by Aimee Bender
Afterward, the farmer’s son ran home for dinner, and the family of five crossed back over. The sky was darkening with clouds, and halfway home, it began to rain. The woman tried to huddle the four under her arms, but they resisted, and held their bodies freely under the water. They seemed to enjoy it, tilting their faces to the sky. She had never seen them wet before, and rain, falling on their dirty potato bodies, smelled just like Mother at the sink, washing. Mother, who had died so many years ago, now as vivid as actual, scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink before breakfast. How many times had she done that? Year after year after year. Lighting the new fire of the morning. Humming. Her skirt so easy on her waist. Her hands so confident at the sink. They were that memory, created. Holding their potato hands up, they let the rain pour down their potato arms, their potato knees and legs, and the woman breathed in the smell of them, over and over, as deeply as she could. For here was grandmother, greeting her grandchildren, gathering them in her arms, and covering their wide faces with kisses.
Let’s face it. The dead bodies were clearly acts of easy murder, done by the husband to the wife, then the wife to the husband. I found them face-to-face, cold, on the living-room carpet. There is nothing here to solve. The only mystery I can see I have addressed in my report, which will soon be on the desk of my superior, and has to do with the number of salt and pepper shakers in a household of two people. Fourteen seems to me excessive. That, in my opinion, is the living core of this mystery. If you want a motive, I will write it out: the husband hated his wife because she had stopped speaking to him years ago; the wife hated the husband because he was stupid with their money. All this has been verified by various neighbors, relatives, and friends. No one I spoke to was particularly shocked by the double murder, seemingly planned on the same day which, if nothing else, seems to show a sense of kinship between the two. But! No one, including the neighbor, the doctor, and the bosses, understood why two people who paid a live-in chef to the very edge of their budget, and whose blood pressure kept climbing up the ladder into the red zone, would collect salt and pepper shakers, in ceramic, wood, glass, and metal. Does this mystery put anyone at risk? No. Will I get reprimanded again for not sticking to the outlines of the report? Of course. But I believe that mysteries surface in unexpected forms, and if I am to be a genuine investigator, then I must follow what I feel needs investigation.
I spent the night in their house staring at the rows of salt and pepper shakers while the bodies were being examined at the morgue. The cook was away for the night, and I slept in the guest bedroom, on top of the comforter, not moving any evidence but just resting and listening, as the only way to get a true feel of a house and its residents is to stay in it overnight. This model was fairly standard for the neighborhood: one story, ranch style, two bedrooms and an office. The pictures on the walls were restful landscapes, and in the guest room, I slept beneath a watercolor of horses running. Every piece of furniture and decor was slippery to the mind and would not stick. I can hardly recall the sofa or the chairs, so unobtrusive was their style, and so involved was I with examining those shakers. Several pairs were masterfully crafted, with zigzag patterns of mahogany and oak, or cut diamonds of crystal, and must have cost quite a pile. One was a humorous set, each a green ceramic frog: salt with a cane, pepper with a hat. Each held varying levels of grain. The house grew so quiet that I could hear the movement of cats next door, paws treading softly on the sidewalk.
In the morning, I awoke to a call from the coroner. He confirmed that the husband was knifed in the stomach at five p.m., while the wife had been poisoned at a quarter to three, with a poison that took exactly 2.5 hours to kick in. They both died within about a minute of each other. Her late lunch had been a small chicken potpie, unsalted, a green salad, peppered, and a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. He had skipped lunch, worried as he was about the exactitude of the poison, which he had slipped into her water bottle. Her fingertips, as she carefully cut and chewed her chicken and carrots, were covered with bandages from all the blade-checking she’d done over the course of the morning. She was described by several sources as a thorough type.
The coroner is an upstanding fellow. He fought in Vietnam and raises orchids. I thanked him repeatedly but he gets embarrassed by gratitude and hung up.
After I ordered in a bowl of tomato soup and a sandwich, I spent several hours in the living room, sitting with the stain from his wound. It spread over the carpet in a curling line, as if he’d put his arm around her with his blood.
Now, she could not have known she was poisoned when she knifed him, as he had chosen a poison that is silent and causes no suffering, and he had hidden the bottle somewhere very difficult to find, as we had not yet found it. In fact, their greatest difference was revealed through their choice of murder weapon, in that she wanted to make him suffer and be aware of her murderous inclinations, choosing the overt and physical technique, while he selected the secretive method, one of the few available where she would die without fully realizing what was happening. He perhaps was more ashamed of his loathing, and also he did not want her to feel pain. Their greatest similarity, however, was revealed in their choice of occasion, since each conceived of the exact month and moment of death fully independent of the other. Certainly that was something. And I imagine that as they lay on the carpet next to each other, one bleeding from the gut, the other foaming from the mouth, they saw something meaningful and linked in the eyes of the other. The nature of hate is as elusive as love’s. I for one am just pleased they did not have children.
Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my lunch and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend who was half asleep, and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. Curious. I had not met her yet; she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning the following morning to begin the slow process of packing up her bags. This couple had not been exceedingly wealthy, but the luxury of a live-in cook was something both felt was important to their happiness. So they shared a car, and rarely ate out or vacationed.
I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible accomplice, particularly now with that poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous atop the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.
“The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate which she handed over to me.
“Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”
“Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model ideal. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt-she intensified the existing flavor-and he was pepper-he added a new kick-and that every fine table needed both.
“In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”
“No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.
She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and befo
re I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”
“Did you have any reason to dislike either one of them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”
“Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”
“Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”
She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself with a full head of very brown hair in the photo album, serving plates of cake, “and that was their gift to each other every single anniversary.”
She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.
I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years …”
“Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.
“What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew sensitive to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.
“After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”
“Truly?”
“From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”
I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.
“And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”
“We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.
She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.
“I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped that I would be able to fix it all. I tried,” she said. “It is a chef’s job, this,” she said, squeezing lemon juice into a pitcher.
She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing pitcher of lemonade with a wooden spoon.
“But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the saltshaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.
“So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”
Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.
“Sir,” she said, “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”
I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.
It was not the chef. I believed her fully. The evidence was in. But if the mystery was solved, both big and small, then why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking over and over. He had a new case for me. This one involved a homicide on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It will solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepperlike” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.
I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the chef retired from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their union had come full circle, and perhaps it was the sting of that bittersweetness that killed them most, crueler than any knife or poison.
The boy was born with fingers shaped like keys. All except one, the pinkie on the right hand, had sharp ridges running along the inner length, and a point at the tip. They were made of flesh, with nerves and pores, but of a tougher texture, more hardened and specific. As a child, the boy had a difficult time learning to hold a pen and use scissors, but he was resilient and figured out his own method fast enough. His true task was to find the nine doors.
• • •
Door one he found as a kid; it was his front-door key. He did not expect this because it seemed so obvious but one day he came home from school and was locked out; his mother, usually home, had just begun taking some kind of sculpture class and was off molding clay and forgot to leave a key under the welcome mat. So he was unwelcome, in his own home. He cried for a bit and tromped on some pansies as revenge and got so frustrated staring at the lock, such a simple piece of metal separating him from his palace of food and bed and TV and telephone, that he stuck the index finger of his right hand inside. It shoved deep into the lock, bumping around, trying to find a perfect spatial match. Nothing clicked. But he’d enjoyed the sensation so he tried the middle finger next. Too big. The pinkie on the left hand: too small; it wiggled inside like a wire. It was the ring finger on his right hand that slipped inside, easy as a glove, ridges filling the humps and the boy settled it deep, rotated his entire hand, heard the click, and the door opened cleanly. Inside. He ripped his finger from the door and let out some kind of vicious delighted laugh.
When his mother came home, two hours later, hands red with clay, he pulled her straight to the door and showed her the trick. Shove in, turn, click, open. His mother kept laughing. And I didn’t eve
n want to buy this house! she said, holding him close. And to imagine, what if we hadn’t? The boy shrugged. He had no idea how to answer that question.
The second key fit the lock of the bank deposit box that held all the securities of the family. The two had gone on a trip to the bank and the boy was bored in the room of security boxes while his mother spoke worriedly with an accountant. He stuck the pinkie on his left hand into their security box and ta da. He was very surprised. So was his mother. I didn’t especially like this bank either, she said. Can I have some of this money? the boy asked, looking with interest at the large piece of gold sitting in the box like a glowing turd. No, she said, but I’ll buy you a burger. They went to his favorite burger joint where the lettuce was shredded and the soda ice crushed, and she told him about how she was making a clay version of him. It’s you, she said, but you are surrounded by doors. You are standing on doors and wearing doors and your hand of keys is held up like a deck of cards. The boy splayed his fingers out on the table. Gin, he said.
The third, fourth, and fifth keys opened his camp trunk, the neighbor’s car, and the storage room of the school cafeteria, respectively. He opened the cafeteria door one day at school when he was wandering around, not wanting to go home yet because there was nothing to do and no one to be with. All the other kids were off playing sports. The boy opened the back of the cafeteria with his right pointer, to his own almost dulled surprise, and sat with the frozen chicken nuggets for a while. It got boring quickly so he went home, opened the door with his other finger, and watched TV. His father was away at war. No one knew what war it was because it was an unannounced war, which made it worse because he could tell no one because that would cause great governmental problems. So he just held on to that information and when his friends asked where his dad was on Open House Night at school, he said, He’s away on business. He wanted to yell out, The business of saving everyone’s life! but he knew that would cause further questions so he kept his mouth shut.
