The Best of Sisters in Crime (2 page)

The
Sisters In Crime
anthologies maintain that
tradition of gathering around the well and sharing tales, of entertaining and
beguiling with words. I doubt that those women in their sandals would have
imagined Kinsey Milhone or V.I. Warshawski or the courageous heroines of Mary
Higgins Clark, but they would recognize a common humanity. They’d understand
their daring, their humor, their intelligence.

As the five
volumes of this anthology series came together, I discovered that stories weren’t
the only things developing: Friendships were growing, too. I began to think
that this must have been the way it was at the well. In the eight years since
the series first debuted, I’ve met wonderful women and men, laughed, joked,
traded information, shared struggle and triumph. It may take a village to raise
children, as Hillary Clinton has said, but it also takes a thriving community
to give readers a true picture of the world we live in. In this volume, we hope
our voices reach past the well to the gathering places and the solitary spaces
to entertain, amuse, and provoke you, and to offer the pledge that we’ll do our
best to keep the stories coming!

Marilyn Wallace

May 1997

New York, NY

Back to table of
contents

Nancy
Pickard’s Jenny Cain is smart, funny, brave, and equal measures of shrewd and
impulsive.
Say No to Murder
won an Anthony in 1985. Since then,
Marriage is Murder
won a Macavity;
Bum Steer
won an Agatha; and the remaining Jenny novels have garnered ten
other nominations.
The
27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders
,
a delightful departure, followed the exploits of Eugenia Potter,
created by Virginia Rich. With typical humor, love, and courage, Jenny returns
to face a troubling situation in the recent
Twilight.

Honored by
Macavity, Anthony, and American Mystery awards, and Edgar and Agatha
nominations, “Afraid All the Time” (not a Jenny Cain story) embodies the
uniqueness of the American prairie and the emotions it evokes. Open space
becomes one of the significant threads woven into the shocking conclusion.

“Ribbon a
darkness over me…”

Mel Brown, known
variously as Pell Mell and Animel, sang the line from the song over and over
behind his windshield as he flew from Missouri into Kansas on his old black
Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Already he loved
Kansas, because the highway that stretched ahead of him was like a long, flat,
dark ribbon unfurled just for him.

“Ribbon a
darkness over me . . .”

He flew full
throttle into the late-afternoon glare, feeling as if he were soaring
gloriously drunk and blind on a skyway to the sun. The clouds in the far
distance looked as if they’d rain on him that night, but he didn’t worry about
it. He’d heard there were plenty of empty farm and ranch houses in Kansas where
a man could break in to spend the night. He’d heard it was like having your
choice of free motels, Kansas was.

“Ribbon a
darkness over me …”

Three hundred
miles to the southwest, Jane Baum suddenly stopped what she was doing. The fear
had hit her again. It was always like that, striking out of nowhere, like a
fist against her heart. She dropped her clothes basket from rigid fingers and
stood as if paralyzed between the two clotheslines in her yard. There was a wet
sheet to her right, another to her left. For once the wind had died down, so
the sheets hung as still and silent as walls. She felt enclosed in a narrow,
white, sterile room of cloth, and she never wanted to leave it.

Outside of it
was danger.

On either side
of the sheets lay the endless prairie where she felt like a tiny mouse exposed
to every hawk in the sky.

It took all of
her willpower not to scream.

She hugged her
own shoulders to comfort herself. It didn’t help. Within a few moments she was
crying, and then shaking with a palsy of terror.

She hadn’t known
she’d be so afraid.

Eight months
ago, before she had moved to this small farm she’d inherited, she’d had
romantic notions about it, even about such simple things as hanging clothes on
a line. It would feel so good, she had imagined, they would smell so sweet.
Instead, everything had seemed strange and threatening to her from the start,
and it was getting worse. Now she didn’t even feel protected by the house. She
was beginning to feel as if it were fear instead of electricity that lighted
her lamps, filled her tub, lined her cupboards and covered her bed—fear that
she breathed instead of air.

She hated the
prairie and everything on it.

The city had
never frightened her, not like this. She knew the city, she understood it, she
knew how to avoid its dangers and its troubles. In the city there were
buildings everywhere, and now she knew why—it was to blot out the true and
terrible openness of the earth on which all of the inhabitants were so horribly
exposed to danger.

The wind picked
up again. It snapped the wet sheets against her body. Janie bolted from her
shelter. Like a mouse with a hawk circling overhead, she ran as if she were
being chased. She ran out of her yard and then down the highway, racing
frantically, breathlessly, for the only other shelter she knew.

When she reached
Cissy Johnson’s house, she pulled open the side door and flung herself inside
without knocking.

“
Cissy?
”

“I’m afraid all
the time.”

“I know, Janie.”

Cissy Johnson
stood at her kitchen sink peeling potatoes for supper while she listened to
Jane Baum’s familiar litany of fear. By now Cissy knew it by heart. Janie was
afraid of: being alone in the house she had inherited from her aunt; the dark;
the crack of every twig in the night; the storm cellar; the horses that might
step on her, the cows that might trample her, the chickens that might peck her,
the cats that might bite her and have rabies, the coyotes that might attack
her; the truckers who drove by her house, especially the flirtatious ones who
blasted their horns when they saw her in the yard; tornadoes, blizzards,
electrical storms; having to drive so far just to get simple groceries and
supplies.

At first Cissy
had been sympathetic, offering daily doses of coffee and friendship. But it was
getting harder all the time to remain patient with somebody who just burst in
without knocking and who complained all the time about imaginary problems and
who—

“You’ve lived
here all your life,” Jane said, as if the woman at the sink had not previously
been alert to that fact. She sat in a kitchen chair, huddled into herself like
a child being punished. Her voice was low, as if she were talking more to
herself than to Cissy. “You’re used to it, that’s why it doesn’t scare you.”

“Um,” Cissy
murmured, as if agreeing. But out of her neighbor’s sight, she dug viciously at
the eye of a potato. She rooted it out—leaving behind a white, moist, open
wound in the vegetable—and flicked the dead black skin into the sink where the
water running from the faucet washed it down the garbage disposal. She thought
how she’d like to pour Janie’s fears down the sink and similarly grind them up
and flush them away. She held the potato to her nose and sniffed, inhaling the
crisp, raw smell.

Then, as if
having gained strength from that private moment, she glanced back over her
shoulder at her visitor. Cissy was ashamed of the fact that the mere sight of
Jane Baum now repelled her. It was a crime, really, how she’d let herself go.
She wished Jane would comb her hair, pull her shoulders back, paint a little
coloring onto her pale face, and wear something else besides that ugly denim
jumper that came nearly to her heels. Cissy’s husband, Bob, called Janie “Cissy’s
pup,” and he called that jumper the “pup tent.” He was right, Cissy thought,
the woman did look like an insecure, spotty adolescent, and not at all like a
grown woman of thirty-five-plus years. And darn it, Janie did follow Cissy
around like a neurotic nuisance of a puppy.

“Is Bob coming
back tonight?” Jane asked.

Now she’s even invading
my mind
, Cissy thought. She whacked resentfully
at the potato, peeling off more meat than skin. “Tomorrow.” Her shoulders
tensed.

“Then can I
sleep over here tonight?”

“No.” Cissy
surprised herself with the shortness of her reply. She could practically feel
Janie radiating hurt, and so she tried to make up for it by softening her tone.
“I’m sorry, Janie, but I’ve got too much book work to do, and it’s hard to concentrate
with people in the house. I’ve even told the girls they can take their sleeping
bags to the barn tonight to give me some peace.” The girls were her daughters,
Tessie, thirteen, and Mandy, eleven. “They want to spend the night out there ’cause
we’ve got that new little blind calf we’re nursing. His mother won’t have
anything to do with him, poor little thing. Tessie has named him Flopper,
because he tries to stand up but he just flops back down. So the girls are
bottle-feeding him, and they want to sleep near . . .”

“Oh.” It was
heavy with reproach.

Cissy stepped
away from the sink to turn her oven on to 350°. Her own internal temperature
was rising too. God forbid she should talk about her life! God forbid they
should ever talk about anything but Janie and all the damned things she was
scared of! She could write a book about it:
How Jane Baum Made a Big
Mistake by Leaving Kansas City and How Everything About the Country Just Scared
Her to Death.

“Aren’t you
afraid of anything, Cissy?”

The implied
admiration came with a bit of a whine to it—
any
thing—like a curve on a
fastball.

“Yes.” Cissy
drew out the word reluctantly.

“You
are
? What?”

Cissy turned
around at the sink and laughed selfconsciously.

“It’s so silly .
. . I’m even afraid to mention it.”

“Tell me! I’ll
feel better if I know you’re afraid of things, too.”

There!
Cissy thought.
Even my fears come down to how
they affect you!

“All right.” She
sighed. “Well, I’m afraid of something happening to Bobby, a wreck on the
highway or something, or to one of the girls, or my folks, things like that. I
mean, like leukemia or a heart attack or something I can’t control. I’m always
afraid there won’t be enough money and we might have to sell this place. We’re
so happy here. I guess I’m afraid that might change.” She paused, dismayed by
the sudden realization that she had not been as happy since Jane Baum moved in
down the road. For a moment, she stared accusingly at her neighbor. “I guess
that’s what I’m afraid of.” Then Cissy added deliberately, “But I don’t think
about it all the time.”

“I think about
mine all the time,” Jane whispered.

“I know.”

“I hate it here!”

“You could move
back.”

Janie stared
reproachfully. “You know I can’t afford that!”

Cissy closed her
eyes momentarily. The idea of having to listen to
this
for who knew how many years . . .

“I love coming
over here,” Janie said wistfully, as if reading Cissy’s mind again. “It always
makes me feel so much better. This is the only place I feel safe anymore. I
just hate going home to the big old house all by myself.”

I will not
invite you to supper
,
Cissy thought.

Janie sighed.

Cissy gazed out
the big square window behind Janie. It was October, her favorite month, when
the grass turned as red as the curly hair on a Hereford’s back and the sky
turned a steel gray like the highway that ran between their houses. It was as
if the whole world blended into itself—the grass into the cattle, the roads
into the sky, and she into all of it. There was an electricity in the air, as
if something more important than winter were about to happen, as if all the
world were one and about to burst apart into something brand-new. Cissy loved
the prairie, and it hurt her feelings a little that Janie didn’t. How could
anyone live in the middle of so much beauty, she puzzled, and be frightened of
it?