“Blanche DuBois,” Pete says later, when it’s just the two of them alone in the house, lying side by side in the darkness.
The body has been removed, and Beatrice and Dwight have been called. They’ll drive in the next morning. They’ll handle things now. The police took the Colonel away for questioning, for evaluation, and Keri began straightening up, picking up glass, rubbing at the paint on the cabinets, until Pete took her in his arms and held her tight and told her it was time for bed, time to let go, at least for the night.
But she couldn’t do that, of course. For a while, staring at the ceiling, Keri has listened to the silence of the house, believed that she could hear the old man’s absence somewhere in it. Pete has seemed far away in his own thoughts, reflecting on the loss in his own way, Keri thinks, until those sudden words of his.
“What?” she asks. She doesn’t turn to look at him.
“Blanche DuBois,” he says. “Tennessee Williams. Streetcar Named Desire. ‘I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.’” Pete tries out a Southern drawl, not as good as his British voice, though it strikes her now that none of his accents is very good. “I’d thought of the Colonel like Lear, you know, but tonight, watching him with the police when they took him away, the way he stood up straight, the way he walked… Pure Blanche DuBois. Living in his own world, his delusions, the long gone past.”
“He was brave,” Keri says. There’s light on the ceiling, from the moonlight shining down through the window and reflecting somehow off the bedspread. “Gallant.”
“Gallant,” Pete echoes. “But that’s the tragedy of it, isn’t it? The way that we take the Stella role-all of us, the reader, the audience-trying to keep the illusions aloft, maybe even believing in them a little.”
In the blankness of the ceiling, Keri imagines Pete in the front of the class, pacing and gesturing, holding forth, the tweed jacket, patches on the sleeve. There’s pride in those patches and a strut in his step, and she’s sure she heard a snicker when he repeated the word gallant, as if he was marking up her term paper and dissatisfied somehow with the logic of her argument.
“When you say tragedy,” she asks, “are you talking about the Colonel or about Blanche?”
He shrugs beside her, a laying-down shrug, shoulders shuffling against the pillow.
“Either,” he says. “Both. Killing your daughter, not knowing it. That has all the elements of something classical, doesn’t it?”
Later, many years later, lying in another bed with another man, and with her children with that husband nestled safely in their own beds just down the hallway, Keri will think back once more on this night and wonder yet again if this was the exact moment when things ended between them or if it was just one in a progression of such moments that took too long to accumulate. She’ll wonder again why she stayed so long with him after this night, why she didn’t just get up then and walk out into the darkness, up that gravel drive-off base once and for all. Illusions, she’ll think. And tragedy. And she’ll think of the hundred things she might have told Pete, the hundred times she might have told him. Then she’ll remind herself: But maybe it was enough.
“He said her name,” she tells Pete. “The Colonel. After he turned on the lights and saw her there, before he wandered out into the yard, he said ‘Claire’ because he saw her, what she’d done, and what he’d done, too. But first, just before that… He was looking for me, I know he was. Looking out for me. Before he said her name, he said mine. He called out for me. For the first time, he said Keri.”
Art Taylor’s fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and North American Review; online at Fiction Weekly, Prick of the Spindle, and SmokeLong Quarterly; and in various regional publications. His story “A Voice from the Past” was short-listed for the 2010 Best American Mystery Stories anthology. He regularly reviews crime fiction for the Washington Post and contributes frequently to Mystery Scene. A native of Richlands, N.C., he graduated from Yale University and earned writing degrees from N.C. State and from George Mason University, where he is now an assistant professor of English. More information can be found at arttaylorwriter.com.
About the Editors
Donna Andrews’s biography can be found at the end of her story in this book.
Ellen Crosby is the author of a series of six mysteries set in Virginia wine country, including her most recent novel, The Sauvignon Secret (Scribner, 2011). She has also written Moscow Nights, a standalone novel published in the United Kingdom, and is currently at work on a new series featuring a Washington, D.C., photojournalist. Previously she worked as a freelance reporter for the Washington Post, a Moscow correspondent for ABC News Radio, and an economist at the U.S. Senate. Ellen lives in Virginia with her family. Visit her website at www.ellencrosby.com.
Barb Goffman’s biography can be found at the end of her story in this book.
Sandra Parshall is the Agatha Award-winning author of the Rachel Goddard mysteries, which include The Heat of the Moon, Disturbing the Dead, Broken Places, and Under the Dog Star. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and cats and is a long-time member of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime and former member of the national Sisters in Crime board.
Daniel Stashower is a two-time Edgar-award winner whose most recent nonfiction books are The Beautiful Cigar Girl and (as coeditor) Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Dan is also the author of five mystery novels, and has received the Agatha and Anthony awards. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.
Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of eleven mysteries featuring survivor and sleuth Hannah Ives. Marcia’s first mystery, Sing It To Her Bones, won the Malice Domestic grant and was nominated for an Agatha Award. Ten mysteries followed that early success, including three IMBA bestsellers. Hannah’s eleventh adventure, The Last Refuge, was released in early 2012. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections. Marcia served as president of Sisters in Crime, and is a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Authors’ Guild, and the Crime Writers Association. She divides her time between Annapolis, Maryland, and living aboard an antique sailboat in the Bahamas.
