AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD

by Gloria Dank

  After the first drug-induced heart attack, Irma apparently had another, and another, or so the doctors told Sarah. Sarah did not care; she was dulled to all feeling, overwhelmed, insensate. Her life had become an endless round of meals cooked in a blur for the family at home, and long hours spent at Irma’s bedside at the hospital. Most of the time Irma slept; even when she was awake, she did not seem to know where she was. She did, however, get agitated if Gertie was not there. “Gertie,” she would call out feebly. “Gertie!” She did not seem to recognize any of the others in the family. This nearly broke poor Roger’s heart. He would hover for hours over her bed, watching her face, hoping against hope that when she woke up, she would smile and say his name; but she never did. During her wakeful periods, she would look around feebly and ramble on to herself and cry out for Gertie, never anyone else. She had one or two lucid periods, no more. Once, after a visit, Sarah found Roger in the hallway of the hospital. He was sobbing silently, his face distorted.

  “She doesn’t know me,” he said over and over, burying his great shaggy head on Sarah’s shoulder. “She doesn’t know me!”

  Sarah patted his arm and made soothing sounds, but she felt strangely far away and distant. She felt as if her head was floating far above the rest of her body, eyes averted, looking down scornfully at the chaos below her.

  Snooky was there constantly, helping her cook for the family, driving her back and forth from the hospital, his face a study in anxiety. Bernard and Maya came and helped out, cleaning the house, bringing in food. Irma was in the hospital three, four, five days, hours that seemed like days, days that seemed like weeks. There was some muttering among the hospital staff that she might pull through, she might recover and get better; but then she would take a turn for the worse and the doctors would leave her room looking abstracted and vague, as if they had already dismissed her from the rolls of the living. Sarah would watch them as they went down the hallway carrying their official-looking clipboards, with their names printed black on white on tiny tags clipped to their pockets (JOHN FALWORTHY, M.D.; LISA HEPPLER, M.D.), the two small initials after their names somehow qualifying them (she thought with rage) to judge over her aunt’s life and death. They would murmur to each other in soft professional sympathy, and their faces would tighten and close up whenever a member of the family (of the already bereaved, perhaps they were thinking) approached them. They would say something noncommittal and escape, leaving their questioner stranded in the middle of the hall. Sarah would watch them, hating them for their professional competence and their professional indifference, and at times she would think, confusedly, This can’t go on … this can’t go on … I can’t go on like this.

  And then, on the sixth day, Irma passed away quietly in her sleep.

  The funeral was very grand. Irma’s family did not count pennies in their last farewell to her. She was lowered into the space reserved years ago next to her husband’s grave. Nearly the entire village of Lyle attended, all the neighbors and friends and distant acquaintances. Tiny Sam and his wife were there, looking as solemn and unmatched as an elephant and a tsetse fly. Carol Ann Studebaker, who ran Dinah’s House of Beauty and had done Irma’s hair for years, came looking small and leathery as an anteater’s snout, her skin brown and wrinkled from too much sun and too many bleaching creams. (There was no Dinah of Dinah’s House of Beauty anymore; the original owner had left her husband and run away on a whim with a traveling Australian farmer whom she had met in a bar in Wolfingham, neither of them ever to be heard from again. Her friend Carol Ann, the aging blonde who took over the shop, often wistfully imagined Dinah and her Crocodile Dundee running a big sheep farm, miles of brown land and dirty white sheep, with lots of kids and farmhands all gathered around the table for dinner, Dinah ladling out the soup from an enormous black pot.) At the funeral Carol Ann held a wistful bunch of daisies, which drooped sadly in her hands as she listened to the service.

  Harry from Harry’s Market came, with his wife in tow, a heavyset woman who looked more ideally suited to Tiny Sam. The Grunwald sisters came, twittering to each other with ill-concealed pleasure that somebody their age had passed on before them. Frank Vanderwoort came, holding a small bunch of forget-me-not’s. Detective Bentley attended, his eyes on the family, his expression somber. Everyone watched as the black casket was lowered into the frozen ground. Nina, the occasional cook from Hugo’s Folly, who used to come in and lend a hand when there was company, stood on the edge of the crowd and made loud baaaing noises, like a forlorn sheep. Listening to her got Carol Ann Studebaker from Dinah’s House of Beauty thinking again about the Australian back country, with its rolling hills (or was it totally flat? she wondered) and its brown grasses and the hot blue sky. Carol Ann stood by the side of a grave on a cold November’s day in northern Vermont, shivering in her wool coat (doubtless made from wool from those very sheep, she thought with pleasure), and imagined the Australian sun, as she always pictured it in her mind, a flat heavy disk against an opaque azure sky, the sunlight beating down with a palpable rage.

  Snooky looked around at the assembled mourners. All at once his heart leaped up into his throat. There, on the edge of the crowd, shielded from the family’s view by the massive bulk of Tiny Sam, was an incongruous figure, totally shrouded in black, with a black veil and black dress and black coat. However, on the top of its head was a bright blue bow, and shockingly orange shoes peeped out from under the coat. Snooky had seen those shoes before. As the service concluded with several solemn admonitions to the living by the local minister (“let her life be an example …”), Snooky whispered to his sister, then threaded his way cautiously through the crowd.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” said the figure.

  “Is this some kind of disguise?”

  She lifted up the veil, revealing Diane Caldwell’s bright blue, heavily mascaraed eyes. “You told me that somebody had recognized me. I thought I should dress so nobody would know.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Thank you. Nice funeral, isn’t it? I like it when the minister talks about hell. They never seem to think that whoever’s died is going there, but they make you feel sure that everybody else at the funeral is.”

  “Paying your respects?”

  Diane Caldwell shrugged. “Not much love lost between me and Irma. This is the closest I’ll ever get to her, though. I’m not sorry she’s dead. No, I can’t say I’m sorry at all.”

  “I wouldn’t say it so loud. There’s a murder investigation pending.”

  She shrugged again. “Somebody did me a favor. There’s no way I could have given her those pills. I’ve never even been to the house. I told you what Bobby said. Somebody in that family had it in for him. Somebody wants that money real bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “They couldn’t even wait for an old woman to die,” she said. “They couldn’t even wait, could they?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well.” She let the veil drop. “I wanted to get a look at the family. They’re just the way Bobby described them. I’d keep an eye on them, if I were you. One of them is a killer.”

  She winked at him roguishly from behind the black veil.

  “One of them is a killer!”

  The will was read to the family the next day. It was short and straightforward. The house and its entire contents were left to Gertie absolutely, with an ample income to support her for the rest of her life. The rest of Hugo’s fortune was divided among the remaining family members, Roger, Dwayne and Sarah. This meant that all four of the surviving family were extremely wealthy.

  Snooky, who was waiting outside the living room for the lawyer to finish, watched their faces carefully as they filed from the room. Sarah looked distant, cold, somehow uninvolved in the proceedings. Gertie, on the other hand, looked positively triumphant. She smiled to herself and fingered the gewgaws on the front table with a proprietary glee. She righted one of the portraits which was hanging askew. Roger, next to her, was in tears. He had st
arted crying when his sister was rushed to the hospital, over a week ago, and he could not seem to stop. He carried a large handkerchief, red with blue checks, and mopped his face continually. Dwayne, as before, looked closed and secretive. The truth was that he was thinking that now he could set up a real photography studio, one in which he could do color prints, and maybe hire somebody to help him. He would never have to worry about supporting himself or borrowing money from his stepfather again. In his mind he was calculating how much it would cost to buy that little old shed he had seen on the edge of town and convert it into a studio, complete with all the latest fixings and gadgets.

  “How are you?” Snooky said to Sarah.

  “Fine.” She looked at him coolly, as if her attention were elsewhere.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “The house is mine!” screamed out Gertie suddenly, in a high-pitched, hysterical voice. “The house is mine!” She was holding one of Irma’s grotesque Victorian knickknacks, a small silver monkey with an inquisitive expression and a bell around its neck. She stared at the rest of the family, who stood silent and shocked around her. Then she broke away and galloped up the stairs to her room. They could hear the door close with a triumphant bang! behind her.

  “Gertie acted very strangely,” reported Snooky that evening. “Very strangely indeed.”

  Bernard sat silent and attentive as Snooky related what had happened. “Hmmmpphh. Interesting.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the will—?”

  “Divided equally among all of them, with the house and everything in it left to Gertie.”

  “I see. That’s what was expected?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Snooky collapsed into a chair and rubbed his head wearily. “I feel exhausted. I feel as though I haven’t slept in days.”

  “You haven’t,” said Maya, who was sitting at the table surrounded by books from the local library. She was thumbing through a large red book entitled Exotic Flora and Fauna.

  “Is that true? I haven’t slept?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarah’s acting strangely. Sort of detached. I can’t seem to get through to her.”

  Maya looked at her brother with compassion. “Why don’t you go and lie down, Snooks? We’ll make dinner and bring you something. You deserve to be waited on, after all you’ve been through. You’ve practically lived at the hospital for a week now.”

  “Thanks, My. I think I will.”

  Snooky left the room. They could hear the old bedstead groan as he flung himself down on it. Bernard said irritably, “I don’t like the way this is going. Now we’re cooking and cleaning for him. I thought we came up here to be his guests.”

  “Bernard, sweetheart.”

  “Plus, people are dying again. Every time we see your brother, we end up going to somebody’s funeral. He only seems to know people who have just days to live. He really is born to trouble, the way you said.”

  “Bernard.”

  “I want you to know I don’t like the way this is going,” he said ominously, turning back to his typewriter.

  “There were only two sets of fingerprints on that bottle of pills,” Detective Bentley said to Sarah. “Yours and your aunt’s.”

  Sarah shrugged. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  They were sitting in the living room of the Folly. Bentley had insisted on coming by and interviewing Sarah and Gertie again, and Sarah had called on Snooky for moral support.

  “So you think it was suicide?”

  Sarah regarded him remotely, her face impassive. “I don’t know.”

  “Why would she kill herself now?” asked Bentley. “It doesn’t make any sense. She was getting better.”

  “Her health was poor. She was very often depressed.”

  “You don’t think it’s far more likely it was murder?”

  “I don’t know, Detective.”

  “You don’t know,” snapped Bentley, rising to his feet. “You don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody seems to know anything about these deaths. Nothing!”

  Sarah did not answer.

  Bentley gave a snort and left the room. In the front hall he encountered Gertie, who was edging her way down the stairs, breathing heavily through her nose like a wild boar. Gertie, if the truth be known, was not feeling very well, but it was such a gorgeous day out—one of those brilliant, cold, sun-drenched New England autumn days—that she could not resist. She imagined the goshawk waiting for her, perhaps hiding a tidbit or two in the bole of a tree and feasting on it like a king feasting on golden plates. Just so had she seen it a few weeks ago, having its lunch, its gray feathers hunched with a primitive joy. She edged her way slowly downstairs, clutching her binoculars, her eyes wide with anticipation.

  “Miss Ditmar. Just the person I want to see.”

  She regarded the detective ungraciously. “Well? Make it short. I have a lot to do today.”

  “Did you ever give any medicine to your sister-in-law?”

  “No,” she snapped.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Can you think of any reason why she would want to take her life?”

  “What a stupid question. Of course I can. Her fiancé was dead and her health was failing. What else do you need?”

  “So you think she killed herself?”

  “Well, I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re asking. Now let me ask you something, Detective.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have any proof—any proof at all—that my sister-in-law was murdered?”

  Bentley shook his head slowly.

  “I thought so,” said Gertie cunningly. “In that case, please stop coming around and bothering us. I have to go now. Good-bye.”

  As Bentley left, Sarah came into the foyer. “Oh, it’s you,” Gertie said rudely.

  “Yes. How are you feeling today, Gertie?”

  “Fine. I’m on my way out. Now that that idiot detective has gone.”

  Sarah thought she did not look well—her color was high and she seemed to be breathing quickly—but she did not say anything. She knew it was pointless to interfere. No force in nature could keep Gertie away from the woods on a day like today. “Well, be careful. Don’t overdo.”

  “Don’t be silly. I never overdo. Good for me, all my walking.”

  Gertie bent over to lace up her boots, which had been thrown carelessly under the hall table. When she straightened up, her face was bright red. She leaned against the banister for a moment and then said abruptly,

  “Sarah.”

  Sarah looked at her inquiringly. “Yes?”

  “Something I want to say to you.”

  Sarah waited, but Gertie seemed to be having difficulty going on. She grunted to herself softly for a moment. “About the house.”

  “Yes, Gertie?”

  “You can stay here as long as you like. No, don’t say anything. Didn’t want you to think I’d throw you out in the cold or anything like that.”

  Tears sprang to Sarah’s eyes. “Oh, Gertie—”

  “Don’t say anything. Can’t stand when people say things. Wanted you to know how I felt, that’s all. You can stay here as long as you like.”

  She turned and thumped her way down the hall. Sarah heard the back door open and close with a dull bang. She went into the laundry room and watched from the window as Gertie, clothed now in her great gray shapeless mackintosh, with her stubbly boots sticking out underneath it like roots from a tree, crossed the little garden out back. Gertie stood at the edge of the woods for a minute, adjusting her binoculars, looking around her at the bright winter day and inhaling with satisfaction (her color looked a little better now, Sarah noted), before stumping away into the shadow of the trees. For a moment her massive form lingered, huge and gray, against the blue and green shadows. Then she was gone.

  “Damn it,” said Roger. “Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

  He r
egarded the detective with a touching air of helplessness. “I mean, damn it,” he said. “No, I didn’t sneak over to the Folly that night and give my sister an overdose of pills. How could you think … what kind of person do you think … damn it, man, how could you?”

  Overcome, he sank back into his favorite armchair and gestured with the television remote control.

  “I was here, watching TV. I’m always here, watching TV. I’m the original couch potato. Dwayne and I had dinner together that night, like we always do, and then we watched some TV and later on we went to sleep. Neither of us got up in the middle of the night to rush over to the Folly. Isn’t that right, Dwayne?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  Dwayne was crouched against a sofa, watching the detective with distaste. “What makes you think somebody killed her, anyway? Why couldn’t it be—you know—”

  “Suicide?” said Bentley. He was scribbling on his notepad. “There’s a great deal of money involved, Mr. Costa. As you know.”

  Dwayne flushed. “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said hotly. “I never wanted Aunt Irma’s money. I never wanted it.”

  “But you could use it, couldn’t you?”

  “Well, of course I can use it. Anybody can use money. Who doesn’t need more money? Of course I can use it. But there’s no need to imply—well, what you’re implying.”

  “That you killed your aunt for it?”

  Roger leaned forward, his face mottled. “You’re out of line, Detective. Way out of line. Dwayne loved my sister. I loved my sister. Everyone in the family loved her.”

  “Everyone?”