“Hey, Boss, Ms. Grimshank rides again.”
Marvin Frolich’s secretary tossed the weekly Monday missive onto his desktop with a grin. They had dubbed their “volunteer” editor “Ms. Grimshank” as a play on her real name, which was Phyllis Shank. Once a week, like clockwork — which she would have derided as cliché — her copies of their articles arrived, all marked up in blaring red ink.
“Sometimes,” Marvin admitted to his secretary, “I like to imagine that all that red ink is her blood...”
“Boss!” His secretary laughed. “You’d never get away with it.”
He sighed. “I know, but wouldn’t it be nice.”
What really ticked him off was that she was sometimes correct in the letter, if not the spirit, of her corrections. He had even learned a few things from her “editing.” But that learning wasn’t worth the price of how nasty it all seemed, and it wasn’t worth the pain it caused the reporters who had seen that awful acronym, “AAH.” Affirmative Action Hire? What colossal arrogance! One of the victims had been a young black reporter with budding talent, but no confidence to match. The bigoted remark had set her back months. Only last week, it had infuriated an editor who may have fit the definition of “handicapped” in terms of his paralyzed legs, but who was anything but handicapped when it came to brains and ability. Marvin had never meant for either of them to see the mailings from Ms. Grimshank, but both of them had, by accident.
“One of these days,” Marvin predicted to his secretary, “our Ms. Grimshank is going to get what’s coming to her.”
She grinned. He didn’t.
“And what is that, Boss?”
“She’s going to get edited out.”
When Diane Stevens didn’t find the usual stack of ivory envelopes in Ms. Shank’s mailbox on Monday, she sensed that something was wrong. Maybe the old biddy was out of town, but Diane doubted it, because Phyllis Shank never seemed to venture beyond her own mailbox. She even had her groceries delivered.
Probably so she can tell the boy to tuck his shirt back in, Diane thought.
“Or maybe,” she muttered to herself as she stared at the small house down the short walkway, “so she can tell him that canned goods really should be double bagged, and what was he thinking to put the frozen vegetables in with the loaf of bread?”
Diane tried to get herself in hand. The old woman could be sick in there.
She went up the walk, hurrying to make up for her previous ill will. But when she reached the front door, she took the few seconds required to make sure her uniform was on straight and to pat down her hair. Not that either action would silence dear Ms. Shank. No, no, if your uniform looked good, and you’d just got your hair done, she’d still ask you if you really thought those shoes were suitable.
Diane smiled a little as she rang the bell.
It was funny, really, the way she hid from this resident so they wouldn’t meet at the box. There was a conveniently placed tree, wider than Diane’s own butt (which Ms. Shank had remarked could benefit from the exercise of the job!), where she could wait until she heard the front door close and the locks click. Then she counted to ten, ran to the box, opened it, pulled out the letters, stuck in the new stuff, and ran off to the neighbor’s house before she could get caught. If the Postal Service had an Olympics for fastest mail carrier, Diane thought she might win it.
When Ms. Shank failed to answer the ring, Diane called her supervisor.
And when the neighbor lady came over to open the house for the police, they found the homeowner lying at the foot of the stairs, with strangulation marks around her scrawny neck. Red marks, red as the ink in her pen.
When informed of the identity of the victim, the chief of police — who had been receiving his own regular envelopes from Ms. Shank for years — exclaimed, “Good God, this will be the longest suspect list in history!” He didn’t add what else he was thinking, “And the most sympathetic jury, too.”
If they catch me, it will have been worth it.
Arnold Sullivan sat in his studio apartment and stared at the hands that had held the bitch’s neck and squeezed. It had been the most satisfying few moments of his life. Again and again he reviewed in his memory how he had lunged, how she had gasped, and how she had looked as life struggled out of her.
“I have finally figured out who you are,” she had said to him on Sunday.
He had put down the grocery sacks and asked politely, “Excuse me?”
She’d put a finger to her nose. “Who is that grocery delivery boy, I kept asking myself, because there was something about you that looked so familiar. And now I know. You’re Sam Sullivan’s older brother, aren’t you?”
The grocery “boy,” who was seventy years old, said simply, “Yes.”
She had smiled her vicious smile, the one she used every week when she handed him a dime. One dime. As if he were ten. As if it were 1928, instead of 2008. It was also the smile his brother Sam had said she’d had on her face when she read his essay aloud in class, the one in which Sam confessed to his feelings for another boy. She had encouraged them to write passionately, tell something secret and deeply true, and she had promised nobody else would ever see it.
It had been 1957. Sam was a small boy, physically, and a naïve one socially. Arnold remembered his brother as being a sweet and innocent thirteen years old, too trusting for his own good.
Three hours later, Sam had hanged himself in the basement.
She had worn that smile at his funeral.
“You’re the older brother of that gay boy, aren’t you?” she’d asked him this past Sunday. “I wonder what your parents did wrong, that they would have one son who killed himself and another who didn’t amount to a hill of...” She’d pointed triumphantly to the contents of one of the grocery sacks. “...beans.”
And so he’d lunged. With these hands.
The same hands that had cut his brother down before their parents could see Sammy like that. He hoped he had left fingerprints on her neck. He thought he might like to get caught, so he could tell the world what kind of person she was. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they’d be surprised.
Marvin Frolich read over his reporter’s story about the murder of the retired teacher. They still hadn’t arrested anybody, because there were just so many likely suspects, including himself. The district attorney had confided to Marv, “You know, even if we find who did this and bring him to trial, the defense attorney will have a field day proving how many other people hated her. And that’s all any jury will need to acquit based on reasonable doubt.”
Marvin edited the article gently, with faint pencil marks, remembering how harsh red ink could appear.
His secretary came in to take it from him.
“What did you say?” she asked, when he muttered something.
“Ding, dong,” he said, with profound and unashamed pleasure. “Ding. Damn. Dong.”
© 2008 by Nancy Pickard