Three Sisters

by James D. Doss

  Beatrice was putting the empty jars into the picnic basket. “As delightful as it would be to chat for a while, I must be leaving.” She glanced at the darkening sky. “Bears are very punctual creatures. They will be coming soon—looking for their nightly snack on the stump.” She offered a rhetorical question: “Won’t they be pleasantly surprised to find what’s new on the menu.”

  Turner’s white-knuckled hands gripped the wheelchair arms. He searched for a suitable protest, came up with the timeworn “You’ll never get away with it!”

  “You don’t think so?” The lady’s brow furrowed with concentration, as she reviewed her plot. “I do not wish to be argumentative, but I am inclined to disagree—having worked this out with considerable care, I believe my chances are rather good. I have prepared and rehearsed so many plausible explanations for this terrible tragedy that I can hardly decide which one suits me best. I do admit this—when your remains are discovered and the grisly similarity between your fate and Astrid’s becomes apparent, it is probable that suspicions will be raised. But there will be no evidence whatever of my involvement in your untimely passing.” She smiled at her wild-eyed husband. “You, on the other hand, do not have—what is the quaint expression? Oh yes, ‘a snowball’s chance in hell.’ You will be ripped to shreds well before the sun comes up again.” Bea heard a twig break in the forest. “Perhaps even before it goes down.” She patted his hand. “Well, I must be off now—talley-ho.” She started to go, paused, leaned close to her wedded mate. “When the beasts come, and start licking the honey off your face—” she licked a drop off his ear, “I hope you will remember poor Astrid, and the strawberries you used to lure the bears into her bedroom.” She stood up straight. “If you had taken proper interest in my sister, you might have learned that your lovely wife was extremely allergic to strawberries.”

  So that’s it. But how was I supposed to know…. “Bea, please listen to me—”

  “Andrew, I am not the least bit interested in anything you have to say.” She bit her lower lip. “Unless you wish to make a full confession of your misdeeds.”

  The drowning man grabbed at this sliver of driftwood. “If I did admit to doing some things that I very much regret, would you—”

  “Would I reconsider my plan to leave you to the mercy of the wild animals?” She seemed to mull it over. “Yes. Yes, I suppose there’s a small chance that I might.”

  “Okay, then.” He took a deep breath. “I hardly know where to start.”

  She made a suggestion: “Begin with your first wife.”

  This was like a slap in the face. “Why—whatever do you mean?”

  “You know very well that I refer to April Valentine.”

  “Oh—that first wife.” Never a quitter, the desperate fellow gave it his best shot: “I can explain why I thought it unwise to mention poor April—”

  “Oh, shut up, Andrew.” Perhaps I should have just pushed his wheelchair into the Devil’s Mouth. “On the day when Cassie saw us off on our honeymoon, April’s mother showed up at the airport. Mrs. Florence Valentine gave my sister a bag of newspaper clippings. Most were about the horrid death of her daughter. But not all. Some were of happier times. One of them had your picture, with April. The ecstatic bride and her smiling groom. If the poor woman had only known that she was marrying a cold-blooded—”

  “Bea, April’s mother is certifiably insane.” He pointed a trembling finger at his accuser. “There was not a shred of evidence to support her preposterous suspicions that I was responsible for her daughter’s tragic death. April must have fainted when she was feeding the pigs, and fallen into the pen.” Seeing just a hint of doubt on Beatrice’s face, he pressed the point: “Ask any insurance company actuary—they’ll tell you farmwork is among the most dangerous occupations.”

  “Your first wife’s death could have accidental.” Not that I believe it for a minute. “It is entirely possible that you had nothing to do with it.”

  “Your sister must have realized that.” He trembled with inner rage. “But Cassandra was determined to create a scandal—publicly humiliate me.”

  Beatrice nodded. “Cassie was always terribly impetuous. I tried to talk her out of her absurd scheme. Imagine, pretending that she was communing with your first wife’s vengeful spirit. But she thought that if she managed to unsettle you, you might do something foolish—something that would provide evidence of your guilt.” She closed the lid on the picnic basket. “But you didn’t react as Cassie had hoped. Rather than panic, you decided to discredit our family psychic. You sent Cassie that phony e-mail—announcing your death by violence. What did you have in mind? No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. You planned to wait until Sis had received the phony ‘message’—which she would assume had been forwarded by Nicky Moxon. I’m guessing you would have been across the street from her home, in the Corner Bar, watching your victim on TV—waiting for her to make the dramatic announcement of your death. No doubt, you and some of your boozy friends would have a good laugh at my sister’s expense. And then, you would have crossed the street, entered Cassie’s home to announce that reports of your demise were ‘greatly exaggerated.’” When he opened his mouth to protest, she said, “Don’t bother to deny that you sent the e-mail, Andrew. That devious little plot had your grubby fingerprints all over it.” Her eyes were orbs of blue ice. “It was quite a coincidence that, on that particular evening, your prophecy came so close to being fulfilled.” And should have been. “By the way, if you don’t mind satisfying my curiosity—how did you discover that Cassie was receiving clandestine messages from Nicky Moxon?”

  He was too proud of that accomplishment to be coy about it. “I hacked into her computer. Found copies of Moxon’s encoded e-mails—and passwords.”

  “Ah—I should have guessed.”

  Turner continued in a repentant tone: “I don’t know why I did such an absurd thing, Bea. I must have been out of my mind. Crazy.”

  She arched both eyebrows. “The accused chooses to plead insanity?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.” He added quickly, “Not for April’s death—I had nothing whatever to do with that. But sending your sister the e-mail while she was on TV—it was a lunatic thing to do.”

  “I quite agree. And it was also very mean-spirited. But considering Cassie’s alleged communion with April Valentine’s spirit, I suppose you had a right to retaliate.” She patted him on the cheek. “So don’t give it another thought. Consider yourself forgiven.”

  Relief flooding over him, he said, “Thank you, Bea. Thank you for being so understand—”

  “There is, however, the matter of Astrid’s death.”

  “But—”

  “But me no buts, Andrew. You have used up your allowable quota of lies. I simply cannot tolerate another one.” The judge, jury, and executioner cocked her pretty head. “But if you come clean—and I mean squeaky clean, I might find it in my heart to forgive all. And even, as time passes, to forget.” She pointed a finger at his nose. “But do not cut any corners. I assure you—aside from a few minor details, I know precisely what you have done. I merely want to hear it from your own mouth. Clear the air between us, so that perhaps…we can go on from here.”

  Turner was grateful for this one last chance. “Very well.”

  “Defendant shall have three minutes.” She consulted an exquisite diamond-studded wristwatch. “You may begin.”

  He cleared his throat for the recitation. “There were things about your younger sister that you didn’t know. Astrid was making my life miserable. She was insanely jealous. Listened in on my telephone calls, checked to verify where I’d been. And I’m sure you never had a hint of this—Astrid even thought she was hiding it from me. She had become an alcoholic. Poor thing was sipping martinis before breakfast.”

  “Really?”

  A glum nod. “She kept a half pint of Jack Daniels concealed in the drawer of her antique sewing machine. Finally, it became more than I could stand. I tried to reason with your sister, convince he
r to submit herself to therapy, but it was no use. Once, in desperation—and I’m ashamed to admit this—I even brought up the subject of divorce. Astrid went wild with rage, and threw a wine bottle at me!” He paused, as if to rid himself of the bitter memory. “I felt hopeless, trapped in a failed marriage. In an attempt to regain some level of sanity, I started going on long walks into the forest.” Turner frowned. “I suppose the seed must’ve been planted on one of my strolls. I found a deer carcass—a cougar kill, I imagine. But there was evidence that a bear had been feeding on it. I remember thinking…‘If that unfortunate deer had been my alcoholic wife, we would both be better off.’ From that moment on, I began to bait the forest nearer and nearer to our home with fruit.” A wistful sigh. “At first, it was merely a game—therapy for my troubled mind. But day by day, as the bears got closer to the house…I began to think of the exercise as something real. Something I could actually accomplish…”

  “And on the day of her death, before you left for Denver, you left strawberries in her bedroom.”

  “Yes,” he said. “On a paper napkin, under her bed.” But if you’re thinking of telling the DA about this forced confession, it won’t do you a bit of good.

  “And you jammed her bedroom window, so it wouldn’t shut.”

  He gazed at Beatrice’s face for some sign of pity. “I was under unimaginable stress. I’m so terribly sorry—please believe me.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  This was too good to be true. “You do?”

  “I believe you’re a terribly sorry liar, concocting all that nonsense about Astrid. My little sister and I had a telephone conversation almost every day. There were no secrets between us.” Her look could have frozen bubbling lava. “You fed your first wife to the pigs to acquire her five-hundred-acre farm, and used the proceeds to set yourself up in business in Granite Creek.” She shushed his protest with a wag of the finger. “You arranged my sister’s death with the expectation that you would inherit Yellow Pines. Poor Andrew—that must’ve been quite a bitter disappointment for you.”

  It shall be mentioned that this small drama had an audience of several dozen creatures. Including some who qualified as Homo sapiens. For example, those ardent anglers who—at Daisy Perika’s prodding—had denied themselves a few cherished hours of night fishing to do their duty. Which compelled them to shadow Beatrice Spencer and her husband.

  Some forty yards away, Charlie Moon and Scott Parris were belly-down on the ground, concealed in a thicket of chokecherry, bitterbrush, and fairy-comb ferns. The chief of police shook his head. “Charlie—can you believe this?”

  The Ute nodded. Appreciatively. What a woman!

  Beatrice hooked the picnic basket handle onto her arm, looked beyond the clearing, deep into the inky shadows. “It is beginning to get dark, and that’s when the hungry bears come out, so I really must say goodbye.” She raised a hand, wriggled fingers to simulate a wave.

  “But—you said if I would confess that you’d reconsider…you promised.”

  “Au contraire; I said that I might reconsider.”

  His shrill shriek was filled to the brim with unabated hatred: “You filthy, lying bitch!”

  “Ah, now the real Andrew Turner appears.” She turned away. “Give the famished bruins my bon appétit. Ta-ta.”

  “Wait…I’m sorry, Bea.” He banged his fists on the wheelchair armrests. “Please don’t leave me here all alone!”

  Like his life, Turner’s words were wasted.

  His wife had departed, leaving a cold, cruel emptiness in her wake. The response to his pleading was a chill twilight breeze—a melancholy sigh in the spruce, a sorrowful whine in the pines.

  Scott Parris whispered to his Ute friend, “Well what do you make of that?”

  “Pard, ask anybody who knows yours truly, and they’ll tell you Charlie Moon may be a lot of things—but he’s not a fella who leaps to conclusions.” A thoughtful pause. “But it looks to me like the honeymoon is over.”

  Fifty-Two

  Close Combat

  Scott Parris made this observation: “Bea figures she’s pulled off what them hack mystery writers call a ‘perfect crime.’”

  The Ute nodded. “Way the lady tells it, she took her invalid husband on a stroll in the forest, intending to treat him to a nice little picnic. Only when they got there, she remembered that she forgot something essential. Like maybe—”

  “Pickles,” Parris said.

  “Okay. Let’s say sweet baby gherkins. So she says, ‘Tarry here a few minutes, sweetie-pie, whilst I return to our cozy twenty-room bungalow and glom onto a fresh jar of Mrs. Vlasic’s finest.’ And he says—”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  The chief of police pointed out a flaw in Moon’s plot: “That won’t explain how he got the honey poured all over his head.”

  “Yes it will, if you won’t interrupt me for about sixteen microseconds.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.” Moon gathered his thoughts, commenced to splice the broken storyline. “So she says: ‘Tarry here a few minutes, sweetie-pie, whilst I return to our cozy twenty-room bungalow and get a fresh jar of Mrs. Vlasic’s finest.’ And he says, ‘But I’m a poor, sickly cripple in a wheelchair—if you leave me here all alone, I might get et by a bear.’ And she says, ‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat, Andrew—there ain’t been no scumball-eatin’ bears in these woods for years and years.’ And off she goes, skippin’ back home like the darlin’ little wife she is, to get the cucumber condiments. But her husband gets despondiment and decides to prove her wrong even if it kills him. So, to up his chances of being a bear’s supper, he twists the lid off the honey jar, pours it right on his head and—”

  “Charlie, that’s downright silly.”

  “Yes it is. And so’s your objection to the lady’s devious plot. See, after the bears get finished with Turner, there won’t be enough left of the fella to find any hide or hair on, much less honey.”

  Parris recalled the grisly remains of Astrid Spencer. “Good point.”

  “And even if his corpse was found soaked in honey, nobody could prove it was his wife that put it on him.”

  “But, Charlie—both of us watched her do it!”

  “That’s a fact. But beside the point.”

  “Please tell me why.”

  “Because you and me won’t be telling a solitary soul what we saw or heard here.”

  “Please tell me why again.”

  “Because if we did, the lady would very likely be charged with a serious crime.”

  “Excuse me, Charlie—but I kinda figured that was the whole idea.”

  “Scott, you got to look deeper into the matter. If all we had here was a ticked-off woman setting up her innocent husband to be a carnivore’s supper, a murder charge would be just the thing that was called for.” The Ute paused to listen to a noise in the forest. “But this particular husband fed his first wife to the pigs and his second one to the bears—just so he could get title to some real estate. And if Beatrice doesn’t see that justice is done, Turner’ll get away with both of those killings—clean as a whistle.”

  Parris was beginning to get the gist of it. “Because even though we heard him admit to Bea how he lured the bears to her sister’s bedroom, that so-called confession was what the DA will define as ‘under duress.’”

  “Which it dang well was.”

  “But you and me, we know Andrew Turner’s guilty as a fat man with his hand in the cookie jar and—”

  “Sure we do. Which leaves us with only two options. Neither of ’em much fun to think about.”

  Parris blinked. “You suggesting we walk away, leave Turner for the bears?”

  “Nasty as it is, that plan gets my vote.”

  “Well I say we get him out of here before the—”

  “Shhh.” Moon touched his companion on the shoulder. “Listen.”

  Scott Parris strained both ears. “I don’t hear nothing.” And then he di
d. Something coming through the woods. Something that did not bother to keep quiet. Something big and bad and unafraid. This was top of the food chain. He muttered under his breath. “Jeepers—it must be a bear come for the honey.”

  The Ute was listening carefully to the creature’s approach. That’s a bear, all right.

  The chief of police reached for his shoulder holster. “I don’t care what Turner’s done—I’ll have to shoot it.”

  Moon caught his first glimpse of the hairy, four-legged forager, shook his head. “You take a pop at it with that little .38, you’ll just make it mad.”

  “But we can’t just do nothing.”

  “Pard, have you ever tangled with a hungry bear?”

  “No, I haven’t, but—”

  From the man in the wheelchair came a pitiful, lost-soul wail that made the lawmen’s skin crawl and prickle.

  “Charlie, we have to do something—beat it off with a stick—anything!”

  “We are doing something.” Letting nature take its course.

  The bear, trotting along on all fours, was a big-shouldered black with a cinnamon stripe running the length of its bristled back.

  His thin arms raised in a futile attempt at defense, Turner was whimpering.

  Parris remembered his friend’s big horse-pistol. “Charlie, you can stop it with your .357.”

  Within a few yards of the source of the sweet scent, the beast saw the creature in the wheeled chair. Puzzled by such a novel spectacle, the animal raised its long snout, sniffed.

  Charlie Moon had a hard decision to make. He reached for the Ruger revolver, cocked it, closed his left eye, laid a bead dead-center on the animal’s chest, all his thoughts coming during the intake of a breath. If I fire a shot over the bear’s head, maybe that’d scare it off. Or a sudden, loud noise might make it charge. He tightened his finger on the trigger. God, I wish I didn’t have to do this—