Aunt Bessie Enjoys

by Diana Xarissa

  She looked from Bessie to Doona and back again. “I’m sure you can guess where the story is going? No? Margaret’s wonderful boyfriend, the man she thought she was going to marry, was Nicholas Lewis.”

  Bessie nodded; it was obvious, now that Elinor had said it.

  “For whatever reason, he decided that he wanted me instead of Margaret. There were ugly scenes and Margaret and I didn’t speak for a time, but I didn’t care. Nicholas swept me off my feet. I’d never dated. I’d been focussed on having a career, and suddenly the only thing that mattered was being with Nicholas.” She laughed bitterly.

  “Once he’d married me, he lost interest, of course, but my life was over by that time.” She shook her head. “I got my revenge by introducing Margaret to Jonathan. He was a nasty, horrid little man and he made Margaret’s life miserable for many, many years, which went some way towards making up for the mess she made of my life.”

  Doona made a disgusted sound, but Bessie caught her eye and shook her head. Now was not the time to argue with Elinor. The woman was clearly insane and they needed to humour her and see what else she had to say.

  “Did Margaret know that you disliked her?” Bessie asked.

  “Oh, no, I was too clever to let her know. She thought we were all the best of friends, all of the Raspberry Jam Ladies, always there for each other, always supporting one another.” Elinor shook her head. “It wasn’t just Margaret and I that didn’t get along, of course. There were all sorts of disagreements in the group. But it didn’t matter as long as the group kept going strong.”

  “And you made sure of that,” Bessie said.

  “I did,” Elinor laughed. “The group was all I had, really. My marriage was pretty much over within months of the ceremony. I was actually planning to leave after the first year. I had my bags packed and a plan in place. It was all arranged.”

  “What happened?” Doona asked.

  “I found out I was pregnant, of course,” Elinor replied. “And when I headed off to see the midwife for the first time, guess who I found there. Margaret, of course, all glowing and excited to be expecting her first child. I almost slapped her.”

  “And that’s where the jam ladies began?” Doona asked.

  “Exactly. Margaret was further along than I was, so she was already friends with the others when I started going. Once I joined in, we started getting organised and it just grew from there. It was hard for those months, though, as they were all so excited about their babies and all I could think was how much I hated my baby’s father.”

  Doona’s eyes flashed, but Bessie patted her arm. “How difficult for you,” Bessie murmured, hiding her own feelings.

  “It was better when Nathan arrived. In spite of everything, I actually came to love him. He was a gorgeous baby,” Elinor said. “Wait, I’ll show you.” She walked slowly out of the room, leaving Bessie and Doona to talk in hurried whispers.

  “She’s crazy. We need to call John and get out of here,” Doona hissed.

  “We need to hear her out,” Bessie argued. “This could be our only chance to hear her side of the story. It isn’t like she going to suddenly pull out a knife or anything.”

  “But she’s….”

  “Now, now, no talking behind my back,” Elinor said with a chuckle. “I’m sure you think I’m insane, but I’m not, really, and I’m not even the littlest bit dangerous. Anyway, look at this.”

  She held up an old black-and-white studio photograph of an infant. He was looking solemnly at the camera, a small cuddly toy clutched in his hand.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Bessie said.

  “He really was,” Elinor replied. She put the photo down on the coffee table next to a small closed box that was already there and sat back down. After a sip of water, she sighed.

  “But where was I? Oh, yes, Nathan was a gorgeous baby and the jam ladies were meeting regularly and I was pretty much resigned to being stuck in my miserable marriage forever. Nicholas was cheating on me, of course, but I had Nathan, so I didn’t much care what Nicholas was doing. But slowly, over time, it became apparent that Nathan was, well, different. He didn’t meet his milestones like he should have. I didn’t say anything to Nicholas for the longest time. It wasn’t until the doctors told me that we should consider sending Nathan away that I finally told Nicholas what was going on.” Elinor shuddered and then took a deep breath.

  “He wanted to send Nathan away, of course. He said it would be best for all of us. Of course, I refused. Not long after that, Nicholas took a job in the UK. That was certainly best for all of us. I suppose those were the happiest years of my life, really, when Nathan was small and Nicholas was gone. If I had to be stuck in time somewhere, that’s where I’d go, back to those days.”

  She stopped for another drink of water, her eyes unfocussed as she looked out towards the sea. Bessie and Doona exchanged glances.

  “So what went wrong?” Doona asked after a moment.

  “Pardon?” Elinor shook her head. “I’m sorry, I was lost in the past. What went wrong? We all got older, of course. I didn’t mind. While all the other ladies complained about their children and their grandchildren, I still had my Nathan. He was gentle and kind and he could just about look after himself for a few hours once in a while so I could get to the jam ladies’ meetings or do the shopping. I never thought anything would change, and then one day, it did.”

  Elinor’s eyes filled with tears. Bessie spotted a box of tissues on a side table and quickly brought them to Elinor. She took one and pressed it to her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said eventually. “I keep thinking that I’ve run out of tears for my poor Nathan, but they never seem to stop.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bessie said, patting Elinor’s hand. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

  Elinor looked up at her, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “My life ended,” she said softly. “That day, when I got home and Nathan wasn’t there to greet me, my life ended. I found him in the bath. He’d slipped and hit his head and drowned. That was when I decided I wanted to die.”

  Doona gasped, but Elinor didn’t seem to notice.

  “For the longest time, I just kept going out of habit,” she continued. “I sold the house immediately. I couldn’t even go back inside. The other jam ladies rallied around and packed all my things for me. It was six or seven months before I finally started thinking again. And that’s when I decided to kill myself.”

  Bessie patted her hand again. “You should have called someone,” she said. “There are people that can help you.”

  Elinor shook her head. “I don’t want help,” she said. “I simply want to die. I’ve nothing left to live for. Nathan was all I had and he’s gone. It’s not a great tragedy or anything; I’ve just decided that I’ve had enough. Life’s been hard and soon it will be all over. It’s a relief, really.”

  “But what about the others?” Doona asked quietly.

  “About three months ago, at one of our regular meetings, I told the others what I was planning to do. Actually, I asked for their help. I wanted to get enough sleeping pills together so that I could take an overdose and I was hoping they might all have some to add to the bottle that I’d managed to get from my doctor.” She sighed and sat back in her seat, looking out at the sea again.

  “And what happened?” Bessie asked.

  Elinor laughed lightly. “I thought they’d try to talk me out of it or something,” she said. “Agnes was the first to respond. She said she wished she were brave enough to kill herself. She’d just been told that her heart was weak and she must avoid anything upsetting. She said she’d spent the last week watching scary movies, hoping one of them might do the trick.”

  “Oh, my,” Bessie murmured.

  “Nancy knew her cancer was back, even though the doctors hadn’t told her yet. She didn’t want to face more treatments. Joan was so tired of all the pain that her arthritis gave her. And dear Margaret was getting forgetful. She knew her mind was starting to go and s
he wanted out before she forgot who she was and how to function. Oh, we were a group of miserable old ladies and we all wanted to die.” Elinor stopped for another drink.

  “So you decided to kill them before you killed yourself,” Doona said.

  “Oh, no,” Elinor laughed. “My dear girl, we made a rota.”

  Bessie and Doona exchanged looks while Elinor laughed until tears began to flow again. After she wiped her eyes, she looked at them both.

  “It was all so simple,” she said. “And the police can’t figure it out. But now I have to tell you, so that no one ends up getting blamed for something they didn’t do.”

  “Go ahead,” Bessie said.

  “It was a couple of weeks after that meeting where we all talked about wanting to die. I couldn’t stop thinking about what everyone had said. They all wished they could die quietly in their sleep or something. None of them was brave enough to kill themselves. After a lot of thought, I came up with an idea and I brought it up at a meeting. Maybe we could murder one another.”

  “Wanting to die is one thing,” Bessie said, shaking her head. “But murder is another.”

  “Yes,” Elinor agreed. “And it took them all some time to think it through. Is it really murder, though, if the other person wants to die? That was the key to the whole thing. We all wanted to be dead. We were really doing one another a favour. Our last chance to help out our fellow jam ladies, if you like.”

  “It’s insane,” Doona said.

  Elinor smiled at her. “When you get to my age, life becomes a burden rather than a blessing,” she said sadly. “And the step from life to death gets so much shorter. Helping my friends to make that step seemed like the right thing to do, and eventually they all came to agree with me.”

  “So you planned to murder each other?” Bessie asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “If there’s one thing I learned over the years with the jam ladies, it was that we all had different talents. Now we pooled our abilities with a new goal in mind. Everyone was tasked with figuring out two different ways that someone could be murdered where it would look like an accident. Not everyone managed to come up with two, but we ended up with seven or eight ideas. After that, we just put them all in a hat and we each drew one. And that was how we had to kill our victim. We drew the victims from a hat as well.”

  Bessie sat back in her seat, stunned. “You drew names from a hat?” she asked after a minute, almost too shocked to speak.

  Elinor nodded. “Each of us had an intended victim and a method and then I drew the numbers for the order in which we were to die,” she said, talking as calmly as if she were explaining how she’s arranged for a bake sale.

  “So no one knew that they were next?” Doona asked.

  “No, well, except for poor Margaret, because I had to be last, as I’m the only one willing to kill myself, you see,” Elinor explained.

  “Maybe you could just walk us through the whole thing from the beginning?” Doona asked.

  “It was simple,” she said, talking slowly as if explaining things to a not-very-bright child. “I drew Nancy’s name first, so she was the first to die. Agnes had drawn her name and she’d drawn poison as the method.” Elinor sighed deeply. “Of course, everything went wrong with Nancy’s death, but I suppose I mustn’t blame Agnes. It was really Sarah Combe’s fault.”

  “Why?” Bessie couldn’t help but ask.

  “The poison idea was too complicated, anyway,” Elinor continued, ignoring the question. “But that was Joan for you, always full of crazy ideas. Oh, the plan was splendid, but asking Agnes to execute it?” She shook her head. “I should have insisted that she draw a different method, but she was quite excited about making jam and I couldn’t persuade her to change.”

  “So Joan came up with the plan, but Agnes carried it out?” Bessie asked, feeling confused.

  “That was all part of it. No one could know the order of the deaths or indeed how they were going to die. If you knew it was your turn to die and that your brakes were going to fail, you simply wouldn’t drive your car. This way the accidents were as much a surprise to the victim as to everyone else.”

  “So what did Agnes do wrong?” Bessie asked.

  “I guess I should blame Joan as much as Agnes,” Elinor replied. “She had the idea about passing out jars of jam at Tynwald Day. She thought if we gave away dozens of jars, no one would suspect that one of them was poisoned. Agnes was meant to be at Nancy’s first thing the next morning. She was supposed to switch the poisoned jam for a good jar and then leave the box of rat poison on Nancy’s shelf, next to the sugar. The hope was the police would think that Nancy had accidently added rat poison to her breakfast tea instead of sugar.”

  “The police would have figured out otherwise,” Doona said.

  “Maybe, but maybe not,” Elinor answered. “We figured they might decide that it wasn’t an accident, but no one would suspect murder. And how hard would they even look at it? An old woman like that? The police aren’t that interested.”

  “That’s not fair,” Bessie said. “The police work hard no matter who dies.”

  “Rather harder than I might like,” Elinor said dryly. “But anyway, Sarah turned up to see her mother for the first time in years at just the wrong time, and that almost ruined everything. I had a very difficult time persuading everyone that we should press on in spite of everything.”

  “Maybe you should have stopped,” Doona said.

  “There was a very real chance that Agnes might get arrested,” Elinor said. “She had the box of poison, after all.”

  “Where did it come from? And where is it now?” Doona asked.

  “Joan’s husband was a gardener. He used to use rat poison, many years ago, and after such things were banned, he kept some in their shed. Joan had actually been thinking about using it to kill herself, so she offered it to the group for our plan,” Elinor answered.

  “And where is it now?” Doona repeated herself.

  “In that box,” Elinor said, pointing to the box on the table. “Don’t touch it, not yet,” she snapped as Doona leaned forward towards it. “You have to let me finish. The box of poison isn’t the only thing in the box.”

  “So what happened next?” Bessie asked, feeling numb.

  “Well, clearly Agnes had to go. The poor woman was falling apart. She felt guilty about killing her best friend, in spite of the fact that Nancy wanted to die. Anyway, I’d drawn up the plans for tampering with her brakes. Joan carried them out, but not without a lot of complaining. Apparently she had a terrible time getting under the car, what with her arthritis and all.” Elinor shrugged. “Anyway, Agnes’s death went much more closely to plan, and if Joan followed my instructions exactly, the police will never prove the brakes were tampered with deliberately.”

  “Your husband worked with cars,” Doona recalled.

  “Yes, and when we were first married, he showed me some of the most important bits and pieces. He also left a bunch of books and manuals about car repair with me when he moved across. It was lucky that Agnes drove such an old car. More modern cars are more complicated.”

  “So Joan tampered with Agnes’s brakes and that got rid of her,” Doona said. “What about Joan?”

  “Agnes’s husband was an electrician,” Elinor told her. “She fixed an old kettle so that it would give someone a powerful shock when they switched it on. It might not have killed a younger person, but we’re all old. Anyway, she fixed the kettle and left it with me. When it was Margaret’s turn to kill Joan, I gave Margaret the kettle. She was supposed to have Joan over for tea and ask her to fix the drinks. It was a bit of serendipity that the same afternoon that I gave the kettle to Margaret, Joan mentioned that hers was broken. Margaret just had to pop out to her car and get the kettle to give Joan.”

  “So it wasn’t the spare one from the community building?” Bessie asked.

  “No. After everyone left for the day, I took the actual spare kettle and hid it, so if the police looked they
wouldn’t find it. It’s in a box marked ‘napkins and paper plates’ in the bottom left cupboard in the kitchen,” Elinor replied.

  “So then you just had to push Margaret down her stairs and that would be the end of that,” Doona concluded.

  “Oh, dear, how inelegant,” Elinor said, shaking her head. “I did not push Margaret down the stairs. Last night I went to visit her again and I helped her run her bath and poured her a glass of wine. Once she was settled in the tub, I ran a piece of cord across the landing at the top of the stairs. I let myself out, went home, making sure to wave to the lovely policeman who was watching my flat, and then, several hours later, I called Margaret.”

  “She only had the one phone, in her kitchen, right?” Bessie checked.

  “Exactly, and she couldn’t simply let the phone ring. All those years married to an abusive husband who would smack her if she didn’t answer fast enough? She always rushed to grab the phone. She may well have fallen on her own, without the cord,” Elinor said.

  “But the police didn’t find any cord,” Doona said.

  “No, hours later, well after midnight, I snuck out of here and walked over to Margaret’s. I let myself in the back door and climbed up and removed the cord. It’s in the box as well,” she said, gesturing towards it.

  “But you’d have had to climb over Margaret’s body,” Doona said with a shudder.

  “I did,” Elinor replied. “But as she was dead, she didn’t mind.” Elinor dissolved into giggles that turned into tears. Bessie sat staring at her, uncertain as to what to say next.

  “I guess that’s the whole story,” Elinor said once she’d calmed down and sipped at her water. “So you see, I didn’t kill all of my friends, just one of them. And I was ever so pleased to draw her name. I’ve been wanting to kill Margaret for years.”

  “You’ll have to come down to the police station now,” Doona said, standing up. “You’ll need to tell Inspector Rockwell everything you just told us.”

  “I’d really rather not,” Elinor said, yawning. “You can take the box, though. It has all of the details of every plan, and a letter, signed by all of us, agreeing to it. Tell your inspector friend that he can come and get me in about an hour, or maybe ninety minutes would be better.”