Max watched the line of Lotty’s legs change as she stood on tiptoe to reach a brandy snifter. Short, muscular from years of racing at top speed from one point to the next, maybe they weren’t as svelte as the long legs of modern American girls, but he preferred them.
He waited until her feet were securely planted before making his announcement.
“The board is bringing in Justin Hardwick for a final interview for chief of staff.”
“Max!” She whirled, the Bengal fire sparkling in her eyes. “I know this Hardwick and he is another like Caudwell, looking for cost-cutting and no poverty patients. I won’t have it.”
“We’ve got you and Gioia and a dozen others bringing in so many non-paying patients that we’re not going to survive another five years at the present rate. I figure it’s a balancing act. We need someone who can see that the hospital survives so that you and Art can practice medicine the way you want to. And when he knows what happened to his predecessor, he’ll be very careful not to stir up our resident tigress.”
“Max!” She was hurt and astonished at the same time. “Oh. You’re joking, I see. It’s not very funny to me, you know.”
“My dear, we’ve got to learn to laugh about it: it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to forgive ourselves for our terrible misjudgments.”
He stepped over to put an arm around her. “Now where is this remarkable surprise you promised to show me.”
She shot him a look of pure mischief, Lotty on a dare as he first remembered meeting her at eighteen. His hold on her tightened and he followed her to her bedroom. In a glass case in the corner, complete with a humidity-control system, stood the Pietro Andromache.
Max looked at the beautiful, anguished face. I understand your sorrows, she seemed to say to him. I understand your grief for your mother, your family, your history, but it’s all right to let go of them, to live in the present and hope for the future. It’s not a betrayal.
Tears pricked his eyelids, but he demanded, “How did you get this? I was told the police had it under lock and key until lawyers decided on the disposition of Caudwell’s estate.”
“Victoria,” Lotty said shortly. “I told her the problem and she got it for me. On the condition that I not ask how she did it. And Max, you know— damned well that it was not Caudwell’s to dispose of.”
It was Lotty’s. Of course it was. Max wondered briefly how Joseph the Second had come by it to begin with. For that matter, what had Lotty’s great-great-grandfather done to earn it from the emperor?
Max looked into Lotty’s tiger eyes and kept such reflections to himself. Instead he inspected Hector’s foot where the filler had been carefully scraped away to reveal the old chip.
Afraid All the Time
NANCY PICKARD
Nancy Pickard (b. 1945) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism, working for a time as a reporter and editor before turning to freelance writing.
Her series about Jenny Cain, foundation director in a small Massa-chusetts town, began with the paperback original Generous Death (1984), graduating to hardcovers with the third book, No Body (1986).
Noted from the beginning for their humor, the Cain books gradually became darker in tone and theme. In an interview with Robert J.
Randisi (Speaking of Murder, volume II [1999]) Pickard explained why, using Susan Wittig Albert’s term, the “‘mega-book’ mystery series…a new phenomenon…which denotes a series of novels which are essentially one long book. Each novel in the series is rather like a ‘chapter’ in the mega-book.” Unlike the series of writers like Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald, in which sleuths like Miss Marple and Travis McGee remained essentially the same from book to book, “in a ‘mega-book’ series, you can’t count on each succeeding book being much like the last…It’s more like real life (if…any amateur sleuth is ever like real life), because the protagonist goes through some real changes…As we (and they) mature, things do come to assume a more substantial feeling, a weightiness, which can sometimes carry a feeling of greater ‘darkness.’”
In several books, beginning with The 27 Ingredient Chile Con Carne Murders (1993), Pickard has adopted the character of Eugenia Potter, introduced in three novels by the late Virginia Rich. Pickard’s continuation of the series, the first based on Rich’s notes and the later ones on original stories, brought a sense of pace, craft, and complex-ity missing from some cooking mysteries and others in the domestic cozy category. Asked by Randisi if she is a cozy writer, Pickard has fun with the concept: “I don’t know what I am. What’s between cozy and uncomfortable? If mystery writers were chairs, I wouldn’t quite be a chintz rocking chair, but I wouldn’t be a hard metal folding chair, either. A nice, swivel office chair, perhaps?”
Some novelists who also write short stories produce the same sort of narrative, only shorter. Others use the short form to experiment with theme, mood, and subject matter. Pickard is in the latter category, as shown in her collection Storm Warnings (1999) and in the Edgar-nominated story, “Afraid All the Time.”
Ribbon a darkness over me…”
Mel Brown, known variously as Pell Mell and Animel, sang the line from the song over and over behind his windshield as he flew from Missouri into Kansas on his old black Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Already he loved Kansas, because the highway that stretched ahead of him was like a long, flat, dark ribbon unfurled just for him.
“Ribbon a darkness over me…”
He flew full throttle into the late-afternoon glare, feeling as if he were soaring gloriously drunk and blind on a skyway to the sun.
The clouds in the far distance looked as if they’d rain on him that night, but he didn’t worry about it. He’d heard there were plenty of empty farm and ranch houses in Kansas where a man could break in to spend the night. He’d heard it was like having your choice of free motels, Kansas was.
“Ribbon a darkness over me…”
Three hundred miles to the southwest, Jane Baum suddenly stopped what she was doing. The fear had hit her again. It was always like that, striking out of nowhere, like a fist against her heart. She dropped her clothes basket from rigid fingers and stood as if paralyzed between the two clotheslines in her yard. There was a wet sheet to her right, another to her left. For once the wind had died down, so the sheets hung as still and silent as walls. She felt enclosed in a narrow, white, sterile room of cloth, and she never wanted to leave it.
Outside of it was danger.
On either side of the sheets lay the endless prairie where she felt like a tiny mouse exposed to every hawk in the sky.
It took all of her willpower not to scream.
She hugged her own shoulders to comfort herself. It didn’t help.
Within a few moments she was crying, and then shaking with a palsy of terror.
She hadn’t known she’d be so afraid.
Eight months ago, before she had moved to this small farm she’d inherited, she’d had romantic notions about it, even about such simple things as hanging clothes on a line. It would feel so good, she had imagined, they would smell so sweet. Instead, everything had seemed strange and threatening to her from the start, and it was getting worse. Now she didn’t even feel protected by the house. She was beginning to feel as if it were fear instead of electricity that lighted her lamps, filled her tub, lined her cupboards and covered her bed — fear that she breathed instead of air.