A romantic mystery of the usual kind

 

Jill

Alene, Iris, Susan and Jill met for drinks once a month at the lounge in the Sorrento Hotel. By agreement, each one of them brought a secret with them, to share openly or by implication. A well rounded Malbec, assorted crudités, fresh bread and then cognac brought them to a peak of confidentialities every month. Some months, these were served with great whooping laughter, other months the four heads pulled together over low tables and they leaned into their secrets. In their twenty years together, they’d told a number of scandalous stories, some romantic ones, some sad and mortal. This year was their first brush with murder.

“What kind of hell would we live in if we all revealed our secrets?” Jill started, while the Mediterranean plate was passed around. She scooped kalamata olives, crusty bread and a roasted bell pepper tapenade onto the small bread plate. Setting it down, she picked up her wine. Looking over the rim of the glass, she assessed the effect of her words on Alene, Iris and Susan. All three of them, hands raised halfway to their mouths, had paused. Eyebrows raised, their faces made one unified statement: Why are we here if not to reveal our secrets? Here at least, if nowhere else? She tipped the glass, and the warm earth tones of the Malbec delivered red for strength. She set the glass down and began again.

“It was right after last month, after Alene wrote that check to Cosmo, remember?” she said. Alene looked around – yes, they remembered, even after the third bottle of wine. Cosmo and his specialty auto body and paint shop. Yes, even now all Alene really remembered was a smell of turpentine and the bright glaring lights and the tattoos on Cosmo’s shoulders and then the hydraulic lift and lower that explained to her forever after the appeal of the low rider. She blushed and picked up a large caper berry with the stem still attached. She put it in her mouth and sucked, watching Jill to see where this story was going.

“At the end of the evening, we said goodbye and said be careful, the roads are wet.” Jill continued. Her voice was flat. Iris picked up her bread knife and cut a thin slice of the chilled butter. She waved the knife at Jill and said, “Yes. Continue.” Jill looked at the knife and touched her throat. They could see a pulse, jittering at the edge of her collarbone, and her face, suddenly strained and strange. A stranger.

Susan pushed her hair behind her ears, attuned to something new.

“Let’s go to my house,” she said. A first. As a group, they’d made the decision to never tell tales where the walls might hear them. She waved down the waiter, paid, and 40 minutes later they had all reconvened in her living room.

“I got home that night and I was lonely. The lights were low and there were no stars.” Jill continued. The women sat clustered on sofas in front of the fire, the flames shaking their faces. I can see our twenty years passing in the flames, thought Susan.

“Wait. Look, I can’t say it. I can’t. Just look.” She pulled a photo out of her purse and handed it to Alene. Alene looked, dropped it suddenly, then picked it up and put it on the table in front of them. They all looked – that familiar face, known and unknown the way the very famous are – and the sudden, shocking realization that he was dead. Barely, freshly, horribly dead.

 

Iris

Her brother, Dennis, was her mother’s favorite. Iris’s hair was red, not blonde. She bit her nails. Her mother’s name was Charlene, and Dennis was a bully and the model for all her future husbands. “Iris-itis” was the nickname given to her by Dennis and his friends when he was fifteen and she was twelve, with big gap-toothed teeth and ink stains on every skirt she owned.  When he was sixteen, he tripped on a rock at the edge of a ravine near a half developed sub-division and broke his neck. Two years later he suffocated under the weight of a pillow, an accidental death that Charlene recreated in mixed media non-representational art for the next 15 years, until she died of mixing paint fumes with cigarettes and valium. She passed out and fell face down in a clay piece that was wet and sticky, and never came up for air. Iris went to art school on the insurance, and bought a little studio in a pricy neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, where she worked when she was not in Seattle. Iris, like her namesake, liked wet, cold climates, and disliked both sunlight and morning.

When Iris first met Susan, they’d been out making the rounds at the espresso cafes that were so much a part of life in the pacific northwest. No point in being a morning person in the far north. Iris had moved there completely at random, getting away from the relentless sun and endless daylight hours of the southwest, and settled into the vampire routines of the northerly climates quite naturally. Eventually, she settled on a job in publishing that allowed her to work afternoon hours, which left night-time for studio work and morning for sleep. She quite liked her pale complexion in the rain forest among the ferns; her red hair lit up the woods like a dangerous flame, a suggestion of things not quite right, ready to erupt, sudden, violent heat pouring down the mountain side.

Harry is not quite right

I suppose you could say, in a manner of speaking, that it all started with the tupperware parties. That was in our June Cleaver days, you know, you’re too young of course but I’m pretty sure you and Harry watched the reruns when you were little. Remember Harry at those tupperware parties – I think when they first started he was so little he could sit in the cake holder. I remember putting frosting on him one night, what a cute baby he was. Well, house and home was everything to everyone in those days. Sometimes I look back on it and think what in God’s name came over us all? It was like a collective insanity – you know, and then there was that backlash and everyone was taking LSD and singing and traveling around the country in bright orange camper vans. Those were cute; Harry got one in the 90s for nostalgia I suppose and fixed it up like he was going to a Brady Bunch reunion or something. Anyway, the tupperware. I got to saving just about everything in those tupperwares, and we have a basement with a wet bar, a game area and a lot of storage just in case of Armageddon, you know, all packed with water, canned goods, medicines, the kind of thing you might need just in case. I don’t like to be predicting doom all the time, you know, so I did grow tomatoes and keep up with things, kept the house up to date. I remember hanging a shower curtain in the 80s that was just covered with sea creatures: seahorses, clam shells, dolphins, starfish. Very pretty, as I recall. Things were complicated just then, what with the Cold War and the man with the shoe who kept pounding. I think his face was red, but our TV was black and white, so I may be misremembering. So I started collecting all sorts of things other than food and water and storing them in the shelves in the basement. Salt, aspirin, bandaids, socks. Things I could imagine us needing in case of nuclear disaster or a change in the divine plan. These were difficult times, and there were serial murders, and the president seemed to be having some kind of mental problem. So I started thinking a little more broadly. Like wondering what we might need if one of our own, or a neighbor down there with us, got a little disturbed. I picked up a few books on psychiatry and hid these in three inch deep rectangular tupperware behind the dryer, in case I needed to look up some kind of psychosis. The kids wanted some science projects, so we collected burrs and feathers, baking soda, vinegar, and safety pins. Then I thought arsenic might come in handy, a few knives for skinning small animals in case we needed them. I had a hard time remembering the name of that drug that smells like almonds, or was it like cordite? Eventually I bought a book on Poisons and Poisoning. It’s a big basement, generally speaking, but still I couldn’t help imagine being listened to, followed through the low halls under the stairwells that led to the semi-hidden rooms where the weapons were kept. Sometimes I heard their voices, you remember, Harry, don’t you? Sometimes I forget that Harry isn’t here now. Remember when he spoke in his own defense? I was so proud of him. He learned a lot in that library. Law, chemistry, psychology, the history of death. He started painting about three years ago. I haven’t seen him since I fell last year. Those stairs are pretty steep for a woman my age. But he still sends me cards once in awhile. You’ve been keeping the crawl spaces clean and clear of spiders and roaches, I know, and I do thank you for that. So does Harry. Shall we have a glass of wine now, or is it too soon, what do you think?

 

20 minutes, long list of collectively generated words. Silly, innit?

Another English Mystery

The front room was dusty and smelled of something, I couldn’t decide what. Old house, some cooking smells, ashes in the grate perhaps – Nigel had told me it would need a bit of care, but not bad overall. He’d dropped me off at the front gate, then took the Peugeot into the village to shop for me, getting sausages, tomatoes, baking soda, lemons, vinegar, hard soap, a rag mop, and a tin of shortbread.

While he was gone, I walked from room to room, pulling sheets off of worn armchairs, small tables, bookshelves, a fainting couch, a low embroidery rocker and an upright Victorian sofa covered in blue velvet. Most of the house was put away for the season, or for ever, I thought, without sign that anyone had recently left or recently been back.

Until I stepped into the kitchen. This room, which sat at the back of the house with a door leading out into an unkempt vegetable garden,  was in full and current use. Mac n cheese burnt into an aluminum saucepan, dishes stacked high in the sink. No running water, but a large jug of water apparently in use for general washing up. An old army cot with wool blankets and a flat pillow with dirty pillowcase. When I first opened the door into the kitchen, I instinctively backed away when I saw the signs of inhabitance, but realized almost immediately that there was nothing in the room to suggest that someone was in there at the moment. Still, after a quick look round, I closed the door behind me and went outside, where I stood awkwardly in the drive wishing Nigel hadn’t taken the car.

All around me in the yard were the peaceful sounds of a warm summer morning: bees buzzing in the snapdragons, a small white cat with a black spot on her nose passing through, stropping me briefly on her way somewhere else. In the distance, I could hear someone mowing their lawn. From the house, I could not see any of the neighbors, I realised, and thought what a good, safe place it would be for someone who did not want to be seen. I tugged on my skirt and walked down the drive to the gate and opened it, cautiously. It opened without a sound. I had remembered it as a creaking, loud gate that I could never sneak out of at night, and when I looked I found, as I had half expected, that the hinges had been recently cleaned and oiled.

Nigel came back, half an hour later, to find me sitting on a stump in the lane, picking at my cuticles. He’d been thinking about selling the house. I had decided to keep it. I quite understand the kind of situation that would lead a person to hide in an English cottage, and I thought I might know who this person could be.

Inspector Morse and the needlepoint murder

Inspector Morse brushed aside the corn husk and the corn silk that lightly covered the body. Beneath it, and innocent looking it was, lay a brave little embroidery hoop, with a needlepoint sampler half done. “We all wander in this vale of tears. Find happiness in …..” it read. The thread dangled off, an incomplete thought hanging there, expectant.

“No needle,” Morse said, to himself. He felt tired. “Another day, another corpse,” he said under his breath, imagining this cheery motto done nicely on a pillow cover in his Aunt Edna’s parlor. Loved his Aunt Edna, he had. Still missed her cookies. What was that she’d done with marshmallows and chocolate bars? Well, she’d been gone a long time. He shook himself back to the present, where this corpse was sitting quietly in her chair, hand still holding the hoop as if ready to take one more stitch. Eyes open and staring out, or past. Contemplating, those eyes might almost be.

Morse thought he’d have a nice vacation, that had been his intention. That’s what brought him to this quiet old town of aunties, church fundraisers, and bakeries. He’d pictured himself sitting in someone’s front room with a cup of tea in one hand and a plate of jam tarts in the other. But death follows the inspector, he told himself. He brushed the ashes off his suit jacket and damned himself for starting to smoke again. He damned the nice local constable who asked him, just as a matter of courtesy, to come in on this needlepoint death. He considered ways to excuse himself, pointing out the obvious: elderly women die in their sleep, it is 3 in the afternoon on a warm summer day, and she’d obviously nodded off, permanently. He opened his mouth to say so, when the young officer held out his hand and gave Morse the corn husk.

“Way I see it,” he says. “Is she’d about finished with the corn – she made corn dolls and sold them like Indian made for tourists in the states – that’s how she kept a little extra money coming in. Anyway, she’d done with the corn and set it aside to do her needlework.”

“Yes,” Morse said, almost leaving off the question mark. “And then?”

“Well, I guess she must’ve fallen asleep, don’t you?” The young man’s red eyebrows wagged a bit, and he looked at Morse for help. Morse looked again at the quiet body, the corn, the needlework. Why am I here? He asked himself, feeling foolish, feeling automatic. The automatic inspector. His eyes scanned the chair, the hoop, the thread, then up to the woman’s face. Her face was upturned, eyes china blue, her expression pleased, expectant. Her hair was slightly mussed. He thought she might want to reach up and tidy it, just a bit. He leaned over and looked at the back of her head, where the hairpins would ordinarily keep her hair well contained. There, at the base of the neck, he saw it. A small red dot, a shiny metallic point. A needle, neatly inserted into the base of her skull. A murder, here in the quiet village where he’d come to regain his sanity. He sighed, and fingered his pocket for his smokes. Time to step outside and think, for just a moment.

Writing practice, 25 minutes. See the Inspector Morse TV series, or the books, by Colin Dexter, for more on the source of this character.