I’d only seriously prayed once in my entire life. About a year ago. I’d asked God to please find a match for Aubrey. It had been an odd feeling, like I really had no business asking since I’d never once prayed before. I’d never spent time in church or thought about religion or God or anything else. Maybe on a few occasions when I’d been stoned as a teenager, talking with friends about the afterlife, but that was about it. So I’d felt guilty praying, like I was trying to get something for free.
But now, as Mike McGill took a quick right and rolled the car into Dunkin’ for a coffee, I closed my eyes, shutting out the pink glow of the store, and silently prayed for only the second time ever. Something told me I shouldn’t beat around the bush, just be flat-out honest. And so I said it, direct and to the point. Please, God, don’t let it be a match. Make there be a problem. Make it not work.
Then I stepped out of the car, zipped my jacket tight to my throat, and put on my game face. I walked inside, forced a smile at Judy, who’d been working there for as long as I’d been on the force. A woman I’d seen nearly every day for the past twenty years, who was almost as familiar to me as Aubrey was. As Ginny was. “Can I get a large, Jude? Black. I think it’s gonna be a long night.”
“Sure thing, Rob. You want a lid?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, a lid would be good.”
Promises to Keep
by Sharon Hunt
Sharon Hunt’s first story for EQMM, “The Water Was Rising,” appeared in the August 2015 issue and went on to receive nominations for both the Thriller and Arthur Ellis awards. The Canadian author has had stories in a number of literary magazines, and in our sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
The second time her name was screamed, Constance Hunter stopped walking. People stared at her, most likely thinking she was too well dressed to be one of them. The irony was not lost on her. Too well dressed or too shabbily dressed, she had never been one of them despite growing up here. She would hardly become one of them now, nearing the end.
She hated this town as much as she longed for it, with an intensity that made her legs weaken, even though Amelia was nothing much. It was hard to find on a map and didn’t even show up on some, just another small town in the woods, dotting the northeast coast. Over the past forty years it, like most of its neighbours, hollowed out as the anchors of the local economy — here, a pulp and paper factory — closed or moved somewhere else. The middle-class life most worked for disappeared overnight and those who didn’t pack up to chase after it retreated behind doors kicked shut more often than quietly closed, waiting out their time in mended clothes and bitterness.
Constance’s mother, Ruth, eventually retreated behind the doors her daughter’s fame purchased, but the bitterness had set into her and leached into Constance long before that.
Both times, Constance’s name was screamed, not shouted, screamed the way girls at school screamed “Paul,” “John,” “George,” and “Ringo” fifty years ago. Feckless girls, they had no shame about embarrassing themselves in public. Now perhaps one of them, grown as old as Constance, had no shame about embarrassing her, again.
She was in no mood for attention, working hard at being anonymous whenever she was here, especially on this last visit.
After the first scream she kept walking, never encouraging public displays even though they were few and far between anymore. Forty years ago she couldn’t walk around anywhere alone. Like the Beatles, she would have been mobbed, although not with the same ferocity or as much by adoring fans as photographers hunting pictures of a movie star for whom tragedy in love became her real fame.
There had been a Paul, John, and George in her life — two actors and a producer, not the iconic musicians — with whom she created the tragedies, but the public frenzy for them was out of all proportion. Even in Amelia, people had tragic love affairs, she knew only too well.
Upon hearing her name the second time, she watched a woman in a red caftan running along, her sleeves flapping as if trying to lift her across the street. The woman’s helmet of silver hair was yellowed, reminding Constance of tarnished cutlery.
Resigned to endure whatever was approaching, she removed her sunglasses and smiled. When the woman removed her own glasses, Constance’s smile broadened.
“Oh Constance, it is you. I just knew from that regal bearing and there was talk in the coffee shop that someone saw you at the airport.”
The woman, Constance’s age but failing miserably at looking younger, smiled broadly. Her thin caftan was something for the beach, not running around the main street of town.
She never had any class, Constance thought.
“I’m sorry but I’m not good with faces or names anymore. I’ve become forgetful in my old age,” she lied, extending her hand to Brenda Connors, who clasped it like a drowning woman being hauled to shore.
“Please, I understand completely. Brenda Sampson, well, Brenda Connors when we were friends at school.”
“Oh, Brenda, of course. Hello.”
By the time Brenda Connors — Sampson — said goodbye, Constance had agreed to dinner at her home the next evening.
That was easier than I imagined, Constance thought, walking to her car.
Whenever she came back, Constance felt the same choking anger that drove her onto that bus at seventeen, the last of her mother’s savings in her pocket. The fact that Constance made it in Hollywood — for a short time, at least — meant little in Amelia. It caused flutters of recognition — like this morning — but no real pride. She was still just one of those Hunter women who never knew their place, thinking they could slink up the mountain and settle in with the ones living there.
The mountain was cut through by a narrow strip of road with fresh blacktop and no potholes, while you could sink in the cracks and craters in the rest of Amelia’s streets.
Amelia’s founding families and their sycophants lived up there, behind grey stones and iron fences with pointed finials that assured you would puncture something if you tried climbing over them. The descendants of these families might have arrived penniless but didn’t stay that way for long. The matriarch of the Sampson clan, Amelia, lost no time in naming the town for herself and declaring the Sampsons a dynasty, when all they were was thieves, drunkards, and worse. She bought the forest for as far as you could see for a pittance, wrapped up the logging rights in perpetuity through intimidation, and settled behind those grey stones, plotting alliances and controlling who was allowed into her family. When she died, that job fell to her son and his son, after that. For five generations, there were only male Sampsons born to women who were carefully selected to be part of the dynasty.
Constance was never going to become a Sampson, any more than her mother before her. Even if Roger, Jr., was in love with Constance, although Ruth assured her he wasn’t, love wasn’t going to dance her into the Sampson mansion. Roger, Jr., was just using her, the way his father used Constance’s mother. Even on her deathbed, the specter of that Roger’s betrayal blotted out everything else in Ruth’s life. Her final thoughts were of him, venomous and poisoning her coming eternal rest as they had her ending life.
Constance took the old Lake Road, navigating the sharp turns and fissures as easily as when she drove Roger’s convertible that last summer, before she left town and he fell in line about Brenda. The Connorses weren’t as rich as the Sampsons but the fathers belonged to the same club and worked at the same law firm, unlike Constance’s father, who neither golfed nor worked and finally drifted away in an alcoholic haze.