Deadly Anniversaries

by Marcia Muller

  He realized that what he had done for Cheryl—all right, for the two of them—wasn’t really anything to do with money. That was entirely her perspective. No. He had done it because he had wanted Cheryl all to himself, for always. But now that he had Alice, he didn’t want Cheryl at all. In his memory, she had become coarse and crude, little more than a cheap whore, and nothing she did would surprise him. The thought of her repelled him—however, he had to go to Cornwall. He had to meet with her just this one more time and tell her he no longer wanted her or her money. She would be relieved about the latter, but as for the first, he wasn’t so certain. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or so they said.

  The announcement that St. Ives was their next stop came over the PA and the train started to slow down. The change in rhythm jolted Marco out of his memories. He reached up for his suitcase. Time to meet with his destiny.

  * * *

  Cheryl was waiting outside the station in her new green racing sports car. The cottage she had rented was on a hillside overlooking a secluded bay farther west. It was an idyllic location: perfect for watching the sunset and close enough to the sea to hear the waves breaking on the shore at night.

  As Cheryl had expected, things were a little awkward at first. The hug seemed perfunctory, the kiss a little hesitant. A year is a long time without any contact at all, she realized, and Cheryl was aware that they may have drifted apart to some extent. It was a beautiful day. She had planned a barbecue at the cottage, and perhaps after that they could take a sunset stroll on the cliff path above the beach. It was very wild and romantic. Poldark country. Marco would love it.

  He put his suitcase in the boot and got in beside her. She wore dark glasses against the glare of the sun and felt the warm wind ruffling her hair as she drove. They passed no other cars and saw only the occasional distant farm laborers working in the fields.

  Finally she pulled up outside the cottage, a rambling old structure with three large bathrooms, an open-plan kitchen complete with cookware, cutlery, and dinnerware, and a large garden out front, looking over the bay, complete with wicker chairs and low tables. Cheryl had been enjoying her breakfast coffee there, looking out over the sea, for the past couple of days. There was no Wi-Fi or mobile phone reception, but that wasn’t much of a drawback as far as Cheryl was concerned.

  She changed into shorts and halter top and busied herself with the barbecue in the garden while Marco freshened up. First, she wrapped a couple of potatoes in foil and put them on the grill, then tossed the shrimp in oil and spices and rubbed the steaks she had bought to go with them. Surf and turf. She threw the salad together as the potatoes cooked.

  Marco came out wearing rather tight garish shorts and a yellow T-shirt. He was carrying a bottle, which he handed to her, and something wrapped up in gift paper.

  “Presents,” he said.

  The first was a bottle of fine cognac from the duty-free shop, but the second, she saw when she had peeled off the wrapping, was an earthenware jar.

  “Black water,” said Marco, beaming. “I finally managed to find some.”

  Cheryl thought it a bit insensitive of him to present her with an obvious reminder of the night of her husband’s death on the day of their reunion, but she let it go. No sense making a fuss about it. “Thanks,” she said. “I haven’t seen any since...you know. We’ll have it with dinner.”

  Marco stretched out on a lounger while Cheryl barbecued.

  “Mmm,” he said. “This is the life. I could get used to it here.”

  Cheryl laughed, standing over the barbecue, keeping an eye on the steak and shrimps. “Come to the table,” she said finally. “Dinner’s ready.”

  Cheryl served the meal with all the requisite condiments, and put out the bowl of salad for them to help themselves. A couple of bluebottles and a pesky wasp started to show an interest. Cheryl waved them away.

  “We’ll save the cognac for later,” said Marco, opening the earthenware jar and pouring them both a glass of black water. They clinked glasses and toasted themselves. Cheryl took a sip. It was good, she remembered. Like ordinary water, only slightly bitter and more full-bodied. “So, tell me what you’ve been up to this past year,” she said as they settled down to eat.

  “Oh, this and that,” Marco replied between mouthfuls. “It was hard just after...you know. We all got fired.”

  “It was pretty hard for me, too,” said Cheryl. “I’d just lost my husband, remember?”

  Marco gave her a cockeyed look. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Cheryl shrugged. “I’m not saying I didn’t. Just that it was a tough role to play.”

  “Well, being unemployed was no great shakes, either. Not to mention being a murderer.”

  “But you got over it.”

  “You do, don’t you? Especially when you get away with it.”

  They lapsed into silence for a while and carried on eating. When Cheryl could stand it no longer, she asked, “What are we going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marco. “Depends on what you want.”

  He sounded strangely hesitant, Cheryl thought. “Got cold feet?”

  “About what?”

  “Us. Being together.”

  “Oh, that. No. Course not.”

  But there was still something about his tone. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “No. Just that it was hard, that’s all. Making ends meet, being alone and everything.”

  “But you got another job?”

  “Eventually.”

  Cheryl pushed her empty plate away. “And you don’t have to worry about money now, do you? I’ve got plenty for both of us.”

  “It wasn’t about the money. You know that.”

  She was about to respond that it was for her, but held herself in check. “Of course not. But even so...it helps.”

  “Helps what? Salve our consciences?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I give my conscience much thought.” What was wrong with him? Cheryl wondered. They used to be able to talk so easily. Now it was like pulling teeth. “Come on,” she said, reaching over and taking his hand. “The sun’s going down. Let’s go for a walk. We wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  * * *

  The path followed the cliff edge around the jagged bay. Marco took Cheryl’s hand as they walked. One of the rock formations below had a keyhole in it, and the waves gushed through with a loud whooshing sound, then retreated with a sound like an indrawn breath. To their left, the sun was setting in a deep orange and lilac glow, light fluffy gray clouds on either side, as if they were little dogs nipping at the edges of the fading light.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Marco, pausing to look.

  “I knew you’d like it,” she said.

  “How did you find it?”

  “Mostly good luck,” said Cheryl. “And newspaper adverts.”

  They walked on.

  Soon the sun had sunk below the horizon and tinged the underbellies of the clouds with its dying light. “It’ll be dark soon,” Cheryl said with a little shiver. “We’d better be getting back.”

  But Marco didn’t move. “Look,” he said, standing with his back to the fading light. “I want you to know that I’ve found someone else.”

  The words seemed to burn their way into Cheryl’s consciousness. “I’ve found someone else.” This wasn’t supposed to happen. True enough, she no longer felt any need for Marco in her life, and in fact, he seemed immature and vain to her now. But it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. “Someone else? How could that be?”

  “I met her at work,” he went on, though she was hardly hearing him. “We want to get married, have children. I’m sorry. I wanted you to know. I can’t let anything get in the way of that.”

  The sea was roaring in her ears, and before she knew it, she had pushed his chest
. He flailed his arms as he fell backward, as if trying to fly, a surprised expression on his face. Then he went over the cliff edge and fell all the way down, his scream harmonizing oddly with the noise of the sea, and crashed onto the rocks below. Cheryl held her breath, put her fist to her mouth and looked over the edge. He lay broken on the rocks, arms out like a scarecrow. He wasn’t moving. Then a huge wave came rushing over him, and when it went out, Marco’s body was gone.

  * * *

  Cheryl practically ran the whole way back to the cottage, and when she got there, she was breathless and shaking like a leaf. She had never killed anyone before. Well, true, she had been involved in Gerald’s murder, but not like this. Besides, Marco had done all the actual work; he was the poison expert. This time she had actually shoved a man to his death. And not just any man. Her lover. But she had known even before she saw him again that she didn’t want him back. She had got used to living by herself, got to enjoy the freedom, and the last thing she wanted was to be involved in a relationship again. She wanted the life she had made for herself after Gerald’s death, the money, too, and she would share it with no one.

  She hadn’t been sure what she was going to do about him once she had told him she didn’t need him anymore, but she knew she couldn’t risk having him on the loose, liable to turn up at any moment or, worse, feel the need to confess to Gerald’s murder. Perhaps killing him had always been her intention, though she hadn’t realized it until that moment when he opened his mouth and told her there was someone else. Only then did she know for certain that she had to do it. Marco could implicate her. She would never have been truly rid of him while he was alive. He could have turned her life into a living hell.

  In retrospect, she had been very careful in planning their meeting. She had convinced herself it was because they mustn’t be seen together, but what if it had really been so that she could kill him and get away with it? There was no one for miles around. Nobody had seen them on the cliffs, and if anyone had noticed her with Marco at the station, it was hardly something they would remember. With any luck, his body would never turn up, and even if it did, the authorities would just assume he’d had an accident. It happened all the time on dangerous cliffs like these.

  She went into the bedroom and found he had left his case open on the bed, his jacket beside it. She would make a bonfire on the beach later. She went through the pockets and found little of interest. The was a photo in his wallet of a pretty young woman about Marco’s age. So that was her. Cheryl felt another surge of anger. Then she told herself to calm down and not be so stupid. He was dead now. It didn’t matter that he’d found someone else, someone younger and prettier. She wouldn’t be so pretty when her precious Marco never came home again. She opened the case and was surprised to find it almost empty. Where were his changes of clothing, his toiletries and so on? Hadn’t he planned on staying more than one night? Perhaps not, given what he had told her earlier. So why bring a suitcase at all?

  Cheryl felt exhausted, and she lay back on the bed. She couldn’t think clearly at all, didn’t want to think anymore tonight. She had just killed a man and she couldn’t process what she had done.

  But she must have fallen asleep, because it was going on for four in the morning when a sharp pain in the stomach woke her. She’d had acid reflux before, so she thought nothing of it at first as she went downstairs to find the Zantac she carried in her handbag. Maybe it was something to do with the shellfish she had eaten from the barbecue.

  The pain struck again on the stairs, almost doubling her up, and by the time she got down she was feeling nauseated, and the agony had become even harder to bear. She clutched her stomach and groaned. God, she had never felt like this before.

  She staggered through the kitchen toward the downstairs toilet to be sick, and on the way she passed the dishes from their dinner. She hadn’t noticed before, but she saw that Marco hadn’t touched his glass of black water.

  The bastard, she thought, as another spasm twisted through her gut like a burning corkscrew, then she finally collapsed, gasping for air, on the bathroom floor.

  * * *

  THE LAST HIBAKUSHA

  BY NAOMI HIRAHARA

  Mas Arai hated his wheelchair, but might have hated his cane even more. It was his cane, after all, that had forced him in this jail on wheels. The rubber end of his cane had gotten stuck in between two bricks in a walkway at his wife’s care facility, launching him forward into some camellia bushes. He felt something pop around his side and it was as he suspected: he had fractured his hip. Up to this time—ninety years old, sixty of which had been spent tending lawns—he had not broken even one bone. He went off to surgery and was now recuperating. He vowed to himself that he would be back on his feet without the wheelchair or the cane in a month’s time.

  The worst thing about the wheelchair was, once his daughter, Mari, or son-in-law, Lloyd, got him in it, he was under their full control. Today, however, he was a willing prisoner of Dr. Rin Fujii, his physician for the past six years. Mas didn’t care much for women doctors, but Dr. Fujii was different. Her smooth face was usually expressionless, whether she was treating an ingrown hair or a cancerous tumor. She was no-nonsense and she delivered difficult diagnoses unadulterated but still with humanity. She did so with Mas’s second wife, Genessee. “You’re in stage two Alzheimer’s, but you have time,” she said. Two years later, Genessee’s mind began to really slip, tiles of memory coming loose and disappearing. Dr. Fujii, not Mas, was the only one who seemed able to mitigate this loss. Sometimes Genessee was fully aware of what was happening to her and the doctor’s self-assured, calm voice served as her only guide through the maze. Genessee had been the young spouse, the professor. She wasn’t supposed to go first, and especially like this. Mas was used to surprises, however, and met this tragedy in the same fashion that he initially dealt with other ones in his life: to dig a deep hole and bury it.

  “We’ve arrived,” Dr. Fujii announced in Japanese. She parked her car in front of a tiny building in a residential area in a nebulous neighborhood in between the Arts District and East Los Angeles. Mas was immediately suspicious. He didn’t go anywhere unless he was forced to, like today, but he knew enough about Los Angeles’s Hiroshima Peace Flame. It was housed at a Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo accessible from First Street through a narrow driveway. They were at least a mile from where they should be.

  Dr. Fujii read Mas’s confused expression. “They had to do some seismic retrofitting at the main temple. So the Peace Flame is being brought here.”

  Moving a flame from one location to another was absurd. But that was the legacy of this flame, whose fire had somehow been transferred from the cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Park to Southern California by the Los Angeles mayor at the time, a commanding and distinguished African American man, the former LAPD chief. Mas wrinkled his forehead imagining the gangling mayor holding a heated block on his lap in the plane. This was years before 9/11, of course, a time when people actually lit their cigarettes and smoked on planes. Considering the late mayor’s feat, perhaps moving the flame in a lantern at a distance of one mile for today’s anniversary may have been inconsequential.

  Mas waited for Dr. Fujii to get out of the car, unload the wheelchair from the trunk, and open the passenger door for him. The thing that he hated the most about getting old was waiting. It was as if his body had lost all of its proactivity. Everything now was about responding to someone else’s action. It infuriated him, but what did the old-school Japanese say—shikataganai. It could not be helped.

  Dr. Fujii had not only brought out his chair but her black medical bag that reminded him of a prop in that old medical television show Marcus Welby. Mas’s arms were still strong enough to help steer his body into his wheelchair without his doctor’s help. More than six decades of gardening in the hot Southern California sun had gifted him that much. He was also able to get his loafers onto the footrests by himself, another physical acc
omplishment. Perhaps that was a sign that today, the 75th anniversary of the first atomic bombing, might be a surprisingly good day.

  Dr. Fujii pushed Mas along the concrete path to the small building, which was essentially a house, a bungalow like the others next to it. The only thing that seemed to distinguish its purpose was a rock garden that bordered the house. Placed amidst the sea of smooth stones were three jizo, simple carved statues with infantile round, bald heads and closed eyes. Dressed in little red aprons and knit hats, the jizo, the protectors of dead children, traveled in the spirit world where the living parents of the deceased could not.

  The door of the house temple was open and a Japanese man, his head as bald as the jizo’s, bowed in the doorway. He was wearing a black robe with a woven purple sash around his neck and Mas presumed that this was the minister. “Dr. Fujii, it’s so good of you to come in such heat,” he said.

  Dr. Fujii bowed from the bottom of the steps. Chikusho, Mas cursed in his mind. Again, no ramps.

  “Sensei, this is Arai-san, the hibakusha.”

  “Maybe the last one,” Mas replied in Japanese. The last atomic bomb survivor, at least maybe the oldest one in California.

  He meant it as a semijoke, but the minister didn’t laugh. He instead bowed, awkwardly flashing a quick smile before murmuring to himself. He assisted in pulling Mas’s chair up the two steps. Mas felt as though he was a sack of potatoes being carried in a wheelbarrow.