Elizabeth George - A Moment On the Edge - 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

You don’t pity your own mother, asshole .

If he’d come home immediately after school. By four p.m. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy’s across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight okay? — Math Club — study group — calculus — don’t wait up for me, please . How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone.

Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already…dead?

Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek ? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact.

And what had he said ? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday.

Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed out smiling ’ Bye, Mom !

Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lone woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, HealthSty Fitness Center, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Center. And her friends: most of them divorced middle-aged women, mothers like herself with high-school or college-age kids. Lucille was lonely, how was that his fault? — as if, his senior year in prep school, he had become a fanatic about grades, obsessed with early admission to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, just to avoid his mother at that raw, unmediated time of day that was break-fast.

But, God, how he’d loved her! He had. Planning to make it up to her for sure, SAT scores in the highest percentile he’d take her to the Stanhope for the champagne brunch then across the street to the museum for a mother-son Sunday excursion of a kind they hadn’t had in years.

How still she was lying. He didn’t dare touch her. His breathing was short, ragged. The squid-inky black beneath her twisted head had seeped and coagulated into the cracks of the floor. Her left arm was flung out in an attitude of exasperated appeal, the sleeve stained with red, her hand lying palm-up and the fingers curled like angry talons. He might have noted that her Movado watch was missing, her rings gone except Grandma’s antique opal with the fluted gold setting — the thief, or thieves, hadn’t been able to yank it off her swollen finger? He might have noted that her eyes were rolled up asymmetrically in her head, the right iris nearly vanished and the left leering like a drunken crescent-moon. He might have noted that the back of her skull was smashed soft and pulpy as a melon but there are some things about your mother out of tact and delicacy you don’t acknowledge seeing. Mother’s hair, though —it was her only remaining good feature, she’d said. A pale silvery-brown, slightly coarse, a natural colour like Wheaties. The mothers of his classmates all hoped to be youthful and glamorous with bleached or dyed hair but not Lucille Peck, she wasn’t the type. You expected her cheeks to be ruddy without makeup and on her good days they were.

By this time of night Lucille’s hair should have been dry from her shower of so many hours ago Derek vaguely recalled she’d had, the upstairs bathroom filled with steam. The mirrors. Shortness of breath!

Tickets for some concert or ballet that night at Lincoln Center? — Lucille and a woman friend. But Derek didn’t know about that. Or if he’d known he’d forgotten. Like about the golf club, the two-iron.

Which closet? Upstairs, or down? The drawers of Lucille’s bedroom bureau ransacked, his new Macintosh carried from his desk, then dropped onto the floor by the doorway as if — what? They’d changed their minds about bothering with it. Looking for quick cash, for drugs. That’s the motive!

What’s Booger up to, now? What’s going down with Booger, you hear?

He touched her — at last. Groping for that big artery in the throat — cateroid? — car toid? Should have been pulsing but wasn’t.

And her skin clammy-cool. His hand leapt back as if he’d been burnt.

Jesus fucking Christ, was it possible — Lucille was dead ?

And he’d be to blame?

That Booger, man! One wild dude .

His nostrils flared, his eyes leaked tears. He was in a state of panic, had to get help. It was time! But he wouldn’t have noticed the time, would he? — 11:48 p.m. His watch was a sleek black-faced Omega he’d bought with his own cash, but he wouldn’t be conscious of the time exactly. By now he’d have dialed 911. Except thinking, confused, the phone was ripped out? ( Was the phone ripped out?) Or one of them, his mother’s killers, waiting in the darkened kitchen by the phone? Waiting to kill him ?

He panicked, he freaked. Running back to the front door stumbling and shouting into the street where a taxi was slowing to let out an elderly couple of neighbors from the adjoining brownstone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, bareheaded, running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”

EAST SIDE WOMAN KILLED

ROBBERY BELIEVED MOTIVE

In a late edition of Friday’s New York Times , the golf club-bludgeoning death of Lucille Peck, whom Marina Dyer had known as Lucy Siddons, was prominently featured on the front page of the Metro section. Marina’s quick eye, skimming the page, fastened at once upon the face (middle aged, fleshy yet unmistakable) of her old Finch classmate.

“Lucy! No .”

You understood that this must be a death photo : the positioning on the page upper center; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic cultural significance, or beauty. For Times readers the news value lay in the victim’s address, close by the mayor’s residence. The subtext being Even here among the sequestered wealthy, such a brutal fate is possible .

In a state of shock, though with professional interest, for Marina Dyer was a criminal defense attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inside page and disappointing in its brevity. It was so familiar as to resemble a ballad. One of us (Caucasian, middle-aged, law-abiding, unarmed) surprised and savagely murdered in the very sanctity of her home; an instrument of class privilege, a golf club, snatched up by the killer as the murder weapon. The intruder or intruders, police said, were probably looking for quick cash, drug money. It was a careless, crude, cruel crime; a “senseless” crime; one of a number of unsolved break-ins on the East Side since last September, though it was the first to involve murder. The teenaged son of Lucille Peck returned home to find the front door unlocked and his mother dead, at about eleven p.m., at which time she’d been dead approx-imately five hours. Neighbors spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence, but several did speak of “suspicious” strangers in the neighborhood. Police were “investigating.”

Poor Lucy!

Marina noted that her former classmate was forty-four years old, a year (most likely, part of a year) older than Marina; that she’d been divorced since 1991 from Derek Peck, an insurance executive now living in Boston; that she was survived by just the one child, Derek Peck, Jr., a sister, and two brothers. What an end for Lucy Siddons, who shone in Marina’s memory as if beaming with life: unstoppable Lucy, indefatigable Lucy, good-hearted Lucy: Lucy, who was twice president of the Finch class of 1970, and a dedicated alumna: Lucy, whom all the girls had admired, if not adored: Lucy, who’d been so kind to shy stammering wall-eyed Marina Dyer.