Wheeler shook his head. “No. I do not hunt, and I do not fish. I indulge in the greatest adventure of all. I think.”
He reached for his pipe and pouch. “I was just past twenty-one when my father died. He left me a small inheritance. Anyone else might have run through the money within a year or so, but I chose to come here. It has always been my natural predisposition to avoid the world. By living simply, I made the money last for almost twenty years. But now there is nothing left — nothing at all.”
“What has that got to do with killing the girl?” I asked.
“Patience,” Wheeler said. “And so I was faced with the prospect of having to go to work in order to live.” He smiled broadly. “Oh, it is not work itself that appalls me. It is the expenditure of time that the operation involves; time stolen from me and my thoughts. And one has only one lifetime, you know.”
“Sure,” Harry said. “She was fourteen years old.”
Wheeler shrugged. “So finally I came up with the solution to my problem, the only solution. I would go to prison. There I would be fed and clothed, but above all, I would be given the freedom of time for speculative thought.”
Harry had been examining the rifle. “You think they won’t make you work in jail?”
Wheeler smiled. “I have taken the time to investigate thoroughly your enlightened prison system. I will simply refuse to work. I know that no force or intimidation will be used against me. I will be placed in solitary.”
“And you figure that a philosopher can do his thinking on bread and water?” I asked.
Wheeler lit his pipe. “As I said, I took the trouble to investigate. Solitary in this state means just that and nothing more. The meals served are identical to those given the other prisoners, and one is even allowed reading material.” He smiled contentedly. “I think that I shall be supremely happy.”
Harry put down the rifle. “You wanted to go to prison, so you shot somebody to get there? Just like that?”
He frowned. “No. Not just like that. I planned and researched before I acted, and then this morning I went down the path that winds to the lake and waited. I shot the first person to come by. It happened to be this Carol Wisniewski. But it could have been anyone.”
There was silence and his eyes went over us. “Do you think I am insane?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He glared. “No, I am not insane. On the contrary, I have reached the ultimate in sanity, and that is to realize that nothing is really important except one’s own wishes, one’s own desires, one’s own life.”
“So the life of Carol Wisniewski meant absolutely nothing to you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Wheeler said. “Nothing at all.” He laughed sharply. “I see that you have no use for me. Perhaps you are thinking that, if nothing else, it could be arranged that I ‘accidentally’ fall down a number of times before I reach the police station environment?”
Harry and I said nothing.
Wheeler pulled a folded piece of paper from a book on the table. “This is a copy of an affidavit from my doctor. It certifies that I am in the best of health and, specifically, that I do not suffer from any bruises, contusions, or broken bones. Would you care to examine it?”
Neither Harry nor I touched the paper.
His eyes went over the objects in the room. “There is really nothing material here that I will miss. In fact, I am rather looking forward to the new leisure required for pure thought. You might say that I am actually engaged in distilling human existence to the length of one book; perhaps even one essay; one sentence.”
“Or one scream?” I asked.
He seemed irritated. “We will not wait for the coffee. You may take me to your police station now.”
My cousin, Harry Wisniewski, pulled the knife out of his pocket.
And I smiled. “Who the hell said we were cops?”
Good Old Mom
by Sharon Mitchell
It’s been said that no one is a hundred percent good or bad, that everyone is a combination of both. That must mean that “mean” is not necessarily bad, because Good Old Mom, otherwise known as Felicia Hooks, was just plain mean. One hundred percent mean. A mean woman. Phoebe suspected that by the time she was a few hours old her mother had already decided she didn’t like her very much. Why else would she name her Phoebe, for Pete’s sake?
Felicia didn’t like Phoebe, yet she clung to her like a burr in a spaniel’s ear. Phoebe was her only child, and her husband had disappeared long ago. Good Old Mom seemed to feel like she should get some return for having put up (so to speak) with her daughter all the years she was growing up. Phoebe felt like she should get the Purple Heart for surviving into her thirty-second year.
“Mom’s not a fragile old woman,” Phoebe told her psychologist one bright afternoon in October as they sat in his cosy little office. “Never had a sick day in her life, and she’s even kind of a young looking sixty-six.
“She was with a traveling carnival for years before she got married and had me. Never remarried after my father hit the road, though — probably because she’s got the personality of a rattlesnake. That’s probably why it took her over thirty years to land a husband in the first place.”
The psychologist cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Comparing Mom to a rattlesnake may not be fair to the rattlesnake,” Phoebe continued. “She’s kept me single, too. What man in his right mind would want me when the package includes a mother-in-law like Felicia Hooks?”
“Would it have to be a package deal?” Brock Weaver asked as he scribbled a hasty note in his notebook. He was a long, lean man of thirty-seven with an incongruous halo of golden curls.
“I can’t get away from her.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve tried, believe me. She always comes along and moves in on me. Next time I’m not going to leave a forwarding address or anything. I’m just going to make a clean break once and for all.”
“You’re planning to move away?”
“As far as I can, as soon as I can afford it.”
“Maybe it would be better to stay and try to resolve your problems with your mother.”
“Impossible. You wouldn’t say that if you knew Good Old Mom.”
“It’s not so unusual for a young woman not to hit it off so well with her mother. Then, as the years go by, she finds herself identifying more with her.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Mother-daughter relationships often improve with age.”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“Do you think I should? Perhaps some joint counseling—”
Phoebe flopped back in her chair and rolled her eyes. “Oh, wow!”
“Why do you say that, Phoebe?”
“My mother thinks you guys are all quacks. She’d never come within a mile of you.
“She doesn’t even know I come here.”
“Maybe it’s time you told her. Maybe she should know how distressed you are about your relationship with her.”
“She knows how distressed I am. Believe me, she knows, and she loves it.”
Brock put the notebook down on the table next to his chair. He folded long, thin hands on one knee and regarded her with baby blue eyes. He wore blue-jeans and a blue sweater and the longest sneakers Phoebe had ever seen on human feet. “So often,” he said kindly, “people suffer needlessly because they don’t communicate. They assume the other person knows how they feel when really they haven’t an inkling.”
Phoebe’s brown gaze fell before Brock’s steady blue one. Looking down at her hands, she traced invisible circles on the knees of her own jeans. “It’s not possible to communicate with my mother,” she muttered uneasily. “You just don’t understand.”
“You do it every day,” he said. “Every time you speak to her — that’s communication. All you need to do now is find the right kind of communication. I think I’m going to give you an assignment this week, Phoebe. You don’t have to mention me, but every day until we meet again I want you to tell your mother about at least one thing she does that distresses you. And then you must ask her what you do that distresses her.”