Deadly Anniversaries

by Marcia Muller

  He tried to keep up with the courses when they began to arrive: stuffed calamari (a little rubbery); a psychedelic scrambled egg concoction served with the ubiquitous black water on the side in small earthenware jugs (just like his tap water, only a little more bitter); a wild mushroom risotto (rice overcooked and mushy). There was no beef, nor even a shred of pork, lamb or chicken; the only real meat dish was sweetbreads, which Cheryl didn’t like. She did, however, approve of the meal as a whole and asked the waiter to compliment the chef, then insisted that Gerald leave a larger than usual tip, even though, he noticed, the twelve and a half percent “service charge” had already been added.

  When they went back to their hotel room, after a couple of substantial cognacs out on the balcony, Gerald hoped it might be his lucky night. Cheryl had been smiling and flirtatious all evening, but when they got to the room, she said she was very tired and wanted to go straight to sleep. Gerald realized that he had probably drunk too much, anyway, so he gave her a good-night kiss and sat up watching some rubbish on TV after raiding the minibar for another cognac. Since they had a suite—it was their celebratory anniversary trip, after all—he didn’t have to worry about disturbing Cheryl. After a while, the cognac had its effect, and Gerald found himself drifting to sleep on the couch.

  * * *

  Gerald didn’t know what time it was when he woke up, but the television was still on, and it was dark outside. His watch face was blurred, but he thought it said a quarter to five. He wasn’t feeling at all well. It wasn’t just a hangover, he was certain. The terrible burning sensation in his chest and stomach, like indigestion only ten times worse, had awoken him. He even thought for a moment that he might be having a heart attack. Didn’t they start with something like heartburn? Or maybe it was an ulcer. He hadn’t been careful enough with his diet.

  He tried to get up off the couch but doubled up in pain and fell on his knees to the floor. It was getting quickly worse. He needed to get to the telephone. No. Wake Cheryl. She was a heavy sleeper, especially after a few drinks, but he would have to rouse her somehow. She would take care of him and call the ambulance.

  He tried to shout out, but the sound wouldn’t come. With almost superhuman effort, he got to his feet and pushed over the little table beside him. The carpet was thick, though, and the table didn’t make much noise when it fell. He suddenly needed to be sick and staggered to the toilet, where he bent over the bowl and retched. No sooner had he finished with that, than he felt his bowels explode and maneuvered himself onto the toilet just in time. After he had emptied himself, he made his way shakily back to the couch just in time to see Cheryl coming out of the bedroom rubbing her eyes as she felt for the light switch.

  “Gerry! Darling!” she said, dashing toward him and helping him back to the couch. “What is it?”

  Gerald shook his head. It made him feel dizzy. “Don’t know,” he said. “Feel sick. Aaarrrgghh!” And he retched again, this time on the carpet.

  Cheryl stepped back. “My God,” she said. “It’s all bloody.”

  Gerald was sweating and his breath was coming in short gasps. He could barely get the words out, but thought he said, “Thirsty. Water. Please.”

  Cheryl disappeared for a moment and came back with a glass of water.

  “Please call someone,” Gerald gasped. “Doctor.” He drank the water, but it didn’t do much good. His stomach lurched, and he retched again. He felt like he imagined the John Hurt character in Alien must have felt before the creature burst out of him. Was something trying to burst out of him? He clutched his stomach and moaned, feeling dizzy and faint.

  When he looked up again, Cheryl was standing over him. The expression on her face puzzled him. She didn’t look worried or afraid. If anything, she seemed curious.

  “Cheryl,” he said, struggling to get the words out. “Please...doctor. Ambulance.”

  Cheryl took his hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes. He couldn’t understand what she was saying now, what she meant. He tried to get up, but a terrible pain shot through him. He felt paralyzed. “Cheryl,” he whispered. “Can’t move. Too weak. Please help me. Dying.”

  Cheryl kept hold of his hand and lowered her head so he couldn’t see her face.

  “Please! Hurry!”

  But Cheryl kept on kneeling there, head bowed, and Gerald lapsed into unconsciousness, felt her recede further and further away from him until she was nothing but a tiny image at the wrong end of a telescope.

  * * *

  The next few weeks were a terrible ordeal for Cheryl. First came the doctors, desperately trying to save Gerald and discover what it was that had afflicted him. She told them about their meal, the drinks they had consumed. Could it be a heart attack? No, they said. It was something else, something that attacked his organs and caused them to fail one by one. They did tests and took samples, but it was all too late. Gerald died, without regaining consciousness, of cardiac arrest caused by multiple organ failures at eight nineteen the following morning, just over twenty-four hours since the ambulance had arrived at the hotel. The doctors were no wiser then than they had been when he was admitted.

  After the doctors came the police, of course, and she told them the same story. She and Gerald had been celebrating their wedding anniversary, and she had gone to bed early, having had a bit too much champagne, leaving her husband on the sofa watching TV. When she had awoken in the morning, he still hadn’t come to bed, and she had found him lying on the sofa, comatose. At first she had thought he was dead, but discovered that he was still breathing, though he didn’t seem able to tell her what was wrong with him. She had immediately phoned reception and asked them to send an ambulance, that it was an emergency. The rest was... Well, something of a blur.

  For a short while, she believed that they suspected her of murdering Gerald, though it was never spoken out loud. They just kept coming back, asking more and more questions, often the same ones, over and over. How would she describe her marriage? Were there any problems between her and her late husband? What time did she wake up and find him? The facts worked in her favor. It appeared she had acted quickly, and the ambulance had arrived in fifteen minutes. Also, though she was adequately provided for in Gerald’s will, and she inherited the mortgage-free detached house they had lived in, it was hardly a vast fortune, and it spoke greatly in her favor that Gerald had never bothered to take out a life insurance policy. The police, therefore, lacking any other evidence to the contrary, soon concluded that she lacked a financial motive for wanting him dead. And what other could there be? These days, if you wanted rid of a husband, whatever the reason, you simply divorced him; you didn’t need to resort to murder.

  And then came the stories of several others claiming they were sick after eating at Mystique that same night. That also helped convince the police that there was no foul play. One elderly woman died in much the same way as Gerald had, and two others were seriously ill, though expected to recover. Naturally, the restaurant had been closed and inquiries were underway. Of course, the police returned with more questions. Why hadn’t she been sick, too, if they both had the same tasting menu? She had felt a little ill, she told them, but only to a very minor extent. As it happened, she wasn’t particularly fond of mushrooms and, as she didn’t know that they were on the menu, she hadn’t been able to avoid them. So she had left most of them. She was pretty full by then, anyway.

  Cheryl took the train home a few days after Gerald’s death. Her mother came down from Durham to stay with her and comfort her for a while, and the neighbors all rallied around and helped her through the funeral and its aftermath.

  But there was no postponing that dreadful moment when she was finally alone in the large house.

  Except that it wasn’t dreadful; it was as if a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The burden of having to play the grieving wi
dow. That role would have to continue in public for some time, of course, but in private she could unbutton, as one might say, put her feet up, and dream and plan for the future. For there was most definitely a glittering future ahead of her.

  * * *

  Hot on the heels of the doctors, the police, and the undertakers, came the lawyers. As it turned out, they said, the restaurant was owned by a wealthy international chain, and the question of compensation had arisen. A preliminary investigation had concluded that the item responsible for the Gerald’s death was amanita phalloides, a deadly fungus which could grow beside, and easily be mistaken for, the more edible variety of mushroom. Despite the rigorous checks and balances to which all the restaurant’s ingredients were usually subject, these had somehow slipped in among a supply of nonpoisonous field mushrooms, bringing about the possibility of a tidy sum in compensation for those affected. Most of the people who had eaten the mushroom risotto that night had swallowed such small amounts that they had been only mildly sick, but Gerald and the other fatality were older than the rest, and therefore more susceptible. Gerald also drank too much, which rendered his liver already fair game for the first predator that approached it—in this case, a poison known as phalloidin, which targeted the kidneys, liver, and cardiac muscles, ultimately causing death.

  * * *

  The money finally came through several months after Gerald’s death, by which time Cheryl had adapted to her new single life. Though the amount wasn’t quite as much as she had hoped for, it was enough to raise her standard of living a notch or two and to ensure that she wouldn’t have to go back to work. She had served as a bank teller at the local branch, which was where she had met Gerald, the manager. Though the #MeToo movement was unknown at the time, it was still frowned upon for senior management to form liaisons with the clerical staff, but Cheryl had as little regard for that idea as Gerald did. No man was ever going to force her or persuade her to do something she didn’t want to do just because he happened to be her boss, but if she wanted to marry him, why the hell shouldn’t she?

  Of course, Gerald wanted her to stay at home in the hope of children, but she saw to it that nothing like that was going to happen, especially as he would be in his seventies by the time any progeny of theirs entered his or her teens. Cheryl was damned if she was going to end up either changing nappies or playing single mum to a sulky teen. And so life had gone on without any particular highs or lows.

  Until Marco, that was.

  Cheryl would be the first to admit that it had started as a purely physical affair. Gerald had liked the bottle rather too much, and his performance in bed, if it occurred at all, often wasn’t up to snuff. With Marco it was sex, sex, and even more sex. Cheryl was thirty-nine at the time they met, and Marco was twenty-four, a waiter at Mystique. The poisoning had all been his idea. He knew the owners of the restaurant had millions. He also knew his poisons—he had had grown up in the countryside and had started, though he hadn’t finished, a university course in pharmacology—so he even knew how the deed could be done. Cheryl had taken a bit of persuading. After all, she didn’t dislike Gerald. Life with him might be dull, but it was comfortable enough. Even so, lust and passion had won out over reason and common sense in the end, as they so often did, and she had become as excited by the idea as Marco was.

  Forever cautious, Cheryl and Marco had decided it was safest to have no contact whatsoever for a year after Gerald’s death—no letters, texts, emails, or phone calls—after which time they would meet at a remote Cornish bay and plan their future. So until then, she was on her own.

  After a suitable period of mourning, Cheryl had taken stock of herself and concluded that she was an attractive woman, just turned forty, with the sort of gamine looks and svelte but curvaceous figure that attracted men. One or two of Gerald’s old pals made passes at her, which she found easy to resist. Her female friends told her she could get out more. After all, why should she simply sit at home and watch television while she waited for the time to pass? There was excitement out there, a life to be enjoyed, to be savored. So she did get out.

  The first time she went alone to a busy bar accompanied only by her newfound freedom, she went home with a football player—only championship league, not premier, admittedly—who proceeded to demonstrate that kicking a ball around a large field for ninety minutes wasn’t the only skill he used his stamina for. After that, it became a regular thing—not with the footballer, whose name she couldn’t even remember—but with other fit-looking young prey she came across in bars and shops and cafés.

  Time passed. She had some work done on the house, putting in an exercise room with all the usual accoutrements, including a personal trainer, and having her bedroom redecorated more to her taste, including a mirror on the ceiling, and an en suite bathroom installed. She also developed a taste for cocaine. It wasn’t hard to spend money, she soon found, after paying out a small fortune for a luxury stateroom on a top-of-the-line South Pacific cruise that winter.

  The cruise provided no interesting distractions except the gorgeous weather and some delightful excursions to exotic locations on shore. Most of her fellow passengers were well into their seventies, which meant more groping on the dance floor, and when she was flying back home, she decided to postpone any further cruising activity until she reached that age herself. She would see who tried to grope her then.

  And so life went on in a delightful hedonistic whirl of money, booze, coke, and sex.

  But there remained one nagging problem, and every day it was getting closer, beginning to throb like an aching tooth. What was she going to tell Marco when it came time for their meeting?

  * * *

  As Marco settled into the train’s soothing rhythm, he thought of the ups and downs of the past year. What a year it had been.

  Needless to say, when the scandal of the tainted mushrooms broke, the entire staff of Mystique had been fired and the restaurant closed, and though no one had been singled out for blame—it was regarded as a failure of the system as a whole—the kitchen staff had certainly come under suspicion. Nobody suspected Marco, a waiter, though it was he who had introduced the amanita phalloides into the store of perfectly edible mushrooms, and he who had added an extra dash to Gerald’s dish before serving it. Everything had been meticulously planned. Marco had already managed to ingratiate himself with the kitchen staff, just as he had in his previous jobs, so access during the hours when the restaurant was closed was not difficult. Nor was it hard for him to get in there unseen when no one else was around. He also knew that the sous-chef drank too much and tended to be sloppy, which meant he was unlikely to check the spore print and gills of the mushrooms he prepared. And he knew that mushroom risotto was on the tasting menu that night.

  When he thought about it afterward, he was not only amazed at the audacity and sangfroid with which he had carried out the murder, he was also appalled—appalled that he had let himself be so carried on a tide of lust to the madness of murder. For that was what it had been. And innocents had died. He had their blood on his hands. Though he had instigated the poisoning, and persuaded Cheryl of its financial benefits, he hadn’t expected such a sudden attack of conscience.

  There was a long agonizing period when he had yearned for the release and relief of confession. On a number of occasions he had even found himself loitering outside a police station—on one occasion, during a particularly tense period of terrorist activity, being told to move on. He knew the facts, the method, things they would be able to tell that no one but the true killer could know, and that would convince them. But he had never got farther than the front steps.

  And then he had met Alice.

  * * *

  When Marco had got over the guilt and the urge to confess, he felt that he had finally come to his senses, emerged from the vile spell of Cheryl’s domination and begun to see things as they really were. And Alice had a lot to do with that transformation. What was it about
Cheryl that had so drawn him in and corrupted him? Girls his own age had often seemed silly, brash, crude, and shallow to him, but he had thought Cheryl had class. She was the sexy, sophisticated older woman: elegant, sensual. She had style. She wore expensive silk underwear and subtle perfumes. Their first meeting had been an across-a-crowded-room moment, and Marco had been emboldened by the power of his attraction to her. She hadn’t rejected his advances or reacted as if she was doing him a favor, like the most attractive girls his own age usually did. She was a real woman, and when they were together they fulfilled one another in every way. Or so he had felt at the time. Exotic as Cheryl had seemed at the start of their relationship, when he thought of her now, from a distance, he realized how she had used him. What a witch, an enchantress, she really was! And how much older than him. She was forty, for crying out loud. She’d be well into her fifties before he reached that age, and by the time he was fifty, he’d probably be pushing her around in a wheelchair.

  He had started working again out of financial necessity, lying about his references, saying he had been unemployed for the past year and a half. And that was how Alice had come into his life—at a gourmet burger café in Lowestoft. She was sitting alone at a table, long hair tied back, little makeup, the sleeves of her black sweater pulled down over her hands the way some young girls wore them. Looking back, Marco realized there could hardly be anyone more different from Cheryl. Alice was his own age—a month younger, as it turned out—and she was on her lunch break from the bookshop across the road. They started chatting casually. Alice was rather shy, and Marco had reverted to his old awkwardness around girls. But there was definitely a spark, and as she came in two or three days a week, they were able to strike up some sort of relationship before Marco dared to invite her out for a drink after work. Alice accepted, and before long they were inseparable. This was true love, Marco felt. Not the head-whirling, kaleidoscopic illusion of love with Cheryl, which had led him to murder. No, that part of him was gone now. Alice was the genuine article. She had brought freshness and clarity to his life, and they were going to get married, have children, and live a normal life, with his past far behind him. The only problem was that he was a murderer. Alice was an innocent, and he couldn’t risk her finding out what he had done.