“But who could have phoned her?” I asked in real perplexity. “Did someone call her to the phone? Would she answer the phone in Carmen’s house?”
He let out a humming sound. I had dented him. “Well, I’ll tell you, Miss, I got to go over the ground. And that’s my duty. How about coming with me? And talk to this Frederick, too?”
“Now?” I rubbed my eyes.
“I know you’re tired. Especially after that long walk.” I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I might as well,” I said. “How could I sleep?”
I went with him. I knew, all the time, that our story hinged on one thing. The body of Celia must have had only one shoe. (Her other shoe was at Frederick’s and supposed to be mine.) But no shoes of mine were lying in the road. Our story lacked that bit. And Celia’s missing shoe was potentially dangerous—as soon as my policeman saw it.
Yet the one thing that would really give us away would be if the police were to find any traces of my own two shoes in the burning car. Then Blair and I would be proved liars—we would be prime suspects. Celia’s shoe would then become evidence against us.
I went with the policeman because I had to know.
I couldn’t ask, but I might find out.
I did. We stopped at the point of the accident and looked down at the ruins of Blair’s car. A man in uniform came up to us. “Not a thing left,” he said. My policeman checked his speedometer and we drove on.
I breathed a little easier.
It was close to dawn, but Lloyd Frederick was up and about. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Burning automobiles, broken legs, young woman in distress—too much for me.”
He let us in and offered coffee.
My policeman said, “Reason I got to check up on this car breakdown, there’s been a murder. Stepsister of this Miss Olcutt got strangled to death last night.”
“Not Celia Olcutt!” cried Lloyd Frederick.
“You know the lady?” The policeman and I were both suddenly suspicious.
“Of course. I met her in a business way.” He went through a gamut of explanations, which added no light. Then my policeman got down to Celia’s murder.
“Tell me what happened around here last night. You hear Mr. Meaghan’s car go by, for instance? If so, when?”
“I may have heard it,” Frederick cocked his handsome head. “Lord,
I don’t know. I was reading scripts. Paying no attention. I don’t even know when Miss Jenny Olcutt got here.” He smiled at me.
“You know this Miss Olcutt, too?”
“Never saw her before tonight, to my sorrow,” he said gallantly. His eyes sought mine.
“I’m looking for some kind of tricky time business,” said my policeman frankly. “This Meaghan had a real dilly of a fight with the murdered girl. He even said he ought to wring her neck. He had plenty of motive. What I need now is his opportunity.”
Frederick looked startled. “But wasn’t Miss Jenny with him? You don’t think she—”
“Oh, I wonder,” my policeman said blithely, “because it’s my job to wonder. Now, they tell me that shoes were worn at this wedding. But it’s a funny thing.” My heart stopped. “Where are this Miss Olcutt’s shoes? Maybe their condition could tell me something.”
He looked shrewd. Didn’t he believe that I had walked three miles? Was there a sign on me, something I didn’t know about, to tell him that I hadn’t?
“This lady’s shoes, if that’s what you can call them, won’t tell you much,” Lloyd Frederick said. “I’ll show you.” He rummaged on a shelf and turned to us with a pair of shoes in his hands. “See? I finally found your other one,” he said to me, flashing his smile. “You must have dropped it just after you started walking to this cabin. You see, officer? She couldn’t walk in these. In fact, these are sitting-down shoes, so
I am told.” He was being very charming.
“Those are shoes!” my policeman said, staring at them incredulously.
“May I put them on?” I said.
So I put them on. I stood up in the silly things. My feet were swollen and the straps cut into them. But, standing there in two shoes, I was safe. Blair was safe. Our story was safe; it would hold up. Who could prove it wasn’t true?
I could.
“I guess I’m not Cinderella,” I sighed. “I’m the stepsister. These are Celia’s shoes. See, they’re too small for me!”
“But that’s impossible!” cried Frederick.
“Celia had no shoes on, did she?” I asked my policeman. “No shoes at all. Well, I can tell you how one of them got here. You will have to ask Mr. Frederick about the other one.”
“What are you trying to say?” cried Frederick. “What do you mean, these are Celia’s shoes? They can’t be too small for you. They’re exactly the same—”
“That’s because they are both Celia’s,” I said patiently.
“That’s not so! Only the one . . .” Frederick yelled—and when he saw that he had tripped on his own tongue he dove for me. My policeman jumped protectively, before Lloyd Frederick could wring my neck. . . .
I said to Blair in the hospital, “She phoned him.”
“Celia was bound he’d have a part in my picture,” Blair told me. “He’s pure ham. I couldn’t do that. I suppose she called to tell him that we’d split up.”
“He met her at the bottom of the stairs,” I went on. “Probably she got into his car to talk. Probably she had her shoes in her hand—she couldn’t have walked down all those steps with them on. He was furious that she’d muffed the deal, and she was in that vicious mood. She made him feel like wringing her neck. And he did. Dumped her out. Hurried home. No wonder I scared him! I must have looked like Celia’s ghost, in the same dress.”
“And then you left her shoe in the cabin—the shoe I’d picked up next to her body.”
“Celia’s other shoe must have been in his car,” I said. “He found it too late. Maybe he found it when he got the car out for me. That was a strange ride. Shoes on our minds. Both of us.”
“Why too late, Jenny?”
“If he’d found it before I came, he’d have paid more attention.”
Blair twisted in the hospital bed. “I don’t see why he didn’t just destroy the shoe that he knew was Celia’s.”
“Instead, he helped our story,” I said. “Of course, he believed me—he knew who had killed Celia. He just saw a chance to get rid of Celia’s shoe.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, I did. After we had gone to the hospital, he must have rushed back to the cabin, took her shoe in, and picked up the one he thought was mine, to compare them. They were mates, a right and a left. They were the same size. Don’t you see why he had to do what he did? He hadn’t paid close attention to me. He’d seen me put my foot into one of those shoes. But he must have shuffled them, got them mixed up, and didn’t know which one I had brought to the cabin. Don’t you see?—he couldn’t be sure which one to destroy. But I’d know which one I’d put my foot in. He didn’t.”
“So he cleverly produced both.”
“We’d watched the road. No shoe of mine there. He thought it was pretty clever.”
“It was clever,” Blair said.
“Yes, I know.”
Blair sighed. “Until you took a notion to lie about the size.”
“That wasn’t hard,” I said. “My feet were all puffed up. So I knew he’d think some store could prove that they really were Celia’s shoes. It rattled him. He just blew up.”
“You ought to be in the motion picture industry,” Blair said. “Anybody who can think in the midst of all that trouble and confusion . . .” Then he went on gently. “But he had helped us, Jenny. We were pretty safe.”
“No,” I said. “Because he was a murderer. Besides, I don’t like telling lies.” I broke off. “Blair, what are they going to do to us?”
Blair was laughing at me. “You beat all,” he teased. “You don’t like telling lies and so you told another. Know w
hat I think? You’ve got the police baffled.”
After a while I said, “One thing . . . I’ll have Celia’s money. So if they don’t get around to putting us in jail or anything, do you want a partner?”
Blair sat up as far as he could. “No,” he shouted. Then he shouted, “Yes.”
“Well, which?” I said.
“I want you for a partner all the rest of my life,” he said, “as you well know. But not that money!”
“S-sh,” I said. “Don’t look so wild. There isn’t any problem. And we’ll make your picture.”
Blair said, “I think we will,” in a funny voice.
Well, they didn’t put us in jail. We’d told a lot of lies. Yet our lies had helped to catch the murderer, so I suppose it was a little confusing to the police.
Anyhow, the real murderer has been caught. No doubt hangs over us now and nothing can keep us apart.
People talk, of course. People say we must be crazy. We are going to make a motion picture, although all we have is the dream. We gave away the money. To a charitable foundation. It buys things for poor needy persons. Especially shoes.
A trip to the grocery store is not the only thing that shows the priorities of the young protagonist in this short, short story. The quick thinking, various options selected, and sense of timing that the protagonist exhibits will endear her to readers in this EQMM story from 1966.
A MATTER OF TIMING
Jane paid for the groceries and looked at the wall clock. Good. She had made it. She put the paper bag on her left hip.
“It’s not too heavy,” she said kindly to the boy who offered to help.
She batted through the door and out into the sunshine, her mind running down its list, in case she had forgotten something important.
There was a black thread tied around her right forefinger. Mike had tied it there, this morning, over the breakfast eggs. Black was for pepper. They had been out of pepper for four days.
Jane didn’t like pepper. Mike said that explained it—she wasn’t motivated. Jane said she had it written down on her shopping lists, but every time she went to market, she forgot to take the list.
So Mike had tied the black thread around her finger, telling their daughter Sally that old-fashioned methods were sometimes best, especially with an old-fashioned character like Mommy. Sally had thought Daddy was a riot.
Smiling to herself, Jane resolved that the thread would be removed at dinner with all due ceremony. Yes, she had the pepper. She was a good housekeeper; she didn’t always remember everything, but then, who did?
Jane pranced around the corner of the building into the parking lot. Her car was over there. How strange that one always remembers where one leaves a car. Memory is odd, thought Jane; maybe there are instinctive priorities.
She crossed the big lot. It had its usual complement of cars, and a few people were coming in and going out. There was a man standing beside her car—he was tucked in between Jane’s and the next one.
She walked into the slot, toward her driver’s seat, saying in her usual friendly fashion, “Excuse me?” The man shuffled and let her pass.
Then he turned and said to her startled ear, “Don’t yell, lady, or I’ll give it to you.” He was a thin, pale, red-eyed man, with a wicked-looking knife in his hand. “Get in, lady. You drive. And do as I say.”
Nobody was noticing. A woman in blue was getting into a car at the far end of the lot. Jane didn’t yell. She said, “What do you want me to do?”
“I said do as I say. Drive. I’m getting out of here. I said drive.”
Jane was remembering, as clear as bells ringing, everything that was really important. She pushed the bag against the car, lifting her knee under it. She put her right hand down into it. She scrabbled inside, watching him. He looked miserable, more frightened than she—but dangerous.
Jane said, “I’ve got to find my keys, don’t I?”
“Hurry up.” The knife was pointed at her stomach. He didn’t care; she could see that.
And an automobile is not important—not as important as a life.
Jane said, “I’ll give you the keys. You want the car, don’t you? Take it.”
“Nope. Nope. Get in, lady. I’m not leaving you behind. You’d call the cops.”
“That’s right,” she said, “I would.”
Jane widened her eyes, holding his gaze. Her thumb had to be strong enough. She felt it scrape past sharp metal and lose skin. “Hah,” she grunted in triumph.
She pulled her hand out of the bag and threw pepper out of the now-open can straight into his eyes. Then Jane hurled herself to the ground.
The man screamed, lunged, tripped over her body, fell, screamed again. Jane crawled out of the parking slot, somehow, anyhow, around him, over him, then out and free.
People had stopped in their tracks, a few on the sidewalk, the few who were getting in or out of cars. Jane ran. A man stepped into her way and said, “What’s the matter with him? Is he having a fit? Call an ambulance.”
“He’s got a knife! Call the police!”
People seemed to have come up out of the ground like worms after a rain. None of them went near the man. They had stunned looks—looks of distaste—don’t-bother-me looks. The woman in blue slammed her car door and frantically tried to start her engine.
The man in the parking slot was now on his feet, blind and blundering, seeking the way out. People’s feet were nervous, but nobody moved.
Jane moved. She ran back into the grocery store.
She was on the phone when the man with the knife, staggering, stabbing the air, stumbled blindly behind the car of the woman in blue and down under her wheels as she, in panic, was trying desperately to get the motor going.
The cops came with a rush.
People said to Jane, “You were so quick.” “You were so smart.” “You were so brave.”
Jane said, “But I couldn’t go off with him.”
“You could have been hurt, maybe killed.”
Jane said, “No. I couldn’t let him stab me—I just couldn’t.”
“Lucky you had just bought some pepper.”
Jane said impatiently, “I’d have thought of something else. I’d have stabbed his knife with my roast of beef. What time is it?”
“I’d have been scared to death!” a woman exclaimed.
“I didn’t have time,” Jane said.
The woman in blue was having hysterics in the parking lot. The cop said to Jane, “You did okay, Ma’am.”
“I’d like to go home now,” Jane said to him. “You can come there and talk all you want. What time is it?”
“Three twenty-five, Ma’am.”
“Then I must go! You see, my little girl will be home from school in a few minutes. Children shouldn’t come home to an empty house. So, of course, I couldn’t go with him, could I?”
“No, Ma’am,” the cop said, and he cleared the way for her, tipping his cap.
No-nonsense Sarah Brady does not like to be protected, or to have things hidden from her. When she calls the hand of her family members, gathered together, her honesty incites dialogue. And in dialogue the truth will out. Not only in her short stories, but in her novels as well (notably, The Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci and The Protégé), Armstrong creates admirable and strong older women who challenge those around them in productive ways. “Monday” was first splintered in EQMM in 1966.
THE SPLINTERED MONDAY
Mrs. Sarah Brady awakened in the guest room of her nephew Jeff’s house, and for a moment or two was simply glad for the clean page of a new day. Then she found her bookmark between the past and the future. Oh, yes. Her sister, Alice, had died on Monday, been buried on Wednesday. (Poor Alice.) This was Saturday. Mrs. Brady’s daughter, Del, was coming, late today, to drive her mother back home tomorrow.
Now that she knew where she was, Mrs. Brady cast a brief prayer into time and space, then put her lean old feet to the floor.
The house was very still. For days now it ha
d seemed muffled, everyone moving slowly in a quiet gloom, sweetened by mutually considerate behavior. Mrs. Brady had a feeling that her own departure would signal a lift of some kind in the atmosphere. And she did not particularly like the idea.
She trotted into the guest bathroom to wash herself, examining expertly the state of her health. Mrs. Brady had an uncertain heart, but she had lived with it a long time, and she knew how to manage. Still, she tried to get along with as few drugs as she successfully could, so she opened the medicine cabinet, peered at her bottle of pills, but did not touch it.
No, on the whole, she thought, it would be better to get through the morning without a pill—at least, to see how it would go. She dressed herself briskly and set forth into the hall.
It was going to be a lovely summer day, weather-wise.
The door of the enormous front bedroom stood wide and her sister’s bed, neatly made, shouted that poor Alice was gone. Mrs. Brady sampled the little recurring shock. It was not exactly lessening, but it was changing character. Yes, it was going over from feeling to thinking. She could perceive with her mind the hole in the fabric, the loss of a presence, the absence of a force.
But Mrs. Brady found herself frowning slightly as she proceeded downstairs and back through the house to the breakfast room. This was her last day here. And her last chance? Had she cause to feel offended?
Or to feel whatever this uneasiness of hers could be called?
Henny, the cook-housekeeper and general factotum, came at once with her orange juice. She was a big, rawboned, middle-aged woman with a golden cross dangling at her throat. Henny still had that sad and wary look in her big eyes. She had been much subdued, too much subdued, since Alice’s death.
She had taken to being very solicitous, treating Mrs. Brady as if she were an invalid. Yet Mrs. Brady and Henny had been good friends for many years. They had set up between them a kind of boisterous relationship, with a running gag that Mrs. Brady was a great nuisance to have around, and Henny, whenever Mrs. Brady visited, wished only to see the last of her.
Perhaps that gag was no longer in good taste—not today, not yet. But the continued coddling rather annoyed Mrs. Brady, who had never asked for it in the beginning and didn’t particularly like it now.
Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense Page 9
