Rotten Peaches

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I googled SuperBeauty and saw that it had gone belly up. Even though Ralph went to great pains to explain that I’d gone rogue and I was solely and personally responsible for Iris’s murder, faith in the product line plummeted and, thanks to me, everyone lost their jobs. I felt bad about that for a couple of nanoseconds and then I remembered what annoying assholes they all were, and how quick Ralph was to throw me under the bus, to used one of his well-worn phrases, and I didn’t feel so bad at all.

  I googled myself and it was fascinating. Newspapers dubbed me the Killer Cosmetics Queen, which no doubt helped hammer the nails into the coffin of the beauty line. And, what a laugh, Don Carlson crawled out of the woodwork and wrote a bestselling novel, BORN BAD: How the Killer Cosmetics Queen Ruined My Life. Looks like I did you a favour, bud, look, you’re rich and famous now. Of my mother, Dave and the kids, there was no word. Nancy was spitting mad which made me laugh. I bet she wasn’t quite so happy anymore about the extra zing I added to her jars. But her friends rallied around her and she ended up marrying Oscar Dallaire, a billionaire, so she got what she wanted even if her system was loaded with slow-acting, irreversible poisons. Dosing her added an extra attempted murder charge to my rap sheet. My ex-school buddies had a field day, trashing me liberally and Marcia Gray ran a two-hour feature on Who Was Leonie Logan? All the pictures of me were flattering, of JayRay, not so much. I told him what I had found and he looked at me, startled.

  “They can trace that shit you know. Who’s googling what, and from where. Don’t be stupid Leo, think for once. We’re on the run. We’re never safe, not from anyone, ever.”

  “I won’t do it again. I needed to know, and now I know. There’s something else I need to know.” I studied my nails and JayRay chugged orange juice from the cartoon.

  “The fridge is dying,” he pulled a face. “Nothing’s cold anymore. What else do you want to know, cupcakes?”

  I felt like he knew what was coming. “I want to know why you didn’t switch up that jar in the hospital? I know you lied. You could have done it, but you didn’t.”

  He wiped his mouth and considered the question. “Yeah, I wondered when you’d get to that. Well, puddytat, I didn’t want them to pin it on me. Look at it this way. I marry Iris and next thing, she dies. Who do they look at? They look at the spouse. First and foremost. And for sure she was poisoned. So I had to.” He grins. “But you’d been kicked out by Dave and it all worked out just like it was supposed to. And here we are, in sunny Mexico, living the dream.”

  “You pointed the nurse to the cream, didn’t you? Like, oh, maybe it was that…?”

  He shrugged. “I did what I had to do. You would have done the same. Hell, you did worse.”

  I think about his words early one morning when I arrive home from my shift. I sit at the kitchen table in our basement apartment. Calling it an apartment is a wild exaggeration. We rent three rooms in the basement of a rundown house; we have a tiny bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a doorless, leaning closet, a walk-in shower with a toilet that’s inches away from the cracked shower door, and a kitchen that used to be a bedroom. It has a broken cupboard, a filthy old stove, a microwave, and a wobbly table. I keep meaning to get us a table that doesn’t wobble but it seems like I never remember until I’m actually sitting at the thing.

  I’m waiting for JayRay to wake up. When it looks like he’s going to sleep till noon, I wake him up.

  “I’m making eggs,” I tell him, just like I do every morning when I come back. “You want some?”

  He mumbles agreement and I push the dark black hair back from his face. He looks beautiful, with his tan and his white teeth and startling green eyes.

  I whip up two bowls of his and hers scrambled eggs, whites only for me, extra pepper for him, and when they’re ready, I dish them onto plastic plates with yellow daisies.

  “They’re getting cold,” I call out, forking in a mouthful. “Come on already.”

  I stop eating to wedge a folded-up piece of newspaper under the gimpy table leg and I test the table. “Piece of shit,” I say, like I always do. “Come on, you’re wasting good food.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” JayRay says and he stumbles into the room. “I don’t think I can eat. I don’t feel good.”

  “You need some protein. That’s what you need. Breakfast will make you feel better. You’re just hungry.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I’ve got like no energy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He shovels some eggs into his mouth. “These are good. You added lots of hot sauce, just like I like it. Thank you, baby.”

  He cleans his plate and sit back, rubbing his belly. He shakes his head. “Man, I still feel bad. I’m going to lie down for a bit.”

  “I’ll come with you. I’m beat. Busy night.”

  I draw the curtains, which are weak protection against the tough sun, and the basement room is hot as Hades as the heat pours through the tiny street level window. I lie down in my panties and singlet and feel the sweat running down my ribs.

  We lie there, and I wait. JayRay’s breathing grows laboured and he starts grunting.

  “JayRay? Are you okay?” But he can’t answer me; he’s lost consciousness.

  I help him onto his back and I stroke his chest and hands and say soothing things to him. He throws up and chokes on the vomit and the whole thing doesn’t last long.

  I smooth the hair off his forehead and close his eyes. “My poor baby,” I say. “My beautiful boy.”

  I have been siphoning off tiny amounts of sleeping pills and tranquillizers for months, waiting patiently until I had a lethal dose. I had to make sure I did it right, and I was careful to mix up a concoction with no scent or taste. I was panic stricken when it looked like JayRay wasn’t going to eat the breakfast I made. It would have ruined everything. What were the odds that he’d some kind of stomach bug on the very day I needed to kill him? But it all worked out in the end.

  “I am sorry, baby, but you deserved it,” I tell his dead body. “You ruined my life. I loved you more than anything, but you ruined my life.”

  I pack my meagre belongings along with my stash of accumulated money and leave the apartment. The sun is shining and the street is full of little kids playing. And in that moment, I feel the tiniest glimmer of happiness and hope.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my beloved Inanna Publications for this book (and all my books), with huge thanks to our beyond-amazing Editor-in-Chief, Luciana Ricciutelli, for her skillful and detailed sculpting of this work. And huge thanks as always to our fantastic publicist, Renée Knapp.

  Thanks to my lovely Bradford for his tireless support of my writing endeavours and to my family for always believing in me and for supporting me every step of the way.

  Special thanks to Jennifer Shelswell for the beautiful portraiture for the cover.

  Many grateful thanks to Terri Favro for reading various incarnations of the manuscript along the way and for offering invaluable insights with regard to character, plot and motivation and also, a huge shout out to Toronto Police Services Forensic Specialist, Detective Ed Adach, for his detailed and critical help with the crime scene and crime insights. You both strenghtened the book immeasurably!

  Grateful thanks to all the early readers of the novel and to all who endorsed the book: Stacy Lee Kong, Carol Bruneau, Karen Dionne, Terri Favro, Shirley McDaniel, Robin Richardson, Marilyn Riesz, Jennifer Soosar, Karen Smythe.

  Thanks to my dear friend and colleague, Beth Fraser, who let me channel the beauty of her adorable twins, Maddie and Kenzie, by letting me borrow their names for the two girls in this book.

  Thanks to my friends who have patience with my lengthy absences and vocal preoccupations with my craft, who listen to my ideas, and indulge my flights of fantasy! There are too many to be named; I am very blessed and grateful to all.

  Thanks to the Mesdames of Mayhem, the Sisters in Cr
ime, the Crime Writers of Canada and the Toronto Public Libraries. We are a community above all else, fostering friendship, creativity and a commitment to the written word.

  And I would be very remiss if I didn’t thank my fellow collaborators for making Bake Your Way to Happiness come to life! Thanks to registered psychotherapist Marilyn Riesz (Evii), MA, RP, and to talented food editor Gilean Watts for turning an idea in Rotten Peaches into a beautiful, well-received self-help book that would have made both Betty and Bernice proud!

  I acknowledge the following sources from which I have borrowed fragements:

  “Daddy, I have had to kill you.” From “Daddy” from Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, Copyright 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 Estate of Sylvia Plath (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992).

  “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.” From “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith, New Selected Poems, Copyright 1972 Stevie Smith (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988).

  And from songs:

  “Rotten Peaches,” written by Elton John, Madman Across The Water, 1971.

  “You Oughta Know,” written by Alanis Morrisette, Jagged Little Pill, 1995.

  “Echo Beach,” Martha and The Muffins, Copyright: Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

  I am also grateful for the information provided by The Afrikaaners of South Africa by Vernon February (London: Kegan Paul International Limited, 1991).

  Note to the readers:

  With regard to the South African aspects of this book, I wanted to present the psyche of apartheid, including the abhorrent language and the prevalent attitudes of the time.

  We write in order to make amends — if we pretend that things never happened, we are complicit. I ask readers not to confuse the attitude and opinions of any of the characters with those of the author.

  Photo: Bradford Dunlop

  Lisa de Nikolits is the award-winning author of eight novels: The Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa, A Glittering Chaos, The Witchdoctor’s Bones, Between The Cracks She Fell, The Nearly Girl , No Fury Like That, and Rotten Peaches. No Fury Like That will be published in Italian in 2019 by Edizione Le Assassine under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo. Her ninth novel, The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution, is scheduled to be published in 2019 by Inanna Publications. Her short fiction and poetry have also been published in various anthologies and journals across the country. She is a member of the Mesdames of Mayhem, the Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, and the International Thriller Writers. Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits came to Canada in 2000. She lives and writes in Toronto.