I’d heard rumors of a wife in Manchester, figured they were separated. I knew nothing of a child. And I presumed that Dara Mills was old news, until the night I’d found them shacked up on the Equity cot, making the beast with two backs. That was the weekend before Hamlet opened. The Agatha Christie play, it had been And Then There Were None that year, was closing the next night. And then, of course, there was strike. I was stuck in the theater with him, sorting through all those murder mystery play props — tumblers and prop guns and suitcases — and we still didn’t have Yorick’s skull for the Shakespeare, and I should have known it was just a summer fling.
The theater was dark. No lights. No life. The Mousetrap had been swept away without a trace, and the community troupe that used the barn during the year for their productions hadn’t moved back in yet. I made my way to the set shop. Someone had left a light on.
“I thought you’d come. I expected you sooner.”
Jaime sat on a stool, perched above the sawdust that was splayed across the work table. The skull sat delicately on her lap.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” She held it up.
I nodded.
“How did you know?” I managed to ask — my mouth dry, a choking feeling creeping across my neck.
“I didn’t. You’d think a mother would recognize her own son...” She held up the skull. “Funny, fifteen years ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me. And then Jed was sorting props in the spring, before our season started, and he said something about the jaw line. But even then, I refused to believe it.”
I didn’t say a word. Anything I said at that point would have been an admission of guilt.
“You didn’t know, of course, that Harrison was my son. No one did.” She was right about that. So the rumors were true — he’d been that backstage baby. “I always imagined that he’d turn out to be a great success. His talent was clear. He was bound to be a grand sensation — designing Broadway shows. He never had the chance.” She didn’t seem to be looking at me at all, but she was. “It wasn’t fair that his killer’s career should take off.”
Her phone call. Her timing. It made sense to me now.
“At first I suspected Ginny. She thought it was her directing skills that got her the job. She should have known better. I’d forgotten that she’d gone home sick. Mono my ass. I knew that Harrison had that effect on young girls. I thought, it must have been either her or Dara. It was easy enough to convince Ginny that Dara was the perfect Gertrude. Of course, then Ginny reminded me that you had taken her place that summer. I didn’t mean to kill her.”
“Of course not. But if you knew—”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything for sure. The police had suspected Dara, so I thought I’d start with her.”
I could picture her driving down the path in her pickup truck, holding a gun to Dara’s head. The gun found at the scene was just a prop...
Before I could finish my thought, Jaime continued: “She sputtered something about Harrison working on props that night. The terror in her eyes. If she hadn’t killed Harrison, then it must have been you. I knew for sure then that this didn’t just look like Harrison, it was Harrison.” She held up the skull in one hand, a pistol in the other. This gun was no prop.
“You don’t have to kill me, Jaime. You could call the police.” I tried to reason.
“And tell them what? That I’ve killed two innocent women attempting to avenge my son’s death? Besides, I plan to turn myself in when I’m done with you. I thought leaving props by the bodies would be a nice touch — a tribute to my son. Unfortunately, it’s cast suspicion on my grandson.”
Her eyes wandered for a moment. It was all the time I needed. My hands had found the axe. The same axe that I had used fifteen years ago — in a jealous rage. It had been so easy to dispose of the body. The dumpster from strike had been right outside. No one had noticed the splatters of blood I had missed. They mixed right in with the paint. And Harrison’s head had solved the one prop problem that he hadn’t been able to fix before his demise. Hours of boiling and scraping — bleach and steel wool — had transformed him into Yorick. It’s amazing what the sleep-deprived mind will concoct.
Jaime would prove to be trickier. The dumpster was out at the pasture, but her truck was nearby. Work gloves to keep the prints off. All the actors and designers would be sleeping off their hangovers. I had a few hours to clean up the mess I had made.
And then what? I could get myself to a nunnery. Drown myself in a river. Or return to the city and hope that ghosts were figments of Shakespeare’s imagination.
Copyright © 2009 by Nina Mansfield
The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold
by Lee Goldberg
Fans of the Monk TV series and followers of Lee Goldberg’s tie-in novels about the obsessive compulsive San Francisco P.I. are in for a treat. Mr. Goldberg’s winter 2009 book in the Monk series, Mr. Monk in Trouble, contains this stand-alone short story. It stars not TV’s Adrian Monk but an ancestor of his, Old West assayer Artemis Monk, who shares some of Adrian’s obsessions, but has to cope with them amid the filth of an 1855 mining town.
Trouble, California, 1855
A dream killed my husband Hank Guthrie before his twenty-fifth year.
We’d been working this barren patch of dirt in Kansas, trying to make it into a farm and having no luck at it, when he read about all the gold that was sprinkled on the ground out west in California.
The newspapers said the riverbeds there were lined with gold and that anybody with two good arms, a shovel, and a tin pan could earn at least a hundred dollars a day without breaking a sweat. It sounded too good to be true, but that didn’t stop every poor farmer from catching gold fever anyway.
My Hank was one of them.
I tried to talk sense to him, but his mind was set on abandoning the farm, packing up what little we had, and heading to California.
I could hardly blame him for wanting to go.
When you’re killing yourself trying to grow a crop in a land as ornery, dry, and infertile as my old granny, you want to believe there’s an easier way.
I knew California couldn’t be the paradise of gold that the newspapers made it out to be, but I figured we couldn’t be any worse off than we already were. Besides, I was raised to obey my husband no matter how thickheaded, foolhardy, and stubborn he might be.
So in 1852 we teamed up with four other families and went west. Along the way, we lost nearly all of our cattle and had to toss our stove, our dishes, my momma’s candlesticks, and just about every possession we had to lighten our load. Those losses were nothing compared to the human toll. Half of our party died of cholera.
The way west was littered with valuables, graves, and animal carcasses from Kansas to California. More than once during those long, brutal months I wondered what wealth could await us that could match what we’d all lost.