Lucy put on the dress. “Have you ever been down in Prewitt’s study, Amorette?”
“Ummum.” The dainty woman shook her head ambiguously, patting her carefully styled blonde hair.
“Would you like to see it now?” Lucy asked her.
Amorette gave her a curious look. “We don’t have time to look at Prewitt’s study now, honey. We are waaay late already. Not that jacket, it doesn’t go at all. Sometimes, Lucy … This one. Oh, you look so pretty when you want to.”
Lucy followed her dead husband’s mistress out to her car. Amorette called to her to come along: “Hop in now, and if you see that mall shooter, duck!” She merrily laughed.
As they drove toward the interstate to Tuscumbia through Pain-ton’s flower-edged, unsafe streets, Lucy leaned back in the green velour seat of her neighbor’s Toyota (had Amorette and Prewitt gotten a special deal for buying two at once?) and closed her eyes. Amorette babbled on about how someone with no handicaps at all had used the handicapped-parking space at the Winn-Dixie and how this fact as well as the Mall Maniac proved that the South might as well be the North these days. Amorette had taken to locking her doors with dead bolts and might drop dead herself one night from the shock of the strange noises she was hearing after dark and suspected might be burglars or rapists. It was then that Lucy said, “Amorette, when did you and Prewitt start sleeping together?”
The little sedan lurched forward with a jolt. Then it slowed and slowed, almost to a stop. Pink splotched Amorette’s cheeks, until they matched the color of her coat, but her nose turned as white as a sheet. “Who told you that?” she finally whispered, her hand on her heart. “Was it Gloria Peters?”
Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
“It was, wasn’t it! It was Gloria Peters. She hates me.”
Lucy took one of Prewitt’s left-behind hidden cigarettes out of her purse and lit up. “Oh, calm down, nobody told me. I found things.”
“What things? Lucy, what are you talking about? You’ve gotten all mixed up about something—”
Blowing out smoke, Lucy reached in her purse. She thrust in front of the driver the Polaroid picture of her younger self, flash-eyed, cupping her breasts.
Now the car bumped up on the curb, hit a mailbox, and stopped.
The two widows sat in the car on a residential avenue where oleander blossoms banked the sidewalks and honeysuckle made the air as sweet as syrup. There was no one around except a bored teenage girl in a bathing suit who rollerbladed back and forth and looked blatantly in the car window each time she passed it.
Lucy kept smoking. “I found all your love letters down in Prewitt’s study,” she added. “Didn’t you two worry that I might?”
With little heaves Amorette shook herself into tears. She pushed her face against the steering wheel, crying and talking at the same time. “Oh Lucy, this is just the worst possible thing. Prewitt was a wonderful man, now, don’t start thinking he wasn’t. We never meant to hurt you. He knew how much I needed a little bit of attention because Charlie was too wrapped up in the law office to know if I had two eyes or three, much less be sympathetic to my murmur when I couldn’t do the things he wanted me to.”
“Amorette, I don’t care to hear this,” said Lucy.
But Amorette went on anyhow. “Prewitt and I were both so unhappy, and we just needed a little chance to laugh. And then it all just happened without us ever meaning it to. Won’t you believe me that we really didn’t want you to get yourself hurt.”
Lucy, dragging smoke through the cigarette, thought this over. “I just want to know how long?”
“Wuh, what, what?” sobbed her neighbor.
“How long were you screwing my husband? Five years, ten years, till the day Prewitt died?”
“Oh, Lucy, no!” Amorette had sobbed herself into gasping hiccups that made the sound “eeuck.” “No! Eeuck. Eeuck. We never … after Charlie died. I just didn’t think that would be fair. Eeuck. Eeuck.”
“Charlie died a year ago. We’ve been in Painton fifteen.” Lucy squashed her cigarette butt in the unused ashtray. She flashed to an image of the maniac smashing the glass storefronts that looked out on the concourse of the shopping mall. “So, Amorette, I guess I don’t know what the goddamn shit ‘fair’ means to you.” She lit another cigarette.
Amorette shrank away, shocked and breathing hard. “Don’t you talk that way to me, Lucy Rhoads! I won’t listen to that kind of language in my car.” Back on moral ground, she flapped her hand frantically at the thick smoke. “And put out that cigarette. You don’t smoke.”
Lucy stared at her. “I do smoke. I am smoking. Just like you were screwing my husband. You and Prewitt were a couple of lying shits.”
Amorette rolled down her window and tried to gulp in air. “All right, if you’re going to judge us—”
Lucy snorted with laughter that hurt her throat. “Of course I’m going to judge you.”
“Well, then, the truth is …” Amorette was now nodding at her like a toy dog with its head on a spring. “The truth is, Lucy, your negativity and being so down on the world the way you are just got to Prewitt sometimes. Sometimes Prewitt just needed somebody to look on the bright side with.”
Lucy snorted again. “A shoulder to laugh on.”
“I think you’re being mean on purpose,” whimpered Amorette. “My doctor says I can’t afford to get upset like this.”
Lucy looked hard into the round brown candy eyes of her old bridge partner. Could the woman indeed be this obtuse? Was she as banal of brain as the tiny plastic mom down on the board waving at Prewitt’s electric train? So imbecilic that any action she took would have to be excused? That any action Lucy took would be unforgivable? But as Lucy kept staring at Amorette Strumlander, she saw deep down in the pupils of her neighbor’s eyes the tiniest flash of self-satisfaction, a flicker that was quickly hidden behind a tearful blink. It was a smugness as bland and benighted as Painton, Alabama’s, history.
Lucy suddenly felt a strong desire to do something, and as the feeling surged through her, she imagined the maniac from the mall bounding down this residential street and tossing his gun to her through the car window. It felt as if the butt of the gun hit her stomach with a terrible pain. She wanted to pick up the gun and shoot into the eye of Amorette’s smugness. But she didn’t have a gun. Besides, what good did the gun do the maniac, who had probably by now been caught by the police? Words popped out of Lucy’s mouth before she could stop them. She said, “Amorette, did you know that Prewitt was sleeping with Gloria Peters at the same time he was sleeping with you, and he kept on with her after you two ended things?”
“What?”
“Did you know there were pictures, naked pictures of Gloria Peters locked up in Prewitt’s letter box too?”
Mrs. Strumlander turned green, actually apple green, just as Prewitt had turned blue on the ambulance stretcher after his coronary. Amorette had also stopped breathing; when she started up again, she started with a horrible-sounding gasp. “Oh, my God, don’t do this, tell me the truth,” she wheezed.
Lucy shook her head sadly. “I am telling the truth. You didn’t know about Gloria? Well, he tricked us both. And there were some very ugly pictures I found down in the study too, things he’d bought, about pretty sick things being done to naked women. Prewitt had all sorts of magazines and videos down in that study of his. I don’t think you even want to hear about what was in those videos.” (There were no other pictures, of course, any more than there had been an affair with Gloria Peters. The Polaroid shot of Amorette’s cupped breasts was doubtless as decadent an image as Prewitt could conceive. Every sentiment the man ever had could have been taken from one of his Mylar balloons or greeting cards.)
“Please tell me you’re lying about Gloria!” begged Amorette. She was green as grass.
Instead Lucy opened the car door and stepped out. “Prewitt said my problem was I couldn’t stop telling the truth. And this is the truth. I saw naked pictures of Glor
ia posing just like you’d done and laughing because she was copying your pose. That’s what she said in a letter; that he’d shown her the picture of you and she was mimicking it.”
“Lucy, stop. I feel sick. Something’s wrong. Hand me my purse off the backseat.”
Lucy ignored the request. “Actually I read lots of letters Gloria wrote Prewitt making fun of you, Amorette. You know how witty she can be. The two of them really got a laugh out of you.”
Unable to breathe, Amorette shrank back deep into the seat of her car and whispered for Lucy please to call her doctor for her because she felt like something very scary was happening.
“Well, just take it one day at a time,” Lucy advised her neighbor. “And look on the bright side.”
“Lucy, Lucy, don’t leave me!”
But Lucy slammed the door and began to walk rapidly along beside the oleander hedge. She was pulling off fistfuls of oleander petals as she went, throwing them down on the sidewalk ahead of her. The teenage girl on rollerblades came zipping close, eyes and mouth big as her skates carried her within inches of Lucy’s red face. She shot by the car quickly and didn’t notice that Amorette Strumlander had slumped over onto the front seat.
Lucy walked on, block after block, until the oleander stopped and lawns spread flat to the doorsteps of brick ranch houses with little white columns. A heel on her beige pump came loose, and she kicked both shoes off. Then she threw off her jacket. She could feel the maniac on the loose right beside her as she jerked at her dress until she broke the buttons off. She flung the dress to the curb. Seeing her do it, a man ran his power mower over his marigold beds, whirring out pieces of red and orange. Lucy unsnapped her bra and tossed it on the man’s close-cropped emerald green grass. She didn’t look at him, but she saw him. A boy driving a pizza van swerved toward her, yelling a war whoop out his window. Lucy didn’t so much as turn her head, but she took off her panty hose and threw them in his direction.
Naked in her panties, carrying her purse, she walked on until the sun had finished with its daytime tricks and night was back. She walked all the way to the outskirts of Helen Keller’s hometown.
When the police car pulled up beside her, she could hear the familiar voice of the scanner dispatcher on the radio inside, then a flashlight was shining in her eyes and then Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston was covering her with his jacket. He knew Lucy Rhoads from the Painton Town Hall, where she clerked. “Hey, now,” he said. “You can’t walk around like this in public, Mrs. Rhoads.” He looked at her carefully. “You all right?”
“Not really,” Lucy admitted.
“You had something to drink? Some kind of pill maybe?”
“No, Mr. Puddleston, I’m sorry, I’ve just been so upset about Prewitt, I just, I just …”
“Shhh. It’s okay,” he promised her.
At the police station back in Painton, they were handcuffing a youngish bald man to the orange plastic seats. Lucy shook loose of her escort and went up to him. “Are you the one from the shopping mall?”
The handcuffed man said, “What?”
“Are you the one who shot his wife? Because I know how you feel.”
The man tugged with his handcuffed arms at the two cops beside him. “She crazy?” he wanted to know.
“She’s just upset. She lost her husband,” the desk sergeant explained.
Prewitt’s lawyer had Lucy released within an hour. An hour later Amorette Strumlander died in the hospital of the heart defect that Gloria Peters had always sarcastically claimed was only Amorette’s trick to get out of cleaning her house.
Three months afterward, Lucy had her hearing for creating a public disturbance by walking naked through the streets of Painton, the cheerfulest town in America. It was in the courtroom across the hall from the trial of the Mall Maniac, so she did finally get to see the young man. He was younger than she’d thought he’d be, ordinary-looking, with sad, puzzled eyes. She smiled at him, and he smiled back at her, just for a second, then his head turned to his wife, who by now had filed for divorce. His wife still had the scar on her chin from where the plaster piece of the swan had hit her in the florist shop. The florist sat beside her, holding her hand.
Testifying over his lawyer’s protest that he’d tried to kill his wife and her lover but had “just messed it up,” the maniac pleaded guilty. So did Lucy. She admitted she was creating as much of a public disturbance as she could. But unlike the maniac’s, her sentence was suspended, and afterward the whole charge was erased from the record. Prewitt’s lawyer made a convincing case to a judge (who also knew Lucy) that grief at her husband’s death, aggravated by the shock of the car accident from which her best friend was to suffer a coronary, had sent poor Mrs. Rhoads wandering down the sidewalk in “a temporarily irrational state of mind.” He suggested that she might even have struck her head on the dashboard, that she might not even have been aware of what she was doing when she “disrobed in public.” After all, Lucy Rhoads was an upright citizen, a city employee, and a decent woman, and if she’d gone momentarily berserk and exposed herself in a nice neighborhood, she’d done it in a state of emotional and physical shock. Prewitt’s lawyer promised she’d never do it again. She never did.
A few months later, Lucy went to visit the maniac at the state penitentiary. She brought him a huge box of presents from the going-out-of-business sale at The Fun House. They talked for a while, but conversation wasn’t easy, despite the fact that Lucy not only felt they had a great deal in common but also thought she could have taught him a lot about getting away with murder.
MICHAEL MALONE is one of North Carolina’s most successful writers, among both critics and readers. His range is immense. He has written mainstream novels, comic novels, short stories, and mysteries. He was head writer for the soap opera One Life to Live for many years. He’s won both an Edgar and an Emmy. His mystery series, set in a fictional North Carolina town resembling Hillsborough, features “two of the most memorable detectives ever to appear in mystery fiction” (Cuddy Mangum and Justin Savile V), according to the New York Times Book Review. Malone, a native North Carolinian who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lives and writes in Hillsborough.
Copyright 2001 by Michael Malone. First printed in A Confederacy of Crime, edited by Sarah Shankman (New York: Signet, 2001). Reprinted with permission of the author.
Beauty is Only Skin Deep
Gallagher Gray
“Absolutely not.” There was no way T.S. would relinquish the wheel to Auntie Lil. Fat flakes of snow whipped against the windshield and dark clouds above promised more. Besides, she never drove more than twenty-five miles an hour. At that rate, it would take them a week to get to Highland Lake Lodge.
“I’m an excellent driver,” Auntie Lil protested. She crossed her arms firmly and glared out the window. The trouble with Auntie Lil was that, at age eighty-four, she was not only a horrible driver herself but firmly convinced that everyone else was much worse.
“You owe me one for this weekend,” T.S. said, ignoring her sulking.
She ignored him. “A mystery weekend jaunt will be fun for both of us. We can relive old glory.”
“I don’t see how a bunch of bad actors screaming lousy dialogue can ever approach solving the real thing.” An unwelcome fantasy unfolded before him: suppose he was trapped in a blizzard with an entire houseful of Auntie Lils? It was enough to make him turn around and speed home to New York City.
“Besides,” Auntie Lil added. “We had to come. I promised Clarabelle. I believe we are part of the draw. That’s why we attend for free.”
Oh Lord, it really had to be a low-rent crowd if they were the celebrities, T.S. thought grimly as he steered his way through the storm.
The snow was approaching blizzard proportions by the time they neared Highland Lake, making the steep ascent perilous and Auntie Lil’s attempts at backseat driving all the more maddening. The town was no more than an intersection marking the final crest of a mountain overlook
ing the Delaware River. Following Clarabelle’s directions, they passed a small community of deserted summer homes blanketed with snow, then turned left down a narrow road. They abruptly came upon a converted Victorian house that was splendid in its overgrown majesty. A porch wrapped around the entire structure, and snow-dusted bushes grew wildly over the carved wooden railings. Through a large bay window, a cozy sitting and smoking room could be seen, complete with crackling fire.
“I see my room,” T.S. remarked cheerfully as he helped Auntie Lil up the steps. Ice made the going slippery, and he was forced to perform several heroic maneuvers in order to preserve his elderly aunt’s dignity.
“I can’t think why they don’t have someone to help the guests,” Auntie Lil muttered as she grabbed a fence post to keep from tumbling ass over teakettle.
Before they could ring the bell, the door was opened by a small woman with impossibly orange hair. She was in her early fifties and dressed in a purple leotard topped by an elaborately embroidered blue vest. She collapsed into raptures at the sight of Auntie Lil. “You made it!” she squealed in a babyish voice that made Marilyn Monroe sound like a truck driver with congestion. “I knew you would come through for me.”
“Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor …” Auntie Lil began.
“I’m T.S. Hubbert, Lillian’s nephew,” T.S. interrupted, before Auntie Lil moved on to quoting Tennyson.
“I’m Clarabelle Clarke,” their hostess replied, leading them into a huge hallway with the highest ceilings they had ever seen in their lives. A curving stairway led upward past a wide landing to a three-sided balcony area that served as the second-floor hallway. Huge oil portraits of dour ancestors crowded the walls. Dozens of sour expressions caught the casual observer in a cross fire of ancient grumpiness.
“Are these all yours?” Auntie Lil inquired faintly.
“Of course not. But don’t they just lend the place the most fabulously rich and exotic aura?” Clarabelle spread her arms wide and breathed deeply.
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