A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  “An air lock, you see. It works perfectly.”

  H.J. was staring at Barry George. “But I don’t know about gas,

  H.J. H.J., tell them—”

  “One moment.” Alleyn removed the towels that had been spread over the dressing-shelf, revealing a sheet of clean paper on which lay the rubber push-on connection.

  “Will you take this lens, Bannington, and look at it. You’ll see that it’s stained a florid red. It’s a very slight stain but it’s unmistakably greasepaint. And just above the stain you’ll see a wiry hair. Rather like some sort of packing material, but it’s not that. It’s crêpe hair, isn’t it?”

  The lens wavered above the paper.

  “Let me hold it for you,” Alleyn said. He put his hand over H.J.’s shoulder and, with a swift movement, plucked a tuft from his false moustache and dropped it on the paper. “Identical, you see. Ginger. It seems to be stuck to the connection with spirit gum.”

  The lens fell. H.J. twisted round, faced Alleyn for a second, and then struck him full in the face. He was a small man but it took three of them to hold him.

  “In a way, sir, it’s handy when they have a smack at you,” said Detective-Sergeant Thompson half an hour later. “You can pull them in nice and straightforward without any ‘will you come to the station and make a statement’ business.”

  “Quite,” said Alleyn, nursing his jaw.

  Mike said: “He must have gone to the room after Barry George and Miss Bourne were called.”

  “That’s it. He had to be quick. The call-boy would be round in a minute and he had to be back in his own room.”

  “But look here—what about motive?”

  “That, my good Mike, is precisely why, at half-past one in the morning, we’re still in this miserable theatre. You’re getting a view of the duller aspect of homicide. Want to go home?”

  “No. Give me another job.”

  “Very well. About ten feet from the prompt-entrance, there’s a sort of garbage tin. Go through it.”

  At seventeen minutes to two, when the dressing rooms and passage had been combed clean and Alleyn had called a spell, Mike came to him with filthy hands. “Eureka,” he said, “I hope.”

  They all went into Bannington’s room. Alleyn spread out on the dressing-table the fragments of paper that Mike had given him.

  “They’d been pushed down to the bottom of the tin,” Mike said.

  Alleyn moved the fragments about. Thompson whistled through his teeth. Bailey and Gibson mumbled together.

  “There you are,” Alleyn said at last.

  They collected round him. The letter that H. J. Bannington had opened at this same table six hours and forty-five minutes earlier, was pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Dear H.J.

  Having seen the monthly statement of my account, I called at my bank this morning and was shown a check that is undoubtedly a forgery. Your histrionic versatility, my dear H.J., is only equalled by your audacity as a calligraphist. But fame has its disadvantages. The teller recognized you. I propose to take action.”

  “Unsigned,” said Bailey. “Look at the card on the red roses in Miss Bourne’s room, signed

  C.C. It’s a very distinctive hand.” Alleyn turned to Mike. “Do you

  still want to be a policeman?” “Yes.” “Lord help you. Come and talk to me at the office tomorrow.” “Thank you, sir.” They went out, leaving a constable on duty. It was a cold morning.

  Mike looked up at the facade of the Jupiter. He could just make out the shape of the neon sign: I CAN FIND MY WAY OUTby Anthony Gill.

  The Summer People

  SHIRLEY JACKSON

  Shirley Hardie Jackson (1916-65) was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, but her name is most readily associated with a single story, “The Lottery” (1948). Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Burlingame, California, and attended University of Rochester and Syracuse University. Her first major publication was the short story “My Life with R. H. Macy,” published in The New Republic in 1941. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948, the same year “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker to considerable controversy. According to Jackson’s essay “Biography of a Story” (1960), no one (including her agent and the editor who bought it) liked “The Lottery”; New Yorker editor in chief Harold Ross did not understand it; and it was the subject of torrents of disturbed reader mail. Jackson has been pegged as a specialist in horror and the supernatural because of her famous story but was actually far more versatile, her work including children’s books and lighthearted domestic humor in her autobiographies Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957).

  Jackson’s celebrated touch for understated horror developed quite early; see, for example, her very short story, “Janice” (1938), about a college student’s devastatingly casual description of her suicide attempt. According to her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman’s introduction to the posthumous collection Come Along with Me (1968), it was this story, written while she was a sophomore at Syracuse, that led to their first meeting.

  “The Summer People” is a subtle tale, troublingly unresolved, with a sense of gathering menace assaulting the everyday. Is it an allegory, a horror story, a crime story? Are the Allisons dying or is some human agency terrorizing them? It makes a detective of the reader but doesn’t necessarily verify the reader’s conclusions.

  The Allisons’ country cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill; from three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at midsummer, lay still and dry. On the fourth side was the lake, which touched against the wooden pier the Allisons had to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the Allisons’ front porch, their side porch, or any spot on the wooden staircase leading from the porch down to the water. Although the Allisons loved their summer cottage, looked forward to arriving in the early summer and hated to leave in the fall, they had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and the lake as improvement enough for the life left to them. The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from the backyard pump, and no electricity. For seventeen summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water; Robert Allison had brought buckets full of water daily from the pump and read his paper by kerosene light in the evenings and they had both, sanitary city people, become stolid and matter-of-fact about their backhouse. In the first two years they had gone through all the standard vaudeville and magazine jokes about backhouses and by now, when they no longer had frequent guests to impress, they had subsided to a comfortable security which made the backhouse, as well as the pump and the kerosene, an indefinable asset to their summer life. In themselves, the Allisons were ordinary people. Mrs. Allison was fifty-eight years old and Mr. Allison sixty; they had seen their children outgrow the summer cottage and go on to families of their own and seashore resorts; their friends were either dead or settled in comfortable year-round houses, their nieces and nephews vague. In the winter they told one another they could stand their New York apartment while waiting for the summer; in the summer they told one another that the winter was well worthwhile, waiting to get to the country.

  Since they were old enough not to be ashamed of regular habits, the Allisons invariably left their summer cottage the Tuesday after Labor Day, and were as invariably sorry when the months of September and early October turned out to be pleasant and almost insufferably barren in the city; each year they recognized that there was nothing to bring them back to New York, but it was not until this year that they overcame their traditional inertia enough to decide to stay at the cottage after Labor Day.

  “There isn’t really anything to take us back to the city,” Mrs. Allison told her husband seriously, as though it were a new idea, and he told her, as though neither of them had ever considered it, “We might as well enjoy the country as long as possible.”

  Consequently, with much pleasure and a sli
ght feeling of adventure, Mrs. Allison went into their village the day after Labor Day and told those natives with whom she had dealings, with a pretty air of breaking away from tradition, that she and her husband had decided to stay at least a month longer at their cottage.

  “It isn’t as though we had anything to take us back to the city,” she said to Mr. Babcock, her grocer. “We might as well enjoy the country while we can.”

  “Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before,” Mr. Babcock said. He was putting Mrs. Allison’s groceries into a large cardboard carton, and he stopped for a minute to look reflectively into a bag of cookies. “Nobody,” he added.

  “But the city!” Mrs. Allison always spoke of the city to Mr. Babcock as though it were Mr. Babcock’s dream to go there. “It’s so hot—you’ve really no idea. We’re always sorry when we leave.”

  “Hate to leave,” Mr. Babcock said. One of the most irritating native tricks Mrs. Allison had noticed was that of taking a trivial

  statement and rephrasing it downward, into an even more trite statement. “I’d hate to leave myself,” Mr. Babcock said, after deliberation, and both he and Mrs. Allison smiled. “But I never heard of anyone ever staying out at the lake after Labor Day before.”

  “Well, we’re going to give it a try,” Mrs. Allison said, and Mr. Babcock replied gravely, “Never know till you try.”

  Physically, Mrs. Allison decided, as she always did when leaving the grocery after one of her inconclusive conversations with Mr. Babcock, physically, Mr. Babcock could model for a statue of Daniel Webster, but mentally…it was horrible to think into what old New England Yankee stock had degenerated. She said as much to Mr. Allison when she got into the car, and he said, “It’s generations of inbreeding. That and the bad land.”

  Since this was their big trip into town, which they made only once every two weeks to buy things they could not have delivered, they spent all day at it, stopping to have a sandwich in the newspaper and soda shop, and leaving packages heaped in the back of the car. Although Mrs. Allison was able to order groceries delivered regularly, she was never able to form any accurate idea of Mr. Babcock’s current stock by telephone, and her lists of odds and ends that might be procured was always supplemented, almost beyond their need, by the new and fresh local vegetables Mr. Babcock was selling temporarily, or the packaged candy which had just come in. This trip Mrs. Allison was tempted, too, by the set of glass baking dishes that had found themselves completely by chance in the hardware and clothing and general store, and which had seemingly been waiting there for no one but Mrs. Allison, since the country people, with their instinctive distrust of anything that did not look as permanent as trees and rocks and sky, had only recently begun to experiment in aluminum baking dishes instead of ironware, and had, apparently within the memory of local inhabitants, discarded stoneware in favor of iron.

  Mrs. Allison had the glass baking dishes carefully wrapped, to endure the uncomfortable ride home over the rocky road that

  led up to the Allisons’ cottage, and while Mr. Charley Walpole, who, with his younger brother Albert, ran the hardware-clothing-general store (the store itself was called Johnson’s, because it stood on the site of the old Johnson cabin, burned fifty years before Charley Walpole was born), laboriously unfolded newspapers to wrap around the dishes, Mrs. Allison said, informally, “Course, I could have waited and gotten those dishes in New York, but we’re not going back so soon this year.”

  “Heard you was staying on,” Mr. Charley Walpole said. His old fingers fumbled maddeningly with the thin sheets of newspaper, carefully trying to isolate only one sheet at a time, and he did not look up at Mrs. Allison as he went on, “Don’t know about staying on up there to the lake. Not after Labor Day.”

  “Well, you know,” Mrs. Allison said, quite as though he deserved an explanation, “it just seemed to us that we’ve been hurrying back to New York every year, and there just wasn’t any need for it. You know what the city’s like in the fall.” And she smiled confidingly up at Mr. Charley Walpole.

  Rhythmically he wound string around the package. He’s giving me a piece long enough to save, Mrs. Allison thought, and she looked away quickly to avoid giving any sign of impatience. “I feel sort of like we belong here, more,” she said. “Staying on after everyone else has left.” To prove this, she smiled brightly across the store at a woman with a familiar face, who might have been the woman who sold berries to the Allisons one year, or the woman who occasionally helped in the grocery and was probably Mr. Babcock’s aunt.

  “Well,” Mr. Charley Walpole said. He shoved the package a little across the counter, to show that it was finished and that for a sale well made, a package well wrapped, he was willing to accept pay. “Well,” he said again. “Never been summer people before, at the lake after Labor Day.”

  Mrs. Allison gave him a five-dollar bill, and he made change methodically, giving great weight even to the pennies. “Never after Labor Day,” he said, and nodded at Mrs. Allison, and went

  soberly along the store to deal with two women who were looking at cotton housedresses.

  As Mrs. Allison passed on her way out she heard one of the women say acutely, “Why is one of them dresses one dollar and thirty-nine cents and this one here is only ninety-eight?”

  “They’re great people,” Mrs. Allison told her husband as they went together down the sidewalk after meeting at the door of the hardware store. “They’re so solid, and so reasonable, and so honest.”

  “Makes you feel good, knowing there are still towns like this,” Mr. Allison said.

  “You know, in New York,” Mrs. Allison said, “I might have paid a few cents less for these dishes, but there wouldn’t have been anything sort of personal in the transaction.”

  “Staying on to the lake?” Mrs. Martin, in the newspaper and sandwich shop, asked the Allisons. “Heard you was staying on.”

  “Thought we’d take advantage of the lovely weather this year,” Mr. Allison said.

  Mrs. Martin was a comparative newcomer to the town; she had married into the newspaper and sandwich shop from a neighboring farm, and had stayed on after her husband’s death. She served bottled soft drinks, and fried egg and onion sandwiches on thick bread, which she made on her own stove at the back of the store. Occasionally when Mrs. Martin served a sandwich it would carry with it the rich fragrance of the stew or the pork chops cooking alongside for Mrs. Martin’s dinner.

  “I don’t guess anyone’s ever stayed out there so long before,” Mrs. Martin said. “Not after Labor Day, anyway.”

  “I guess Labor Day is when they usually leave,” Mr. Hall, the Allisons’ nearest neighbor, told them later, in front of Mr. Babcock’s store, where the Allisons were getting into their car to go home. “Surprised you’re staying on.”

  “It seemed a shame to go so soon,” Mrs. Allison said. Mr. Hall lived three miles away; he supplied the Allisons with butter and eggs, and occasionally, from the top of their hill, the Allisons

  could see the lights in his house in the early evening before the Halls

  went to bed.

  “They usually leave Labor Day,” Mr. Hall said.

  The ride home was long and rough; it was beginning to get dark, and Mr. Allison had to drive very carefully over the dirt road by the lake. Mrs. Allison lay back against the seat, pleasantly relaxed after a day of what seemed whirlwind shopping compared with their day-to-day existence; the new glass baking dishes lurked agreeably in her mind, and the half bushel of red eating apples, and the package of colored thumbtacks with which she was going to put up new shelf edging in the kitchen. “Good to get home,” she said softly as they came in sight of their cottage, silhouetted above them against the sky.

  “Glad we decided to stay on,” Mr. Allison agreed.

  Mrs. Allison spent the next morning lovingly washing her baking dishes, although in his innocence Charley Walpole had neglected to notice the chip in the edge of one; she decided, wastefully, to use some of the red eating
apples in a pie for dinner, and, while the pie was in the oven and Mr. Allison was down getting the mail, she sat out on the little lawn the Allisons had made at the top of the hill, and watched the changing lights on the lake, alternating gray and blue as clouds moved quickly across the sun.

  Mr. Allison came back a little out of sorts; it always irritated him to walk the mile to the mailbox on the state road and come back with nothing, even though he assumed that the walk was good for his health. This morning there was nothing but a circular from a New York department store, and their New York paper, which arrived erratically by mail from one to four days later than it should, so that some days the Allisons might have three papers and frequently none. Mrs. Allison, although she shared with her husband the annoyance of not having mail when they so anticipated it, pored affectionately over the department store circular, and made a mental note to drop in at the store when she finally went back to New York, and check on the sale of wool blankets;

  it was hard to find good ones in pretty colors nowadays. She debated saving the circular to remind herself, but after thinking about getting up and getting into the cottage to put it away safely somewhere, she dropped it into the grass beside her chair and lay back, her eyes half closed.

  “Looks like we might have some rain,” Mr. Allison said, squinting at the sky.

  “Good for the crops,” Mrs. Allison said laconically, and they both laughed.

  The kerosene man came the next morning while Mr. Allison was down getting the mail; they were getting low on kerosene and Mrs. Allison greeted the man warmly; he sold kerosene and ice, and, during the summer, hauled garbage away for the summer people. A garbage man was only necessary for improvident city folk; country people had no garbage.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Mrs. Allison told him. “We were getting pretty low.”

  The kerosene man, whose name Mrs. Allison had never learned, used a hose attachment to fill the twenty-gallon tank which supplied light and heat and cooking facilities for the Allisons; but today, instead of swinging down from his truck and unhooking the hose from where it coiled affectionately around the cab of the truck, the man stared uncomfortably at Mrs. Allison, his truck motor still going.