“All right, Madeleine, yes, of course.” Roland drained his glass, looked at his watch, and rose to his feet. “Still half an hour before dinner, think I’ll get my things together. It’s an early flight.”
“A good idea, Roland.” And there was a chance he might follow it up by sending a message down to say he was having a bad reaction to the funeral and would she mind if he missed dinner and had a tray sent up to his room...
Relaxing into her lounge chair, Monica Millican watched the disappearing figure of her husband and knew with relief and in triumph that the last and most dangerous hazard had been overcome.
She had always known she was capable of bringing it off, from the moment she had stood at her kitchen window that rainy morning in the school holidays looking down the narrow garden and realizing that her life as it was was not worth living. For the first time, from the lowest point even she had ever reached, she had squared up to fate and decided to bend it to her will. It had denied her Felix as a husband, but she would secure her place as his widow and his heir...
She had loved Felix and, she was sure, he had begun to love her. But then Madeleine had come to Oxford on a flying visit and swept him away with her. You do understand, don’t you, darling? We’re made for each other. And it isn’t as though you and he...
Not quite then, no, but it would have been.
With Felix gone, it hadn’t seemed to matter to Monica whether it was Roland or anyone else. But she had been married for only a few weeks when she had begun to wish it was nobody...
She threw her first wobbly the very evening she decided to take matters into her own hands. Not having the dinner ready when Roland got home from work, telling him she wished she was dead. She kept on telling him, and the following week she cut her wrists in the bathroom — crying so loudly as she did it that he was there to bind them up before she had done more than scratch them. Then she resigned from her job and went to a psychiatrist, and then it was on record that she was mentally disturbed.
She had never been tempted to let Roland into the secret, so she was able to suggest to him that going to see Madeleine might be of help.
Roland had seized on the idea. It just might do the trick, she had seen him thinking, and even if it didn’t it would give him a few weeks without her and the strain she was putting on his dicky heart.
Madeleine, on the telephone, had obviously found it hard to believe that her sister could want to visit her, but after a pause for thought she said she supposed that at least the sunshine, the idleness, and the absence of Roland might be therapeutic, and told Monica to come if that was really what she wanted.
It had continued to be as easy. Monica presented herself in France as even more dull and dowdy than she was in England, and was amused to see how Madeleine’s wary suntanned face relaxed when they met at the airport and she was assured that her sister would not be her rival. Madeleine’s relief, in fact, had made her generous, and she had let Monica help herself to her shorts, bikinis, slips of dresses — all of which fit, as Monica had dieted discreetly to the specifications of her sister’s most recent photographs.
After a couple of weeks Monica’s skin, too, was a golden brown, and she wore Madeleine’s emerald-green bikini the day she joined her in the pool for her regular dawn swim and held her head under the water.
Changing the wedding rings had been a fraught moment, but both had slipped off easily enough in the early morning cool. The hazard after that was to get back to her room and cut her hair the inches necessary to turn it into Madeleine’s. But she had already worked out where the scissors had to go, and Madeleine — as she had seen initially from the photographs — had been content not to meddle with the natural ash-blond with which nature had endowed them both. In case it should be observed that Monica’s hair was a little shorter in death than it had been in life, she had left the clippings where they fell — on and around Monica’s dressing table — as evidence of a last pathetic attempt by the dead woman to look more like her sister.
As for the language... Monica had read Modern Languages at Oxford, and despite living so long in France, Madeleine was lazy and had spoken English to her husband and as many other people as possible. Monica had listened to her with her staff and quickly realized that her own knowledge of French still outran her sister’s. But she had played it down, limping, stumbling, asking people to speak more slowly, apologising to Madeleine for having got so rusty. And even their own mother had been unable to tell their voices apart.
She’d been practising Madeleine’s signature for as long as she’d been acting out her depression, and their handwriting had always been the same. And Madeleine had actually mentioned her intention of finding a local dentist now that her London wonderman was talking of retiring...
So that was it, really, apart from Roland. And Roland, now out of sight and so soon to be out of mind, had shown her that her crime had paid.
Getting slowly to her feet, Monica followed him into the house and locked herself into her beautiful new bedroom. Even before cutting her hair after Madeleine’s last swim she had taken the little bottle from Monica’s handbag and hidden it at the back of one of Madeleine’s drawers. Now she took it out and held it in her hand, reading the labeclass="underline" Digoxin tablets: one to be taken once a day. It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose.
She hadn’t expected Roland to recognize her, but she had brought the pills with her just in case — the reserve bottle he kept at the back of the medicine chest. If he had been suspicious she would have put a lethal dose into the glass of scotch he always took up to bed with him and which Madeleine always put into his hand as they said good night, and no one would have known whether his unhappiness at the loss of his wife had made him suicidal or merely careless...
Reluctantly, Monica threw the pills and the label down her sister’s private lavatory and flushed them away. She would have relished killing Roland, punishing him for the years of sadistic belittlement, but that would have been to tempt the fate she had at last bent so successfully to her will.
And the second-best thing about a perfect murder was that it cut out the need to commit any more.
Homecoming
by Gerald Pearce
© 1998 by Gerald Pearce
Born in England and raised in the Middle East, Gerald Pearce has lived in the U.S. since 1948. He worked as a television writer early in his career, creating more than 250 half-hour documentaries and travelogues, and later served as a staff writer for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. These days Mr. Pearce is almost exclusively a fiction writer, who publishes in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and EQMM.
An hour ago David North had been on a plane. Then at a funeral — had buried the old man just before the rain began. Now he was in the rented Tercel again.
He rounded the last corner. Through the wet windshield the old MacDonald house looked even more rundown, its empty garage door-less and disconsolate. Beyond it the double empty lot was still overgrown, bedraggled. Then, at the end of the block, where the blight hadn’t quite reached, his grandfather’s house.