Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

A huge crash as something hit the door. A long thin splinter of wood popped off.

  I slashed the knife across the screen.

  Another crash. The wood split, and the head of the hatchet lanced through, black with rust.

  I ripped at the screening with my fingers, tore it from the frame.

  Crash! A large ragged chunk of wood was sent spinning through the air and left a hole in the door, and a hand appeared there, fingers curled like talons, groping for the lock.

  Using both hands, I raised the knife high overhead, ran at the door and, with all the power I possessed, putting all my weight behind it, I slammed the knife down into the hand.

  It sliced through flesh and bone and dug into the wood and then, from beyond the door, came a wild, shrill, unearthly shriek.

  Panting, sickened, I let go of the knife and stepped back.

  And the hand clenched into a fist and jerked downward, and the knife snapped free and fell. The hand moved to the lock, the fingers found it, turned it, and then the door flew open and Mrs. Mortimer stood there in a long black dripping raincoat, her hair dank with fog and rain and sweat, her eyes wide and crazed.

  “Bitch!” she screamed at me, and the cords in her neck were taut.

  I could not move.

  “Bitch!” she screamed, and she stepped into the room.

  She held the hatchet raised in her left hand. The right hand hung limp at her side, blood spilling from it and spattering on the wooden floor.

  I backed away.

  She curled back her upper lip. “You knew all the time, you filthy little bitch. She told you, the fat momma bitch, she told you about me and Kevin. And you knew about the coffee. How’d you know, bitch? Who’d you tell?”

  I felt the wall against my back; I had moved away as far as I could. I gasped. “Mrs. Mortimer—”

  She took another step toward me. There was a long pool now of bright-red blood spreading along the floor. “Filthy little bitch, slut bitch, you’re going to die, bitch, I’m sending you to hell so you can be with your fat bitch momma bitch.”

  The bed was to my left. I sprang onto it, rolled across the silk comforter, landed in an awkward clatter on my hands and knees. I stumbled to my feet and Mrs. Mortimer began to walk around the bed, inexorable, inescapable.

  “Fucking bitch,” she hissed. “Fucking bitch, you’re not going to ruin my life, oh no, I’m going to smash you, bitch. I’m going to smash your fucking face in.”

  She took another step and then there was a movement off to my right, at the doorway, and I saw—and I realized that all along I had been expecting this, praying for this—that it was Miss Lizzie.

  She wore, like Mrs. Mortimer, a black raincoat that dripped water; and she was holding, as Mrs. Mortimer was, a double-bladed hatchet.

  She said, “Get away from her.”

  Mrs. Mortimer wheeled around, her coat swirling like a cape.

  “You!” she said.

  “Get away from her.” Miss Lizzie stepped into the room, her eyes narrowed, the mouth set in a line as thin as a knife edge.

  Mrs. Mortimer, her back to me, took a step toward Miss Lizzie. “Did you come home to help your little dyke friend?” She laughed, a high-pitched lunatic bark, frayed at the edges. “Did you come to give her a wet dyke kiss? Did you? You wicked wicked fucking bitch dyke.”

  And suddenly, arm above her head, she ran at Miss Lizzie and swung her hatchet.

  Quickly, backhanded, her entire body twisting with the blow, Miss Lizzie brought up her own hatchet. The two blades collided with a loud brittle clang, and both women, rocked by the impact, staggered back.

  Miss Lizzie was the first to recover. Her teeth bared, the hatchet at her shoulder, she leaped toward Mrs. Mortimer. She swung, and Mrs. Mortimer drew swiftly away, and I heard the swoosh of the hatchet as it swept through empty air.

  Mrs. Mortimer’s hatchet came flying at Miss Lizzie’s neck. Miss Lizzie jerked back, and the hatchet whistled past.

  They began to circle each other, Mrs. Mortimer moving to her left. Beyond them, in the wide mirror atop the dressing table, another Miss Lizzie and another Mrs. Mortimer performed the same wary, lethal dance.

  This could not go on much longer. Miss Lizzie was an old woman, and overweight; Mrs. Mortimer was still losing blood. But each of them seemed fiercely determined, each eyed the other with a frightening, savage intensity. Mrs. Mortimer’s lips were still drawn back in that malign, maniacal grin. Miss Lizzie’s face was mottled, blotched with purple bruises, exactly as it had been in her speechless fury after confronting the mob.

  As they completed a full circle, I saw Mrs. Mortimer’s glance dart toward me. A kind of calculation suddenly glittered in her mad eyes. All at once she flailed out at Miss Lizzie, wildly. As Miss Lizzie jumped back, Mrs. Mortimer spun about and rushed round the bed, directly at me.

  I think she intended not to kill me, not just then, but to use me as a hostage, as a means of forcing Miss Lizzie to yield.

  I stumbled back, away from her, but she moved too quickly. Hatchet high in her left hand, she snatched at me with her bloodied right. It should have been impossible for her to use that hand. Bones had been split, tendons severed. But she was possessed, driven by rage and madness, and I felt her fingernails slice through my nightgown and knife into my shoulder.

  I struck out at her in a rush of horror, smashing the back of my knuckles against her eye. Her face twitched back and her fingers loosened, and I grabbed her hand, my fingers sliding in the blood, and as hard as I could I twisted it, wrenched it away. And, mouth awry, eyes astounded, the woman squealed, a sound that even then, in the midst of my terror, seemed childlike and pathetic. And then she was swerving, turning to meet Miss Lizzie, but there was not enough time, not for Mrs. Mortimer, for Miss Lizzie was already there, and Miss Lizzie’s hatchet swooped down, overwhelming, inevitable, and the curved blade sank into her forehead with a sudden, final, liquid crunch.

  She sagged to her knees like a marionette whose strings have been clipped, and then she toppled, face forward, to the floor. Miss Lizzie stood over her, staring down, swaying slightly and breathing through her mouth. She still held the dripping hatchet.

  She looked at me. I swallowed, unable to speak. She brought up her hand, looked down for a moment at the hatchet, then lowered the hand and opened her fingers. The hatchet fell and banged against the floor.

  She said to me, “Are you all right?” Her voice was raspy, distant.

  I nodded. “Yes … yes.”

  She reached out to touch me and I moved to her, and then she was holding me and I could smell the citrus smell of her and I could hear, even through her raincoat, the thud of her heart.

  I said, “Is it over now? Is it all over?”

  She stroked my hair and she said, “Yes. It’s all over.”

  EPILOGUE

  BUT OF COURSE it was not all over. There remained the small matters of motive, means, and opportunity: as the legal profession, and Chief Da Silva, liked to call them.

  If this were a mystery novel and not a sort of memoir, a kind of extended and much belated What I Did Last Summer, I suppose I could gather all the characters in the library and have them sit there, rapt, over Stilton and amontillado, while Miss Lizzie (a Miss Marple with a hatchet) primly explained what had actually happened over the course of the past few days, below the surface of what had appeared to.

  Unfortunately, things did not proceed that way. Some time passed before the truth became known, and, even then, the verifiable facts were few. A truth and a fact, thank goodness, are not the same.

  Not that Miss Lizzie, Marple-like, had not determined, and early on, who the murderer was. From the beginning, she had believed it was Mrs. Mortimer.

  “The key,” she told me on Monday, two days after Mrs. Mortimer’s death. I had just come from the coroner’s inquest into Audrey’s death. “The missing key. There was really no one else who could’ve taken it, or who had any reason to.”

  “Why did she want the key?”
I asked her.

  Smiling, she looked at me over her pince-nez. “What does one usually do with a key?”

  I shrugged. “Open a lock.”

  She nodded. “Your stepmother kept the front door locked. In order for Mrs. Mortimer to get into the house and kill her, she needed a key. She’d been planning this for some time, I believe, and she was just waiting for the proper opportunity. She found that when you and Audrey were out on the back porch that morning. She simply lifted the key from the hook and pocketed it.”

  “And then later”—I nodded—”when Audrey and I were asleep, she came back and used it to unlock the front door.” (And used it to lock the door again when she left, perhaps out of habit, perhaps further to confuse the police.)

  “Yes,” said Miss Lizzie. “I imagine she called out, for you or for Audrey, when she got inside. If either one of you answered, you could say that she’d picked up the key by mistake and that she’d come back to return it. She could say she’d knocked at the door, no one answered, and she’d come in to put the key back on the hook.”

  “No one answered because we were both unconscious from the chloral hydrate.”

  Miss Lizzie said, “She had no reason to believe you were in the house. No reason to believe you’d been drugged. I imagine that when she discovered, later, that you’d been there, she was horrified. She had no way of knowing what you might’ve seen or heard.”

  It had been Chief Da Silva, not Miss Lizzie, who had worked out the chloral hydrate. Although there was no proof, it appeared more than likely that Mrs. Mortimer, before or after stealing the key, had put the drug in Audrey’s coffee that Tuesday, to make certain she took her usual guest-room nap. Mr. Mortimer had admitted to Da Silva that he kept the chemical in his house and that his wife had access to it.

  My taking chloral hydrate, in the few sips of coffee I stole from Audrey’s cup, would explain why I had slept through Audrey’s murder and, shortly afterward, Father’s visit.

  By mentioning the stolen coffee to Mrs. Mortimer, and later that same day asking her husband, purely by coincidence, about chloral hydrate, I had caused her to believe that I knew what she had done. Presumably, this is what she meant when she babbled about “the coffee” during that dreadful scene in Miss Lizzie’s bedroom.

  In Da Silva’s opinion, Mrs. Mortimer had believed herself safe so long as William was in prison. The moment he was released, she realized that the police would once again start searching for the murderer. And I had shown—or so she thought—that I knew about the chloral hydrate, which suggested that the murderer was she. She decided to kill me, using a hatchet, as she had on Audrey, to throw suspicion on Miss Lizzie. That Saturday night she telephoned Miss Lizzie from the Fair-view, anonymously, promising information about the killing, luring her out of the house so she herself could get in and reach me.

  She was quite mad, I believe.

  If she had not been insane before, then worry over her safety had surely driven her insane by Saturday night. Otherwise, I doubt she would have killed Mr. Foley, the Pinkerton man.

  Mr. Foley was out there that night because Boyle could not be. Ever since the police guard had departed, Boyle had been watching over me like a guardian angel. Miss Lizzie, knowing that I had been in the murder-house at the time of the killing, and feeling that Mrs. Mortimer might see me as a threat, had wanted someone to keep an eye on me. She had given Boyle the job.

  On Friday, when I went off to examine the shed by the swamp, Miss Lizzie had somehow, using the telephone, tracked him down and sent him after me. He had picked me up at Annie Holmes’s house and followed me. His was the presence I had sensed in the woods, his was the. stare I had felt along my skin.

  At night, too, he had watched the house. I do not know when he slept, or if he managed to sleep at all.

  But on Saturday Boyle had been forced to go to Boston, and so Miss Lizzie had conscripted Mr: Foley.

  As a precaution, it had not been very successful. Mr. Foley had been killed and so, very nearly, had I.

  Now, as we sat there in Miss Lizzie’s parlor (for the last time, as it happened), I said to her, “How do you think Audrey found out about Mrs. Mortimer and Kevin?”

  After talking to Kevin Mortimer in Boston, Boyle had verified that during the War, while his brother was fighting in France, Kevin had conducted an affair with Mrs. Mortimer.

  Miss Lizzie said, “I don’t know. Perhaps Mrs. Mortimer told her herself.”

  “Or maybe it was that Mrs. Marlowe.”

  “That may be. We’ll never know for certain, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you think Audrey was blackmailing Mrs. Mortimer? For money?”

  She frowned. “Again, I doubt we’ll ever know. But I suspect, from what we know of your stepmother, that whether money came into it or not, she was using the information as a form of power over Mrs. Mortimer, a way of controlling her. Perhaps Mrs. Mortimer couldn’t stand it any longer. Or perhaps your stepmother’s threats to tell the story had become more serious.”

  “I guess,” I said, “that there’s a lot we’ll never know.”

  Miss Lizzie smiled. “I guess,” she said, “there is.”

  We left that night for Boston, Father and William and I. Neither my father nor my brother wanted to return to the shore; I did, but I was outvoted. When I telephoned Miss Lizzie to tell her, she told me that she was leaving as well, going back to Fall River. We would see each other, she said, we would visit; but although we sent cards and letters to each other for a few years, we never did.

  Officially, no one in Fall River ever learned of what happened between Miss Lizzie and Mrs. Mortimer. Chief Da Silva and the rest of the local authorities hushed up the entire thing. Two axe murders within a week were fairly bad publicity for a resort town.

  During that last week, unbeknownst to me, as were so many things during that week, Father had arranged for Audrey’s body to be shipped to Boston. The funeral services were held on Wednesday, two days after we returned to the city. It was there, for the first time, that I met her parents. A sad silent pair with an air of resigned disappointment, they returned afterward to their home somewhere in Nebraska, and I never saw them again.

  I met Susan St. Clair within a month after our return to Boston. Nothing like I expected, she was a bright, lovely, capable woman, totally unaffected (and not at all French). Even before she and Father married, we had become friends. It was she who explained to me the mysteries of Sex (some of them, anyway; no one knows them all). Had I known about them that summer, I should have begun to understand the relationship between Father and Susan, between William and Marge Grady, between Mr. Chatsworth and Mrs. Archer. And perhaps begun to understand the relationships that (perhaps) existed between Audrey and William, and between Miss Lizzie and the actress, Nance O’Neil.

  When I began this account, several years ago, I wrote to an old friend in the States and asked for any information he could obtain about Nance. He was able to verify all that Miss Lizzie had told me and to provide some additional facts.

  A leading lady of the stage at the turn of the century, beautiful and immensely talented; she became in the late twenties and early thirties a well-regarded character actress in films. Among many other roles, she played Felice Venable in the cinema version of Cimmaron. During the early 1960s, she lived on 34th Street in New York (less than two blocks, as it happened, from where I, unknowing, lived at the time), and she died at the Actor’s Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1965.

  There were many other deaths before hers. One by one, all the people I knew that summer walked off the edge of the world and disappeared. William went first. He died in 1937 in Spain, fighting with the Abraham Lincoln brigade. Father died in 1938, and Susan in 1952. Roger Drummond became a reporter and finally a bureau chief for Time magazine, and died in 1960.

  Harry Boyle and I wrote letters to each other until he died of lung cancer in Florida, in 1943. I wrote the first letter in care of the Boston Pinkerton office, asking him where Mrs. Archer
had been that last Saturday. She had been in New Haven, he wrote, seeing still another “boyfriend.”

  There is one final loose strand.

  Miss Lizzie died in 1927, in Fall River. We had not corresponded for some time; like most other people, I read of her death in the newspaper.

  In 1930 I was living on West End Avenue in New York while I attended Columbia Law School. One hot August afternoon I received a special delivery package, heavy, perhaps eight inches wide and deep, and sixteen inches long.

  I carried it into the kitchen, set it down on the table, and opened the wrapping. Inside was the teak jewelry box, trimmed with gold, I had seen on Miss Lizzie’s dressing table eight years before.

  Taped to its top was a note addressed to me in my married name. I opened it and read:

  As you may know, Miss Lizbeth A. Borden died in 1927. The bulk of her estate was bequeathed to two different animal shelters, but litigation between the two has delayed the distribution of the estate’s remainder. I am pleased to say, however, that this issue has now been resolved and that Miss Borden’s last wishes may finally be honored. Miss Borden personally requested to me that you receive the enclosed. Please acknowledge receipt at your soonest possible convenience.

  It was signed Peter M. Wilburforce.

  When I opened the box, suddenly from inside it rose a thin metallic tune I had not heard for eight years. Some hand, at some earlier time—Mr. Wilburforce’s? Miss Lizzie’s?—had wound the mechanism. The music played, and repeated itself, and slowly died.

  Inside the box, lying on the shelf, was a single playing card. I carried the box and the card into my husband’s study and set the box, closed, on his desk, then lay the card beside it.

  He had been sulking for an hour or so; our usual disagreement: He hated New York. Now he looked up, his green eyes puzzled, and he said, “It’s very pretty, but what is it?”

  “It’s from Miss Lizzie,” I told him. “She left it to me in her will.”

  He picked up the playing card, turned it over, turned it back. “Six of hearts. Is that significant?”