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

by Elizabeth George

  “Sit down and get out of the way,” she ordered. “There isn’t enough room for both of us to be milling around between the stove and the table while I’m trying to put food on the table.”

  Obediently, Oscar sank into the bench. While Agnes shifted the lukewarm food from the stove to the table, he struggled his way out of the nylon fanny pack he customarily wore on his

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  walking jaunts. Agnes wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was doing, but when she finished putting the last serving bowl on the table and went to sit down, she found a small earthen pot sitting next to her plate.

  Agnes had seen Mexican ollas for sale at various curio shops on their travels through the Southwest. This one was shaped the same way most ollas were, with a rounded base and a small, narrow-necked lip. But most of those commercial pots were generally unmarked and made of a smooth reddish-brown clay. This was much smaller than any of the ones she had ever seen for sale. It was gray—almost black—with a few faintly etched white markings dimly visible.

  “What’s that?” she asked, sitting down at her place and leaning over so she could get a better view of the pot.

  “Aggie, honey,” Oscar said, “I believe you are looking at a winning lottery ticket.”

  Agnes Barkley sat up and stared across the tiny tabletop at her husband. It wasn’t like Oscar to make jokes. Working in the post office all those years had pretty well wrung all the humor out of the man.-But when she saw his face, Agnes was startled. Oscar was actually beaming. He reminded her of the grinning young man who had been waiting beside the altar for her forty-six years earlier.

  “It doesn’t look like any lottery ticket I’ve ever seen,” Agnes answered, with a disdainful sniff. “Have some meat loaf and pass it before it gets any colder.”

  “Agnes,” he said, not moving a finger toward the platter, “you don’t understand. I think this is very important. Very valuable. I found it today. Down along the San Pedro just south of Saint David. There’s a place where one of last winter’s floods must have caused a cave-in. This pot was just lying there in the sand, sticking up in the air and waiting for someone like me to come along and pick it up.”

  Agnes regarded the pot with a little more respect. “You think it’s old, then?”

  “Very.”

  “And it could be worth a lot of money?”

  “Tons of money. Well, maybe not tons.” Oscar Barkley never allowed himself to indulge in unnecessary exaggeration. “But enough to make our lives a whole lot easier.”

  “It’s just a little chunk of clay. Why would it be worth money?”

  “Because it’s all in one piece, dummy,” he replied with certainty. Agnes was so inured to Oscar’s customary arrogance that she didn’t even notice it, much less let it bother her.

  “If you read Archaeology, or Discovery, or National Geographic, once in a while,” he continued, “or if you even bothered to look at the pictures, you’d see that stuff like this is usually found smashed into a million pieces. People have to spend months and years fitting them all back together.”

  Agnes reached out to pick up the pot. She had planned on examining it more closely, but as soon as she touched it, she inexplicably changed her mind and pushed it aside.

  “It still doesn’t look like all that much to me,” she said. “Now, if you’re not going to bother with the meat loaf, would you please go ahead and pass it?”

  The grin disappeared from Oscar’s face. He passed the platter without another word. Agnes saw at once that she had hurt his feelings. Usually, just a glimpse of that wounded look on his face would have been enough to melt her heart and cause her to make up with him, but tonight, for some reason, she still felt too hurt herself. Agnes was in no mood for making apologies.

  “By the way,” she said, a few minutes later, as she slathered margarine on a stone-cold potato, “Gretchen and Dolly Ann invited me to come up to Phoenix with them on a senior citizen bus tour the day after tomorrow. I told them I’d go.”

  “Oh? For how long?” Oscar asked.

  “Just overnight. Why, do you have a problem with that?”

  “No. No problem at all.”

  He said it so easily—it slipped out so smoothly—that for a moment Agnes almost missed it. “You mean you don’t mind if I go, then?”

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  Oscar focused on her vaguely, as though his mind was pre-occupied with something far away. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not at all. You go right ahead and have a good time. Just one thing, though.”

  Agnes gave him a sharp look. “What’s that?”

  “Don’t mention a word about this pot to anyone. Not Gretchen, not Dolly Ann.”

  “This is yours and Jimmy’s little secret, I suppose?” Agnes asked.

  Oscar shook his head. “Jimmy was a good half mile down the river when I found it,” he said. “I brushed it off and put it straight in my pack. He doesn’t even know I found it, and I’m not going to tell him, either. After all, I’m the one who found it. If it turns out to be worth something, there’s no sense in splitting it with someone who wasn’t any help at all in finding it, do you think?”

  Agnes thought about that for a moment. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t suppose there is.”

  The meat loaf tasted like old shoe leather. The potatoes were worse. When chewed, the green beans snapped tastelessly against their teeth like so many boiled rubber bands. Oscar and Agnes picked at their food with little interest, no appetite, and even less conversation. Finally, Agnes stood up and began clearing away the dishes.

  “How about some lemon pie,” she offered, conciliatory at last. “At least that’s supposed to be served cold.”

  They went to bed right after the ten o’clock news ended on TV. Oscar fell asleep instantly, planted firmly in the middle of the bed and snoring up a storm, while Agnes clung to her side of the mattress and held a pillow over her ear to help shut out some of the noise. Eventually she fell asleep as well. It was close to morning when the dream awakened her.

  Agnes was standing on a small knoll, watching a young child play in the dirt. The child—apparently a little girl—wasn’t one of Agnes Barkley’s own children. Both of her girls were fair-skinned blondes. This child was brown-skinned, with a mane of thick black hair and white, shiny teeth. The child was bathed in warm sunlight, laughing and smiling. She spun around and

  around, kicking up dirt from around her, looking for all the world like a child-sized dust devil dancing across the desert floor.

  Suddenly, for no clear reason, the scene darkened as though a huge cloud had passed in front of the sun. Somehow sensing danger, Agnes called out to the child: “Come here. Quick.”

  The little girl looked up at her and frowned, but she didn’t seem to understand the warning Agnes was trying to give, and she didn’t move. Agnes heard the sound then, heard the incredible roar and rush of water and knew that a flash flood was bearing down on them from somewhere upstream.

  “Come here!” she cried again, more urgently this time. “Now!”

  The child looked up at Agnes once more, and then she glanced off to her side. Her eyes widened in terror at the sight of a solid wall of murky brown water, twelve to fourteen feet high, churning toward her. The little girl scrambled to her feet and started away, darting toward Agnes and safety. But then, when she was almost out of harm’s way, she stopped, turned, and went back. She was bending over to retrieve something from the dirt—something small and round and black—when the water hit. Agnes watched in helpless horror while the water crashed over her. Within seconds, the child was swept from view.

  Agnes awakened drenched in sweat, just as she had years before when she was going through the change of life. Long after her heart quit pounding, the vivid, all-too-real dream stayed with her. Was that where the pot had come from? she wondered. Had the pot’s owner, some small Indian child—no one in Westmont ever used the term Native American—been swept to her death before her mother’s horrified eyes? And i
f it was true, if what Agnes had seen in the dream had really happened, it must have been a long time ago. How was it possible that it could be passed on to her—to a rock-solid Lutheran lady from Illinois, one not given to visions or wild flights of imagination?

  Agnes crawled out of bed without disturbing the sleeping Oscar. She fumbled on her glasses, then slipped into her robe and went to the bathroom. When she emerged she stopped by

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  the kitchen table, where the pot, sitting by itself, was bathed in a shaft of silver moonlight. It seemed to glow and shimmer in that strange, pearlescent light, but rather than being frightened of it, Agnes found herself drawn to it.

  Without thinking, she sat down at the table, pulled the pot toward her, and let her fingers explore its smooth, cool surface. How did you go about forming such a pot? Agnes wondered. Where did you find the clay? How was it fired? What was it used for? There were no answers to those questions, but Agnes felt oddly comforted simply by asking them. A few minutes later she slipped back into bed and slept soundly until well after her usual time to get up and make coffee.

  Two nights later, at the hotel in Phoenix, Agnes Barkley was down to nothing but her bra and panties when Gretchen Dixon’s irritated voice brought her back to herself. “Well?” Gretchen demanded. “Do you want a card or not, Aggie? Either get in the game or get out.”

  Agnes put down her cards. “I’m out,” she said. “I’m not very good at this. I can’t concentrate.”

  “We should have played hearts instead,” Lola offered.

  “Strip hearts isn’t all the same thing as strip poker,” Gretchen snapped. “How many cards?”

  “Two,” Lola answered.

  Agnes got up and pulled on her nightgown and robe. She had followed Gretchen’s advice and started the game wearing as many clothes as she could manage. It hadn’t helped. Although she was usually a quick study at games, she was hopeless when it came to the intricacies of poker. And now, with the room aswirl in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, she was happy to be out of the game.

  Agnes opened the sliding door and slipped out onto the tiny balcony. Although the temperature hovered in the low forties, it wasn’t that cold—not compared to Chicago in January. In fact, it seemed downright balmy. She looked out at the sparse traffic

  waiting for the light on Grand Avenue and heard the low, constant rumble of trucks on the Black Canyon Freeway behind her. The roar reminded her once more of the noise the water had made as it crashed down around the little girl and overwhelmed her.

  Although she wasn’t cold, Agnes shivered and went back inside. She propped three pillows behind her, then sat on the bed with a book positioned in front of her face. The other women may have thought she was reading, but she wasn’t.

  Agnes Barkley was thinking about flash floods—remembering the real one she and Oscar had seen last winter. January had been one of the wettest ones on record. The fill-in manager at the trailer park commuted from Benson. He had told them one afternoon that a flood crest was expected over by Saint David shortly and that if they hurried, it would probably be worth seeing. They had been standing just off the bridge at Saint David when the wall of water came rumbling toward them, pushing ahead of it a jumbled collection of tires and rusty car fenders and even an old refrigerator, which bobbed along in the torrent as effortlessly as if it were nothing more than a bottle cork floating in a bathtub.

  Agnes Barkley’s dream from the other night—that still too vivid dream—might very well have been nothing more than a holdover from that. But she was now convinced it was more than that, especially after what she’d learned that day at the Heard Museum. Just as Gretchen Dixon had told her, the museum had been loaded with what Agnes now knew enough to call Native American artifacts—baskets, pottery, beadwork.

  Their group had been led through the tour by a fast-talking docent who had little time or patience for dawdlers or questions. Afterward, while the others milled in the gift shop or lined up for refreshments, Agnes made her way back to one display in particular, where she had seen a single pot that very closely resembled the one she had last seen sitting on the kitchen table of the RV.

  The display was a mixture of Tohono O’othham artifacts. Some of the basketry was little more than fragments. And just as Oscar

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  had mentioned, the pots all showed signs of having been broken and subsequently glued back together. What drew Agnes to this display was not only the pot but also the typed legend on a nearby wall, which explained how, upon the death of the potmaker, her pots were always destroyed lest her spirit remain trapped forever in that which she had made.

  Oscar’s pot was whole, but surely the person who had crafted it was long since dead. Could the potmaker’s spirit somehow still be captured, inside that little lump of blackened clay? Had the mother made that tiny pot as some kind of plaything for her child? Was that what had made it so precious to the little girl? Did that explain why she had bolted back into the path of certain death in a vain attempt to save it? And had the mother’s restless spirit somehow managed to create a vision in order to convey the horror of that terrible event to Agnes?

  As she stood staring at the lit display in the museum, that’s how Agnes came to see what had happened to her. She hadn’t dreamed a dream so much as she had seen a vision. And now, two days later, with the book positioned in front of her face and with the three-handed poker game continuing across the room, Agnes tried to sort out what it all meant and what she was supposed to do about it.

  The poker game ended acrimoniously when Lola and Dolly Ann, both with next to nothing on, accused the fully dressed Gretchen of cheating. The other three women were still arguing about that when they came to bed. Not wanting to be drawn into the quarrel, Agnes closed her eyes and feigned sleep.

  Long after the others were finally quiet, Agnes lay awake, puzzling about her responsibility to a woman she had never seen but through whose eyes she had witnessed that ancient and yet all too recent drowning. The child swept away in the rolling brown water was not Agnes Barkley’s own child, yet the Indian child’s death grieved Agnes as much as if she had been one of her own. It was growing light by the time Agnes reached a decision and was finally able to fall asleep.

  The tour bus seemed to take forever to get them back to Tombstone. Oscar came to town to meet the bus and pick Agnes up. He greeted her with an exultant grin on his face and with an armload of library books sliding this way and that in the back seat of the Honda.

  “I took a quick trip up to Tucson while you were gone,” he explained. “They made an exception and let me borrow these books from the university library. Wait until I show you.”

  “I don’t want to see,” Agnes replied.

  “You don’t? Why not? I pored over them half the night and again this morning, until my eyes were about to fall out of my head. That pot of ours really is worth a fortune.”

  “You’re going to have to take it back,” Agnes said quietly.

  “Take it back?” Oscar echoed in dismay. “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone nuts or something? All we have to do is sell the pot, and we’ll be on easy street from here on out.”

  “That pot is not for sale,” Agnes asserted. “You’re going to have to take it right back where you found it and break it.”

  Shaking his head, Oscar clamped his jaw shut, slammed the car in gear, and didn’t say another word until they were home at the trailer park and had dragged both the books and Agnes Barkley’s luggage inside.

  “What in the hell has gotten into you?” Oscar demanded at last, his voice tight with barely suppressed anger.

  Agnes realized she owed the man some kind of explanation. “There’s a woman’s spirit caught inside that pot,” she began. “We have to let her out. The only way to do that is to break the pot. Otherwise she stays trapped in there forever.”

  “That’s the craziest bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense I ever heard. Where’d you come up with something like that? It sounds
like something that fruitcake Gretchen Dixon would come up with. You didn’t tell her about this, did you?”

  “No. I read about it. In a display at the museum, but I think I already knew it, even before I saw it there.”

  “You already knew it?” Oscar sneered. “What’s that supposed

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  to mean? Are you trying to tell me that the spirit who’s supposedly

  trapped in my pot is telling you I have to break it?”

  “That’s right. And put it back where you found it.”

  “Like hell I will!” Oscar growled.

  He stomped outside and stayed there, making some pretense of checking fluids under the hood of the Honda. Oscar may have temporarily abandoned the field of battle, but Agnes knew the fight was far from over. She sat down and waited. It was two o’clock in the afternoon—time to start some arrangements about dinner—but she didn’t make a move toward either the stove or the refrigerator.

  For forty-six years, things had been fine between them. Every time a compromise had been required, Agnes had made it cheerfully and without complaint. That was the way it had always been, and it was the way Oscar expected it to be now. But this time—this one time—Agnes Barkley was prepared to stand firm. This one time, she wasn’t going to bend.

  Oscar came back inside half an hour later. “Look,” he said, his manner amiable and apologetic. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle. You didn’t know the whole story, because I didn’t have a chance to tell you. While I was up in Tucson, I made some preliminary inquiries about the pot. Anonymously, of course. Hypothetically. I ended up talking to a guy who runs a trading post up near Oracle. He’s a dealer, and he says he could get us a ton of money. You’ll never guess how much.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred thou. Free and clear. That’s what comes to us after the dealer’s cut. And that’s at a bare minimum. He says that if the collectors all end up in a bidding war, the price could go a whole lot higher than that. Do you have any idea what we could do with that kind of money?”