I must have given something away in my expression because she quickly apologized.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Alvin. I shouldn’t have said that. You work in the kitchen here, don’t you?”
“No, that’s okay. You don’t like the food?”
“Well, I hardly ever eat it. It’s one of the benefits of having money. I have almost all my meals smuggled in from my favorite restaurants. I’m sure my nurses know, but as long as I am careful with my choices, they pretend not to notice.”
“But your trays come back empty. We check…to make sure you’re eating.”
“Yes, dear. I just told you. Daisy enjoyed the food here. She would schedule her visits around meal times and eat whatever came from the kitchen. I shouldn’t have let her, knowing she needed to lose weight, but I thought it was better than having her stop at some fast food place on the way home. At least the food here wouldn’t hurt her.”
I sat there, letting the meaning of her words sink in. Margaret hadn’t been getting any of the extra drugs. Daisy had. And Daisy was dead.
“So, just a heart attack? No other causes?” Damn. Did they run tests? Was there an autopsy?
“That’s what her doctor said. At least it was peaceful. She went in her sleep.”
I didn’t dare ask any more questions.
“Maybe I let her eat here,” she went on, more to herself than to me, “because I knew George was always on her about her weight. At least here she could relax and enjoy her meal.”
Her words brought me back with a start. “Oh. George. How’s he taking the loss?”
All the warmth went out of her. “The only loss George Marsh is grieving is the chance to get his hands on my money.”
I didn’t have to fake my confusion. “But isn’t George your sole heir now?”
“Hah. That man was never my heir.”
“I don’t understand. You told me Daisy was your only family. With her gone…”
“Daisy wouldn’t have inherited a thing from me. She knew that. Not as long as she was married to George Marsh. Now if she had left him, I would have taken care of her. I loved Daisy. I would have set her up in a nice place, given her a monthly allowance, anything she needed. But I knew as long as she was married to George, any money she got from me would have gone straight to him, to be wasted on one of his shady business deals.”
Say what? “Did he know?”
“Well, I certainly never told him. That man is mean as a snake. Lord knows how he would have treated my Daisy if he knew he was never going to get any money out of her. And as much as she loved him, I think she understood it, too.”
I was screwed. Screwed. My grand plan for killing Margaret was a bust. And even if I succeeded, there’d be no payoff. Twenty percent of zero was zero. Plus there was George—and his angry friends.
“So, who are you leaving your money to?” Wrong question. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
Her smile was coy, and a little mischievous. “Well, I guess you could say I have lots of heirs. I like setting up individual bequests for people I meet. It makes me feel good. Most of them aren’t aware and it makes me happy knowing I’m leaving pleasant surprises behind when I go. When the time comes, everything that’s left after those bequests will provide an endowment fund for scholarships at my alma mater, Denison University.”
“Wow. That’s…” That’s gonna piss George off royally. Wasn’t doing much for me either. “That’s really beautiful, Miss Margaret.”
She studied me for a long moment then leaned in, motioning me to do the same. “I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to let you in on a secret. While I was taking care of Daisy’s affairs, I saw my lawyer…and added a bequest for you.”
I leaned back and gaped at her.
“Close your mouth, dear,” she twinkled at me.
“But…why?”
“Because you’re a nice man who makes time for an old lady.” She patted my hand. “It’s not a fortune but it will get you out of that kitchen and let you do something you want to do.”
That night I walked to the corner bus stop, trying to get my head around the weird turn of events. Margaret hadn’t named a figure, and I sure couldn’t ask, but it was going to be more than I’d get from George, the non-heir. Now I was the one waiting for the old lady to die, which meant I couldn’t kill her, even if I could find another way. Heirs have motive. But I could wait her out.
I was so lost in thought I didn’t notice the figure that stepped out of the shadows until he said my name.
“Bixby.”
Damn. George.
“What the hell did you do? You killed my wife.”
“What do you mean? I heard she died of a heart attack.”
“Don’t give me that crap. You were supposed to kill Margaret and now Daisy’s dead. You screwed up. Without Daisy, I’ll get nothing.”
Should I tell him? Sorry, George, you were always going to get nothing. Nah, better not.
“Man, I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault. I didn’t touch Daisy. I swear. I couldn’t know she was going to have a heart attack.” Or that Margaret was putting me in her will instead of him.
“I don’t see it that way. This whole thing was your idea. You said you could deliver. I made promises. Now I’m going to be paying the price.”
His hand came out of his coat pocket holding a small but deadly .38 revolver and he gave me a cold, mirthless smile. “And so are you.”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I guess neither of us would be inheriting from Miss Margaret. She was going to outlive us both.
Lisa de Nikolits
Lisa de Nikolits, originally from South Africa, has lived in Canada since 2000. Her seventh novel, No Fury Like That, will be published in Italian in 2019, under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo. Previous works include The Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa, A Glittering Chaos, Witchdoctor’s Bones, Between The Cracks She Fell, The Nearly Girl, and Rotten Peaches. The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution is forthcoming in Fall 2019. Her short stories appear in several collections. Lisa is a member of Sisters in Crime National and Toronto, the International Thriller Writers, Crime Writers of Canada, and Mesdames of Mayhem. Find her at lisadenikolitswriter.com.
Fire Drill
Lisa de Nikolits
Fly under the radar. That was my plan. Don’t lose your cool. That was my mantra. I told myself I could do it. I’d made it this far, hadn’t I?
My mirrored reflection stared back at me in the elevator. I was ridiculously exhausted and it was only seven a.m. I counted the red numbers as we passed each floor. Going up, when my whole life was going down. Down the tubes, that is. What with the shrinking industry, tenacious Shar-Pei lines etching their way into my cheeks, my teeth like old corn on the cob, the gums receding as fast as the prospects for my future, the prognosis wasn’t good. And what was with the steel-wool hair sprouting up around my ears like some crazy old guy’s sideburns? No one had ever mentioned that was in my future.
I stood on the gray diamond centre of the elevator floor and stared down. If the elevator got stuck, I wouldn’t even be able to lie down and sleep. The floor was too filthy. But my diamond was still there, under the salt grime and shoe dandruff. The diamond, my magic place to make a daily wish. Keep me safe. Let me last out this day. It had worked for nearly eighteen years. It would work today. It had to. Chester, my aging Weimaraner, needed me.
I was the first one at my desk. It was a military strategy, get the lay of the land, see what emails had come in, prepare the necessary weaponry. Make oatmeal and get a big mug of decaf sweetened with stevia. I couldn’t handle caffeine anymore and sugar was the devil in a blue dress. Gone were the days I could down three double espressos with nary a flutter in my veins. Nowadays I was as twitchy as a rabbit at Eastertime and god knows it didn’t take much of anything to get me all fired up.
Ah frig. I peered at my screen. A meeting request flashed: Icons, further discussion. Accept with comments, accept without comments
. Not a request, a demand. I accepted without comments although I wanted to reply seriously, not another meeting about the icons, how many meetings can we have? The icons would be the death of me.
I worked in a marketing firm and my new boss had insisted on “elevating the brand” by introducing “navigable, user-friendly, iconic pathfinders”— tiny illustrations littering the brochure pages in case the dumb, dumber, and dumbest out there couldn’t find the prices and noteworthy features of the products we told them they couldn’t live without.
But I’m not an illustrator and the free vector art I found was, according to my boss, just wrong, wrong, wrong. I couldn’t get the formula right and not for lack of trying. This had been going on for months, ever since Princess Tight White Pants in Red Stilettos had taken over.
Yep. I’d been hanging on by my fingernails, dangling over a cliff, with bits of scrub and brush falling onto my upturned face as I tried not to lose my grip. I was doing kind of okay until our primo client decided they hated Alice A. It broke my heart to watch my friend and former boss being marched out, tears streaming down her face, her purse hitting her thigh like a sack of old fruit. But I blew my nose and counted my blessings that I was still there. I had to keep fighting, had to carry on.
But then the stiletto-heeled supermodel from Mars came back from maternity leave to take her place at the throne.
Heaven knows, I tried to make the princess happy. Tried over and over again. But I’m a fuzzy kitten type of gal, not some kind of techno gangsta kid. I like happy faces and friendly-looking little doodles, maybe some speech bubbles with a bunch of exclamation marks. Apparently, that’s not the style these days. I’m not “graphic enough,” my art needs to be “streamlined,” my icons are “too busy.”
I studied the email meeting invite again and a sinking feeling filled my gut. I had already had three meetings with the princess. Three. And now I had just agreed to numero four. Report for duty in the Aurora boardroom at 11a.m.
I put my head in my hands. There it was. That familiar throb. Angry pincers needling lobster claws into the softest meat behind my eyeballs. I reached into my purse and dug out two codeine pills and added two ibuprofen for good measure. I knew I had been taking too many meds but I felt justified. I had to get rid of the headache before it took hold. Interns and acne-ridden adolescents were banging on the door like the zombies from the Walking Dead, and I was trapped with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Nothing could keep me safe in this war zone. My guardian angel, Alice A, was gone. And Alice B, yes, how weird, two Alices, was back.
And she’d never liked me.
Eleven a.m. came. I walked into the Aurora boardroom and gingerly sat down while Alice B fired up her laptop. She proceeded to lead me through half an hour of torture, flicking through icons and illustrations. “You see the difference?” she kept saying, interspersed by, “You see what I mean?”
I didn’t. Why couldn’t she just choose the icons she wanted and let me get on with it? Because this was so much more fun for her. I tried to note the ones that she seemed to like but as soon as I did, she’d say, “well, that was just about there, but the curves aren’t quite right, you see what I mean?” and I nodded dumbly. What had I done to deserve this punishment? I looked at her, her white jeans impeccable and nearly transparent, her black bra showing through her sheer white blouse. Who dresses like that for work? And those shoes, six inches of killer icepick heels. She even adjusted her bra while we were talking, hitching it up and scratching where the straps had dug in. The woman had zero class.
“So you like that one?” I asked, my pen poised hopefully over my notebook.
She shook her head sadly. “No Miranda, that one’s too angular? You see the difference?”
And then the fire alarm went off. Whoop, whoop, whoop. Thank god. I gathered my notebook and started to stand but she waved me back.
“It’s just a drill,” she said. “Sit. Ignore it. We need to get this nailed down.”
The boardroom across from us was full and they too carried on working. I had no choice but to force my gaze back to Alice B and her laptop.
Whoop, whoop, whoop. The siren was insistent. “You see what I mean?” Alice B yelled above the din, and I forced myself to nod.
“Make a note of this one,” Alice B continued, her voice manic, “but you’ll have to….” Whoop, whoop, whoop. And then, mercifully, the words were drowned out, the siren honking like a goose trapped under the wheel of a bus. Whoop, whoop, whoop. Alice B’s red lips moving as she pointed to her screen. Whoop, whoop, whoop. I nodded again, the noise a suffocating blanket. I felt like I was under an overturned boat, bobbing in dark water, with a foghorn blasting in my ears. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
I watched the boardroom across from us empty. Whoop, whoop, whoop. The emergency response guy opened the door and waved us out, shouting. And still, Alice B shook her head.
“We must finish this,” she screamed over the siren, “we have a deadline, we’re behind.” Whoop, whoop, whoop. Whoop, whoop, whoop. She forced me to sit there, the howling smashing at me like a baseball bat. I was trapped. Me, who was once the boss.
You see, Alice B and I went way back. “Oh I know Miranda,” she said during team introductions and she smirked. She hadn’t forgotten our past. I’d had to call her out, back in the day, when she wasn’t pulling her weight. She’d responded by not speaking to me for six months before leaving for mat leave. I had hoped she’d never come back. In a way, I’d been counting on it.
No such luck. I heard they begged her on bended knee to return and save our sinking ship, and my first thought was, there goes my life. I tried to get another job but there wasn’t anything out there. I had to make it work.
“Don’t worry,” Alice A said when we heard Alice B was coming back, “I’ll take care of you, just like I always have.” But then, out of nowhere, Alice A got pink-slipped. And there I was, being tortured by an evil emissary straight out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Why hadn’t they let me go? Paid me off? That would have been better than this. This was fun for Alice B, her revenge for all those years ago when I’d given her a failing grade on her performance review.
Whoop, whoop, whoop. I kept my fists clenched tightly by my sides. I dug my nails into my cuticles as if the pain would distract me and it did for a while but she wouldn’t shut up. The fire alarm was honking Whoop, whoop, whoop, and she kept on talking. I was trapped with her in that boardroom, her with her perfect hair and her dead black eyes, droning on and on, “Do you see what I mean? Can you see what I’m saying, can you see the difference?” Whoop, whoop, whoop.
Eventually, the emergency response guy kicked us out of the boardroom, wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wanted to leave and never come back. But if I quit my job, I wouldn’t get severance, I’d lose everything. Chester was getting older, he needed me. I had to keep this job, whatever it took. But at that moment, I had to get away from Alice B. I was soaked in sweat, rivers running down my rib cage, puddling in my love handles and the waistband of my trousers. My heart inflated like the inner tube of a bicycle tire about to explode. I needed to flee from Alice B, find a coffee shop, pretend I got lost in the crowds who had left the building. Take some time to myself, get a cup of decaf—maybe even a full caf with real sugar—take a Xanax, come back and try my hand at those icons again.
Whoop, whoop, whoop. I stood up, shaking, and Alice B shuttled me back to our desks so we could grab our winter coats and purses. She herded me towards the stairwell, pushing her way in front. I had grabbed my big thick coat and started to struggle into it. Alice B, of course, had a flimsy little jacket, no gloves or hat, how did she do that? Didn’t normal blood flow through her skinny supermodel veins?
I paused at the top of Stairwell 9 and shoved my arms into my twisted jacket while Alice B trotted ahead. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
Alice B was half a flight down when I saw my opportunity. It wasn’t so much a conscious thought as a fully fleshed-out realization. Lose your footing. Crash into
her. Solve this problem. Get rid of her. I was wrapped in a cocoon of soft down and I could tackle her, push her, destroy her. Reclaim my life. “I fell, in the rush,” I would say, “it was an accident.”
She had her back to me. I’d once read that shoving a person down stairs was as easy as opening a door. I rushed towards her, figuring if I nailed her on the turn at the top of the stairs, she’d tumble the full length for maximum damage.
I hardly had to do anything and there she was, tumbling down, down, down, and the bicycle tire in my chest flew away as if it never existed. I clutched my hands to the sides of my face while I watched her fall and I couldn’t help but smile.
Bounce, bounce, bounce, there she was, nearly at the foot of the Stairwell 6. But then a terrible thing happened. The door to Stairwell 6 opened and a woman stepped out, right into the path of Alice B. Alice B careened into her, linebacker style, and they both tossed and turned down the stairs, like laundry spinning in a big old dryer, both of them coming to an abrupt stop at the bottom of Stairwell 5. Somehow I knew the other woman was dead.
And that Alice B was still alive.
I stood frozen, watching from above as Alice B raised her body off the dead woman. Alice B who wouldn’t even need stain remover for her white jeans. She looked up at me and stared for a long moment before reaching for her phone.
I sank to my haunches, watching and waiting. The fire alarm throbbed to the message my heart was banging out: What did you do, OMG, what did you do?
Adwar.
I had killed my friend Adwar. She was a cleaning lady from Ethiopia, here to help her family. She sent money home every month. I knew because I collected money for her at Christmastime and I knew that in English, her name was Sophia.
I had killed my friend.
But when I tried to explain that it was an accident, me bumping into Alice B, well, the jury wouldn’t buy into it.
The Best Laid Plans Page 8