Evelyn Marsh

by S. W. Clemens

  A warm breeze sprang up. She began reading again but soon gave it up, the novel’s flaws having been revealed. Ramon was right — the natty Belgian made extraordinary leaps of logic that were unsupported by the evidence, and she was continually reminded of how modern forensics would make most of his deductions superfluous. Given the same characters and circumstances in a contemporary setting, it would certainly be more difficult to get away with the crime.

  The sun had moved behind the jacaranda, throwing dappled shadows that danced in the breeze. She put down the book, her hat and sunglasses and stood at the edge of the deep end, her thoughts returning to Ramon and the feel of his hands. If she were twenty years younger...She wondered if he had a girlfriend. Surely he must, she thought, a young man as attractive as that. She felt a sudden twinge of envy, for whoever the young lady was, she must feel very lucky indeed.

  Then she dove into the cool water and began swimming laps, alternating between breaststroke, sidestroke, and backstroke, reveling in the texture of the water against her skin, emptying her mind of everything but the tactile pleasure of moving through liquid, and the sound of her own breathing. She swam fifty lengths and, pleasantly exhausted, pulled herself from the pool.

  It was as she was toweling off that she stopped and smiled as an inspiration for a new painting presented itself. She would paint the herb garden: the rows of herbs; gardening gloves next to a trowel; the shovel standing upright, topped with a gardening hat that sported a peach colored ribbon fluttering in the breeze (to relieve the static nature of the composition); an arching branch adorned with purple blossoms framing the upper edge, and a tree trunk framing the right. She would entitle it, Tending Your Garden, in reference to Voltaire’s Candide.

  The rest of that week she drew sketches, and finally painted a small study in watercolors, though she was still undecided on what medium she would use in the final painting she envisioned.

  She hardly thought of Ramon at all, except for Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m.

  She awoke early that day and went downstairs to make coffee. She filled a bowl with cubed pears and carried it back upstairs. Howard was still sleeping. She placed the bowl on his night table, then showered and dabbed perfume on strategic places before climbing back into bed. She may not have been thinking precisely of Ramon, but he had awakened something in her, and for the first time in a long time she pleasantly anticipated making love to her husband. It was eight, about the time he usually awoke. He was still snoring. Making love over the past three years had become a routine, an obligation that rarely ended in an orgasm for her, to the point that she’d been trying to hurry him along and get him off so she could keep an appointment with her favorite pulsating showerhead.

  Sex had been easy when she was young, but then it was new and exciting, and Howard had been trim and eager. He was still handsome in a suit, but naked — was it disloyal to admit it? — he looked flaccid and a touch paunchy and, if one were to be honest, just a little past his prime. Weren’t they both? She acknowledged that. It was what they signed up for when they got married — for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, until death did they part. It had been better for a long time, and it had been rich beyond her expectations, and now they would grow old together. She was reconciled to that, but she didn’t want to give in to old age before her time. Hell, she wasn’t that old! She was just forty-nine. Sure, Hollywood actresses had a shelf life that expired at forty or forty-five, but in real life, your story continued. The three-act play expanded to become five or six or seven. The goal, though no one wanted to admit it when standing at the altar, was to live long, stay healthy, and age gracefully together, older but wiser, without giving up all the things that had made life worth living when you were twenty or twenty-five or thirty. The trick was to grow, to enjoy the process of aging, to embrace the best that each stage of life had to offer, the wisdom you gained, the perspective of time, and push aside the vapid, mundane nonsense that distracted one’s focus from the things that really mattered.

  Ramon had reminded her that she wasn’t yet really very old. She was still desirable, and she was ready this morning to show Howard that their love life was not yet dead. She waited. He snored. She scooted closer to him. He rolled onto his side. She reached out and lightly stroked his thigh. He snorted and rolled onto his back. His breathing returned to normal. She playfully gripped his cock and was surprised to find it already hard and fat as a sausage. He came half-awake and fell back to sleep, but his cock remained at the ready. She went under the covers and kissed it.

  “What the hell, Lori! What are you doing!?”

  He was awake now. Evelyn came up from under the covers. “Lori?” she asked. Lori had been his previous secretary.

  “What?”

  “You called out Lori when I....” She squeezed with force.

  “Ow! What the fuck!?”

  “Why did you call out Lori’s name?”

  “How the hell should I know? I was sleeping, for god’s sake! I was dreaming. I was at work. Ow, Jesus, that hurt. What did you do?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time for you to get up. I’m going downstairs. I’ll be back in an hour,” she said with obvious annoyance.

  Howard’s unconscious response to her tender ministrations had put her in a foul mood. She made an omelette and toast. It took a strong Irish coffee to put her in the mood again, but when he finally rolled atop her, at nine thirty, she was thinking of Ramon. She didn’t have to fake it this time.

  Fog lay thick on the hillside when she saw Howard off on Tuesday morning, his black BMW nearly swallowed by it, as he reached the end of the driveway and turned left onto Via Sueños Perdidos. Evelyn went back inside, still wrapped in her robe, and settled in front of Howard’s desktop computer with a cup of coffee. She bought a swimming suit online from Orvis, and a striped cotton top from Lands’ End. Then she checked their stock portfolio and lastly her children’s Facebook pages.

  By the time she was out of the shower, the fog had burned off, leaving the house in bright sunshine. The lawn glistened with dew, and accumulated moisture still dripped from the trees. From her bedroom window, she could see the fog through the tops of the trees, spreading out like a sea of whipped cream all the way to the horizon. It was very quiet, save for the warbling of a mockingbird, the cooing of turtledoves in the palm trees, and far away the lonely song of a meadowlark.

  She dressed in khaki shorts, a halter top, and flip-flops, then went downstairs to eat sushi and cantaloupe for breakfast. She made a move in her chess game with Robert, paid a few bills, and when she could procrastinate no longer, she set up her portable easel and sketchpad by the herb garden. She’d penciled several studies on her sketchpad, each displaying a different combination of angles and composition. She’d created them all from her imagination. This morning she was observing the real scene and adding details to her sketches. A hummingbird flew in to inspect the jacaranda blossoms, and she added it to one of the sketches. She contemplated adding edible flowers to the scene, almost discarded the idea, and finally settled on a few nasturtiums in the background.

  Then, remembering, she added a gopher hole as a personal tribute and reminder to herself that one should tend one’s own garden with kindness. She thought, without a shred of facetiousness, that if she ever got to heaven she would have to apologize to that gopher. With the exception of mosquitos, which she viewed as a scourge upon the earth, she had never before killed another living thing on purpose, and her one indiscretion weighed on her mind.

  Everything had happened so fast. She’d turned over a shovelful of earth, seen the gopher scrabbling in confusion on the surface, and afraid it would burrow back underground to eat her roots, she’d panicked. She’d struck without thinking.

  Now pushing the image from her mind, she turned back to the pencil study of the garden. She narrowed her preference down to two ske
tches, and waited for the right light that would give the best shadows. When it came, she would take a photo for reference and sketch in the shadows on her pad.

  She was concentrating on how to make the background interesting without being cluttered, when a voice spoke up behind her.

  “A still life?”

  Evelyn shrieked and dropped her pencil. She whirled around, heart hammering. “Jesus Christ! You scared me! Are you always so quiet?”

  Ramon stepped back and held up both hands. Today he was hatless, dressed in canvas pants and T-shirt. “My apologies. I guess the grass....”

  Evelyn took a deep breath, and bent to retrieve her pencil just as Ramon did the same. They bumped heads. Ramon grabbed her arms to steady her, looking with concern straight into her eyes. Then he released his grip and handed her the pencil. They both rubbed their foreheads.

  Evelyn gave a little laugh. “You certainly know how to make an entrance. Aren’t you early? I didn’t expect you until the afternoon.”

  “Each house takes more or less time depending on whether I’m just doing maintenance or a project or a repair, and sometimes, like today, I do the houses in reverse order, just to keep things interesting.”

  She took a deep breath, feeling her heart slow to a more moderate pace. “Next time, call out.”

  “Will do.”

  She turned back to her easel. He went about his work testing the chlorine level, cleaning the trap, skimming the blossoms off the surface of the water, and checking the heater and filter motors. When he was done, he looked over her shoulder.

  “What can be so interesting?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know exactly. There’s just something missing, and I was hoping to figure it out. It’s getting better, see?” She flipped through the sketches. “These two are my favorites.”

  “Why not this one?” he asked, flipping back a page.

  “It’s too busy, too cluttered.”

  “Let me see your favorite again.” He studied it, looked up to examine the garden, then back to the drawing. “Are these petals? I can’t tell without the color.”

  “Yes. They lead the eye from the bottom right toward the center.”

  “How about this?”

  Ramon pulled the green garden hose over to the garden and laid it on the ground. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the right idea. Evelyn could imagine how she’d paint it snaking in from the middle left, a little water issuing from the hose and dampening the ground before it, evidence that her trademark missing person had exited the scene to turn it on. She sketched it in, stopping a couple of times to erase.

  “There, that does it,” she said with satisfaction. “What do you think?”

  “It’s good. I like it.” He was behind her and reached over her shoulder to point. “But what’s this gopher hole doing here? I don’t see any gopher hole.”

  “Don’t be so literal. It’s a metaphor.”

  “For what?”

  “The darkness beneath the surface of things.”

  He humphed in acknowledgment. “Your back is getting burned. Do you have sunscreen?”

  “I left it in the house.”

  “I have some. In my business, you can’t do without it.”

  He rummaged in his case and came out with a squeeze bottle. She turned her back to him and lifted the hair from the nape of her neck as he squirted lotion on her shoulders. She was proud of her still naturally dark hair, unlike her mother, whose hair had remained the same color for decades thanks to dyeing.

  He smoothed the liquid out with the palms of his hands, then his strong fingers squeezed her shoulders.

  “That feels good.”

  “You have a knot. Lie down and I’ll work on it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I don’t mind. It won’t take long.”

  He was matter-of-fact about it, she thought. She might find massage an intimate experience, but to him it had been a job. So she lay on her stomach on the chaise lounge, thinking that in her fantasies this was where she lured the young man to her bed. There was a term for that kind of woman — cougar. Could she be a cougar? No, she thought, that was a term reserved for promiscuous women in their thirties who preyed on inexperienced men in their early twenties. She was far too old to be a cougar, not to mention married. She was invisible to young men. As attractive as she found Ramon, and as young as he made her feel, she had to admit that the attraction wasn’t mutual. She would turn fifty in less than a year. Half a century. Besides, she could never betray Howard like that. But flirtation was fun.

  He knelt beside her and carefully kneaded the knot above her right shoulder blade. It hurt, but in a good way. In a minute, he left her shoulders and squeezed sunscreen onto her back, working it into her skin. Her shorts were loose and his fingers slipped under the waistline as he massaged her lower back at the base of her spine. She held her breath. Then he moved back to the middle of her back above her kidneys and she relaxed.

  “There,” he said, “your back is done. Would you like me to do the back of your legs?”

  “Could you do that thing you did last time — with my feet? If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “I don’t mind.” He slipped off her flip-flops. “Did you finish that book?”

  “No, you ruined it for me.”

  “I did? I’m sorry,” he said sincerely as he massaged the arch of her left foot.

  “Well, it’s true what you said. To arrive at his conclusions, Poirot has to make assumptions that are insupportable by the evidence. For instance, how could anyone suspect that the murderer had successfully impersonated a woman to obtain poison? Who would do that?” Ramon moved on to her right foot. “Who could pull it off? I don’t know of any men who could pass for a woman. Though it did make me wonder how someone might get away with murder today. Of course many do get away with it.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible. ‘Big Brother is watching.’”

  “That can’t be true, or every murder would be solved.”

  He squeezed a line of sunscreen onto the insides of her knees and began smoothing it in. “Gang bangers get away with it because no one will talk to the cops and they provide each other with alibis. The rest of us would get caught.”

  “Why would we?”

  “Because the police can track your every movement, for one thing. There are security cameras everywhere. I’ll bet I was photographed twenty times on my way here.”

  “Aren’t you being a little paranoid?”

  “A lot of these estates have security cameras.”

  “We don’t,” she said, wondering if their house could be considered an estate.

  “It doesn’t matter; your phone tracks your every move. Have you ever gone online or on your phone and a pop-up asks if this application can use your current location? Or used your phone’s GPS?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then your phone has a record of where you’ve been.”

  Ramon’s hands ran up the back of her right thigh to the bottom of her shorts, then slid back to her knee. “Oh, yeah,” she purred softly as he pressed on her tight hamstrings. He switched to the left leg, up and back, up and back, more slowly now, up and back, and this time his fingers pushed up under her shorts, just a knuckle or two. She tensed. His hands slid back down. Another line of sunscreen, then his left hand ran up the outside of her thigh, while his right ran up the inside. This time his fingers went much deeper.

  “That’s enough of that!” she shouted, slapping his hands away.

  He held them palms up in apology, but there was still a question in his eyes. “I’m sorry, I thought...I guess I misread....”

  Evelyn scrambled to her feet. “Yes, you most certainly did!” She did her best to sound indignant, but the words sounded false even to her
ears. He was right. She had given him signals. She just hadn’t counted on him picking them up. It was just a fantasy after all. He was supposed to be professional, immune to her fading charms. She was horrified at herself for leading him on. It was one thing to fantasize, but it was a little creepy when your fantasies came to life.

  “I’m going inside,” she said. She strode barefoot down the grass toward the house, her heart racing, ears burning with embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry!” Ramon shouted after her. “Evelyn? Mrs. Marsh?”

  She dead bolted the French doors and ran upstairs. What had she been thinking? In her bedroom, she looked out on the yard. Ramon was walking grim-faced down the lawn carrying his kit, his eyes downcast. She pulled back from the window and caught sight of herself in the mirror. She didn’t want to look at herself. She wanted to disappear.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She felt dirty. She took a shower, as if the water could wash humiliation down the drain. How could she have been so stupid? She stood under the water for a long time and, unable to relax, turned to the pulsating showerhead for release. Afterwards she dressed in long pants and a modest blouse.

  She imagined Howard coming home, seeing guilt written all over her face, and guessing the rest. He would be disgusted. He would feel betrayed. Even if she had chickened out in the end, she had fantasized about it. Deep down inside she had wanted it, and Howard would be able to tell.

  She had never cheated on him...well, only once, and that didn’t count, she told herself, because it was before they were married and it hadn’t been her fault anyway. Shortly after they’d started dating, while she was still attending UCSC, and Howard was just beginning his career as an Associate in her father’s law firm, she’d begun a flirtation with Steve Mead, a boy in her sculpting class. Steve was her fallback position if Howard’s ardor cooled, because even though there was some truth to the old saying that “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” there was also some truth in the adage “out of sight, out of mind.”