Alan Cook - Catch a Falling Knife

I read some of the jokes and anecdotes because I couldn’t concentrate on anything longer. The stories in the “Life in these United States” section didn’t make me laugh. “Humor in Uniform” wasn’t humorous. I tossed the magazine aside and went looking for the poems I had copied from Donna’s personal notebook.

After a five-minute search I found the poems underneath a pile of papers on top of my small desk. I carried them to my sunroom and sat on the sofa, basking in the afternoon rays that streamed through the wall-to-wall windows on three sides. I read all the poems I had copied and then read them again. I came back to one and read it for a third time. It was one Tess and I had puzzled over before. It had no title-none of the poems had-and it went like this:

Will I shoot seven or eleven?

Will I find a jewel that gleams?

Will you lend your wand to me

So I can wave it at my dreams?

Keep it, Lady Luck.

Each lass is Satan’s earthly prize.

He makes angels run amuck

And blinds them with his laser eyes.

There was something wrong with this poem. At least, it wasn’t like Donna’s other poems, which were laid out in neat patterns. For example, the two limericks she had written, one about Elise and the other about Mark. The first four lines of this poem were smooth enough, but the line, “Keep it, Lady Luck,” was jarringly out of place.

Perhaps Donna did that for emphasis, to call the reader’s attention to it. Poets, writers, were known to use various tricks. It was not a happy poem. Apparently, it was about unfulfilled dreams and the lure of sin. Girls had always dreamed; some girls were tempted to do things society didn’t approve of. Some wrote poems about their dreams and temptations. So what was new or different about this poem?

In the limerick about Elise, Elise’s name had been spelled out by the first letters of each line, but no word in my dictionary started with three w’s. My field was mathematics and logic, not literature. I needed help. Sandra taught English. When did she get home from school?

I called her number. She didn’t answer so I left her a message, saying that I was on my way over to her place.

Sandra’s condo was located not far from Silver Acres and I had been to it quite often so I had no trouble getting there. The condominiums were wooden, two-story buildings, on a cul-de-sac. They didn’t have garages so the owners parked on the street. Fortunately, there was a space next to Sandra’s little red Toyota; I pulled in there.

I was happy to see that she was home now as I was too antsy to mount a stakeout. I went up the walkway and two concrete steps to the front door. These buildings were quite new and in good repair. Everything worked, including the doorbell, although this one’s ring had only two notes instead of the four notes of Frank Scott’s bell.

Sandra opened the door after a short pause and said, “Hi, Gogi,” as if she was surprised to see me.

She still had her teaching clothes on, consisting of a long skirt and a tailored blouse, and her long blond hair was in a pedagogical bun. She must have just arrived home and not checked her telephone messages yet.

I kissed her, apologized for barging in on her and told her I needed help.

“Give me five minutes to change my clothes and I’ll be right with you,” Sandra said. “Winston can entertain you while you wait.”

She called, “Winston, Great-Grandma is here.”

Sandra went up the stairs and a minute later Winston walked down them, holding on to the handrail, just like a grownup. He had a Dr. Seuss book in one hand.

“Hi Great-Grandma,” Winston said, “how is your blue car?”

“My blue car is fine,” I said, catching him and giving him a kiss. “Would you like me to read you the book?”

He acquiesced to that so we sat on the couch and read about the cat in the hat. In a few minutes Sandra reappeared down the stairs, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, with her blond hair cascading down to her waist. She looked years younger and more carefree. I finished reading the book to Winston and then gave him my car keys, as a condition of leaving him.

Sandra and I set up shop on her small breakfast table in a nook beside the kitchen. I opened the manila folder in which I had carried the poems and showed them to her. There weren’t that many so she quickly read all of them. They included the limericks about Mark and Elise.

When she had finished she said, “She has an obsession with Elise and Mark. I knew when I met her that I didn’t want her around Mark.”

I thought about telling Sandra that if she wanted to protect Mark she should take him back. “Let’s concentrate on this poem,” I said, finding the one about dreams and the devil. I asked her what she made of it.

Sandra studied it for a minute and said, “She’s upset with what she thinks is her fate and this may lead her to do something she shouldn’t. Of course, you’ve got to understand that poets write about doing a lot of things they wouldn’t actually do. Many of them are rather passive people, but they momentarily escape from their unhappy lives through their words.”

“Isn’t the line ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ out of place? The rhythm seems to be different.”

“Yes, it has only three feet while the other lines have four. That’s a good observation, Gogi. Maybe you missed your calling.”

Not likely. “You’re talking about something like iambic pentameter.”

“Well, tetrameter, at least for the other lines. But most of the feet are iambic.”

That was more than I cared to know about poetry. “I was searching for a clever idea, like how Donna put Elise’s name in the limerick about her.”

Sandra studied the poem again. Suddenly she stood up, almost knocking over the table, and said, “Look, Gogi. The first letters of the words, ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ spell out the word ‘kill.’”

“Now that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for,” I said. “I came to the right place.”

“Of course, it might be coincidence,” Sandra said, sitting down again, “but the way she deliberately used that wording…”

“Let’s look at the next line: ‘Each lass is Satan’s earthly prize.’ The first letters of the first five words…”

“Spell out ‘Elise.’ Holy cow, do you suppose Donna killed Elise?”

“It’s never been very far from my thoughts. Look at the following line.”

“He makes angels run amuck.”

“If you take the first letters of ‘makes angels run’ and the last letter of ‘amuck’…”

“It spells Mark. Holy cow!” Sandra said again.

Teachers are conditioned not to swear, especially in the presence of their grandmothers. I said, “Is that too farfetched?”

“No. After all, it’s hard to find a good word that starts with k, especially at the end of a sentence. Gogi, Donna is going to kill Mark.”

“That may have been her original plan. But when he became a suspect she may have backed off, figuring that if he was convicted of Elise’s murder, she would still get her revenge on him for liking Elise instead of her-if that’s what infuriated her.”

“But with the new things you and Mark found out yesterday about Eric Hoffman, doesn’t that change things? Mark isn’t so much of a suspect, anymore.”

“How do you know about that?” I didn’t think anybody else knew what Mark and I had done yesterday.

“Mark called me last night after you were in bed.”

So that’s what the murmuring was that I had heard through my closed door. And I had thought it was the television set.

“We’ve got to warn Mark,” Sandra said, getting more agitated.

She picked up her cordless phone and called my number.