Deadly Housewives (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  The children beneath the stairs screamed.

  Anthea put her hands over her eyes. She counted as fast as she could, One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen…

  The children stopped screaming.

  Slowly, Anthea put her hands back to her sides. She walked down the steps, removed a glove, and tested the woman’s pulse. Lisa Ferguson was dead.

  Anthea turned and looked beneath the steps. There were no children. No sign of children.

  She looked inside the plastic boxes. There were dogs inside, folded neatly, and stiff with rigor mortis, tongues lolling.

  She painted throughout the night. Finish a new one for the show. A new one will be good. A new one new one new one new one.

  It was black against white, this painting, furious and wild strokes that cut the canvas like the blades of night. Ebony pigment splashed Anthea’s apron and the drop cloth.

  Morning dawned, red. Paul was audible in the hallway, shuffling, coughing, moving toward the bathroom. Anthea could hear his footsteps stop short, and then he called, “Anthea? You up already?”

  She said nothing. His footsteps moved closer.

  “Anthea?”

  She held the paintbrush in her teeth, studying the angry, jagged image. She heard Paul as he moved into the open doorway. And then: “Oh my God, Anthea, you’re painting in black again.”

  The paintbrush went back to the paint and then to the canvas with a whoosh, whoosh!

  “Anthea.”

  Anthea said nothing.

  “Anthea, who did you kill?”

  Anthea said nothing.

  “Anthea!” Anthea jumped and the paintbrush went flying. “You’ve killed another neighbor, haven’t you? Did you kill Lisa?”

  Anthea could smell the chemical smell again, cloying, thick, overwhelming. The floor beneath her seemed to shift. “She fell and hit her head on the wall. She wasn’t sane, Paul. Not sane at all.”

  “Damn, Anthea,” he said, his voice filled with anger, regret, resignation. “I thought it would be better here. I thought you would be better here. A new place, the pace slower, less stress.”

  Anthea stared at her black painting. Black sky at morning. Who should take warning?

  “In Chicago, you thought the man ran a white slave trade, but he just liked to party. In Atlanta, you thought the woman belonged to a sleeper cell, but she was only a Southern Baptist with dark hair!”

  I have to protect my child from danger.

  Paul put his wife to bed, saw Dylan off to school, and went to work, knowing very well that to stay home would be to arouse some kind of suspicion. Let Lisa be discovered by someone, sometime. Thank God it would appear to be another accident. But they would have to move again, get out of Richmond, find a place even smaller, out in the country perhaps, if Paul could even find work in such a location.

  Damn.

  It was getting old, Anthea’s delusions.

  As the real-estate agent hammered the For Sale sign in the yard of the Victorian and as the coroner hauled Lisa Ferguson’s week-old corpse out of the cat-and dog-filled brick rancher to the fascinated stares of the neighborhood kids, good news circulated throughout the street. George and Gene Kidd were home again, having run off and having run out of money after eight days.

  Anthea sent a note to the art gallery, apologizing for bailing on her November show, but she sent along a stirring black-on-white painting to the patrons as a thank you for their thoughtfulness.

  Acid Test

  Sara Paretsky

  I

  She hadn’t known her life could unravel so fast. Yesterday morning, her biggest worries had been the phone calls from Ruth Meecham, complaining about the noise (“Are you running a hippie commune in there, Karin?” “Yes, Ruth.” “I’m complaining to the alderman: you’re renting rooms without meeting the building code for separate entrances.” “Fine, Ruth”) and Clarence Epstein’s threats to sue her for harassment. In fact, when the cops arrived—all thirteen of them, at midnight, with enough cars to run Indy right there on the spot—she’d assumed it was because Clarence had made good on his threats.

  Hyde Park was filled with people she’d known since first grade. Ruth Meecham was one of them—they lived side by side in the same outsize houses where they’d grown up. Clarence was another. In high school, he’d just been another grade-grubbing faculty brat, but when Karin got back from her time in India, he’d turned into a power-grubbing economist.

  He and Ruth and Karin had all lost their parents relatively young, and they’d all inherited their childhood homes. Clarence Epstein had donated his family’s brick home to the Spadona Institute. Of course, their main offices were in Washington, but so many of their fellows were on the University of Chicago faculty—most in economics or business, some in law—that Spadona needed a home near the university.

  Ruth had inherited a portfolio along with her house. She lived alone in eighteen rooms, and kept them up with a meticulous round of repairs, gutter cleanings, and tuck pointings. Gardening was her acknowledged hobby, but meddling ran a close second.

  Ever since her parents’ death brought Karin back from India twenty-six years ago, Ruth had been monitoring her. She’d even noticed Karin’s pregnancy before Karin admitted it to herself, admitted that the nausea she’d suffered since coming home wasn’t due to changing back to Western food, or even grief at the loss of her elderly, remote parents, but a souvenir of the ashram in Shravasti.

  She so missed life in the ashram that she turned her parents’ mansion into a kind of co-op. Unlike Ruth, she hadn’t inherited money to keep up the house, and the co-op helped pay the bills, besides giving her a chance to practice the nonviolent activism of Shravasti. She usually had three or four tenants, usually young activists who stayed a year or two before moving on. Right now the most intense was a young environmentalist with a toddler who’d shown up at Karin’s door when the baby was only a month old. Remembering her own trials as a young single mother, Karin took her in, adopted Titus as an honorary grandchild, and tried to keep peace between young Jessica Martin’s volatile moods and the rest of the co-op.

  Jessica had made Clarence’s Spadona Institute her particular project, writing about it for the blogosphere, staging sitins, helping a group of nuns with prayer vigils, and inviting a lot of police surveillance of Karin’s home—which had increased since Clarence’s death Tuesday morning.

  Karin sat cross-legged, palms up, thumbs and forefingers forming an O, trying to chant, but she couldn’t empty her mind. She’d been arrested before, but for demonstrations against wars, or the kind of trespass that Clarence had been so exercised about. She’d never been alone in jail, though—it had always been with friends, and never for a charge like murder. She couldn’t comprehend it, even though she was choking on cigarette smoke and gagging on the other smells—stale urine, vomit, the iron stench of drying blood.

  Empty the mind. Swami Rajananpur used to say, “Karin, caught between hope and fear, the spirit is like a trapped bird frantically beating its wings, and going nowhere. Empty the mind, join yourself to the great Now.”

  “Eka leya,” she chanted softly, harmony. A woman rattled the bars of the cage and screamed for a guard. A trapped bird, let it out, let it fly away. “Eka leya, eka leya,” she kept repeating, trying to set free all the birds whirring in her head, but last night’s interview with the state’s attorney kept flying back in.

  “We know you had a major fight with Dr. Epstein two nights before his death.” The state’s attorney had been a young man, wearing navy pinstripes even at two in the morning, and trying to intimidate her by leaning over her and talking in too loud a voice.

  “We didn’t fight,” Karin had answered, trying to explain that even if Clarence was angry, she, Karin, was too committed to nonviolence to fight with him. Nor would she add that everyone in the house had been angry, because it was also against her principles to shield herself at someone else’s expense.

  Had it been only
five days ago? Clarence had come over in person—usually he’d sent a student or an intern with his complaints—and he’d seemed angrier with young Jessica Martin than with Karin herself. That wasn’t so surprising, given Jessica’s protests at the Spadona Institute. Conversation had been heated but civil until Jessica’s little boy, Titus, toddled in, moving uncertainly on his chubby legs. Clarence tried picking him up, and Jessica snatched Titus away, shouting, “Don’t touch my child. I won’t have him covered with the blood that’s on your hands.”

  Clarence had turned white with fury. “At least everyone knows what I stand for. I hate to see a child raised by a hypocrite.”

  Titus was usually a sweet and happy baby, but the angry voices made him start to howl.

  “You two know how to calm down,” Karen cried, taking Titus from Jessica. “Don’t you see, if two smart grown-ups can’t talk calmly, there’s no hope for the world?”

  “Karin, don’t tell me what to do, you overgrown hippie. You never had a sense of values and you haven’t got them now, letting anyone and everyone camp out here, and using your father’s house as a base for violating my privacy!”

  Jessica started to shout something, but Karin shook her head. “Insofar as I can, I run this house on principles of nonviolence. That means nonviolent verbal reactions, too, Jessica. If someone comes in here who’s out of control, it’s his problem, not ours. So I won’t allow you to shout at him in here or call him names. You can take it outside if you have to do it, but think how much happier you’ll be if you can stay calm.”

  “Oh, be as sanctimonious as you want, Karin, but keep this in mind while you practice your heavy breathing: if you let this flip-flopping radical stage a protest out of your father’s house one more time, I will be suing you for intent to injure me and my institute. I came over to tell you I’ve been getting legal advice on this matter and my attorney is prepared to act.”

  Karin laughed. “It’s my house, Clarence. Are you trying to say my dad would have supported your institute if he were still alive? Maybe so, but I bet your mom would hate to know what you do in there.”

  And then she’d felt ashamed, because in one second all her training, all her values, had gone out the window at the chance to score on him. Jessica had given a harsh laugh and yelled, “Right on, Karin,” which made Karin leave the room abruptly, still holding the baby. At least she’d defused the encounter—Clarence had stayed another half hour, and Karin hadn’t heard any shouting coming from the big common room where he and Jessica were talking. That was the last time she’d seen him, and she’d been shocked, even if not grief-stricken, when she learned of his death two days later.

  The state’s attorney hadn’t believed Karin. He thought the threat of Clarence’s lawsuit was enough to make her drop all her principles, figure out how to make a bomb, and how to set it off just when Clarence and his crony, the Spadona constitutional scholar Thomas Antony, were having an early-morning meeting on Tuesday.

  “I don’t know anything about explosives,” she’d protested.

  “But your daughter does, doesn’t she?”

  “Temple?” Karin had been astonished. “She’s an engineer. She knows how to calibrate things, and wire a house, and make heating and cooling systems go. She doesn’t know bombs!”

  “Anyone could have built this one.”

  Karin shook her head. “Not me. And I’m sure not Temple, either.”

  Although, really, where her daughter was concerned, Karin was sure of nothing. How could you love someone and know so little about her? She had raised Temple in the relaxed, accepting atmosphere she herself had longed for in her own rigidly controlled childhood—and Temple had grown up tidy, precise, so compulsive she changed her answering-machine message every day—as Karin realized when she’d made a frantic call to her daughter as the police were arresting her. Listening to Temple give the date, her whereabouts, when she’d return calls, Karin had moaned, “Darling, please, just answer, just answer,” and, when the beep finally came, had time only to cry out, “Temple, come as soon as you get this message—it’s urgent!” before the cops snatched the phone from her.

  II

  Temple had been in the water lab at the Probit Engineering labs when the Spadona Institute blew up. She was conducting tests on a grooved end-fitting that had come loose in a water-main break to see whether the fitting was defective or had simply been improperly installed. She was covered in waterproof gear, happily reading gauges and jotting down notes to take back to the computer, and didn’t hear the news until later.

  “Isn’t that the place where your mom leads protests?” Alvin Guthrie asked when Temple got back to her desk. “I thought I saw her on TV when Abu Ghraib hit the news, because she said that some of the Spadona fellows were training torturers, or justifying them or something.”

  “Your mom is totally amazing,” Lettice announced. “Still living the hippie life after all these years. My mother is, like, obsessed with her body, you know, getting into a size two instead of a size six. I like how your mom just enjoys life, and eats what she wants.”

  “It would be better for her health if she worked out, and didn’t eat so much dal and curry,” Temple said—although her suggestions along those lines to Karin had made her mother tilt back her head, with its rope of graying blond hair, and laugh. (She’d stroked Temple’s cheeks an instant later, because she hated cruelty in herself as much as in others, and said, “Darling, I can’t be the kind of woman you see at your health club. I do yoga every day, you know, and even if I’m twenty pounds overweight, that doesn’t stop me from making a tree vrksana.” And she flipped onto her hands, knees against her elbows, while little Titus clapped his own hands and tried to imitate her.)

  “Anyway, I don’t have enough memory in my BlackBerry to keep track of all the places Karin goes on protests,” Temple added, when Alvin went back to his original question. “I think I was born at a rally or protest of some kind.”

  She could picture her mother, giving birth in the street, wrapping Temple in a banner, and continuing to march. Temple’s earliest memories were of painting signs for protest marches, or the marches themselves. Whether the cause was peace, farmworkers, or reproductive rights, Temple’s childhood was spent waking to a house full of strangers, tiptoeing around throwing out beer cans, and scraping leftover curry into the garbage while the activists slept until noon.

  She told her coworkers this, and Lettice once again exclaimed in envy about how open Temple’s mother was. The idea of a house full of empties didn’t make them gag, the way it did Temple herself. She’d gone to engineering school as the logical culmination of an obsession both with order and with making things work properly, but Alvin and Lettice were both good engineers with a high tolerance for mess—as Temple knew, since they’d all roomed together in engineering school.

  “If you’d grown up in my family, you’d welcome your mother’s open-house outlook,” Alvin said. “My parents only entertain once a year, when they have my father’s family to Thanksgiving, and that is an evening in hell, let me tell you.”

  While Alvin and Lettice argued which one of them had the more neurotic family, Temple slipped into the hall to call her own mother. “You weren’t at the Spadona Institute today, were you?”

  Karin laughed. “You don’t think I blew it up, do you? We had a gazillion fire trucks on the street; Titus was in heaven—you know how little boys are with loud machines. But we had a teen reading circle at the house this morning, so I couldn’t go. Jessica was there with the sisters, and I hope you don’t think a group of pacifist nuns could blow up a building. Thank goodness none of them was injured—they were kneeling out front when the place went up.”

  “Temple!” Her boss, Sanford Rieff, had suddenly appeared behind her. “I hope that conversation is about the threads on Rapelec’s pipe valve, because we need a report for them by the end of the day.”

  Temple felt her cheeks grow hot and fled back to the office. While she wrote up her results, her off
ice mates kept up a running commentary on the Spadona bombing, which the news sites were covering with an orgiastic glee.

  TERRORISM STRIKES CHICAGO, and AL QAEDA IN THE HEARTLAND, they trumpeted. A few hours later came the reports that police had discovered the bodies of Clarence Epstein and Thomas Antony in the building rubble. This seemed to pin the blame securely on Al Qaeda: the two men had been heavily involved in the interim government in Iraq, Epstein as an economist, Antony giving advice on how to draft a new constitution. The FBI figured that Epstein and Antony were targets of the blast, since they often met early in the morning before any of the administrative staff arrived.

  The news reports expressed astonishment at the institute’s location, but the Herald-Star did a sidebar explaining that the University of Chicago had taken over a lot of mansions on Woodlawn and Kimbark Avenues to house some of their auxiliary activities; the Spadona Institute, from its beginnings among the economists of the Nixon era, had always had close ties to both the university and the Republican Party.

  When Sanford Rieff came in at three to see whether Temple had finished her analysis, she was glad she had Rockwell hardness charts up on her screen—it was to Lettice and Alvin that Rieff said drily, “Have you been assigned to the Spadona bombing? I didn’t realize anyone had retained Probit Engineering on that case yet. Temple, are you finished? And, Alvin, don’t we have anything productive for you to do? You can go assist them in the crash lab.”

  The bombing was a three-day wonder. What ever clues the FBI’s forensics team had picked up in the building, they were keeping as secret as possible, although they did concede it wasn’t a typical bomb—something more homemade, which made people think about Oklahoma City. On Thursday, Temple, egged on by Alvin and Lettice, went down to see what Karin knew, and to inspect as much of the damage as the police barricades allowed.