Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  A long look at the unmoving Bettinger; the slow fire of scotch burning his way to clarity. He slid his second drink from the bar and crossed the room. He bought Bettinger a drink and another, and morose Bettinger, in slurred and garbled half-sentences, staring into his gin, muttering “black widow bitch,” cast light on his darkness.

  She’d set them up. Bettinger was the one before him, but before that had come Cramer, and Robbins, and Sutton. Every one her hero, saving her from the incompetence of the attorney before (the formal complaints and charges she’d filed being something she mentioned to none). Every one instructed to make bad business deals, to sell low and buy high. Every one’s objections quieted with the generosity of her body, in the deserted house.

  Every one ruined.

  Bettinger, sloppy with brotherhood, offered him sympathy, claimed revulsion, pretended to fury and swore revenge. But he could see-anyone could see-that if she walked in right then to the tavern where they sat, Bettinger would follow her out on his hands and knees.

  He left Bettinger in his pool of self-pity and walked through the fading day to think. The gray of the sky went to black and he considered this: Each complaint had been filed, as she’d said the one against him would be, a full week after she’d dropped her bombshell and changed attorneys. Stars pricked holes in the sky and he thought about this: the self-loathing in her voice when she talked about her failure to rescue herself from her husband’s brutality by taking her own life. The city streets quieted around him as he heard her say spending her inheritance was her only pleasure.

  And he saw what the others hadn’t: who the trap was really set for, who the intended victim was.

  So he did as she wanted. He called her, and asked her whether she had filed the charges and complaints against him yet. She had not. He asked her to meet him at the house that was theirs, across the river. “To talk about it,” he said. And he heard a shiver of anticipation in her voice as she agreed.

  And now, tonight, he’d given her what she’d hoped for, fulfilled her desire.

  Desires. The sweep of her car’s headlights had brought him to the door. As she stepped onto the porch where he waited, he felt her heat. They stopped still and time stopped with them, until, without speaking, she pressed her body, her lips, on his. He led her to the bed. He undressed her slowly, her blouse, her skirt, her silken slip, and tethered her to the bed with the silver handcuffs she’d brought him in their first days. With his hands, with his lips and tongue he took time, made slow love to her, built her toward the peak and reached it with her. After, he didn’t unlock the cuffs, nor did she ask him to. He held her gently, stroking her hair as she lay motionless, eyes closed, lips parted.

  Then he rose, and blindfolded her. She smiled softly. He kissed her a last time. The tastes, the scents, the thrills of the first kiss rushed in and rolled over him like a wave. Then they subsided, revealing the satin finality of this last one.

  The last one.

  She’d tried, he understood now, to drive each of them, Bettinger and the others, to this, hoping for one to release her. The disasters that befell them were punishment for being weak.

  He was strong.

  The blade glittered as he slid it into her heart.

  She arched toward him as in pleasure. She didn’t scream, but gave the same small cry he’d heard not long before, at the height of her joy.

  He burned her clothes in the fireplace, wrapped her purse with her body, laid her across the rear seat of her own car. He drove to the hillside overlooking the town, dug her a grave among the trees, and, under a sky dotted with stars, he said farewell.

  Abandoning her car far into the woods, he hiked back to the house for his own, drove home and slept soundly.

  At the office the next day his morning was productive and his afternoon was the same. He decided to go down to the tavern and buy Bettinger a drink. Bettinger, after all, had done him a great favor. Of course, he’d done Bettinger one, Cramer and Robbins and Sutton, too, though they’d never know whom to thank. With the complainant gone, the cases against them would never be made. He’d freed them, too.

  He was about to leave when the police arrived. They wasted no time, but arrested him for her murder.

  “We got a call from her attorney.”

  He searched for his voice. “Paul Dreyer?”

  The lead detective explained. She’d left Dreyer a message last night that she’d call in the morning, before ten. If she didn’t, he was to open a kidskin portfolio in his safe. She hadn’t called, so, acting on instructions, Dreyer had broken the lock. Inside were directions to the house and the hillside, and a note asking that the authorities examine transactions her previous attorney had conducted for her. She wasn’t sure, the note said, but she believed she’d been cheated. She was going to confront the attorney, who’d also been her lover. And, the note said, she was afraid.

  The attorney was not named.

  But she had told the attorney she was using now who her previous attorney had been.

  The cops had had a busy morning. They’d found the house, her body, her car. They’d found her blood on the turned-over mattress. They’d found his fingerprints.

  They led him away.

  As he stepped onto the sidewalk, the tastes, scents, thrills of their first kiss waited in ambush. They crashed so hard over him that he stumbled, and because he was handcuffed and could not reach out to hold anything, he fell.

  Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf

  SNEAKER WAVE

  ANNE PERRY

  T

  onia was driving and Kate was in the front seat beside her, talking about the route, which left Susannah free to gaze at the sublime coastline stretching in brilliant blue to the western horizon. Not that the route needed any discussing. They were simply following the rim of the ocean south from Astoria the twenty miles or so to the beach house where they were going to spend a few days together.

  It was spring 1922, and they had seen little of each other in the last few years since the war. Of course, America had been involved in it only toward the end, but it had still brought tremendous changes into their lives. Even as far west as the Oregon coast they had felt the reverberations of the conflict in Europe. Society could never be the same again with the return of peace.

  Was “peace” the right word? Susannah looked at the shining width of the Pacific spread out before her as the car eased speed, climbing up the gradient. There were pine trees to the left, forests stretching inland with a wealth of timber that made families like hers rich, and north was the vast Columbia River with its seemingly inexhaustible salmon, supplying canneries that exported to the world. But “peace”? That was an inner quality, and as she watched her elder sisters in front-Tonia polite, proud, all her hurt suppressed under careful control; Kate, her grief exploding now and then into scalding temper-peace did not seem the word to use.

  “We can’t expect this perfect weather to last,” Kate said, turning in her seat to stare out to sea. The coastline was dazzling, cliffs and rocky promontories jagged, waves crashing in and white surf shining in the sun.

  “Of course not,” Tonia agreed, her voice edged with emotion. “Nothing ever does.”

  Kate kept her face turned away. “Then we’d better make the best of it while we can. A little rain won’t hurt-it’s only the endless gray days I really mind. I don’t even care if there’s a storm-they can be magnificent.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Tonia replied, taking her hand off the wheel for a moment to push her hair back. She had it aggressively short in the new fashion. It was dark, and beautiful, emphasizing the strength of her features.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Kate said suspiciously.

  “That you like storms, of course,” Tonia answered with a tiny smile. “Thunder, lightning and the closeness of danger. Don’t you? The electricity in the air?”

  “I like the wind and the sea,” Kate said, as if she were measuring her words, sensing that she needed to be careful.
/>   Tonia smiled, a secret expression, knowing more than she was saying.

  “I wonder if we’ll see any whales,” Susannah put in. “They go north about this time of the year.”

  “If you are prepared to stand and watch long enough, I daresay you will,” Tonia answered her. “You were always good at watching.” She seemed about to add something, then changed her mind.

  It left Susannah feeling uncomfortable without knowing why. She had always regarded Tonia with admiration and some awe. She was beautiful, clever, thirty-three years old to Kate’s twenty-nine and Susannah’s twenty-five. It was Tonia who had married the brilliant, charming Ralph Bessemer. What a wedding that had been! All Astoria that mattered had been there, happy, showing off, touched with envy, but hiding it for the most part. It was money marrying more money. What else did anyone expect? And Antonia Galway was the perfect bride for him, with her looks, her poise, her heritage, she would be all he wished, not only to answer his love, but to help achieve his ambitions.

  But that had been years ago. Now Ralph was dead, and neither Kate nor Susannah had married, at least not yet.

  They were nearly there. The beach house had belonged to the family for years. Before the war their parents had come here often. It was full of memories, most of them happy. After their deaths the sisters had come less often, but only because other aspects of life had taken up too much time.

  Tonia swerved the car off the road onto the track and five minutes later they pulled up in front of the small wooden house, less than a hundred yards from the edge of the shingle, and then the long slope down to the hard sand. There were a few trees close by, single, windbent pines, brave enough to stand alone against the winter. Farther up the slope were rhododendrons in scarlet and amethyst profusion right into the shade of the forest canopy. They were wild now, but someone had planted them once.

  “Don’t sit there, Susannah!” Tonia said briskly. “We’ve got to unpack!”

  Susannah snapped out of her daydream and obeyed. They had one suitcase each for clothes, heavy skirts and jackets against the wind, strong shoes, warm woollens and night clothes. Added to that, of course, there were boxes of food, bed linen, towels, cleaning materials. They would leave the place as they found it! And books to read, a jigsaw puzzle and a little hand work, Kate’s embroidery, Tonia’s crocheting, Susannah’s sewing. They might never touch them; it depended on the weather. Miserable thought, but it could rain for a week, quite easily.

  They carried the boxes in, unpacked and put away, made up the beds and lit the fire in the sitting room and the potbellied iron stove in the kitchen, for cooking and hot water. Fuel had never been a problem, there was driftwood enough to last a lifetime. Carrying it in and sawing it to manageable lengths was really a man’s job, but as many people had discovered since the war, women could do most things, if they had to.

  “I’d like to go along the beach before we eat,” Kate said, standing at the big window in the sitting room and staring across the rough grass to the shore. She could see the curve of the point to the south, and the long sweep of the bay to the north, and the calm water of an inland lagoon, where a small river emptied out into a natural basin before finding its way to the sea. That was motionless now, and two blue herons made an elegant, sweeping pattern across the pale sky before landing somewhere out of sight.

  “Good idea,” Susannah agreed, longing to feel the hard sand under her feet, and stride out before settling for the night. Astoria was on the water, but it was the river, and mighty as the Columbia was, for her it had always lacked the sheer, unfettered power and vitality of the ocean. On this particular shore I he waves broke incessantly, even on a windless day. There was something in the formation of the land that caused the water crest and break in white spume, gather and break again, and again, so that as far as the eye could see along the shore white water was hurled high against the blue sky, and crashed in boiling foam to race up the beach. If ever the ocean were alive, was here.

  Tonia gathered her coat in silent agreement, and the three of them set out, walking abreast over the grass then picking their way with care down the drop to the stones, through the washed-up driftwood, and then at last to the sand. The tide was out and there was plenty of room to walk. The wind was soft, and the fall of the waves had a steady, comforting boom and roar.

  Kate lifted her face to the wind, her dark auburn hair blowing off her face, showing the lines of her cheek and brow clear, and yet oddly vulnerable, as if she had known too much pain, and still carried it with her.

  Tonia was walking a little ahead now, looking toward the sea. Susannah wondered if Tonia saw in Kate any of the same things that she did. Did she sense the guilt, or only the anger? Had she even the remotest idea how much of it was grief? Ralph had been dead for over a year now, but of course the pain was older than that. There had been the two years before, when he had been in prison. How the world could shatter in one short week! At least it had for Kate, and for Tonia.

  For Susannah it had broken slowly, like a creeping decay, getting worse a day at a time, until it had become unbearable. But they didn’t know that. They were striding out now ahead of her, hair blowing, skirts molded against their bodies by the wind, no more than a breeze really, but nothing to soften it between here and Japan!

  She bent and picked up a sand dollar, a perfect one. How few things were as perfect as they seemed. She had thought Ralph was perfect once. But then so had Tonia, and Kate. Had he laughed at that-all three sisters?

  She used to think he had the best, the most robust and individual sense of humor, that his laughter healed all the little scrapes and abrasions of life, made them stop mattering and sink into things worthy only of jokes-and then forgetting. But she used to think a lot of silly things, once.

  She put the sand dollar down again, gently, so it would not break. There were other shells also, most of which she did not know the names for. She did know the razor shells, and knew to be careful touching them; the edges could gash deep. In fact you could pretty well cut someone’s throat with the big ones, the sort you found in rock pools at the point, when the tide was low.

  They were about twenty feet from where the waves finally stopped, hesitated, and then sucked back and under into the deep water again. The sand was wet, but she was not quite sure whether the tide was going in or out. Kate was nearest the sea, Tonia next to her. The light was lengthening, the air a little cooler, the mountains of white foam more luminous.

  Then suddenly one wave didn’t stop, it kept on coming, surging farther up the sand, swift and deep, and Kate was in it up to her calves, her boots and skirt soaked, and Tonia only just escaped because she saw it in time and ran, skirts flying.

  The wave sucked back again, almost knocking Kate off balance, drawing the sand from under her, and she gasped with the shock and the cold. Then she started stumbling up, wet skirt slapping around her ankles. Tonia looked at her with wide eyes, her expression unreadable. “Forgot about the sneaker waves, eh?” she observed.

  “I’m sodden!” Kate said in fury. “My boots, my skirt, everything! For heaven’s sake, you could have warned me! Or at least got out of my way!”

  Tonia’s eyebrows shot up. “Warned you? My dear, you know the Oregon coast as well as I do! If you didn’t see a sneaker wave coming, then you weren’t paying attention, your mind was somewhere else. And I am not in your way. The beach is wide enough for all of us.”

  “You saw it in time to run!” Kate accused, her anger still clear in her face. “I would have warned you!”

  Something close to a smile touched Tonia’s mouth. “Would you?” she asked. “Would you really, Kate?”

  “What kind of a question is that?” Kate shouted at her. “Of course I would!”

  “I wonder.” Tonia turned away.

  Susannah waited for Kate to retaliate, then saw her standing still, the wet skirt clinging around her legs, ice cold in the wind. She was watching Tonia walk away, and there was embarrassment in her expression and even
a touch as if it were the beginning of fear.

  Susannah caught her breath, and felt her heart pounding. As clearly as if she had heard words, she knew what was in Kate’s mind, the horror and the shame. And yet she had gone on doing it, as if she couldn’t stop. Ralph had been Tonia’s husband, charming, witty, ambitious, bound for the State Senate, and perhaps the governor’s mansion one day not too far away.

  Now she was terrified that Tonia knew, or at least suspected. Did she? Was that the hidden meaning behind her words? Or was it just bereavement in Tonia, loneliness and crushed pride, because Ralph had fallen so far? And in Kate the guilty fleeing where no man pursued, because she had the taste of her own betrayal always in her mouth?

  Tonia bent and picked up a shell. It must have been a good one, because she put it in her pocket, then looked back at Kate. She barely seemed to notice Susannah, as if she had been a seagull, or some other natural thing that belonged here, but was of no importance.

  Susannah was not offended past the first moment of feeling excluded. After that it was relief. If Tonia did at last suspect something, it was Kate she was thinking of. Kate’s betrayal of her was wrong, in anyone’s eyes. One might understand it-oh, so very easily! Memory of Ralph filled her and surrounded her, like the sweep of the salt air enclosing her in its arms, filling her senses and burning into her mouth, her lungs, even her mind. Except that it was clean and sweet, and it was boundless, enough for every living thing. For one to take it did not rob another. Yes, she could understand Kate, any woman might, however they condemned.

  Would they condemn Susannah? Would they see it as the act of a woman scorned, used and cast aside, a petty act of jealousy and revenge?

  It hadn’t been. But it would still cut deep, right to the bone, if it were thought to be. It would help little if strangers knew it had been so desperately difficult, an act of terrible decision, fought and struggled over, the choice between betrayal of others, or of self and all she knew to be right. She needed that understanding from those she cared for.