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.
I had awakened from my fitful sleep that night because the room felt cold; I opened my eyes to see a man standing at the foot of the bed. Until I was fully awake, I almost thought it was David. Like David, he was about six feet tall, with dark brown hair and big, brown eyes. He was handsome, but I discovered that even handsome men who suddenly show up uninvited at the foot of my bed can scare me. This one did. I opened my mouth to scream, and he vanished.
I was more than a little upset, but I convinced myself that I had dreamed the whole thing, and fell back into a restless slumber, full of dreams of David dying. The next morning I felt grumpy and ill-at-ease. It was the day of David’s funeral, and there wasn’t anything on earth that was going to make me feel good about that day. As I looked in the mirror, I became even more certain of that. I looked like a blouse someone had left to wrinkle in the dryer. My blond hair framed a colorless face and I had dark shadows under my blue eyes.
“You’ll be just fine, Anna,” I said to myself. At forty-two, I wasn’t in bad shape. The lines that had appeared on my face weren’t etched too deeply. Gave it character, my father said. I was getting more character every year, but I’m not the type to fret over it. At least, I hadn’t been until she came along.
I wondered if she would have the nerve to show up at the funeral. I wouldn’t know her if she did. When he made his confession, David never told me her name, and I never asked for it. As far as I was concerned, it was important not to know the name of the woman David had met at the St. George Hotel every Wednesday for fifteen weeks. For fifteen weeks, on the night I taught a class in-of all things-ethics, Ms. X had taught David that he could still lure a woman to bed. I wondered if they had laughed about that. He wasn’t laughing when it ended. “A temporary madness,” he had told me, weeping as he did. “Forgive me,” he pleaded.
To this day, I’m not able to be very precise about why I did forgive him. At the time I was outraged, hurt, angry, humiliated. The pain of betrayal remained; whatever trust was between us had taken a torpedo broadside. But the ship didn’t sink, it just listed.
Maybe the reason I stayed with him wasn’t really so complex. David and I had been together for twenty years; and in that twenty years I had come to love him more than anyone else on earth. He was a habit I couldn’t break. Fate broke it for me.
David had made his confession six months ago, and strove to be the ideal husband in the time since. Together we tried to renew our marriage, and somehow, we were making it. On the morning of the day he died, he told me that he was working on something that would really make me proud of him. I had no idea what it was. “I’m proud of you all the same, David,” I said to the haggard reflection in the mirror. Ten minutes later I was still sitting on the bathroom floor, sobbing.
I pulled myself together, hoping I wouldn’t shame myself at his funeral. As I put on a plain black dress that David had always liked, I held on to the anger I felt toward his killer. David had come to the college to pick me up that night. I was on my way to the car when I heard the shots. The college is in a part of town that has become rougher over the years, and I didn’t think much about hearing gunfire. It wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but it wasn’t that rare. When I saw the crumpled form on the steps that lead up from the parking lot, I didn’t know it was David until I was only a few feet from him. He was unconscious, and bleeding to death. Nothing, not even a ghost in my bedroom, will ever terrify me the way those moments did, when I held David as he died.