The ritual was familiar, but not comforting. Once I had the house to myself, I tidied up and started a load of laundry, but the window in the front room was a magnet. Why had Sarah befriended Gerald, of all people? Even odder, why had Wafford agreed to buy back the house? He’d always circled like a vulture, waiting to foreclose on hapless widows and families whose breadwinners had been fired or become disabled.
I hadn’t received any great insights by three o’clock, when it was time to walk to the bus stop. I was almost there when Mr. Perniski came outside, dressed in his customary cardigan sweater and khaki pants.
“What’s going on at the end of the road?” he said. “That young woman was acting mighty peculiar last night.”
“Sarah?”
“You betcha. She pulled into the driveway over there”-he pointed at our neighbourhood drug dealer’s establishment-“and gave that one with the beard what looked like a key. Long about midnight, he went sneaking down the road toward her house. The last thing we need out here is another criminal. My grandson found a hypodermic needle in the ditch last summer. We have to-“
“Sarah and Cody moved out last night,” I said, cutting him off. “Are you sure she gave him a key?”
“Hell, I ain’t sure about nothing,” Perniski muttered, then wandered away.
I thought about all this while I waited for the school bus, and I hadn’t made much progress by the time Amy was occupied with a bag of cookies and old sitcoms on television. I finally slipped out and went across the street to what had been Sarah’s house. The doors were locked, so all I could do was peer through windows at unoccupied rooms.
The police did not arrive for more than two days, and my instinctive response was to tell them nothing. After a moment, though, churchgoing woman that I am, I murmured something about the basement door, its shiny new bolt, and the possibility that Wafford’s Cadillac was in a chop shop in the next county. As for Sarah Benston, I’ve never heard from her. I’m not real worried; as she said, she learned a lot about real estate during her brief stay across the street.
She can take care of herself.
Judith Kelman
Judith Kelman shares with her friend Mary Higgins Clark the ability to walk us gently to the edge of a well-manicured lawn where just beyond yawns a terrifying abyss. Her popular novels, which include ‘Hush Little Darlings’, ‘The House on the Hill’, and ‘Fly Away Home’, are quite brilliant at turning seemingly secure suburban neighbourhoods into bedroom communities for hell. It is not difficult to see how well earned is Kelman’s success: she truly gets us where we live.
Sometimes, however, writers just want to have fun. Here, in a story that positively drips gleeful venom, Kelman takes a new route through her usual territory. How does one imagine afresh version of the familiar heroine-as-victim? Think high-school reunion and a moment, decades after the original adolescent humiliations, when justice is finally served… and found to be deliciously lethal.
Homo Horriibilus
Carlotta peered in her mailbox and froze. Twenty years had passed, but she recognised his handwriting at once: sharp hooks and vicious slashes; whimsical flourishes, meant to deceive.
Everything about the man was a nasty game of deceit, even his name. The return address read: ‘Chervil Lattimore, 14 Bismarck Circle, Rockville Centre, New York.’ Chervil, indeed, Carlotta huffed. She remembered elementary school, when he’d sometimes passed himself off as Basil. Later, for a time, he went by Sage. In high school, it was Lovage or Borage or Valerian. He claimed all variations on his real name, which was Herb.
Herbert Alton Lattimore IV. Thinking of the man made Carlotta furious. The nerve of him to invade her world after all this time! Wasn’t it enough that he’d been the source of all her childhood misery? Wasn’t it sufficient that he’d knocked her life off its intended course? What more could that hideous creature possibly want from her?
Carlotta considered several satisfying ways to dispense with this unthinkable intrusion. She could crumple the letter and toss it in the trash. She could burn it or tear it apart, as Herb had done to her. But, in the end, she yielded to the pull of curiosity. Surely, she would be consumed with questions if she didn’t find out what the letter said. The last thing she could afford right now was a foolish distraction. Carlotta had to be in peak form for tomorrow’s CPA exam.
In six attempts during the past five years, Carlotta had failed the Auditing section of the test. After the last time, Mr. Detuzzi from Human Resources had laid it on the line. If Carlotta flunked again, she would be dropped from all future consideration for an accounting position at the Carswell Communications Corporation, Inc., her sole place of employment since graduation.
Carlotta would be forced to spend the rest of her working days in the dreary bookkeeping department, where she had to endure the company of Martha Siwicki, the human hyena, and dumpy Irwin Draper, who mined his nose as if it held a mother lode of gold. As if the tedious job and her unseemly colleagues weren’t bad enough, the bookkeeping office adjoined the company kitchen, so Carlotta’s clothing, not to mention her hair, held the permanent stench of institutional gravy.
Carlotta had to get out. And this time, she was fully prepared to do so. She had enrolled in the Becker review course and studied several hours every day. To silence her strident inner doubts, she had entered into therapy with Dr. Friedrich Hume himself at Peoria’s famed Hume Institute for Personal Enrichment. Nothing would stand in the way of her success, especially not some poisonous little Herb. She resolved to read the silly letter, toss it out, and be done with it.
Carlotta found her reading glasses on the desk beside a sepia wedding portrait of her parents, Rose and Sam. She cast a wistful glance at the young, loving pair. If only they were alive to see her now. For once, they would have reason to be proud of their only offspring. So what if she’d inherited her father’s lacklustre face and fireplug physique? Fiddle de dee that she tended to be a teensy bit high strung and hypersensitive like her mother. No biggie wiggy that she’d never married or had children or distinguished herself in any particular way. Carlotta Little was about to grab the gold ring, hit the heights, soar to the pinnacle: accounting.
She slashed the envelope and plucked out the lone vellum sheet. “My dearest Carlotta,” the letter began. “I’m writing in the heartfelt hope that you can find some way to forgive me. No words can express how deeply sorry I am for the pain and distress I’ve surely caused you. These past few years cruel fate has forced me to reappraise my life and recognise what is truly important. Having known the agony of loss, I’ve come to treasure precious people such as you who have touched my life.”
As she read, Carlotta’s sod-coloured eyes filled with tears. Herb’s two-year-old son, conceived after years of excruciating infertility treatments, had drowned in the family pool during a valiant attempt to rescue his beloved Barney. The child’s nanny was absorbed in a particularly compelling episode of General Hospital at the time.
Herb’s wife, suicidal over the tragedy, had been committed to the Happy Hollows Sanatorium. Several months later, Giselle had appeared so improved, her doctor allowed her out on a day pass. She lunched with a friend, went shopping at Loehmann’s, then hurled herself under the wheels of the four thirty-five express bus to Manhattan.
Carlotta shook her head in rueful empathy. Loehmann’s could do that to a person.
Herb’s horrendous misfortune did not stop there. His house had burned down, taking with it all precious mementos of his beloved wife and son. His family business, the venerable Lattimore Fidelity Fund, tottered at the brink of ruin following several years of lacklustre performance. In a desperate effort to save the firm, Herb had taken a huge position in the EasySlim Corporation, manufacturers of a caplet designed to liquefy body fat, so it could be redistributed from, say, thighs to breasts. Unfortunately, the FDA had banned the highly touted drug after tests found that it caused an alarming incidence of clinical consternation in laboratory rats.