The last thing he saw was that large letter C. With his last breath, he made the sound “Ccccc,” almost, Frances thought, as though he was trying to utter the other half, “clean.”
It was time to draw a bath. Frances Hart set her purse on the glass end table, pulled off her cotton gloves, and kicked off her shoes. She stepped into a pair of white slip-on house slippers with a nylon rose on top.
She took a roll of grocery produce bags from under the kitchen sink and tore off five or six. She separated them and folded them neatly, and placed them in a pocket inside her purse. The stunner was still disconnected from the electrodes on the purse handles, so she took it out — it was a simple one that Harry had designed — and put it back on its charger. One must always be ready for the unexpected.
She walked into the bathroom and, after giving the tub a quick rinse, set the plug and began to draw her bath.
It had been a long day. A good day, but a long one. She was tired, and feeling a little dirty. Now it was time to clean up.
The following morning, Cora Lewis made her way from one end of the kitchen to the other. She was furious. A slice of toast was getting cold on the kitchen table. A grapefruit sat on the cutting board beside the sink.
On her ever-present television, a local newscaster said, “Last night, a twenty-four-year-old man was found dead on the corner of High Street and Sweeney, another apparent victim of the Bell Town Strangler. Police are not disclosing the name of the victim and the details of his death. But sources tell us that the victim died of asphyxiation in a manner similar to that of five other men in the same vicinity over the past three months...”
“Damn her,” said Cora, not listening to the television, her mind on the grapefruit waiting to be sliced, as she frantically searched the countertops. “If Fran took my knife, we’ll see if I let her in my house again. I know she took it. That was part of a set we got for our anniversary. Frances and her damn purse.”
A place for everything, she thought angrily. And everything in its place.
She didn’t think to look at the side of her easy-chair cushion, where it had lain since Fran’s visit, its blade still sticky with the juice of yesterday’s orange.
Rearview Mirror
by Art Taylor
An assistant professor of English at George Mason University, Art Taylor also has his fingers in a number of related literary pies. He’s a fiction writer, an editor for Metro Magazine, a reviewer for Washington Post Book World, and a contributor to nonfiction fan magazines such as Mystery Scene. He’s a native of North Carolina and often sets his stories in the South; this tale was inspired by a trip he took to New Mexico and is in a somewhat lighter vein than most of his work.
I hadn’t been thinking about killing Delwood. Not really. But you know how people sometimes have just had enough. That’s what I’d meant when I said it to him: “I could just kill you,” the two of us sitting in his old Nova in front of a cheap motel on Route 66 — meaning it just figurative, even if that might seem at odds with me sliding his pistol into my purse right after I said it.
And even though I was indeed thinking hard about taking my half of the money and maybe a little more — literal now, literally taking it — I would not call it a double-cross. Just kind of a divorce and a divorce settlement, I guess. Even though we weren’t married. But that’s not the point.
Sometimes people are just too far apart in their wants — that’s what my mama told me. Sometimes things just don’t work out.
That was the point.
“Why don’t we take the day off,” I’d asked him earlier that morning up in Taos, a Saturday, the sun creeping up but everything still mostly quiet in the trailer park where we’d been renting on the biweekly. “We could go buy you a suit, and I could get a new dress. And then maybe we’d go out to dinner. To Joseph’s Table, maybe. Celebrate a little.”
He snorted. “Louise,” he said, the way he does. “What’s it gonna look like, the two of us, staying out here, paycheck to paycheck, economical to say the least” — he put a little emphasis on economical, always liking the sound of anything above three syllables — “and then suddenly going out all spiffed up to the nicest restaurant in town?” He looked at me for a while, and then shook his head.
“We don’t have to go to the nicest restaurant,” I said, trying to compromise, which is the mark of a good relationship. “We could just go down to the bar at the Taos Inn and splurge on some high-dollar bourbon and a couple of nice steaks.” I knew he liked steaks, and I could picture him smiling over it, chewing, both of us fat and happy. So to speak, I mean, the fat part being figurative again, of course.
“We told Hal we’d vacate the premises by this morning. We agreed.”
Hal was the man who ran the trailer park. A week or so before, Del had told him he’d finally gotten his degree and then this whole other story about how we’d be moving out to California, where Del’s sister lived, and how we were gonna buy a house over there.
“Sister?” I had wanted to say when I overheard it. “House?” But then I realized he was just laying the groundwork, planning ahead so our leaving wouldn’t look sudden or suspicious. Concocting a story — I imagine that’s the way he would have explained it, except he didn’t explain it to me, he just did it.
That’s the way he was sometimes: a planner, not a communicator. Taciturn, he called it. Somewhere in there, in his not explaining and my not asking, he had us agreeing. And now he had us leaving.
“Okay,” I told Del. “We’ll just go then. But how ’bout we rent a fancy car? A convertible, maybe. A nice blue one.” And I could see it — us cruising through the Sangre de Cristos on a sunny afternoon, the top slid back and me sliding across the seat too, leaning over toward him, maybe kicking my heels up and out the window. My head would be laid on his shoulder and the wind would slip through my toes. Now that would be nice.
“No need to blow this windfall on some extravagance,” he said. “No need to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily. Our car works fine.”
He headed for it then — an old Nova. Little spots of rust ran underneath the doors and up inside the wheel well. A bad spring in the seat always bit into my behind. Lately, the rearview mirror had started to hang just a little loose — not so that Delwood couldn’t see in it, but enough that it rattled against the windshield whenever the road got rough.
I stood on the steps with my hip cocked and my arms crossed, so that when he turned and looked at me in that rearview mirror, he’d know I was serious. But he just climbed in the car, and sat there staring ahead. Nothing to look back at, I guess. He’d already packed the car while I slept. The trailer behind us was empty of the few things we owned.
“A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me.
When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.
“It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug extra hard into my left rump.
Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.
When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d just been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the Cosmos off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.