Eighteen Read online

  “Did you say the Prayer of St. Francis for the mouse?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then he had a very nice funeral,” she said, and fell asleep.

  Eventually, I went back to school. I don’t remember now how long I stayed out; it seems to me I might have been allowed an extra day at home with my mother. No one mentioned the mouse to me. Doreen asked me if I wanted to walk to catechism with her. I said yes. We didn’t talk on the way there or the way home, though, and we never did anything together again after that. But she stopped hanging around Lindy.

  The cancer moved to my mother’s liver. I said the Prayer of St. Francis one hundred times, but God didn’t accept it as a trade. She died the summer I turned twelve.

  I started seventh grade the next fall at a new school, a junior high. All the kids from my school went to it, but kids from two other schools went there, too. I was making new friends and was feeling pretty good about the fact that I hadn’t cried at school, not even when other girls complained about their mothers.

  One day, one of the new friends, Barbara, stopped me in the hall outside of geography class. She seemed uneasy about something, and asked me to walk away from the other kids who were waiting for the teacher to arrive. We moved a few feet away, closer to the lockers. “I have to ask you something,” she said. “Lindy has been going around saying that you used to walk around school with dead mice in your pockets. Is it true?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “It’s not true.” I hesitated, wondering if anyone would believe the truth if I told it. Was every other kid from Mrs. Hobbs’ class saying the same thing?

  But before I could make up my mind about what I would reveal, a locker closed behind us. I turned to see Doreen. She must have heard every word.

  Doreen had changed a lot since fifth grade; we had even less in common. She had grown much taller and had really big breasts now, and I was still short and flat as a griddle. Doreen had beautiful long hair, and was popular. My hair was cut even shorter after my mother died, and my circle of friends was much smaller than Doreen’s.

  She looked from me to Barbara, then her face set in a frown. I was expecting the worse. “Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “Use your brain.”

  She walked off. Barbara smiled at me and said, “Yeah, now that I think about it, that was a pretty stupid story Lindy was telling.”

  But every now and then, throughout the school year, I was asked about dead mice.

  I moved to a neighboring town the next year, when my father remarried. I grew my hair long again and, after a couple of years, I even got breasts and grew taller. No one at my new school knew about what happened when I was in fifth grade, or even that my father’s new wife was not my birth mother. By then, I knew how to keep a secret. And my stepmother defied the fairy tale image, loving her stepchildren so well that I decided God had not, after all, abandoned us.

  Until the day before my college graduation, I never saw anyone from elementary school. That day, I had gone into a department store to buy some new underwear. As I approached the counter, I recognized the saleswoman. Lindy.

  My first impulse was to run from her, my second to think up something cruel to say. Or maybe something snotty. (“Lindy, I’m giving the commencement address tomorrow. Why don’t you come on down and heckle me-you know, mention the mouse thing from fifth grade.”)

  Instead, I just bought underwear. She didn’t seem to recognize or remember me.

  In the car in the shopping mall parking lot, I held on to the steering wheel and screamed behind my teeth. As much as I wanted to, I knew I would never forget Lindy, or fail to recognize her.

  To my surprise, Peggy cried when I told her the story of the dead mouse in my pocket. It dawned on me, as I finished telling it, that just about all of us have these memories of some moment of humiliation, have secrets that weigh down our pockets, but are really no larger than a mouse. The things that we think will bring our lives to a halt, don’t. And no one remembers our shame as well as we do.

  The next day, Peggy told me that she had gone home and told the story to her mother and to her elementary-school-aged daughters. Her mother cried, too.

  Her daughters wanted to know if it was really true that I used to carry dead mice around in my pockets.

  “Tell them yes,” I said, “it’s really true.”

  Revised Endings

  Harriet read the letter again. She wasn’t sure why; each rereading upset her as much if not more than the first.

  “Once again, I must tell you that the ending of this story positively reeks,” Kitty Craig had written. “I can’t imagine any reader believing Lord Harold Wiggins would choose this method of killing off his enemy, nor would any reader believe he could manage to mask the taste of antimony by mixing it into the braunschweiger. Rewrite.”

  Harriet Bently had been writing the popular Lord Harold Wiggins series for ten years now. She knew exactly what dearest Harry (as only Harriet had liberty to call him) would choose to do in any given situation, even if her editor did not. After all, Harry had moved into Harriet’s life-lock, stock and barrel. No, she didn’t invite him to tea like a child’s imaginary friend; but she thought of him constantly, and had grown comfortable with his presence in her life. Like any series character and his author, they had become quite attached to each other.

  It was more than Kitty Craig’s rude tone that upset her. Kitty was notorious in the publishing industry for her biting, sarcastic remarks; Harriet told herself (not entirely successfully) that she shouldn’t take Kitty’s insults personally. What upset Harriet was Kitty’s disregard for Lord Harold Wiggins’s intelligence. His trademark was to effect justice without costing the English taxpayers a farthing for an imprisonment or a trial; once Lord Wiggins knew who the guilty party was, he cleverly killed the villain. In this book, Lord Wiggins made sure the poisoner Monroe would never age another day by slipping him a lethal dose of antimony. Monroe was a villain of the first water, and certainly deserved the punishment Lord Wiggins meted out. Harriet couldn’t help but feel proud of her protagonist.

  Her previous editor, Linda Lucerne, had loved Lord Harold almost as much as she did. Linda never changed much more than a punctuation mark; Kitty used industrial strength black markers to X through pages of manuscript at a time. Pages that had taken hours of research, planning, writing, and rewriting before they were ever mailed to Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews (known affectionately as SDM), the esteemed publishers of the Lord Harold Wiggins series.

  Yes, Linda Lucerne had loved Harriet’s style, and said so from the moment she accepted the first novel, Lord Wiggins Makes Hay While the Sun Shines. And make hay he did. Linda’s faith was proved justified, and the success of Makes Hay was repeated in Lord Wiggins Beards the Lion in His Den and the next seven Lord Harold Wiggins books. Alas, Linda had suffered a heart attack just after the tenth book, Lord Wiggins Throws Pearls Before Swine, had been mailed off to SDM. Upon her recovery, she had opted for retirement from the publishing industry.

  Harriet tried hard to remember a sin she might have committed that would have justified so mean a punishment as having Kitty Craig become her new editor.

  She had known other writers who had suffered under Kitty’s abuses. Upon learning that Kitty would be her editor, Harriet had complained long and loud to her agent. But Wendall had pointed out that Kitty had been personally chosen for Harriet by Mr. William Shoehorn III. He had also mentioned that unless she was willing to come up with a new main character, they had no hope of moving to another publishing house. SDM owned Lord Harold. Wendall urged her to be open-minded.

  Harriet loved Lord Wiggins too much to forsake him, and so she had tried to follow Wendall’s advice. Tried, that is, until she received her first editorial letter from Kitty Craig. A long list of changes were demanded, each demand phrased in abusive language. The one that bothered Harriet the most was the demand to change the ending:

  “How absolutely boring! Monroe dies when he swallows lemonade lac
ed with strychnine. Strychnine! That old saw? Is your imagination so limited? Formula writer though you are, I would hope you could come up with something a tad more original.”

  Old saw indeed! Strychnine was a classic poison, she lamented, famous throughout detective fiction. But Kitty would hear none of it.

  Harriet decided to be big about it; after all, she didn’t want a reputation as the sort of writer who simply couldn’t let go of a word she’d written. She was no rank amateur. She could bear the burden of criticism; being showered with the unwanted opinions of others was inevitable in her profession. And so she set herself to the painful task of revising the ending of Pearls Before Swine. That in turn meant that she had to revise a number of passages in the story, but she did not complain.

  In fact, by the time she mailed off her new version, she was quite pleased with it. This time, Lord Wiggins offered Monroe a piece of chocolate cake chock-full of Catapres. It had been a bit tricky for dear Harry to obtain the drug, but she had managed it. Monroe had suffered heart failure thirty minutes after eating his dessert, allowing Lord Harold all the time in the world to leave the scene. It was certainly not as popular in fiction as strychnine, so Harriet thought Kitty might be contented.

  Kitty hated it.

  “You are going to have to do better than this. Catapres? Could you possibly devise anything more obscure? No reader is going to recognize this as a poison. Crimeny, it sounds like a resort that would appeal to people from the Bronx.”

  Not being from New York, Harriet couldn’t guess what Kitty meant by her last remark. She steamed and stewed for a while and then went back to work. Now it was a challenge.

  In version three, Lord Harold arranged for Monroe to be bitten repeatedly by a Gila monster.

  “What utter nonsense!” Kitty wrote. “How the heck does an English lord happen to have a twenty-inch Arizona desert lizard hanging about?”

  Even Harriet had to admit that the Gila monster wasn’t her best effort. She spent a little more time on version four. There might not be many Gila monsters roaming about the English countryside, but she knew that rhododendrons weren’t so rare. And so it was that Lord Harold made tea from the deadly leaves, and served it with scones to the unsuspecting Monroe.

  “Harriet, please. You are trying my patience. This is so unimaginative. If you want this to sell anywhere outside of the East Lansing Lawn and Garden Club, rewrite.”

  Harriet wasn’t even sure how she found the nerve to try a fifth time. She needed to publish annually to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, and Kitty’s demands were delaying the publication date of Pearls Before Swine. She had arranged to attend the annual Mystery World Awards Banquet, the Whodundunits. Her flight from Los Angeles to New York was booked, the hotel arrangements made. But now she wasn’t sure she could face the inquires of her fellow authors; they were bound to notice that the next Lord Harold Wiggins book had not arrived on schedule.

  She had grown more bitter about this trial by rewrite as each day passed. But once more she devised an ending, this time with antimony, arranging elaborate plot devices to allow Lord Harold Wiggins access to an industrial poison. And still Kitty wasn’t satisfied.

  As she held Kitty’s fifth nasty letter, something snapped inside Harriet. She began to see Kitty as the root of all evil in her life. Before Kitty, she had been happy. Nothing much had disturbed the world dear Harry had shared with her; he had paid her way, she had kept him alive. It seemed to Harriet that Kitty wanted to kill them both. Well, Harriet decided, we’ll see who kills whom.

  The idea began to comfort her. She would attend the Whodundunits, slip a little something into Kitty’s wine and sit back and enjoy her evening, knowing that her troubles would soon be over. In a room full of people who were constantly dreaming up ways for other people to die, the death of a woman who was almost universally despised by them would present a monumental problem for New York ’s Finest.

  Harriet became quite delighted at the prospect. She did not doubt that she would be able to kill. After all, she had already murdered over thirty characters. (Three was Harriet’s lucky number, and so she made it the average body count in her books.) Among those thirty characters were a great many individuals she liked better than Kitty Craig.

  For her first real life murder, she would need something special. For weeks, she consulted her reference works on poison. She searched the pages of A Panorama of Poisonous Plants, Powders, and Potions. She studied the listings in Lyle’s Lethal Liquids, even considered Conroy’s Compendium of Caustics. But her most promising candidates were found in Everyday Toxic Substances: Our Dangerous Friends.

  She made a long list of factors to consider. Reaction time. What would dear Harry say? Quick, she decided. Very quick and highly toxic. Kitty in prolonged, relentless pain was a tempting picture, but she concluded that having Ms. Craig dead before the salads were served was preferable; attention-getting though agonizing death throes are, it might put a bit of a damper on the evening’s festivities.

  The poison would need to be something that could be transported easily; if discovered among her belongings, it could not seem out of place. Her final prerequisite was that it be something she could obtain without raising suspicions.

  After hours of concentrated effort, she finally had the means in hand and the logistics of delivering it well planned.

  She hummed a happy little tune as she latched her suitcase closed and carried it to the front door. She sat in the entry, lovingly caressing the corners of her carry-on bag. Harriet was far too careful to have her plans spoiled by the possibility of lost luggage. She could hardly contain her excitement when the taxicab pulled up in her driveway and tooted its horn.

  She was pleased to learn that she was not the type to get the pre-homicidal jitters. Dear Harry would be thrilled to find his creator so calm, so poised, so at ease with this new role. Indeed, both flight attendants and Mr. Johnson, the gentleman seated next to her in first class, found her a charming traveling companion.

  Harriet couldn’t remember the last time she had really noticed or been noticed by a man, and she gloried in the handsome Mr. Johnson’s attentions. At first she wondered if deadly intentions might somehow serve as an aphrodisiac. But then Mr. Johnson confessed himself to be a great fan of Lord Harold Wiggins, and said he recognized Harriet from her cover photo. This was sheer flattery, she was certain, as she hadn’t updated that photo in ten years.

  In New York, he accompanied her to baggage claim, and helped her to retrieve her suitcase. As he carried it for her, she learned that he was staying at the same hotel. Harriet was sure at that moment that this was her lucky day.

  It was as they stood waiting for a taxi that Harriet saw the young woman. Ticket jacket in hand, no doubt late for a plane, she ran across the opposite sidewalk. Looking directly at Harriet, she took two quick steps off the curb; Harriet screamed a warning in her mind that never reached her lips-the driver had even less of a chance to stop the car in time. The car struck the young woman and hurled her several yards down the street.

  Harriet experienced the moments of intense awareness that come to those who are caught as unwilling spectators to such events: with absolute clarity she heard the grating screech of the car’s brakes, saw the disbelief on the woman’s face at the moment of impact, heard the dull thud as it launched her into an unnatural and graceless flight, watched the awful landing.

  Harriet rushed toward the woman and stood frozen above her. There could be no doubt that the woman was dead. Heads and necks are not configured in the same way on the living. Harriet had never before stood so close to the dead.

  In contrast to the clarity of those few moments was the enveloping confusion which followed. Somehow, she ended up back inside the terminal, sitting on a plastic chair next to Mr. Johnson, who held her as she cried.

  He didn’t question Harriet’s purchase of an immediate return flight; he took the same one back to Los Angeles. She left her carry-on bag on the plane.

>   Mrs. Johnson opened the envelope from Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews without the sense of dread she had come to expect.

  Dear Harriet,

  You are no doubt as saddened as we are about the unfortunate incident at the Whodundunits. Why no one who knew the Hemlich manuever could have been there at the moment Ms. Craig choked on that chicken bone is beyond me. We’re all brushing up on our CPR here at SDM.

  I look forward to serving as your new editor. I’ve browsed through several of the drafts you sent to Ms. Craig, and I hope you won’t mind my saying that I believe your first effort was the best. Will you be too angry with me if I send it along as is?

  Lord Harold’s Biggest Fan,

  Lana Dunstreet

  P.S. Best wishes on your recent marriage. I hope Mr. Johnson realizes how lucky he is.

  Ghost of a Chance

  It wasn’t hard for the ghost to awaken me.

  It was the second night after David died, and my grief was still so great as to thin my sleep to gossamer. Just about anything would cause me to wake up suddenly, reach for his side of the bed, feel the emptiness there, and then the emptiness within myself; next would come a tightness in my chest, the pressing weight of the sudden loss of my husband.

  Some might believe I saw the ghost because I so wanted David to be alive, I imagined he had come back to me. The only problem with that theory is, it wasn’t my husband’s ghost.