Betty picked up the carafe and filled her cup and my mug. Then she held out her cup. I tapped it with the mug, and we drank.
“Rabart was going to sell the house,” she said. “He gave them three months to find another place to live. Apparently his new position in Connecticut was the perfect excuse to sever the cord.
“After all those years of good living at Rabart’s expense, spending their golden years in a trailer wasn’t in the cards. So at five o’clock the morning after the party they helped him load his trunk into the back of the station wagon. When he turned to Milt to give him a last handshake, Elinor pulled Milt’s Knights of Columbus ceremonial sword from under the car and rammed it through his chest.
“Now, if you think about it, even if that thing had severed his aorta, it still would have been a terrible minute or so until he died. Chief Morin asked them if they said anything to him while he lay there with three feet of steel through him, and they looked at Morin like he was some kind of lizard.”
Betty drank some of her wine. “They unloaded the chest, folded Rabart into it, and hauled it up to the attic. They called Connecticut and told the university that he was killed in a car accident up here. They waited a week, then spread the word and drove down to Connecticut in a rented car for the ‘funeral.’ While there, they found a printer who made up a newspaper facsimile describing Gordon’s accident and sent it up here to the Gazette, which printed the thing. They told everyone that Gordon had always wanted to be buried in Connecticut because that’s where his parents were buried, which happens to be true.”
She poured more wine in her cup and gave me a sideways look. “They have a good lawyer, and tomorrow everybody meets with the D.A. for a plea-bargain session. Gloria Barbara, our new assistant D.A., thinks they’ll get five or six years in the locked ward at the county home.”
“Five or six years in a county home?”
“This is rural America, Harry. The courts are backlogged into the next century, and the prisons are jammed. And no one in the
D.A.’s office wants to be the one to take those two nice, fat, sick old people before a jury of their peers.”
We drank in silence for several minutes. Then Betty tapped me on the hand. “We’re going to haul the station wagon out of the garage later this afternoon.” She smiled thinly. “About an hour ago Donny Pavia, our new gung-ho apprentice patrolman, radioed in that he thought he’d heard someone prowling around back there and wanted to know if he should check it out. I told him to stay on the porch. Didn’t want him to waste some curiosity seeker hiding in the trees.”
I nodded slowly. “That was probably a good idea.”
Annie was in her kitchen, but I decided against any theatrics. I backed away from the window and rapped on the door. When she answered, I said, “Perhaps a glass of wine?”
She nodded, stepped back into the kitchen, and ran her hand through hair that looked like it might have been combed last Christmas.
She pushed a pile of magazines off an ancient wood chair painted three different colors and seated me at the kitchen table, which was a cluttered mishmash of cast-iron pans, three working toasters, about six weeks’ worth of newspapers, and a wire cage with a sleek looking gerbil in it.
Cat pulled herself out of the sling onto the table and despite her handicaps threaded her way through the junk without bumping into anything, sat down in front of the gerbil’s cage, and clamped her good paw on the wire door.
Annie put a water glass full of white wine in front of me. She raised her own glass, and we toasted and drank.
I pulled the package wrapped in brittle gold foil from under my sweat jacket and handed it to her.
She stared at it for a long time, took a sudden deep breath, and looked at me.
I smiled, gently I hoped, and said nothing. She carefully slipped the stiff, mold-blackened ribbon off the package and tried to unwrap the thick gold foil paper. It was too brittle and fell apart in her hands, so she just pushed it off, revealing a cedarwood box. She studied the box, then pried up the clasp. Reaching in, she plucked several small pieces of yellowed pasteboard out of the box and fanned them out like a hand of cards.
She looked at them a few moments and then whispered, “Two tickets to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for a special showing of modern Impressionists, two tickets to The King and I, and two tickets to the new Boston Aquarium.”
She raised her glass and gulped down the wine. Then she pushed herself up with both hands, grabbed the bottle off the counter, and refilled her glass.
We sat in the dim, cluttered kitchen. Annie, the tears flowing down her face, gazed at the tickets in her trembling hand. And I looked out the window at the coming night and listened to the distant rumble of thunder.
Finally Annie came around the table, patted my shoulder twice, and shuffled out of the kitchen.
Cat limped over to the edge of the table, fell into my arms, laid her small head against my chest, and meowed softly as thunder rolled over The Farm.
Barbara D’Amato
Motel 66
From Murder on Route 66
About eight miles south of Bloomington-Normal, June finally convinced Donald to let her drive. At that point they were a hundred and thirty miles away from Chicago. A hundred and thirty miles from home. Donald had crossed the middle line too often, and she was worried about the amount of champagne he had drunk. The secondhand Packard that was her grandfather’s wedding gift held the road through sheer weight, tacking slowly like a working sailboat and not much less hefty than a Packard hearse, but there were giant produce trucks with vertical wooden pickets holding loads of asparagus coming the other way, bound to Chicago probably, and June was terrified about what would happen if Donald steered into one head-on.
Once relieved of driving, David picked a champagne bottle off the floor of the back seat and swigged some of it. Donald’s brother had put six of the bottles of champagne that had not been drunk into the car, saying “Celebrate!”
“Do you think you should have all that?” she asked, very cautiously, not wanting to start off their marriage sounding like a nag.
“Why, sure, Juney. If I can’t drink champagne today, what day can I ever drink it?”
“Well, that’s true.”
It was getting late and the sun was low. A noon wedding had been followed by the wedding lunch, then the bouquet-throwing, and finally she had changed into this peach-colored suit and matching little hat, and her new wedding hairstyle. She felt glamorous, but the straight skirt was too tight for comfortable driving. She wondered if she should hike it up, but she would feel brazen to have her thighs exposed. Then she thought, “How silly. We’re married.” But she still didn’t hike it up. Somehow it just didn’t seem right.
Her mother had insisted on June and Donald having a good solid snack before they left, and it turned out, much as June hated to admit it, her mother had been right. They would really have been hungry by now otherwise. The woman had also put a package of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper in a bag in the back seat and June had eaten a sandwich while Donald drove. He only seemed to want champagne.
They had passed three or four Motel 66s along Route 66 as they headed south. But they had no connection with each other, Donald said. She said, “Maybe they’re a chain, like Howard Johnson’s.”
But Donald said, “No. Howard Johnson’s is restaurants. There aren’t any motel chains.”
She was sure she’d heard of some, but she didn’t want to contradict Donald, because he didn’t like being contradicted. And anyway it wasn’t important.