Calamity Jane got herself killed on a Friday and less than a week later Myrna and me thought we had solved the case. Not proved it, mind you, but definitely solved it. Well, were we wrong.
Myrna phoned me with the news of the murder. I hadn't gotten to the radio yet, being busy in the garden. Our resident toad had startled me by blinking out from the grotto of ferns and I lost track of time weaving together the drooped fronds and talking to him.
Myrna was 'living out' at the time, taking care of two old twins who were sick of life and sick of each other but just too woeful to die. One of them had gotten a nuisant out-of-season cold and she'd agreed to live in for a bit; it was supposed to be for a week or two but it was already nearly a month and Myrna was becoming cantankerous herself.
"If no one ever bothered you you'd never come in out of that garden," she chided me. "How do you expect to know what's going on in the world, in your own neighbourhood in fact?"
"I expect the bees would tell me if it were important," I told her calmly. "What's happened?"
She told me, but first she made me go get a glass of water with a bit of bicarb in it because she thinks I have a queasy stomach. I don't. I have a queasy heart and soda is useless on it. But I ran the water and rattled a cupboard door and made drinking sounds before I picked up the kitchen phone again. What Myrna can't see won't hurt her. I am the elder sister, after all.
She told me. Phyllis Carstairs had either fallen or been pushed down her basement stairs and a cement block dropped on her head.
"Whoooo-weee!" I breathed, sitting suddenly onto a chair by the table. Maybe I should have really taken the soda.
"Are you all right?" she asked after a moment or so while she made deep breathing sounds that she hoped I would follow. I did.
"Yes, of course," I replied. I wanted to remind her it was me who baited our hooks and put the poor fish out of their misery when we went fishing in the creek at the end of our street but remembering how I did this, it did not seem a good time to mention it.
"Is Papa 'at coffee'?"
Since it was just on eleven she knew he was. He walks downtown every morning, whatever the weather, and spends an hour or so with some other men in a cafe almost as old as he is. The coffee shop, that is. He's ninety-two. Most of the other gents are 'youngsters' in their seventies and eighties.
"Then he'll have heard. Don't give him jelly for lunch. Tell him we're out of it."
"You know darned well he'll trot back downtown and get another jar if I do that."
Papa has been having grape jelly on some sort of bread every lunch time for thirty years or so. For his dessert. Presently he's hooked on bagels. The problem is that if he is overly excited about anything – and the spectacular murder of a woman hardly a block away certainly qualified – the grape jelly seems to rile his body to match his mind and he can't sleep. And an afternoon nap is what keeps him healthy and me and Myrna sane. Papa starts trying to rearrange our lives when he gets riled.
"I'll make him potato pancakes for lunch. He'll eat so many it won't leave room for much jelly."
"I'll drop by this afternoon and we'll discuss this." I knew she meant the murder. Myrna and me have had some success with such problems in our town, well, city as it is now. Papa still calls it a village. The local police have some notion that we are psychic and we have been right enough in the past for them to pay attention to us. It's more common sense than hocus pocus. But maybe that's what being psychic is all about.
I thought about Phyllis while I peeled and grated the potatoes (I added an extra for insurance). She'd moved into the neighbourhood a year or so back, into the old Seymour house which was on the next block over but down two houses. Our lots are still large and treed so I can't see her property as I might in the new developments. She was a distant relation of Ernie Seymour and because the closer relatives had all died she inherited the house. She lived there with a cousin who seemed a bit simple but I think it was some medical problem that was controlled by drugs that kept her sort of dazey.
We called her Calamity Jane because from the very start she seemed to cause annoying ripples and even tiny ripples in our old and established neighbourhood reveal our intolerance of disruption, of change.
Little things like having the ancient yew hedge taken down when she hadn't been in the house a month. Ernie Seymour had planted that hedge himself with shoots he'd gotten from the Gilbert estate when the Gilberts still lived there. When she felt the outrage, silent and otherwise, Phyllis said she'd wanted light. I could have told her about careful clipping and pruning. She'd hacked down history and there was resentment. And the place where the hedge had been was soon all nicely grassed but it still looked like a scar.
Not a reason to push someone down stairs and…I shuddered and got on with the pancakes.
Myrna came by at three and went straight to the pantry and got one of her famous cranberry loaves out of the freezer that still bothered Papa with its presence even though we've had it for twelve years. He claims things frozen acquire a funny taste and even though he's long since refused to eat anything frozen he still gets the taste in his mouth whenever he spots the freezer. He eats quite happily the things we thaw out of his sight.
"I'll take this over to that cousin of Phyllis – I never can remember her name – when I go back to the Twins. And express our condolences."
It was what we do in our neighbourhood but I could not remember the loss ever being so violent. Myrna spread the cut slices out on a tray so they would thaw by the time she left. I knew she would then put the reassembled loaf in plastic wrap so I went to the garden to get something to accompany it. It took a bit of thought but I finally selected a stem of myrtle and some sweet cicely. I don't know what they mean in the language of flowers but I hoped it was appropriate. I had considered rosemary (remembrance) and arugula (deceit) but they both seemed a bit insinuating.
Myrna had taken the tea tray out to the front verandah. I toss a bucket of water across its cement floor every morning in warm weather and by afternoon, once the noonday sun has whisked around the corners and passed on, it smells sort of moist and gingery. Myrna says the smell reminds her of freshly ironed linen. Papa once said it was exactly like a rain forest. To Myrna's and my knowledge he has never been in a rainforest but he does read a lot of National Geographic.
He was nicely asleep in his lounge chair out under the maple in the side yard. We could just see his feet. Myrna nodded toward him and gave a relieved sigh.
"Seven pancakes," I told her.
Well, we sipped our tea and nibbled our cakes and dutifully ate our bowl each of yogurt (the Seniors Centre had a woman speaking on the benefits of yogurt for the aging population and Myrna and me had been so impressed – and intimidated by what could happen to us if we neglected all the goodies thus contained – that we had been having a bowl every day ever since. Papa refused to touch it).
And we discussed the murder.
Myrna had a few facts such as time of discovery (early this morning) and people involved (the cousin had found her) but it was too soon for any real details.
Papa must have gotten some gory tidbits from his cronies at the cafe but he would have found it indelicate to pass these on to me. He had limited himself at lunch time to admitting that he knew of the murder but was darned noncommital when I tried to talk about it.
He was definitely riled but not to the point where he was going to want to change the furniture around in any or all the rooms in the house (it's been where it is for fifty or so years and that suits Myrna and me just fine) or tell me I ought to join some groups so I will meet new people. He seems to figure Myrna gets more than her share of exposure to the world in her 'living outs' but as for me I too often come across stategically placed brochures (he must pick them up in the library and save them for his tiresome times) for such as Tole Painting With Thelma or The Historical, Architectural and Graveyard Society (even if we are a city now we still are small and bunch things together).
Once when he was in a state he decided our cats needed to be belled because they were a menace to the birds. Our youngest cat was eleven years old at the time so you would think the birds would no longer be at risk. But belled the cats were. It was only when Old Tom managed to somehow chew off the collar and swallow the bell (or so we thought) and spend two days at the veterinarian that Papa gave up the notion. He can be irksome.
Myrna and me talked about the murder in the soft afternoon shade of the verandah while the bees joyed around collecting nectar. We don't really seem to come to our conclusions logically which is likely why the police think there is something supernatural about our deductions.
We just kind of talk. And talk. And talk. And then something seems to come clear. Usually.
Well, that's what we did then. We discussed everything we knew about Phyllis since her arrival in the neighbourhood. Went over all the 'calamities' that had occurred, the yew hedge and the rickety old car (there are likely finacially distressed people in our neighbourhood but appearnaces are kept up and understanding has it that the house was bequeathed with funds sufficient for its upkeep and that of its occupants but that Phyllis just didn't care how her car looked). The lack of church attendance. Any church. Her comments about spraying fruit trees and weeds with substances as toxic as DDT (I agreed with her in THEORY but when my Cox Pippins got in trouble I admit it – I sprayed!) The plastic lawn furniture. The sheer curtains in the front windows where there had always been lace taken down every spring and entrusted to the only authentic Chinese laundry in town.
We went over from different angles the reactionof all and sundry to these. There did not seem sufficient motive to do one's neighbour in.
That was Friday. On Saturday, Aloyisus Mason came by from the police to see if we had seen or heard anything or had any opinions. He's a captain or something on the force – he tries not to smile when I seem to consistently forget his rank so I've stopped trying to remember (so annoying these mental blocks of aging) – and he is a very nice young man, somewhere in his mid forties, I think.
He has at times referred to Myrna and me as the Bronte sisters but I think he does Papa a disservice in this. Papa, over the years, has wanted Myrna and me to find true love and happiness with some suitable gentlemen and move out on our own – he says that would leave the way clear for him to bring in some nice widow – but Myrna and me have never found anyone suitable. Papa has found many – he still does. And Myrna and me are now quite amused when he brings someone home for a visit that he considers son-in-law material.
I am the only one who calls Aloyisus by that name – Myrna calls him Al or Officer Mason, I don't think she can remember his title either – I have never known anyone by that name, I like very much the sound of it, and I take every opportunity to use it.
I had nothing to tell him and he had nothing, really, to pass on to me that I did not already know from the newspaper and Myrna and my own chats with neighbours. Except that Phyllis had died of a broken neck, likely when she fell. He told me this as I was picking a sprig of apple scented geranium for him: his wife likes to chop it up fine in her gingerbread, the recipe of which she got from me, I am pleased to say.
My heart went into a quease but I found myself commenting, "So why on earth would anyone drop a block? It almost seems like someone would have to be a bit insane."
"Have you someone in mind?" he inquired too quickly, even if gently. He is much too perceptive of my feelings.
"No, I haven't," I told him truthfully. I had no one in mind at all and if I had someone in psyche, well, I wasn't aware of who just then.
I saw him stop and have a word or two with Papa who was just coming back from his walk but I knew Papa wouldn't tell me what was said. He calls Aloyisus "that detective chap" so maybe we inherit our forgetful ways in this regard from him.
On Tuesday Myrna and I met in the park by the lagoon and admired the sun on the water and the sea birds while we had another marathon discussion. Nothing.
On Thursday she arrived home at ten in the morning, just as Papa was leaving for the cafe, with her suitcase.
"Enough?" he inquired.
"Enough." she said firmly. She put the case at the bottom of the stairs for Papa to take up to her room. He would have been terribly offended if she had done it herself allthough she can hoist a bedridden patient single-handedly when she changes the sheets. I could, too, come to think of it. We both take after Papa. Substantial women is how one would-be suitor once referred to us. Papa never asked him home to tea again. I think he thought him a trifler.
Papa paused at the doorway and reached down his straw fedora from the hall stand. "You girls might think about the day of the week the murder took place. Refuge collection. I was just wondering about that."
We stared at him and he gave a courtly nod as he went out.
Then Myrna and me stared at each other. Papa had never even acknowledged our little adventures let alone had any input into them. He seemed to think they were unseemly.
We discussed this for a bit and then Myrna diffidently called the police station. Aloyisus wasn't there but she had a talk with someone else who told her they were aware that Friday was garbage day and it had been checked into.
"Well so much for Papa Holmes," Myrna said and we both giggled and I hugged her because it is wonderful having a sister.
"It could be a random act of violence" Myrna put forth at one point sometime later in our discussion. But it was simply to see if any little spark was felt at this suggestion – none was – and police opinion was that if it was for robbery the thief had panicked because nothing at all in the house was disturbed. Only Phyllis.
Just before lunch – I sat back and let Myrna do it all, she'd had nearly a month's break, if she wanted to go out and do for other people that was her business, but it meant I was then totally responsible for the home front – Myrna suddenly stopped mixing the tuna salad and said, "Rats!"
The spoon she was holding flicked at me with her emphasis and sent bits of tuna flying across the kitchen. She didn't notice but Toby, one of our cats, went into action.
I caught onto her wavelength – is this what they mean by ESP? I suddenly had a clear memory of Phyllis once saying "I'd drop a brick on it." when we were discussing rodents in the city. Myrna had said later that Phyllis obviously had no idea how BIG a rat was and how ineffective a brick would be. But maybe Phyllis had learned just how big a rat could be. And maybe she'd substituted a cement block. And somehow balanced it at the bottom of her basement stairs above some sort of area where rats gathered. Or where she enticed them. And maybe she had fallen down those stairs by accident. And the block had fallen on her head.
Myrna and me conveyed all this to each other with words but also some thought processes.
"It's awfully far fetched." she said.
"I know. A burglar would be far more believable."
"But we're both feeling there's something in this, aren't we. I mean, we'll have to check into it further."
Papa came home then and we had lunch, this time on the flagstone patio outside the French doors. He did not ask if we had followed up the refuge collection comment. We talked of other things. He said he was tired of bagels and brought from his jacket pocket a longish bun he said was called a poor boy and he wanted his jelly on this. It was a bit squashed – Papa is so fastidious about creased clothing, it amazed me that he didn't seem to mind his food wrinkled.
The poor boy was a definite replacement for the bagel. He ate the whole thing with his jelly.
Since Myrna was making the lunch she cut the bun and jellied it and she and Papa got into a bit of an argument because she cut it in half and served him the bottom part. He said that was all well and good but it meant the next time, like right now, he had to eat an entire top half and he really would prefer if she would cut it in half lengthwise and then crosswise because then if he only wanted half he would still get a top and a bottom both times.
Myrna swiped at the top of his head with her hand and told him he was an ornery old coot and to cut his own bread if he didn't like how she did it. He is very proud of his thick wavy white hair and smoothed it down again while telling her that daughters had no respect for their fathers any longer.
"I don't have to put up with that any more," she told him. "Even though the government sends me a cheque now to do so."
This caught Papa's fancy and he hooted in delight. "So that is why you get a pension!" And he was still chuckling as he got a book and headed for his lounge which he moved closer to the garage.
It looked as if it might rain and more than once in the past he had been awakened during his nap by raindrops and it was handy to be able to move under the overhang beside the garage.
Once the dishes were done (I dried and am pleased to report I did so without comment) Myrna and me started out. I picked a bouquet of herbs with some daisies included and took these along.
We stopped to chat four times before we got along the block and around the corners to the Seymour place. It is that kind of neighbourhood. Much of the conversation was about Poor Mrs.Carstairs (she had been That Mrs. Carstairs but death does tend to bring on compassion; Myrna and me hadn't once referred to her as Calamity Jane since we heard) but a week had passed and life does go on and there was other news and events to catch up on. We did need a rain. The church bazaar was fast approaching and it was said the promises for the bake stall seemed to be low this year.
No one answered the bell at the house where Phyllis had lived. The found-wanting car was not in the driveway. We looked at each other, waiting on inspiration. There seemed nothing to do except go back home. Well, the bouquet would look nice on our table.
When we got around the corner again back onto our street the Jamiesons were still pottering about in their front garden. They have a full time gardener but they like to keep involved even if it is mostly now strolling about and either admiring or criticizing the work. They are both old and frail. Not much older than Papa but they haven't worn nearly as well.
We were just going to give a small wave, having spoken with them on our earlier passing, but suddenly Myrna and me, as if attached, turned and stopped.
"Mrs. Carstair's cousin wasn't there," I said. "I guess she may have gone. I don't expect she'll want to stay on in that house all alone."
The Jamieson's agreed and shook their heads but could offer no information as to where she had gone, or if she had. Then Myrna said, "I thought I spotted a rat as we came down from her verandah."
I was careful not to look at her. The Jamiesons expressed horror and Mr. Jamieson nodded and said Poor Mrs. Carstairs had mentioned to him earlier in the spring that she was having a problem with rats (Myrna made a sound like a pleased squeak) and wondered if his old tool shed might be harbouring them. Their properties were back to back. "My tool shed has been there for forty-four years and we've never had rats," the old man said. "Would have told her that but I got into an argument with her a year or so ago about my trees overhanging in her yard and I didn't want to repeat that."
Myrna and me had a calming cup of herb tea when we got home – lemon balm, spearmint and anise hyssop. We were practically shaking with excitement.
"We'll have to phone Sargeant Mason," Myrna said.
Well, it started to rain and we went out and helped Papa move his lounge and then we had to stand on the back porch and just try and get enough of the smells the water from the sky called out of the earth. I used to lick raindrops off the edge of the pantry windowsill but I haven't done that for awhile.
When we got back inside neither of us felt like phoning just then. I'm glad we went with our feelings. Our stupendous theory was just that and would not have the dignity of being proved correct. We would have been a laughing stock.
What did happen is that Myrna and me decided to warm up our 'cold feet' by going back to the Seymour house and testing our theory, checking the place at the bottom of the basement stairs.
We had absolutely no business being on the property. We had absolutely no right to act on our knowledge that the boarded up rectangle on the far corner of the basement was actually a door and could be pried open and give access to the basement. Myrna and me had discovered this many years ago when we played with the Seymour children (he had been killed in the war, she had died in a boating mishap off Australia). It might still open. It was worth a try.
The rain had eased and the sidewalks smelled delicious, that warm wet cement fragrance. Myrna said one of her favourite sounds in the world was tires slapping on wet pavement. I told her this sounded naughty and we both giggled.
This time no one else was outdoors when we walked along and around the block, except we did wave to Mrs. Finn-Owen on her front verandeh who called out to us, "Now don't catch cold, you two. You girls always were ones to go out in any weather."
Phyllis' place already looked unlived-in, almost as if it were boarded up. As we went up toward the house we were silent and walked around it likewise.
Then we stopped, startled to see Maisy Evans bending over in the back garden as if looking for something. She looked up, saw us, a look of absolute terror crossed her face and she fainted.
We revived her, of course, Myrna having a fair knowledge of medical care what with her 'living outs' where people less than healthy have given her a lot of practise over the years. We propped her up on the wet grass against a tree and fanned her face and Myrna gave me a bit of a puzzled look when I hunkered and began to rub Maisy's wrists – last time I had my teeth cleaned I'd read in a health magazine about chafing the wrists of fainters. I never expected to have a chance to use this new knowledge, it isn't a family trait. Papa doesn't believe in fainting.
Maisy opened her eyes and wiped her hands up and down on the legs of her slacks but she did not look at us or offer an explanation.
She'd grown up in the area but had moved away when she married, then came back to town when her husband died. She now lived in a very nice condominium in the newer part of town, the section that had been developed in the sixties.
Finally she struggled to her feet and started across the yard toward the street. Myrna and me watched her walk along the sidewalk, none too steadily, and after a few seconds we started after her. Her car was parked several houses down and when she stopped by the driver's door and put one hand up on the roof of the vehicle as if supporting herself Myrna picked up speed until she reached her.
"I'll drive you home," Myrna said. Maisy just stood there. Myrna took Maisy's purse from unresisting fingers and handed it to me. I think she was worried Maisy might faint again and she wanted to be ready to break her fall. I simply stood there and held the purse until Myrna gave me a frown and made a key-turning motion. I found them. Myrna led Maisy around the other side and put her in the passenger seat. "Let's pick up our car," Myrna was saying but I had already thought of this and waited for her to open the back door for me.
At home Papa was in the wet garden busily picking the wrinkled peas – oh lord, they weren't at the proper plumpness yet, see what I mean about riled – and he stood up (he was wearing an old pair of hip waders that I'd last seen hanging, scarily, in a corner of the attic at least twenty years ago) and watched me open the garage door, then glanced at the street where Myrna was behind the wheel of a stranger's car. I don't think he knew Maisy.
"You've got mud on your skirt and your left limb, I've noticed, " he told me when I had backed out of the garage and lowered the window.
"I'll explain later, Papa," I told him and hoped to high heaven he would keep away from the strawberries. He was wearing the heavy rubber gloves Myrna and me use when we strip furniture and around his neck he had on the plastic bib that was given out when the church had a lobster supper a few years back. He looked very odd. I began to fear that he was getting a bit senile but I couldn't worry about it then.
At Maisy's condo I found a visitor's space and then found my own way up to her flat. They had gone on ahead.
Maisy had sort of folded in on herself on the chesterfield. She looked quite ghastly. She likely wasn't even aware she was sitting on her lovely sofa with wet and dirt-stained slacks and blouse.
"I don't like to leave her like this," Myrna told me, "but she won't say a word. Maybe we should have taken her to the hospital."
Maisy finally spoke. "No. I'll be fine."
"What were you looking for?" Myrna finally allowed herself to ask.
"Plants. Phyl said I could have some of her plants. Please go. I'll be fine."
Well, we did go. But only as far as the elevator.
"How does she know Phyllis well enough to call her Phyl?" Myrna wondered aloud as we stood there but did not press the button to summon the elevator.
"What was she looking for really?" I added to the question.
Myrna put her hands in her dress pocket to think better and suddenly gave me a huge smile. It didn't take her jingling for me to catch her delight. We both turned back along the hall and knocked on Maisy's door.
"Who is it?" she called out. We were standing well to the side of the peephole.
"It's us again." Myrna said. Then went silent so Maisy had to open the door. "I forgot to give you back your car keys," she said, taking them from her pocket and holding them but just out of reach. "And could Betsy please use your washroom. She has problems with, well, you know."
I tried to look the problem and Maisy opened the door to us like one reluctant but unwilling to object. I scooted into the bathroom off the hall and left the door slightly open the better to hear what Myrna was up to as she followed Maisy along and back into the living room.
"I didn't know you knew Phyllis before she came here," Myrna was saying.
"Did she tell you that?" Maisy asked on a half gasp. "Did she?"
Myrna did one of her pregnant pauses and Maisy gave birth into it. "We both lived in Ottawa a long time ago. That was all."
I was then startled by a most unusual noise. It took me a moment but then I realized I was hearing teeth chattering. I knew it wasn't Myrna. Her dentures would fall out if her teeth ever shook against each other like that.
"Why don't you tell me about it?" Myrna was saying as I slipped out of the bathroom and went along to the living room where I sat quietly on a chair just inside the room. Myrna was leaning back comfortably on the chesterfield.
Maisy was standing by the window, her teeth clenched together and the knuckles of her right hand pressed against her lips.
I had never seen my sister in such high form of spill-the-beans before; I'd been the recipient of it often enough but not an observer. It was fascinating. She gave the impression of such calm assurance, safe port in a storm, tell Myrna and all your troubles will be over. She sounded so relaxed but I could see her toes pushing against the tops of her soft leather oxfords and knew how tense she must be to grip them like that.
Maisy now started to shake and Myrna stood up, put her arm gently around her shoulders and led her to the chesterfield where she sat her down and wrapped an afghan that had been folded across the back around Maisy's shoulders.
Then she sat a cushion away and waited. Myrna can wait up a vacuum. You sort of feel compelled to fill it.
It took Maisy a lot longer to respond than it would me but then Myrna has had a lifetime of practise on me so I am conditioned.
"Was it an accident?" I suddenly heard myself asking and gave Maisy the motivation to flow into Myrna's vaccuum.
"Accident?" Maisy sounded as if she had never heard the word before. "Accident," she said again in quite a different tone. "She fell down the stairs."
Maisy looked at us both and realized she had spoken and realized what she had said, that she had admitted to being there. She dropped her head and covered her face with her hands and all three of us sat in the most eerie of silence. I could not help staring at Maisy's hands. They were large and strong and could likely easily pick up a cement block and…
I was about to say, "But why drop the block?" when Myrna intercepted my intent with a look that kept my mouth closed. So I increased the vaccuum.
The double void was too much for Maisy. A week of living with what she had done must have been hell. It couldn't get any worse. She spoke into her palms.
"I took off my gloves when I came out of there and when I went to get them today, out of my coat pocket, because it was raining, I could only find one. I thought I must have dropped the other one in her side yard. When I went out to the road along the side of the house. That's what I was looking for."
She looked up at Myrna and me. She could not find a reason to stop.
"Phyl knew me in Ottawa in 1956 and knew when I had Carol."
She paused, as if that explained everything, but when she realized it did not she gave the most awful smile, like one might who has said something irretrievably tactless.
"Don't you see? We moved to a small town a year later and I took six months off Carol's age. It worked. She was a small baby, a small child. I said she was born in June, not January. Later on, when she went to school, Alex altered her birth certificate. No one ever knew. We buried the past.
"Then Phyl moved here to town, I didn't realize until a month or so ago, we ran into each other downtown. She recognized me after all those years. I had to do something. I had to do something. She might never mention it, but then she might. I had to. No one must ever question that Alex was not her father. Begin to wonder, to guess. Carol must never know…"
That eerie silence again. My stomach was in such a quease. I didn't know what to do or say. Myrna reached out and simply put her hand on Maisy's shoulder.
Maisy looked at her. "An accident." she said. "It was an accident?"
"But why drop the block? If she fell down the stairs?" Myrna's voice was calm but she had such sadness in her eyes and I likely loved my sister more then than I have in nearly seventy years of knowing her.
Maisy continued to stare at Myrna and I could see Myrna's fingers rubbing ever so gently back and forth across Maisy's shoulder. Myrna has a soothing touch. She can put her caring across in her hands. I thought everyone could do this until I had an aunt try to calm me in this way many years ago and I realized the difference. I don't know if I can do it or not.
"Because I kicked her. In the face."
I closed my eyes to shut out the image but this made it worse so I opened them again. I must have made a sound because Maisy turned her head to look at me and an explanation poured out. "I went there to talk to her, to ask her – I mean I couldn't just wait and hope she wouldn't mention it. I asked her and she – she laughed. She just didn't understand. We were standing by that back door – I wouldn't go in – and she, she laughed, in that way she has."
Maisy suddenly bent her head down and kept trying to clear her throat. I felt I had something caught in my chest but I didn't know how to clear that.
Myrna got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a cup. Maisy took a drink and frowned. "Hot water," Myrna told her and she drank it.
Myrna has this habit of drinking hot water straight from the tap – I am sure she is slowly poisioning herself. Lord knows what has built up on the inside of our water heater over the years. She thinks I am obsessive over this and I have stopped commenting on her doing so because she then has stopped telling me about the time when I was small and refused to drink milk for ages because I thought the insides of cows might be dirty. I personally think she has made this up. I could ask Papa, I suppose. Well, I haven't. I let myself think of this while Maisy drank the water and Myrna sat down beside her again.
"I didn't push her. She fell. She had laughed and said what did it matter when Carol was born and who cared anymore if babies were conceived before marriage – she just didn't understand. 'You always were a worry-wart twit.' That's what she said to me. With that laugh. Then there was a funny noise from the basement and she said oh damn the machine was stuck on its cycle again, the ancient old bugger, and she rushed along the hall saying her cousin slept like the dead but if she was awakened she couldn't get back to sleep again so she wanted to stop the machine. And she tripped at the top of the stairs. And she fell."
Maisy was nodding, reliving it, reseeing it. I could see it too. I didn't want to see the next part. Not at all.
"When I got downstairs she was lying in a heap at the bottom. She was staring at me. All I could think of was 'worry wart twit' and how she didn't understand and how she could destroy Carol. How she could destroy so many of us. Ruin lives!" Maisy's voice was rising. " So I kicked her! She -"
Both Myrna and me at the same instant practically shouted, "Maisy!" Startled to silence she looked from one to the other. Then she must have realized that she was the only one who knew if Phyllis had been alive or dead when she kicked her. And that it would make all the difference.
I didn't realize this then. It was one of those things that happen between Myrna and me.
Maisy said, "Oh." Then she sighed. "I guess I went a bit crazy when I did that. And then, when I -" she gulped and I was afraid Myrna was going to leap up for another cup of water, "when I realized what I had done, I couldn't stand to see what I had done and I picked up a block and… "
The eerie silence again. Well, Myrna and me and Maisy might have sat there forever, none of us wanting to move, none of us wanting the next things that needed to happen to happen.
They did, of course. I eventually really did need to use the bathroom and my getting up and doing that prompted Myrna to rise also. She was waiting for me when I came out. Maisy was still on the chesterfield.
I went over to her and leaned down and pressed my cheek to hers, suede against suede. "It must have been awful," I said and I'm not sure if I meant the last week or most of her life.
Maisy looked up at me and neither of us closed down behind our eyes. "It was," she said.
Myrna and me got ourselves out into the hall and pressed the button for the elevator.
"I don't want to think about it," I said. "I don't want to interfere in people's lives ever again."
Myrna took some deep breaths and of course I did too. We got onto an empty elevator. "I don't want to think about who the father could have been or how it could have happened to have been so shameful." But I was thinking of many possibilities.
Someone tried to get on the elevator at the next floor but I shoo'ed them away with my hands.
"I refuse to phone Aloyisus, you'll have to do it. We likely should have phoned him from there. Oh, that poor woman. And what about Carol?"
We had reached the lobby.
"She'll get help," Myrna said.
"Oh, great consolation," I said.
Myrna was shaking. I put my arms around her and we stood there, Myrna and me, hugging each other. Then we walked out and around the building to the parking lot. As we were getting into the car I looked up and could see Maisy standing partway in the opened door onto her balcony.
"I hope she doesn't jump," I said.
Then Maisy raised her hand to us and waved slightly. We both waved back. "In a way I think she already has," Myrna said.
Maybe she was right. When we got home and Myrna phoned Aloyisus he told her Maisy had given herself up. And to say he'd be by in the morning because he understood we had been involved.
Myrna and me spent the evening shelling peas and topping strawberries. Mostly in silence, not our usual chit chat.
And it was just on nine when I started up the stairs to my room. "I'm retiring," I said. And I hoped it had a double meaning.
(appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine June 1998)
(pre-sequel to "Diversion" posted on July 28 2024)