He’d killed a man. A bad man by any measure. Peach wondered how that’d settle in his stomach. In that moment, as his ’92 Ford choked to attention, all he felt was hot. Too hot to worry about it. Too hot to wonder. It was almost too hot to remember his lines as he backed out of his parking spot and drove away from the Palm Springs Hotel.
A few more cockroaches skittered out of the drain, but Bernie had already had his fill. He struggled at the smooth wall of the toilet until enough of him cleared the lip and the rest spilled after. Bernie crawled over the bodies of John Carmel and Sherman Fisk. He smelled them, but didn’t bother even to nibble. He wasn’t hungry.
Bernie made his way out of the room, across the gravel, and into the swamp behind Palmetto Springs, where wildlife he could only imagine slithered between knotty roots and bubbled under dark water.
How Does He Die This Time?
by Nancy Novick
Nancy Novick describes herself as a Midwestern transplant. For close to two decades she has lived in the New York City area, where she has worked as a medical writer, editor, and instructor. She’s currently the editor of West Side Words, a blog for and about readers and writers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. How fitting it is that her first short story should be about a writer!
Ellen was sipping from her “Librarians Do It by the Book” mug when Charlie came downstairs, nursing a slight but nagging headache.
“Hello,” she said, and put her hand briefly over his as he sat down beside her at their kitchen counter. “That was fun last night, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, though he wasn’t sure he meant it. The party had been a great success for Ellen. Her editor, a tall woman with hennaed hair and black nail polish, was in from New York, and their friends had turned out in force. Even the rain held off until well after twilight, so the guests were able to spill outside onto the patio. If it had gone on a little later than Charlie would have liked, he understood. It was Ellen’s night.
He was pleasantly surprised now to find that the dishwasher was humming with the first load of dishes, though she tended to oversoap. Ellen handed him a cup of coffee from the fresh pot. She looked rested and pleased; her dark blond hair, streaked with silver now, was pulled back from her face. Ellen looked good, Charlie thought with satisfaction. She was one of those few fortunate women who got more appealing with age and had, in recent years, acquired a scrubbed-clean look, as if, now that the primary responsibilities of mothering were finished, she had shed a psychic weight. Ellen’s recent success, rather than overstimulating her, seemed to relax her.
Yes, it would be wrong, he thought, to begrudge her this moment. She had worked hard and she deserved it. And he certainly benefited from her achievements. The house, freshly painted and brightened by the recent purchases of a new sofa and curtains, had never looked better. They had indulged in some luxuries, a pool table for him, the new table lamps, and a whimsical iron coatrack with arms like tree branches. That last choice was a little over the top, but he had agreed to it with an uneasy feeling that it was her money in play. Still, it was odd that most of their guests now came to see Ellen, not “Ellen and Charlie.”
They had been celebrating the publication of Ellen’s fifth book. Deepest Sympathy was another mystery, this one set in Oregon, where they had spent six months thirty years earlier. “I’m worried it might be a little dated,” she told him when the idea first occurred to her, one of the few details she revealed about her project. But when he suggested a trip out West for “research” — he had lots of time on his hands these days — she had demurred. “I can probably find everything I need on the Internet.”
He would like to travel, though, to go someplace new, take the kind of vacation she used to bring up. Something with the university, maybe, with lectures to satisfy her academic side. There was one in Greece she had mentioned at least a few times, even if they couldn’t go this year. The publication of a new book would mean a tour and appearances, a remarkable vote of confidence in these days of limited marketing resources, but Ellen’s publishers, delighted with her success and the appeal of her small-town persona, were happy to support their golden goose. Well, maybe next year. In the meantime, he would think more about how he would spend his time while she was away. When the first book was published, he had enjoyed being on his own. He played golf often, went to bed early, and relished the orderliness of a house with no other occupants. Apart from their nightly phone call and the visit from their daughters, he savored the silence of his bachelor life. It was only toward the end of the tours that he would get lonely, even missing what otherwise bothered him, the damp bath towels left draped over a bedroom chair, or her habit of leaving her overflowing tote bag near the front door when she came back from running errands or her now part-time job.
Charlie watched Ellen now, wiping the counter carelessly, with a not entirely clean dish towel. When she had finished, a ring from the water pitcher remained on the shining granite surface. He held his tongue.
Outside, Razzie, the neighbors’ German shepherd, was barking in loud, insistent bursts. Charlie’s head began to throb
“God, I wish that dog would give it a rest,” he snapped.
“Oh, she’ll quiet down in a minute,” Ellen answered soothingly. “The Allens were nice enough to keep her in last night anyway.”
Charlie reached past her for the plastic pill container. Only two pills, both of which kept his blood pressure in check, and a couple of vitamins that his doctor had assured him would keep him feeling good and “out on the links” for a long time to come. But he resented the little routine of morning and evening pills, nostalgic for the time when he freely ate what he wanted and slept like a baby. Ellen had dripped some soapy water from the sponge onto the container, which slipped from his hand to the floor. He pressed his lips together in irritation as he reached down for it.
All that morning he was out of sorts. He found a smeared, crusty spot on the new sofa, where someone had spilled some food the night before, and then tried, ineffectually, to rub it off with a napkin.
He suffered from a vague and frustrating feeling of wanting something, but not knowing exactly what it was. It happened fairly often now that he was retired, or semiretired, as he liked to tell his friends, thinking that it made him sound less obsolete. The firm that had recruited Charlie right out of graduate school continued to send some consulting jobs his way, and he wrote the occasional article for an industry magazine. “Civil engineering is valuable work. Lives depend on it,” he would tell the children back when they were young. Recently he had started serving on the town council — not really a job, if truth be told, but he preferred to think of it that way. Though others clearly didn’t.
“How is it, being a kept man?” Al Kinney had asked after their last council meeting. Al still worked in the city, though as a senior partner he was able to make his own schedule. The two were in the parking lot walking toward their cars. “Can’t beat it,” Charlie had replied, smiling, aware that condescension weighed more heavily than envy in Al’s tone.
Ellen’s writing had started as a hobby, something to fill her time when Tara, their youngest, had left for Oberlin. In a way, it was surprising that she hadn’t tried it before. With her years of experience as the children’s librarian at the town’s only branch, he had assumed she would try her hand at picture books, something about woodland animals or an eccentric child with a special talent. When her manuscript turned out to be a mystery, he recalled that Ellen had been in the habit of bringing home volumes of Agatha Christie and P.D. James, and then a writer named Patricia Highsmith. More than once he had found her in the kitchen reading with such rapt absorption that he’d had to speak to her twice before he could get her attention.