Jan Burke - Eighteen

She had grown more bitter about this trial by rewrite as each day passed. But once more she devised an ending, this time with antimony, arranging elaborate plot devices to allow Lord Harold Wiggins access to an industrial poison. And still Kitty wasn’t satisfied.

As she held Kitty’s fifth nasty letter, something snapped inside Harriet. She began to see Kitty as the root of all evil in her life. Before Kitty, she had been happy. Nothing much had disturbed the world dear Harry had shared with her; he had paid her way, she had kept him alive. It seemed to Harriet that Kitty wanted to kill them both. Well, Harriet decided, we’ll see who kills whom.

The idea began to comfort her. She would attend the Whodundunits, slip a little something into Kitty’s wine and sit back and enjoy her evening, knowing that her troubles would soon be over. In a room full of people who were constantly dreaming up ways for other people to die, the death of a woman who was almost universally despised by them would present a monumental problem for New York ’s Finest.

Harriet became quite delighted at the prospect. She did not doubt that she would be able to kill. After all, she had already murdered over thirty characters. (Three was Harriet’s lucky number, and so she made it the average body count in her books.) Among those thirty characters were a great many individuals she liked better than Kitty Craig.

For her first real life murder, she would need something special. For weeks, she consulted her reference works on poison. She searched the pages of A Panorama of Poisonous Plants, Powders, and Potions. She studied the listings in Lyle’s Lethal Liquids, even considered Conroy’s Compendium of Caustics. But her most promising candidates were found in Everyday Toxic Substances: Our Dangerous Friends.

She made a long list of factors to consider. Reaction time. What would dear Harry say? Quick, she decided. Very quick and highly toxic. Kitty in prolonged, relentless pain was a tempting picture, but she concluded that having Ms. Craig dead before the salads were served was preferable; attention-getting though agonizing death throes are, it might put a bit of a damper on the evening’s festivities.

The poison would need to be something that could be transported easily; if discovered among her belongings, it could not seem out of place. Her final prerequisite was that it be something she could obtain without raising suspicions.

After hours of concentrated effort, she finally had the means in hand and the logistics of delivering it well planned.

She hummed a happy little tune as she latched her suitcase closed and carried it to the front door. She sat in the entry, lovingly caressing the corners of her carry-on bag. Harriet was far too careful to have her plans spoiled by the possibility of lost luggage. She could hardly contain her excitement when the taxicab pulled up in her driveway and tooted its horn.

She was pleased to learn that she was not the type to get the pre-homicidal jitters. Dear Harry would be thrilled to find his creator so calm, so poised, so at ease with this new role. Indeed, both flight attendants and Mr. Johnson, the gentleman seated next to her in first class, found her a charming traveling companion.

Harriet couldn’t remember the last time she had really noticed or been noticed by a man, and she gloried in the handsome Mr. Johnson’s attentions. At first she wondered if deadly intentions might somehow serve as an aphrodisiac. But then Mr. Johnson confessed himself to be a great fan of Lord Harold Wiggins, and said he recognized Harriet from her cover photo. This was sheer flattery, she was certain, as she hadn’t updated that photo in ten years.

In New York, he accompanied her to baggage claim, and helped her to retrieve her suitcase. As he carried it for her, she learned that he was staying at the same hotel. Harriet was sure at that moment that this was her lucky day.

It was as they stood waiting for a taxi that Harriet saw the young woman. Ticket jacket in hand, no doubt late for a plane, she ran across the opposite sidewalk. Looking directly at Harriet, she took two quick steps off the curb; Harriet screamed a warning in her mind that never reached her lips-the driver had even less of a chance to stop the car in time. The car struck the young woman and hurled her several yards down the street.

Harriet experienced the moments of intense awareness that come to those who are caught as unwilling spectators to such events: with absolute clarity she heard the grating screech of the car’s brakes, saw the disbelief on the woman’s face at the moment of impact, heard the dull thud as it launched her into an unnatural and graceless flight, watched the awful landing.

Harriet rushed toward the woman and stood frozen above her. There could be no doubt that the woman was dead. Heads and necks are not configured in the same way on the living. Harriet had never before stood so close to the dead.

In contrast to the clarity of those few moments was the enveloping confusion which followed. Somehow, she ended up back inside the terminal, sitting on a plastic chair next to Mr. Johnson, who held her as she cried.

He didn’t question Harriet’s purchase of an immediate return flight; he took the same one back to Los Angeles. She left her carry-on bag on the plane.

Mrs. Johnson opened the envelope from Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews without the sense of dread she had come to expect.

Dear Harriet,

You are no doubt as saddened as we are about the unfortunate incident at the Whodundunits. Why no one who knew the Hemlich manuever could have been there at the moment Ms. Craig choked on that chicken bone is beyond me. We’re all brushing up on our CPR here at SDM.

I look forward to serving as your new editor. I’ve browsed through several of the drafts you sent to Ms. Craig, and I hope you won’t mind my saying that I believe your first effort was the best. Will you be too angry with me if I send it along as is?

Lord Harold’s Biggest Fan,

Lana Dunstreet

P.S. Best wishes on your recent marriage. I hope Mr. Johnson realizes how lucky he is.

It wasn’t hard for the ghost to awaken me.

It was the second night after David died, and my grief was still so great as to thin my sleep to gossamer. Just about anything would cause me to wake up suddenly, reach for his side of the bed, feel the emptiness there, and then the emptiness within myself; next would come a tightness in my chest, the pressing weight of the sudden loss of my husband.

Some might believe I saw the ghost because I so wanted David to be alive, I imagined he had come back to me. The only problem with that theory is, it wasn’t my husband’s ghost.

I had awakened from my fitful sleep that night because the room felt cold; I opened my eyes to see a man standing at the foot of the bed. Until I was fully awake, I almost thought it was David. Like David, he was about six feet tall, with dark brown hair and big, brown eyes. He was handsome, but I discovered that even handsome men who suddenly show up uninvited at the foot of my bed can scare me. This one did. I opened my mouth to scream, and he vanished.

I was more than a little upset, but I convinced myself that I had dreamed the whole thing, and fell back into a restless slumber, full of dreams of David dying. The next morning I felt grumpy and ill-at-ease. It was the day of David’s funeral, and there wasn’t anything on earth that was going to make me feel good about that day. As I looked in the mirror, I became even more certain of that. I looked like a blouse someone had left to wrinkle in the dryer. My blond hair framed a colorless face and I had dark shadows under my blue eyes.

“You’ll be just fine, Anna,” I said to myself. At forty-two, I wasn’t in bad shape. The lines that had appeared on my face weren’t etched too deeply. Gave it character, my father said. I was getting more character every year, but I’m not the type to fret over it. At least, I hadn’t been until she came along.