Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

While he waited for her, he listened rather sadly to her activities behind the closed door. He heard the water-closet empty and fill. He heard water running into the lavatory. After a flurry of splashing, he heard the brisk, bristly sound of the brushing of teeth. Then she came out, wrapped in a robe, and went directly to the kitchen. It was indicative of their status that they did not speak all this while, and his feeling of vague sadness persisted. If he regretted what he was going to do, or attempt to do, it was not because of what she was, but because of what she had failed to be.

In the bathroom, after hurrying through what was necessary to prepare himself for the day, he took the bottle of bleach from the linen closet, where he had tucked it away the night before, and poured it all, a full quart, into the small amount of water at the bottom of the toilet bowl. The harsh odor of the bleach pervaded the small room, but he was reasonably certain that it would incite Millicent to no more than a sour resentment toward him for creating it.

After all, a woman would hardly recognize a danger signal when she was completely unaware of being in danger. He wondered if Millicent was even aware of the deadly reaction set off by chlorine bleach and any acid-producing substance, such as a toilet bowl cleaner, and he doubted it. Like many housewives, she rarely read labels.

Anyhow, it was done. It was done, so far, so simply. Of course, the crucial part remained. It was necessary now to make certain that Millicent cleaned this morning, but he was already fairly certain that she would. She did her housework on schedule, as he had learned in the years of their marriage, and he knew that this was the morning for the bathroom. It was for this reason, to exploit the schedule, that he had waited the two days after bringing the bleach home.

In the kitchen, he sat down to his egg and toast and coffee. “What are you going to do this morning?” he said.

“Housework, as usual,” she said. “What else is there?”

“This is your morning for the bathroom, isn’t it?”

“It is. Why?”

“I noticed that the toilet bowl is a bit stained. It needs cleaning.”

“Well, don’t let it disturb you. I’ll get to it as soon as you’re out of the way.”

“Of course, dear. I didn’t mean to complain.”

At the front door, he received the habitual peck on the cheek that always seemed to convey more animosity than affection. He walked the three blocks to his store, and it was then, for him, the beginning of a long, long day. There were so many things that could go wrong, and all of them plagued his mind as the long day dragged by.

What if Millicent staged a petty domestic rebellion and refused to clean the bathroom at all? Not likely, and if she did he could always try again. What if she flushed the bowl before adding the cleaner? The answer as before: he could try again. What if the gases were not fatal? A possibility certainly, but the possibility was just as good that they would be. Fatal or not, the incident would surely pass as an accident. Failure in this event would make it impossible, of course, to try the same method again, but there were other methods, and there would be other chances.

At noon he made himself a bologna sandwich and drank a pint of milk. At four Jimmy Cobb came in and began delivering the neighborhood orders that had accumulated during the day. Caroline Hardy did not come or call, and for once Cameron was glad that she didn’t. When next he saw her, he hoped that it would be with the expanded vision and prospects of a free agent.

At six, he locked the store and walked home. At six-five, his hopes neatly realized, he found Millicent dead just inside the bathroom door.

He summoned the family physician at once, who came and pronounced her dead and summoned the police, as required in such cases. The police, in the person of a detective, called the coroner, who delivered, for lack of anything constructive to do, a bitter little lecture on the incredible stupidity of the average housewife.

All the evidence of death by misadventure was present. There was the can of cleaner, lying where it had fallen, a few crystals spilled out from its lip upon the floor. There was the bottle that had contained the bleach. There was the fallen brush on the floor beside the cleaner. There, finally was the bereaved husband, roundly berating himself for having never warned his wife against the deadly danger of bleach and cleaners mixed.

“Millicent never read labels,” he said dully. “I could never teach her to read labels.”

Thereafter, he was too busily engaged to permit the intrusion of fears, real or imaginative, or the grim indictment of his conscious. There were relatives to notify. There were arrangements to make with a local undertaker. There were insurance agents to see. There were callers to receive, expressions of condolence to acknowledge.

Later, there were relatives in the house, and at last, on the following Monday, the funeral itself. It was not until Monday evening that he was really left alone to assess his feelings.

Somehow, he did not feel as elated as the success of his venture warranted. Not even the vision of Caroline Hardy, now invoked, was enough to lift his spirits. Perhaps it was because he was so tired. Perhaps he would have to survive a period of adjustment — of convalescence, so to speak. Suddenly he was intensely eager for tomorrow to come. Suddenly he longed in anguished loneliness for the sweet-smelling sanctuary of his enchanted store.

The longing could not be denied. Leaving the house, he walked in darkness to the store and let himself in. A small night light was burning at the rear.

In the shadows, he found his apron and put it on and stood behind the counter as if he waited for a nocturnal customer. He stood there for a long time, and he was aware that it was not the same, that something was lacking, and then he realized that he could smell nothing.

The magic odor, recovered daily from the enchanted past, was dissipated, gone, lost forever in the acrid stench of chlorine and acid, and lost and gone with it were the thousand and one associations that had sweetened his days for all his years.

What have I done? he thought dully.

And standing alone in bleak sterility, he answered his own question.

I’m dead , he thought. I’ve killed myself .

The next afternoon, when Jimmy Cobb reported for work and found the store closed, he merely decided that Mr. Fleming was observing a brief period of mourning, and he went quietly away.

It was, in fact, two days before Mr. Fleming was widely missed, and still another day before authority could be prevailed upon to enter the store. Inasmuch as the neighbors had been incited by anxiety to grim expectations, no one was greatly surprised when Mr. Fleming was found dead in his cooler, a tight little death chamber. There was a tin pail on the floor of the cooler.

Beside the pail, empty, were a bottle that had contained bleach and a can that had contained toilet-bowl cleaner.

Mr. Fleming’s body, thanks to the low temperature in the cooler, was very well preserved.

It was considered both pitiable and romantic that Mr. Fleming, in his grief, had chosen to die deliberately by the same domestic devil’s brew that had killed his wife accidentally. But it must be remembered that Mr. Fleming, being a kind of poet, was given to poetic fancies.

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , May 1966.

Banty was all brains and no luck. That was his trouble. You kept thinking he was a guy on his way to somewhere, with all those brains under black curly hair, but he never did have the luck when he needed it. It makes no difference how smart or good-looking you are; you aren’t going to attain your objective if you don’t have a little luck here and there along the way.