Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  Agnes thought that delirious people should be put in straitjackets and carried off.

  And then one day when the lady who lived behind them once again asked Frederick about this wonderful trip of a lifetime he was planning, Agnes began to think in a new direction, emphasis on that lifetime of his, and that trip of it.

  Okay, she thought. Fine. If he was so eager to see Bali before he died, she’d grant him his wish. Both his wishes. He’d see Bali and die. Having had no other trips, and having no life beyond this one, this would definitely be the trip of his lifetime.

  Frederick made all their arrangements and was pleased when he saw Agnes dipping into the travel books stacked on the coffee table. She soon gave up, however. The books weren’t sufficiently detailed for her purposes. She would have to wait until she was there and she got the lay of the land before she could finalize ideas.

  Eventually they packed a suitcase apiece with lightweight clothing and took along a satchel full of Frederick’s heart medications. They stopped mail and newspaper delivery, moved Mickeys Eleven and Twelve to Margaret’s, locked the house, gave the neighbor who’d promised to water the philodendron a key, and set off. Frederick was elated and couldn’t stop talking about what was ahead. Agnes was exhausted by the preparations, and by worry over the future of her philodendron.

  Hawaii was nice enough, although Agnes wasn’t one for sitting around and doing nothing on a beach. Hong Kong was neon lights, crowds and skyscrapers, and she’d seen those things before. Singapore was boring and scary, with fines for things like chewing gum on the street or not flushing a public toilet. Agnes, who always flushed and never chewed, was nonetheless glad to get out of there.

  They tried Java, particularly two enormous monuments, one Buddhist, one Hindu, built God knew when and still partly in rubble. Frederick could not get over the reassembled parts, the carvings, the massive size of the places, the years and years it had taken pre-technological people to build them, the story of The Buddha painstakingly carved in panels that spanned the huge monument.

  Agnes had nothing but contempt for the places. Their stone steps were so uneven and dangerous that her feet hurt nearly as much as she said they did, the figures in the carvings silly nonsense—a man with an elephant’s head, of all things. What was the point?

  They went to the famous Bird Market where, as Agnes made a point of saying loudly, almost everything but birds were being sold. Peculiar foods she wouldn’t touch with a stick and hideous komodo dragons and panther kittens—over which Frederick, of course, went gaga. And as for the birds—most of them were pigeons. “For God’s sake!” she shouted. “I had to travel around the world to see pigeons in cages?”

  “Very expensive,” the guide said with reverence. He explained how they had contests, the pigeons wearing whistles in their tail feathers so that their swoops and arcs made lovely airborne sounds. A truly excellent racing pigeon could cost a year’s salary.

  “Back home, we call them rats with wings,” Agnes snarled.

  So they left for Bali, a short flight away. “This better be good,” Agnes said. “I’ve had it with people who talk funny and can’t build a smooth staircase.”

  “Those steps were twelve hundred years old,” Frederick said. “People’s feet wore those stones down.”

  “That isn’t my problem,” Agnes said. “They should fix ’em!”

  Bali would have no wretched stairs she had to climb, Frederick promised. And the cab ride to their hotel was pleasant enough, she admitted as they drove through green and flowering lanes. They passed a group of women in bright, tight sarongs. They wore towering tiers of fruit and flower offerings on their head.

  “How beautiful,” Frederick said with awe. “Just as it’s been for thousands of years.”

  “You’d think by now they’d have heard of shopping carts and tote bags,” Agnes snapped.

  And then they arrived at their hotel. Several times, she had to warn Frederick to calm down or he’d have another heart attack. He could barely contain himself. “I picked this hotel because it’s authentic Balinese,” he said. “Right on the rice fields.”

  She looked at rows of free-standing cottages with thatched roofs and bamboo rails and woven walls and was singularly unimpressed.

  And when they got to their room, she became nearly incoherent. “Where is the bedroom?” she demanded.

  “Here, madam,” the small man in the sarong said with a bow.

  “No, I mean—where is the inside?”

  “Excuse me? This is your room, madam,” he said with another bow. “Deluxe. The bathroom is behind that door.”

  “This is a porch! Frederick, tell him—this is a porch! As him where the room is!”

  Frederick smiled. “This is a sleeping pavilion, Ellie dear,” he said. “Surely you can see the bed. Balinese homes are built this way. The high ceiling keeps it cooler and breezes can come through the open side. What use would windows be?”

  It didn’t matter what fancy names he gave it. She knew a porch when she saw one. He had condemned her to an extremely high-ceilinged hut with woven half-wall and no glass or screens or anything except insects and animals who lived in the woven ceiling and grunted and chirped if she lit the bathroom light at night. And right outside the porch were the rice fields, a grid of squares in various stages of growth and cultivation, separated by raised grassy walkways. She could not believe that she’d come halfway around the world to camp out in an infested hut on a field.

  Frederick was enchanted by everything, no matter how ridiculous. “Look there,” he said next morning. He stood at what should have been a window, but was instead open space overlooking the rice fields. “The duck herder. I read about that, but it seemed too unbelievable. Never thought I’d see it for myself.”

  Outside, an ancient man made his way across the rice fields. He carried a pole with a bright banner attached. A flock of brown ducks followed him until he planted his flat in the middle of an empty-looking field. “They’ll eat the last bits of loose grain that didn’t get harvested,” Frederick explained.

  The old man walked away. The ducks stayed in the field near the flag. “They’ll stay there all day, until he comes and leads them back,” Frederick said. “Isn’t that incredible? Isn’t it charming? Exactly what I’d hoped for. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier. I want to stay here forever.”

  “It already feels like forever,” Agnes muttered. “If I wanted to visit a farm I could have gone to Iowa.” Her sleep had been torn to shreds by the bleats and snorts and barks and moos, crows and bellows of dogs, roosters, cows, birds, frogs and possibly the old man’s ducks.

  In the light of dawn, with yet another chorus of roosters deafening her, it had become painfully obvious that this unbearable trip—and Frederick—had to be terminated as quickly as possible.

  The logistics of ending Frederick were, however, tricky. For a moment, she’d been optimistic about the night noises. The squeaking, squealing barnyard outside had startled her awake a dozen times in precisely the manner that supposedly would do Frederick in.

  But the calls of the wild outside their porch did not jolt Frederick. The few times their sounds roused him, he seemed delighted, chuckling at the cackles and caws.

  As the days rolled on, hot and boring and impossibly foreign, she searched for other options. Aside from the insanely reckless driving that took place on the main street—the only street as far as she could tell—Bali was entirely too mild for murder. The people seemed constitutionally incapable of the act, with perhaps one serious act of violence a year for the entire country, and that included acts involving foreign visitors.

  Agnes hadn’t seen a police person since she arrived. That was the good news. Surely, if they existed, she could outwit them. They’d be too unpracticed to be much as detectives.

  But the people in general were too smiling, too gentle. Agnes had to be mighty careful if she wasn’t going to upset them with sudden moves. She couldn’t, for example, simply push Frederick in
front of a car, which had been her first idea. The passersby would notice. Nobody rushed, nobody scowled, nobody pretended you were invisible the way they did back home. Plus, the drivers, recklessly insane though they might be, were also tricky and quick-witted and would probably swerve in time.

  If only she could disguise Frederick as a dog, They were the single exception to the rule of gentle kindness. Nobody swerved for them. Nobody deliberately hurt the dogs—nobody here seemed to deliberately hurt anything. But neither did drivers try to avoid the mangy wraiths who wandered into the streets. Dogs were considered dirty, earthbound creatures who scavenged the offerings left outside to appease the wrathful gods each day. It was up to dogs to react quickly and scram.

  For a few blissful moments, she imagined stuffing Frederick into a St. Bernard suit and putting him on the road where he’d be squashed flat by a careening taxi. Of course, she realized with regret, even in a land of reckless drivers and some belief in magic, this would be a stretch.

  The long, lean cats who roamed the island, leaping up onto thatched roofs and staring down at Agnes were, to Frederick’s delight, not reviled the way dogs were. Cats were less earthbound, less crass, more celestial and discriminating, and they were tolerated with affection. And much to Agnes’s disgust, Frederick befriended a gold and white slip of a cat who’d taken to sitting on their porch and keeping them company. He even invented a new and equally dismal joke for this one. It, at least, wasn’t called Mickey. It was called, “Balicat, you get it? Instead of alley?” Frederick’s sense of humor had not improved over the years.

  She gritted her teeth and wondered if a person could break another person’s neck by swinging a cat directly into the jugular. But she guessed that even if you could, it would be difficult pleading that it had been an accident or a completely innocent act. She was living on a porch with no walls. She couldn’t do anything that would arouse suspicion, raise Frederick’s voice or be observed by somebody gleaning rice out in the fields.

  And there were no natural hazards to speak of where they were. They weren’t warned against snakes, vipers, wild animals, or black widow spiders. Frederick was rigid about not drinking unpurified water or eating food washed in it, so he didn’t even get a stomach ache. It was not a land of guns the way home was, so even if she could find one, using it was out of the question let alone getting someone else to use it.

  She eyed the machetes used to harvest the rice, but they were too awkward to steal, and what would be her excuse for swinging one, anyway?

  The days rolled on. They took excursions to black sand beaches, walked the rice fields, watched men painstakingly carve masks. Went to the dance. To many dance performances. Too many dance performances. Night after night they sat on uncomfortable chairs around an ancient palace and listened to peculiar music and watched people enact old stories. Frederick was entranced by the diminutive, stylized Balinese dancers.

  “They call themselves dancers,” Agnes sneered. “And they never lift a foot. Where’s the pirouettes, the leaps? What did we pay good money for?”

  Of course, Frederick had his defense and explanation. He was always on their side. Again it had to do with earth and sky and good being above, bad below. “The hands,” he said. “Watch them. And the eyes. It’s a different aesthetic, that’s all.”

  He was no use. She knew what it was really about: ogling dark-haired, dark-eyed, honey-skinned girls. Agnes knew she looked like a piece of suet in this heat, her blonde hair slicked to her pale forehead. The Balinese didn’t even sweat. Watching these performances was about drooling over tiny foreign slips of girls and not liking good solid American bodies. Thinking she wasn’t graceful enough because she couldn’t make her hands bend backward.

  She was well and truly sick of the dancers and of Frederick and of being compared—even if silently—to ten-year-old unsweaty girls. Even the damned cat was slender and the color of light honey, like a constant reminder of how large and clumsy Agnes was. She’d watch Frederick snuggle and drift off to sleep, the golden Balinese intruder in his arms and a smile on his face, and she’d feel stranded and betrayed and she’d hate him even more.

  One month into their trip, Frederick made an announcement. “I have never been this happy,” he said. “I understand why people have always considered this paradise. I want to stay here. Forever. And try as I can, I can’t think of any reason to go back.”

  “The Mickeys,” she said.

  “Yes. I miss them. But I know they’re happy with Margaret. She always adored them and vice versa. I’m going to write and tell her to keep them and to put the house up for sale.”

  There was no time left to dither. He had to be gone, and soon.

  And then, one morning Frederick decided to visit an old master crafter of instruments, but Agnes, who could not get used to the sound of the Gamelan music in the first place and didn’t want to hear what the old man had to say about its creation, refused. “I’m too tired,” she said. “All this gallivanting. I’m not one of your ten-year-old dancing girls. I don’t have endless resources of strength.”

  “Then rest up, dearest. I’ll see you later.”

  “You mean you’d still go?” she said. “Without me? You’re going to abandon me here?”

  Frederick laughed as if she’d made a fine joke, and left. Never, ever, had he done anything like that.

  She sat on the porch, out of the midday sun, her lips clamped together with resolve. Frederick’s cat, Bali, lay dozing on their bed. Frederick’s books about this country, its people, its customs, its history lay on a stack on the table. One of Frederick’s sarongs, to be worn when visiting holy sites, lay on a chair.

  Frederick was everywhere, but it wasn’t the Frederick she’d known for decades. Her relatively agreeable husband had disappeared and been replaced by somebody who lived precisely the way he wanted to, with no regard for her. Somebody selfish and independent she could not abide.

  She had to find a way out now. A safe way. The perfect crime. The perfect weapon.

  And there it was, as it had been for a while now. Across a rice field, near a wall, a skinny brown cat mewed in her direction. Agnes was sure it was the same pesky cat that had nearly tripped her the day before. She had no idea what it wanted of her, or why it had chosen her to torment, but there it definitely was. Agnes allowed herself a smile.

  Bali opened one eye, seemed to consider the mewing, then sighed and returned to her snooze.

  Agnes, on the other hand, put on her straw hat and her sandals and walked to the market, humming all the way. The open-air stalls normally revolted her. What these people needed was a supermarket with freezers and aisles and tidy stacks of cans and boxes. What they had instead were cramped rows of tables holding peculiar grains and pods and unidentifiable meat with only flapping awnings as protection from contamination.

  Fish would have been best, but these idiot people didn’t eat much fish. They lived on an island, but avoided the sea, and when she commented on the pure idiocy of this, Frederick, who thought they were so wonderful, explained again the religious basis, about how high, as in mountain tops, was worshipped, and low, as in the sea, was avoided. Demons lived in the sea. Hence, little fishing.

  Agnes surely didn’t care why. Smelly, oily fish bits would have been the most effective. But she would make do, anyway. She always did.

  A wizened woman with black-stained betel-nut teeth nodded at her, and Agnes swallowed hard and pointed at a duck back. The woman gestured at other, more succulent segments of duck, but Agnes shook her head and pointed again at the back and the woman wrapped it in paper and exchanged it for a bit of money.

  On the way back to the porch, she saw the brown cat. It kept its distance but eyed her as she was sure it had done for days. It looked tougher than its kin, belligerent in some way. One of its ears was jagged, as if it had been ripped and poorly healed, and she could clearly see the outline of its ribs.

  She had never seen anyone call it or invite it inside a compound where it could f
ind kitchen scraps and a child to cuddle it. “Hey, Mickey,” she whispered, and she lay the duck back by the side of the path where the cat stood.

  After a few wary glances and tentative steps forward, the cat seized its bounty and busied itself with it. Agnes heard its purr as she walked back to her hotel.

  The next day, Frederick announced that he wanted to learn to make batik, and he’d signed up for a five-afternoon beginner’s class. He didn’t ask Agnes if she wanted to come along. Of course she didn’t. Why ruin her nails with inks and hot wax? But all the same, he should have asked.

  Each afternoon for five days while Frederick was at the workshop, Agnes went to the market and bought a morsel of duck meat. She knew that if this were any other place in the world, the woman at the market stall would eventually testify against her. But not here. First of all, no one would suspect what she had done. Second of all, this was not a land of questioning and finding witnesses. And third and most important of all, Agnes wasn’t going to do anything herself.

  After she left the market, she looked for the Mickey. Number Thirteen, she realized. How appropriate. Each afternoon, she found him alone, slightly hunched and defensive looking, but less and less wary.

  Each day she let him follow her a few more paces, and then she’d place his daily duck part on the edge of the path, further from the wall where she’d first seen him, closer to her room. The last afternoon, she tiptoed down from the porch, carrying her bit of duck, and placed it directly under the woven wall of their sleeping pavilion.

  Frederick’s batik class ended. He proudly presented her with a black and blue square of cloth, drips and blobs marring whatever design he’d intended. “Sarongs by Frederick of Bali,” he said with a smile.