Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  In the distance, the fog expanded, a white waterfall spilling over the spires of the city and through the Gate, then seemed to stop and hover, waiting, as was Emma, for the point of the story. Happily ever after wasn’t the end of her story and wasn’t the story itself. Emma finished her hamburger, ate each and every french fry, drained her beer, ordered another and still she waited. And finally, Vivian looked at her, her amber eyes awash with moisture.

  “He—I didn’t see him all those years except three times when we found ourselves at the same event. We never spoke. Gene never mentioned it. But someone who didn’t know my connection to him mentioned she’d been to a funeral. His wife’s, it turned out. She said how bad the widower looked, that he was retiring sooner than expected for reasons of health.

  “The last time I saw him, Gene wasn’t with me, so I said hello, had a little more time to see him. I tried to hide my shock, he looked so crumply, and gray—his skin, I mean. Not healthy. He was older than I was, but not old enough to look that way. He said his health had been poor, but he was hopeful of a change for the better.

  “I didn’t ask why. I should have, because then maybe… I didn’t put together the gray skin, how weak he looked, how slowly he walked up the one step in front of him. Maybe if I’d known… But Emma, I didn’t suspect a thing. Why would I have? It was fifteen years ago!”

  Emma wished she’d ordered coffee instead of beer. It wasn’t warm anymore. She wished she were inside anything. Protected in some way she suddenly felt she was not.

  “He was on the heart-transplant list. I didn’t know. If I had only asked, if I’d known…”

  She was off again, lost somewhere. Emma was getting used to this rhythm, and she waited.

  “Three days ago,” Vivian said in a flat voice, “Gene came home from the office in a great mood. Buoyant and beaming like something great had happened, and when I asked, he said, ‘Vivian, it’s over at last.’

  “Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought about his projects, about anything on earth he’d been waiting for—grants, awards, equipment.

  “He said, ‘Your love affair is what’s over. Finally. It took fifteen years, but he’s out of your life. And mine. Out of his, too. He’s dead. Why the hell would I let him qualify for a new heart after he broke mine? Go ahead, cry for him. Feel whatever you like. Love him. It no longer bothers me a bit. I hear he was a really nice guy.’ And he smiled.”

  Emma shivered. “If I’d known…I would have lied, Emma. I would have said I didn’t, I never loved him. But I didn’t know and Gene did. And he killed him,” Vivian said. “On purpose. Isn’t that murder?”

  Intentionally killing someone. Yes, of course. He’d murdered his rival. Except. She could see Gene’s clean healer’s hands, could imagine him explaining the complex protocol for deciding who gets transplanted organs and who doesn’t. Vivian said he’d been older than she herself was. That would put him near sixty. Borderline age, Emma assumed. In a rarified world, with a procedure as complicated as a heart-transplant, Gene would produce scientific, compassionate, heartfelt, rational and irrefutable arguments. Gene was a physician. The expert in his field. He’d know things nobody else on the jury, in the courtroom, possibly could.

  Murder—or speculation. Hysteria. Much too petty an act for the good Dr. Carter whose entire career had been dedicated to saving lives.

  And what would be gained by accusing him of the crime? Gene’s undeniable lifesaving talents would be rendered useless. Vivian’s lover could never return. The situation would never repeat itself.

  “I’ve moved out,” Vivian said softly. “It’s obvious that those fifteen years were a farce, that just below the calm, there was boiling lava. Fifteen years waiting for revenge; fifteen years of hate—it all came out in that greeting. In less than a minute. I can’t live with him anymore, knowing that.”

  That fury, that murderous rage, that twisted passion. Straight out of a nineteenth-century opera. Pure Tchaikovsky.

  Be careful what you wish for…

  “What do I do now?” Vivian asked. “What’s the right thing to do?”

  Nothing would be made better if she went to the authorities. There was nothing they could do. And nothing would be made worse by silence. Nothing had been real for fifteen years. You can’t lose what never was.

  Emma was glad George wasn’t here to witness the dismantling of her carefully calibrated systems. The clear-edged blacks and whites she’d flipped in front of him this morning had muddled into each other to form a non-color. A veil she couldn’t see through. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know that there’s an answer.”

  “But Emma, you always—I thought you’d—”

  “I thought so, too.” Emma felt exposed as her absolutes fell away. “But I was wrong.” She thought about hearts, their secrets and unknowable mysteries.

  In the distance, a foghorn moaned. Emma turned. Fog had swallowed the city until all definition was gone, turned into a fuzzed and featureless wilderness of gray.

  The Shrine of Miki

  Nothing was as irritating as not finding a good objection to any idea her husband had. “But…” Agnes Morris spluttered. “But…” Still, for the first time ever, her cupboard of objections, complaints and oppositions was bare.

  “It’s a lifelong dream,” Frederick Morris said. “You know that. Paradise on earth, they say. I want to see it.”

  “But…”

  “It’s our time, Aggie,” he said. “We’ve scrimped and saved and put off so many good things, luxuries…”

  The boat. That’s what he was talking about. The stupid sailboat he’d wanted for years. All those outdoor conventions he dragged her through, even the talk about building his own boat. Was it her fault she got seasick? A boat was impractical, not for the likes of them, and sailing, a waste of time that could be better spent taking care of chores and meeting responsibilities. Eventually, Frederick understood, or at least stopped talking about it. Until now.

  Or, good Lord, was it about the stupid RV? See the U.S.A., all that nonsense. No way she was going to be imprisoned in a metal box with wheels on its outside and Frederick on its inside. Who needed it, anyway? No place like home was her philosophy. She hated the funny way people talked in other parts of the country, hated the weird things they cooked, the stupid ways they built their houses. And why leave when you could see everything you needed on TV, anyway?

  “…and no vacations while Mickeyboy was growing up or since.”

  “Nonsense—you always took your two weeks off, even though you could have gotten time and a half if you’d skipped them.”

  “But we stayed home. Painted the house or fixed the decking, which was important, of course, but all the same…now, the house is painted, the decks are fine, the boy’s a grown man and I want to see Bali before I die. Let’s do it.”

  “But…” She just plain didn’t want to go to Bali. Didn’t, for that matter, want to go anywhere with Frederick. Didn’t want Frederick. “What about your cats?”

  “Margaret told me she’d gladly take care of them while we’re gone.”

  “She’ll steal them, Frederick.” Not that Agnes would care. “She’ll alienate their affections.”

  “Nonsense. She loves them. They’ll be happy, and even if they run home here by mistake, she lives down the street, so she’ll know where to get them. The Mickeys will love it.”

  “They’ll be spoiled rotten by the time we get back.”

  “Cats are born spoiled. What’s Margaret going to do that I don’t already do? I’ve always had a soft spot for my Mickeys.”

  She gritted her teeth. His Mickeys were pampered jerks, lording it around the house and eating only gourmet delicacies, costing them a fortune.

  Everything about the Mickeys irritated her, starting with their names. Forty-two years ago, when she was a newlywed, a tiny mewling black and white stray that gave Agnes the willies, but that Frederick found charming, the way he found every cat on God’
s earth charming, appeared at their door. He named it Mickey, because of its coloring. “Mickey Cat, not Mouse, get it?” he’d said. “See the little white gloves?”

  The Mickey joke was one of many early clues that her groom was not as much of a prize catch as she’d thought he might be.

  And she didn’t like cats. They shed. They got fleas. They ruined furniture. And they liked Frederick, not her.

  He’d named every cat since then—and there had been numbers of them—Mickey. Mickey Two, Mickey Three and so forth. It didn’t matter if they were black with white gloves. They were Mickeys. Currently, Mickey Eleven and Twelve lived with them, and Frederick still found the names amusing and the cats adorable, and she still found Frederick, his cats and their names repugnant.

  He even called their son Mickey even though his name was Stephen. At least there was no need to number him. One pregnancy and childbirth was more than enough for Agnes. Their one and only offspring was called, by his father, Mickeyboy.

  Not that it mattered any longer what they’d called him. Stephen-Mickey, no longer anything like a boy, lived fourteen hundred miles away. Their relationship consisted of his having his dreadful wife send Christmas and anniversary gifts. Always in bad taste.

  Oh, he visited when Frederick had the heart attack and surgery, she’d grant him that. And he even brought that witch of a wife and his ninny of an oldest daughter, but they left the second Frederick was on the mend.

  She didn’t care. Stephen had turned out to be too much like his father. Spineless, ambitionless, impractical.

  And in absolute truth, she could understand his leave-taking when his father was disconnected from the machines. She, too, liked Frederick hooked up and inert. Not that she necessarily wished him ill—she wasn’t really that type—but when the doctor said that her husband was in grave danger, that his heart attack had been serious, that all his gaskets and valves and pipes had to be repaired—she hadn’t been exactly distraught. There’d been instead a giddy reaction the nurse called “nerves.” Agnes would have called it dizzy relief. Her marriage to a man with one stupid joke and jackets covered with cat hair had gone on long enough. It had seemed that nature agreed and was granting her a reprieve.

  Except Nature reneged and Frederick recuperated. Became a fanatic about diet and exercise and keeping a benign outlook on life. “Healthier than ever,” the doctor said.

  Forty-two years tied to such a man was excessive. And the thought of traveling halfway around the world with him to a stupid island where the women barely covered their parts was unbearable.

  “It’s too far,” she told her husband. “Bad for your heart. Too dangerous. The doctor would never allow it.”

  “I already asked and he said it was fine. Just to take it easy, take it in steps, don’t overtax myself. So I thought we could stop in Hawaii, and Hong Kong, and Singapore. And maybe stay a while in Java, too. Just saying the names of the places makes me need to sit down! Exotic ports, different cultures, a whole new world, Ellie!”

  “Ridiculous,” she said. “At our age—”

  “At our age we have to do things like this. We should have been doing them all along. But now—when else are we going to live out our fantasies, the things we’ve dreamed of all our lives?”

  “I dreamed of staying put and finally getting some peace and quiet.”

  “Bali is the very heart of peace and quiet,” he answered.

  “Not when it involves packing and getting on and off airplanes and winding up in a heathen country with bare-breasted—”

  “They cover themselves up nowadays,” he said.

  She thought he sounded sad about that.

  “They aren’t heathen. They have their own blend of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism. It’s quite a lovely religion, too. It’s a different world there—not just far away, but different. For starters, art isn’t a separate thing. It’s part of their daily life. After working in the rice fields, they dance, they sing, they play music and make masks all as a part of their religion.”

  Another jab at her because he had once had delusions about being a singer. He had a nice enough voice, she would admit that, but show business was no profession for a married man, particularly one with a child on the way, so he’d done the right thing and gotten the job at the plant. Was that her fault? Was she to blame that there wasn’t time to work and sing, the way he said the Balinese did? That she needed his help in the evenings instead of having him gallivant off to perform in a bar or at a wedding?

  “The Balinese live differently than we do,” Frederick said in his mild voice. “Less competition, less stress. It would be good for me to be with them, to learn from them. Therapeutic. And good for you, too.”

  “Me? What are you insinuating? I don’t need to travel halfway around the world to gape at happy-go-lucky natives who lounge around singing all day.”

  “They don’t. They work the rice fields work hard, but they—”

  “You listen now, Frederick. I don’t need to get away to escape stress. I wouldn’t have any stress in my life if only you’d grow up and stop indulging in these ridiculous flights of imagination.”

  Frederick’s chin looked solid and set. Forty-two years and she had never seen his face wear that expression before. “I am quite grown up,” he said in his customary quiet voice, although it sounded steelier, more solid than she remembered. “And I want to see Bali before I am so thoroughly and completely grown up that I’m dead.”

  She tried out different avenues of protest. The trip was too expensive, she said, but he asked what they were supposed to do with their savings, anyway. To tell the truth, every time she watched the Home Shopping Network, she saw lots of fine ideas for those savings, but Frederick was becoming too selfish to understand.

  She relented a bit and said she’d consider going if they were part of a tour. Travel seemed safer, easier and cheaper—and less confined to Frederick, although she didn’t say that part—if they were in a group.

  “No,” he said. “I want to be on my own. On our own. All my life I’ve felt like somebody on a package tour. I’ve been one of the gang, the guy who goes along. But not this time. No leaders, no itinerary, no rules, no time limits.”

  He already lived with no time limits. Almost with no clocks. They’d tossed away the alarm clock after the surgery. The doctor had said that he was to wake up gently, with no shock to his heart. Worst thing you could do for the heart was to be jolted awake. Not that they had to be up at any particular time, but it wasn’t right to live this way. Loll around, wake up whenever. Wasn’t decent.

  “I don’t want to talk to people I don’t like.” He was still going on about why he wouldn’t be part of a tour.

  She faked pain in her ankles and feet, claimed arthritic damage that made walking painful if not impossible. The doctor—in front of Frederick—said that the equatorial heat of Bali would probably do her aches and pains a world of good.

  She insisted that the diet in Indonesia would kill Frederick. After all, he was supposed to eat low-fat foods, wasn’t he? Lord knows, his damnable cardiac cooking requirements took up half her days, and what did those heathen people know about health?

  “Did you ever once see a fat Balinese?” Frederick asked her.

  She had never once seen a Balinese of any shape, so she kept her lips clamped together.

  “Their mainstay is rice, which is fine, and vegetables, and tiny bits of meat. Tiny. And fruit. A perfect diet. Much better than ham and eggs or American take-out.”

  He was casting aspersions at her cooking. The doctor had made her change every single thing she knew and liked about food, just for Frederick’s sake. Now, because of him, they weren’t permitted to have any of her favorite foods. And no rest for the weary cook. No fast foods. Frederick required slow food. Her food, slowly made by hand. Frederick got to retire and lord it over her and her very kitchen, while she slaved on without a break. It just wasn’t fair.

  When they reached an impasse concerning the trip, Fred
erick resorted to guerrilla warfare, telling everybody he met about his dream and the difficulties he was having attaining it, enlisting their support. This was extremely abnormal behavior on his part—he had never been one to complain or air their dirty laundry. She suggested that he was losing his mind and insisted he see a therapist.

  The psychologist said he was doing the right thing, letting out his feelings. That, in fact, bottling them up all along until now had helped give him the heart attack.

  In the end, exhausted, she realized Frederick had boxed her in so that she had no choice. She had to give in, but this was not a form of behavior with which she’d had much experience. Her “giving in” muscles were flabby with disuse, and ached constantly. It pained her to see Frederick tote home travel books. It gave her psychic muscle spasms to watch him outline itineraries, clip hints from travel columns and collect ideas from anyone he met who’d been in the general vicinity of Indonesia.

  And although she’d hoped that time itself would take its toll, nature proved perverse. Instead of wearing himself out, Frederick seemed to gain strength and vitality with each day that brought them closer to the distant island world. “I feel young again,” he’d tell people who inquired after his health. “I feel reborn. Invigorated. I have something to look forward to. The only bad part is leaving my Mickeys, but maybe they need a vacation, too, and I know they’ll be well taken care of. I’m practically delirious about this.”