Offerings—

Three Stories by Mary Anna Evans

http://www.maryannaevans.com

Copyright 2005 by Mary Anna Evans

Kindle Edition

“A Singularly Unsuitable Word” – Originally published in A Kudzu Christmas

River City Publishing, Montgomery, Alabama.

2005

“Mouse House” – Originally published in North Florida Noir

Pottersville Press, Pottersville, Florida

2006

“Starch” – Originally published by Plots with Guns

www.plotswithguns.com

2004

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Kindle Edition, License Notes

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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What People are Saying About Mary Anna Evans' Fiction

For short story "Land of the Flowers", published in A Merry Band of Murderers:

"... Three [stories] are particularly noteworthy: Mary Anna Evans' Land of the Flowers, Jeffrey Deaver's The Fan, and Val McDermid's Long Black Veil.... A Merry Band of Murderers is an admirable anthology of short stories by a skilled company of mystery authors."

--Mysterious Reviews

For Florida Book Awards Bronze Medalist Effigies:

"We mystery lovers who've enjoyed Artifacts and then decided that Relics was even better may not believe this, but Ms. Evans has done it again, and Effigies is the best one yet.  Again, she makes a lesson in our past a fascinating read."--Tony Hillerman, recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award, among many other honors.

For Benjamin Franklin Award-winner Artifacts:

“It’s always fun to discover a new Florida voice, especially one who can bring to life the rich texture—the sand, the sea, the moss-draped live oaks, the seedy fishing shacks, the salted boat culture—of the state’s coast…the menace and the history are resolved in a hurricane of a finale.”--Tampa Tribune

For IMBA Bestseller Relics:

"A fascinating look at contemporary archaeology but also a twisted story of greed and its effects." Dallas Morning News

For IndieNext Notable Book Findings (starred review):

“This is a series that deserves more attention than it garners.” Library Journal

***

A SINGULARLY UNSUITABLE WORD

by Mary Anna Evans

I am so old that I remember when ladies didn’t swear or drive automobiles. I recall a time when a young lady was considered fast if she let a boy hold her hand before he slid an engagement ring onto it. I’ll be blunt. I remember Prohibition. How old do you reckon that makes me?

I remember my childhood, too, in a blurry kind of way. There were no hard edges in those days for little girls who were lucky, like me. There was no television to bring the world into my home, so I thought everybody had chickens and cows and vegetable gardens that gave them all they needed to eat. I saw no reason why all children wouldn’t have two or three toys to play with, just like I did. I was Florida-bred so, though I could well imagine that other folks might sweat occasionally—I certainly did—I had no notion of what it might mean to be cold. I went to Sunday School weekly, so I knew that there were bad things that I shouldn’t do. Still, for the first eight years of my life, those bad things were just numbers on the commandment list. What did killing and stealing and taking the Lord’s name in vain have to do with me?

Perhaps my eight-year-old self was aware that I was infringing on one of those commandments when I filched a cookie shaped like a candy cane and crept out into that warm December night. Even now, I’m not sure which commandment covers spying on your sister, but one of them must. I knew that I shouldn’t be creeping around in my nightgown, following Iris as she crept down the river path wearing hers. I justified my actions by telling God (and Santa Claus, whose sleigh was probably on its way to my house right that minute) that if seventeen-year-old Iris couldn’t manage to stay in the house when she was supposed to be asleep, then how could I?

I tried to be quiet as I skulked down the damp trail, but Florida riverbank foliage is lush and overgrown, even in wintertime. Iris should have been able to hear the spider lilies and palmettos rustle like crinolines as I pushed past them, but her mind was on something else. When she reached the landing, I saw what that something else was. Except it wasn’t a “something” else. It was a “someone” else.

He was older than Iris. I would have called him a man, and Iris was, in my eyes, just a girl. And a silly one at that. He wore a driving cap pulled low over his eyes, and a glen plaid vest that was so fashionable that it must have come from a city. Maybe Tallahassee. Pensacola, even.

I was glad to see that he was gentleman enough to take off his cap when he saw Iris coming. Then he tossed that fancy cap into the bottom of his flat-bottomed boat, stepped onto the landing, wrapped his arms around Iris, and commenced doing some ungentlemanly things. After a time, his behavior turned quite ungentlemanly—I’ll refrain from discussing her behavior completely, if you don’t mind—and there I sat, stuck in the palmettos until they got finished with whatever it was they were doing.

When the other boat arrived, they were in no condition to hear it coming, particularly since the two men piloting it came from upstream with their motor off, poling it silently into place beside the dock. With a careless motion, the thin, dark-haired man standing in front tied the heavily loaded boat to a handy cleat.

“And here I thought your deliveries was slow ‘cause you was cheating me,” said the burly man standing in back with his hand on the rudder. “Shit, Owen. You was just passing the time with this young slut.”

The young man lunged toward him with both fists balled up, but he never got to use them. Fists aren’t a whole lot of good against a revolver.

Owen, who suddenly looked less like a man and more like a boy, went dead still when the burly man pulled his gun. I swear, he stopped moving so fast that he was left standing on one foot, with the other hanging in the air behind him. Iris, who had been busily arranging her nightgown, which was in quite some disarray, started screaming. The sound stirred the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Come to think of it,” the gunman said, “maybe I want to spend some time with the slut, too.” His hand shot out and grabbed Iris by the waist. He showed that he’d spent a lifetime on the water by hauling her into the boat, one-handed, without flipping the blamed thing. Also, it was a mighty big boat.

“Leave the girl alone, Gibson,” his partner whined. “This’ll get us nothing but trouble.”

“Shut up,” Gibson said, and I was relieved to see the gun swing away from Owen toward this man I didn’t know. This makes no sense, since I didn’t know Owen, either, but Iris did (quite well, it appeared) and that made him almost kin.

“I’m done with the two of you,” Gibson said, waving the revolver back and forth between Owen and the other man, who I suddenly recognized. It was Mr. Robbins, who worked at the sawmill in town. “You’re cheating me, the both of you.”

“How can you say that?” Mr. Robbins asked. His eyes bugged out of his long sallow face every time the gun swung his way. “I go over the numbers with you every night. We count the bottles together before we deliver them. We count the money together when we get home. Then we pay Owen and we split the rest. How could we cheat you?”

Gibson’s eyes flicked away toward the woods for a second, and I recognized two things in those eyes that scared me. First, they were unfocused, the way my grandfather’s got when he’d had too much rum. And second, they showed a peculiar mix of confusion and humiliation that I’d seen before.

My friend Jeremy, Daddy’s fieldhand, had come home one day with that self-same look on his face. It was the day he got tricked into paying a dime for a little old candy bar because he didn’t know his numbers. After that, I made it my business to walk to the store with him and look over the clerk’s shoulder while he totted up Jeremy’s receipt. Eight-year-old girls can get away with most anything when they smile, and everybody in town knew I’d been able to add a double-column of numbers since I was six.

I’d been real proud of my tidy solution to Jeremy’s problem, but on that night I felt as cold and rudderless as if I’d been dumped into the muddy river below me. I wrapped my arms around my knees and tried not to shiver. If my shaking set the spider lilies and palmettos to moving, then Gibson would know I was there. I didn’t intend for him to be pointing that gun at me, too.

He was going to shoot them—Owen and Mr. Robbins, and maybe Iris, too. That shamed, angry light in his eyes said that he saw no other choice. He needed the other men to help him run his business because he couldn’t count the money, but he couldn’t trust them not to cheat him…because he couldn’t count the money.

Owen had finally eased his airborne foot down onto the landing, but his stance was odd and stiff, just like you’d expect of a man being held at gunpoint. Still, there was something funny about his right arm. He was holding it about a foot in front of him, with the palm pointed in toward his belly. Since I was situated where I could see that belly in profile, I was well-positioned to see something that Gibson couldn’t—a bulge beneath that glen plaid vest. If Gibson was distracted, just for a moment, Owen might be able to save my sister, and himself, too.

I needed something to throw. A shoe would be perfect, but I wasn’t wearing anything but my nightgown and underdrawers. I would have thrown them and sat there stark naked, except I couldn’t imagine that they would make much noise.

Being as how Florida is nothing but a spit of sand, there were no handy rocks, but our swamps are full of cypress balls. I hefted one of them, a hard green knob about the size of a baseball, and heaved it into the river. It landed near Mr. Robbins’ end of the boat, which turned out to be an altogether bad thing for him. Gibson hollered out a word I’d never heard before and pulled the trigger without a moment’s thought, hitting Mr. Robbins square in the middle of his chest.

Poor Mr. Robbins toppled overboard and sank like a rock. Even though my sister was in the worst trouble imaginable and I wasn’t in a much more secure position myself, there was a long heartbeat when all I could think about was Ginny Robbins, who was two grades ahead of me in school. She didn’t deserve the news she was going to get come morning.

Now, let me tell you about the word Gibson said when he pulled the trigger, because it’ll be important later on. In the years since then, I’ve heard that word several times. Not a lot, because people used to have some discretion about swearing in front of ladies. Certainly not lately, because you’d have to be some kind of a buffoon to swear in front of a doddering old woman like me. But now and then, someone has let it slip, so I’ve heard it and I know what it means, but I’ve only let it cross my lips once. I don’t intend to do it again, so you’ll have to figure it out for yourself. It rhymes with “Love your truck.” And it is a major violation of the commandment about honoring your mother.

At the instant Mr. Robbins lost his life, Owen went for his gun, but he took just a whisper too long to pull it clear of his waistband. Gibson’s revolver went off again. Owen’s shot went wild, and he pitched off the landing into the river. I don’t recollect whether Iris had been screaming all the while, but she was making plenty of noise by this time, for sure. Gibson smacked her a good one, started the boat’s motor, slipped it from its mooring, and headed upstream with my sister. By the time they passed out of sight, I reckon I was making as much noise with my blubbering as Iris was with hers. It was only when I stopped to breathe that I heard the gurgling sound in the water.

***

It is a blessing that Owen was shot in the arm, because that left him two legs and one good arm to help me drag him out of the water. I was an unusually smart little girl, but I wasn’t as big as a minute.

He probably needed to sit there for a while and remember how to breathe, but there was no time. Gibson was hauling Iris upstream, but he had to navigate around a big oxbow and I knew a path that cut straight across the bend.

I grabbed Owen by his good arm and hustled him to the spot where he had a fighting chance to save my sister. He was cooperative, which was good, because I was hardnosed enough to twist his bad arm until he saw the light. He moved well for a man whose blood was dripping out and splashing on the ground. I knew that situation probably couldn’t go on much longer, but we didn’t have far to go. The path dead-ended at the river and, praise Jesus, we had gotten there fast enough.

The bank we stood on rose five feet above the river. We could have leaned over and spit on Gibson, but I paused for a second to come up with a more constructive way to use this competitive advantage. Owen was ordinarily a very smart man but, as a thinker, this wasn’t his finest hour. He didn’t stop to plan; he just launched himself, feet-first, at a man holding a gun who had just proven himself capable of murder.

As I’ve said, the boat was fully loaded with cargo. The two men crashed so hard into one box that it busted open and let out a smell like the inside of my grandfather’s flask. Even Gibson wasn’t a good enough boatman to keep his vessel upright under this onslaught. Gibson, Owen, Iris—all three of them went into the river, and the fighting and cursing began in earnest.

I needed to help my sister, and I was going to need a distraction bigger than a cypress ball. I looked around for an idea and was rewarded. The riverbank sloped downward a few yards upstream until it was barely higher than the river itself, and the criminals in the boat below me had made good use of that fact. It was an ideal spot to unload boxes from a car directly into a boat, and the Model T Ford that they used to run their rum was still parked there, waiting for them. It was certainly bigger than a cypress ball, but I didn’t have a clear idea how I could use it to save Iris and Owen. Yet.

As I ran for the car, I learned another curse word. It rhymes with “odd ma’am,” and it is a serious transgression against the commandment against taking the Lord God’s name in vain.

I must confess that the rescue plan I developed was at least as ill-considered as Owen’s, but I was under duress. I was also eight years old.

It seemed to me that Owen and Iris were only a few feet from shore, and that perhaps I could just drive the car out there and get them. The car would provide me some protection from Gibson’s gun, assuming the revolver was even still dry enough to shoot. Once Owen and Iris were in the car, we could flee at top speed—thirty miles an hour, maybe more. It did not occur to me to wonder whether an internal combustion engine would work any better underwater than a revolver would. Cars were, in those days, new and magical beasts.

Like most children, I watched and remembered each move the adults around me made, even when I didn’t understand its purpose. I knew how to “advance the spark” so that the car would start. I knew that I would find the crank on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat. I knew how to fit it into the housing on the car’s front and turn it. I knew that I would need to pull it away fast when the engine started, so as not to have my arm jerked off. However, I did not—and still do not—know much about the braking system of the Model T. At some point in the process, I disengaged the brake and, when I knelt in front of the car, crank in hand, it started to roll.

Iris, God bless her, was in the middle of the worst night of her life when she looked up and saw a car driving over her cherished baby sister. To this day, I can hear her screaming, “Lila! Lila, don’t die—please don’t die!” I have rarely felt so loved.

She might have known that I had sense enough to lay down real flat on the ground between the wheels and let the thing roll right over me.

A Model T splashing into a river makes a mighty fine distraction. Owen, who probably should have been more worried about me than he was, though perhaps he already knew me well enough to presume I’d be fine, took the opportunity to wrestle Gibson into a headlock.

The sound of a baying dog and a man’s steady voice reached me, and I knew my daddy had heard the gunshot and had come to set things right. For all the years my father lived, I enjoyed the assurance that he would take care of Iris and me. That night was no different. Watched over by Daddy and also by his hunting rifle, his bird dog Sam, and Owen, Gibson was no trouble to any of us while we waited for the sheriff.

***

Our ordeal should have been long past when the sheriff arrived. Quite a crowd had gathered on the river bank to gawk at Gibson by then—news travels fast in places where nothing interesting ever happens—and a more somber group had gathered downstream to look for Mr. Robbins. The sheriff listened soberly as Owen told his story, shaking his head at his description of how Gibson shot Mr. Robbins in cold blood.

Then Gibson raised his head and said, “The kid’s lying. He shot Robbins, and then he tried to kill me. I shot him in self-defense.”

I did not, at that time, fully realize the jeopardy that Owen was now in. In those days before fancy forensic work, I doubt that anyone in central Florida could have told whether the bullet that killed Mr. Robbins had come from Owen’s gun or Gibson’s. Assuming their guns could be fished up off the river bottom, I imagine the lawmen could have told that they’d both been fired, but that’s about all. This case would be decided based on eyewitness testimony which, in my mind, wasn’t going to be a problem. It wasn’t a question of Owen’s word against Gibson’s. Iris and I had both seen what happened. Once we got the chance to tell our stories, I knew that everyone would see the truth.

I didn’t understand that Jeb Gibson was a man of substance and wealth in our county, and the fact that his wealth was built on rum running didn’t bother people all that much. Truth be told, a lot of the gawking onlookers were his customers. Maybe the sheriff was, too, for all I know.

I also didn’t understand that the word of an eight-year-old child meant nothing then. Still doesn’t, actually. And the testimony of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been caught visiting with her boyfriend in her nightgown could hardly have been taken seriously, not in those days. Women had only been granted the right to vote and sit on juries during my short lifetime, so our word might have been suspect to that crowd, even if we’d been upstanding citizens of legal age. I didn’t understand these matters, but I sensed that things weren’t going Owen’s way, so I leapt into the breach. That seems to have been my lifelong way of doing things.

“I saw him! I saw Gibson shoot Mr. Robbins, right in the chest.”

Women started murmuring about how a child hadn’t ought to see such awful sights. They were right, but that was water under the bridge now.

“Why would he do such a thing?” the sheriff asked, getting down on one knee beside me. I could tell by his tone of voice that he was just humoring me. He had no intention of letting a little girl interfere with the august processes of the law.

“He thought Mr. Robbins and Owen were cheating him. Mr. Robbins explained to him that they weren’t and I believed him. I think—” I hesitated to expose Gibson’s ignorance but he was a murderer and all, so I plunged ahead. “—I think he can’t read and do his numbers, and he was afraid they were taking advantage.”

I saw a couple of people, including the sheriff, flick their eyes at the ground, which told me that I wasn’t the only one who knew Gibson’s secret.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” the sheriff said, so I did. I must have looked like an avenging cherub, standing there in a nightgown wet with riverwater and Owen’s blood. I started at the beginning and I told the story.

Perhaps I went into too much detail regarding the things Owen and Iris were doing at the landing because, for a time, every eye was fastened on my sister’s mortified face. But when I described the two men floating downriver on a boat loaded with contraband, those eyes swiveled in my direction. When I delivered—word for word—the argument between Gibson, Mr. Robbins, and Owen, people listened. When I got to the part where Gibson shot Mr. Robbins, his widow moaned. Still, I had the sense that I was failing. None of these people would decide which man to put in jail based on the word of a skinny girl-child.

I imbued my description of the shooting with every lurid detail I could recall. The red spray of blood from the victim’s chest. The smell of gunpowder and mud. The lonely splash of a body striking water. They were there with me, watching the murder. I could see it in their eyes. Yet they could not muster the faith they needed to act. I was still not a plausible witness.

Then I dropped the final fact onto my teetering pile of details, and they believed. I told them what Gibson had said when he pulled the trigger.

Everyone there knew me. They knew my mama and my daddy. They could well believe that Iris was capable of misbehaving in the way I described, but they were equally certain that no eight-year-old girl from a good family could possibly know that loathsome word. Some of the women in the crowd turned uncertain eyes on their husbands because they, themselves, had never heard it.

Later, when I told my story to the judge, I had been advised of how singularly unsuitable that word was for a young lady. Or an old lady or a gentleman of any age, for that matter. I refused to say it again, but the sheriff had heard my testimony the first time, and he explained things to the judge for me. Justice was served.

Owen did a little time for his rum running, but it was nothing compared to what he would have gotten for killing Mr. Robbins. I don’t know if Gibson ever got out of prison. They may have hanged him, for all I know. That was not the kind of information that was shared with little girls in those long-ago times. Everyone concerned agreed that it was best to let Owen and Iris get married before he went off to jail. Just in case. She was waiting for him when he got home, and they lived together in a little house on the riverbank for the rest of their long lives.

Eventually, I stopped being a little girl and people started listening to me when I talked.

I take that back. After that night on the river, people paid heed to what I said, because I had proven myself. I believe some of them were a little afraid of me, which may have been why I came so near to being an old maid. Webster Simpson was the only man, other than my father, who could take me seriously without being afraid of me, so I married him. We lived next door to Iris and Owen for the rest of his long life, and we were happy.

Webster was a roofer by trade, but he was an artist at heart. There was nothing that man couldn’t make with a piece of galvanized roofing and a pair of tin snips. He made Iris a toy Model T, complete with tires that rolled and a tiny little crank on the passenger floorboard. She hung it on her Christmas tree every year until she died.

It’s hanging near the tip-top of my own Christmas tree, right this minute.

####

Mouse House

By Mary Anna Evans

If Peter Pan had expired less flamboyantly or, better yet, if he had not expired at all, the murder of Paolo Arrezzo might have remained forever unsolved. If Peter Pan had stayed alive, it is possible (though unlikely) that Mr. Arrezzo’s death certificate might always have read “cardiac arrest.” Medical examiners tend to take special care with the post-mortem examinations of high-level Mafia officials who find themselves without a pulse at the tender age of 42, but there are many chemicals capable of rendering one dead. While the crime lab would certainly have looked for the poison that left him face-down in his apple strudel, some of them are damn hard to find unless you know precisely what noxious agent you’re seeking.

Young Mr. Pan’s cause of death was much easier to pinpoint. When a human being covered in fake fairy dust leaps out of a castle window, trusting that his safety cable will guide him gently to the ground, it’s best for that cable to be in one piece. I was in my office, using a dozen security cameras to scan the excitable crowd below the unfortunate Pete, when the cable failed and sent him to his fate.

Parents snatched their children—some of them teenaged and quite large—and carried them bodily toward the park exit. Within ten seconds, Main Street was a bottleneck with the potential to kill hundreds of panic-stricken guests. In the array of security monitors, I could see my staff, efficient and well-trained, leap into action. Opening seldom-used gates, they began funneling guests down into the basement that serves as the backstage for the biggest show in the world. Each guest who was shuttled through the basement and out an emergency exit was one more person who would not trample someone else or be trampled themselves. If our luck held, Mr. Arrezzo and Pete would be the only people to die in the park today.

Two deaths in one day. In a single morning. Mr. Arrezzo had expired over breakfast, and Pete had been flying the pre-noon show designed to welcome latecomers into the park. It was also timed to make the earlybirds stop in the tracks and wonder whether it wasn’t time to grab an overpriced hot dog for lunch. The sooner they ate, the sooner the Corporation would have a chance to sell them another meal.

I pitied the PR chief. The Corporation does not appreciate publicity that can’t be manipulated into a favorable slant. That’s why they hired me. Good security does not make news. It is invisible. While my job application said all the right things—a degree in criminology, fifteen years of law enforcement experience, and specialized training in surveillance technology—my interview won me the job.

My employers have a deep and abiding knowledge of psychology. If you doubt that, spend a week at the park sometime. Ride all the rides once for pleasure, then ride them again for understanding. Watch how they use costumed characters and mildly humorous films to distract you from the fact that you just spent half-an-hour standing in line outdoors.

In Florida.

In August.

Then ride all the rides again. Make an effort not to look where they want you to look. Ignore the charming dolls chanting about how small the world is, and look for the underwater tracks that branch off from the ride’s main line.

Where do you think they go? To a maintenance area, of course. When some destructive kid carves his name in a boat’s shiny finish, somebody’s got to hustle that watercraft to the repair shop. Maintaining the illusion of magical perfection is tough when 70,000 imperfect human beings troop through the park on any given day.

Now, ride something else and look for tell-tale gaps in the scenery where a door might hide. If some idiot stomps on your daughter’s finger while they’re clambering into one of those fake mine cars, do you think they’re going to let you carry her, screaming and crying and bleeding, out the front entrance in front of all those waiting guests? Nope, they’ll send a cast member to spirit your whole family away through a hidden exit, down into the basement where you’ll find a friendly nurse with a first-aid kit and a lollipop for your young one. Hell, they might even send a dwarf to the emergency station to apply the antibiotic ointment.

My point is this: I’ve never personally met a colleague who admitted to being a psychologist, but I’m convinced the Corporation employs a whole staff of folks whose sole purpose is to keep 70,000 people happy every day. (I wish somebody would turn them loose in the Middle East. We might achieve peace in our time.)

I am convinced that those psychologists are intimately involved in the hiring process, and I believe that is why I was hired for this job. I am a man of utmost discretion. I consider the ramifications of my words and my actions. If anyone is less likely to say something stupid to the press or to a law enforcement official, I don’t know who that person might be. I communicated that quality to my interviewers five years ago, and I was rewarded with my dream job. Two rather theatrical deaths made today a more difficult day than most, but I love my work. I knew I could handle this.

I backed up the surveillance video and took a close look at Peter Pan’s final flight. He’d paused on the specially built balcony high up the castle’s tallest tower, swashing and buckling with his faux sword until the crowd noticed him, then he’d launched himself into his trademark tumbling dive.

Guests have thrilled to Tinkerbell’s nightly flight for decades, but there are stunts that only a male body can do. When the park added a second circus-trained aerialist to the lineup, the official website lit up with messages from awe-struck guests describing Peter Pan’s daring entrance, so Pete the Aerialist became a permanent part of each day’s entertainment…

…until tonight, when his flashy dive accelerated downward toward the point at which the safety cable should have pulled taut, yanking him out of gravity’s grip. Only it didn’t.

Perfectly toned arms and legs flailed at the air, trying to save an acrobat’s body that could do nearly everything except fly. He landed on a paved area amid bushes and shadows that obscured my view, and I was glad for that. I had never liked Peter Pan’s alter ego, a bitchy egotist whose real name was Merrill Chatham, but that didn’t mean I was anxious for a look at his broken body. I would get a look at Merrill’s remains soon enough, as well as a blow-by-blow description of the autopsy, but I was in no hurry.

I buzzed my assistant Keith. “Get every staff member who’s not working crowd control in here. Tell them to sift through every second of surveillance video of the castle’s exterior and interior, starting just after Merrill’s flight last night. If someone cut that cable, we should have them on video.”

“We’ve already got all available staff here, running through the videos and trying to re-trace Mr. Arrezzo’s last few hours.”

Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket and heading out the door into the makeshift workroom where all those people were, I said, “I knew that. Watching Merrill die just got me rattled. Tell them to keep an eye out for him, too, while they’re scanning the video. I want to know everything he did today, and that includes what time he took his last piss. Call in some off-duty staff to go through the castle videos, if that’s what it takes.”

Letting the door slam behind me, I dialed James, the person most likely to know things about the dead Peter Pan that no surveillance camera could ever pick up.

“James—” He cut me off before I got any further.

“You’re calling me during working hours—” James took a breath and I knew he was checking his Caller ID. “—and you’re on your company cell phone. Is that completely safe?”

“Please don’t start. This is not the time. Merrill is dead.”

“Dead? Merrill? He’s the healthiest man I know. God. And you’re calling me on your company phone, so I’m guessing he died in the park on your watch. Whatever happened?”

Striding through the broad underground corridors alongside staffers muttering amongst themselves about Peter Pan’s fall, I wished I’d made this call before leaving my office. Reaching the infirmary where Merrill’s body would be brought, I told James to hold on a second and stepped into an empty examining room, closing the door.

“He fell. His wire broke. We’re trying to find out whether it was an accident. Can you tell me whether he had any enemies?”

“How should I know? What makes you think I knew anything about Merrill’s friends or enemies? We had absolutely nothing in common. Other than being flaming faggots.”

“The dressing room, James. Please don’t make this into something it’s not. I just thought you might know something about his personal life because you see him every day in the dancers’ dressing room.”

“Well, it is the single-gender Peyton Place of central Florida,” James purred. The prospect of being asked to gossip on the company payroll had driven the knowledge that he was angry with me clean out of his mind. “Merrill cheats on Aaron quite regularly, and he flaunts it in his face, too.”

“Would Aaron have killed him for it?”

“Sweetheart, that dressing room is filled right up every day with men that could just kill Merrill. First, there’s Aaron. Then, there’s all the other men he’s loved and left. Also, he’s stolen a few boyfriends from a few people who don’t like him much any more. And don’t forget the classic culprit—his understudy. Me. How far do you think I might go for a chance at that job, not to mention the glory and the money that come with it?”

“James, come on. You? A murderer? Who stomps the palmetto bugs at our house?”

“Well, you do. But I like palmetto bugs more than I liked Merrill.”

I shifted the cell phone to my other ear. “So you’re telling me that every male dancer in the park had some reason to want Merrill dead?”

“Pretty much. Any more questions? Want to know what I’m cooking for dinner?”

“I don’t think I’ll be home for dinner tonight.”

***

My professional observation of Merrill’s body was much more unpleasant than viewing Mr. Arezzo’s body had been. The Mafia chief had simply been a middle-aged man, limp and pale. The apple strudel smeared on his blank face had impaired his dignity, but it had not destroyed it.

Merrill, on the other hand…well, I happen to believe that God never intended a man to die with his green, pointy-toed boots on. And He damn sure didn’t mean for him to do it in sparkly tights.

Merrill’s broken body had nothing to tell me. All I needed was the identity of the person who sabotaged his cable. And I knew now that it was sabotage. My people had examined both ends of the cable. A clean cut had extended almost all the way through its diameter, leaving just enough material to hold the thing together, but not enough to support Merrill’s weight.

This was murder.

I moved through the emergency center in Keith’s office, peering first over one shoulder, then another.

“Anybody got anything?” I asked.

Keith caught up with my frenetic pacing long enough to say, “We’ve got nothing on who cut Merrill’s cable. There’s no security camera up there.” Of course there wasn’t, I reflected. Why would there be?

A young blonde woman whose name had escaped me beckoned. “Mr. Arrezzo seems to have been…difficult. I’ve got video of him arguing with his wife, browbeating a ride attendant, yelling at his kids. And the park was only open two hours before he died. Who brings their kids someplace like this, then makes them cry?”

I didn’t think his kids put rat poison in his strudel, and I told her so.

“Yeah, well if I was married to a guy like that, I just might,” the blonde confessed. “I mean, how easy could it be to divorce the Godfather?”

I nodded to concede her point. “See if you can get video of her poisoning the Godfather.”

Another staffer tapped me on the shoulder and beckoned for me to lean down close. “Better have somebody check her work,” he whispered. “Sounds to me like she might not mind if Mrs. Arrezzo got away with poisoning the man.”

Another good point.

“Does anybody have the Arrezzos ordering their breakfast? I want as good a look at his food as we can get.”

The blonde had the video I wanted. The victim ordered for his whole family, like a man who was accustomed to doing all the talking in his world. He got bacon and eggs and orange juice for everybody. Nobody got strudel but him, which might have been one more evidence of his extreme self-centeredness. Or it could have meant that Mrs. Arrezzo was on a diet and the kids were holding out for ice cream later.

I couldn’t see anything going in or on Mr. Arrezzo’s food from the moment it was handed to him. There were gaps in camera coverage of the kitchen, but everything I could see looked good.

I wished the surveillance video had sound, but all I could see was the murder victim’s mouth moving and his head nodding. In an hour, he’d be gone. For a while, I just watched the dead man talking.

Then I ran the tape again, trying to look at everything but the dead man. I scanned every face in the room, looking for Mafia hit men. All I saw were kids and diaper-bag-packing moms and a couple of dads dandling babies on their laps. Behind Mr. Arrezzo, surrounded by the restaurant’s fake Bavarian trappings, his wife and kids cowered. In front of him, a teenaged cashier nervously hit the wrong keys on her register and had to start over. The dead man was not pleased.

Experience spoke in my ear, and it said, Look beyond the immediate. Screen out the obvious. What else do you see?

At the edge of the screen, I saw other teenaged cashiers, oblivious to the Arrezzos and their unfolding drama. And in the background, for just an instant, I saw Rosa.

***

Beneath the park, there are dressing rooms and employee cafeterias and storage rooms and food staging facilities. There are broad passageways where golf carts shuttle people and things where they need to go. And if you stray far enough from the beaten path—if you burrow deep enough—you can find rooms full of things people have forgotten ever existed. In the case of Rosa, you can even find a person whose existence has faded from memory. Well, most memories.

The hardworking kids who run the park know Rosa. They see her pass quietly as they load the trains and serve the burgers and march in the parade. Some of them are afraid of her, but the ones with hearts see Rosa for what she is…a sweet-faced old lady with nowhere to go.

Rosa likes the kids. I’ve seen her walk past a little ticket-taker who was having a rough day and pat her on the elbow. No talking, no hugging, just a little pat. I’m not supposed to know this, but sometimes she fills in for them, spending a few minutes selling ice cream so that the real ice cream guy can go to the bathroom or steal a moment with his girl. It’s against the rules, but what the hell.

If old people are invisible in our world, then I guess you could say homeless old people inhabit some other dimension. You’d think Rosa would stand out in a crowd affluent enough to afford the park’s hefty ticket prices. You’d think wrong. I’ve watched a family of five jostle past Rosa as she stood leaning against a wall, minding her own business. Not one of them looked her in the face.

Can you imagine a better informant for someone in my position?

***

Rosa likes pizza, so I brought three slices down into the deepest part of the basement, to the storage closet she uses for an apartment. Kicking aside a sizeable stuffed pig with only one ear, I eased myself down onto a pile of stuff that she uses for a guest chair. She sat on another pile next to me. At the bottom of her pile, I recognized a cast-off ballgown and a pirate suit. Rods hung on Rosa’s walls at about eye level all around the room, suggesting that it had once been used for costume storage. This would explain the air conditioning vent in the closet ceiling. Fabric gathers mildew within days in this climate, unless the humidity is wrung out of the air with expensive machinery.

Rosa seems to gather lost sweaters and misplaced stuffed animals. These things serve her well as clothing and furniture. It occurred to me that maybe we should pay her for being the park’s scavenger. A teepee of old gardening tools leaning in the corner of the closet made me wonder whether Rosa ventured out at night to shape up the topiary bushes, just for fun.

“You’ve had a bad day,” Rosa said, patting my elbow.

“You hear about Merrill?”

“A pity. He was a very pretty person.” Her voice had the high, keening quaver of the very old.

“Did you know him?”

“He only talked to pretty people like himself.”

Well, that was true. So I’d proceed on the assumption that Rosa knew Merrill.

“Rosa, did you know that another man died in the park today?”

“Yes.” She smoothed a thin veil of gray hair away from her forehead. Her right eye was murky with an untreated cataract. “He was a gangster.”

My, how well the employee grapevine functioned. Rosa probably knew more about Arrezzo’s death than I did. But, then, that was the reason I was here.

“What else do you know about him?”

“Only that he was the kind of man who would make his own children cry. Here. In this place that was built for children. They’re better off without him.”

That seemed a bit harsh, but Rosa’s whole life was harsh, so I let it go.

“I know you were there when he died.” This was a stretch. I only knew that Rosa was there when he bought his food, but I bent the truth and was rewarded with the effect I wanted. “What did you see?”

“It was a quiet thing. He twitched a little and dropped his fork. His wife—she’s a dainty little woman, don’t you think?—looked up from her own plate and asked him what was wrong. Then he just…fell over.”

“Did his wife help him serve his food? Did she salt it for him? Did she help him sugar his coffee?”

“He didn’t have coffee.” I knew this already. The fact that Rosa knew it, too, made her that much more credible as a witness. “I did hear him ask her for an antacid tablet.”

“Did you see her give it to him?” I didn’t have any tape of Mrs. Arrezzo passing a pill to her doomed husband, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“Nope. Didn’t see anything like that.” She eyed my pizza crust. I gave it to her.

“Did you see anything else that will help me find out whether Mr. Arrezzo was murdered?”

“Only thing I saw after that was two crying kids. How are they holding up? Here. Take these to the man’s children.” She clutched the one-eared pig to her breast, as if it were too precious to give, and held out a toy car and a marionette with tangled strings instead. “Tell them that Rosa wants them to feel better.”

I knew when I’d been dismissed.

***

I recognized the tap at my office door. It had been a long time since James had visited me at work, and he’d only done it once. I hadn’t been sufficiently welcoming and he’d punished me for it for a week.

Discretion, circumspection, keeping one’s own council—these are all ways of saying that I keep my business to myself. I don’t chat about my home life around the water cooler, and I don’t say stupid things about my employer to the press. This close-to-the-vest quality had won me my job, and it had lost me two lovers that I didn’t want to lose. Two, so far. James had one foot out the door.

He tapped again, and I knew that he’d walked through the emergency headquarters outside my door, which was clotted with a half-dozen off-duty personnel called in to work the two murder cases. Law enforcement types are not typically kind to men with James’ flair for fashion. This was just one in a long list of reasons why I treasured my own circumspection. To be fair, I once knew an emphatically straight cop who took a bullet for his transsexual partner, but in a field where even the women are expected to be macho, the closet feels like a very safe place to me.

I heard no insults or catcalls through the door, but I imagined them. I hurried to open it and to let James in, where it was safe.

As soon as the door shut behind him, he burst out with his news, “You remember we were wondering about Aaron, whether he maybe killed Merrill out of jealousy? Well, he’s gone. He quit! Said he couldn’t face this place without his true love’s presence or something like that.”

When I took a second to respond, he kept talking, “Well, isn’t that important? I was afraid someone would overhear me, so I came straight here to tell you.”

Sometimes I think I just don’t talk fast enough to suit James. Sometimes I think maybe I think too much to suit him, but I really was just gathering my thoughts. He interpreted my hesitation differently.

“I shouldn’t have come here. You’ve never wanted me here, and I’ve respected that, but this is important. This is murder and you asked me to help. Well, I gave you the news. You do whatever you want with it.”

He headed for the door and was nearly knocked to the floor by a half-dozen security officers bursting into my office.

“We’ve got tape of Merrill fighting with a bunch of kids yesterday just before the park closed last night,” Keith said, popping a disc into my office machine.

“And a couple of their dads,” another guy added.

I was interested to hear it, but my eyes were on James’ back as he worked his way through the maze of desks hauled into Keith’s office just for this emergency.

“Who in the hell is that?” Keith asked. A couple of the other guys tittered, but there were no crude jokes, no insinuations. Yet. They would come after James was out of earshot, and James knew it.

Through my half-open door, I could see him. His hand was on the doorknob that would take him out of sight. Forever.

Keith looked at me, waiting for the answer to his question. Who in the hell is that?

Keith deserved an answer, and so did James. Maybe because I’d just had lunch with an old woman who lived alone in her closet, I knew the right answer.

“That, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, glancing about the room with my customary air of command, “is the love of my life.”

James heard me. I could tell. He continued, uninterrupted, in the smooth motion of opening a door. His exit was grand, like the dancer that he is, but I thought he’d probably be back.

***

The answer to Merrill’s death was indeed in the video Keith and his friend had found, though not in the way they expected. The night before, just after his last flight, Merrill had been the center of an ugly scene. His poisonous and cocky personality never took a rest, not even when he’d just been cheered by tens of thousands of adoring fans. As he walked away from his triumphant landing, he’d been besieged by children wanting autographs. Unfortunately, Merrill just hadn’t been in the mood to do something nice for the people who paid his handsome salary.

When you’re brushing off a few clinging kids, it can’t be a surprise when one falls on his little diapered butt. And it can’t come as much of a shock when his daddy tries to rip off your feathered cap and beat you with it.

I looked at my in-box, where the day’s petty woes festered. I’d had time for nothing but these two murders, but I would lay odds that several guests had complained about Merrill’s behavior and that those complaints were waiting for me right there.

“Back it up and slow it down,” I barked. And I set myself the usual task of looking in the background for information that’s hiding in plain sight.

None of the people watching the altercation looked familiar. It would have been too much to hope that the Arrezzos were standing there, waiting for me to tie the two murders up into a neat bow. Still, there was a smudge of pink on the ground that I thought I recognized.

Another run through the tape confirmed that this pink smudge was a stuffed pig with a missing ear. And a third pass showed me that the pink pig walked away from the scene, though obviously not under its own power.

The pig was there when Merrill started to misbehave, and it was gone when he regained his senses.

Rosa was there. And she didn’t tell me

***

Rosa didn’t seem surprised to see me again so soon, and she didn’t seem surprised to see that, for the first time, I hadn’t come alone.

In my office, my team was assembling the evidence. The video that showed Rosa had been at arm’s length from Mr. Arrezzo’s food, just before he succumbed to rat poison—which was probably easily available down here in the vast network of storerooms where she lived. And the video that linked Rosa to Merrill through the shabby little pig.

No record existed of Merrill’s cable being cut, but surely one of the topiary shaping tools leaning in the corner of Rosa’s room would have served that function well enough. I jerked my head in that direction, so that Keith would know to gather the tools and find the one that had been scarred by cutting a metal cable. He had already deployed a team to search the area for an unguarded tray of rat poison. Or a tray where some rat poison had been.

Finding the right poison, as well as the scarred blades of a pair of tree loppers, would give me two pieces of physical evidence to shore up my flimsy web of circumstantial evidence. These things would show that Rosa had the means to do the crimes.

I had video confirmation that she’d had the opportunity to poison Mr. Arrezzo, but my cameras had not been conveniently arranged to capture her in the act of cutting Merrill’s cable. I had a few seconds showing just a glimpse of her from behind, standing near the employee entrance to a web of backstage corridors, one of which led out onto the deadly castle balcony. It wasn’t enough. Can you imagine the publicity that a trial over the murder of Peter Pan would produce? I needed an open-and-shut case.

The only other video I had linking her to Merrill’s death merely showed that she and the pink pig had been present the last time he behaved like a diva, drunk on a testosterone-spiked cocktail. Still, the Corporation didn’t hire me just for my law enforcement prowess. Their psychologists had determined that I was psychologically right for the job. I won my position because I choose my words carefully, and because I think through the full ramifications of my every action, and because I’m a very passable amateur psychologist myself.

I understood exactly what had driven Rosa to kill, and I could make her tell me about it.

“I know why you live here, Rosa.”

Rather than meet my eyes, she looked at her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. Every joint was swollen to the point that her fingers canted in odd directions. “I live here because it’s warm all the year. When you’ve got no roof and no hope of one, Florida looks mighty good.”

“That’s true, but it’s not what I meant. I meant that I know why you live here at the park.”

“I do have a nice place here,” she said, as her good eye wandered up toward the air conditioning vent. “Cool in the summer. Warm in the winter. The bathroom’s right down the hall.”

“That’s still not what I meant.” Finally, the rheumy eyes rested on my face, so I delivered the key to her crime. “This is a very special place.”

“I like happiness,” she said dreamily, looking upward toward the park that rested on the ground above our heads. “If I want to see people smiling, all I have to do is go up top. There’s sunshine up there, too, but I need happiness more than sunshine.”

“And children?”

“I need children more than anything. Here, I can see happy children all the time.” Her eyes drifted down to the damaged pig. “The children…the ones whose father made them cry. Did you give them the toys I sent?” I nodded. “Because, if you didn’t, they can have this one.”

I wanted to say, They’re crying now. You made them cry, Rosa, but that would have been too much for her. I’d have lost my confession. So, instead, I said, “You worked hard today for the children. Are you very tired?”

“Oh, no!” Her voice was almost youthful, rich and musical. “Oh, nothing is hard when you do it for children. I could run so fast today because I knew I had to. If I’d been slow, I would have missed my chance at the gangster’s food, but I got back with the rat bait just fast enough. After that, I felt so strong. I knew I could pick the right tool and carry it up to the balcony. I knew I’d be able to balance out there long enough to do what needed doing.”

“And these things needed doing to Mr. Arrezzo and Merrill because…”

“Because they made the children cry. And they did it here! This place is…well, it’s like sacred ground. You leave your tears outside. Everybody needs a place like that. And now those children can have it.” A pale flush spread over her withered cheeks. “They can have it because of me. I gave it back to them.”

I had my confession, but I wasn’t sure whether I was proud of it.

***

The Corporation avoids bad publicity with all its hefty financial might, and I can’t say I blame them. They’ve never asked me to lie for them, and there’s no sin that I can see in putting the truth in its best possible light. And, as Rosa has finally made me see, the Corporation exists for the purpose of giving people pleasure. Particularly the very small people who are supremely unimportant everywhere else in the world.

The details of Rosa’s conviction, other than the bare facts, never made the press. The public was told that Mr. Arezzo and Merrill Chatham were killed by a deranged guest who had been put away in a facility from which she can never expect to emerge. This is true, and this is all they need to know.

The Corporation was exceedingly grateful for my speed and, as always, for my discretion in solving these crimes. It has shown its gratitude in monetary terms. There also have been quiet assurances that any inappropriate behavior in the workplace toward James, me, or the two of us as a family unit will trigger prompt action. A woman even came to my office to ask me, and I quote, “Is there anything else that the Corporation can do for you?”

I described to them a place that was warm and safe. A place where a criminally insane elderly woman would feel like she’d been transported to a resort. A place where people would smile when they spoke to her. A place where she could play cards with other peaceful but criminally insane people, blissfully unaware that there were armed guards watching every moment of her well-earned retirement. Perhaps it was too much to hope that children could be brought to visit now and then. I wanted Rosa to be put in a place where she was so happy that she’d never notice that there were locks on the doors.

From the look on the woman’s face, I knew that the Corporation owned just the right place for Rosa. Or it would soon. After all, it does specialize in building places where the impossible seems real and dreams come true.

####

STARCH

by

Mary Anna Evans and Lillian Sellers

In 1954, the word “nurse” was a female one. We worked among women. We were taught by women. We trained at an all-female school that required us to live on-campus—with women, of course. It was an odd time and place to be a lesbian, and this was particularly true for me. I had, at that time, never even heard the word “lesbian,” and thus had no idea that I was one.

In those days, on-duty nurses were addressed by their last names, so I was known as “Crain.” I liked the notion of dispensing with “Mrs.” and “Miss,” and all the social baggage that separated women outside the hospital into single girls, married ladies, and old maids. The doctors we served were, without exception, male, and we were expected to stand when any of them entered the room, just as gentlemen outside the hospital rose out of respect for ladies. I positively reveled in this perversion of the prevailing custom. If anyone was ever born to be a nurse, I was.

I loved the uniform, white and severe. I kept mine starched so stiff that the collar chafed at my neck. Even our caps were starched to the texture of cardboard. My dark hair was no longer lank when I pinned it up beneath that old-style cap. Its medieval lines suited my strong features and, while I was still not pretty when I wore it, I was surely memorable.

Only one thing could have made me give up my cherished whites. When I was offered a job as a surgical nurse in the OR, I accepted on the spot, even though it meant that my working life would be spent in a nondescript scrub dress. Surgery is a life-or-death proposition, every day. This job was a chance to make people well, every day. People that might have died would roll out of my OR into decades of life. Every day. How could I turn that down? I spent the rest of my career in the OR.

And that is how I found myself face-to-face with bloody, messy, intentional death. Murder.

I was the circulating nurse that night, which meant that my entire purpose for breathing was to make sure that nothing went wrong. When a surgeon or a scrub nurse or an anesthesiologist needed an instrument unexpectedly, the circulating nurse had better by God get it for them. If she was good, she knew what her doctors needed before they did. I was good.

It was an emergency case, a terrible one, the kind of case you remember forever. A twenty-five-year-old woman, more than eight months pregnant, had gone to sleep at the wheel and drifted off the road. Her car rolled twice before slamming into a telephone pole. If you’re old enough to remember 1954, then you already know the worst part. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

I don’t like to think about how many times that poor woman’s body must have slammed into the car door or the steering wheel or the stick shift or the roof of that car. And every impact inflicted its damage.

There were no paramedics in those days, simply attendants who loaded the wounded into ambulances and ferried them to the hospital. There were no cell phones, either, so those attendants couldn’t call ahead and warn the hospital what to expect. But in serious cases, and this one was serious, the policeman on the scene used his radio to pass along the bad news. Thanks to that alert lawman, an emergency surgical team began assembling before the patient ever reached the hospital.

I was at home washing my supper dishes when I got the emergency call, but barely ten minutes passed before I parked my car in the hospital lot and hit the ground running.

The nursing supervisor met me in the surgical dressing room, briefing me as I peeled off my street clothes and pulled on a clean scrub dress.

“All the other on-call staff were in the hospital when we got the message, so you’re the last to arrive. I’ve helped Moseley suit up. The room is ready and the patient is prepped, so we’re all set.”

“What’s her condition?”

“Head injuries. Multiple broken bones. Internal bleeding. She’s comatose, so Dr. Gomez intubated her in the ER to keep her from aspirating during surgery.”

“So what are we going to fix first?”

“First, we’re going to take the baby. The patient’s thirty-five weeks along. I’d say the baby’s got a lot better chance than she does.”

It made sense. Cesarean sections were performed with lightning speed in those days. Once the patient was anesthetized, the goal was to deliver the child within a minute and a half, before the sleep-inducing chemicals could make their way from the mother’s blood to the baby’s. Otherwise, the risk of damage to the child was too great.

Waiting ninety seconds to begin repairing her internal injuries posed no great risk to the patient, not compared to the damage that had already been done. And in the process, we would save a life.

Rushing into the OR, I noticed that Dr. Lacey was scrubbed up and ready to assist, even though I was sure that Dr. Wilkinson had been on call. Displaying the clairvoyant talents of a true nurse, the supervisor leaned toward me and whispered, “Dr. Wilkinson was supposed to be in the hospital, but…well, he couldn’t be found. Dr. Lacey was here, so we drafted him.”

This did not bode well for Dr. Wilkinson. He was widely known as a man devoted to ethanol and to other men’s wives, but he was a competent doctor. The other surgeons tended to overlook foibles of such a manly nature, so long as patient care wasn’t compromised. Failing to respond to an emergency call, however, was an intolerable offense, even for the old boys’ network.

The surgeon, Dr. Hale, was scrubbed up and ready to get started. Dr. Auburn, the pediatrician who would take charge of the baby, stood with his arms crossed and his head cocked awkwardly, as if he knew that he was useless until his patient was born.

Moseley was laying out the instruments directly on the patient’s draped thigh, where Dr. Hale liked them. Dr. Lacey stood across from her, watching to make sure she did it right. This served only to make Moseley nervous.

Doctors can smell fear, just as easily as wild beasts can. They had savaged her daily during her first months on the job, until I took her aside and showed her a few tricks, like how to clip sutures with her left hand. It helps to be ambidextrous when you’re working in quarters as confined as a human body cavity, and not all surgeons are good with their non-dominant hand. When they see you do something that they can’t, they’re impressed. And when they’re impressed, they tend to shut up and leave you alone.

Dr. Gomez had moved his rolling equipment chest to its place next to the patient’s head. He was as finicky about his anesthesiology equipment as any of the surgeons were about their tools, and the patient’s life rested in his hands just as certainly as it did in theirs. It’s well-known among nurses that people who choose to be surgeons or anesthesiologists have total confidence in their own god-like powers. This does not make them pleasant people.

Having known perhaps a hundred surgeons in my working life, I have developed a most sincere sympathy for their spouses. While it was a shock to find Dr. Wilkinson dead in the supply closet—actually, he was dead all over the supply closet—in retrospect, it was not surprising that someone hated him enough to kill him. He was a surgeon.

I only stepped into the supply closet to fetch a retractor to replace one that Dr. Lacey had dropped. Retractors were hardly necessary for a C-section, since the overstuffed uterus rises out of the abdomen as soon as it’s opened, making itself easily accessible without mechanical aid. No, retractors would be helpful later in the operation, when we were looking for the bone fragments and punctured organs that might well kill this young woman.

As expected, I found the supply room well-stocked with sterile retractors. People who supply operating rooms believe in planning ahead. Unexpected events kill patients, so redundancy is a cardinal virtue. On the other hand, the closet’s ample supply of surgical tools hadn’t been such a good thing for Dr. Wilkinson. Someone had used a scalpel to send him to his Maker. I studied the wreckage of his body with a detachment born of years spent watching bodies being cut apart and sewn back together.

His throat had been slit, severing the trachea and depriving him of the ability to breathe or to cry for help. Then, not satisfied with merely ending his life, the murderer had enjoyed a moment of recreational surgery. Using the same vertical incision that Dr. Hale would soon use to deliver a baby, the killer had opened Dr. Wilkinson’ abdomen and festooned the supply closet with his entrails. I assessed the volume of blood splashed about and judged that this had been done quickly, before his heart stopped beating.

I remember thinking that it would have been a damn sight neater if the murderer had just taken a gun and shot him.

A good nurse pays attention to detail. The lone surgical gown in the hamper next to the door was saturated with blood that was too red. It had been more than three hours since the last patient was wheeled out of this OR, so the freshly soiled gown was the one that the killer had used to fend off Dr. Wilkinson’ blood. If the killer had dropped scrubs into the hamper, I would have known the killer’s gender, because we women wore scrub dresses in those days. Unfortunately, surgical gowns were unisex.

I couldn’t even glean any information from the gown’s size, since surgical gowns were one-size-fits-all. At least in theory. In reality, they fit the doctors quite well. Being a tall, raw-boned woman, I too found them comfortable, but they hung like sacks on the smaller nurses.

An empty cloth wrapper tossed into the hamper with the bloody gown told me that someone had opened a sterile gown, either in preparation for premeditated murder or as a replacement for the clean gown they’d worn into the room. The supply closet had never seemed a particularly threatening place before I realized that it was kept stocked with wide variety of murder weapons, stored alongside a stack of clothing specially designed to protect one’s clothing from spurting blood.

Other than the surgical gown and the empty bag, nothing else in my supply closet was out of place. Well, except for Dr. Wilkinson and his entrails.

I devoted a moment to his injuries. The scalpel had been wielded by a steady hand, with no hacking or jabbing. Because the abdominal incision had been done hastily, nicking the intestines in a couple of places, I couldn’t say for sure that it had been done by a surgeon. Still, if the murderer didn’t wield a scalpel for a living, I was willing to bet that he or she had watched someone else do it, time and again. I knew a couple of dozen people personally who could have done it, but my circle of friends has always been somewhat atypical.

I backed out of the supply closet and into the OR. Though I’d been with the body hardly a minute and I’d touched nothing, I felt as soiled as if I had lain down and rolled in Dr. Wilkinson’ blood. If one of the five people gathered around the unconscious patient had looked up, my face would have told them something was terribly wrong, but they didn’t. The operation was beginning.

I lingered near the supply closet door, outside the imaginary line that delineated the “sterile field,” the portion of the OR where exacting techniques protected the patient from the infectious organisms that we all carry around with us. The five people inside the sterile field were intent on their work.

The patient’s body was swathed in drapes, with only her pale and bulbous belly exposed. The anesthesiologist had done his job, so the baby needed to come out right way. After that, the woman lying unconscious on the table needed life-saving surgery, immediately. Could I afford to wait until both patients were stable before I let someone know there was a killer loose in the hospital?

I pictured a killer walking down the second-floor corridor, pushing open the double doors labeled, “Surgical Suite—Authorized Personnel Only” and walking in. It had been four hours since the seven-to-three shift had completed the last case of the day and gone home, but that didn’t mean the surgical wing had been deserted all that time. After hours, the cleaning staff carted dirty gowns to the laundry. They washed bloody surgical instruments and took them to Central Supply for sterilization. They restocked the supply closets with freshly sterilized gowns and instruments.

People don’t just walk off the street and decide to take a tour of a hospital’s operating rooms. Maybe the killer was lucky enough to slip in without being seen, but I doubted it. It seemed more likely that Dr. Wilkinson was slain by someone he expected to see, someone who walked past the cleaning staff unnoticed. Suddenly, I saw the five people surrounding an unconscious mother-to-be in a more sinister light. The nursing supervisor had explicitly said that they’d all been in the hospital when the emergency call came in. Any one of them could have ripped Dr. Wilkinson’s guts out.

I looked at Dr. Gomez, rhythmically squeezing the bag delivering cyclopropane and oxygen to the patient. His hands would breathe for her until she was able to breathe again on her own. The sweat beads gathering on his brow didn’t indicate guilt. They didn’t indicate innocence, either, only that his job was both physically and mentally strenuous.

Dr. Auburn, as a pediatrician, didn’t ordinarily frequent the OR, so I ignored him for the time being.

Dr. Lacey stood on the far side of the patient, ready to assist Dr. Hale. His expression was impassive, just as it was during surgeries that ended in amputation or a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Poker players and murderers could learn many a lesson in control by studying surgeons.

Moseley stood on the far side of the patient, nervously counting the sponges arrayed on the tray beside her.

Dr. Hale stood with his back to me, scalpel in hand, preparing to open a woman’s body. There was nothing, no twitching shoulders, no trembling legs, nothing that might have told me whether he knew that Dr. Wilkinson lay dead behind the door I had just closed.

He sliced into the patient’s abdomen, and the first bead of blood extended in the wake of his scalpel into a fine, straight, red line. Dr. Lacey went to work sponging the wound and clamping bleeders, and Moseley began a gallant effort to keep up with his and Dr. Hale’s demand for hemostats and scissors and clamps.

Mentally urging her to use both hands like I’d taught her, I left Moseley to her bumbling and tried to think. Would someone have planned to kill a man in a supply closet with a single door that opened into an operating room, which also offered a single door and, thus, only one escape route? Not if they possessed even a particle of good sense, and I didn’t know any dummies who could handle a scalpel the way Dr. Wilkinson’s murderer did.

Dr. Hale’s scalpel sliced through another layer of the patient’s body, opening up the abdominal wall. Dr. Lacey and Moseley hurried to clamp another crop of bleeders. Dr. Auburn took a step forward, anxious to meet his patient. Dr. Gomez just kept pumping gas.

Who would want to kill Dr. Wilkinson? I don’t ordinarily speak ill of the dead, but the man had built a collection of well-deserved enemies. As I’ve said, surgeons are not known for their pleasant personalities. Only the day before, Dr. Wilkinson had lost a patient while Dr. Lacey assisted. He’d laid the blame squarely at Dr. Lacey’s feet, claiming that the younger doctor’s choice of the wrong retractor had hampered his surgical skill, directly causing the patient’s death. I know this, even though the argument took place in the physicians’ private lounge, because their voices were clearly audible to everyone within three counties.

Moseley, on the other hand, had rarely been the butt of the dead doctor’s wrath, despite her incessant fumbling, probably because she was widely believed to be sleeping with him. Given that she’d been caught in a linen closet with Dr. Gomez, and that she’d been named as a party to Dr. Auburn’s divorce, I was inclined to believe the hospital’s formidable army of gossips.

Lover’s quarrels had ended in murder before, though I had trouble picturing ineffectual little Moseley yanking her victim’s intestines out. It was just as plausible to think that Dr. Gomez or Dr. Auburn killed their rival out of jealousy.

And, while on the topic of jealousy, the hospital grapevine said that ice-cool Dr. Hale had been heard to swear a long string of oaths involving God, the devil, and somebody’s mother, when Dr. Wilkinson was honored for developing a new technique for gall bladder removal. I’d watched Dr. Hale use that technique for years, but he’d been too busy taking care of patients to bother writing a scholarly paper. Was he capable of murder? Well, he was a surgeon. Playing God on a daily basis might give a man a penchant for holy retribution.

The brilliant overhead lights bleached the color from the room. The surgical team’s caps and masks obscured their faces, leaving only their eyes visible. Was one of them hoping to bluff a way out of murder? Was there enough evidence left in the supply closet to convict anyone?

The lights reflected off their hair, their clothes, their eyes, the cloths draping the patient’s body. Everything was thrown into a black-and-white world of light and darkness. The shadows at their feet were night-black, as if the floor had dissolved beneath them and exposed the shallower regions of hell. The living red of the patient’s blood was the only color in the room.

A scalpel was poised above the patient’s exposed uterus, and its surface rippled with the baby’s last languid movements before emerging into life’s stark light. I couldn’t stand by, leaving the care of a mother and her child to a killer. I studied them again, one by one, and it struck me that everyone in the room knew that I’d just come out of the supply closet. If the murderer was present, he or she knew what I’d seen.

Dr. Hale reached into the incision for the baby. Dr. Lacey cursed Moseley for being slow with a clamp, because she still insisted on doing everything with her right hand. This puzzled me, because she knew better, until I noticed her left hand hanging curled and useless by her side. It occurred to me that it was dangerous for a married man to carry on with a jittery woman who knew how to open up his trachea.

How would a short woman slice the throat of a taller man? If she was right-handed, she would stand behind him, reach up and grab his chin with her left hand to pull him down toward her, then bring her right hand up to cut from left to right. She might also accidentally deliver a pretty good slash to her left hand, if she was clumsy. I raised my eyes from a rubber glove that could well be hiding some damning evidence and saw that Moseley had taken her eyes off the patient. She studied me for a bare second, then took her second deadly action of the day.

Using her good hand, she released a hemostat, allowing a major blood vessel to hemorrhage into the patient’s abdomen. While both surgeons rushed to salvage this disaster, Moseley grabbed a scalpel and stepped around the foot of the operating table, toward the door on the far side of the room from me. Then she passed the door, hurrying toward the patient’s head.

Why is she moving away from the door? I wondered, but only for a second, until Moseley lashed out and slashed through the hose delivering oxygen to the patient. Dr. Gomez dived for his rolling supply chest, but she kicked it across the room, forcing another person to choose between chasing her and saving the patient. I was on the wrong side of the operating table. She could be out the door, fleeing into the hospital’s maze of corridors, before I reached her.

Perhaps our minds were traveling down those corridors together. At precisely the moment when I realized she was going to need a hostage to get out of the hospital, she took one.

Wrapping her left arm around Dr. Auburn’s waist, she reached up and pressed the scalpel to his throat, saying, “If anybody follows me out of here, he dies.”

The brilliant lights illuminated three doctors doing what they did best. Dr. Lacey was stanching the bleeding of a patient in critical danger, Dr. Gomez was doing his damndest to restore her air supply, and Dr. Hale was trying to free a baby from a haven that had turned deadly. There was nobody to stop Moseley but me.

I had chosen to put myself in the middle of emergency situations every day of my working life. That was what I did best. I did not intend to stand by, helpless, and watch this one unfold.

Stretching my gangly legs to their full length, I leapt onto the operating table and stood astride the patient, one sensible white shoe on either side of her chest. It was the only time in my life that I knowingly violated a sterile field. I stood there for an instant, probably dropping germs and skin particles into the patient’s open incision, then I launched myself onto Moseley. Her scalpel-wielding hand released Dr. Auburn to deal with the more immediate threat. Me.

She did her best with the scalpel, carving a slice through my tibialis anterior, but she couldn’t reach anything but my leg before I descended on her, feet first. Her left clavicle broke under my right foot, and my left foot took out a couple of her ribs. I presume that the police made sure she got adequate medical care, but I can assure you that she wasn’t treated by anybody at our hospital. The police didn’t trust us.

***

Later in the day, when my leg wound had been repaired and I was resting in my hospital room, an aide from the nursery walked in with a wheelchair. Settling me into it, she said, “The baby’s mother is…um…not able to visit with her. Nobody knows where the father is. We thought you’d like to get to know her.”

I passed the afternoon and the evening in a rocking chair with the unnamed baby girl. When word of her mother’s condition filtered through the hospital grapevine, we all knew that there would be no sweet mother-daughter moments for a long time, maybe never. After all these years, I guess there’s no harm in saying that the nursery staff brought her to my room for any number of unauthorized visits, hospital regulations be damned.

A couple of weeks later, the baby’s gutless father surfaced, staying in town just long enough to name the baby Rachel and to saddle his mother with Rachel and her older sister. He committed his wife to a place where she would get lifelong care, courtesy of the state’s taxpayers, and I guess that was a good thing. Nothing was going to repair the damage wrought by too much lost blood and too many minutes without oxygen. I trust that she got better care in that institution than he would have given her.

A hospital houses many eyes, and there was always someone anxious to tell me when they’d seen Rachel at church, or at their child’s piano recital, or on the playground. Sometimes I saw her myself, perched in the basket of her grandmother’s grocery cart. In time, I gleaned information from the newspaper which, in a small town, is always happy to report the exploits of a star basketball player or the awards granted to a talented student. It has been a quarter-century since Rachel married and moved away, but I still hear about her now and then.

My life has been long and productive, filled with the work I love and graced by good friends. There have been no lovers and no natural children, but I have not minded that so very much, because once I had a baby. Her name is Rachel, and she became a grandmother a year ago last March. She is fifty years old today.

~~End~~

From the author:

Thank you for spending time in the operating room with me and my mother and Nurse Crain. And at that nameless theme park with my nameless protagonist and Rosa. And alongside a Florida creek with Lila. I love my characters and I love sharing them with you. (And yes, I know they’re not real. They’re just a few of my many imaginary friends…) I hope you’ll tell your friends about my stories.

I have several novels and short stories that will soon be available as ebooks at http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Anna-Evans/e/B001JP9ZY2/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1 and at

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/maryannaevans. To find out their publication schedule, get more information on my work, or to learn about how to get print, large-print, or audio editions of my traditionally published books and stories, check my website, http://www.maryannaevans.com, or you can always drop me an email at maryannaevans@yahoo.com.

I love to hear from my readers. Thank you for your support.

Mary Anna

About the author:

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the award-winning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries: ARTIFACTS, RELICS, EFFIGIES, FINDINGS, and FLOODGATES. The sixth in the series, STRANGERS, will be published in October. An environmental thriller, WOUNDED EARTH, is available as an ebook on Kindle and with other vendors of electronic books, as well as short stories including those in this collection.

Mary Anna is a chemical engineer by training and license, with a degree in engineering physics thrown in for spice, but she loves reading about history and writing about an archaeologist. Truth be told, she's a little jealous of Faye and her archaeological adventures.

She enjoys reading, writing, gardening, spending time with her family, cooking, and playing her 7-and-a-half-foot-long monster of a grand piano. Her cat helps her write, so she should probably put his name on my books. Learn more about Mary Anna and her work here:

Website: http://www.maryannaevans.com

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http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Anna-Evans/e/B001JP9ZY2/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

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