Marie frowned. “Don’t I get three wishes?”
The genie shook his head, the enormous gold hoops hanging from his earlobes tinkling like tiny bells. “We’ve been hit by the recession, too. We’ve downsized to one wish.”
Rain pelted the cabin’s roof, fast and furious, like the sound of popcorn popping. Marie shivered and buttoned her sweater. She wished she had never ventured into her grandmother’s attic. With her grandmother gone to her bridge club, there was little else to do on this dreary rainy afternoon. Like all teenagers, she was easily bored, and today she was feeling especially restless. Sarah McGinty had bullied her again at school, teasing Marie about her lumpy thighs and unfashionable clothing.
Marie looked down at the shards of crimson glass at her feet. She hadn’t seen the ornate red bottle with its heavy glass stopper until it was too late. While digging through a pile of old clothes, she had knocked it off the dusty bookshelf, watching helplessly as it splintered to pieces on the wooden floor. She sat on a dusty old steamer trunk, brushing away the cobwebs at her feet.
The genie sat down beside her. He smelled of sandalwood and sawdust. “So what’s your wish?”
“How did you end up stuck in a bottle?”
He looked down at his hands, which were immaculately manicured, the nails shiny with just a touch of clear polish. “I lost a bet.”
“With who?”
“Another genie. Look,” he said, “I haven’t got all day. I have to find a new master before sunrise, or I’ll lose my powers.”
“Why can’t I be your new master?”
“I need someone with experience. Otherwise terrible things could happen.”
“Like what?”
He glanced out the dusty window at the rain drumming down on the roof. “Have you heard of the bubonic plague?”
A clap of thunder rattled the loose windowpane, startling her. “You mean—”
“That was started by a nasty little German peasant who stumbled on a really powerful genie living in his hayloft. Apparently his neighbor owed him money, and things got out of hand.”
He brushed the attic dust from his silk trousers. “Do you want your wish or not?”
She studied him, eyes narrowed. “Whatever I wish for isn’t going to go horribly wrong?”
His fleshy face fell. “Why would it?”
She chewed on the side of her index finger. “I can’t think of anything.”
“What do you want more than anything else?”
She shivered as the gold band around his upper arm grazed her shoulder. An idea began to form in her mind. “Can you kill someone?”
He looked alarmed, his chocolate-brown eyes wide.
“You have to do whatever I say, right?” she said.
“Well, yes, but—”
“I want you to kill Sarah McGinty.”
“Who’s she?”
“The meanest girl in school.”
“I don’t recommend—”
Marie felt the hot wind of power rise up her neck, and with it a reckless fearlessness. “I want you to kill Sarah McGinty!”
The genie sighed. “If you insist.”
A smile crept across Marie’s face as she heard the front door slam—her grandmother had returned. Marie dashed downstairs to greet her, deciding to keep her encounter with the genie to herself.
The next day at school Sarah McGinty was much nicer to her. She invited Marie to sit with her at lunch and, after school, offered her a ride home in her snappy red vintage Mustang. Everyone knew that Sarah McGinty loved that car more than anything in the world. She washed it once a week and wouldn’t allow any food or drink in it, for fear of stains on the leather upholstery. The car had buttery leather bucket seats, whitewall tires, and the thought of the whole school seeing Marie riding in it was irresistible to her. She began to have second thoughts about her wish.
The rain had dried up, and a lemony sun cast a soft glow on Sarah’s summer-wheat hair as they headed toward the railroad crossing on Bridge Lane. Sarah chatted about a former boyfriend and why she was so “over him” since he had been dropped from the football team.
As the car rumbled up the incline toward the tracks, the engine suddenly sputtered, rattled, and died. The car slid forward a couple of feet and stopped right in the middle of the tracks, just as the warning bells clanged their alert that a train was approaching. The white-and-red striped gates on either side of them closed, cutting them off from the road. They were trapped on the tracks.
Panic shot through Marie’s stomach, sour and hot. “We have to get out!” she cried as Sarah McGinty tried vainly to start the Mustang’s engine.
“I’m—not—leaving—my—car—behind,” Sarah muttered, sweat beading on her pretty forehead as she turned the keys in the ignition. Marie reached for the door handle, but Sarah was faster. “Neither are you!”
Marie heard the click of the driver’s side switch that locked all the doors. “Please! Let me go!” she screamed, her veins flooding with terror at the sight of the oncoming freight train, black smoke pouring from its chimney.
As the train bore down on them, the harsh sound of its whistle flooding her ears, she knew that her first instinct in the attic had been right.
Her last thought as the metal beast barreled into the little car was how pretty Sarah’s yellow hair looked in the early evening light.
Carole Bugge, writing as C.E. Lawrence, is the author of nine published novels, award-winning plays, musicals, poetry, and short fiction. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her fourth Lee Campbell thriller is Silent Slaughter. Titan Press in the United Kingdom has recently reissued her first Sherlock Holmes novel, The Star of India. Visit her website at CELawrence.com.
WHERE’S DAD?
* * *
* * *
Peter Cannon
“Where’s Dad?”
That was the question running through the mind of fifteen-year-old Jim Neyland as he lay awake in the room he was sharing with his forty-year-old father at London’s Claridge’s Hotel that summer of 1967. Dad didn’t say where he was going when he said good-bye around eight o’clock the last night of the Neylands’ stay in London, only that he was meeting “some friends.” Dad also hadn’t said when he’d be back, but the luminous clock showed it was now well past midnight, and Jim was getting worried.
This was the first vacation Jim and his twelve-year-old twin sisters had taken with their father alone since their parents separated the summer before. Where was Mom? Mom was spending much of the summer at Lake Tahoe, at a place called Glenbrook, getting divorced. Why Dad and Mom were getting divorced was unclear to Jim, but according to Mom, it had something to do with Dad being a poor communicator, among a host of other faults she took care to share with her son, who in many respects, she noted, took after his father.
In contrast to Mom, Dad didn’t talk about the reasons for their divorce. Maybe the topic was painful for Dad because of his own unpleasant experiences as a child. The marriage between Dad’s father, who was of Irish Catholic descent, and Dad’s mother, who was of Protestant English descent, had lasted ten mostly unhappy years. Jim knew just a few details—in particular, that Dad’s father, who had a drinking problem that only got worse, died at age fifty-nine in the hospital, where he was being treated for kidney stones, the year before Jim was born. Jim’s robustly healthy grandmother, who turned seventy-three earlier that summer, never spoke of her ex-husband, despite enjoying the occasional tipple.
In the aftermath of the separation, Dad had nothing bad to say about Mom. In fact, he soon had reason to be grateful to her. While Dad was pretty fit (he’d boxed in college), his appendix ruptured the following spring. After he got out of the hospital, Mom let him stay in the guest room at her house outside Boston, what had once been his house too, while he recovered. No one else at that point was prepared to look after him.
During his convalescence, Dad sold Mom on the idea of his taking the children on an extended tour of Ireland and England while she did her
time in Nevada. (Although Dad scarcely ever mentioned his parents, he was fond of their ancestral homelands.) Joining them for part of the Irish leg of the trip was a pretty, if proper, Englishwoman named Fiona. Jim and his sisters learned that Dad had met Fiona through mutual friends while Fiona was in the States on holiday earlier that year. Jim’s sisters weren’t too pleased about sharing hotel rooms with Fiona while Jim got to bunk with Dad. At least you could give Dad credit for not losing any time seeking a replacement for Mom. Perhaps Dad was staying out late with Fiona, but Jim sensed that Fiona and Dad hadn’t hit it off that well during their Irish tour, and Jim and his sisters had seen her only once in London, near the beginning of their week there. Still, maybe the “friends” Dad said he was meeting was in fact just the Englishwoman, whom he was making one last effort to woo.
The hours passed. Jim must have drowsed. Then sometime before dawn Dad returned. In the half-light, as Dad entered the bathroom, Jim noticed Dad rubbing his hand. Over breakfast, before they left for Heathrow to catch a plane home to Boston, Jim thought the fingers on Dad’s right hand looked a little red and swollen.
One night, about a year after Jim and his sisters returned safely home to Massachusetts, the subject of their trip with Dad came up between Jim and his mother. They were alone in the kitchen; his sisters were in bed.
“Dad stayed out really late that last night in London. I don’t know why,” Jim said.
“Didn’t he tell you?” Mom said.
“No.”
“Your father was robbed.”
“What?”
“He was in some bar.”
“Wasn’t anyone with him?”
“I gather he had company, but she left early. He was drunk.”
“And?”
“Someone picked his pocket. They took his wallet, with your passports and airline tickets in it.”
“Then how…”
“He was sober enough to realize the people who ran the bar, the people he’d been talking to, had set him up. He offered them a deal. They could keep his money if they gave him back the passports and plane tickets.”
“And if they didn’t give him back the tickets?”
“He threatened to kill one of them. Then he slugged one of them hard enough to show he meant business.”
“Then what happened?”
“They gave him what he wanted.”
“Say, Mom, how do you know all this?”
“Because your father called me collect at Glenbrook that night from London. He was lucky I was near a phone. It took a while, but I was able to wire him the money to pay the hotel bill and get you and your sisters to the airport.”
In the decades that followed, Jim never did raise the matter with Dad, who eventually did find a replacement for Mom, a woman more tolerant of his shortcomings who, even now, looks after him in his declining days. Old age is perhaps more difficult for him than it might be because Dad chose to ignore the diabetes he was diagnosed with in his fifties and told no one about until, in his seventies, the severity of his symptoms forced the issue and belated treatment. Jim has never asked Dad why he decided to pretend he didn’t have the disease because, like Dad, Jim prefers not to discuss unpleasant family matters.
Peter Cannon is a senior reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, where he assigns and edits the mystery reviews. He’s also the author of Pulptime, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. His short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Resurrected Holmes, The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories. He and his wife live with their three children in New York City.
THEY’LL CALL ME WHISTLIN’ PETE
* * *
* * *
Chuck Caruso
My ma weren’t even goin’ to take me to see it when they hanged my pa. But I put up one hell of a fit about that and set her straight. Somebody hangs your kin, I told her, you go and watch them doin’ it. My sister, Charlotte, didn’t want to go, but she’s only eight so Ma left Sis with old Widow Atwell while her and me went down there to see the hangin’. I reckon I’m growed up enough to see a man swing when it happens. I turned eleven last October.
Early in the morning that day I hitched our horses to the wagon, and me and Ma rode near twenty miles down to Perseverance where they held the trial and were doin’ the execution. Ma said we’d just go down for the noon hangin’ and travel home by nightfall, but I stashed a bundle with some things under the seat anyways.
Perseverance is a pretty big town with a newspaper and a sheriff’s office and all. Pa had been sittin’ in the one-room jail there for a week since they got the verdict passed on him. Guilty of murder as charged. Pa claimed he’d been dead drunk in the back room of some whorehouse when the deed was done, but he never could explain how an ax from our barn and his hat with his name in it got out to the Reed ranch all by themselves the same night somebody kilt both Mr. and Mrs. Reed.
At his trial, they said Pa done them murders to rob the Reeds. Besides their everlasting souls, a few other things went missing from their house, like some coins and banknotes, a gold watch, and a gun belt with an old Colt pistol in it. Mr. Reed’s ivory dentures went missin’ too, but that got shrugged off as what they called a “minor peculiarity.” Dead men don’t need to chew much anyways.
They were a nice old couple, the Reeds, and folks said neither of them would hurt a fly. Course they never seen the whuppin’ old Mr. Reed give me and my friend Butch when he caught us stealin’ an apple pie off the windowsill of his wife’s kitchen.
Everybody was real broke up about the Reeds gettin’ done for by my no-good drunk of a pa. It was true enough that Pa got ornery and mean when he’d been hittin’ the whiskey bottle. Ma and I both had scars enough to show for that. Last time he laid into me, he even busted out some of my teeth, including one of the new big ones in front. I’d only had the damn thing for three years. After that I whistled when I talked and kids made fun of me. I told Butch that someday when I’m a famous outlaw they’ll call me Whistlin’ Pete on the wanted posters. We had a good laugh about that, him and me, but I was mostly serious. I am going to be an outlaw some day. You just wait and see if I ain’t.
When Ma and I got to Perseverance on hangin’ day, we found lots of folks crowded in the town square where they’d put up the gallows. You’d a thought it was the Fourth of July the way most of them were drinkin’ and hollerin’. It was almost catchin’ how they was carryin’ on like it was some sort of holiday. I pert near found myself smilin’ along with them as we pushed through so’s we could stand near the front.
Me and Ma held hands at the foot of the gallows while the deputies made Pa walk up them pine steps and stand there facin’ the crowd. Pa said sorry to me and Ma when he saw us. It was a familiar enough word on his lips, so I recognized it right off even though we couldn’t hear the sound of the actual word above the hootin’ of the crowd. Ma wiped her eyes with a hanky from her sleeve, but I didn’t spill no tears myself. I’d heard that lie comin’ from him too many times before to believe it now, and I was done with cryin’ anyways.
Pa’s eyes searched ours in the last moments before they pulled the burlap sack down over his face and looped the noose over his head. I don’t know what he mighta been lookin’ for, but he sure as hell didn’t see it in my eyes. Ma turned away weepin’, but I watched to the finish. When the trap fell, he dropped down and his neck snapped. He didn’t kick or nothing, just became dead weight swayin’ on a line. The crowd hushed then, and I could hear the sound of the hemp rope whisperin’ against the crossbeam.
Back at the wagon I grabbed my bundle of things and told Ma I had to go check on somethin’. Most days she would have peppered me with questions, but she just nodded and climbed up on the wagon, seemin’ real sad on account of Pa. I kissed her on the cheek and run off. I don’t know how long she waited there before she figured out I wasn’t never comin’ back.
I didn’t really have nothin’ to check on except the time of the next coach out of there. Down at t
he depot, I paid for a ticket as far as Fort Boise and waited around for the stagecoach to come through at one thirty. A pretty lady showed me how to tell time on my gold watch. I told her it was an inheritance from my dearly departed grandfather. I felt good leavin’. I had some cash and an old Colt pistol in my bag, and I was hopeful that if I did good for myself I’d find a dentist who could fix these dentures I was carryin’ so they’d fit me proper. Otherwise, well, I guess they’d still just have to call me Whistlin’ Pete.
Chuck Caruso teaches American literature at Marylhurst University near Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Petra, and their two cattle dogs. Recently his Western noir tales have been published online at The Flash Fiction Offensive, Shotgun Honey, Fires on the Plain, and The Western Online. An assistant editor for Dark Discoveries magazine, Chuck also moonlights at Portland indie bookstore Murder by the Book.
THE BUNNY
* * *
* * *
William E. Chambers
She appeared in a pink bunny costume every day for one week straight.
I take the L train from Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to the last stop—Eighth Avenue in Manhattan—and walk several blocks downtown to my job tending bar in a gay/straight pub in Greenwich Village. Thank God—if He exists—that I miss the madness of subway rush hours. I leave home at three thirty p.m. and start setting up at about four fifteen for the opening five o’clock happy-hour rush. The Bunny is usually on the platform when I arrive at Eighth Avenue, and then she scoots up the steps throwing backward glances toward me as I follow. But she always trots uptown as opposed to my Lower Manhattan direction. I once called out “Excuse me, miss—” but she either didn’t hear me or pretended not to, which is just as well since this figure in pink was arousing instincts within me better left dormant.
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