“Daddy, how did you find her if you didn’t know her address?”
“I didn’t find her. That’s why I kept calling you, to get her address.”
“You didn’t go out?”
“No, of course not,” he said crossly.
Daddy was no fool, she knew that. Would it really be that hard for him to trace Claudine? Daddy had always had resources.
She suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of his presence, said she must dash, they would talk later.
“Don’t you want to see your mother?”
“No time, Daddy.”
“But wait, I’ll call you a cab.”
“I’d rather walk, thanks. I’ve got my umbrella.”
“Your mother had to borrow one from Judith or she’d have been drenched.”
Fay shut the door to the vestibule behind her and opened the closet to remove her coat. Only by chance did she happen to see what stood in the corner. At first she stared at it with total disbelief, then reached in and picked it up. The French umbrella. Claudine’s umbrella, with its ivory handle and silver band.
Fay knew with absolute, intuitive certainty what it must mean, and could only speculate on what madness could have possessed her mother to have taken it away with her. As a concealment, perhaps, when she left Claudine’s apartment?
With a spiteful joy at imagining her mother’s consternation at finding the umbrella gone and knowing who must have taken it, Fay tucked it under her arm as she left the building.
I wonder, she thought, not very much caring, what she did with the gun.
Detectiverse
Mother Goose Nursery Crimes V
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
by Gloria Rosenthal
© 1994 by Gloria Rosenthal
Dating Sally
by M. E. Beckett
© 1994 by M. E. Beckett
Canadian M.E. Beckett began writing fiction four years ago, producing a number of stories in quick succession. Although this is his first published work, several other stories have already been sold and his career as a writer seems truly to have been launched...
Horror is in the mind of the victim. Make the victim think that he ought to be in terror, and he is in terror. There are no intrinsically horrifying things. Only the response of the victim makes them so.
When Luther Warrant decided to make a victim, he had no idea who she would be, or how he would frighten her. That she ended as she did was because of the ways in which she perceived him and the phantoms he raised in her. And in himself.
On the third day of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-one, Luther Warrant was born. His mother turned away from him even as she presented her breast to him, and from then on, nothing in his life arrived without a second, hidden message attached to it. There was no receiving without its price. No gift that did not have its string. No love untarnished by the hook of whatever the lover wanted him to feel. From the first breath to the last, he was a manipulated thing; a creature of others, a puppet.
On the third day of March, nineteen hundred and eighty-one, Luther Warrant broke the mold. He altered forever his patterns of behavior, he thought, when he chose his first victim randomly from the telephone book, and sent her the head of a dead rabbit in the mail.
It was not an act that heralded the unfolding of a devious plan; he had no plan at all. He just wanted, one time only, he thought, to make someone dance for him, as he had for others all of his life.
He was wrong. He never really broke the mold at all. The strings of the Luther-marionette were simply being pulled from farther away, and with increasingly jerky movements.
Sally Whitfield opened the package with a tiny thrill of delight. It wasn’t a really big or exciting-looking package. But it had arrived a full ten days after her birthday, and she was imagining that she was reliving, extending the pleasure of that day by a full week-and-a-half.
Her scream at the sight of the rabbit’s head was mostly reflexive. She had never had much feeling for animals, and little fear of blood, and so there was only the oddity of the rabbitless head, and the disappointment of not really having received a belated birthday present to arouse any feeling in her.
Later, she began to think about the meaning of it, and about who might have sent her such a thing, and it was then that she first felt the terror that Luther Warrant had intended her to feel. After the telephone call.
When the phone rang, she was still only mildly afraid, and she made no connection between the arrival of the grisly packet and the ringing of her telephone.
“Hello?”
“Did you enjoy your Easter rabbit?”
“Easter’s not until April nineteenth. You were six weeks early,” she replied, and, to Luther, her voice sounded cool, detached, almost calm. He hung up, intensely disappointed, and never again tried that experiment or any other. He had failed to master even a single moment of another human being’s life, and he slipped back into the dull routine of responding to jerks at his strings and pushings of his buttons until he died, a year later, on his fifty-first birthday, of walking under a moving van.
Sally, on the other hand, was touched more and more deeply by the event, and she was the one whose life was altered forever. She and those with whom she came into contact.
Nobody had wanted to hurt her before that. Not in so brutal a way, anyway. Nobody had ever really harmed her. There had been one fellow in high school who had pushed her much further than she wanted to go in the backseat of his car, but her father and brother had sorted him out the next day, and that, to her, had sealed that event. She had had minor difficulties with boys for a few months afterward, but the certainty that she would and could be protected, or at least avenged, by her male relations kept others from trying the same things.
She was self-assured, articulate, intelligent, and very attractive. And then the Easter bunny came early one year, and much of that was forever altered.
Not that she became less intelligent, or less beautiful. But she did seem to become less articulate. Her self-confidence was shattered after the nightmares began. Once she had experienced them for a period of some months, she went for help.
“Doctor Lawton, I have bad nightmares, and I want them to stop.” Her lip and her fingers were trembling, but Dr. Lawton was making notes, and only noticed the flatness of her tone when she spoke.
Some flattening of affect? he wrote, but later scratched that out, with a single line through the words, so that he would be able to tell that he had had and discarded that idea.
“How long have you been having them?”
“About six months.”
He stopped and glanced at the page-header he had just written.
“Just after your twenty-first birthday.”
“Yes.”
“What do you think triggered the nightmares?”
“I got a rabbit’s head in the mail.”