The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  Good job, Larry.

  Karen and Sam would’ve sold the memorabilia first. The collection would’ve brought more like four instead of the three the anchorman said. The house was worth another million-and-a-half by now, with all the improvements she put in it. Insurance money is sweet.

  But I canceled the policy last week. No insurance on the house, no insurance on my memorabilia.

  I wake up near dawn again. Sweet Ruth Andrews this time. Two doors down. Breast cancer. The gurney, the whispers, the elevator to the morgue downstairs.

  I lie in darkness, waiting my turn.

  YESTERDAY AND THE DAY BEFORE

  The rain didn’t exactly help Elly Ward’s mood.

  She sat at her desk in her office at Sullivan & Kostik Advertising wondering how she was ever going to face him tonight. Neither ten months of seeing a shrink nor eleven months of taking every kind of anti-depressant imaginable had helped him much. He still went to the cemetery two days a week, and he still cried out for her in the middle of the night.

  She watched the October rain streak the window here on the thirty-sixth floor. She felt confined, just as she had when she was a little girl and the rain made her stay indoors. She wanted to be outdoors, and she wanted the sun to be shining, and the wind to carry the scent of lilacs and the soft silent arc of butterflies.

  A knock. She knew who it would be. She’d been dreading it all day.

  “Yes?”

  The door opened. Tom stuck his head in. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Busy?”

  “Thinking, I guess.”

  “That’s why you win all the awards. You think about what you write. Unlike some other people I could name.”

  Tom was an account executive. She’d won two Clios in the past three years and was the darling of the agency. Both the accounts she’d won the awards for were Tom’s accounts.

  “Just wondered if we could talk.”

  “Sure,” she said. She just wanted to get it over with.

  He came in, sat down in the leather chair facing her desk. He was handsome in a middle-aged sort of way. He’d been a professor before turning to advertising and college still clung to him. He wasn’t quite as hard or cynical as the others, and seemed to have some occa-sional difficulty groveling before clients. Pride, she supposed, was the word she was looking for. Unlike most advertising people, Tom still had a little pride left. He glanced only once at the framed photograph of the twelve-year-old girl, Danielle, on her desk, then looked quickly away.

  “Is it all right to say,” he said, “that I had a good time last night?”

  She looked out the window, at the darkening sky, the slanting silver rain streaking the glass. Then, rumbling distant thunder. Easy to think it was actually gunfire of a distant war somewhere, people being killed, children. Especially children.

  “I won’t let it happen again,” she said quietly.

  “You deserve a life, too,” Tom said earnestly. That was another thing she liked about him. He wasn’t afraid of being earnest, even slightly foolish. Some of the men found Tom vaguely embarrassing. But she liked his foolishness. It was usually well-placed.

  She turned and looked at him. “You seem to forget, Tom, I’m married. And I’m sorry but I feel like shit about last night. I’ve never committed adultery in my life, and I don’t intend to ever again.”

  “God,” he said, and smiled sadly. “We’re really working at cross-purposes here, aren’t we?”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, the sad smile still on him. “I came in here to tell you that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  David Ward told his secretary at the law office that he was leaving early because of a headache. She nodded knowingly, and not without sympathy. Ever since his daughter’s death three-and-a-half years ago, Daniel had pretty much coasted through his job here at the law firm. He’d once been the firm’s most aggressive lawyer. Now he just put his time in, and sometimes—as today—he didn’t do even that. But it was an old-line firm—quiet as a church in its offices, its partners Presbyterian, Princeton, Republican—its one charitable inclination being that it took care of its own.

  She smiled. “Going to get your costume ready?”

  “Costume?” he said, throwing his topcoat over his arm.

  “You know. For Halloween.”

  “Oh, yes. Halloween.”

  That was another thing since the accident. Half the time David was in some other world. Just didn’t hear what you said.

  The secretary looked out the window. “Well, at least the rain has stopped. The kids’ll be out tonight, you know, trick or treating.”

  He nodded—she still wasn’t sure he’d actually heard and understood what she’d just said—and then he was gone.

  “It isn’t a life, and you know it,” Tom said, still being earnest. “It’s just existing.”

  They were still in her office. The rain had stopped. The late afternoon rush traffic was just beginning. Up this high, Elly could see most of the freeways from here. Another twenty minutes, it would be bumper-to-bumper.

  “Well, if you think it’s bad for me,” she said quietly, “think of what it’s like for him. He’s lost thirty pounds, he can’t sleep, he has no interest in sex or work—he spends most of his time up in her room. He even sleeps in her bed half the time. And I can hear him in there talking to her.” She paused. “And he scares me, the way he talks about the neighbourhood kids sometimes. What he’d like to do with them.”

  “The little bastards. It’s too bad you can’t do anything about them.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s no law against cruelty.” Tears glistened in her grey eyes. “The names they called her—the way they used to follow her around all the time—they’d write things on the front of her locker at school—and they’d stand out in front of our house and call her names till David would come out and chase them away. There wasn’t anything she could do about her condition, how obese she was. It was her endocrine glands, they put too much of a hormone into her system. She just got bigger and bigger.” She touched a fingertip to a lone tear silver on her cheek. “I really am afraid of what he might do to them. It was their fault, it really was—they were just so cruel, I’d never seen anything like it—it’s just that I know there’s nothing we can do.” Then, “Maybe I’m being selfish.”

  “Selfish? How?”

  “He’s given himself to her. He won’t let go of her. He’s willing to lay down his whole life for her. Maybe I’m too selfish. Maybe I should be that way, too—instead of wanting to go on with my life.” Tears choked her voice suddenly. “She was twelve years old.”

  Tom shook his head. “God, she was just twelve years old.”

  “Twelve,” she repeated gently. How many times she’d whispered that lone word to herself. Twelve. All history, all suffering was in that word. Twelve. She’d come home and found her daughter dead. She’d overdosed on Tom’s tranquillizers. Twelve years old.

  “I’ve never heard of anybody that young doing—” He stopped himself before he said the actual words. The actual words would just make things worse, the way actual words often did.

  “I hadn’t, either,” Elly said. “I hadn’t, either. But the grief counselor we saw said that it happens more than most people realize. At that age, I mean.”

  After a time, when she was gone from him again staring out the window, he said, “I love you.”

  She looked at him, then, and said, “Oh, God, Tom. It’s your divorce, can’t you see that? Your wife left you and you need somebody and we see each other every day and so it’s just very convenient. That’s what last night was—not love, not love at all. We were just trying to comfort each other.”

  “You need somebody, Elly. You really do.”

  “I have somebody, Tom. My husband.”

  “But he isn’t—” More actual words he didn’t want to say. More actual words that would just hurt.

  “I know what he isn’t, Tom. But that doesn’t mea
n that he’s not still my husband and that doesn’t mean I don’t still love him. I do. And I’m going to tell him about what happened last night.”

  “Oh, God,” Tom said. “I’m not sure I’d do that. I’m not sure that’s a good idea at all.”

  She looked right at him and said, “It may not be a good idea, Tom. But I owe him the truth.”

  The smell of brownies reminded David of his childhood. Of his mom and winter days when he’d stay in and read his science fiction novels. She’d always bring two brownies and a glass of milk up the stairs to his room. The aroma was always rich, sweet, warm.

  As it was now.

  He’d spent the last hour making the brownies. He’d used a box of Pillsbury Brownie Mix. Even a non-cook like him had no trouble. These were special brownies. His special brownies. He’d added one extra ingredient.

  As they cooled, he went into the living room. He wanted to make sure that the porch light worked fine. So all the neighbourhood kids would know he was home and ready to give them their Halloween treats. A beacon, that’s what the porch light was. Summoning the neighbourhood kids. Summoning.

  When the brownies were cool, he cut them neatly into squares and then put them on a large white serving tray. He covered the tray with aluminum foil. He wanted to keep the brownies nice and warm for the kids, the neighbourhood kids. He carried the tray into the living room and set it on a TV tray which he stood to the left of the front door.

  Then he turned on a table lamp and waited. He would have preferred the darkness. But he wanted to make sure that they knew he was home.

  He wanted to give them his very special brownies.

  Elly got home an hour later.

  She was late because every crosswalk she came to on her way home was filled with Dracula and Frankenstein and the glowing white mask of Jason from Friday the 13th. The littlest kids were the cutest, tiny bodies lost in vast costumes, booty bags almost as big.

  Halloween. With a stab, she remembered they could never find costumes large enough for Danielle. Elly always made her costumes by hand. The neighbourhood kids were especially mean to Danielle on Halloween nights. Finally, Danielle just stayed in, hiding in her room as she did so often.

  As she reached her own block and saw the kids who had tormented her daughter—she could recognize them even beneath their costumes—she felt some of the rage that David felt constantly. Here they were out and enjoying themselves. They’d forgotten Danielle utterly. Life was so unfair sometimes. She thought again of the idea she’d been discussing with David recently. Maybe they needed to move. New city. New lives.

  Two Freddy Krugers were washed by her headlights as she pulled into the drive. They didn’t move, just stood there boldly, glaring at her. She knew who they were, Ronnie Haskins and Bob Nolan, two of Danielle’s most relentless tormentors. She had an impulse to floor the accelerator. She could almost feel them crumpling beneath her car. How satisfying that would feel. How terrible they had been to Danielle.

  Finally, they moved on the walk leading to her front door. They were trick or treating.

  She pulled up the drive and into the two-stall garage.

  The kitchen smelled of brownies. Freshly baked. For a moment, she let the scent carry her back to her Minnesota childhood. Her mother had been a pretty bad cook—there were a lot of good-natured family jokes about that fact—but her older sister Doris was wonderful in the kitchen. These brownies smelled like something Doris would have made.

  “David? David, are you here?” But of course he was here. His car was in the garage. But he didn’t answer. For some reason, this made Elly uneasy. Even when he was at his most depressed, he answered her calls.

  Elly walked over to the counter. It was a mess. Mixing bowl, Pillsbury brownie box on its side, half full quart of milk turning warm. And a small paperback book. She wondered what it was. The instructions for brownies would be right on the box.

  She picked up the paperback, which had been flattened to pages 61-62. A sentence was underlined.

  Swallowing or smelling a toxic dose of cyanide as a gas or salt sprinkles can cause immediate unconsciousness, convulsions, and death within one to fifteen minutes or longer.

  Then she saw the small rumpled paper sack pushed far back on the counter. She looked inside and found the cyanide. It had been opened, used.

  She knew what he’d done, then.

  My God.

  She ran into the living room. Empty. She ran up the stairs. Their bedroom, empty. The TV room, empty.

  Danielle’s room—that’s where she found him.

  He was lying on his back on her bed, hands folded across his sternum the way he’d be in his coffin, eyes staring straight up at the ceiling. The eyes were glassy, tear-stained. The room was a zoo of cuddly stuffed animals, red birds and blue monkeys and canary yellow dinosaurs. Danielle’s best friends. How she’d loved them. The room was in darkness but for the miserly light of the quarter moon.

  Before she could speak, he said, “I couldn’t do it.” He didn’t look at her.

  She came over and sat softly down next to him on the single bed with the festive pink spread. She lay down next to him, both of them fully dressed, not even their shoes off, lay on the bed together, husband and wife, best friends, brother and sister, so many, many different kinds of relationships in a good marriage.

  “I’ve been planning this for months,” he said, “and I couldn’t do it. I’m too much of a coward.”

  He began sobbing, then, and she held him the way she’d held sobbing Danielle so many, many nights when simple existence became so over-whelming that it crushed them, and made them hate not their tormentors but themselves. Danielle had loathed herself. Nobody considered her more of a freak than she herself had.

  “I owe it to her,” he said, choking on his tears. “I owe it to her. They’ve got it coming—and I still can’t do it. Even as much as I love her I can’t do it.”

  Danielle used to cry herself asleep. Literally exhaust herself. David did this tonight. And it didn’t take long, either. One moment, he was talking; the next, next to her, he was snoring softly.

  The doorbell rang downstairs.

  She didn’t want to wake him.

  He needed sleep. Then maybe he’d forget this terrible day.

  She hurried downstairs before the doorbell rang again.

  She was just about to reach for the doorknob when she saw the serving

  plate with the aluminum foil over it. The brownies. She touched the foil. Warm. Still very warm.

  She opened the door and there in the grainy porch light of the damp October dusk stood the two Freddy Krugers. Ronnie Haskins and Bob Nolan. The neighbourhood kids.

  The words came as from a far place, as from a puppeteer that had turned her into his handmaiden.

  Instead of sending them away empty-handed, she put on the big fake smile that all adults use on Halloween night and said, “Treat ‘r treat, I’ll bet.”

  Both boys were technically a little old for trick ‘or treating. But she wasn’t about to mention that now.

  She filled their hands with brownies and said, “Right from the oven. Be sure and eat them while they’re still warm.”

  They mumbled thank-yous and hurried down off the porch. Before they reached the next house, they’d flipped their masks up and were cramming the rich, chocolatey brownies into their mouths.

  She went up and lay next to her sleeping husband. There would be no sleep for her.

  She listened to the laughter and the sheer joyful shouting of the littlest ones as they went door to door. Nothing was more innocent than the sound of a child laughing.

  She thought of Danielle and started to cry.

  The ambulance—shrill siren, raucous red lights—raced into the neighbour-hood twenty-three minutes later.

  Ronnie Haskins was the first to die. He did not even make it to the hospital. At the hospital, Bob Nolan got the full treatment. They pumped his stomach and gave him an intravenous injection of sodium nitrite and sodi
um thiosulfate. But it did no good. He died nineteen minutes after reaching the hospital.

  Elly did not answer any of the ringings of the bell or knockings on the door. Two were enough. Two settled the score.

  But later there was a knock that sounded different—not a trick or treat knock—and she slipped away from her sleeping husband and went to the window and looked down.

  A police car stood at the curb.

  She thought of waking David, of telling him what she’d done. But, no, he deserved his sleep.

  There would be plenty of time to tell him when he had to call the family lawyer and when the press came around to covet her with its cameras and put her—weepy and crazed-looking—on the six-o’clock news.

  PARIAH

  Every so often, Frank Stover would let himself go and take the chance of relaxing. Of enjoying himself. Of forgetting for the moment his dirty little secret.

  Take today, May 16, 1951. How could a man not enjoy a summer’s afternoon of flawless blue sky, babies in strollers pushed by young pretty moms, the Andrews Sisters on the radio of his yellow Plymouth convertible, butterflies, furiously gorgeous summer flowers, and the prospect of going home to the perfect wife and the perfect eleven-year-old son?

  Maybe he’d finally found the right town. Maybe his days of running, of hiding, were finally over. He hoped so. It was hard enough on him. But on Mary and Tommy…he didn’t know how much more they could endure.

  The house was one of those prefab jobs going up all across the country now that the war was over and all the soldiers were back home. Nineteen forty-nine had been a terrible year for the economy, but fortunately it was now doing cartwheels. Everybody was buying washers and dryers and automobiles and the latest and greatest must-have of all, television sets. Oh, yes, and starting families. There were now as many diaper services as there were corner grocery stores.