Monster in Miniature (34 page)

I thought about it and it was not self-defense. Maybe I should make it self-defense in my case by at least trying to attack Lillian. I looked around for something I could use. Any of the machines would have done the job, if I could have lifted them. I saw grinders, blades, heavy blunt objects, and a myriad of things that would do for a stabbing. Nothing within my reach, however.

“This could be over, Lillian, if you just put the gun down.”

Apparently I didn’t have decent words, either, just lame platitudes. I felt a stream of perspiration roll down my back. I knew my hair was as wet as if I’d been out trick-or-treating in the rain.

“It’s already over,” Lillian said. “I shot Oliver.” Lillian’s eyes glazed over. Should I make a move? Before I could decide, her gaze met mine again. “If I could only figure out what to do with you.”

I knew she meant not all of me, but my body.

“I’m sorry we had to give up one of our guns, and now another,” she continued. “We have a number of them that aren’t registered. Do you know why?”

There was only one correct response. “Why, Lillian?”

“Because there’s evil in the world.” This from a woman in a costume that could have passed as the devil’s own. “We’ve been robbed over and over. Kids break in and smash things just to steal a screwdriver. Or they tip over every machine just to hear the noise. It costs us thousands of dollars for their entertainment. But if you shoot one of them, the police are harder on you than they are on the thieves. So we take care of ourselves.”

I wondered if Lillian were confessing to a rash of killing petty thieves. One more wouldn’t matter. She could always say I was an intruder. It was looking worse and worse for me.

“It was already dusk and I didn’t know what to do with Oliver.” Lillian had gone back in time. I shuffled my feet to relieve the pressure of standing still for so long. She jerked the gun. I stopped shuffling. “I dragged the scarecrow into the house and out the back door, then I managed to push Oliver into place on my porch. It’s a good thing there are no stay-at-home moms on my street.”

“And you drove it over here to be part of the decorations.” I wanted to tell her how brilliant she was, perhaps recommend Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” I did neither.

I’d closed in a little on Lillian. My best shot was to overpower her in a surprise move. If I could catch her off guard, she might not think to pull the trigger.

Thunk. Thunk.
A noise from the office area.

“Geraldine?” Henry’s voice? Why so formal?

Lillian turned toward the sound. It was now or never. In another two seconds, Henry’s life would also be at stake.

I swung my heavy tote down from my shoulder and against Lillian’s hand with full force. The gun fell to the floor and I kicked it as hard as I could into a pile of wood shavings that reminded me of Henry’s workshop, and ran back toward the office area where his voice had come from.

But it wasn’t Henry.

“Geraldine? Is that your car out there?” Sam asked.

I ran past Sam, who was nonplussed, clearly not part of Lillian’s plan for today.

I burst through the double doors and—this time it was real—into Henry’s chest.

Skip pulled up at the same time. Which was my signal that I no longer had to be in charge. I could allow myself to collapse.

As I slipped to the ground, my head ending up at Henry’s feet, I heard the howling of a witch.

“We hauled them all in,” Skip said. “All the Fergusons.
For one reason or another.”

Nine hours later, my adventure at E&E Parts seemed like a bad trick someone had played on me because I didn’t have enough treats to hand out.

At midnight, Skip, Henry, Beverly, and I sat in my living room, trying to make sense of a monstrous Halloween season.

“Did the twins know that their mother was a killer? Did Sam know?” I asked.

Skip shrugged. “I’ve never seen such a family. It’s a very complicated dynamic. Everyone in the Ferguson family was covering for everyone else. Lillian gathered her clan around her and, without revealing that she had killed Oliver, got them all to swear that everyone was at the factory all day on that Friday. Sam might have figured it out when you pointed out the scarecrow.”

“But I had no idea it was the real scarecrow the first time I saw it.”

“It happens,” Skip said. “Sam might have had a feeling about it and then interpreted your innocent remark accordingly.”

Henry had had his arm around my shoulders since right after I’d been checked out of the ER, it seemed. “Is Lillian Ferguson the oldest female killer? Or the oldest killer, period?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Beverly, our criminal justice student, answered. “You should look up this case of a woman in Minnesota who shot a man who was her caregiver. She was eighty-eight and he was in his sixties. I think it was because she was jealous of the attention he was paying to another woman.”

“I guess you’re never too old to start a new life,” Henry said.

We all cheered the idea, if not the Minnesota woman’s, or Lillian’s, choices.

 

 

“If you men don’t mind, I need a final word with Gerry
tonight,” Beverly said.

“I don’t mind, but—” Skip began, looking at Henry.

“Enough, Skip,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And don’t forget you promised to go to Maddie’s Halloween party this weekend.”

The men trudged off in mock poutiness.

Once we were alone, Beverly wasted no time.

“I was so scared for you, Gerry, even though Skip didn’t call until they knew you were fine.”

“I really am fine.” I spread my arms to indicate: no bruises.

“The worst of it was that I thought you were upset with me, and if anything had ever happened, I’d never have forgiven myself.”

I might have known Beverly wouldn’t let me get away with simply returning to normal. “I know I’ve been a little distracted, but why would I be upset with you, Beverly?”

She shrugged and looked at me with a guilty expression. “Maybe because I’ve been spending too much time with Nick? But we’re at that stage where we’re still getting to know each other, and—”

“There’s no need to explain. I don’t begrudge you one minute of time with Nick, or anything or anyone else who makes you happy. I feel terrible that you’d think otherwise.”

“What is it, then?” she persisted.

“I had something on my mind that doesn’t matter at all now, really,” I said.

“Okay, but I’m here if you want to hash it out.”

“I’m fine, thanks. Sorry I let it get to me. Why don’t we move to the atrium and I’ll get more tea.”

“And more cookies?”

“And more cookies.”

I felt cheery enough to sing, if I were the singing type. Things were back to normal on all counts.

The feeling lasted all of five minutes, the time it took for me to gather cookies and tea and head back to the atrium.

Where Beverly was standing with a pad of paper in her hand.

“What’s this, Gerry?”

The name and number of Sunaqua Estates was what it was.

I couldn’t believe how careless I’d been. It must have been only in my dreams that I’d torn that paper to shreds and tossed it in my recycling bin with empty detergent bottles and crinkled foil.

I took the small pad from her. “It’s nothing,” I said.

Beverly’s expression was as sober as I’d ever seen it. “You found out? After all these years.”

I cleared my throat. “You knew?”

Beverly gave me a strange look. “How could I not know?”

Why did this remind me of an Abbott and Costello routine? There was nothing funny about it.

“Did it happen when you were both living at home?”

She pointed to the notepad. “Are we talking about the same thing here, Gerry? Sunaqua Estates?”

“The . . . the baby.”

“Angela. My daughter. When did you think she was born?”

Beverly’s daughter? Was Beverly trying to cover for her brother?

I could tell by her face that she wasn’t. I looked down at the tray of tea and cookies on the atrium table and wondered how it got there. Surely I hadn’t managed to set it down in just the right place, without spills or the crashing sound of breaking china.

“Angela was your daughter?”

My atrium took on an otherworldly glow. Beverly and I sat down together, slowly, as if we were practicing a part in a play.

Beverly stared over my shoulder; her voice seemed to come from the past.

“I was fifteen years old. That’s four years older than Maddie. I was still using my yellow phone that was shaped like a banana, but I thought I was so grown up. Grown up enough to date a senior. My mother was against it, but I was so flattered.” Beverly ran her sleeve across her teary eyes, the way children sometimes do. “I went upstate to Sunaqua to have the baby. The plan—my mother’s plan—was to leave her for adoption, but the baby was premature and had a lot of problems, so my mother let me stay with her for a while.”

“And the father?”

“Huh. He never gave me the time of day again. How foolish I was.”

“You were a child, Beverly. He took advantage of you.”

I heard every word Beverly spoke, at the same time trying to adjust to a whole new awareness. Not Ken’s baby. Beverly’s little girl. I wondered how long it would take for me to absorb the facts. Angela was Ken’s niece, not his daughter.

Beverly looked over my shoulder, focusing on a high point on the wall, as if a photo of her baby were projected there.

“Angela was jaundiced, with a high fever all the time, and she didn’t know how to feed. The doctors thought it was a flu. After a couple of months she seemed okay, but then she contracted delayed-onset meningitis.” Beverly paused. Remembering. “There were . . . complications. She . . . died.”

Beverly took a sip of tea. She looked at me as if I’d just arrived at the table.

“I can’t imagine how painful that was, Beverly. I can’t imagine.”

With no prompting, but out of her own reflections, Beverly seemed finally to grasp the nature of the misunderstanding. “Gerry. You thought Ken had a baby, didn’t you?”

“I saw some photographs.”

She shook her head. “I told Ken to destroy every one of them.”

“He didn’t. In fact, he sent money to the Estates on a regular basis. I had no idea until last weekend.”

“I had a feeling he was doing that but I didn’t want to know. When Angela died, it was so painful I couldn’t bear it. My mother saw it as a good thing, believe it or not. She let me stay upstate until it was over. Didn’t you ever wonder why I was graduating from high school a year older than most kids?”

“I never thought about it. Kids start at different ages; a year plus or minus wouldn’t seem odd.”

“It did to me,” Beverly said. “I made Ken promise he would tell absolutely no one. When he met you, when I met you, I came very close to telling you, but I couldn’t. Ken begged me to. It hurt him to keep it from you, but I was adamant. The longer I waited, the more impossible it became. Now I realize how wrong and selfish I was to pressure him that way.”

“You were a kid and in a lot of turmoil.”

“I thought you’d think less of me.”

“That would never happen, Beverly.”

“Once I knew that, it was too late. What was done—”

“Couldn’t be undone.”

My world seemed to have changed shape. In the first, dark, angular world Ken had a child he never told me about. A new light, round world took its place and in it Ken was the big brother, protecting his sister and keeping a promise he made to her.

“You’ve never told anyone?”

“Not even my husband. When Skip was born and he was all there, you know, and bright and healthy, I was so grateful. I thought surely there would be something wrong with him. Because there was something wrong with me.”

“What an awful burden, Beverly.”

“Can you ever forgive me? If I ever dreamed you’d find photographs and that you’d think—”

I reached out and took her hands.

“Can you forgive me, for not going to you when I found them?”

We sat for a long time, holding hands, each reconciling a different part of our past.