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

by Elizabeth George

  “I don’t care how much money it is,” Agnes replied stubbornly. “It isn’t worth it. We’ve got to let her out, Oscar. She’s been trapped in there for hundreds of years.”

  “Trapped?” Oscar demanded. “I’ll tell you about trapped. Trapped is having to go to work every day for thirty years, rain or shine, hoping some goddamned dog doesn’t take a chunk out of your leg. Trapped is hoping like hell you won’t slip and fall on someone’s icy porch and break your damned neck. Trapped is always working and scrimping and hoping to put enough money together so that someday we won’t have to worry about outliving our money. And now, just when it’s almost within my grasp, you—”

  He broke off in midsentence. They were sitting across from each other in the tiny kitchen nook. Agnes met and held Oscar’s eyes, her gaze serene and unwavering. He could see that nothing he said was having the slightest effect.

  Suddenly it was all too much. How could Agnes betray him like that? Oscar lunged to his feet, his face contorted with outraged fury. “So help me, Aggie…”

  He raised his hand as if to strike her. For one fearful moment, Agnes waited for the blow to fall. It didn’t. Instead Oscar’s eyes bulged. The unfinished threat died in his throat. The only sound that escaped his distorted lips was a strangled sob.

  Slowly, like a giant old-growth tree falling victim to a logger’s saw, Oscar Barkley began to tip over. Stiff and still, like a cigar store Indian, he tottered toward the wall and then bounced against the cupboard. Only then did the sudden terrible rigidity desert his body. His bones seemed to turn to jelly. Disjointed and limp, he slid down the face of the cupboard like a lifeless Raggedy Andy doll.

  Only when he landed on the floor was there any sound at all, and that was nothing but a muted thump—like someone dropping a waist-high bag of flour.

  Agnes watched him fall and did nothing. Later, when the investigators asked her about the ten-minute interval between the time Oscar’s broken watch stopped and the time the 911 call came in to the emergency communications center, she was unable to

  J. A. JANCE

  explain them. Not that ten minutes one way or another would have made that much difference. Oscar Barkley’s one and only coronary episode was instantly fatal.

  Oh, he had been warned to cut down on fat, to lower his cholesterol, but Oscar had never been one to take a doctor’s advice very seriously.

  The day after the memorial service, Gretchen Dixon popped her head in the door of the RV just as Agnes, clad in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a straw hat, was tying the strings on her tennis shoes.

  “How are you doing?” Gretchen asked.

  “I’m fine,” Agnes answered mechanically. “Really I am.”

  “You look like you’re going someplace.”

  Agnes nodded toward the metal box of ashes the mortician had given her. “I’m going out to scatter the ashes,” she said. “Oscar always said he wanted to be left along the banks of the San Pedro.”

  “Would you like me to go along?” Gretchen asked.

  “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

  “Is someone else going with you, then? The girls, maybe?”

  “They caught a plane back home early this morning.”

  “Don’t tell me that rascal Jimmy Rathbone is already making a move on you.”

  “I’m going by myself,” Agnes answered firmly. “I don’t want any company.”

  “Oh,” Gretchen said. “Sorry.”

  When Agnes Barkley drove the Honda away from the RV a few minutes later, it looked as though she was all alone in the car, but strangely enough, she didn’t feel alone. And although Oscar hadn’t told Agnes exactly where along the riverbank he had found the pot, it was easy for Agnes to find her way there—almost as though someone were guiding each and every footstep.

  As soon as she reached the crumbled wall of riverbank, Agnes Barkley fell to her knees. It was quiet there, with what was left of the river barely trickling along in its sandy bed some thirty

  paces behind her. The only sound was the faint drone of a Davis-Monthan Air Force Base jet flying far overhead. Part of Agnes heard the sound and recognized it for what it was—an airplane. Another part of her jumped like a startled hare when what she thought was a bee turned out to be something totally beyond her understanding and comprehension.

  When Agnes had arrived home with Oscar’s ashes, she had immediately placed the pot inside the metal container. Now, with fumbling fingers, she drew it out. For one long moment, she held it lovingly to her breast. Then, with tears coursing down her face, she smashed the pot to pieces. Smashed it to smithereens on the metal container that held Oscar Barkley’s barely cooled ashes.

  Now Agnes snatched up the container. Holding it in front of her, she let the contents cascade out as she spun around and around, imitating someone else who once had danced exactly the same way in this very place sometime long, long ago.

  At last, losing her balance, Agnes Barkley fell to the ground, gasping and out of breath. Minutes later she realized, as if for the first time, that Oscar was gone. Really gone. And there, amid his scattered ashes and the broken potsherds, she wept real tears. Not only because Oscar was dead but also because she had done nothing to help him. Because she had sat there helplessly and watched him die, as surely as that mysterious other woman had watched the surging water overwhelm her child.

  At last Agnes seemed to come to herself. When she stopped crying, she was surprised to find that she felt much better. Relieved somehow. Maybe it was just as well Oscar was dead, she thought. He would not have liked being married to both of them—to Agnes and to the ghost of that other woman, to the mother of that poor drowned child.

  This is the only way it could possibly work, Agnes said to herself. She picked up a tiny piece of black pottery, held it between her fingers, and let it catch the full blazing light of the warm afternoon sun.

  This was the only way all three of them could be free.

  The River Mouth

  LIA MATERA

  From the time of Wilkie Collins, a large number of crime fiction writers have been drawn from the ranks of lawyers, but the past twenty years have seen a veritable flood of attorneys hoping to escape the billable-hour rat race and emulate the success of John Grisham and Scott Turow. For a time, legal fiction, and indeed the practice of law itself, was largely a male province, but recent years have changed that. Lia Matera (b. 1952), who was born in Canada to an Italian-American family, received her law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, where she was the editor in chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. She was later a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School. The author of two separate series about lawyer sleuths, Matera is one of the best of the lawyers-turned-mystery-writers. Her first series, beginning with Where Lawyers Fear to Tread (1987), which draws on her background as a law review editor, introduces Willa Jansson, the daughter of fiercely left-wing parents. The family political background gives a political charge to the series that often results in widely divergent critical reaction. As Contemporary Authors (volume 110, 1999) points out in a discussion of Hidden Agenda (1987), “Though a reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that the novel ’is angry, and devoid of humor or emotions other than hate,’ a Booklist critic praised the novel as ’offbeat and very funny.’” The Smart Money (1988) began a shorter series about a sharper-edged, higher-profile advocate, Laura DiPalma.

  Matera has written relatively few short stories, and several of those few were originally envisioned as novels. All her stories to date are collected in Counsel for the Defense and Other Stones (2000). In introducing that collection, she identifies “The River Mouth,” an outdoor account of gathering menace, as among those stories that have “given [her] a welcome break from writing about lawyers.”

  To reach the mouth of the Klamath River, you head west off 101 just south of the Oregon border. You hike through an old Yurok meeting ground, an overgrown glade with signs asking you to respect native spirits and stay out of the c
ooking pits and the split-long amphitheater. The trail ends at a sand cliff. From there you can watch the Klamath rage into the sea, battering the tide. Waves break in every direction, foam blowing off like rising ghosts. Sea lions by the dozens bob in the swells, feeding on eels flushed out of the river. My boyfriend and I made our way down to the wet-clay beach. The sky was every shade of gray, and the Pacific looked like mercury. We were alone except for five Yurok in rubber boots and checkered flannel, fishing in the surf. We watched them flick stiff whips of sharpened wire mounted on pick handles. When the tips lashed out of the waves, they had eels impaled on them. With a rodeo windup, they flipped the speared fish over their shoulders into pockets they’d dug in the sand. We passed shallow pits seething with creatures that looked like short, mean-faced snakes. We continued for maybe a quarter mile beyond the river mouth. We climbed some small, sharp rocks to get to a tall, flat one midway between the shore and the cliff. From there we could see the fishermen but not have our conversation carry down to them. Our topic of the day (we go to the beach to hash things out) was if we wanted to get married. Because it was a big, intimidating topic, we’d driven almost four hundred miles to find the right beach. We’d had to spend the night in a tacky motel, but this was the perfect spot, no question.

  Patrick uncorked the champagne—we had two bottles; it was likely to be a long talk. I set out the canned salmon and crackers on paper plates on the old blue blanket. I kicked off my shoes so I could cross my legs. I watched Pat pour, wondering where we’d end up on the marriage thing.

  When he handed me the paper cup of bubbles, I tapped it against his. “To marriage or not.”

  “To I do or I don’t,” he agreed.

  The air smelled like cold beach, like wet sky and slick rocks and storms coming. At home, the beach stinks like fish and shored seaweed buzzing with little flies. If there are sunbathers on blankets, you can smell their beer and coconut oil.

  “So, Pat?” I looked him over, trying to imagine being married to him. He was a freckly, baby-faced Scot with strange hair and hardly any meat on him. Whereas I was a black-haired mutt who tended to blimp out in the winter and get it back under control in the summer. But the diets were getting harder; and I knew fat women couldn’t be choosers. I was thinking it was time to lock in. And worrying that was an unworthy motive. “Maybe we’re fine the way we are now.”

  Right away he frowned.

  “I just mean it’s okay with me the way it is.”

  “Because you were married to Mr. Perfect and how could I ever take his place?”

  “Hearty-har.” Mr. Perfect meaning my ex-husband had plenty of money and good clothes. Pat had neither right now. He’d just got laid off, and there were a thousand other software engineers answering every ad he did.

  “I guess he wasn’t an ’in-your-face child,’” Pat added.

  Aha. Here we had last night’s fight.

  “With Mr. Perfect you didn’t even have arguments. He knew when to stop.”

  Me and Pat fight on long drives. I say things. I don’t necessarily mean them. It was too soon to call the caterer, I guess.

  I held out my paper cup for more. “All I meant was he had more experience dealing with—”

  “Oh, it goes without saying!” He poured refills so fast they bubbled over. “I’m a mere infant! About as cleanly as a teenager and as advanced in my political analysis as a college freshman.”

  “What is this, a retrospective of old fights? Okay, so it takes some adjustment living with a person. I’ve said things in crabby moments. On the drive up—”

  “Crabby moments? You? No, you’re an artist.” You could have wrung the scorn out of the word and still had it drip sarcasm. “Reality’s just more complicated for you.”

  I felt my eyes narrow. “I hate that, Patrick.”

  “Oh, she’s calling me Patrick.”

  Usually I got formal when I got mad. “I’m not in the best mood when I write. If you could just learn to leave me alone then.” Like I said in the car.

  His pale brows pinched as he flaked salmon onto crackers. I made a show of shading my eyes and watching a Yurok woman walk toward us. When she got to the bottom of our rock, she called up, “Got a glass for me?”

  Usually we were antisocial, which is why we did our drinking at the beach instead of in bars. But the conversation wasn’t going the greatest. A diversion, a few minutes to chill—why not?

  “Sure,” I said.

  Pat hit me with the angry-bull look, face lowered, brows down, nostrils flared. As she clattered up the rocks, he muttered, “I thought we came here to be alone.”

  “Hi there,” she said, reaching the top. She was slim, maybe forty, with long brown hair and a semi-flat nose and darkish skin just light enough to show some freckles. She had a great smile but bad teeth. She wore a black hat almost like a cowboy’s but not as western. She sat on a wet part of the rock to spare our blanket whatever funk was on her jeans (as if we cared):

  “Picnic, huh? Great spot.”

  I answered, “Yeah,” because Pat was sitting in pissy silence.

  She drank some champagne. “Not many people know about this beach. You expecting other folks?”

  “No. We’re pretty far from home.”

  “This is off the beaten path, all right.” She glanced over her shoulder, waving at her friends.

  “We had to hike through Yurok land to get here,” I admitted. “Almost elven, and that wonderful little amphitheater.” I felt embarrassed, didn’t know how to assure her we hadn’t been disrespectful. I’d had to relieve myself behind a bush, but we didn’t do war cries or anything insensitive. “I hope it isn’t private property. I hope this beach isn’t private.”

  “Nah. That’d be a crime against nature, wouldn’t it?” She grinned. “There’s a trailer park up the other way. That is private property. But as long as you go out the way you came in, no problem.”

  “Thanks, that’s good to know. We heard about this beach on our last trip north, but we didn’t have a chance to check it out. We didn’t expect all the seals or anything.”

  “Best time of year; eels come upriver to spawn in the ocean. Swim twenty-five hundred miles, some of them,” she explained. “It’s a holy spot for the Yurok, the river mouth.” A break in the clouds angled light under her hat brim, showing leathery lines around her eyes. “This place is about mouths, really. In the river, the eel is the king mouth. He hides, he waits, he strikes fast. But time comes when he’s got to heed that urge. And he swims right into the jaws of the sea lion. Yup.” She motioned behind her. “Here and now, this is the eel’s judgment day.”

  Pat was giving me crabby little get-rid-of-her looks. I ignored him. Okay, we had a lot to talk about. But what are the odds of a real-McCoy Yurok explaining the significance of a beach?

  She lay on her side on the blanket, holding out her paper cup for a refill and popping some salmon into her mouth. “Salmon means renewal,” she said. “Carrying on the life cycle, all that. You should try the salmon jerky from the rancheria.”

  Pat hesitated before refilling her cup. I let him fill mine too.

  “King mouth of the river, that’s the eel,” she repeated. “Of course, the Eel River’s named after him. But it’s the Klamath that’s his castle. They’ll stay alive out of water longer than any other fish I know. You see them flash that ugly gray-green in the surf, and thwack, you get them on your whipstick and flip them onto the pile. You do that awhile, you know, and get maybe fifteen, and when you go back to put them in your bucket, maybe eight of the little monsters have managed to jump out of the pit and crawl along the sand. You see how far some of them got and you have to think they stayed alive a good half hour out of the water. Now how’s that possible?”

  I lay on my side too, sipping champagne, listening, watching the gorgeous spectacle behind her in the distance: seals bobbing and diving, the river crashing into the sea, waves colliding like hands clapping. Her Yurok buddies weren’t fishing anymore; they were talking
. One gestured toward our rock. I kind of hoped they’d join us. Except Pat would really get cranky then.

  Maybe I did go too far on the drive up. But I wished he’d let it go.

  “So it’s not much of a surprise, huh?” the woman continued. “That they’re king of the river. They’re mean and tough, they got teeth like nails. If they were bigger, man, sharks wouldn’t stand a chance, never mind seals.” She squinted at me, sipping. “Because the cussed things can hide right in the open. Their silt-bark color, they can sit right in front of a rock, forget behind it. They can look like part of the scenery. And you swim by feeling safe and cautious, whoever you are—maybe some fancy fish swum upriver—and munch! You’re eel food. But the river ends some-where, you know what I mean? Every river has its mouth. There’s always that bigger mouth out there waiting for you to wash in, no matter how sly and bad you are at home. You heed those urges and leave your territory, and you’re dinner.”

  Pat was tapping the bottom of my foot with his. Tapping, tapping urgently like I should do something.

  That’s when I made up my mind: Forget marriage. He was too young. Didn’t want to hear this Yurok woman talk and was tapping on me like, Make her go away, Mom. I had kids, two of them, and they were grown now and out of the house. And not much later, their dad went too (though I didn’t miss him and I did miss the kids, at least sometimes). And I didn’t need someone fifteen years younger than me always putting the responsibility on me. I paid most of the bills, got the food together (didn’t cook, but knew my delis), picked up around the house, told Pat what he should read, because engineers don’t know squat about literature or history; and every time someone needed getting rid of or something social had to be handled or even just a business letter had to be written, it was tap-tap-tap, oh, Maggie, could you please…?

  I reached behind me and shoved Pat’s foot away. If he wanted to be antisocial, he could think of a way to make the woman leave himself. We had plenty of time to talk, just the two of us. I didn’t want her to go yet.