The Best Laid Plans
Page 24
Another first. Freddy has never heard Zach say he was right. “About what?”
“No one was gonna help two bros take a hike.”
“Yeah, I told you. People fall for those medical emergencies. That was some photo you posted on the update. Where did you find it? That sliced hand.”
“Sliced ham? Oh, sorry. Hand.” Zach lets loose a raucous laugh.
Freddy laughs along. When they stop laughing, Zach says, “They have all kinds of bloody photos on these medical websites.”
“Well, that was some photo you found.” Freddy shakes his head and falls silent for a moment. Then he says, “You were right too.”
“About what?”
“No way can they get inside your head to know if you’re actually going to do what you say you’re going to do.”
“Then why did they arrest me for fraud?”
“Because you forgot something. They don’t have to get inside your head if the thing you’re planning is obviously impossible. A lie. Fake news.”
“Fake news, eh?”
“No facts to back it up. No sliced hand.”
“You need facts?” A devilish grin curls Zach’s lips. He snatches Freddy’s hand and pushes it through an imaginary blade, making a high-pitched, metallic squeal.
“Argh,” Freddy yells. He can almost feel it.
Zach lets go, stops the squeal, and gives another hearty laugh. Freddy shudders. For a month now, he’s been wary of the meat and bone saw at Food Super. Zach’s little joke is no help.
But, a minute later, all is forgiven and forgotten. It’s a bright, sunny day, a good day for a hike. Zach breaks out in a big, toothy smile and delivers the old brotherly punch to the shoulder.
Judy Penz Sheluk
Judy Penz Sheluk (editor/author) is the author of two mystery series: the Glass Dolphin Mysteries and the Marketville Mysteries. Her short stories appear in several collections, including Live Free or Tri and Unhappy Endings. Judy is a member of Sisters in Crime National, Toronto, and Guppy Chapters, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, International Thriller Writers, South Simcoe Arts Council, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she serves on the Board of Directors. Find her at judypenzsheluk.com.
Plan D
Judy Penz Sheluk
Jenny wasn’t sure when she first got the idea. Maybe it was the big ice storm back in the winter of 2012. One day there were icicles hanging from the eaves, glistening in the pale moonlit night like giant teardrops. The next day, as the temperature soared and the sun shone, the icicles had slowly melted, drip by drip, until they had vanished without a trace.
“Ted got laid off again,” Jenny said. She was sitting in the Coffee Klatch Café with her sister, Stephanie.
Stephanie raised a well-groomed eyebrow, then shrugged. “I’m not surprised. Can’t be a lot of demand for an appliance repairman’s helper these days. We live in such a disposable society.”
Jenny concentrated on her vanilla bean non-fat latte, extra foam, took a sip, grimacing slightly at the too sweet taste. She’d have to remember to order half the syrup next time. They always overdid the syrup.
“So is Ted finally willing to admit it’s time to get some retraining?” Stephanie asked. “Or would that take too much initiative on his part?”
“Ted has initiative, he’s just had a string of bad luck,” Jenny said, although she knew it wasn’t true. She could picture her husband sprawled out on the battered brown sofa, a TV remote in his left hand, a scotch on the rocks in the other. When it came to watching television, Ted was ambidextrous. And ambitious. He could channel surf with the best of them.
“Maybe it’s time for you to stop making excuses for him, Jenny, and start making him accountable. Lord knows he’s been dead weight since the day you two got married. Retraining just might be the answer. Unless you have another plan.”
Dead weight. That had to be a sign to confide in her sister.
“As a matter of fact,” Jenny said, “I do.”
Naturally Jenny didn’t implement her plan straight away. She was cautious if nothing else, and besides, part of her still loved Ted. Still remembered the way things had been, in the beginning. Before the endless stream of minimum wage jobs and broken promises. There might even be a chance to save him, save their marriage, save her sanity.
There was also the added complication of Stephanie. Jenny had made the mistake of confiding in her that day at the Coffee Klatch Café, had misread the sign. She thought her sister would understand.
She hadn’t. Instead she’d gotten all holier than thou on her. In the end, Jenny had assured Stephanie that she’d just been kidding around. “Icicles,” she had said, forcing a laugh. “C’mon, Steph, what do you take me for?”
And yet, despite all of that, the idea continued to niggle at her. Niggled through the first daffodils of spring, and two more lost jobs, one “too junior,” the other “too senior” for Ted’s skill set. It niggled through the hot, sticky nights of summer—the air conditioning turned off to save on hydro—Ted lying snoring and slack-jawed by her side, a thin stream of drool finding its way down his stubbly chin and onto the freshly washed cotton sheets.
It kept on niggling right through the cool, crisp days of autumn, especially when Jenny found herself doing ninety-nine point nine percent of the leaf raking while an apparently “allergic to leaf mould” Ted stayed indoors to watch football. What if, she thought, cramming another mound of leaves into the oversized paper yard waste bag, what if the icicle became an ice pick?
For the first time since she was a kid, Jenny looked forward to winter.
It turned out the icicle wouldn’t cut it. All those months of thinking and waiting and the idea turned out to be a big, fat, watery bust. Repeated attempts on Teddy—a stuffed bear, not her husband—had only served to prove it over and over and over again. The tip either broke or melted before it could do the job, leaving Teddy wet and wounded, but decidedly alive. Well, as alive as a stuffed bear could be, although Jenny was convinced that at one point his big black button eyes had begged her to stop.
Jenny could have taken it as a sign to give up. She believed in signs, in omens. Like the time she couldn’t find her car keys. As it turned out, she’d put the keys in the mailbox by mistake, and a good thing, too. She’d managed to avoid getting into a major league pile-up on the highway. Folks had been stuck on there for hours while the emergency responders and tow trucks tried to clean up the mess.
But she couldn’t let it go. The thought of another ten years of marriage, of another decade of defending Ted to Stephanie, left her feeling sucked dry and semi-suicidal.
She’d checked with a lawyer—under an assumed name, of course—and a divorce meant splitting everything with Ted, right down the middle. Well screw that. She’d already given Ted the better part of her adult life, the part where she’d had cellulite-free thighs and size zero jeans. She’d be damned if she’d give him half the house and half the money too. It was her that made sure the mortgage got paid, her that kept the refrigerator stocked with food, her that had managed to save a few measly dollars for retirement.
Her, her, her. It was always all on her.
What Jenny needed was a Plan B. Only this time, she wouldn’t share it with Stephanie.
She wouldn’t share it with anyone.
The idea came to Jenny when she was filling up the ice cube trays. She rarely used ice, rarely drank cold beverages, her drink of choice being coffee. But today she’d felt like a diet cola, and as usual Ted had used up all the ice for his after dinner cocktails.
Recently, coming off a two-day marathon of back-to-back episodes of Mad Men, he’d switched from scotch to Manhattans, which turned out to be a blend of whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a maraschino cherry.
As if they had money for such nonsense. Always a dreamer, Ted was, as if an alcoholic beverage would transform him from an unemployed loser into a bigwig in the advertising business.
Nevertheless, for once Ted had managed to make her life
easier. Jenny had read about a Georgia woman who’d killed off two men by poisoning them with antifreeze. Apparently antifreeze had two distinct advantages as a murder weapon: it was odorless, and the sweet taste was easily disguised in liquids. Not that Jenny was about to try any herself.
Further research revealed that the ethylene glycol in antifreeze was deadly when consumed and absorbed into the bloodstream. Even better, it could take a few days to bring on death by a combination of kidney failure, heart attack, and coma.
In the case of the Georgia woman’s husband, and a few years later, her boyfriend, the men had exhibited severe flulike symptoms before being taken to the emergency room. Both died less than twenty-four hours after they left the hospital, with heart failure initially being identified as the cause.
Where the Georgia woman had made her mistake, Jenny decided after reading everything she could about the case, was that she’d used the same method for both men. It was only after the boyfriend had died that the police decided to exhume the body of her first husband. Which meant the Georgia woman would have gotten away with murder, if she had thought things out a little bit better.
Jenny acknowledged that her own plan was not without its faults. It seemed antifreeze didn’t freeze until -40 or so, far colder than a typical freezer. Which made sense, when you thought about the name. Why else call it antifreeze?
Then there was the problem of the color, which manufacturers added so it was instantly recognizable. She’d found green, pink, reddish-orange, and blue at the automotive supply store, and bought all four, but even diluted with water, the color remained problematic, at least until all that was left was a mere drop. By that point, it might have looked clear-ish, and it just might have frozen, but Jenny doubted there’d be enough poison left to do the job—unless she continued to make the ice cube concoction for weeks on end.
As much as she was tired of Ted, Jenny didn’t think she had the stomach to poison him in dribs and drabs. And the last thing she needed was Ted getting sick enough to see a doctor, but not sick enough to die. With her luck, he’d be an invalid, and she’d be at his beck and call for the rest of her days.
Simply put, making ice cubes out of antifreeze just wouldn’t work. Jenny toyed with the idea of adding antifreeze to the sweet vermouth, which had a brownish-red color, but by the time she thought of it Ted had abandoned Manhattans and gone back to his scotch on the rocks. It was just like him not to stick with something. Even an imaginary work cocktail was too much of a commitment.
What Jenny needed was a Plan C.
The next-door neighbor was always filling his front yard skating rink, eyesore that it was.
What if that water somehow flooded their driveway one night?
And what if she sent Ted out to go get milk, if he slipped and fell on the ice, hit his head…
It was a plan worth considering.
“I’m just glad that Ted’s found a job,” Jenny said, trying to insert a note of pride in her voice. She was sitting in the Coffee Klatch Café with her sister, Stephanie. Ted waved at them from behind the counter. He was wearing the brown-and-white striped apron that all the baristas wore, though admittedly the rest of the staff was a few years younger than he was.
“Ted does seem pleased with himself,” Stephanie said. “But a barista, Jenny. Seriously, what sort of career is that for a forty-five-year-old man?”
“So maybe this isn’t his dream job, but after his fall in the driveway a couple of weeks ago, I’m just glad he’s able to work at all.”
“You’ve got a point there. He was lucky that the fur-lined hood of his parka softened his fall.”
“Yes, that was lucky,” Jenny said, staring down at her latte. “Actually I’m impressed with how seriously Ted seems to be taking this. He even managed to get the foam on my latte just right.”
“Well, as long as you’re happy, I’m happy,” Stephanie said. “You are happy, aren’t you? I mean you’ve abandoned that ridiculous idea with the icicles. Because Ted mentioned that he found you stabbing a stuffed teddy bear, and I have to admit I was more than a little bit worried.”
Now that was news to Jenny. She had no idea Ted had known about her experiments with Teddy, never mind that he had mentioned it to Stephanie.
“I was just releasing some frustrations. It was all perfectly harmless. Even the bear came out unscathed. A gentle wash in the laundry and he was as good as new.”
“It’s just that we both know how obsessive you can be when you get an idea in your head.”
Jenny thought about the half empty jugs of antifreeze in the garage. She probably should have thrown them out, instead of keeping them. Looked at in the wrong light, folks might consider an antifreeze collection as obsessive. And flooding the driveway only around Ted’s car had been a bit sloppy.
“What are you trying to say, Stephanie?”
“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying, Jenny. Just be careful. Who knows what Ted will do if he suspects—”
“There’s nothing to suspect,” Jenny said, “and even if there were, Ted would be the last guy on the block to figure it out.” She took a sip of her vanilla bean non-fat latte, grimaced at the too sweet taste. She’d made of point of telling Ted to give her half the syrup, and instead, he must have given her double. It was just like him to screw up the simplest of jobs. Before long, he’d be fired from this one too. She was about to take it back when she saw the look on his face.
“Made it especially for you, baby,” Ted said, smiling. The way he used to smile at her, back when things were good between them. Before the minimum wage jobs and all the broken promises.
Jenny took another sip of her vanilla bean latte and decided to finish it, for Ted’s sake.
After all, a little bit of extra syrup wouldn’t kill her.
The Lineup
Tom Barlow
tjbarlow.com
* * *
Susan Daly
susandaly.com
* * *
Lisa de Nikolits
lisadenikolitswriter.com
* * *
P.A. De Voe
padevoe.com
* * *
Peter DiChellis
shortwalkdarkstreet.wordpress.com
* * *
Lesley A. Diehl
lesleyadiehl.com
* * *
Mary Dutta
Twitter: @Mary_Dutta
* * *
C.C. Guthrie
Goodreads: C.C.Guthrie
* * *
William Kamowski
williamkamowski.com
* * *
V.S. Kemanis
vskemanis.com
* * *
Lisa Lieberman
DeathlessProse.com.
* * *
Edward Lodi
Facebook: Rock Village Publishing
* * *
Rosemary McCracken
rosemarymccracken.com
* * *
LD Masterson
ldmasterson-author.blogspot.com
* * *
Edith Maxwell
edithmaxwell.com
* * *
Judy Penz Sheluk
judypenzsheluk.com
* * *
KM Rockwood
kmrockwood.com
* * *
Peggy Rothschild
peggyrothschild.net
* * *
Johanna Beate Stumpf
johannawritesstuff.wordpress.com
* * *
Vicki Weisfeld
vweisfeld.com
* * *
Chris Wheatley
silverpilgrim.com
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