Grab Bag

by Charlotte MacLeod

  But her husband perversely refused to kill her. Far from tampering with her Alfa Romeo, he never even went near it. He was constantly cautioning her against driving too fast. His devotion showed no sign of slackening, but rather seemed to grow. He waited on her hand and foot. His lovemaking became even more sickeningly mawkish.

  “You’re so completely unlike anyone I’ve ever known, Pamela my darling,” he’d gush. “So exquisitely detached, so serenely aloof, so infinitely above the messy emotional scenes with which other women always want to clutter up one’s life. You’re the most beautiful statue ever carved. I could look at you forever.”

  And as the weeks continued to roll by, it began to appear Clayton Beardsley intended to do just that. The fifth Mrs. Beardsley had to face the horrible truth: her husband was in love with her. She was furious.

  “I came here to be murdered,” she stormed to herself, “not idolized and fawned over and trapped into a lifetime of being dressed up and dragged around to expensive night clubs and fancy restaurants. If he doesn’t get on with it soon, I’ll—”

  She’d what? Divorce a devoted husband simply because he refused to kill her? Fat chance she’d have of getting any judge to swallow that one! Desert him and ruin her career on the force? Not bloody likely. Stay here and die of boredom?

  “What a ghastly mess I’ve got myself into!” Her emotion was deep and heartfelt.

  That evening, Clayton Beardsley found his lovely bride in an unusually pettish mood. He outdid himself trying to please her.

  The following morning after he’d gone to his office, she spent more time than usual tinkering with her yellow Alfa Romeo. Then she drove it very carefully to the nearest garage.

  “Something is making a queer noise down inside,” she told the mechanic. “I wish you’d make it stop.”

  “Have it right in no time,” he told her cheerfully.

  Actually, it should take him a couple of hours to locate the screw she’d dropped strategically inside the engine. She enjoyed the walk back to the house. Naturally she cut across the fields. The highway was much too dangerous for pedestrians.

  Clayton called from town later that afternoon. “I’m taking the 5:02 down, dearest. Is there anything I can bring you?”

  “How good of you to ask, darling. Yes, would you mind terribly stopping at the garage on your way back and picking up my car? No, just a funny noise in its tummy. The mechanic said he’d have it ready by evening. Hurry home, sweet. I’ll have a cocktail waiting.”

  “I suppose you’ll be resigning from the force now that you’re a rich widow.” Superintendent Pearsall tried not to sound hopeful.

  “On the contrary, I can’t wait to get back to work.” The former Mrs. Beardsley flicked a disdainful finger at the sable cuff of her black Balenciaga coat. “Soft living doesn’t suit me at all. I do regret not having been able to pull off the arrest. I must confess I was rather hoping to get a promotion out of it.”

  “You have that anyway,” he assured her, “for devotion over and beyond the call of duty.” The affable smile cost him a considerable effort. “It was ironic, his getting caught in his own trap like that.”

  “Yes, wasn’t it? When he told me to take my car into the garage, I naturally became suspicious, especially after I’d checked it over and found nothing wrong but a screw dropped where it had no business to be. I did as he said, but then pretended I wasn’t feeling well and he’d have to pick it up himself. I took it for granted he’d either find an excuse not to or be extra careful driving home, then I’d have a chance to ferret out the evidence and confront him with it. But apparently he couldn’t resist the temptation to speed on the highway. It’s positively hypnotic, you know, watching everybody else whiz by. Clayton always drove much too fast anyway.”

  “The car was demolished, as usual.” Superintendent Pearsall sighed. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know precisely how he managed the murders.”

  “No,” said Chief Inspector Fanshawe, “I don’t suppose we ever shall. It’s a pity. Now what did you have in mind for my next assignment?”

  More Like Martine

  THIS IS THE OTHER story I dreamed, wrote, and sold. Unlike the first, though, it has undergone considerable revision. Good Housekeeping once changed the heroine’s sister’s name to Cora and ran a considerably different version as “Mine to Love” in their issue of August 20, 1966.

  “You’ve got to feed the whole child.” Martine spoke decisively, as always.

  “It’s about all I can do to feed the end that hollers.” Betsy spoke wearily, as usual.

  “I know, dear. If you’d only planned—”

  “How can you plan to have twins?”

  “But did you have to have them so soon after Peggy?”

  “Jim and I wanted our kids to grow up in a bunch. It’s more fun for them.”

  “But darling, fun isn’t everything. You must develop their aesthetic awareness, too.”

  “I don’t think mine have any.”

  “Oh, but all children do, dear. I saw the most charming exhibition of Guatemalan hand-weaving yesterday, done by six- to ten-year-olds. So fresh and spontaneous.”

  “Peg does hand-weaving. She made me this pot-holder at the playground.”

  “Sweet.” Martine barely glanced at her niece’s clumsy effort.

  “Don’t you think it’s sort of fresh and spontaneous?” Betsy hung the red-and-green-and-yellow mess back on its hook. Martine was right, she supposed.

  Martine was always right. Martine had been graduated from high school with all possible honors while Betsy was squeaking through third grade by the skin of her brace-laden teeth. Martine had been May Queen and Phi Beta Kappa at college and would soon be vice-president of her firm. Martine wore designer models and gave perfect little dinners to amusing people. Betsy handed out peanut-butter sandwiches.

  “You mustn’t vegetate in the suburbs,” Martine was saying for the fifty-seventh time since Jim and Betsy had bought the house. “You have to keep broadening your horizons.”

  “Sorry.” Betsy shoved another load into the washer. “I don’t have the time right now.”

  “But you could do it in little ways, dear. Put some glamour into your meals, for instance. Dine by candlelight. Serve exotic foods.”

  “Jim likes steak and potatoes.”

  Her sister left, wearing that what-can-you-do-with-her expression Betsy had been seeing all her life. Somewhere, right now, some aunt or other must be wondering, “Why couldn’t Betsy have turned out more like Martine?”

  She slammed the empty coffee cups into the dishwasher. Betsy hated these unexpected flying visits. They always meant Martine had something to tell her for her own good. The awful part was, Martine always did. Maybe, deep down, Jim found his marriage boring. Maybe some day the kids would resent not having had a more well-rounded childhood.

  The twins whooped in demanding lunch. “How about some nice cream of mushroom soup for a change?” she asked them timidly. The yecch was deafening.

  Betsy tried again at dinner. She knew better that to tamper with the menu because if she served anything fancy, Jim would say in a sorrowful tone, “I thought we were having steak and potatoes.” But she went all-out on gracious touches. She set the table with flowers and hand-embroidered place mats. She shut her eyes to the probable consequences and gave everybody, even the twins, crystal goblets instead of peanut-butter tumblers. She put on the green velvet hostess gown Martine had given her for Christmas a year ago, that she never wore because it was much too beautiful to fry an egg or scrub a twin in. She still hadn’t got around to taking up the hem. Even with her highest heels, the skirt brushed the floor.

  Her family reacted much as she’d expected. Jim grinned and rumpled the hairdo she’d fussed over. “Hi, Gorgeous. When do we eat?” Peggy demanded, “Is it a party, Mummy? Why, Mummy?” The twins yelled, “Who gets the presents?”

  It was Mike who knocked over his goblet. Jim got most of the milk in his lap. “Why did you give it to hi
m?” he roared, sopping frantically with his napkin.

  “I’ll get a sponge.” Betsy jumped up, caught a spike heel in her too-long skirt, and went sprawling.

  Jim was beside her, his big hands under her shoulders. “Can’t you watch where you’re going? Come on, kid.”

  “Jim, don’t!” She hadn’t meant to scream. “My leg.”

  “Let’s see.” He clawed away at the slippery velvet, cursing its endless folds. The angle of the bones sickened him. “Oh my God!”

  He ran for the telephone. The children were all around her, trying to help by crying and patting her face with sticky fingers and offering to kiss it and make it better. Then Jim was back, shooing them off. “They say don’t try to move. The ambulance is on its way. It’s okay, kids, Mum’s going to be fine. Oh Christ, who’s going to stay with them?”

  “Get Martine.” She was talking from inside a tunnel. “Call Martine.”

  “That’s it. Martine will know what to do.”

  From then on it was all bits and pieces: Jim’s hand holding hers too tight, voices saying things like dislocation and compound fracture, then a needle in her arm, then nothing. When she woke up, she was in traction.

  “They’ll have to get me out of this. I have to get home to the kids.”

  She must have said it aloud. Somebody said, “Relax and enjoy it, honey. You won’t be going anywhere for a while.” Red hair and a red satin bathrobe with I’m the Greatest embroidered in white on it. Kind hands, raising her head, holding a glass with a straw in it. Something cool and wet going down her throat. Then more sleep, then a terrible business with a bedpan that started the hip and leg throbbing, then it was night and Jim was with her. She held his hand against her cheek and drifted into a pleasant nothingness where the pain was something happening a long way off. She could hear Jim talking. Sometimes it made sense.

  “Martine was teaching the kids to finger paint. Peg did a mural for the playroom.”

  “That’s nice.” She supposed it was her own voice answering. “Did you eat?”

  “Oh sure. Martine had a real gourmet meal waiting when I got home.” After a while, he kissed her and left.

  The next day Betsy was less groggy, which meant she felt the pain more. She was in a room with three other women. She hadn’t quite grasped that fact before. One was very old and groaned a lot. One had a tube up her nose and lay watching the little television set over her bed. The redhead in the red satin bathrobe prowled around wearing a pair of white gym socks for slippers. She had friends all up and down the corridor. When they took their shuffling walks, they’d stick their heads into the room looking for her. “Hi,” they’d say to Betsy when they saw her eyes open. “How’s it going?”

  It was a comfort having people around. Even the old lady who groaned was nice, the redhead said. It was just the medication that made her like that. The redhead herself was feeling great and didn’t see why they wouldn’t let her out. Those goddamn doctors thought they knew everything. Betsy said she hoped they did. The redhead laughed.

  “Hey, you’re going to be fine. How about if I get you some juice?”

  That night, Jim brought her ice cream. She ate a little, but the plastic spoon was too heavy to keep lifting. “Here, you finish it.”

  “Thanks, I couldn’t. Martine put on a Spanish meal. We had gazpacho.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cold soup with a lot of stuff floating around in it.”

  “Did the twins eat any?”

  “Sure, they thought it was great.”

  “What else did you have?”

  “Don’t ask me. Some kind of chicken and rice thing. She served Spanish wine with it. Only half a bottle,” he added rather embarrassedly. “She used those glasses Aunt Florrie gave us. She says it’s a shame not to enjoy them.”

  “You yelled at me when I did that.” Betsy just barely kept herself from saying it. Did Martine always have to make such a howling success of what she herself fell flat on her face trying to do? Jim misunderstood her silence, of course.

  “Don’t worry, she’ll take good care of them. She’s got the place shined up so you wouldn’t know it.” On the whole, his visit was less of a comfort than Betsy had expected it to be.

  She’d just finished her lunch the following day when Martine blew in with a big box from the most expensive florist in town and a book on Guatemalan folk art. Martine stopped in the doorway and stared around the crowded four-bed ward, at the woman with the tube up her nose and her television blaring, at the old lady groaning in the corner, at the redhead’s white gym socks and I’m the Greatest bathrobe. Before Betsy had a chance to ask her, “Who’s staying with the kids?” she was gone. Maybe ten minutes later Martine was back leading a troop of doctors, nurses, attendants, technicians, and an orderly wheeling a gurney.

  “It’s all fixed, Betsy,” she caroled. “You’re moving.”

  “To where?”

  “A private room, of course. You can’t stay in this rat trap. Now don’t worry about the extra charges, darling. I know Jim’s insurance won’t cover them, but Big Sister’s will. I carry a special rider just for you. Just lie perfectly still. You’re going to be joggled around a bit, so they have to give you something for the pain first.”

  That was that. When Betsy woke again, she was in a tastefully decorated room with a handsome floral arrangement on the dresser, a book on Guatemalan folk art ready to hand on the bedside table, and no ministering angel in a red satin bathrobe and white gym socks to offer her a drink of juice. And who was staying with the kids?

  She was still groggy from the shot, she supposed. She’d missed supper, but they brought her soup and some whitish stuff in a little plastic bowl. She picked at it, then turned her head away and shut her eyes. Jim didn’t come. She wondered if he’d stopped by on his way home from the office and couldn’t find her in the new room. She asked the nurse who came to fix her up for the night. The nurse said she wouldn’t know; she wasn’t on duty then. Maybe Jim had stayed home to take care of the kids. Betsy took her medication like a good girl. There was nothing to stay awake for, not in this lonesome place.

  The next day lasted forever. When she couldn’t endure lying there staring at her flower arrangement any longer, she got the attendant to turn on the television, and lay there watching soap operas, like the woman with the tube up her nose. They were all about people falling in love with people they weren’t supposed to be in love with.

  Jim came at last. He said he was sorry to be late. Martine had rearranged the living room furniture, taken the children to the art museum, and served coquilles St. Jacques with an amusing little sauterne. Betsy said how nice.

  After that, one day was as bad as another. Betsy lay there watching men make love to other men’s wives and women chase after other women’s husbands. They started getting her up for physical therapy. It hurt, so they gave her something for the pain. She asked the nurse what would happen if she took two of the little red pills together instead of one at a time. The nurse put on her professional smile and said. “Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that.”

  She got cards and flowers, but not visitors. The aunts were too far away. The neighbors were either working or taking care of their kids. Martine didn’t come again, either. She must be too busy repapering the walls and feeding the whole child. The children couldn’t have come even if anybody had tried to bring them. Nobody under eight was allowed in the rooms. Betsy asked for a telephone so she could at least hear their voices, but the floor nurse said she couldn’t have one. Orders. The nurse didn’t say whose.

  Jim came every night but he never stayed long. He always told her what Martine had served for dinner, but he never told her what they talked about over the candlelight and wine after Peggy and the twins had been tucked in their beds with visions of Guatemalan hand-weaving dancing in their heads. He was beginning to look drawn and anguished, like all the Joshuas and Jeremies in the soap operas who dreaded having to hurt the Jessicas and Jennifers they’d married
on a boyish whim and had to stick with on account of the children.

  How could it have happened? Martine was years older than Jim. She’d always gone for suave, sophisticated middle-aged types who held important positions and got divorced a lot. But the current fashion was for glamorous older women in important positions to form attachments with less glamorous younger men in relatively insignificant positions, some of whom had never been divorced at all. Betsy could see it happening every day, right there on the television screen.

  Jim wouldn’t walk out on Peg and the twins. He’d hang around looking anguished and noble, Jim who seldom looked anything but glad or mad or quietly content except when he did his barnyard imitations for the kids to laugh at. He wouldn’t give up Martine, either. Martine wouldn’t let him. Sooner or later, Martine would decide it was best for all of them that Betsy give Jim a nice, quiet, uncontested divorce.

  Then what? Jim didn’t earn enough to support two households. Even Martine wouldn’t be able to make him live on her money. Betsy would have to get some scroungy, ill-paid job as a clerk or waitress and try to scrimp by. What sort of life would that be for Peg and the twins? And who’d look after them while she was at work? Inevitably, they’d wind up with Jim and Martine.

  Martine would broaden their horizons. She’d break Peg of needing to run in out of the sandbox for a quick cuddle now and then, sand and all. She’d send her to boarding school, turn her into a slick young sophisticate. At least Peg wouldn’t grow up listening to her great-aunts moaning, “What a shame she’s not more like Martine.”

  Martines didn’t mess up their lives. They took what they wanted and hung on to it while the Betsys floundered around breaking their bones and wrecking their marriages. When the nurse brought her the little red pill, Betsy asked for two. The nurse said sorry, she couldn’t have two.

  Her leg was progressing nicely. The therapist was proud of her. The doctor said she could go home Saturday. She told Jim that night and he said, “Great!” But he looked awfully anguished when he said it.

  After that, when they brought her the little red pills, she pretended to swallow them and didn’t. When she couldn’t sleep, she lay there dredging up, one after another, all her memories of Martine acting for the best. Always Martine’s kind of best, never Betsy’s. Always having to knuckle under and be grateful. How she hated being grateful! Or was it Martine she hated?