by Joan Boswell
What she did know was that Mr. Harrington, who had always been so deliciously aloof, so adorably out of reach, had suddenly become gracious. Not just friendly, but—yes, it had to be acknowledged—doting.
Miss Culpepper was no stranger to the doting male. In her youth, she had been courted by any number of men who professed to find her charming but were actually, she was almost certain, attracted to the Culpepper family fortune. Her father possessed no doubts of this whatsoever. “There’s no harm in it, Willie,” he’d say to her over a bowl of steamed cauliflower—Mr. Culpepper was a vegetarian every Tuesday and Friday, and every other Wednesday ate only foods that were white. “Wealthy people have always traded on their money when forming a new alliance. Just be sure you get something worthwhile in return, hmm?”
But she could think of nothing sufficiently worthwhile to justify marrying any of the men who’d come crawling. She much preferred a man who wouldn’t speak to her at all. The challenge of winning him over! The romance of never losing hope! Oh dear yes. Much better than flowers from a beaming boy in a too-new suit.
Miss Culpepper had had her share of passions over the years, but no man had excited her imagination the way Gilbert Harrington had, the day he came to be interviewed for the position of Librarian. His suit was decidedly not new, and he most definitely did not beam. If he looked at her at all, it was with an expression of the utmost condescension. So confident, even arrogant! In spite of that appalling resume—it was quite obvious that he did not possess any quality fit for a legitimate librarian, save a love of fine binding—he truly believed himself superior in his field.
He may, for all she knew, have considered himself physically attractive also, something she could not say was the case. He looked something like a penguin with his large belly and short legs. Such a man should realize, surely, the detrimental aspect of perfect posture and instead develop a winning smile or perhaps a knack for telling jokes. Mr. Harrington instead courted the comparison with old-fashioned suits tailored to his form and favoured a still expression on his slightly raised face—a face whose features were overlarge, and whose eyes and lips protruded quite alarmingly—a face that was set, furthermore, over an impossibly small jaw. No, nobody could possibly say that Mr. Harrington was attractive.
What could be said nicely about Mr. Harrington, she did say: he was unique! His faith in himself was admirable, his contempt for others simply adorable. So many women threw their lives away on bad men, thinking what a statement it would be if they could inspire such a man to love. Who then could find fault with Wilhemina Culpepper for longing to find out whether such a man as this could be inspired to love her?
And yet, with so much to gain, and so few other opportunities likely to come his way, he had resisted her gentle hints and discreet invitations for months. Until a few days ago, when he had greeted her with the news that dear Bertram had had another go at the books in the library and suggested that perhaps he could accommodate the dogs with a shelf just for them? Lacking the wit to close her open mouth, she’d had to raise a hand to her quivering lips. But it hadn’t ended there. The very next morning he’d asked whether there was anything he could do to help prepare Culpepper Manor for its annual fête. He, who despised social occasions and had openly scoffed at the tradition her grandfather had borrowed from English gentry—the tradition her own father had maintained to such great effect in the community. He had expressed concern for her health when she shuddered in response. And then—oh, horrible!—he asked her whether she had allowed herself to catch a cold, walking the dogs so early each morning.
At least he stopped short of offering to walk them himself.
But the worst was yet to come. This morning, unprompted, he had remembered her birthday with a friendly greeting and an impeccably wrapped gift. It was a stole, which he told her he hoped she would wear on those early morning walks and—she could barely bring herself to acknowledge the fact—he had remembered her allergy to all things woollen. He had selected a garment fashioned from synthetic mohair.
Something had to be done. But what? She was under no illusions about the library her forebears had amassed. She had had it valued on taking over the estate and learned that her father’s works were of the most significant interest. Judging by the tone of the report she’d received, this did not represent high praise. She had herself always questioned the merit of the books chosen to grace those lovely mahogany shelves and strongly suspected that more than a few had been selected for their size, or the colour of their binding, not to mention their affordability. It was not rare for her to catch her father in the act of snatching a volume out of the leavings from the local church rummage sale.
Still, the library had been a source of family pride for generations, and its maintenance was fully guaranteed through the generosity of the estate. The librarians to whom her father and grandfather and great-grandfather had offered the position held it as a sacred trust; none had ever been fired. She could not even imagine how to go about telling Mr. Harrington to leave. Had she not heard that in these modern times there was some legal requirement to give proper notice? She did not know what might constitute “proper”, but feared it would involve additional weeks spent enduring the attentions of a fish-headed penguin-man. Surely no one could expect her to live under such conditions.
Perhaps she could take a trip...but then what would become of her precious pups? So few hotels of quality were enlightened enough to welcome dogs of their size, and it would be impossible to leave them behind.
It would be much better, really, if Mr. Harrington could be persuaded to leave. Not that anything was likely to woo him or his prodigious appetite from his career and accommodation at Culpepper Manor.
Miss Culpepper stopped her pacing, her hands reaching out from habit to the heads of her ravenous dogs, as she considered the possibilities of Mr. Harrington’s appetite...
Mr. Harrington looked into his reflection and saw a man who was torn between satisfaction and fury. Damn her! And damn that shop! And damn all mushrooms, while he was at it. One hand crept instinctively to his belly and caressed it, as if to further worship the delectable soup that lay comfortably within.
His plan had failed. Miss Culpepper had not worn his birthday tribute long enough to break out in the painful hives that would send her into a bath softened with baking soda, from whence her librarian could dispatch her by drowning. Drowning would have been so simple, and it appeared that hives were the only justification for the trouble it would take for her to bathe. She had, it was true, slipped the shawl around her shoulders, but not before noting with pleased surprise that it was woven from artificial mohair. Artificial! The most important word on the label! The one thing he ought to have noticed! It was not as though the price could have given it away. The damned rag had cost a fortune, if a slightly smaller one than that required by the ones on the next table. Those had been absolutely unacceptable. He supposed, now, that they were the real thing. His nostrils flared, and he gripped the sides of the marble sink in his private ensuite bath.
And now, not only did he still have to endure the companionship of dogs, children, and Miss Culpepper—she had grown even more determined to please him. Oh yes, there was no mistaking it. It was not just the way she had been haunting his steps, looking nervously desperate when he turned and saw her. It was much worse than that.
Today, she had cooked for him. Told the chef to take the day off and made his lunch with her own beady hands. Not just any dish, but a dish he favoured above all others: mushroom soup. And not just any mushroom soup, either. She had, on one of those infernal morning walks through the woods at the back of the estate, discovered a cache of false morels, whose flavour, in his opinion, surpassed that of all fungi. True, false morels could sometimes be poisonous. But properly cooked in a well-ventilated room, the poison within them could be driven off to leave the most marvellous treat for one’s taste buds. He smacked his large lips at the memory, before pursing them again in revulsion at Miss Culpepper’
s audacity.
He had to think of another way to dispose of the woman—a more straightforward way, if possible. He glared at his reflection and thought hard.
Miss Culpepper was decidedly put out. She had had a perfectly brilliant idea to dispense with the problem of Mr. Harrington. Early on, it seemed as though it would go without a hitch. Even though he’d caught her preparing what was meant to be his last meal during a highly irregular visit to the kitchen for what he termed a mid-afternoon snack, and even though he had, to her great surprise, immediately recognized that she had harvested possibly poisonous false morels rather than the true version, he had not shown the slightest hesitation to consume the fruit of her efforts. All that work, and the man was still perfectly healthy. As he ate, he had informed her—with pleasure, if not with the awareness that a cleverer man might have employed—that the downfall of her plan was the technique she had employed in preparing the dish. Had she served the dreadful things raw in a salad, he would not now be here annoying her with inane suggestions regarding the fête.
Frustrated, Wilhemina kicked open the door of the garden shed. In the next instant, three things happened. She reached down to rub her sore foot, a cement pot sailed from the top of the door through the air where her head had been a moment previously, and a wonderful idea unfolded inside her precise, focused mind.
Mr. Harrington, crouched on the ground near the switches for the Culpepper Estate’s garden railroad, felt a heat spread across his cheeks not prompted by the soaring temperatures of this July afternoon.
First, Miss Culpepper had refused to retain an appropriate position under the cement pot he had propped up over the door of her beloved retreat, the shed where he knew she enjoyed collecting spiders for her disgusting dogs to chase and crush. Next, she had taken him up on his offer to assist with the hateful fête, an offer he had extended only to retain her blind trust.
And now, after granting him time to repair the garden railway for the fête, a task that would normally be a mixed pleasure to him—he loved trains, but hated sharing them, particularly with the rambunctious children for whose entertainment the railway had been maintained—he found that she had already resolved the one problem whose solution had eluded him for months.
She had fixed the short in the branch line.
Mr. Harrington rose to his feet, and glared up at the front of the house where Miss Culpepper sat on her bedroom’s balcony, gently swaying back and forth on the old swing that hung there. Noticing that her eyes were trained upon him, he forced a smile and waved, and while executing the motion shifted his own gaze to the wooden support structure for the balcony on which she so often took the early morning air. His smile became genuine. Mr. Harrington had a new idea, and this time, it was one that could not possibly fail.
“Waving at me, and with such familiarity! The nerve!” At dusk of the day her cleverest plan yet had become a spectacular failure, Wilhemina Culpepper was still livid. She sat at the mirror of her dressing table and brushed her heavy hair with fierce strokes, having read in her youth that this technique would evenly distribute the natural oils in which she took such pride.
She had been very much looking forward to watching Mr. Harrington electrocute himself during branch line repairs, after she had tangled some of the wires and placed others nearer the water of the creek than strictly advisable. She had not done this without referring to her own father’s work on electricity and felt particularly wounded on that account, as though her late parent had let her down in her hour of need.
There seemed so few options remaining to her. She could not shoot the man. Indeed, she did not possess a gun, all firearms having been removed from the house after that unfortunate incident between her father and the milk delivery man. There was a ceremonial sword hanging on the wall of Father’s study, but she suspected that using it would make a terrible mess. It also lacked something of the finesse she would require if she were to catch Mr. Harrington by surprise. Her dear dogs were too kind to do the job for her. Even if they were not, she suspected that the city to which she paid taxes might have something to say that neither she nor they would enjoy hearing about dogs who killed a human.
There was no objection when they killed other things, of course. And sometimes those other things were dangerous in themselves...
Miss Culpepper put her hairbrush down and moved to the wardrobe where she kept her most precious items. It seemed that a call to Mr. Harrington’s room was in order.
“If this does not work,” Mr. Harrington muttered as he dragged his heavy form up an alarmingly rotten ladder outside the house in the dead of night, “I might have to give notice after all. The way she stared at me tonight when she asked me to pick up supplies for the fête in the morning—she seems more infatuated with me now than ever before. It is without question enough to make a grown man scream in terror.”
In fact, he had been more inclined to scream at the sight of his employer, her hair slick with a fresh layer of whatever salad dressing she saw fit to pour over it, than he had at the leggy spider crossing his starkly white bedspread half an hour previously. If only Miss Culpepper were so easy to kill.
And so she might be after all, Mr. Harrington told himself, squeezing a pair of pliers around a rusty bolt.
Miss Culpepper looked desolate as she stepped onto her balcony the next morning, a heavily bound copy of War and Peace in her hand. The innocent looking, yet highly venomous spider she had tossed into Mr. Harrington’s bedroom seemed not to have done him any harm.
“Perhaps it was hurt in the landing,” she reflected. “Or perhaps it didn’t care to bite such a poor specimen.”
She watched the man’s car pull out of the driveway and pass slowly in front of the house. He was watching her again, his expression hungry, as though he could not bear to be out of her presence for half the time it would take to pick up paper plates and party streamers. She tossed her book onto the porch swing and sank, with her weight on her elbows, onto the balcony railing. Even the sound of wood snapping could not distract her from her despair, though the enormous crash as her book, the swing, and the floorboards immediately beneath it dropped down to the main floor porch did strike her as unusual.
Glancing at the carnage, she made a mental note to call a carpenter, and possibly an exterminator. Then she looked back over the railing to lock eyes with her librarian, who had stopped his car halfway into the road and was staring intently at her upright figure. He didn’t even notice the cement truck barrelling out of her neighbour’s construction site.
What an attractive man the funeral director is, Miss Culpepper thought admiringly, as she signed the contract for Mr. Harrington’s burial arrangements. So intent on his work, so warmly impersonal, so completely unaware of me as anything but a grieving source of income. I must invite him for dinner some time.
She always had loved the thrill of the chase.
Mary Keenan is a writer and editor whose short stories have appeared in Storyteller magazine, The Ladies’ Killing Circle anthology Fit To Die, Crime Writers of Canada’s holiday collection Blood on the Holly and the first KnitL anthology, published by Three Rivers Press. When she is not writing, she is updating her procrastination diary at www.marykeenan.com.
Cobwebs
Lorie Lee Steiner
Brookfield is a lovely place, downright charming if you go in for that “old folks come with wheels” environment. I do not. I would prefer to use the same pair of legs the good lord gave me, though lately I’m afraid the bones have exceeded their best before date. Spongy is the best way to describe them, like walking on stilts made of angel food cake. The skin down there, too, has changed, become curiously patterned with cobwebs the colour of ink stains. Sometimes at night, when it’s dark, and still, and that confounded tingling starts, I take comfort in the thought that it’s only the Daddy Long Legs from the corner above my bed, come down to weave blue silk across my shins. It’s better than being alone.
My stepsister put me here. Danella. She’s young
er by fourteen months, big as a house, and dumb as a post. Her only claim to fame was a lucky ticket on the Irish Sweepstakes back in the seventies. She and that rat-faced husband of hers lived high on the hog for a while after she won, but when the money ran out, he did too, and poor Danella ended up crying the blues on my doorstep. I always was a sucker for a sob story, so I let her in. Thirty-two years ago this week, and damned if she’s not still there in Holly Cottage, drinking tea from my Royal Albert and rocking on the front porch like she owns the place. (Must make a note to change the will.)
I was perfectly content hobbling around my pretty little stone house—in spite of Danella’s presence. Sure, the going was getting slow, but I had Shorty, my orange Tabby, to keep me company and, besides, once you hit eighty, there’s no rush. Then one day I came home from the fruit market and, out of the blue, everything changed.
Danella was on the front porch, shoe-horned into her cushy rocking chair, when the bus dropped me off. She watched me struggling up the walk with a basket of fresh peaches in one hand and my cane in the other and didn’t lift a pudgy finger. When I finally did reach the veranda, I found her blubbering into my favourite handkerchief; the lacy turquoise one with daisies and buttercups embroidered on the corners.
“Somebody die?” I asked her. It’s a perfectly valid question at our age. Her Plumpness ignored it and started in on me instead.
“Oh, Hilda, just look at you, dear, hardly able to make it up the sidewalk. It pains me to even watch. You’re going to need a wheelchair before long, I’m afraid. And I hope you’re not expecting me to push you. I’m not a strong woman, you know.”