A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “How did she do it?” Frances asked.

  “Valiums,” Gretchen whispered. “Poor things, they’re all in a state of shock, the two girls and Mr. Bell.”

  Drifting in and out of sleep, Frances lay by the pool on her stomach, her limp arms hanging over the chaise longue. Suddenly her eyes opened wide and her head shot up. Nobody was going to screw up her life. Not Anita Bell. Not John Kolditis. Not Martha. Not even Steve. She hadn’t been to the club in over a week and already it was starting to show. She pinched a roll of tanned flesh at her waist. She had put on weight. Her deck wasn’t built. On the kitchen table were two boxes of printed invitations that still had to be addressed and mailed. She jumped up and wrapped herself in her towel, knotting it as she went inside. She would call Patty and Hank Brewster for tennis, and then maybe early dinner at the club. Cradling the phone to her ear, she opened her telephone file to “B”: Barnes, Brewster.

  There was ringing on the line.

  “Cleaners! Can I help you!” a woman shouted over a din of voices, and music, and hissing sounds.

  Martha hung up.

  “Guess who?” the woman on the other end shouted, and then a man barked in a long, chilling howl.

  She ran over to the apartment and banged on the door, which Martha opened at once. Martha stared at a point over Frances’s left shoulder, only looking at her when Frances said John had asked the telephone company to put a tracing device on his line. Frances leaned closer. “One more call and they’ll arrest you.”

  “But I have to talk to Birdy!” Martha blurted.

  “Forget about Birdy. Damn it, Martha. You’ve got to stop this!”

  “She’s my friend, and I can’t have her thinking I’d steal money and get her in trouble. And he must still be doing it. I just know he is. That’s why he won’t let me near her. We were such close friends, he knows she’ll believe me. Don’t you see? I have to talk to her! I have to!”

  “Stop it! Stop it right now! You should see your face, how twisted it gets when you even say his name. Don’t you see what’s happening, what you did? Because you HAD to see Birdy, you got into a car with a man you didn’t even know, a stranger! Martha, it’s just like that night all over again.”

  “Don’t!”

  “But it’s the same.…”

  “No!” Martha covered her ears. “I can’t hear you, so you might as well stop it. Just stop it.”

  “All right, I’ll stop,” she said, and Martha looked up. “But you’ve got to forget about Birdy Dusser and the Cleaners and get on to new business.” She sighed. “We both do, okay? We’ll start in the morning. First thing, bright and early!” She reached for her arm, but Martha drew back stiffly.

  Eight

  The air was ripe with the smell of sweet cut grass and fresh cedar chips. Colin Mackey was building her deck, and young Johnny Henderson was doing the yard work. Frances checked her watch. She always knew to the penny what she owed, and the minute Henderson gathered his tools he got paid.

  He had trimmed all the shrubs and mowed the lawns, and at the corners of the pool, in the ornate clay pots festooned with bunches of grapes and the cruel little faces of gargoylian children, he had planted bushy pink and white geraniums and slender vines of dark ivy that with each breeze swept back and forth over the white apron. When he finished weeding the flower beds, he piled his clippers and rakes and shovels in the wheelbarrow and pushed it to the side of the garage, where he uncoiled the garden hose and rinsed off every single tool. As soon as he put the first tool into his truck, she hurried outside with his check. He looked at it, then glanced at her. Both this time and last, he had worked almost fifteen minutes over the hour. Hoping to distract him, she described how she wanted pink and white impatiens planted in front of the deck when it was finished.

  “Awful lotta sun for impatiens,” he said, squinting that way.

  She could already picture them against the white lattice. “They only have to look good for three weeks. Until Steve’s party,” she laughed, then immediately regretted it. He was such a humorless young man. She was always explaining herself while he would look at her with this same blank expression.

  The power saw came on with a deafening whine. They waited while Mack cut a long post into three sections.

  “Who’s your carpenter?”

  “His name’s Colin Mackey.”

  He shook his head, the name meaningless to him. “He got a helper?”

  When she told him no, he smirked. “At the rate he’s going,” he said behind his hand, “that deck’s going to take him the whole summer.”

  “He said two weeks,” she said uneasily. Mackey had spent most of the day driving back and forth to town for supplies.

  “No way!”

  Mack’s mallet pounded the newly cut post into the ground. The new windshield for the laundry truck had cost $375. Though he had tried to talk her out of it, Steve had arranged it so that, if Mack came up with the money, John wouldn’t press charges. The deck would cost her the price of the lumber, the new windshield, and, for Mack, an additional three hundred dollars, which she had just this minute decided he would not get until the job was done. He was the desperate one; let him meet her terms. In any event, it was her best bargain in a long time—since Floyd.

  “He’s here first thing in the morning and he doesn’t leave till dark,” she said, annoyed with herself for explaining anything to this twerp. The curtain in the apartment window moved, and she was further irritated to think that Martha had been up there all morning, both hiding from Henderson and watching him.

  “Well, you get in a bind, remember, me and my dad do decks. And we wouldn’t be setting the posts directly in the ground like he’s doing neither.”

  “You wouldn’t?” She bit her lip. Damn. Didn’t the ass even know what he was doing?

  “No, ma’am. We use footings.”

  “Footings?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Smiling, he extended her check. “Seems about five dollars short, I think.”

  After he drove off with the additional five dollars, she stood with her arms folded, watching Mackey work. He had twisted a white rag around his brow to keep sweat out of his eyes. His bare back had burned to an angry red.

  “Why aren’t you using footings?” she called shrilly the minute he stopped hammering.

  “Because you don’t need them,” he answered over his shoulder, as he set a board into place. “Just more work, time, and money.” He checked the board with the level, then shifted it a hair bit higher before nailing it into place. “These posts are all pressure-treated. Guaranteed not to rot for forty years.”

  Massaging his waist, he went to the new lumber that he had spent the morning stacking. Stapled to the end of one length was a small rust-stained tag, which he yanked off and told her to read. It was a forty-year guarantee. When she put it into her pocket, he laughed. “You going to save that?”

  “Of course.”

  “You think you’ll still be here in forty years?”

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  “I mean in this house.” He was still smiling.

  She glanced at her watch. “I really shouldn’t be wasting your time like this. You’ve only got another week and a half.”

  “Yessum, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right,” he muttered, running back to the deck.

  It wasn’t until she was in the house that she realized he had been making fun of her.

  Less than an hour later, she heard him calling her from the kitchen. She hurried out of the study, where she had been addressing invitations.

  “Mrs. Beecham! Excuse me, Mrs. Beecham!”

  He held up his hands. “I’m sorry, but I need work gloves.”

  She cringed at the sight of his palms, raw with cuts and blisters—not hands that had done a lot of hard labor. “I told you, everything’s in the garage, in my brother’s workshop.”

  He winced. “I was just looking in there, and Martha …” He winced again. “She came down and threw
me out.”

  “Oh God. All right,” she sighed, going outside.

  She climbed through the heat of the sun-beaten stairs and knocked on the door. There were dark sweaty circles under Martha’s eyes, and she wore baggy corduroy pants and a flannel shirt. Behind her, the apartment was dark and musty-smelling. All the shades were down, with the curtains drawn. A pair of Floyd’s work boots stood on a folded paper bag by the door. That was Floyd’s shirt Martha had on, and his pants.

  When she explained that Mack had to use the workshop, Martha insisted those were her father’s tools and her father’s gloves down there, and no one would use them.

  At that, Frances marched into her brother’s bedroom and threw open the closet door. She took his few limp shirts and pants and laid them on the bed. From the bottom of the closet, she took his one pair of dress shoes and another pair of stiff work boots and tossed them onto the bed.

  Conscious of Martha staring at her from the doorway, she emptied his bureau drawers onto the bed. “I want this all cleared out,” she said, struggling to sound calm. This had always been the trouble, her outbursts igniting Martha’s. Pointing, she came toward her. “Including the clothes you have on. You are a thirty-two-year-old woman, and from now on that’s how you’re going to dress and that’s how you’re going to act. Do you hear me?”

  Martha glared at her.

  “Shades up! Curtains open!” she ordered from window to window, yanking back curtains and snapping up shades. “We have a lot to do and there’s no time for breakdowns, Martha. Life marches relentlessly on.”

  She didn’t have her father to hide behind anymore. From now on it was just the two of them; instead of saying it, though, she forced a smile. Maybe this was exactly what Martha needed. A good harsh dose of reality. Finally.

  Later that night, she and Steve sat in the study. It was their first drink together in over a week. He hadn’t called first, but had dropped by, explaining that he had wanted to see how the deck was progressing and, more important, he whispered, nuzzling her ear, how she was doing.

  He needed a haircut. His new yellow tie was stained, and his suit pants were wrinkled and bagged at the knees. When he put his arm around her, she flinched with shock at his sour body odor.

  He spent every night at the hospital. Anita had gained five pounds, and today Jan had brought her new makeup. His younger daughter, Patsy, a teacher in Hanover, New Hampshire, was subletting her apartment for the summer and had already moved back home. Everything was ready for Anita’s release in the morning. “Jan’s taking the day off, and Patsy and I will be picking her up. Both girls are so nervous, you’d think …”

  “Shh,” she said with her finger to his lip. She unknotted his tie and undid his collar button.

  “Where’s Martha?” he asked as she reached up to turn off the lamp.

  “In the apartment.” She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his fly.

  “We better go upstairs,” he said, starting to get up. She tugged him back.

  “She won’t be over. She’s mad at me. She’s not speaking to me.” She was stripping him down to his underwear.

  “Oh God, Frannie. I need you so much. Oh my God,” he kept sighing as she stood over him, pulling her shirt over her head.

  She knelt beside the couch and laid her face on his chest.

  “I’d rather be upstairs,” he apologized. “I keep thinking somebody’s coming.”

  “Nobody’s coming,” she assured him, bending over him.

  “Please, Frannie!” he insisted against her breast.

  She followed him upstairs, amused and aroused by his panic. Theirs had always seemed more a domestic relationship than an adulterous one. In fact, it occurred to her now, as she folded down the spread and pulled back the sheet, that she had probably felt more like a mistress as Horace’s young wife than she had ever felt with Steve.

  She sighed as he pulled her close and lay trembling against her. He kissed her, and her eyes opened with the sudden vivid memory of Horace pulling her into his lap and kissing her for the first time. She had been eighteen and he had been fifty-eight. She closed her eyes, remembering the touch of his hand as still the most stirring experience of her life.

  “Oh my God!” Steve moaned, and she opened her eyes. “You’re so good to me, Frannie,” he whispered drowsily, his face buried in her long hair.

  She fell asleep with her arms and legs locked around him. Later she woke up grinning at the sight of his narrow backside darting through the doorway. Moments later he returned with his clothes balled in his arms.

  “Don’t go!” she said as he started to dress. “It’s only nine-thirty.”

  “I’m late. I forgot Patsy said she’d hold dinner.” He pulled up his pants. He was out of breath.

  “Steve!”

  He sat on the chaise longue and shook out his sock. “She thinks I’m at a meeting.”

  “Then call her.” She grabbed the telephone and carried it to him. “Tell her you’ve left the meeting and you’re at my house now.”

  He closed his eyes. “I can’t.”

  “Then tell her you got held up.” She stepped closer and pulled his scratchy face against her belly. “Tell her to go to bed and you’ll see her in the morning.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t? Steve!” She tilted his face up to look at her. They were grown women with lives of their own. They knew their mother and father had no kind of a marriage. They had known about her for years, and now all of a sudden they thought they could come back home and change everyone’s lives and all the rules.

  “Because,” he said, “I promised them.”

  “Promised them what?” she demanded.

  “That I’d help. That I’d do everything I possibly could. That I’d be there,” he said, tying his shoes while she watched, the phone still in her hand.

  Nine

  Martha stirred her cereal. She had remembered that today was Birdy’s monthly hairdressing appointment, and her plan was to meet her when she came out of Lucille’s House of Coiffures. She checked her watch again; just five more hours to go.

  Frances leaned in the doorway, sipping coffee while she watched Mack work. He had been out there since sunrise. Frances wore a pleated pink-and-white tennis skirt. Again she reminded Martha that she would be at the club all day.

  “Remember, now, I want you to get all of your father’s things packed and out of the apartment today. It’ll make your …”

  “I’m going into town,” she interrupted, knowing better than to mention Birdy’s name.

  Frances looked at her. “Under the circumstances, I’d think that’s the last place you should go.”

  The milk-bloated corn flakes made a wet, mealy sound against the spoon. “I need groceries,” she said. That was true. With most of her own food gone, here she was, caught again in the tentacles of her aunt’s charity.

  “Will you stop that stirring!” Frances closed her eyes and sighed. “Make a list and I’ll get what you need,” she said, turning back to the screen.

  “No! I want to do my own shopping!”

  Frances spun around. “Look, I told you yesterday …” She paused for a long deep breath. “For your own sake, Martha, don’t go into town. I’ll get whatever you need. Let things settle down. Please! You’ve got a lot to do here. All your father’s things. Today’s a perfect day to get them all out of the apartment.”

  “No.” Martha had been shaking her head. “I want to get my own groceries. I’ll get the apartment cleared out, but I’m going to get my own groceries. I didn’t do anything wrong and I can do what I want and go where I want and people aren’t going to stop me and they’re not going to keep blaming things on me that I didn’t do. It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It’s not fair! I never stole any money! I never smashed any windshield.” She was hitting the glass table.

  “Martha! Stop it!”

  “But everyone thinks I did. They all think I’m a thief, and it’s not fair. I worked so hard
there.”

  “I know you did,” Frances said wearily. She stepped closer to the door and peered outside.

  “It was very hard for me. I tried very, very hard to be a good employee and give good service and to be a good person and a good … friend,” she said as the screen door opened, then banged shut after Frances.

  The board rattled under Frances’s running feet. “No, no, no!” she cried. “It’s out too far!”

  “Six inches,” Mack said. “In just this one place. Six inches, that’s all.”

  “No! It has to be exactly the way it was! Exactly!”

  Angrily he began to tear out the section he had been working on since early this morning.

  “Bitch,” he muttered as Frances drove off.

  Martha hurried over to the apartment, and he called to her, but she ignored him and kept going. The other day, when she had stopped him from going through her father’s trunk at the back of the garage, all he had to do was say he had permission. Instead, he had run to Frances. He was a weakling, another coward, like Getso. “Nothing but trouble looking for a scapegoat,” she muttered with the sun on her back as she ran up the stairs. She opened the door with a swoop of joy at the thought of seeing Birdy and getting the whole mess straightened out. As soon as she got her father’s things packed and in the attic, she was going into town.

  Frances wanted her to throw everything out. But all she been able to discard was her father’s medicine; the rest she deposited neatly in a corner of the attic near Mr. Beecham’s ancient sporting equipment and cameras. Her father would have liked that, she thought with a twinge of childish jealousy for the white-haired old man who had commanded her father’s respect and attention and had received most of his love.

  She hadn’t been up here in years. The high ceilings of rough boards and the long windows on every side filled the attic with light. She had forgotten the peace of this deep, hot dust, which felt, as she gazed around at the stacked pictures and domed trunks and bodiless hanging suits, like such a desiccation of time that she had the strange sensation of being an image herself, someone’s fleeting thought intruding on all these memories.