"I came out here to bring you something." "What?"
I gave her the thin, cheap, yellowed envelope I'd found in Papa's desk with his special letters and papers. It was addressed in neat, cursive pencil to "Clayton." Inside was a silly Valentine card. Betty Boop popping bonbons in her pouty lips, exclaiming "Ooooh, I'm sweet on you." It was childish and lascivious at the same time, and it was signed with a lipstick blot, now brown with age, and with the name "Stella," surrounded by a heart. I said, "He must have kept this since the seventh grade." She nodded. "Clayton was a good man." Her cigarette fell from her ashtray onto the floor. When I came over to pick it up, she said, "Goodness is luck; like money, like looks. Clayton was lucky that way." She went to the piano and took more ice from the bucket there; one piece she rubbed around the back of her neck, then dropped into her glass. She turned, the eyes wet, like lilac stars. "You know, in Hollywood, they said, 'Hibble?! What kind of hick name is that, we can't use that!' So I said, 'Use Doyle, then.' I mean, I took Hugh's name six years before he ever came out to get me. Because I knew he'd come. The day I left Thermopylae he kept yelling at me, 'You can't have both!' He kept yelling it while the bus was pulling out. 'You can't have me and it both!' He wanted to rip my heart out for leaving, for wanting to go." Stella moved along the curve of the white piano to a photograph of Hugh Doyle in a white open shirt, grinning straight out at the sun. She said, "But I could have both. There were only two things I had to have in this little world, and one was the lead in a movie called Fever, and the other one was Hugh Doyle." She put the photograph down carefully. "I didn't know about the cancer till my lawyers found out he'd been to see that doctor in Atlanta. Then it was easy to get the jury to go for suicide." She smiled at me. "Well, not easy. But we turned them around. I think your papa was the only man in town who never thought I was guilty."
It took me a while to take it in. "Well, he sure convinced me," I said.
"I expect he convinced a lot of people. Everybody thought so much of Clayton."
"You killed your husband."
We looked at each other. I shook my head. "Why?"
She shrugged. "We had a fight. We were drunk. He was sleeping with my fucking maid. I was crazy. Lots of reasons, no reason. I sure didn't plan it."
"You sure didn't confess it either."
"What good would that have done? Hugh was dead. I wasn't about to let his snooty-assed mother shove me in the gas chamber and pocket the money."
I shook my head. "Jesus. And you've never felt a day's guilt, have you?"
Her head tilted back, smoothing her throat. The shuttered sun had fallen down the room onto the floor, and evening light did a movie fade and turned Stella Doyle into the star in the painting behind her. "Ah, baby, don't believe it," she said. The room stayed quiet.
I stood up and dropped the empty bottle in the wastebas-ket. I said, "Papa told me how he was in love with you."
Her laugh came warmly through the shuttered dusk. "Yes, and I guess I was sweet on him, too, boop boop dedoo."
"Yeah, Papa said no man could say he'd been alive if he'd seen you and not felt that way. I just wanted to tell you I know what he meant." I raised my hand to wave good-bye.
"Come over here," she said, and I went to her chair and she reached up and brought my head down to her and kissed me full and long on the mouth. "So long, Buddy." Slowly her hand moved down my face, the huge diamond radiant.
News came over the wire. The tabloids played with it for a few days on back pages. They had some pictures. They dug up the Hugh Doyle trial photos to put beside the old studio glossies. The dramatic death of an old movie star was worth sending a news camera down to Thermopylae, North Carolina, to get a shot of the charred ruin that had once been Red Hills. A shot of the funeral parlor and the flowers on the casket.
My sister phoned me that there was even a crowd at the coroner's inquest at the courthouse. They said Stella Doyle had died in her sleep after a cigarette set fire to her mattress. But rumors started that her body had been found at the foot of the stairs, as if she'd been trying to escape the fire, but had fallen. They said she was drunk. They buried her beside Hugh Doyle in the family plot, the fanciest tomb in the Methodist cemetery, not far from where my parents were buried. Not long after she died, one of the cable networks did a night of her movies. I stayed up to watch Fever again.
My wife said, "Buddy, I'm sorry, but this is the biggest bunch of sentimental slop I ever saw. The whore'11 sell her jewels and get the medicine and they'll beat the epidemic but she'll die to pay for her past and then the town'11 see she was really a saint. Am I right?"
"You're right."
She sat down to watch awhile. "You know, I can't decide if she's a really lousy actress or a really good one. It's weird."
I said, "Actually, I think she was a much better actress than anyone gave her credit for."
My wife went to bed, but I watched through the night. I sat in Papa's old rocking chair that I'd brought north with me after his death. Finally at dawn I turned off the set, and Stella's face disappeared into a star, and went out. The reception was awful and the screen too small. Besides, the last movie was in black and white; I couldn't see her eyes as well as I could remember the shock of their color, when she first turned toward me at the foot of the courthouse steps, that hot August day when I was ten, when my father stepped forward out of the crowd to take her hand, when her eyes were lilacs turned up to his face, and his straw hat in the summer sun was shining like a knight's helmet.
Nancy Drew Remembers (A Parody) by BOBBIE ANN MASON
"I shall write my memoirs," Nancy Drew declared. "That should put all those nasty rumors to rest."
As far as Nancy Drew was concerned, she was still the same attractive, golden-haired girl detective she had always been, but not everyone agreed. Chance remarks in River Heights had been troubling her, and her reputation had declined since Draco S. Wren had come to live with her. Nancy knew now that she owed the world an explanation. Besides, her hair wasn't really golden anymore.
"I will begin at the turning point of my career," she thought. "It was many years ago, but I remember it as well as I remember that picnic when Bess Marvin got ptomaine from the pear tart."
She sat at her carved-oak escritoire with the secret clue drawer and began to write the story of what happened many years ago when she was only thirty-nine or so and still had flawless skin.
A Pleasant Afternoon Tea
Nancy Drew felt troubled and defeated for the first time in her career (she decided to write in third person because she wasn't sure she wanted to sign a confession), although in the books she always triumphed over evil easily. The crooks wore hats pulled down low over their eyes, and they always had shockingly poor manners, making them easy to spot. But lately it seemed that her authoress was straying from the proper plots. As Nancy read about herself engaged in this or that adventure, she felt nostalgic for some of her old mysteries.
"The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, for example," she said to herself. "Now that was a satisfactory adventure."
Nancy had watched her roadster change to a convertible, and she read about herself on improbable airplane rides. "I was so much more comfortable in the old days," she said with a sigh. "Most of my best mysteries were within driving distance of River Heights." She missed her blue roadster. She wished she had a mystery like The Password to Larkspur Lane to solve, instead of her current problem.