Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2011 by Janice Law.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  “Secrets” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July, 1997. “Lions on the Lawn” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mar 2002. “The Summer of the Strangler” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, October 2001. “My Life in Crime” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/Aug 2007. “Lying” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March 2002. “Blood in the Water” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, August 2000. “My Famous Relative” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November 2005. “Perfection” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, December 1995. “The Blind Woman” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine August 2002. “The Meeting at the Café Visconti” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March 1995. “Pigskill” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “The Archeologist’s Revenge” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 1998. “Star of the Silver Screen” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 1996. “The Ghost Writer” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2002. “Tabloid Press” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, February 2000. “My Demon Lover” is original to this collection. “The Man Kali Visited” originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, August 1995. “The View From Above” and “To Beauty” are original to this collection. “Ideas in My Head” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2007. “The Paradise Garden” is original to this collection. “The Helpful Stranger” originally appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, April 2001.

  INTRODUCTION

  I used to tease my students that the public works overtime for mystery writers, and it is true that many of these little stories were inspired by something in the press (or, more rarely, on television). However, in every case the incident was selected because it struck some personal chord, and one of the chief pleasures of the short form is that one can so easily indulge one’s interests. Thus my love of gardening shows up in the Paradise Garden, combined— smoothly, I hope— with a passion for folk and fairy tales. A key detail in Secrets came from a news item, but the narrator’s neighborhood adjoined ours and, as a child of immigrants, I found her fears and ambitions easy to understand.

  The young teacher in The Helpful Stranger is saddled with difficult students as I was early in my career, while the protagonists of both The Ghost Writer and Ideas in My Head know the trials and tribulations of the less than glamorous writing life. An interest in archeology shows up in My Famous Relative, itself inspired by an exhibition at Chicago’s Field Museum, and in The Archeologist’s Revenge, whose plot came from a little British news item, but whose atmosphere owes much to a small bark house displayed at the University of Connecticut.

  Just how these disparate ideas come together is something of a mystery even for the writer. As the exasperated screen writer in Ideas in My Head says, you can feel an idea coming. “…you have this feeling that one is in the vicinity, that you just have to watch and wait and you’ll find yourself sitting down at the computer typing…”

  That, in fact, is most of what writers do, namely staying alert for ideas wherever they might show up and writing as soon as the Muse tips her hand. Naturally, like most divas, she has to be courted with lots of work and research. Details have to be checked and various bits of criminal and other lore – from typical insurance frauds to the dietary habits of pigs to types of large watercraft – have to be assembled, whether one is writing a novel or a short story.

  But the short story has the advantage of compression. Because one does not have to know all about, say, parasailing to make a vacation diversion or the Late Riverine Archaic to suggest an academic specialty, the short story encourages all the writer’s nosey interests. Another benefit is that one does not have to keep company too long with psychotics like Bren of Lying or with irritating folk like Vern of Blood in the Water, both interesting enough on a short term basis but, at least for me, not so good for the long haul.

  Characters in novels, on the other hand, represent a long term commitment and can overstay their welcome unless selected carefully, but the denizens of short fiction are literary mayflies. They hang around for a week at most, and if they have a good story to tell all is forgiven. If not, they can be replaced easily, and so the form encourages experimentation with different personalities, different voices, different sorts of plots.

  The mystery genre is particularly flexible in this regard, ranging easily from gritty realism to psychological suspense to the edges of the supernatural. One can be serious, edging up to tragedy as in The Blind Woman or to dark comedy as in Pigskill or to real mystery with a capital M in The Man Kali Visited. This is a genre for the easily bored and one that challenges the writer to keep going to the typewriter, now, the computer.

  But besides lots of time at the desk and an alert eye for ideas, writers need publication. It is safe to say that there would have been far fewer of these stories written, never mind printed, without the encouragement of the editors of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, Linda Landrigan, the late Catheen Jourdan, and Janet Hutchings. I owe their passion for variety a debt of gratitude.

  —Janice Law

  Secrets

  My first and only failing grade in school came in sixth grade, when Miss Solway asked us to write a paragraph about a secret. Patty Tolliver set to work about a surprise birthday party for her dad. I could see “birthday party” and “hiding presents” and the rest of the story emerging in her big curling script. Eric Rodriguez printed out something about fireworks in steeply angled lines. His letters grew smaller and messier as they approached the right edge of his paper, then swelled again into big, assertive words with each new line. Even Jon Hansem, the slowest kid in the class, was hard at work, but my mind refused to function. I sat sweating at my desk and turned in a blank page.

  At the end of the period, Miss Solway called me up to her desk. She looked disappointed and asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine; I just didn’t have any secrets worth writing about. Miss Solway was unconvinced: I was considered a good, even an imaginative, student.

  “I just couldn’t think of anything,” I wailed, and though Miss Solway was one of my favorite teachers, I added, “It was a dumb topic, anyway.” I was almost twelve years old, and I already knew that there are some secrets too big too tell, like the one about my mother and Mr. Conklin and what happened the July that I was ten years old.

  That summer was hot, dreadfully, dreadfully hot. We should have been used to it after three years in Hartford, but we weren’t. Days when the thermometer crept up into the 80s and then the 90s, my mother would wipe her face and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back in Ireland now. It was never imagined to be this hot in Ireland.”

  Of course, other days, Mother “wouldn’t have had Ireland as a gift,” as she’d say, not with my Dad dead. “Not an honest day’s work to be had. Nothing but pride, poetry, and ignorance. It’s bad times here, but worse there. You remember that and work hard in school, my girl.” I would promise, of course. I liked school and did well, even though I was in the public school and not with the Sisters, who provided a really good education. But Catholic school was out of the question, an unimaginable luxury. Although Mother worked hard, cleaning at the motel and the restaurants, we still lived from week to week.
Her pay was usually owed from the moment she got it, and we ate cereal or beans for supper most Wednesdays and Thursdays.

  I don’t suppose we’d have managed at all if it weren’t for Mr. Conklin, our tyrant and savior, who was a distant relative of my late father. Mr. Conklin owned a triple decker house near his “Irish Pub.” He also owned a motel and a snack shop at the shabby end of Park Street, where the Puerto Rican section stopped and the Portuguese, new immigrants like ourselves, were moving in. Their children went to the big, frightening city schools, rough and full of black people, Mr. Conklin said, while we had the top apartment of his triple decker just over the city line in an old Irish-Italian neighborhood. The schools in the suburb were much, much better Mr. Conklin said, as “they damn well should be, considering the taxes.” Both the apartment and my admission to the local elementary were the direct result of Mr. Conklin’s intercession. It was understood that either could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.

  Stout and red faced with a pug nose and a loud, jovial voice, Joseph P. Conklin was a sentimental bully with unsettling moments of gaiety and kindness. He brought me a doll once and occasionally chocolates for Mother, and he sang “Danny Boy” every St. Patrick’s Day as the restaurant was closing. But even in his best moments, I was leery of him. I hated it when he wanted me to sit on his knee and tell him how I was doing in school. Fortunately, his interest was usually focused on his property: the restaurants, his triple decker, and his motel. He hiked his profits and kept his costs down by employing illegal immigrants like Mother, for whom he had originally gotten a visitor’s visa.

  As relatives, Mother and I actually occupied a privileged position; we were given the apartment and protected from the school authorities. In exchange, Mr. Conklin paid Mother less than the minimum wage and visited every Saturday around five o’clock on his way to the restaurant. If it was nice weather, Mother would send me out on the big front porch of the triple decker, where I would watch the traffic and try to spit on the drooping heads of the hydrangeas that flanked the front steps far below. If it was bad weather, Mother would tell me to go down and see Annie on the first floor. Annie was a stooped, arthritic old lady with a close and cluttered apartment and a fat gray neutered cat. She was lonely for company and never minded my visits. We would sit companionably, watching her old black and white tv or crocheting, until I heard Mr. Conklin’s smart patent leather loafers descending the stairs. Then I would tell Annie I had to go to dinner.

  Upstairs, Mother would set the table and lay out dishes without saying much. When we first came, she’d cried and talked to her saint and said Aileen— this was Mr. Conklin’s wife, who’d had polio and was in a wheelchair— would put a stop to it; later on, she was flustered and ashamed; finally, she was bitter. That was when she realized we were trapped. Mr. Conklin relied on that. “You’re nobody,” I heard him say to her once. “Nobody knows you’re here. You’re invisible and be damn glad you are or Immigration’ll have you back on the blessed Old Sod before you can pack your bags.”

  Working in the restaurant and the motel and being visited by Mr. Conklin changed my Mother. She lost the prettiness I can see in her old photographs, and she lost the playfulness and sweetness that she had when my dad was alive. She grew tired and silent and tough. I was not tough— not then and not for many years. That July I was still afraid of the dark people at the far end of the street and of the sirens and night noises and of Mr. Conklin, who held our lives in his clean, meaty hands.

  Since Mother was out working during the day, I spent afternoons in the local park, where there was a pool, picnic tables, a playground, and an organized recreation program. Whenever the swim team or adults had the pool, the rec department supervisors encouraged us in messy arts and crafts and group singing. Eventually, some of us formed a chorus, and the plan was that we would sing for our parents and for the local convalescent home at the end of the summer.

  Everything about the chorus was wonderful: the rehearsals under the maple trees during the hot afternoons, the smaltzy songs like “It’s a Small World” and “Frere Jacques,” the giggling groups of gossipy, self-important little girls. The only difficulty came when the chorus voted to wear dresses for our concerts. I had a skirt for Mass, of course, but for the concerts a dress, preferably a pretty sundress, was essential, and for weeks I teased mother and scoured the newspaper ads for sales. Finally, she announced that she’d gotten some material. Secretly I would have preferred something from Caldor’s or Ames, but the material she pulled out of the bag— light blue with small pink and yellow flowers— was soft and pretty.

  “With a ruffle,” I asked. “Can we have it with a ruffle?”

  Mother smiled. I look at her pictures now and think how pretty she was, how very pretty before she grew tired and overworked and tough. Once she had liked nice clothes, been flirtatious, carefree, popular; she understood the importance of a ruffle. Mother started the dress early the next morning, before she went off on the bus to clean at the motel, and she finished it late the same week, after she came in from mopping up the snack bar. On Saturday morning, I found the dress waiting for me, a pinafore style with ruffles around the arm holes and two pockets on the skirt.

  I put it on. It was not just a perfect fit but a perfect, transforming, dress. I was undersized, bony and plain. In the dress, I seemed dainty; the effect was charming; I was enchanted.

  “Take it off and hang it up,” said Mother, “you’ll have it dirty before the day’s out. It has to be kept for good.”

  I hung the sundress up in our closet, but as soon as I came back from the park, I ran to look at it, to stroke the ruffles and spread out the skirt. And when, just around four, the phone rang and Mother had to go out on an errand, I could not resist trying on my dress again.

  I dragged a kitchen chair into the bathroom and climbed up to look in the mirror of medicine cabinet. I was standing there admiring myself, when I heard the knock on the door, followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  “Are you home, Patsy?” Mr. Conklin was the only one who ever called my mother, ‘Patsy.’

  “Patsy?” I heard him walking softly through the living room and down the hall. For a fattish man, he had a light tread.

  I didn’t want to see him, and if I hadn’t been afraid of dirtying my dress, I’d have slipped under the bed. In my moment of hesitation, he appeared in the doorway.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She had to go to the store,” I said.

  “Don’t you answer the door when someone knocks?”

  I shook my head.

  “Where are your manners?” he asked.

  “Who else visits you every Saturday?” Then he laughed. “But there’ll be boys around soon enough,” he said, looking at me more closely. “Very pretty.” He reached out and touched the ruffle. “I must be paying Patsy more than I thought.”

  I flinched away from him. “Mother made this for me,” I said, almost in tears. His remark spoiled my happiness. I wished I’d never put on the dress; I wished Mother would come home; I wished he was dead.

  “There, there, now,” he said, hitching up his light summer pants and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Who’s your pal? eh? Who brought you that Barbie doll?”

  I bit my lip and didn’t answer.

  He ran his finger along the ruffle again, then smoothed the front of my dress. “I don’t have a little girl of my own, you know,” he said. “Wouldn’t have been as pretty as you, anyway. Your Mother, now, there’s a pretty woman. I met her on a visit to the Old Country. She wasn’t much older than you and she was one of the prettiest girls in Belfast; that’s the truth.”

  He took my arm although I tried to ease away. “Come sit here for a minute,” he said. His voice sounded different, soft and sort of sticky, like something Mother would say was ‘too sweet to be wholesome.’ “Since your mother is out.”

  “You called her,” I said, frightened by sudden knowledge. “You asked her to get something for the snack shop.
”

  “Did I now? And me with a car and going out anyway as I always do on a Saturday evening? Would I do such a thing?”

  “You called her,” I said, stubborn despite my fear.

  “You’re a clever girl,” he said, settling me on his lap. “Maybe we should send you to the Sisters at St. Bridget’s. Would you like that? Wear a nice little uniform, they do. Gray blazer,” he said, running his hand down my dress again, “little maroon tie, little maroon and gray kilt, little gray knee socks. Just to here. Wouldn’t you like that? Lots of nice Irish boys and girls at St. Bridget’s.”

  I stopped trying to squirm away from him. “I like my school,” I said, “but I’d like St. Bridget’s better.”

  He laughed. “I just bet you would. I just bet you would. Well, it depends if you’re good.” He was stroking my knee, and I both did and did not know what he meant. I’d heard a fair bit out on the porch on those warm evenings.

  “We’d have to ask my mother,” I said.

  “Oh, your mother can’t afford St. Bridget’s. Never in this life! Don’t imagine your mother can afford to send you to the Sisters.”

  “My mother decides,” I said.

  He laughed. “Does she now?” I could see the veins in the whites of his eyes; I could smell his aftershave, and something else, a raw, dangerous smell.

  “I want to get down now,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said, sliding his meaty red fingers under my dress. “Not if you want to get to St. Bridget’s.”

  A minute later, I started to scream.

  “Shhh,” said Mr. Conklin, and when I didn’t stop, he yelled,”Shut up, shut up, you little bitch!”

  I wasn’t tough like my mother. The scream wasn’t under my control, it went echoing around my head and burned between my legs and poured out like blood from a wound. I couldn’t stop, not even when he slapped me. The scream was so independent, so beyond my control, that at last it even frightened Mr. Conklin, who did up his pants and hurried down the hall and out the door.