She backed away, saying in a hopeless, hostile voice, “I planned to. But when I saw him, the... injuries, I couldn’t stand to touch him.”
“You had it made.”
“You know how it is, Tim. At the last minute, you sabotage yourself. You realize you’re a loser, you don’t have the strength to carry it off. Maybe if you’d been with me — but I wanted to be alone. That’s all I wanted—”
“I’ll have to take the money back,” Tim said, interrupting.
“I don’t have it.” She had realized he wouldn’t help her. Her mouth tightened, turned bitter.
“Of course you have it. He wouldn’t risk floating down the river with it. No reason to. You were holding it. Go and get it.”
“I tell you, I don’t have it.”
Tim said gently, “Write it off. It’s dead money for you now. If you don’t give it to me I’ll have to tear your house apart, dig up your land. If you tell me now, I’ll say I found it somewhere else.”
She said without any shame or guilt, “All I did was not save him when he was floating down the river. It’s not a crime, is it?”
“I don’t know. But stealing the money would be a crime, and I can’t let you do that. And then, look what you made me do to poor old Ed.”
“It’s in the fireplace, above the flue. Get it yourself.”
He made her walk into the small living room with him. He could hear the TV through the kids’ door. “Is this all?”
“All except the back bills I paid. Are you going to tell on me? If you do, I’ll just go on over the Falls like he did.”
“No. I’m not going to tell.”
She stood in the doorway, glaring as he drove away. “Goodbye, then, you cold bastard,” she yelled after him.
When he came to the bridge, where he needed to take a left to go into Timberlake, he took a right instead and drove to the county airport, his right hand caressing the sooty bag. The Southwest Airlines plane bound for San Francisco was circling above, preparing to land. Through the open car windows, rustles and rushings and sighs drifted in on the wind.
He went into the dark airport bar and sat at a small candlelit table overlooking the runway. He placed the bag carefully on the table. “Drink?” the waitress said.
“A double Jack Daniels, straight up.”
He picked it up, savored the fumes—
Liquor, money, blurry romance, some faraway place — all he had to do was drink it down, have another, buy a ticket, and drop a postcard in the mailbox resigning as deputy sheriff—
“It’s such a beautiful night, isn’t it?” the waitress said. “I guess you’re not ready for another.”
Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars—
But it was dead money. He’d be alone like Valerie, resurrecting that presence in the back of his mind that made him drink—
He wasn’t completely finished. He wasn’t extinguished like Valerie; he could still love somebody. She had taught him that by making a fool out of him.
He was looking down at the table, staring at the little flame guttering in its holder. “Even the candlelight hurts tonight,” Tim said. His voice sounded husky and strange.
She leaned down, put her hands on the table as she looked at the candle. “Blow it out, then, honey,” she said. “Then the moonlight can come in from outside.” She had a strong definite tone of voice and hair sprayed to stand firm against anything.
“You can take this drink away,” he said.
“You’re not going to have it?” Surprise lit her face.
“Not this time.”
“Where you headed?” she said curiously. “San Francisco?”
“Not this time,” he said again. As he climbed back into the patrol car, he glanced out the window.
Outside, the plane was landing, its red lights twinkling off the wet tarmac in the soft haze of evening.
The Dibble and Noah Webster
by James Powell
© 1996 by James Powell
This month EQMM has the honor of publishing the 100th story penned by James Powell, a humorist who discovered long ago that the mystery story and the funny story have strong similarities. “Both,” he says, “travel down a strongly plotted road, all the while preparing the reader for the punch line.” Mr. Powell’s 100th work is a traditional suspense story laced with characteristic flights of fancy.
The McCurdy sisters were weeding the circular flowerbed behind their house, Maudie who was seventy-one in new white garden gloves decorated with little strawberries, Sal who was three years older in her worn goatskin leather ones. Both wore old jackets and trousers from their father’s wardrobe, Maudie with the cuffs turned up. They moved around the flowerbed slowly, sidling on their knees, Maudie clockwise, Sal counterclockwise, pulling the weeds and carefully cultivating the earth around the late daffodils and the emerging flowers.
As usual, Maudie was the first to stop for a break. She straightened up and arched her back. “Oh, my weary bones,” she said. Then she smiled and lightly touched the tops of the ferny little sprouts that looked as if they had only broken through the soil a moment before. “It’ll be a bumper year for larkspur,” she said.
Sal’s grunt combined her gruff agreement with the effort of straightening up.
“I saw old Helen Crowley on my walk yesterday,” Maudie continued. “And she said...” Here she smacked her lips. “ ‘...Well, I just don’t know who started that story about larkspur reseeding itself. Mine never comes back.’ ‘And it never will,’ I replied. ‘Not until you start weeding with your nose in the dirt. My father swore by it. And he was president of the bank.’ Well, that Mrs. Crowley gave me the fisheye like my mind’s starting to go.”
“Good,” said Sal. “There’s a woman with two wishing wells in her front yard. Two. And she thinks your mind is starting to go.” Sal snorted and shook her head. “Last week I asked her was the second wishing well a spare in case the first one didn’t work. She didn’t get it. She thinks I’m getting senile.”
“Good,” laughed Maudie.
They smiled at each other and at the secret they shared.
For years people could set their clocks by the McCurdy sisters, arm in arm, taking their daily constitutional through town. Until last fall, when suddenly they began taking their walks separately and at unpredictable times and in unpredictable directions, Sal alone with an old tam pulled down over her ears, Maudie alone in her flannel turtleneck.
If two people do the same thing at the same time long enough, they are bound to be thought odd. And if they suddenly stop doing it, they will be thought odder still. But after all, the town remembered, the McCurdy sisters were Halversons on their mother’s side and all the Halversons had their certifiable moments. On a shopping trip to Sarnia, for example, someone had once seen Mrs. McCurdy testing Spode china for the heft.
Sal and Maudie went back to work, weeding in silence now, enjoying the good memories the task brought back to them. As children they had gardened with Father while Mother read Dickens aloud to them, sitting in the shade nearby on a wicker armchair Father brought down from the porch for her. Later, when the McCurdy sisters were out of school and had jobs, Maudie at the library and Sal in the art department of a hardware chain with headquarters in Chatham, they always kept Saturday afternoons free for the garden. Even Mother’s Halverson temper had been charmed by those peaceful hours outside. Her dark rages always came behind closed doors, sudden bursts of words and objects directed at Father, who bore both stoically. In fact, his love for her was deep and abiding and when she died of a stroke three chapters into Our Mutual Friend, his drinking turned heavy and he let his affairs slide. The McCurdy sisters tended the garden themselves after that, while the wicker armchair sitting in the weather slowly unraveled into a crazy birdcage. On the day Father died, Maudie and Sal had carried the wicker wreckage down for the trashman.