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

by Elizabeth George

  At first the memory was so strong that I thought that was what I was seeing, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that it wasn’t happening that way. The thing had fallen a little to the side and instead of sliding straight down the roof it was being carried to a little ornamental railing at the edge of it, where the main hotel joined onto the annex, driving a wedge of snow in front of it. Then somebody said, unbelievingly: “He’s stopped.” And the thing had stopped. Instead of plunging over the roof to the terrace it had been swept up against the railing, bundled in snow like a cylindrical snowball, and stopped within a yard of the edge. Then it sat up, clinging with one hand to the railing, covered from waist down in snow. If he’d been wearing a hat when he came out of the window he’d lost it in the fall because his damp hair was gleaming silver above his smiling brown face. It was an inward kind of smile, as if only he could appreciate the thing that he’d done.

  Then the chattering started. Some people were yelling to get a ladder, others running. The rest were asking each other what had happened until somebody spotted the window wide open three floors above us.

  “Her window. Mrs. McEvoy’s window.”

  “He fell off Mrs. McEvoy’s balcony, just like last year.”

  “But he didn’t…”

  At some point Square Bear had put a hand on my shoulder. Now he bent down beside me, looking anxiously into my face, saying we should go in and find Mother. I wished he’d get out of my way because I wanted to see Silver Stick on the roof. Then Mother arrived, wafting clouds of scent and drama. I had to go inside of course, but not before I’d seen the ladder arrive and Silver Stick coming down it, a little stiffly but dignified. And one more thing. Just as he stepped off the ladder the glass doors to the terrace opened and out she came. She hadn’t been there when it happened but now in her black fur jacket, she stepped through the people as if they weren’t there, and gave him her hand and thanked him.

  At dinner that night she dined alone at her table, as on the other nights, but it took her longer to get to it. Her long walk across the dining room was made longer by all the people who wanted to speak to her, to inquire after her health, to tell her how pleased they were to see her again. It was as if she’d just arrived that afternoon, instead of being there for five days already. There were several posies of flowers on her table that must have been sent up especially from the town, and champagne in a silver bucket beside it. Silver Stick and Square Bear bowed to her as she went past their table, but ordinary polite little nods, not like that first night. The smile she gave them was like the sun coming up.

  We were sent off to bed as soon as we’d had our soup as usual. Amanda went to sleep at once but I lay awake, resenting my exile from what mattered. Our parents’ sitting room was next to our bedroom and I heard them come in, excited still. Then, soon afterward, a knock on the door of our suite, the murmur of voices and my father, a little taken aback, saying yes come in by all means. Then their voices, Square Bear’s first, fussing with apologies about it being so late, then Silver Stick’s cutting through him: “The fact is, you’re owed an explanation, or rather your daughter is. Dr. Watson suggested that we should give it to you so that some time in the future when Jessica’s old enough, you may decide to tell her.”

  If I’d owned a chest of gold and had watched somebody throwing it away in a crowded street I couldn’t have been more furious than hearing my secret about to be squandered. My first thought was to rush through to the other room in my nightdress and bare feet and demand that he should speak to me, not to them. Then caution took over, and although I did get out of bed, I went just as far as the door, opened it a crack so that I could hear better and padded back to bed. There were sounds of chairs being rearranged, people settling into them, then Silver Stick’s voice.

  “I should say at the start, for reasons we need not go into, that Dr. Watson and I were convinced that Irene McEvoy had

  not pushed her husband to his death. The question was how to prove it, and in that regard your daughter’s evidence was indispensable. She alone saw Mr. McEvoy fall and she alone heard what he shouted. The accurate ear of childhood—once certain adult nonsenses had been discarded—recorded that shout as precisely as a phonograph and knew that strictly speaking it was only half a shout, that Mr. McEvoy, if he’d had time, would have added something else to it.”

  A pause. I sat up in bed with the counterpane round my neck, straining not to miss a word of his quiet, clear voice.

  “No—something. The question was, no what? Mr. McEvoy had expected something to be there and his last thought on earth was surprise at the lack of it, surprise so acute that he was trying to shout it with his last breath. The question was, what that thing could have been.”

  Silence, waiting for an answer, but nobody said anything.

  “If you look up at the back of the hotel from the terrace you will notice one obvious thing. The third and fourth floors have balconies. The second floor does not. The room inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. McEvoy had a balcony. A person staying in the suite would be aware of that. He would not necessarily be aware, unless he were a particularly observant man, that the second-floor rooms had no balconies. Until it was too late. I formed the theory that Mr. McEvoy had not in fact fallen from the window of his own room but from a lower room belonging to somebody else, which accounted for his attempted last words: “No…balcony.”

  My mother gasped. My father said: “By Jove…”

  “Once I’d arrived at that conclusion, the question was what Mr. McEvoy was doing in somebody else’s room. The possibility of thieving could be ruled out since he was a very rich man. Then he was seeing somebody. The next question was who. And here your daughter was incidentally helpful in a way she is too young to understand. She confided to us in all innocence an overheard piece of adult gossip to the effect that the late Mr. McEvoy had a roving eye.”

  My father began to laugh, then stifled it. My mother said “Well” in a way that boded trouble for me later.

  “Once my attention was directed that way, the answer became obvious. Mr. McEvoy was in somebody else’s hotel room for what one might describe as an episode of galanterie. But the accident happened in the middle of the morning. Did ever a lady in the history of the world make a romantic assignation for that hour of the day? Therefore it wasn’t a lady. So I asked myself what group of people are most likely to be encountered in hotel rooms in mid-morning and the answer was…”

  “Good heavens, the chambermaid!”

  My mother’s voice, and Holmes was clearly none too pleased at being interrupted.

  “Quite so. Mr. McEvoy had gone to meet a chambermaid. I asked some questions to establish whether any young and attractive chambermaid had left the hotel since last Christmas. There was such a one, named Eva. She’d married the under porter and brought him as a dowry enough money to buy that elegant little sleigh. Now a prudent chambermaid may amass a modest dowry by saving tips, but one look at that sleigh will tell you that Eva’s dowry might best be described as, well…immodest.”

  Another laugh from my father, cut off by a look from my mother I could well imagine.

  “Dr. Watson and I went to see Eva. I told her what I’d deduced and she, poor girl, confirmed it with some details—the sound of the housekeeper’s voice outside, Mr. McEvoy’s well-practiced but ill-advised tactic of taking refuge on the balcony. You may say that the girl Eva should have confessed at once what had happened…”

  “I do indeed.”

  “But bear in mind her position. Not only her post at the hotel but her engagement to the handsome Franz would be forfeited. And, after all, there was no question of anybody being tried in court. The fashionable world was perfectly happy to connive at the story that Mr. McEvoy had fallen accidentally from his

  window—while inwardly convicting an innocent woman of his murder.”

  My mother said, sounding quite subdued for once: “But Mrs. McEvoy must have known. Why didn’t she say something?”

  “Ah,
to answer that one needs to know something about Mrs. McEvoy’s history, and it so happens that Dr. Watson and I are in that position. A long time ago, before her first happy marriage, Mrs. McEvoy was loved by a prince. He was not, I must admit, a particularly admirable prince, but prince he was. Can you imagine how it felt for a woman to come from that to being deceived with a hotel chambermaid by a man who made his fortune from bathroom furnishings? Can you conceive that a proud woman might choose to be thought a murderess rather than submit to that indignity?”

  Another silence, then my mother breathed: “Yes. Yes, I think I can.” Then, “Poor woman.”

  “It was not pity that Irene McEvoy ever needed.” Then, in a different tone of voice: “So there you have it. And it is your decision how much, if anything, you decide to pass on to Jessica in due course.”

  There were sounds of people getting up from chairs, then my father said: “And your, um, demonstration this morning?”

  “Oh, that little drama. I knew what had happened, but for Mrs. McEvoy’s sake it was necessary to prove to the world she was innocent. I couldn’t call Eva as witness because I’d given her my word. I’d studied the pitch of the roof and the depth of the snow and I was scientifically convinced that a man falling from Mrs. McEvoy’s balcony would not have landed on the terrace. You know the result.”

  Good nights were said, rather subdued, and they were shown out. Through the crack in the door I glimpsed them. As they came level with the crack, Silver Stick, usually so precise in his movements, dropped his pipe and had to kneel to pick it up. As he knelt, his bright eyes met mine through the crack and he

  smiled, an odd, quick smile unseen by anybody else. He’d known

  I’d been listening all the time. When they’d gone Mother and Father sat for a long time in silence. At last Father said: “If he’d got it wrong, he’d have killed himself.” “Like the skiing.” “He must have loved her very much.” “It’s his own logic he loves.” But then, my mother always was the unromantic one.

  Murder-Two

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  In John Guare’s play Bosoms and Neglect, two deeply neurotic characters are discussing neglected writers. When one advances the name of Joyce Carol Oates, the other demands (paraphrasing), how can she be neglected when she writes a book a week? From the publication of her first novel By the North Gate (1963), Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) has been the most prolific of major American writers, turning out novels, short stories, reviews, essays, and plays in an unceasing flow as remarkable for its quality as its volume. Writers who are extremely prolific often risk not being taken as seriously as they should—if you can write it that fast, how good can it be? Oates, however, has largely escaped that trap, and even her increasing identification with crime fiction, at a time that the field has attracted a number of other mainstream literary figures, has not damaged her reputation as a formidable serious writer.

  Many of Oates’s works contain at least some elements of crime and mystery, from the National Book Award winner Them (1970), through the Chappaquiddick fictionalization Black Water (1992) and the Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired serial-killer novel Zombie (1995), to her controversial 738-page fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe, Blonde (2000). The element of detection becomes explicit with the investigations of amateur sleuth Xavier Kilgarvan in the 1984 novel The Mysteries of Winterthurn which, the author explains in an afterword to the 1985 paperback edition, “is the third in a quintet of experimental novels that deal, in genre form, with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America.” Why would a serious literary writer like Oates choose to work in such “deliberately confining structures?” Because “the

  formal discipline of ‘genre’…forces us inevitably to a radical re-visioning of the world and the craft of fiction.” Oates, who numbers among her honors in a related genre the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers of America, did not establish an explicit crime-fiction identity until Lives of the Twins (1987; British title Kindred Passions) appeared under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith. Initially intended to be a secret, the identity of Smith was revealed almost immediately, and later novels were bylined Joyce Carol Oates (large print) writing as Rosamund Smith (smaller print).

  Among the key attributes of the astonishingly versatile Oates is her insight into deeply troubled adolescents, a quality “Murder-Two” demonstrates, along with her vivid descriptive style and her unconventional way with a crime-fiction situation.

  This, he swore. He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven p.m. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hard-wood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down the steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately. Squid ink?—well, the blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something more or less, and valid, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep. In Derek Peck, Jr.’s, case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief—the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition—from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting later weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed

  open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence

  that vibrated with dread.

  He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother!”

  As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.

  Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek Senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-colored body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy, were from “families of divorce,” and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it?—158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child, they say that remains with you forever, irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells), but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.

  This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.

  Crouched over her now, badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whisp
ering, “Mommy?—can’t you wake up? Mom-my, don’t be—” balking at the word dead for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word old, not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman, for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy, don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned, and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Kennedy to pick him up, so eager to see him again, and he’d stared appalled at the harsh lines bracketing her mouth like a pike’s, and her smile too happy and what he felt was pity and this, too, made him feel guilty. You don’t pity your own mother, asshole.

  If he’d come home immediately after school. By four p.m. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy’s across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight okay?—Math Club—study group—calculus—don’t wait up for me, please. How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone.

  Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already…dead?

  Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact.

  And what had he said? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday. Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his