Neither Peter Chatworth (Shipping), Jeffrey Chatworth (Advertising), Oliver Chatworth (Product Control), Agatha Chatworth (Accounting), nor Henry Chatworth (Human Resources) glared back. Instead, each adopted a rather sorrowful expression. Then they turned their collective attention to the chairperson of the board, Sue Ellen Chatworth Hummer.
Sue Ellen looked at her red-faced husband. “We’ve told you before, honey,” she said in her sweetest voice, “Daddy didn’t want it that way. This is the Chatworth family business.”
“I’m family now, aren’t I?”
His response was a mildly surprised widening of six pairs of disgustingly similar Chatworth eyes.
“You’re my husband now, honey, but you’re a Hummer, not a Chatworth,” Sue Ellen said, purring. “Besides, you should be happy. After all, you’re president of the company.”
Ellsworth Hummer’s blood percolated. She made it sound like playing house—you be the mommy and I’ll be the daddy. Only Sue Ellen’s game was, You play the president and I’ll be the chairperson for real. His title was meaningless as long as Sue Ellen held the stock in her name only.
He’d received the position as an extra wedding gift from his bride, six months earlier, but all it had yielded so far was a lot of free chewing gum. And now, for the sixth time in as many months, the board had voted him down, denied him any real control, any stock, any say.
Ellsworth stood up. The chair he’d been on toppled backwards and landed with a soft thunk on the thick Persian carpet. “I’m sick of Daddy and his rules!” he shouted. “Sick of Chatworths, one and all! Sick of chewing gum!”
“You can’t truly mean that.” Cousin Peter sounded horrified.
“I do!” Ellsworth shouted.
“But honey,” Sue Ellen said, “chewing gum has kept the Chatworths alive. Chewing gum is our life! How can you possibly be sick of it?”
“What’s more,” Ellsworth said, “I am not interested in anything else you have to say, or in any of the business on the agenda today or in the future.” And he left, slamming the heavy door behind him, cursing the fate that had brought him so far, and yet not far enough.
Once home, he settled into the lushly paneled room Sue Ellen had redecorated for him. She called it his “study” although she’d been unable to tell him what important documents he was supposed to study in there, so he used the room to study the effects of alcohol on the human nervous system. It was the most hospitable room in the rambling, semidecrepit mansion Sue Ellen had inherited. The place had gone to seed after Mrs. Chatworth’s death and Sue Ellen had been too busy being his bride—she said—to begin renovations yet. So Ellsworth spent a great deal of time in his study. Now he poured himself a brandy and considered his options. Sue Ellen owned the house. Sue Ellen owned the company. And Sue Ellen owned him. That was not at all the way things were supposed to have worked out.
Divorce was not an option. He had signed a prenuptial agreement because, long ago, Sue Ellen’s daddy had reminded her that she’d better not forget that husbands were outsiders, not family. All a split would get him was a one-way ticket back to his mother’s shack, or, God help us all, to a nine-to-five job.
There was only one logical solution. Aside from what she made as chairperson of the present-day company, Sue Ellen was rich in trust funds and the fruits of earlier chewing gum sales, and he was Sue Ellen’s legal heir. Ergo, Sue Ellen had to die. He sighed, not with distaste for the idea itself, but for the work and effort involved in it. This was not how he’d envisioned the happily-ever-after part. He sighed again, and squared his shoulders. He was equal to the task and would do whatever was necessary to achieve his destiny.
All he’d been gifted with at birth was a well-designed set of features and a great deal of faith in himself. His mother, poor in every other way, was rich in hope. Her favorite phrase had always been, “You’ll go far, Ellsworth.”
And as soon as it was possible, he had.
He’d kept on going, farther and farther, until he finally found the perfect ladder on which to climb to success: Sue Ellen Chatworth, a plain and docile young woman who had spent her life trying to atone for having been born female.
The elder Chatworths, including the much revered Daddy himself, had never paid attention to Sue Ellen. She was regarded as a bit of an error, a botched first try at producing a son. All their attention was focused on the point in the future when they would be blessed with their rightful heir.
After two heirless decades, during which time the daughter of the house attempted invisibility and was by and large raised by the servants, it finally dawned on the Chatworths that Sue Ellen and chewing gum were to be their only products.
Upon realizing this, Mrs. Chatworth quietly died of shame. Given that Mr. Chatworth’s entire existence was devoted to chewing gum, he was naturally made of more resilient material than his spouse had been. He came home from his wife’s funeral and looked toward the horizons. As soon, he made it clear, as a decent period of mourning was over, he’d start afresh with a new brood mare.
But before he found a woman with the look of unborn sons in her, Ellsworth Hummer appeared and became the first human being to take Sue Ellen seriously. She was understandably dazzled. Her father took a dimmer view of the courtship.
He was not for a moment enchanted when Ellsworth appeared at his office door and formally asked for Sue Ellen’s hand. “Blackguard!” he shouted. “Fortune hunter!”
Ellsworth merely grinned. “Now, now,” he said. “You won’t be losing a daughter. You’ll be gaining a son at long last.”
Mr. Chatworth was unused to either irony or defiance in even the most minute dosages. His veins expanded dangerously. His face became mauve, a color Ellsworth had never particularly cared for. Short of breath, he waved his fist at the young man on the other side of his desk. “You’ll get nothing! I’ll change my will!” he shouted. “If you and that daughter of mine, that—”
“Sue Ellen,” Ellsworth prompted. “Sue Ellen’s her name, Pop.”
Mr. Chatworth was now the color of a fully mature eggplant. “I’ll see that you don’t get what you want if it’s the last thing I—”
“We were thinking of having the wedding in about two weeks,” Ellsworth said mildly. “I’d like you to give your daughter away, of course.”
“You’ll marry over my dead body!” Mr. Chatworth shouted. And then he toppled, facedown, onto his desk and ceased this life thereby, as ever, proving himself correct and having the last word on the subject.
Grateful that the gods and high blood pressure had conspired to pave his way, Ellsworth sailed into marriage and a chewing gum empire. But a mere six months later, he recognized that his triumph was hollow. A sham. All he’d truly gotten was married. Very. And Sue Ellen thought that meant something, wanted to be close to him, seemed unable to comprehend that she was merely a means to an end, to the stock, to the money.
At each of the six monthly board meetings, Ellsworth wheedled, cajoled, charmed, argued and pontificated about the necessity of his being given some real control. During six months’ worth of non-board meeting days, Ellsworth suggested, hinted, insinuated and said outright how much more of a man he’d feel if Sue Ellen would only treat him as an equal.
“Oh, honey,” Sue Ellen would giggle from her pillow, “you’re more than enough of a man for me already!”
Today’s board meeting had been his last attempt. Now there was no remedy left except Sue Ellen’s death.
But how? Every eye in the impossibly tight-knit family would be on him. He needed a rock-solid alibi. No amateurish hacking or burying in the cellar would work. The cousins detested him as actively as he disliked them. He had to remain above suspicion.
“Hi, Ellsworth,” Sue Ellen said brightly, interrupting his dark and private thoughts. “You working in here or something?”
“What work would I be doing?” he said. “What real work do I have to do?”
“Still sulking? Oh, my, honey, you don’t want to be so glum abo
ut everything. After all, we’ve got each other and our health.”
He was not cheered by being reminded of those truisms. “You and your cousins take care of all your business?” he asked tartly.
She nodded.
“Anything special?”
She lit a cigarette. “Oh, the company picnic plans and…you know, this and that. Ellsworth, honey, you yourself said you weren’t and never would be interested in the kind of stuff that concerns the board, and I respect that.” She inhaled deeply.
“Those cigarettes will kill you,” he muttered. But too slowly, he added to himself. Much too slowly.
“Aren’t you the most considerate groom a girl could have?” she chirruped. “I know I have to stop, but maybe in a bit. Not right now. I’m a little too tense to think about it.”
“Your family would make anybody tense,” he said. “I hate them.”
“Yes. I know that. But I like them.” She had been leaning on the edge of his desk, but now she stood straight, then bent to stub out her cigarette in his otherwise unused ashtray. “I’m going to visit Cousin Tina this afternoon,” she said. “She’s been feeling poorly.”
There was nothing newsworthy about either Tina’s health or the weekly visit. Sue Ellen saw her crotchety cousin every Saturday afternoon. “Goodbye, Sue Ellen,” he said.
“See you,” she answered with a wave.
Studying the effects of more brandy, Ellsworth listened as his wife’s car pulled out, beginning its way over the mountain pass to her cousin’s. And he smiled, because Sue Ellen had just helped him decide the method of her death. She would meet her end in a tragic crash going down that mountain. A little tinkering with the brakes and the car would be too far gone after plummeting over the side for anyone to bother investigating.
Ellsworth had one week left before he became a widower. For seven days, he was almost polite to his wife, providing her with fond final memories of him. He kissed her goodbye on the morning of the last day. “Goodbye, Sue Ellen,” he said, and he repeated the words to himself several times during the day as he lay dreaming of how he’d spend the Chatworth fortune. He smiled as he dozed, waiting for the police to arrive and announce the accident.
“Ellsworth!” The voice was agitated, feminine and definitely Sue Ellen’s. He opened one eye and saw her. The dull, drab, infinitely boring, and incredibly rich Sue Ellen was intact. “You’ll never believe what happened to me!”
“Try me,” he said slowly.
“I was going over the pass and suddenly I didn’t have any brakes! I just screamed and panicked and knew that I was going to die!”
Ellsworth sat up. So far, it was exactly as he’d planned it. Except for this part, with her standing here, very much alive. “What did you do, Sue Ellen?” For once, he was honestly interested in what she had to say.
“Don’t laugh, but I lost my head and screamed for my daddy. ‘Daddy! Daddy! Help me!’ like a real idiot, I guess, or something. But then, like magic, suddenly I could hear him, clear as day, a voice from beyond shouting and impatient with me the way he always was. It was mystical almost, Ellsworth, like he was right there with me screaming, ‘Don’t be such an all-around idiot, girl, and don’t bother me! Get a grip and leave me out of this!’ It almost makes you believe, doesn’t it?” She looked bedazzled.
“Well, what good is it to be told to get a grip?” Ellsworth asked.
“What good? Well, I always did what my Daddy said. So I got a grip—on the steering wheel. I stopped waving my arms and being crazy, that’s what. And to tell you the truth, I think that’s what my…my heavenly vision meant, because what else could I have gripped? That message from my dear daddy saved me, because I hung on, racing around those curves until finally I was on flat ground again, and then I just ran the car into Cousin Tina’s barn to stop it.” She finally drew a breath.
Ellsworth tilted his head back and glowered upward. He felt strongly that supernatural intervention—even of the bad-tempered kind—violated all the rules.
Sue Ellen’s bright smile flashed and then faded almost immediately. “I pretty much wrecked it, though,” she said.
“The barn?”
“That, too. I meant the car. I think they’re both totaled. I have Cousin Tina’s car right now.”
Ellsworth mentally deducted the cost of a car and Tina’s new barn from the inheritance he’d receive as soon as he came up with a second, more reliable plan for her disposal. He was appalled by how few really good ways there were to safely murder anyone. He studied mystery magazines and books about criminals and was depressed and discouraged by the fact that the murderer was too often apprehended. It seemed to him that the most successful homicides were those semi-random drive-by shootings that seemed to happen in great uninvestigated clusters, but they were so urban, and Ellsworth and Sue Ellen lived nestled in rural rolling hills, not a street corner within shooting distance. Gang warfare would be too much of a stretch in the sticks.
The problem was, once the crime grew more deliberate and focused, there were horrifyingly accurate ways of identifying the culprit, right down to matching his DNA from the merest bit of him. It was Ellsworth’s opinion that forensic science had gone entirely too far.
However, accidents in the home seemed more likely to pass muster. People clucked their tongues and shook their heads and moved on without undue attention or speculation. So one Monday morning, before he left for another day of sitting and staring at his office walls, Ellsworth carefully greased the bottom of the shower with Sue Ellen’s night cream. Then he dropped the jar and left. Sue Ellen was fond of starting her day a bit later than he began his. She was “not a morning person” in her own clichéd words, and she required a steamy hot shower to “get the old motor turning over.” This time, he hoped to get more than the old motor and the clichés twirling. He was confident she’d slip and either be scalded to death, die of head injuries, or cover the drain in her fall and drown. That sort of thing happened all the time and didn’t even make headlines.
This plan had some latitude, and he liked it. He was downstairs, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper, when the old pipes of the house signaled that Sue Ellen’s shower was going full blast.
“Yes!” he said, raising his buttered toast like a flag. “Yes!” Soon he would call the police and explain how he’d found his wife’s body in the shower, too late, alas, to save her.
And then he heard the scream. Yes, yes! He waited for the thud or the gurgle.
Instead, he heard a torrent of words.
Words were wrong. Words did not compute. Whole long strings of words were not what a slipping, sliding, fatally wounded woman would utter.
The words came closer, toward the top of the stairs. Two voices. Ellsworth tensed.
“I don’t care if you’re new!” Sue Ellen was behaving in a shrill and unladylike manner, to put it mildly. Her daddy would not have approved. “Somebody must have told you my routine. I need my morning shower!”
“But, miss, I wanted to make it nice. It was all greasy in there.”
“That’s ridiculous! It was cleaned yesterday afternoon. That’s when it’s always done. Well after I’m through.”
“Messy. Greasy. But it’s nice now.” And then the voices softened. Sue Ellen had a temper when crossed, but it was morning and she wasn’t “up to speed” as she would undoubtedly say, so she made peace and retreated to her unslick, horribly safe shower.
Ellsworth refused to be discouraged. He decided to poison her instead, and he chose the family’s Memorial Day gathering as the occasion. With forty relatives on his patio, there would be safety in numbers.
Cousin Lotta, according to Sue Ellen, was bringing her famous potato salad, just as she had every other year. Ellsworth had never tasted it, but he decided its recipe could nonetheless be slightly altered. He’d offer to help bring out the covered dishes. It wouldn’t be difficult to make additions in the kitchen.
The plan was brilliant. Many Chatworths would be sickened, but Sue Ell
en, her portion hand-delivered by him and specially spiced, would be sickened unto death. And if anyone came under suspicion, it would be Lotta.
He sang all through the morning of the party. In his pocket were small vials of dangerous this and lethal that to be sprinkled over the potatoes, and a special bonus vial for his best beloved.
“I’ll bring out the food,” he told his wife later in the day.
“Oh, thank you.” She spoke listlessly and looked pastier than ever. Her makeup barely clung to her skin. Unwholesome, he thought. Definitely unappetizing. “I’m feeling a bit woozy. I’d be glad to just sit a while longer. Thank you.”
It was amazing how easy it was to doctor the salad with no one noticing. Except that Sue Ellen didn’t want to eat. “I’m not really feeling very well,” she murmured.
Ah, but unfortunately, left to her own devices, she eventually would feel better, he thought. Or was she suspicious? He felt a moment’s panic, then relaxed. She was merely being her usual uncooperative, dim self. “It’s hunger,” he insisted. “You know how you get when you forget to eat for too long. You need something in your stomach. Sit right there—I’ll prepare a plate for you.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think…I really do feel quite odd.”
“You’re overexcited by this wonderful party, these wonderful people,” he said. “Relax and let me take care of you.”
He watched happily as she ate Gert’s ribs and Mildred’s pickled beans and Lotta’s quietly augmented potato salad. He had known that if pressed, Sue Ellen wouldn’t dare hurt her cousins’ feelings by refusing to eat their offerings. He could see the headlines in tomorrow’s papers. “Tragedy Stalks Chatworth Barbecue: Chewing Gum Heiress Bites Potato Salad and the Dust.”
Maybe he’d give the reporters Sue Ellen’s wedding portrait. She looked almost good in it. “Good-bye, Sue Ellen,” he whispered. Suddenly, she stood up, horror and pain distorting her features, and she ran, clutching her mouth, toward the woodsy spot behind the house. He followed until he heard the sounds of her being violently ill. And then, slump-shouldered, he walked back to the party.
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