grief for your mother, your family, your history, but it’s all right to let go of them, to live in the present and hope for the future. It’s not a betrayal.
Tears pricked his eyelids, but he demanded, “How did you get this? I was told the police had it under lock and key until lawyers decided on the disposition of Caudwell’s estate.”
“Victoria,” Lotty said shortly. “I told her the problem and she got it for me. On the condition that I not ask how she did it. And Max, you know—damned well that it was not Caudwell’s to dispose of.”
It was Lotty’s. Of course it was. Max wondered briefly how Joseph the Second had come by it to begin with. For that matter, what had Lotty’s great-great-grandfather done to earn it from the emperor? Max looked into Lotty’s tiger eyes and kept such reflections to himself. Instead he inspected Hector’s foot where the filler had been carefully scraped away to reveal the old chip.
Afraid All the Time
NANCY PICKARD
Nancy Pickard (b. 1945) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism, working for a time as a reporter and editor before turning to freelance writing. Her series about Jenny Cain, foundation director in a small Massachusetts town, began with the paperback original Generous Death (1984), graduating to hardcovers with the third book, No Body (1986). Noted from the beginning for their humor, the Cain books gradually became darker in tone and theme. In an interview with Robert J. Randisi (Speaking of Murder, volume II [1999]) Pickard explained why, using Susan Wittig Albert’s term, the “‘mega-book’ mystery series…a new phenomenon…which denotes a series of novels which are essentially one long book. Each novel in the series is rather like a ‘chapter’ in the mega-book.” Unlike the series of writers like Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald, in which sleuths like Miss Marple and Travis McGee remained essentially the same from book to book, “in a ‘mega-book’ series, you can’t count on each succeeding book being much like the last…It’s more like real life (if…any amateur sleuth is ever like real life), because the protagonist goes through some real changes…As we (and they) mature, things do come to assume a more substantial feeling, a weightiness, which can sometimes carry a feeling of greater ‘darkness.’”
In several books, beginning with The 27 Ingredient Chile Con Carne Murders (1993), Pickard has adopted the character of Eugenia Potter, introduced in three novels by the late Virginia Rich. Pickard’s continuation of the series, the first based on Rich’s notes and the later ones on original stories, brought a sense of pace, craft, and complexity missing from some cooking mysteries
and others in the domestic cozy category. Asked by Randisi if she is a cozy writer, Pickard has fun with the concept: “I don’t know what I am. What’s between cozy and uncomfortable? If mystery writers were chairs, I wouldn’t quite be a chintz rocking chair, but I wouldn’t be a hard metal folding chair, either. A nice, swivel office chair, perhaps?”
Some novelists who also write short stories produce the same sort of narrative, only shorter. Others use the short form to experiment with theme, mood, and subject matter. Pickard is in the latter category, as shown in her collection Storm Warnings (1999) and in the Edgar-nominated story, “Afraid All the Time.”
Ribbon a darkness over me…” Mel Brown, known variously as Pell Mell and Animel, sang the line from the song over and over behind his windshield as he flew from Missouri into Kansas on his old black Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Already he loved Kansas, because the highway that stretched ahead of him was like a long, flat, dark ribbon unfurled just for him. “Ribbon a darkness over me…” He flew full throttle into the late-afternoon glare, feeling as if he were soaring gloriously drunk and blind on a skyway to the sun. The clouds in the far distance looked as if they’d rain on him that night, but he didn’t worry about it. He’d heard there were plenty of empty farm and ranch houses in Kansas where a man could break in to spend the night. He’d heard it was like having your choice of free motels, Kansas was. “Ribbon a darkness over me…”
Three hundred miles to the southwest, Jane Baum suddenly stopped what she was doing. The fear had hit her again. It was always like that, striking out of nowhere, like a fist against her heart. She dropped her clothes basket from rigid fingers and stood as if paralyzed between the two clotheslines in her yard. There was a wet sheet to her right, another to her left. For once the wind had died down, so the sheets hung as still and silent as walls. She felt enclosed in a narrow, white, sterile room of cloth, and she never wanted to leave it.
Outside of it was danger.
On either side of the sheets lay the endless prairie where she felt like a tiny mouse exposed to every hawk in the sky.
It took all of her willpower not to scream.
She hugged her own shoulders to comfort herself. It didn’t help. Within a few moments she was crying, and then shaking with a palsy of terror.
She hadn’t known she’d be so afraid.
Eight months ago, before she had moved to this small farm she’d inherited, she’d had romantic notions about it, even about such simple things as hanging clothes on a line. It would feel so good, she had imagined, they would smell so sweet. Instead, everything had seemed strange and threatening to her from the start, and it was getting worse. Now she didn’t even feel protected by the house. She was beginning to feel as if it were fear instead of electricity that lighted her lamps, filled her tub, lined her cupboards and covered her bed—fear that she breathed instead of air.
She hated the prairie and everything on it.
The city had never frightened her, not like this. She knew the city, she understood it, she knew how to avoid its dangers and its troubles. In the city there were buildings everywhere, and now she knew why—it was to blot out the true and terrible openness of the earth on which all of the inhabitants were so horribly exposed to danger.
The wind picked up again. It snapped the wet sheets against her body. Janie bolted from her shelter. Like a mouse with a hawk circling overhead, she ran as if she were being chased. She ran out of her yard and then down the highway, racing frantically, breathlessly, for the only other shelter she knew.
When she reached Cissy Johnson’s house, she pulled open the side door and flung herself inside without knocking.
“Cissy?”
“I’m afraid all the time.” “I know, Janie.”
Cissy Johnson stood at her kitchen sink peeling potatoes for supper while she listened to Jane Baum’s familiar litany of fear. By now Cissy knew it by heart. Janie was afraid of: being alone in the house she had inherited from her aunt; the dark; the crack of every twig in the night; the storm cellar; the horses that might step on her, the cows that might trample her, the chickens that might peck her, the cats that might bite her and have rabies, the coyotes that might attack her; the truckers who drove by her house, especially the flirtatious ones who blasted their horns when they saw her in the yard; tornadoes, blizzards, electrical storms; having to drive so far just to get simple groceries and supplies.
At first Cissy had been sympathetic, offering daily doses of coffee and friendship. But it was getting harder all the time to remain patient with somebody who just burst in without knocking and who complained all the time about imaginary problems and who—
“You�
�ve lived here all your life,” Jane said, as if the woman at the sink had not previously been alert to that fact. She sat in a kitchen chair, huddled into herself like a child being punished. Her voice was low, as if she were talking more to herself than to Cissy. “You’re used to it, that’s why it doesn’t scare you.”
“Um,” Cissy murmured, as if agreeing. But out of her neighbor’s sight, she dug viciously at the eye of a potato. She rooted it out—leaving behind a white, moist, open wound in the vegetable—and flicked the dead black skin into the sink where the water running from the faucet washed it down the garbage disposal. She thought how she’d like to pour Janie’s fears down the sink and similarly grind them up and flush them away. She held the potato to her nose and sniffed, inhaling the crisp, raw smell.
Then, as if having gained strength from that private moment, she glanced back over her shoulder at her visitor. Cissy was ashamed of the fact that the mere sight of Jane Baum now repelled her. It was a crime, really, how she’d let herself go. She wished
Jane would comb her hair, pull her shoulders back, paint a little coloring onto her pale face, and wear something else besides that ugly denim jumper that came nearly to her heels. Cissy’s husband, Bob, called Janie “Cissy’s pup,” and he called that jumper the “pup tent.” He was right, Cissy thought, the woman did look like an insecure, spotty adolescent, and not at all like a grown woman of thirty-five-plus years. And darn it, Janie did follow Cissy around like a neurotic nuisance of a puppy.
“Is Bob coming back tonight?” Jane asked.
Now she’s even invading my mind, Cissy thought. She whacked resentfully at the potato, peeling off more meat than skin. “Tomorrow.” Her shoulders tensed.
“Then can I sleep over here tonight?”
“No.” Cissy surprised herself with the shortness of her reply. She could practically feel Janie radiating hurt, and so she tried to make up for it by softening her tone. “I’m sorry, Janie, but I’ve got too much book work to do, and it’s hard to concentrate with people in the house. I’ve even told the girls they can take their sleeping bags to the barn tonight to give me some peace.” The girls were her daughters, Tessie, thirteen, and Mandy, eleven. “They want to spend the night out there ’cause we’ve got that new little blind calf we’re nursing. His mother won’t have anything to do with him, poor little thing. Tessie has named him Flopper, because he tries to stand up but he just flops back down. So the girls are bottle-feeding him, and they want to sleep near…”
“Oh.” It was heavy with reproach.
Cissy stepped away from the sink to turn her oven on to 350°. Her own internal temperature was rising too. God forbid she should talk about her life! God forbid they should ever talk about anything but Janie and all the damned things she was scared of! She could write a book about it: How Jane Baum Made a Big Mistake by Leaving Kansas City and How Everything About the Country Just Scared Her to Death.
“Aren’t you afraid of anything, Cissy?”
The implied admiration came with a bit of a whine to it—anything—like a curve on a fastball.
“Yes.” Cissy drew out the word reluctantly.
“You are? What?”
Cissy turned around at the sink and laughed self-consciously.
“It’s so silly…I’m even afraid to mention it.”
“Tell me! I’ll feel better if I know you’re afraid of things, too.”
There! Cissy thought. Even my fears come down to how they affect you!
“All right.” She sighed. “Well, I’m afraid of something happening to Bobby, a wreck on the highway or something, or to one of the girls, or my folks, things like that. I mean, like leukemia or a heart attack or something I can’t control. I’m always afraid there won’t be enough money and we might have to sell this place. We’re so happy here. I guess I’m afraid that might change.” She paused, dismayed by the sudden realization that she had not been as happy since Jane Baum moved in down the road. For a moment, she stared accusingly at her neighbor. “I guess that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then Cissy added deliberately, “But I don’t think about it all the time.”
“I think about mine all the time,” Jane whispered.
“I know.”
“I hate it here!”
“You could move back.”
Janie stared reproachfully. “You know I can’t afford that!”
Cissy closed her eyes momentarily. The idea of having to listen to this for who knew how many years…
“I love coming over here,” Janie said wistfully, as if reading Cissy’s mind again. “It always makes me feel so much better. This is the only place I feel safe anymore. I just hate going home to the big old house all by myself.”
I will not invite you to supper, Cissy thought.
Janie sighed.
Cissy gazed out the big square window behind Janie. It was October, her favorite month, when the grass turned as red as the
curly hair on a Hereford’s back and the sky turned a steel gray like the highway that ran between their houses. It was as if the whole world blended into itself—the grass into the cattle, the roads into the sky, and she into all of it. There was an electricity in the air, as if something more important than winter were about to happen, as if all the world were one and about to burst apart into something brand-new. Cissy loved the prairie, and it hurt her feelings a little that Janie didn’t. How could anyone live in the middle of so much beauty, she puzzled, and be frightened of it?
“We’ll never get a better chance.” Tess ticked off the rationale for the adventure by holding up the fingers of her right hand, one at a time, an inch from her sister’s scared face. “Dad’s gone. We’re in the barn. Mom’ll be asleep. It’s a new moon.” She ran out of fingers on that hand and lifted her left thumb. “And the dogs know us.”
“They’ll find out!” Mandy wailed.
“Who’ll find out?”
“Mom and Daddy will!”
“They won’t! Who’s gonna tell ’em? The gas-station owner? You think we left a trail of toilet paper he’s going to follow from his station to here? And he’s gonna call the sheriff and say lock up those Johnson girls, boys, they stole my toilet paper!”
“Yes!”
Together they turned to gaze—one of them with pride and cunning, the other with pride and trepidation—at the small hill of hay that was piled, for no apparent reason, in the shadows of a far corner of the barn. Underneath that pile lay their collection of six rolls of toilet paper—a new one filched from their own linen closet, and five partly used ones (stolen one trip at a time and hidden in their school jackets) from the ladies’ bathroom at the gas station in town. Tess’s plan was for the two of them to “t.p.” their neighbor’s house that night, after dark. Tess had lovely visions of how it would look—all ghostly and spooky,
with streamers of white hanging down from the tree limbs and waving eerily in the breeze.
“They do it all the time in Kansas City, jerk,” Tess proclaimed. “And I’ll bet they don’t make any big deal crybaby deal out of it.” She wanted to be the first one in her class to do it, and she wasn’t about to let her little sister chicken out on her. This plan would, Tess was sure, make her famous in at least a four-county area. No grown-up would ever figure out who had done it, but all the kids would know, even if she had to tell them.
“Mom’ll kill us!”
“Nobody’ll know!”
“It’s gonna rain!”
“It’s not gonna rain.”
“We shouldn’t leave Flopper!”
Now they looked, together, at the baby bull calf in one of the stalls. It stared blindly in the direction of their voices, tried to rise, but was too frail to do it.
“Don’t be a dope. We leave him all the time.”
Mandy sighed.
Tess, who recognized the sound of surrender when she heard it, smiled magnanimously at her sister.
“You can throw the first roll,” she offered.
In a truck stop in Emporia, Mel Bro
wn slopped up his supper gravy with the last third of a cloverleaf roll. He had a table by a window. As he ate, he stared with pleasure at his bike outside. If he moved his head just so, the rays from the setting sun flashed off the handle bars. He thought about how the leather seat and grips would feel soft and warm and supple, the way a woman in leather felt, when he got back on. At the thought he got a warm feeling in his crotch, too, and he smiled.
God, he loved living like this.
When he was hungry, he ate. When he was tired, he slept. When he was horny, he found a woman. When he was thirsty, he stopped at a bar.
Right now Mel felt like not paying the entire $5.46 for this lousy chicken-fried steak dinner and coffee. He pulled four dollar bills out of his wallet and a couple of quarters out of his right front pocket and set it all out on the table, with the money sticking out from under the check.
Mel got up and walked past the waitress.
“It’s on the table,” he told her.
“No cherry pie?” she asked him.
It sounded like a proposition, so he grinned as he said, “Nah.” If you weren’t so ugly, he thought, I just might stay for dessert.
“Come again,” she said.
You wish, he thought.
If they called him back, he’d say he couldn’t read her handwriting. Her fault. No wonder she didn’t get a tip. Smiling, he lifted a toothpick off the cashier’s counter and used it to salute the man behind the cash register.
“Thanks,” the man said.
“You bet.”
Outside, Mel stood in the parking lot and stretched, shoving his arms high in the air, letting anybody who was watching get a good look at him. Nothin’ to hide. Eat your heart out, baby. Then he strolled over to his bike and kicked the stand up with his heel. He poked around his mouth with the toothpick, spat out a sliver of meat, then flipped the toothpick onto the ground. He climbed back on his bike, letting out a breath of satisfaction when his butt hit the warm leather seat.
Mel accelerated slowly, savoring the surge of power building between his legs.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 32