Crucifixion River

by Marcia Muller

  Sabina interrupted his description of his evening’s plans for them. “I, too, have collected a handsome fee. From Charles Ackerman.”

  “Ah, you solved the pickpocketing case.”

  “Yes.” She proceeded to tell him about it, finishing: “I thought the woman…Sarah Wilds…was preying upon infirm men, perhaps men in gastric distress. It turned out she was stealing from perfectly healthy men, stabbing them in the side with her needle-thin hatpin to distract them while she picked their pockets.”

  “Needle-thin?” John frowned. “I presented you with a silver-and-coral Charles Horner hatpin on your last birthday. As I recall, it was fairly thick.”

  “Sarah Wilds had altered hers, so the pin would pass through clothing and flesh, but not cause the victim to bleed much, if at all. Just a painful prick, and she’d withdraw it while reaching for her victim’s valuables.”

  “But the man who died…Harry Holbrooke?”

  “Henry. The police assume he was unlucky. The pin went in too deeply, punctured an organ, and caused bleeding and an infection. You must remember…Sarah Wilds was using the same pin over and over. Think of the bacteria it carried.”

  John nodded. “Another job well done, my dear. Now, about Marchand’s and perhaps…”

  “I accept your invitation upon one condition.”

  “And that is?”

  “You will pay for your evening from the proceeds of your Carville investigation, and I will pay for mine from my proceeds.”

  John, as Sabina had known he would, bristled. “A lady paying her own way on a celebratory evening…unthinkable!”

  “You had best think about it, because those are my terms.”

  He sighed-a long exhalation-and scowled fiercely. But as she knew he would, he said: “An evening out with you, my dear, is acceptable under any terms or conditions.”

  As was an evening out with him.

  The Dying Time

  by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzin

  Melissa

  Autumn leaves skittered along the narrow main street of the small town in California’s gold country. They leaped the high curb, rattled down the board sidewalk, and drifted against the bench where I sat dying.

  Was this where it was to end-Murphys, population around 300? A hard, wooden-slatted bench my last resting place in this life? Tricked-up shops and polyester-clad tourists my last sight? What was I doing here, anyway? Traveling aimlessly, as my husband and I had done over the past five years, possessed of more time and money than purposes and enthusiasms.

  The pain was growing stronger now; if I had any chance to survive, I had better do something soon. But I felt curiously lethargic and resigned. Even the prospect of a painful death didn’t seem to bother me.

  It had been a good life up until this past year. I’d accomplished most of the modest things I’d set out to do, had visited most of the places I wanted to see. Of course there were loose ends, but didn’t everyone leave a few of those? There was the emptiness of the past few years, but what were a few out of many? And then there were the events of September and my growing suspicions about the terrible way Jake Hollis had died…

  I didn’t want to think about Jake. That was in the past, over now. All over. As my life soon would be.

  Strange. I hadn’t expected to feel such detachment at the end. I seemed as little a part of the dying woman on the bench as the leaves that drifted at her feet. They were dying, too, torn by the wind from the trees that had sustained them through the sudden rainstorms of spring, the blistering heat of summer, the first frosts of autumn. Dying like…

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Slowly I looked up. My husband Ray had returned from the used-book shop with a package under his arm. A handsome man yet, blond and tanned and fit, dressed in a new brown cashmere sweater and cords. Handsome as the day I’d met him at the sorority open house twenty-six years ago. A quarter century of marriage, so long that I could scarcely remember a time when he wasn’t there. Always there, yet so often absent even when physically present.

  I should have sensed that quality even before we were married. The way his eyes kept moving restlessly as he pretended interest in what I was saying. The way he replied with nods and utterances that were mere reaction to my tone of voice, rather than my words’ content. But I was twenty years old; what did I know of a man for whom the real world was never quite enough? A man who sought elusive fulfillment in the new and strange and different, as if he might then enter another dimension that would measure up to his expectations.

  Nothing had ever measured up. Nothing. Not a stellar career that began with the glimmerings of what the media now called the Information Age and culminated in the sale of the last of three computer software firms he’d founded-a sale unprecedented in financial annals that ensured the security of our children and their heirs for generations to come. The children-Donna and Andrew-certainly hadn’t measured up; he’d given them scant attention, and now they had drifted away. There were the various pursuits, all dangerous-flying, mountain climbing, auto racing-and now all discarded. Even the latest passion, skydiving, was a thing of the past. I would be the last to go, the wife who had become nothing more than a good traveling companion.

  The Caribbe an in winter, when rains soaked northern California. Paris in the springtime. Alaskan cruises to escape the heat of summer in the Napa Valley. African photo safaris, visits to Egypt’s pyramids, tours of China and Russia. Hawaii at the holidays when our children and their families failed to return home. We migrated like birds, but insulated from unpleasantness and with fewer surprises.

  Until this past month.

  “Melissa, I asked you, what’s the matter?” Feigned concern turned the fine lines at his eyes’ corners to furrows. With an effort I said: “I’m not feeling well.”

  “I told you you shouldn’t have made that chicken pasta for lunch. It’s a warm day, and heavy food and wine…”

  I nodded wearily. It wasn’t the pasta or the wine, but there was no point in arguing. The only point was in calling for help, trying to save myself. And I still couldn’t seem to care. I was dying, and Ray had poisoned me.

  Ray

  Melissa didn’t want to leave the bench. “It’s already too late, isn’t it?” she said dully.

  “Too late for what?”

  “Oh, God, Ray, I can die here as well as anywhere else. It’s peaceful here…”

  “Die? Don’t be silly, you’re not going to die.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, grimacing, and wouldn’t say another word.

  I was tempted to let her sit there with her stomachache and suffer. She could be exasperating sometimes, when she was in one of her moods. She tended to exaggerate and overdramatize situations even at her best, and, whenever she was hurt or upset or angry, she retreated so deeply inside herself that no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach her.

  Not that I’d ever been able to get to the core of her, really, except in small ways and for short glimpses. There was just no common ground for us. I live in the real world; I don’t believe in anything I can’t touch or see or smell. I have strong appetites-sex, food, danger. I take life in both hands and squeeze hard. Melissa is just the opposite. She’s a romantic, a sentimentalist; she lives in a fantasy world of dreams and ideals, searching for comforts and fulfillments that I can’t give her, that nobody can, because even she doesn’t understand exactly what it is she wants out of life. “Little girl lost” is an apt description of her. Dorothy wandering around in some fantastic Oz of her own devising, where everything and everybody is strange and bewildering.

  That lost quality was part of what attracted me to her in the beginning. It’s very appealing in a beautiful young woman; it makes her more desirable, the chase and catch more exhilarating. Chase and catch weren’t enough for me in Melissa’s case, though. Before we slept together the first time, I knew I was in love with her. But how can you keep on loving someone you can touch only part of the time,
like a ghost who drifts in and out of your life and bed, substantial for a while and then little more than vapor? I don’t deal well with frustration or failure, yet that’s what Melissa had come to represent.

  It was the same for her, I suppose. I’m not what she wants or understands, either. That’s why she keeps drifting from one affair to another-looking for someone who’s more like she is, who can give her what she wants or thinks she wants. A satisfaction I could always take until recently is that none of the men measured up anymore than I have. None until the last one.

  Jake Hollis. My good skydiving pal, Jake. He must have measured up. He must’ve been what she wanted. Otherwise, why would the two of them have plotted to kill me?

  She had to have been part of it, much as I hated the thought. It’d been her idea that Jake and I go jumping that day; I remember her suggesting it. And she’d gone along with us, the first time in years she wanted to be in the plane for one of my dives. I don’t know why I agreed. I knew by then she was sleeping with Hollis. But murder…the possibility never even occurred to me. His hands on my back, clawing at my chute…I can still feel them. Trying to rip the pack off so I’d plummet to my death. A few years younger, a little stronger, but not as determined to survive as I’d been. That’s the main reason his chute was the one damaged in the struggle, his body the one that plummeted 2,000 feet to shatter on the hard earth.

  She didn’t cry for him, at least not in front of me. Shock, horror, but no tears. Retreated inside herself to that place no one else can ever go-like the Cheshire cat when it vanished. If she had cried in front of me, I think I would’ve confronted her then and there. Two weeks now since it happened and I still haven’t done it. And I don’t know why. This trip to the Sierra foothills, the pretense that everything is reasonably normal between us…it’s a fool’s game. If she and one of her lovers had tried to kill me in the past, I wouldn’t have hesitated to accuse her, throw her out, take some sort of revenge. Now…I don’t know. I’m still hanging on to life with both hands, but the grip isn’t as strong as it used to be. Neither are the highs nor the lows, the emotions that once raged in me like torrents. It’s as if part of me, or something within me, did die that day, along with Jake Hollis.

  I ought to hate her, but I don’t. I feel sorry for her.

  She was still sitting with her eyes closed, her hands clutched at her middle, her mouth twisted. Typical of her. An upset stomach, and she turns it into high drama.

  “Melissa,” I said, “we’re going back to the lodge. Right now.”

  She didn’t object this time. “All right.”

  I helped her up, put my arm around her, and led her to the car. People watched us, one or two with concerned expressions or small, approving smiles. Solicitous husband helping unwell wife. The scene was so outwardly caring, loving, that I felt an urge to laugh. But I didn’t. There was nothing left to laugh about.

  And now my stomach was beginning to bother me. Sharp little cramping pains. Sympathy pains? That was almost funny, too-but not quite.

  I helped Melissa into the car and took us away from the watching eyes, away from Murphys. Tom Moore’s hunting lodge was eight miles higher up in the mountains-a secluded retreat, a place for lovers. Why had I agreed to come here? Why had Melissa agreed? What was the sense in us getting away alone together, with the end for us so near?

  Halfway to the lodge, the cramps grew worse. The pain was stabbing and I was feeling nauseous by the time I reached the turnoff. Beside me, Melissa sat hunched over, holding her stomach, her face pale. Pretending, to throw me off guard? Those thoughts came on the heels of the other one, the one that made me jerk and clench my hands tightly around the wheel.

  Christ, what if she’d poisoned me?

  Melissa

  In the car on the road leading to our borrowed mountain cabin Ray asked me in what way I wasn’t feeling well. Nausea and stomach cramps, I told him, as well as a headache.

  “Must be the flu,” he said. “I feel the same way, except I’ve also got chills.”

  Liar, I thought. This was like no flu I’d ever experienced. “How long have you felt sick?”

  “A little while.”

  Then why had he eaten with apparent enjoyment a huge helping of the chicken pasta I’d fixed for lunch? Why had he suggested we drive into town and then spent so long browsing in the bookshop if he was feeling bad? Faking, of course, so I wouldn’t guess the truth. Except that I’d already guessed it.

  “How awful for you,” I said.

  “You’re certainly the sympathetic one.”

  I turned my face to the side window and didn’t reply. My cramps were growing worse; the poison was doing its work.

  At the rustic wood-and-stone lodge belonging to Tom Moore, his former business partner, Ray pulled the car close to the front steps, jumped out, and rushed up them without waiting for me. By the time I made my way inside, he was in the bathroom off the front hallway, making violent retching sounds. Acting again.

  He was a consummate actor, I thought as I went upstairs to the living room and slumped in one of the armchairs in front of the huge fireplace. All those years of high-level business dealings, all those years of pretending interest in and affection for the children and me-they had polished his art. And now he was playing his biggest rôle of all, unaware that his audience of one wasn’t the slightest bit fooled.

  I leaned my head back against the chair, narrowed my eyes, and looked around. Knotty pine everywhere. God, how I hated knotty pine! Every uncomfortable mountain or lakefront cabin I’d ever stayed in was paneled in the stuff, and now I was going to die surrounded by it.

  A violent surge of nausea swept through me; bile rose in my throat. Ray was still in the downstairs bathroom, and I’d never make it upstairs in time, so I rushed to the kitchen and was sick in the sink. Leaning with my hands braced against the countertop, I thought distractedly: All the work I did cleaning up in here…ruined. Not that Tom would care. The man’s become a slob since his poor wife died.

  His poor wife died…

  That’s what they’d be saying about Ray soon. What did he plan to tell people? That I’d been poisoned by accident? Or did he intend to get rid of my body? Claim I’d disappeared? Bury me some place in these woods…?

  My stomach contracted again; another cramp, more intense than any pain I’d ever experienced outside of childbirth, left me weak and breathless. And suddenly the apathy I’d felt since Murphys was gone. I didn’t want to die this way, in agony. I didn’t want to die at all. I’d thought I already had, spiritually, as I’d watched Jake Hollis plummet through the air. But that simply wasn’t true. After a moment I felt well enough to move across the room to a little desk with shelves containing cookbooks and other house hold volumes. The chills Ray had mentioned were starting now. What kind of poison produced chills? Had Ray chosen it because its symptoms mimicked a bad case of the flu? He hadn’t wanted me to know I was dying.

  Unlike Jake. He’d known in those last few awful minutes.

  The scene I’d witnessed from the plane two weeks earlier replayed itself in my mind: Ray and Jake struggling in mid air, neither chute open. Ray’s suddenly blossoming upward, while Jake fell, arms and legs flailing. And when the pilot and I arrived at the airstrip, there was Ray, pretending to be completely broken up over our friend’s death. Over and over he repeated: “I just don’t know what happened.”

  And I had kept my silence, even though I knew what had happened-and why.

  Jake Hollis was dead. Perhaps the closest person to a friend Ray ever had. My friend, too; I’d turned to him in desperation when I sensed my marriage was finally about to end. Not for sex, as I had to two other men in the past, but for insight into what had brought Ray and me to this point. But although Jake had heard me out through two long lunches and an afternoon of drinks, he could shed no light on the situation. Ray had kept him as much at an arm’s length as he had me.

  For days after Jake’s death I’d felt numb, unable to cry, unable to conf
ront Ray with the fact that I knew what he’d done. I even tried to deny it myself, pretend I hadn’t seen the mid air struggle; it seemed too monstrous an act for the man I’d lived with for a quarter of a century. But then a violent scene from five years before escaped from where I’d buried it in my memory: Ray raging at me, having found out about the second of my two brief affairs. His face red and contorted, his eyes wild, he’d accused me of repeated infidelities throughout our marriage. Berated me for sleeping with a member of his mountain-climbing team. Screamed: “I’ll kill him! I swear, on the next climb I’ll grab hold of him and pitch him off Denali! If I have to go down with him, I will!”

  He hadn’t, of course. Instead, he’d spent five years nursing his rage and imagining I was sleeping with every man I met. And when that rage was at a fever pitch, he’d turned it on Jake. Killed his friend because he overheard a phone call between us. Killed him because another so-called friend had told him of seeing Jake and me in intimate conversation in a neighborhood cocktail lounge. I’d denied either when he asked me about them; now I wished I had told him why I’d been talking to Jake.

  I laid my aching head on the desk and moaned. Finally the tears that shock had frozen began to flow.

  Why did you kill him, Ray?

  Why didn’t you just kill me?

  Ray

  Emptying my stomach didn’t help much. I still felt sick and shaky when I came out of the downstairs bathroom. This wasn’t the flu or any other kind of natural illness; there was no doubt of it now. Call nine-eleven, I thought, ask for medical assistance. But it would take a while for an ambulance or medevac helicopter to get here from Jackson or Sonora and I could be dead by then.