Fatal 5

by Karin Kaufman

  The tall blond man turns so I can see his face, giving me an even bigger surprise than the potted yellow plant he’s holding.

  Axel Becker. The German who stalked me in college. In South Carolina. What’s he doing in Point Pleasant, West Virginia?

  6

  ~*~

  Crisp red-orange leaves swirled and fell, dusting my porch like confectioner’s sugar on a Bundt cake. Each one seemed to whisper “Your days are numbered.”

  But the writing on the wall should’ve been for Paul. How I longed to shout in his face, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin—You’ve been weighed in the balances and found wanting. You’ve treated me like a hired hand, not a wife. You’ve withheld good from me at every turn.”

  Judgment doesn’t always fall on the unjust in this life. Sometimes you have to make your own way out.

  I’d wait till winter. In the meantime, I watched Miranda, to see if she reciprocated any of Paul’s smiles. If she clasped his hand a bit longer when he greeted her. If she joked with him more than her husband at our table.

  She never did. In very fact, from the time she was pregnant, she seemed to shun him. But she was hiding something from me. She didn’t visit as often, and when she did, her bright eyes rarely met mine.

  What did she know?

  ~*~

  Fall birds around here have their own burbling song, completely different from the robins of spring. Miranda and I sit at the white metal bistro table, soaking in the warmth of this unusually bright November day.

  She pats her hair, a nervous gesture that speaks more than words. Suspicions creep into my mind and push all niceties aside.

  Seeing Axel Becker in town makes me feel like I’m being followed. Sure, he seemed surprised to see me. Nevertheless, I scrawled something illegible on his delivery slip, grabbed the yellow plant, and high-tailed it back to my house before Nikki Jo and Petey could ask “What’s going on?”

  Better figure out who Miranda’s stalker is, in case I attract one of my own. The yellow plant didn’t come with a card, but it’s unnerving, nonetheless. I lean forward on my elbows. “Did you get another note?”

  Miranda sucks in her breath. “No, my dear, I did not.” She focuses on a bare oak tree, where a crow caws forlornly.

  “How’s Paul doing?” I can’t protect the Grande Dame if she doesn’t open up a little. It’s not like her to be so cagey.

  “Paul? Oh, he’s just fine—coming to see me tomorrow night. There’s a gospel group coming to the forum.”

  The forum is a fancy term for reception hall. Everything about The Haven is fancied up to make family feel better about shedding their elderly cargo.

  Sunlight glistens in the air. A caregiver with a dark navy shirt stands on a ladder nearby, using a rake to knock leaves from the gutter. Is it my imagination, or is he tilting his head our way?

  “How’s the baby doing?” Miranda adjusts the gauzy taupe scarf around her neck, as if to ward off some invisible breeze.

  “I’m still in the first trimester, so I don’t really know. I’ve only been nauseous a couple of times. It’s too bad I’m not getting sick, with all the comfort food Nikki Jo keeps sending over.”

  Miranda adjusts her darkened glasses so I can’t see her eyes. “Nikki Jo. I swan if that girl isn’t the best thing that happened to Roger Spencer. He always had the big-head growing up, being the football star and his momma’s only boy. Then here comes Nikki Jo, a skinny blonde girl with a big attitude, ready to give him a what-for.”

  The cadences of Miranda’s West Virginia dialect soothe my suspicions. I fall into her words, like a plump earthworm slipping back into the dirt.

  “Anyway. How’s Thomas’ job going? Royston have him working long hours?” Miranda’s glasses slip down her nose, revealing her concerned eyes. “You know, those nights when Russell worked late, I wound up baking through the entire Better Homes and Gardens dessert section. Never learned a blessed thing from it, either. My cakes always went flat—cookies too.” She chuckles. “Hope you’ve got something better to do with your time?”

  Now would be a perfect time to mention the watcher in my woods or to discuss how Axel Becker moved to this part of West Virginia. But I’m going to return to the issue at hand.

  “I’ve just been thinking about Rose. So…Paul worked long hours with his coal hauling job?”

  Miranda straightens, back stiff. “Who told you that?”

  “What, that Paul worked late? Nikki Jo. I was asking her things—trying to get a good picture of Rose in my head.”

  The caretaker gets off the ladder and moves it closer to us—and farther away from the actual gutters.

  Miranda sighs. “You want a picture of Rose? I’ve got a whole album of them. Only thing I could do to keep my friend close—take Polaroids of her and put them up on my fridge. She never visited me at my house. Instead, Russell and I would go over to their house for dinner parties.”

  She leans in toward me, our elbows touching on the table. “Rose never told me why she didn’t like leaving her house. I figured she was shy. Her mother said something to that effect once. Anyway, if Rose wasn’t out in her flowerbeds, she was reading books about flowers. She’d have me bring books from the library.”

  “Are the flowerbeds still there? Paul still lives in their house, right?”

  “Oh, law; I don’t know about those flowerbeds, but Paul does live in the same house. I haven’t talked to him about it. Honestly, there are so many memories wrapped up with that place.”

  Indeed. Which makes me wonder how Paul’s been living there cozily since Rose’s death. Paul, the widower of a beautiful, agoraphobic wife, whose handwriting he doesn’t even recognize…

  “What’s going on in that pretty little head of yours?” Miranda smiles, her ruby lipstick hardly faded. The Grande Dame has a habit of telling me how pretty I am, which fills me with hope—a hope I’ll age half as well as she did.

  I’ve seen pictures of Miranda when she was Rose’s age, and she was lovely in her vivid contrasts—dark red-brown hair, luminous eyes, and Snow-White fair skin. But her beauty’s only grown more pronounced with age.

  And now Paul’s falling for her. I wonder…two young couples always getting together for dinner. Two beautiful wives.

  “Did you and Paul always get along?” That question didn’t come out right. Why am I always thinking the worst?

  The deep blue eyes looking over the large glasses fill with tears. Blast it, I hit a nerve.

  In my peripheral vision, I catch a navy shirt with light chinos moving behind my chair. Time to stop this dude’s leaf-cleaning façade.

  I jump up, knocking my chair backward into his leg.

  “Ow!” The dark-haired man hops on one foot. “Lady, didn’t you see me here?”

  “Oh, so sorry. Maybe you should get some ice on that?”

  Wraparound sunglasses hide his eyes, but I’m sure he’s glaring at me. “Shoot, lady.” He drops his rake and limps off to the main building.

  Miranda coughs—a small, ladylike sound—and grins at me. “I wondered when you were going to do something about him, my little spitfire.”

  Yes, for an older woman, Miranda still sees plenty.

  I yank up the back of my low-rise jeans before sitting. The person who created low-riders must’ve either been a guy or a girl built like a pencil.

  “We were talking about Paul.” I wait for her to fill the silence.

  The crows have evacuated the oak tree, but the Grande Dame returns her attention to it, lost in thought. Finally, she covers my hand with her own and looks at me intently.

  “I’ve never told anyone this. You know my Russell and I were crazy in love. He may’ve been quiet, but he worshiped the ground I walked on. Sometimes I think he would’ve given me anything I asked for—so I tried not to ask for much. Still, he could be…distant. He’d retreat into his study with his numbers. I needed flesh and blood, someone to talk to. I thought I’d found that friend in Rose. But she wasn’t always open about things,
like her marriage. And once I got pregnant, she seemed to pull back from me—didn’t ask for library books, and we weren’t invited over as often for meals.”

  Miranda takes a deep breath. “But when we did go over, Paul always wanted to talk with me. See, we had so much in common, like Edith Wharton books and The Twilight Zone.”

  My lips inadvertently quirk upward, so I focus on the fine metal weave of the table.

  “Once, I was doing dishes in their kitchen, while Rose was cleaning off the table. Paul said something that made me laugh so hard I started crying. Then he put his arm around my shoulders; I guess to calm me down.” Miranda’s eyes tear up again, but not with happiness. “Russell came in at that moment. He wondered what I was laughing about.”

  Oh, no. A love triangle, with my beloved Grande Dame smack in the middle of it.

  She squeezes my hand. “No, no, it wasn’t like that. I know what you’re thinking. That one time was it. We avoided each other like the plague after that night.”

  An image flashes into my mind—a video, really. My mom, denying she’d sold her pills to anyone. Even after she’d been doing it for months.

  Thomas always tells me I’d be a great prosecutor, because I don’t take anything at face value and I don’t believe people until I’ve hunted down the facts.

  Only now, my mind has tried and convicted my best friend in the whole world—the Grande Dame of The Haven.

  7

  ~*~

  The best therapist I ever found for my marriage was a pair of sharp pruning shears.

  In my shrub garden, I attacked the greenbrier vines that wanted to twine their way up my rhododendrons. Even with my gloves on, the long thorns would jab my fingers, drawing blood and making them throb for days. Still, I wouldn’t stop until I chopped every vine and pulled it down.

  My flowerbeds demanded even more attention, especially my roses. I read every book I could get my hands on, even concocted an elaborate watering system for them. Some years they got black spot, some years they got Japanese beetles. But they never failed to produce. I felt like God was smiling on me, honoring my name and giving me some small happiness in life.

  What Paul didn’t know was that I had a regular arsenal of poisons thriving in my flowerbeds. Foxglove, belladonna, hellebores….even the hydrangea in my shrub garden and the potatoes in my vegetable beds could be utilized, if necessary. Day and night, I plotted my revenge on my husband. He could not withhold children and civility from me and expect to get away with it.

  Most people saw me as a timid rabbit, scared to come out from my burrow and socialize. But I knew who I was—a mountain lion, silently watching my prey before I jumped on it and tore it to pieces.

  ~*~

  The turnoff to the Spencer driveway looks like someone threw a bucketful of gravel across the shoulder of a one-lane road. You feel like your car’s going to fly off the face of the cliff when you pull in. Blind drive would be a handy sign to post, but no one bothers.

  Still, the florist—rather, Axel Becker—made that turn. Weird.

  I remember the nudges and comments my roommates gave me, every time the blond giant stared at me across the college commons. “He’s fixated, Tess. Why doesn’t he just give you a call?”

  He never did, even though he’d often show up in the same classes I took. I had the freakish feeling he’d employed spies to deliver my semester schedules to him. In Modern Philosophy, or British Literature, or any other random Liberal Arts class, he’d watch the back of my head, or the side of my head, or even turn around to full-on stare at me.

  For a while, I made the mistake of trying to read his mind. I’d interpret the drawn blond eyebrows as misplaced anger, or the pale blue eyes as devoid of pain. I tried different tactics: staring at him, ignoring him completely, smiling. The one thing I couldn’t control was the blush that crept up my cheeks every time he stared back. Really hard to look cool and haughty when your face goes scarlet.

  Then, as we were leaving Pottery class one day, he caught up with me. I gripped my seafoam-green, asymmetrical vase closer, as if he’d try to snatch it from me.

  “Tess Lilly?” His voice sounded almost formal, then I realized he had a German accent. “Axel Becker.”

  He stretched his long arm out, I assumed to shake my hand. Instead, he stepped in front of me, his arm barring my way.

  And then, right there in the middle of the green, he kissed me.

  I should have screamed and run like a maniac. Instead I stood, transfixed by this German stalker of few words, who also happened to be an incredible kisser.

  That was the last I saw of Axel Becker. He disappeared from campus. I wondered if a friend had turned him in for being a predator, or if he was so disillusioned with my limited kissing abilities, he gave up on American women altogether.

  One hand on the steering wheel, I absently let my red SUV coast down the hill, heading past the big house. A whir of black fur darts toward my tires—Thor! I slam the brakes. Gravel sprays against the white siding on my in-laws’ house.

  “You teeny crazed mutt, you’re going to get yourself squashed like a grape—” Petey sticks his head through my open window, interrupting my mutterings.

  “Hey, Tess. Mom left some pumpkin bread on your porch, up in that metal box thingy.” He leans closer and whispers, “I’ve been watching out my window with the binoculars. No action in the woods lately. But I’ve figured out a way to catch him—booby traps!”

  “Petey, this isn’t Hardy Boys, or Choose Your Own Adventure. This could be something dangerous.” Petey’s been reading through all Thomas’ old books at breakneck speed.

  He scrunches up his freckle-splattered button nose. “’Course I know that. But if I set the traps ahead of time, I can’t get hurt, right?”

  His imploring brown eyes make it impossible to refuse. “Okay, Petey. But don’t do anything expensive—no buying traps. And no…spikes or explosives. And let me know where you put them, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Agent Petey Spencer, reporting for duty.” He mock salutes, then picks up Thor. The dog was so close to my tire, I have no doubt he was relieving himself on it.

  I can practically taste a golden slice of Nikki Jo’s eggnog pumpkin bread, slathered in butter. All thoughts of Axel are obliterated as I walk up to my door. Sure enough, the pumpkin bread is neatly wrapped in a cellophane bag decorated with fall leaves. Nikki Jo likes to class things up, unlike my own mom, who frequently served ketchup sandwiches on white bread for supper.

  The phone’s jangling as I open the door. Is it just me, or is my stomach getting in the way a little? Sure, my jeans still fit. But there seems to be a bit more of me these days. I need to lay off the goodies. Then again, Thomas is always telling me that I should eat whatever I crave, for the baby. No doubt, his font of childbearing wisdom springs directly from his mom.

  I grab the phone and shove it between my shoulder and face, nearly dropping my precious bread. I yelp. “Yes?”

  “Tess, what’s up?”

  “Sorry, babe; just trying to keep hold of your mom’s bread. Hey, when you coming home tonight? Should I wait up to eat?”

  “No, go ahead. Royston needs to close a big deal tomorrow, so I have to get the paperwork ready to go for him.”

  Please. As if Royston can’t do that himself.

  “What are you going to eat? You don’t have anything left in the fridge there.”

  Thomas sighs—more a huff than a full-body groan. Even his sighs sound high-class.

  “I’ll grab something from the Stop-N-Go.”

  Bad idea. Last time I got a sub from there, the roast beef was green. “I’ll bring you something, since I need to go to the library tonight.” He might as well enjoy some pumpkin bread before I get going on it, and I want to do some research on Rose.

  His voice brightens. “Sure, come on by. I’ll leave it unlocked. And wear something nice.”

  Yeah, right. “Dude, I’ll be wearing my regular jeans, a turtleneck, and boots. Standard fare. I
said I’m going to the library.”

  “Okay, gotcha. See you soon, beautiful.”

  By the time I pack up leftover meatloaf and scour my fridge in hopes of finding edible side dishes, it’s nearly dark. This is one of two nights a week our library stays open late, so I’m going to capitalize on that. Our modem connection in this hollow is so patchy and my laptop is so dated, I might as well drive the fifteen minutes to downtown Buckneck for normal internet speeds.

  Petey waves at me from our back woods, then kicks at Thor, who’s running circles around his legs. My youngest brother-in-law wears thick yellow work gloves and holds a circle of barbed wire. I’m just going to keep on driving. I’ll have to figure out where he puts that later.

  Meredith and Jenkins, LLP, is located right on the main street in Buckneck—ideally situated between a funeral parlor and a real estate office. It’s one of the original brick two-stories in town. People have been known to enter the law office and promptly exit upon seeing its dark paneling, sure they’ve entered the funeral home by mistake.

  Thomas opens the back door for me, grabbing the food bag before he grabs me. “Come on into my lair, dearie.” He swings me into an embrace, his brown eyes soft.

  I kiss him, then extricate myself.

  “Thomas! I said I have work to do.”

  He holds me at arm’s length. “Did you land a job I wasn’t aware of?”

  “No, nothing like that. Just doing some research for the Grande Dame.”

  Thomas’ smile wavers, then he gives me a resigned look. “It’s for the best anyway. I’ll probably be here half the night.”

  I kiss him goodbye and get going. I know from experience when the library says it closes at nine, they’ll kick you out at a quarter till.

  An hour and a half later, I’ve managed to print a copy of Rose’s obituary, along with the scanty news report on her unexpected death. I tap my pen on the piece of library scrap paper, until the older guy next to me clears his throat. Ooh, so sorry to interrupt your important web browsing session, which looks to consist of checking out pictures of teen models. Pervert.