Make, Take, Murder

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  It was mine.

  “Stop, please. Stop hurting me.” I managed to add, “I promise.”

  “What’s going on in there?” A voice called from out in the hallway.

  The charge nurse must have heard the commotion.

  Brenda realized her predicament. She turned loose of me immediately. She jumped back, making it to the end of my bed just as the door flew open. The light revealed Brenda standing there, shoulders hunched as she blinked and shaded her eyes.

  The newcomer rounded the corner, her figure haloed in the light. She was nobody’s fool. Quickly, she surmised that something—goodness knows what—had happened. “What’s going on? Did someone call out?”

  Brenda was unable to look the other woman straight in the eye.

  I couldn’t either. I adjusted my gown so the spots where Brenda had grabbed me wouldn’t show.

  The newcomer stood in the pie-wedge crescent of light, staring at me, then Brenda, and back again at me. Her voice became more soothing. “Mrs. Lowenstein, are you all right? Is there a problem?”

  “Yes,” I managed. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “You sure?” the woman’s voice probed as she picked up my wrist and put her fingertips on my racing pulse. “Your heartbeat is elevated. Your face is flushed.”

  She turned narrowed eyes on Brenda. “What are you doing here?”

  Brenda stared down at her hands. “Um.”

  “We’re old friends,” I suggested, tentatively at first. “Brenda came by to say hello.”

  “Really?” The expression on her face told me the floor manager wasn’t buying any of this. “Is that so?”

  A long silence followed. I debated what to do. Brenda stood frozen at the foot of my bed.

  As Shakespeare would have said, the worm had turned. She was entirely in my power.

  I could report Brenda Detweiler. No doubt she’d lose her job. As well she should. She had no right to touch me the way she had. No right to bully me while I was here in her care.

  She knew all this. Her face tightened, her mouth turned tremulous, and her hands balled up at her sides. She could tell that I was deciding her fate.

  I could get her back. I could make her pay. I could punish her.

  But I’m not like that.

  I sighed.

  Besides, I owed her one. I’d lusted after her husband, hadn’t I? So, if she owed me one, and I owed her one, then couldn’t we call it even?

  If I did rat her out to her supervisor, things would get very, very messy. Chad Detweiler’s name would surely be dragged into the fray. True, he sort of deserved it, but a little voice inside me whispered, “He can’t help the way he feels … and you can’t either.”

  So I did something rare for me. I kept my mouth shut. In that gap between accusation and evidence, the charge nurse’s inquiry fell flat. While we sat there in the empty crater of quiet, I pleated my sheet hem between my fingers. Did a good job of it, too. I’m not sure what Brenda did. I didn’t watch her. I put all my energy into pleating.

  The charge nurse told Brenda, “Get back to your station.”

  Her shoes slap-slap-slapped along the floor, moving quickly away from my bed.

  After the charge nurse left, I heard her outside my door. I couldn’t make out everything she said, but I distinctly heard, “We’ve got a problem. Brenda’s at it again.”

  The morning after my confrontation with Brenda, I wondered if I’d imagined the whole scene. If it was a pain-induced hallucinatory representation of my guilty conscience. If I’d conjured up the whole scenario.

  But my doubts ended when my best friend Mert stopped by to bring me a book on tape. (Actually she brought me a bunch of CDs. I can’t get used to calling them anything but books on tape. Old habits are hard to break.) I stretched out a hand to examine the CDs more closely.

  Mert doesn’t miss a trick. She noticed bruises on my upper arms. “Holy Macaroni. What happened to you? These weren’t here yesterday.”

  “Nothing happened to me.”

  “You call them nothing? You got yourself a perfect set of fingerprints.”

  “There was a problem. I took care of it.”

  “Which means what?” Mert scolded and scowled. “I heard that Brenda Detweiler works here. You run into her?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “I just bet,” snorted Mert.

  “It’s none of your business,” I snarled. I was tired of my friends being in my business. I was a grown woman. I didn’t need Mert educating me on what to do. Last night I’d been “saved” by the appearance of a second nurse. Try as I might, I couldn’t erase the image of a furious Brenda Detweiler. Every time I closed my eyes, I conjured up her face and its fearsome expression of anger. A shiver wiggled down my spine.

  She could have killed me. She certainly wanted to.

  Despite questions from the charge nurse, I held my tongue, nearly biting it off in the process. I’ll give her this, she was persistent. After all, she was ultimately responsible for my well being.

  “I had a bad dream,” I insisted.

  When the new nurse handed me a paper cup with a couple of Tylenol in it, I refused the painkillers. No way was I willing to relax. What if Brenda came back? Instead of sliding blissfully into nirvana, I lay in my bed watching the black hands of the clock click off minutes. When the sun brightened my room, I was still watching that stupid timepiece. Tick, tick, tick.

  Now I embellished the lie I told the charge nurse the night before. “I had a nightmare,” I told Mert. “Flailed my arms about. Hit something.”

  “That don’t give people fresh bruises shaped like fingerprints.”

  “I bruise easily.” That was true.

  Mert knew it, but she was too smart for my baloney. “The nurses here are paid to provide a service. Last I checked, that don’t include roughing up the patients. I don’t care if you ran off with Brenda’s hubby on their honeymoon. She’s got no call to be mean to you. Hurting you is just wrong.”

  Of course, I didn’t run off with her hubby on their honeymoon. I wish I could have, though. Deep in my heart, I knew that if Detweiler ever came to my door and offered to take me away, I’d step out of this life with only one hesitation—what about Anya? My daughter?

  While this fantasy was highly entertaining, I must admit that I often wondered: Would Detweiler and I have this appreciation for each other if we’d met at a different time in our lives? Perhaps we’d have noticed each other and walked on by. Was it the fact we were older, in our thirties, that gave us the ability to truly “see” each other the way we did? A large part of my desire for him was his constancy, his never-ending concern for me and mine. Even after I’d told him to go away, he worried about me and my daughter.

  And there was this almost physical, visceral connection between us. I felt this pang, right under my rib cage, whenever he was hurt or upset. He didn’t have to tell me something was wrong. I simply knew it.

  More than physical desire, he had my respect. I admired the fact he didn’t grouse to me about his marriage. He didn’t claim to be an injured party or speak poorly of Brenda. Instead, he simply told me they were working on problems, and that he owed it to her and his vows to give it his best shot.

  How can you hate someone who’s honest like that? Who doesn’t deep-six the other person just so he can look good?

  While I was reflecting on all this, all these fine qualities that Detweiler had, Mert peered down at my arm, then continued her harangue. “How dare she put a hand on you? Did you tell ’em to write her up? ’Cause you better. They’ll fire her so fast her head will spin like Chinese acrobats do them there plates. I can’t wait to see it. I want to stand here while they toss her butt right out the front door. See if I don’t.”

  Mert could fuss all she wanted, but I wasn’t changing my mind. So Brenda put a couple new bruises on my arms. Big deal. It was over. Done. Fini. I was ready to move on, but Mert wasn’t. Boy, was she mad. She was so upset, so off the wall, and so full of vinegar, she
was making me queasy.

  “Mert, stop it. Please! You know I love you like family, but I’m asking you to back off. Promise me you’ll drop it. Promise.”

  Which she did.

  But she wasn’t happy about it. Not at all.

  That was a little more than two months ago.

  Since then, I had kept my promise to Brenda. I steered clear of her husband. A couple of times Detweiler dropped by the store to see how I was doing. Strictly business, he assured me. After all, my husband’s murderer was still at large, and Detweiler considered the case still open.

  Fair enough. He was only doing his job.

  Life went on. I moved on. If staying away from Detweiler colored my life blue, well, I could manage. Blue wasn’t as bad as black. Sure, at night I mulled over what little I knew about his marriage. He and Brenda had split up at least once. They had problems. What couple didn’t?

  I admit: I did my fair share of fantasizing. And dreaming. A lot of dreaming. In the middle of the night, I would feel the warmth of his mouth on mine and wake up with a face full of covers. Ugh. My behavior, conscious or unconscious, struck me as pitiful.

  Why did I always want what I couldn’t have?

  When things really got to me, I stood in the shower and sobbed. That way Anya couldn’t hear me. When I finished, or cried myself out, I dried off, pulled up my big girl panties, and went on my way. As long as Detweiler’s path didn’t cross mine, I could cope. Growing up in an alcoholic home, I’d had a lot of practice lying to myself. Pretending the real world didn’t exist. Living on make believe and magic thinking. All that worked well right now.

  Okay … it sort of worked. I was giving it that old college try. (Says the woman who dropped out of school. Sheesh.)

  Most days, my life worked. Today, not so much. I couldn’t stop shivering. Bama, normally a cipher, was clearly upset, too. Shortly after the two detectives left, my co-worker called Dodie and told her about my gruesome discovery.

  Good old Dodie must have been rattled. I worked the sales floor as the two of them talked, but at one point, I needed to retrieve a special order from the back. I didn’t have time to eavesdrop, but I could hear Bama’s voice through the office door. The pitch was unnaturally high, one stop short of shrieking. When she took her place at the register, I thought I saw tear tracks on her face.

  That stunned me. Bama never shows any emotion but annoyance.

  “How’s Dodie?”

  There’d been a lull in the surge of shoppers. I asked for the update, hoping to process the news before another wave of customers distracted us. While Dodie’s condition was widely known through our crafting community, Bama and I still took steps to guard her privacy. Our “boss” needed all her energy to fight for her life, and while our customers were well-meaning, sometimes their interest could be more tiring than helpful.

  “She’s nearly done with her chemo and radiation. The cumulative treatments are tiring her out. The doctors are going to do more tests, and then decide what’s next. If they haven’t gotten all the cancer, they’ll schedule a laryngectomy.”

  The thought of Dodie silenced hit me hard. This was a day for being knocked low. A world without her terse wit and wisdom would be a sadder, stupider place. I felt sad just thinking of her loss, but I reminded myself this wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Not yet.

  Work was my ticket to forgetting what ailed me, so I concentrated on the tasks at hand. If Bama would just keep her mouth shut and not bring up Detweiler again, I might be able to salvage the day. We had wasted a lot of time with the detectives. Tonight was a crop night. I needed to put the final touches on our projects and toss together some nibbles. I also planned to decorate the store before our croppers arrived. This was iffy. Lights and I did not get along together. Heck, screwing bulbs into fixtures challenged me. Those itsy-bitsy fairy lights could be a real hassle. They rarely cooperated. Dodie bought these strands years ago, and they were flirting with early retirement.

  I sighed, made a pit stop, blew my runny nose, scrunched my curls, wiped on heavy-duty undereye concealer, and decided to tackle the hardest job next.

  First, I used the ladder to get down the box of lights from the shelves in the backroom. Then, I tested my first couple of strands. So far, so good. Next, I dragged the ladder to the front display window and climbed up. Even then, I stood on tippy toes to reach the upper edge of the window frame. I strung the lights across the top, secured it with thumbtacks, climbed down, and plugged it in. It refused to light. I pulled it down by carefully unhooking it from the tacks, retested it in the back, re-draped it, and swore under my breath while those dud lights hung there sadly like spent sparklers. On my fourth try, a ding-ding-ding in my brain reminded me my problem could be the socket. Which it was.

  I flipped the strand around to the opposite end so I could run it to a socket on the other side of the window. I draped the strands again. Climbed down. Pushed the plug into the wall and zap!

  All the lights went out.

  To the groans of upset customers, I made my way to the backroom and reset the breakers. Then I returned to the front of the store. This time I brought an extension cord. I plugged it into a “good” socket and watched the formerly dark fairy lights brighten into miniature sparkling Tinkerbells.

  A splattering of applause came from our customers.

  Time to tackle lights over the door. I dragged the ladder over to one side of the door. Once up on it and stretched to my limits, I managed to rest the light cord awkwardly along the doorsill. However, it hung low in the middle. That had to be fixed, tout suite. With a mouthful of thumbtacks, I climbed the ladder again and started to secure the strand. But I didn’t get far. The door minder dinged. The front door flew open. The wires jerked out of my hand. The whole string came crashing down, and I nearly did a back flip off the ladder.

  My mother-in-law Sheila sputtered up at me. “I could have tripped!”

  Crunch. Her boot heel came down on two of the lights.

  “Drat. I just got those up and working.”

  “So what? I need to talk to you.”

  “Anya okay?”

  Sheila snorted. “Of course my granddaughter is okay. If she wasn’t, I sure wouldn’t come running to you.”

  Grrrr. That Sheila. What a pip. Count on her to brighten my day. And she wasn’t done yet. Not nearly. “Grab your coat and come with me.”

  “I have a ton of work. There’s a crop tonight—”

  “Whatever. I said I need to talk to you. You must not be listening carefully.” By golly, she actually stomped her foot.

  I continued with my to-do list. “Food to prepare, and I haven’t eaten lunch.”

  “I’ll buy lunch.”

  That was a pretty good deal. The best I could possibly get. I told her I’d be right back and raced into the stockroom. “Bama, I’m off to buy food for the crop. You’ll need to wait on customers.” With that, I grabbed my jacket, an old navy-blue pea coat I found at Goodwill last week for five dollars. I wasn’t sure why they’d discounted it so heavily, but it fit, and so I snatched it up. Inside the neckline I tucked a scarf I had crocheted all by myself. Sort of. My friend Clancy was teaching me, and I was pretty awful. Instead of being shaped like a long, thin rectangle, my scarf was a wonky triangle. One end had fourteen stitches fewer than the other. But Clancy assured me that improvement was my only option. (She discounted that I should maybe quit and let sheep all over the world graze contentedly without fear.)

  Still, I liked the spot of color that my new turquoise and blue scarf added. I needed all the extra insulation I could muster because it’s hard to heat a convertible, especially an old one like mine.

  By contrast, you could fry eggs on the vents in Sheila’s Mercedes. Slipping into the passenger’s side, I flipped the heated seat switch and wiggled with anticipatory joy. Sheila slammed the car into reverse, then into drive, and capped that off by pulling out in front of a semi-tractor trailer. I saw the red Kenworth logo on the radiator grill as we squeaked
by. “What the …?” I gulped. “Are you trying to kill both of us? Because if you are, my sister in Arizona will raise Anya. Believe me, that’s not what you want.”

  Sheila stomped the brake at the next light. The motion rocked me violently back and forth.

  “Sheila? Sheila? Are you all right? Do I need to drive?”

  “All right? Do I look all right to you? Do I seem all right?” her voice ended on a screech.

  “Um, not exactly.”

  “Huh. Sometimes you are such a fool, Kiki Lowenstein.”

  I blinked hard and thought about this. If Anya was okay, what could be bothering her? That’s all Sheila cared about. Anya and …

  “Robbie? How’s Police Chief Holmes?” I squeaked out as she right turned in front of a line of oncoming cars. “He okay?”

  Thump. Bump. Thump. She ran over the curb in front of St. Louis Bread Co. (Everyone in town pronounces “Bread Co.” to rhyme with “bread dough.” Sort of cute, isn’t it?)

  Her front bumper scraped a concrete parking block. She slammed the car into park and turned the key to off. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Instead, Sheila worked her jaw this way and that, her eyes staring off in the distance.

  “Sheila? Is Robbie all right? I mean, he’s not … he’s okay, isn’t he?” The police chief suffered a heart attack several years ago. Since then, he’d had angioplasty, adhered to a better diet, and seemed the picture of health. There was one other explanation, one other reason Robbie Holmes might be unwell.

  “He didn’t get shot or anything, did he?” I sputtered. Robbie did more desk work than street work, but even so, several years ago, a gunman opened fire at a city council meeting in Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb. The violent deaths brought a new realization that elected officials and city workers were at risk in ways previously unimagined. Five people died at the scene, not including the shooter. Later, the mayor succumbed to complications from his injuries, bringing the total to six, again excluding the shooter. That was a day we all cried, a day none of us in the community would ever forget.