Murder on Memory Lake

by J. D. Griffo

  Holding up his pistol, Marion replied, “You know what this is?”

  “Looks to me like it’s a Pfannl Erika pistol made in Germany right after World War I,” Joyce noted. “Typically considered a ladies’ gun, but the handle is different than most—was it specially made?”

  Smiling as if he and Joyce were discussing dog breeds and not mass-produced weapons of destruction, Marion confirmed Joyce’s suspicions. “Mother didn’t like the way it looked, it reminded her of the guns the soldiers used back home, so she had them redesign it with an alabaster finish.”

  “It’s quite beautiful,” Joyce added.

  “You shot me with your mother’s lady gun?” Denise bellowed. “You couldn’t even shoot me with a real man’s gun?”

  “Do you want me to shoot you again?”

  “Don’t some of those models only carry four bullets?” Joyce asked as innocently as possible. “You’ve already used two. You might want to save the rest, you know, for an emergency.”

  Which was exactly what Marion was about to be faced with. While he and Joyce were reminiscing about the good old days of German gun manufacturing, Jinx was slowly loosening the ropes around Alberta’s hands and feet. By the time their conversation was over, Alberta was freed. She and Jinx were about to tackle Marion from behind, but he must have seen them out of the corner of his eye just before they were going to throw themselves onto his back because he whipped around and shot blindly. A framed picture of snow-covered mountains on the far wall fell to the floor, the glass shattering into tiny pieces.

  “And that makes three,” Helen said. “Looks like you only have one more bullet to go.”

  “You should use it on yourself !” Denise shrieked as she pressed down harder on her thigh trying to lessen the flow of blood.

  “Will you just give the forsennato the money so he’ll get out of here?” Helen suggested as she ran over to Denise to help apply more pressure to her bleeding wound. “This one needs to get to a hospital.”

  Looking around the room frantically, Marion was searching for a way out. From his point of view he had only one. “You wanted your freedom, Alberta. You’re coming with me.”

  “No!” Jinx cried.

  Grabbing her granddaughter by the shoulders, Alberta said, “Lovey, I’m going to be fine.”

  “But he’s crazy,” Jinx whispered.

  Hiding her fear, Alberta smiled. “So are we . . . a little bit anyway. And look how far it’s taken us.”

  “But it has to take us even farther,” Jinx sobbed. “We’ve only just begun.”

  Refusing to cry in front of her granddaughter, Alberta swallowed hard and bit her lip. “In bocca al lupo.”

  “Crepi il lupo.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” Alberta said. “I’m going to be just fine.”

  Unable to control her tears, Jinx hugged Alberta and over her grandmother’s shoulder, looked directly at their captor. “You hurt my grandmother and I swear to God I’ll hunt you down and kill you myself.”

  A bit thrown by the ferocity in Jinx’s voice, Marion took a moment to reply. “After I get the money I’ve been promised, none of you will ever see me again. Now give me your cell phones.”

  “I don’t have mine with me,” Jinx declared.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “I’m wearing a wet suit, where do you think I’m going to hide it?”

  Helen took out her phone from her jacket and slid it toward Marion as Joyce did the same

  “And you, Denise?”

  “I don’t know where it is, I must have dropped it . . . when you shot me!”

  His eyes darted around the room in search of her cell phone and, even though the room was sparsely furnished, he couldn’t find it. Not wanting to waste any more time, he slammed the heel of his shoe into the two cell phones on the floor, shattering them into several pieces, and decided to give them one last warning. “If I hear sirens or see a police car, I’ll use this last bullet on Alberta. Now, let’s go.”

  Marion ushered Joyce and then Alberta out of the cabin and once outside closed the door behind him. He saw a thick branch on the ground a few feet from the door and jammed it into the door handle. It wouldn’t prevent the women from leaving, but it would make their escape that much slower.

  He followed Joyce to her Mercedes, and just as she was lifting the trunk, he grabbed it with his free hand and said, “If this is a trick, I’ll kill your sister-in-law right in front of you.”

  Raising her hands in surrender, Joyce said, “No tricks, just cold hard cash.”

  She opened the trunk and revealed the briefcase that she had brought to the office a few days earlier. She took it out, closed the trunk, and placed the briefcase on top of the car to open it. When Marion saw the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, his eyes glazed over. He was so close to putting this whole nightmare behind him. All he needed to do was get out of town and he could start his life over again. The only thing he needed was a chauffeur.

  “My car is right over there,” Marion said, pointing to the black Volkswagen Passat parked a few feet away. It wasn’t easily seen because the cluster of trees and bushes on either side created the perfect camouflage. Marion aimed his gun from Alberta to the car and ordered, “The keys are in the ignition. Get in the car and drive.”

  Alberta wasted a few seconds trying to find the courage to reach out and grab the gun from Marion’s hand. By the time she was brave enough to act, he had stepped back and there was too much space between them for her to take action without devastating consequences. Marion might not be the most accurate shot, but she doubted he would miss his target if she were less than five feet away. She might’ve lost her courage, but Marion apparently had found his. Looking at Joyce, he said, “This is to make sure you don’t try to help your friends.”

  He slapped her hard across the side of the head with the barrel of the gun and Joyce collapsed to the ground. She rolled over, and Alberta could see blood start to trickle from the open cut on her temple.

  “Joyce!” Alberta screamed.

  “Forget about her or you’ll be next.”

  Resigned to her fate, Alberta got into the driver’s seat and it felt like she stepped into a time warp. The dashboard contained a cassette player, a cigarette lighter just underneath, and on the sides of the doors there were handles that opened each window. Alberta was hardly a car buff, but even she could tell she was sitting in a vintage model and she shuddered when she realized it was more than likely that the original owner of the car was Marion’s mother.

  She didn’t have long to contemplate that she was sitting in the same seat Helga once graced, because Marion jumped in the car next to her. He placed the briefcase between them and pointed the gun at Alberta’s head. “Drive.”

  The last thing she saw through the rearview mirror as she pulled away was Joyce’s still body in the dirt. She couldn’t imagine it was a good omen of what was yet to come.

  CHAPTER 24

  Non avere peli sulla lingua.

  Silence was not something that Alberta had ever gotten used to.

  Growing up in a large Italian family, there were always loud relatives whichever way you looked, always too many people crowded around the small dining room table eating and/or arguing, always people coming and going from their house at all hours of the day and night. Even now that she was living alone for the first time in her life, her moments of solitude and quiet were rare, and most of the time was spent in the kitchen with Jinx, Helen, and Joyce or some combination of the three. She loved their company and, truth be told, would have been incredibly lonely without their frequent visits.

  Almost always being surrounded by noise, however, made her treasure the moments when she was alone sitting by herself gazing at the lake or sitting in her favorite chair drinking a cup of tea, Lola purring softly and snuggled close by. The silence during those moments was welcomed and offered comfort and a chance to contemplate the past, the present, and the future. The silence in the car was differ
ent. It was filled with fear, doubt, and questions. What was Marion going to do to her? Why had she allowed herself to come down this path? Was her life going to end just as surely as Lucy’s had?

  Alberta wasn’t ready to die; she definitely wanted to spend more years getting to know Jinx and even herself. And it would be nice one day to reconnect with Lisa Marie. But the longer Alberta drove, the longer she felt the silence was a sample of what was to come.

  “Mother always liked you,” Marion said.

  The comment not only startled Alberta away from her thoughts, but struck her as odd, because she could only remember meeting Helga Klausner once and that was at their high school graduation. Alberta and her friends were discussing what parties they were going to attend that night, and she saw Marion standing by himself a distance away with his mother. She felt sorry for him, and he looked so lonely and ill at ease that she was compelled to go over and talk to him.

  It was a brief conversation and she stopped short of inviting him to any of their parties, because she knew her friends would kill her if she extended an invitation to the social misfit. Alberta couldn’t remember anything more about what they discussed except that they were interrupted by Marion’s mother.

  Helga Klausner looked like the stereotypical German matron: square face, ample bosom, thick body adorned in a short-sleeved cotton print dress, white gloves, sturdy shoes, and a hat with a small white veil that hung like bangs on her forehead. “Hello Alberta,” Helga had said. “It’s nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  At the time Alberta had focused on her strong German accent and how it sounded very much like Marlene Dietrich if she had starred in a Nazi propaganda film. What shocked her now was not how Helga looked, but what she remembered she had said, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “I didn’t think your mother knew me,” Alberta said.

  “Well not directly, but she knew so much about you because I talked about you all the time,” Marion confessed.

  “Really?” Alberta replied, trying hard to keep her eyes focused on the dirt road that ran along the north side of the lake. “Why did you talk to her about me?”

  “As much as Mother didn’t want me to socialize with girls or make the mistake like so many young men my age did and become trapped by them, she didn’t want me to be lonely,” Marion explained. “So, she was happy to hear that you and I were friends even if we never fraternized.”

  What a complicated woman Helga Klausner was, Alberta thought. The more she heard about her, the less she liked her, but the more she wanted to know about the woman. And how Marion truly felt about her. “Did you love your mother, Marion?”

  Alberta kept looking straight ahead, so she couldn’t see Marion’s expression, but out of the corner of her eye she saw his grip tighten on the pistol.

  “What kind of question is that?” Marion asked. “She was my mother. Of course I loved her.”

  “I guess maybe what I meant to say was did you like her,” Alberta said. “I love everyone in my family, after all they’re my family, but I don’t like them all.”

  “Oh . . . well . . . yes, I know what you mean,” Marion said, his voice softer and less angry. “There are certain people we’re linked to by blood that we have to accept and love for that reason alone, but just because you share the same DNA with someone doesn’t mean you have to like them.”

  “Exactly,” Alberta agreed. “So, did you like your mother?”

  Quickly, Alberta turned to look at Marion and saw that all the color had drained from his face and he was contemplating her question very seriously. His response was exactly what she expected.

  “No.”

  She expected it because it was the same way she felt about her husband.

  “I know how you feel.”

  “You do?”

  “Non avere peli sulla lingua,” Alberta said in her native tongue.

  “What?”

  “Sorry, it’s a saying . . . without hair on the tongue . . . the honest truth,” she translated. “Yes, I feel the same way about my Sammy as you do about your mother. We both loved them, we both would have done anything for them, but only because we loved them and felt obligated, not because we liked them or wanted to make them happy. The fact was that there was nothing I could do to make my Sammy happy, because he didn’t love me. He married me because. . . well, I’m not entirely sure why he did. I was available and a good catch, I guess, but definitely not because he loved me. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, my actions wouldn’t make him happy. I think it’s the same with your mother.”

  While she spoke Alberta eased her bare foot off the gas pedal so the car would slow down. She didn’t want to get too far from the lake and onto the highway because then it would be much harder for anyone to catch them. Here they stood out, a lone car on Memory Lake Road, but on the highway they would be just another vehicle. Fortunately, her words pushed Marion into such deep thought he didn’t even notice.

  “Mother always said she loved me and only wanted the best for me, but I always knew she wasn’t telling me the truth,” Marion pondered. “I was like a prized possession to her, like one of her Hummel figurines, perfect and completely hers. My father stopped trying to connect with me before I learned how to walk because he was tired of fighting with my mother for my attention. She would always interfere with his attempts and push him away—it’s no wonder he buried himself in his work.” Marion smiled at Alberta and said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For making me face the truth,” Marion confessed. “My entire life has been spent trying to please my mother and make her happy, but you’ve shown me that was an impossible task. You’ve released me from her hold and given me freedom that I never had. You’re amazing, do you know that?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said. “I only suggested . . .”

  “You did more than that,” he said. “You listened to me and you asked me questions. You asked me how I felt. Do you know that no other woman has ever done that? Not Beverly or Denise. They never cared about how I felt, they only cared about how I made them feel, just like my mother. Like your husband.”

  “I guess we are similar, Marion,” Alberta acquiesced. “You lived under the shadow of your mother, and I lived under the shadow of my Sammy.”

  “Now we can live outside the shadows! We can push them both aside and live together,” Marion declared. “I have enough money and connections that we can start over, just the two of us, just like it was always meant to be.”

  “Always meant to be?”

  “Oh, come on! You can’t possibly think that your moving to Tranquility, where I happen to live was a coincidence, can you? No! It was destiny, our destiny. We’re going to have such a wonderful life together, just you and I.”

  “I think you’re right, Marion, moving here was my destiny.”

  “So, you agree, the two of us are destined to be together.”

  “No, Marion, what I mean is that I refuse to allow history to repeat itself.”

  A few hundred feet before the entrance to the highway, Alberta slammed her foot on the gas. There was a dip in the land leading into the lake where rowboats and canoes used to dock until a more modern mini-marina was built closer to the residential area, and it was exactly what Alberta was aiming for when she turned the steering wheel sharply to the left so the car could drive off the road. It hung in the air for a few seconds before plunging into the lake.

  Alberta could hear Marion screaming, his voice riddled with terror and shock, but it was as if she were in a trance and the sound was coming from far away instead of from the seat next to her. A second before she swerved the car off the road she had no idea she could do something so drastic. Never before had she acted so impulsively, deliberately putting her life in danger. But knowing that Marion had no intention of willingly letting her go and could at any moment end her life, something in her brain and in her heart clicked. If she was going to die, she was at leas
t going to be in control of how.

  Looking out the front window, she saw only black because the car was completely submerged. Marion was still screaming, but now she saw that he was frantically trying to roll down the passenger side window. She looked over at him and it was as if he was moving in slow motion, his right hand struggling to crank open the window with the old-fashioned handle allowing water to start to seep into the car, his left tightly clutching the handle of the briefcase that held over a hundred thousand dollars. In the darkness, the pistol was nowhere to be found, Marion must have dropped it accidentally or decided he would have to let go of his mother’s antique if he wanted to survive.

  Turning her focus to her own survival, Alberta used both hands to crank open the driver’s-side window and soon a rush of cold water started to flood the car from both sides. She started doing the breathing exercises Freddy taught her as if she were preparing for another scuba dive so she would be ready when she had to take one last deep breath and swim through the car window and up to the surface of the lake.

  Although she was focused, she was starting to become afraid and wasn’t sure if the fear was making the water feel colder than it had before. It could be the cooler temperature outside, but the water was freezing and as it poured into the car and quickly rose up to her waist, she started to shiver.

  “Why did you do this, Alberta?” Marion asked, unable to mask his own fright. “We could’ve had the perfect life together.”

  “My life was already perfect, Marion,” Alberta replied. “There was nothing you or any man could do to make it better.”

  Even if Marion wanted to continue the conversation and persuade Alberta that she was wrong, he wasn’t able to because at that moment they each had to take one last, huge breath as the entire car filled with water.

  Marion deftly maneuvered his body out the car window, his briefcase still in his grip, and Alberta could see his legs flick back and forth to assist him with his ascent to the surface. But when she pushed herself up in her seat to escape she immediately felt a tug against her waist and was pushed back into her seat. She looked down and couldn’t see anything, but when she felt her lap she realized that her seatbelt was still buckled, she didn’t even realize she had put it on. But of course she would have put her seatbelt on because that’s what good little girls do.