Short stories collection

by Fletcher Flora

  I must admit that I greatly admired Connie during this trying period. She never pushed; she never nagged; she never even mentioned, not once, Grandfather’s distressing longevity. She left me strictly to my lonely thoughts regarding that critical matter, and it was only now and then that I caught her looking at me with a wary watchful expression in her ancient Florentine eyes. Otherwise, we played tennis, we lay in the sun, we took walks, we drank gin and tonic, we trifled when we chose. It was, all in all, a pleasant summer, although dull in spots.

  Even the rains, when they came, were rather pleasant. They broke the heat and cleared the mind and stimulated the imagination. Some days of that third July week broke bright and clear, but always in the morning the thunderheads would begin to pile up in the southwest and in the afternoon they would come boiling over with the wind roaring and the thunder crashing and great jagged bolts of lightning splitting the sky.

  Connie responded intensely to these gaudy displays of elemental pyrotechnics. She would stand or sit very erect, her nostrils flaring, her eyes dilated and shining, and I could see her small alert breasts rise and fall in a cadence of contained excitement. We always watched from the front veranda of the house. Sometimes the rain blew in and wet us down. That’s where we were one afternoon when the week had nearly passed, and the rains with the week. The clouds had just rolled over, and the deluge had stopped. The sun, breaking through scattered remnants, transformed the shadowed earth to an Eden of shimmering green and gold.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Connie said.

  “Now?” I said.

  “Yes, now.”

  “We’ll get our shoes wet.”

  “We’ll take our shoes off.”

  She was wearing loafers on bare feet, and she kicked the loafers off and went down off the veranda and across the yard. I took oft my tennis shoes and socks and followed. She was walking swiftly, and she was around the house and past the garages and onto the path beyond them before I caught up.

  She took my hand and held it tightly, as if she were trying by the pressure to transmit a message, and we walked on up the slope and over the crest and down the slope on the other side. Skirting the Happy Hunting Ground, we walked on through thicker trees and denser growth until we came to the far side of the estate where a narrow creek ran between deep banks. Ordinarily, the creek bed carried little water, but the heavy rains had drained into it from the slopes, and now it was nearly full.

  We walked along the creek until we reached a place where the banks were lower and the water spread and became shallower and rushed in a rapids over worn rocks. A chain of large stepping stones had been strung across the creekbed here, but now they were submerged, and the water boiled around them. We sat down together on the trunk of a fallen tree.

  “How could we do it?” I said.

  “It would be easy.” She picked up my thoughts as if there had been a pause of only minutes instead of weeks in our conversation. “He’s an old man. It’s time for him to die. Who would suspect?”

  “It would have to be done just so. At best, it would be a terrible risk.”

  “Hardly any risk at all. I have a plan.”

  “I confess that I feel a certain reluctance, quite aside from the risk, to do Grandfather in. It’s true, however, that his unreasonable tenacity incites it.”

  “There would be no pain, no violence. In the end, he wouldn’t even know. He would simply die in his sleep.”

  “Neat enough, if it could be arranged. How could it?”

  “Surely you have thought of it a hundred times yourself, Buster. You couldn’t have helped yourself.”

  “The nightcap?”

  “You see? I knew you’d thought of it.”

  The reference was to an old habit and a minor family ritual. The old quack who had been Grandfather’s doctor for ages had recommended years ago that he take a nightcap of bourbon and water every night upon retiring. This was supposed to calm his nerves, pep up his circulation, and act upon him generally as a salubrious tonic. Grandfather was by no means addicted to the bottle, but his nightcap became a habit entrenched, and a minor ritual, as I said, developed around it.

  I don’t know what adjustments were made when I was not in the house, but when I was there I was expected at Grandfather’s bedtime to make the highball and deliver it to him in his room, where I usually found him waiting on the edge of his bed in his nightgown. I made the highball in the kitchen from 100 proof stuff that he kept tucked away in the cabinet for his private consumption.

  In the beginning, the highball had been a mild thing, mostly water; but it grew stronger as time passed, and currently it was quite the other way round, mostly bourbon in a water tumbler with one small ice cube and a quick pass under the tap. It was enough, indeed, to blow the top off an ordinary man’s head, but Grandfather had approached it slowly for a long time, and I suppose he had sort of immunized himself to it by small and regular increases of the dosage, as Mithridates is said to have done with poisons.

  “The thought has crossed my mind,” I said. “As you remarked, it affords altogether such a beautiful opportunity that I could hardly fail being tempted.”

  “Why have you never done it?”

  “Poison is so treacherous. It has a way of getting found in the innards.”

  “Only if there’s an autopsy.”

  “Poison has a nasty way of leaving various signs that arouse suspicions and make autopsies inevitable.”

  “Not always. Buster, you simply haven’t taken the trouble to inform yourself sufficiently, that’s all.”

  “Perhaps you would care to inform me sufficiently now.”

  “I’d be delighted. You simply lace his nightcap with chloral hydrate. In brief, you slip him a gigantic Mickey Finn. A large dose would be fatal, I assure you, and it would have definite advantages from our point of view. He would merely pass out and die without recovering consciousness, which would have the virtue of making him appear to have died in his sleep—surely not an uncommon occurrence with men so old. Moreover, besides being merciful, the drug disappears from the system quickly and is extremely difficult to detect.”

  “That last point is particularly important. You are well informed, aren’t you, darling? I’m happy, I must say, that you aren’t devising a scheme for murdering me. Or are you?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Buster. How could I dream for an instant of murdering someone I’ve been so friendly with? You must think I’m a perfect monster.”

  “Haven’t you been friendly with Grandfather?”

  “That’s different. Grandfather and I have hardly been friendly in the same way.”

  “I should hope not. Returning to your plan, however, it seems to me that it would be difficult, as well as risky, to acquire a lethal dose of chloral hydrate.”

  “You needn’t concern yourself with that. My contacts in Chicago are rather diversified, to say the least. I’m always getting interested in all sorts of odd people who have access to lots of things. I happen to have some chloral hydrate in my possession.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Never mind that. If you decide sensibly to put it in Grandfather’s nightcap, I’ll get it for you at once.”

  “Your service is excellent, darling. I’ll have to give you that.”

  “I try to be helpful.”

  “Your plan, so far as I can see, is flawless. Simple and direct. No fancy complications.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Darling, it would be so easy.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “I’ve got mud between my toes.”

  * * *

  When the time came, it wasn’t. Easy, that is.

  We were in the library, Grandfather and Connie and I. Grandfather was dozing in his chair. Connie was listening to muted jazz. I was playing solitaire. The library clock struck ten, and Grandfather stood up.r />
  “I’ll say good night, children,” he said. “Buster, my boy, will you bring my nightcap?”

  He pranced out. I looked at Connie, and Connie looked at me. Turning away, I went out to the kitchen and made Grandfather’s nightcap according to recipe. When I turned around, Connie was in the doorway watching me. We stood there looking at each other for a long minute. She was excited. She was filled with the strange, contained excitement she had felt on the veranda when the thunderheads rolled over.

  “Now?” she said.

  I didn’t answer. Carrying the nightcap, I went upstairs to Grandfather’s room.

  When I came down, Connie had disappeared.

  * * *

  The next day there was another thunderstorm. It came early in the afternoon, just after lunch. Grandfather had withdrawn to the library to put in his daily labor on the county history, and I was on the veranda to watch the black roistering masses roll overhead to the deafening detonations of the thunder and the forked flashes of lightning and the great rush of wind-blown rain.

  The storm, this day, was brief. Fifteen minutes after the rain began it was all over. I kept waiting for Connie to join me on the veranda, but she never did. Not, that is, while the storm lasted.

  She came out afterward and down the steps into the yard. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and a white cotton blouse, and her feet were bare. She didn’t look at me or speak, and I went over to the steps and down into the yard after her.

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “Upstairs in my room,” she said.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Poor boy. Waiting is a tedious business, isn’t it? One gets so sick of it after a while.”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “Not at all. A little disappointed in you, perhaps. It is perfectly clear that nothing extraordinary can be expected of you.”

  “You must give me a little more time, that’s all.”

  “Take all the time you want. Take forever.”

  She had turned to face me, and now she turned away again and started across the yard. I followed a few steps behind.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t care to have you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Life is dull enough around here at best. You’d only make it worse.”

  “You never seemed to find me so dull before.”

  “I thought you were better than nothing, darling. Now I’m not so sure.”

  I stopped where I was and watched her go. She had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and long golden legs. For a moment, watching her, I had a hard and hurting sense of intolerable loss. Then I turned back to the house and went inside and upstairs to my room.

  I opened my windows and lay down on the bed, and the cool wet air blew in across me. I could hear the dripping of rain and the chittering of birds and the rustling of leaves in what was left of the wind. After a while I sank into a strange sort of lassitude, a passive submission to fragmentary dreams between waking and sleeping, and then, some time later, I went to sleep soundly and slept through the afternoon, and when I woke it was after five o’clock. I washed my face and went downstairs and found Grandfather, after a brief search, standing behind the house looking off in the direction of the slope beyond the garages.

  “There you are, Buster,” he said. “I’ve hardly set eyes on you all day long. Where have you been keeping yourself, my boy?”

  “I went upstairs after lunch and fell asleep. I slept longer than I intended.”

  “Where’s Connie?”

  “She went for a walk right after the storm. Isn’t she back yet?”

  “Can’t find her. Can’t find her anywhere.”

  “Maybe she’s in her room.”

  “Knocked. Got no answer.”

  “Well, she wasn’t in a very good humor. Probably she’s off sitting somewhere until she recovers. She’ll be along in good time.”

  “I walked to the cemetery. Didn’t see her along the way.”

  “Perhaps she’s over by the creek.”

  “I’m a bit concerned, my boy. Can’t deny it. She may have hurt herself. Sprained an ankle or something. May be out there waiting for help.”

  “If it will make you feel better, Grandfather, I’ll go look for her.”

  “Do that, my boy. Relieve your old grandfather’s anxiety.”

  “All right. I’m sure I’ll be back with her shortly, if she doesn’t get back ahead of me.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ll go in and change my shoes. Soaking wet. Hurry back, my boy.”

  He turned toward the house, and I walked up the slope and over the crest and down into the hollow and past the cemetery and on through grass among the trees toward the creek. The sky had cleared, and the sun was out, and the light of the sun lanced through the trees. The earth was scrubbed and rinsed and sparkling clean. I could hear ahead of me the rushing sound of the swollen creek. My canvas shoes were soon soaked. At the creek’s bank I turned toward the rapids… .

  * * *

  That was the last day of the thunderstorms. The next morning broke clear, and the clouds never formed, and every day thereafter for a long time was bright and dry.

  It was like that over in the hollow, bright and dry and still in sunshine and shade, the day we buried Connie.

  The funeral service was private. Only a handful of people were there. Grandfather and I were the only mourners, and after the sad and definitive ceremony was finished beside the grave, we walked back alone to the house. The house without Connie seemed vast and empty and filled with whispered echoes. I had not yet got used to her being gone, and I truly missed her, although I knew my loneliness wouldn’t last. Add to $35,000,000 an equal amount, and you have what may be called an antidote to lasting sorrow.

  In the house I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and tried to think of certain things in order to avoid thinking of certain others. This was not very successful, and I began to wish that Connie were there to distract me, which was no more at most than half an ambivalence.

  So I got up and went downstairs again after an hour or so, and there was Grandfather in the library with a visitor. The visitor was a short thin man with pale limp hair, a furrowed face, and a vaguely deferential manner. I had met him once before, which was once too often, and I knew him already as well as I ever wanted to. His name was Drake, and he was a captain of county detectives.

  “There you are, my boy,” Grandfather said. “Come in, come in.”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” I said.

  “No intrusion. None at all. I was just about to send for you. In fact, Captain Drake wants to talk with you.”

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “I’ve already told Captain Drake all I know.”

  “I know you have, my boy. I know that well enough. He merely wants to clarify some points and get his report in order. Isn’t that so, Captain?”

  “That’s so,” Drake said. “I’m sorry to intrude again on a day so sad as this one. Won’t you please come in and sit down, Mr. Canning? This will take only a few minutes.”

  I went in and sat down on the edge of a chair.

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d go over your account again. Just one more time.”

  “Why? I’ve already gone over it and over it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. If you will just indulge me, please.”

  “Well, as I’ve said, it was the day of the last thunderstorm. When the storm was over, Connie went out for a walk. I offered to go along, but she didn’t want me to. I guess she just wanted to be alone. Anyhow, I went upstairs and took a nap. When I woke up, it was late, and Connie wasn’t back, and Grandfather was worried. So I went out to look for her.

  “I walked to the creek and along the creek to the place we’ve always called the riffles. There the water spreads
out and becomes shallow and flows through a lot of rocks. Stepping stones have been placed across the bed, and Connie was there in the water, face down, and her body had lodged between two of the stepping stones. She was barefooted, wearing shorts, and I suppose she’d tried to wade the creek. It wasn’t very deep there, even after all the rains, but the current was very swift, and it must have swept her feet out from under her. She struck her head on a boulder and drowned, that’s all. I can’t tell you any more.”

  He was leaning forward in his chair in a posture of intent listening, but his eyes were abstracted, remote, and he seemed to be hearing, if he heard anything, some private voice subliminal to all but him. Aware after a moment that I had finished, he sighed and stirred.

  “Quite so. The story as before. Well, it’s reasonable. It’s even possible. There’s only one thing that disturbs me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She struck her head, you say, and she must have done so. But still it’s puzzling. There was only one contusion on her head, and it was high up, near the crown. It could have caused unconsciousness, certainly, but it’s difficult, all factors considered, to see how it could have been acquired in falling. It looks very much, in fact, as if she’d been struck deliberately by a rock in someone’s hand.”

  He fell silent and seemed to be listening again to his private subliminal voice. Then he added, almost casually, “It would help if the blow had killed her—if she had been dead when she entered the water, I mean. But that’s no good. There was water in her lungs.”

  “You’re distorting things,” I said. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I’ve been told that it’s a fault of mine.” He turned abruptly to Grandfather. “The young lady who drowned was not your natural granddaughter, I understand. Would you mind telling me if she was one of your heirs?”

  “She was. She was to share equally with my other heir.”

  “And the other heir is young Mr. Canning here?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And now he will become your sole heir. Is that correct?”

  Grandfather rose from his chair, and the white fuzz seemed to bristle on his head. The old boy, when he chose, could be as hard as diamond and as cold as ice.