“Simple solutions are usually the best remedy.”
“Huh?”
Richard’s waitress smiled and refilled his coffee cup. “You seem to be trying to solve a weighty problem. People always complicate things. Most of time, the simplest solutions are the best ones.”
Richard managed a smile. “You know what? I think you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” she said and moved on to the next table.
He finished up his meal and paid the check, leaving an over-generous tip. His coffeepot philosopher had been right. Simple was best. Getting back into his car, a plan was piecing itself together.
Richard parked on Hillcrest Drive. The road was deserted. Not many used the service road to the water plant. He stared down the hill at the run down development and particularly, at Ted and Eleanor’s rental home backing onto the hillside.
From his lofty vantage point, there seemed to be no activity. Eleanor would be at work, but Ted would be there, pottering around, trying to make one of his damn fool schemes succeed. Even in Richard’s short marriage to their daughter, there’d been too many. There was the property speculation deal-buy cheap properties with no money down and give them a quick makeover for a quick profit. The upshot had been a string of expensive home inspections that proved that cheap houses are cheap for a reason. Not being daft enough to buy a termite-infested shack, Ted had moved on to want ads, selling junk that no one wanted. Their garage was still chock full of trash. Buying cars from auctions to sell had been next. The city had confiscated six jalopies after multiple complaints from the neighbors. His current fad was telemarketing. Richard had no idea how that one worked…neither did Ted, in all honesty.
What stuck in Richard’s throat was Ted’s ridiculous belief that he was as successful as Bill Gates. Other people’s successes were his successes. He put himself on the same level, never once acknowledging that he lived in near poverty, and he still had the audacity to consider himself better than Richard.
Just sitting there, Richard’s blood pressure skyrocketed. Ted made him sick. He felt sorry for Eleanor for having to be married to that, especially since he was going to kill her too. But she was just as guilty. She condoned every one of Ted’s harebrained schemes. She never said, “Ted, you’re a grown man. Act like it.” If she had, maybe her name wouldn’t be on the death warrant.
He’d gone there to study their movements, understand their habits, in the hope of seeing a chink in their defenses. But he knew them already. There was nothing to learn.
Instead, Ted and Eleanor were feeding his hatred for them. He despised their squandered lives and the way they were attempting to squander his and Michelle’s. He hated having to be the grown up on this one.
A speeding truck from the water plant roused Richard from his angry thoughts. The dashboard clock said it was after three. He’d been parked there for five hours. It was time to do what had to be done. He gunned the engine.
A week had passed since he spent the day watching Ted and Eleanor’s home, but tonight was the night he was going to do it. It was all planned, and he couldn’t afford to waste any more time. The house buying pretense wasn’t going to last much longer. The mortgage broker had a bank ready and waiting and house viewings with the realtor were a nightly affair. He’d turned down two excellent investment properties already. If he didn’t act now, he’d end up in the financial hole he was trying to avoid.
Tonight was a night off from house hunting and that was his alibi. Richard was a minority in that he loved soccer. There was a night game in San Jose and he would be going alone. The drive to San Jose would take him past Ted and Eleanor’s. He would kill them, go on to the game and return home to the shocking news. He would miss the first half, but that wouldn’t matter. The game was being broadcast on the radio. He took his ticket from his breast pocket and popped his “get out of jail free” card in the glove box. He turned up the radio, listened to the game and peeled off the freeway off-ramp to Ted and Eleanor’s.
Richard concealed his Honda in the park’s overflow parking lot and joined the trail. It was dusk and essentially the park was closed, but it was unsupervised. Ted and Eleanor walked the trail every night to reflect on another great day in paradise. This was their main form of entertainment because it was free and their supposed love of nature could camouflage that. Richard hid himself in an avenue of trees a quarter mile from the parking lot. He slipped into coveralls, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pocketed a knife.
Waiting was hell. He kept swallowing, working his tongue over the roof of his mouth, and wiping his gloved hands on his coveralls. Paranoia seeped in. Maybe he’d screwed up and given himself away. With every passing second, he expected his in-laws to round the bend and the police to swoop in. He knew it was stupid. He was letting idiotic guilt take over, but he couldn’t stop it.
But fear, paranoia and guilt evaporated in a second when Richard heard Ted and Eleanor approaching. Ted’s inane banter cut through the night and Richard’s hand tightened around the knife. He couldn’t make out what was being said. It was all noise. But it didn’t matter. He would pounce the moment they were level with his position.
They were laughing when Richard leapt out of the trees. Laughing at their good fortune at his expense, no doubt. Well, the laughing was over.
They gasped when he growled something and they spotted the knife glinting in the moonlight. How he wished their faces hadn’t been lost in the dark.
“You’ve been taking advantage of me for too long.” Richard didn’t wait for a plea for clemency. He plunged the knife into Ted’s bloated belly, swollen from sponging off others. Blood spilled over Richard’s gloved hand and he pressed the blade deeper.
Ted crumpled, sliding off the blade. Eleanor screamed. In reflex, Richard lashed out with the knife, catching Eleanor’s throat. She went down without another sound.
Richard rummaged through Ted’s pockets for his wallet. Their deaths couldn’t look motiveless. They had too look like a violent robbery carried out by a desperate junkie. Senseless tragedies like this happened every day. He jerked out Ted’s wallet from the back pocket of his pants. Ted groaned and Eleanor gurgled.
Richard raced back to his Honda with the wallet and Eleanor’s rings. He dumped them with the knife into a Ziploc he’d brought with him and stuffed his coveralls and rubber gloves into a trash bag. Peeling out of the parking lot, he headed for San Jose.
At a gas station outside San Jose, Richard filled up and dumped the trash bag in a nearby dumpster. Five miles from the gas station, he tossed the knife out the window and down a freeway embankment. Parking outside Spartan Stadium, he still had the wallet to get rid off. The rings and the wallet’s contents he would keep for now and dispose of down a storm drain on the way home. He opened up Ted’s wallet and tugged out his cash, credit cards and driver’s license.
On the drive to the game, he’d been on a high, delirious to be rid of his burden, but not anymore. The driver’s license pictured a man who wasn’t his father-in-law. Just to reinforce the calamity, the credit cards didn’t have Ted’s name on them, but instead, the name Thomas Fairfax. The rings he held in his palm weren’t Eleanor’s. He’d killed the wrong people.
“Oh God,” he murmured.
Richard stumbled into the stadium on uncertain legs, water gurgled in his ears and he couldn’t breathe. He dropped Fairfax’s empty wallet into a nearby trashcan. He handed his ticket to the yellow-jacketed ticket taker. He climbed the steep steps to his seat, not taking the free program offered.
Goals flew into the back of the net one after another. The San Jose Earthquakes were having a landmark game, but Richard couldn’t raise a smile. The murders of two strangers weighed heavily on him, but that wasn’t what was worrying him. Ted and Eleanor were still alive. That meant he had it all to do again.
The fifth goal went in and the crowd leapt to their feet. A man noticed Richard was the only one who wasn’t cheering. “LA can’t win them all, buddy.”
&n
bsp; Richard said nothing and the man dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
The game ended and Richard trudged back to his Honda. He’d left the car on a residential street and trash and recycle cans for the following morning’s pick up blocked it in. He dumped the Fairfax’s belongings in a can.
Driving home, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t use the same MO to kill Ted and Eleanor now. It was so perfect, but his bungled murders would lead to better security at the park. He couldn’t afford to be hasty, but time was against him. Ted and Eleanor would be evicted in less than a week.
How could he have been so wrong? It had sounded like them. It had looked like them. How did he kill the wrong people?
Richard’s question went unanswered. The eighteen-wheeler changed the subject. The semi’s blowout rendered the rig helpless and the trailer section plowed into the Honda’s passenger side. From the frenetic action inside the cab, the truck driver was doing a valiant job, but he lost the good fight. The eighteen-wheeler smeared Richard’s car across the freeway and drove it into the median.
Richard awakened in a hospital bed. Molasses-thick memories trickled back into his consciousness. Progress was slow. He tried to move but he only managed to move his head.
Suddenly with the intensity of a thunderbolt, he remembered and began to cry. The accident had left him a quadriplegic, but he wasn’t crying because he was incapacitated for life. He was remembering what Michelle had said to him the day after the accident.
“We’ve all decided,” she said. Standing on either side of her, Ted and Eleanor nodded and smiled. “There’s no point in buying a second home, Mom and Dad can live with us. They will look after you while I’m at work. Just think, honey, we can all be one big happy family. It’s the safest solution too. Did you know there were two murders near their home last night?”
SEWING CIRCLE
“The only Jew in town,” Morris said as Laney pulled into the church parking lot.
He pointed to the stained-glass window cut into the middle of the belfry. It looked expensive, more than a little country church could afford. Jesus smiled down from the window, arms spread in welcome and acceptance.
“The story’s about the sewing circle, not the church,” Laney said.
“Jesus as a ragpicker. Was that in the Bible?”
“You’re too cynical.”
“No, I’m just a frustrated idealist.”
Morris rubbed his stomach. He’d gone soft from years at a desk, his only exercise the occasional outdoor feature story, usually involving a free meal. He’d given up the crime beat, preferring to do the “little old lady in the holler” stuff, the cute little profile features that offended no one. Still, the fucking quilt beat was the bottom rung on the ladder he’d started climbing back down a decade ago.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Laney said. She was the staff photographer, and true to her trade, she managed to keep a perspective on things. Cautious yet upbeat, biding time, knowing her escape hatch was waiting down the road. For Morris, there was no escape hatch. The booby hatch, maybe.
“‘Fun’ is the Little League All-Stars, a Lion’s Club banquet where they give out a check the size of Texas, a quadriplegic doing a power wheelchair charity run from the mountains to the coast. But this”-he flipped his notebook toward the little Primitive Baptist church, its walls as white as pride in the morning sun-”Even my Grandma would yawn over a sewing circle story.”
“You can juice it up,” Laney said as she parked. She always drove because she had two kids and needed the mileage reimbursement. All Morris had was a cat who liked to shit in the bathtub.
“That’s what I do,” he said. “A snappy lead and some filler, then cash my checks.”
Though the checks were nothing to write home about. He’d written home about the first one, way back when he was fresh out of journalism school. Mom had responded that it was very nice and all but when was he getting a real job? Dad had no doubt muttered into his gin and turned up the sound to “Gunsmoke.” They didn’t understand that reporting was just a stepping stone to his real career, that of bestselling novelist and screenwriter for the stars.
They headed into the church alcove, Laney fidgeting with her lenses. Morris had called ahead to set up the appointment. He’d talked briefly to Faith Gordon, who apparently organized the group though she wasn’t a seamstress herself. The sewing circle met every Thursday morning, rain, shine, flood, or funeral. Threads of Hope, the group called itself. Apparently it was a chapter of a national organization, and Morris figured he’d browse the Web later to snip a few easy column inches of back story.
The alcove held a couple of collection boxes for rags. Scrawled in black marker on cardboard were the words: “Give your stuff.” Morris wondered if that same message was etched into the bottoms of the collection plates that were passed around on Sundays. Give your stuff to God, for hope, for salvation, for the needles of the little old ladies in the meeting room.
“Hello here,” came a voice from the darkened hallway. A wizened man emerged into the alcove, hunched over a push broom, his jaw crooked. He leaned against the broom handle and twisted his mouth as if chewing rocks.
“We’re from the Journal-Times,” Morris said. “We came about the sewing circle.”
One of the man’s eyes narrowed as he looked over Laney’s figure. He chewed faster. “‘M’on back,” he said, waving the broom handle to the rear of the church. He let the two of them go first, no doubt to sweep up their tracks as he watched Laney’s ever-popular rear.
The voices spilled from the small room, three or four conversations going at once. Morris let Laney make the entrance. She had a way of setting people at ease, while Morris usually set them on edge. His style was fine on the local government beat, when you wanted to keep the politicians a little paranoid, but it didn’t play well among the common folk in the Appalachian mountain community of Cross Valley.
“Hi, we’re with the paper,” Laney said. “We talked to Faith Gordon about the circle, and she invited us to come out and do a story.”
Five women were gathered around a table, in the midst of various stitches, with yarn, cloth scraps, spools of different-colored threads, and darning needles spread out in front of them.
“You ain’t gonna take my picture, are you?” one of them asked, clearly begging to be in the paper. That would probably make her day, Morris thought. The only other way she’d ever make the paper was when her obituary ran. She was probably sixty, but had the look of one who would live to be a hundred. One who knew all about life’s troubles, because she’d heard about them from neighbors.
“Only if you want,” Laney said. “But a picture makes the story better.”
“We just thought the community would be interested in the fine work you ladies are doing,” Morris said. That wasn’t so bad, even if the false cheer burned his throat like acid reflux.
“If Faith said it was okay, that’s good enough for us,” said a second woman. She was in her seventies, wrinkled around the eyes, the veins on her hands thick and purple, though her fingers were as strong as a crow’s claws. “I’m Alma.”
“Hi, Alma,” Morris said. He went from one to another, collecting their names for the record, making sure the spelling was correct. You could miss a county budget by a zero, apply the wrong charge in a police brief, and even fail to call the mayor on Arbor Day, and all these mistakes were wiped out with a Page 2 correction. But woe unto the reporter who misspelled a name in a fuzzy family feature.
Alma Potter. Reba Absher. Lillian Moretz. Daisy Eggers. The “other Alma,” Alma Moretz, no immediate relation to Lillian, though they may have been cousins five or six times removed.
“Just keep on working while I take some shots,” Laney said. She contorted with catlike grace, stooping to table level, composing award-quality photographs. The janitor stood at the door, appreciating her professional ardor. He was chewing so fast that his teeth were probably throwing off sparks behind his eager lips.
&nb
sp; “So, how did you ladies meet?” Morris smiled, just to see what it felt like.
“Me and Reba was friends, and we’d get together for a little knitting on Saturdays while our husbands went fishing together,” Alma Potter said. “They would go after rock bass, but they always came home with an empty cooler.”
“God rest your Pete’s soul,” Reba said.
“Bless you,” Alma said to her.
Morris glanced at his wristwatch. Thirty column inches to go, plus he had to knock out a sidebar on a weekend bluegrass festival. All with the Kelvinator looking over his shoulder. Kelvin Feeney, Journal-Times editor and all-around boy wonder, a guy on the come who didn’t care whose backs bricked the path to that corner office at the corporation’s flagship paper.
“So, Alma, when did you start sewing?” Morris thought of making a pun on “so” and “sew” and decided to pass.
“Oh, maybe at the age of five,” she said. Her eyes stayed focused on the tips of her fingers as she ran the needle through a scrap of yellow cotton. Laney was working the scene, twisting the lens to its longest point, zooming in to get the wrinkled glory of the old woman’s face.
“Did you learn from your mother?” Morris asked, scribbling in his notebook. Maybe he could use some of this in the Great American Novel he’d been working on since his freshman year, which had been tainted by a professor who thought Faulkner was the Second Coming and Flannery O’Connor was the Virgin Mary.
“She learnt it from me,” Daisy Eggers said, her eyes like wet bugs behind the curve of her glasses. Daisy might have been anywhere between eighty and ninety, her upper lip collapsed as if her dentures were too small. When she spoke, the grayish tip of her tongue protruded, constantly trying to keep her upper false teeth in place.
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