The Best of Sisters in Crime (29 page)

“Tell me ’bout
your children. What’s Jesse up to?”

“Well, I guess
he’s doing all right. Married. Uh-huh.” She paused a moment, thinking about
that. And then with pride in her voice said, “He called me today just to say
hello.”

“He lives in
California, doesn’t he? They come and visit you?”

“Uh-huh. Once.
Stopped by my house.” She put her cup down, and this time Loubella didn’t even
bother with the coffee, just filled it with bourbon, straight up. “Why, I think
that day they said they’d been by to see you too.”

“That’s right.”

“Can’t say as I
thought much of her.”

“Why not?”

Blanche just
shrugged. You’d have to be mother to a son to understand that.

Loubella rose
then, steady as a rock, for no alcohol had passed her lips, just coffee and a
few bites of cake. As she skirted the back door, she reached out and tested it,
just to make sure. Before Blanche came, she had locked that dead bolt from the
inside and dropped the key in her garbage sack. Of course, Blanche didn’t know
that.

“Way things are
these days, you can never be too safe,” Loubella said.

Blanche nodded. “Ain’t
that the truth. Why, just last week, I was reading in the paper about some
crazy boys downtown grabbed a woman on her way home, arms full of groceries
and . . .”

Loubella wasn’t
listening, except to a plan she’d run through her mind so many times that it
had become a script. She couldn’t hear Blanche because she was following that
script. Now she read the line that said, “Excuse yourself,” and she did.

“Bathroom,” she
said.

“Sure, honey. Me
too, after you.”

Loubella closed
the kitchen door behind her and headed down a little hall to her bedroom where
she picked up the red five-gallon can of gasoline she’d earlier placed inside.
She tipped the nozzle, splashed the bed, and began a damp trail that followed
her as if to her mamaw’s house. In the living room she locked the front door
from the inside and hid that key, too, beneath a cushion of her favorite chair.
Then she doused the chair, the sofa, the faded Persian rug. After that she did
what she’d said, went into the bathroom and relieved herself. For she wanted to
be perfectly at ease for this last best part, the cherry on her ice cream
sundae.

Then she
rejoined Blanche, who had been sitting there drinking another couple of fingers
of bourbon that she didn’t need. Loubella frowned. She wanted Blanche slowed,
but not so drunk that she missed a moment of the impending horror show.

“Honey, I been
thinking about what I said about Jesse and that girl, his wife, uh . . .”

“Lily,” Loubella
said.

“That’s right,
Lily, and then I was thinking about you and Isaac. You did say—” And then she
stopped. “Jesus Christ, Loubella, what
is
that smell?”

Loubella settled
herself back at the table and plopped down the can she was still holding,
planted it on the floor.

“Gas,” she
answered.

Blanche jumped
up, holding a hand to her breast. “The line’s busted!” She reached for Loubella’s
arm. “Come on, honey, we got to get out of here!”

Loubella smiled
at her as serenely as if she’d just gotten up off her knees from prayer and
knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her supplication had been answered.

Blanche saw that
and suddenly her blood ran cold.

Well, forget
Loubella. She was getting out of here. She pushed past her to the back door and
jerked at it. It didn’t open. She jerked again. “The door’s locked!” she
screamed.

Already she was
hysterical. This was better than Loubella had even dreamed. She just kept on
watching as if Blanche were a picture show, a movie she had waited a long time
to see.

“Aren’t you
going to do something? You just going to sit there?” Blanche’s voice shrilled
with terror and disbelief.

Of course,
Blanche had always thought that nothing very bad was going to happen to her,
and up until now, she’d been right.

As if in answer,
though without saying a word, Loubella stood, picked up the gasoline can, which
until now Blanche hadn’t spotted, and heaved it toward her, splattering Blanche’s
baby-blue dress.

Blanche
screamed. She stood in one place with her hands in fists atop her head and
screamed. You would have thought she could already feel the flames.

“What
are you doing?”

“What does it
look like, Blanche?” Loubella’s words were slow and calm. “I’m killing you.
Actually, I’m killing us both.” And with that she reached over into a cabinet
drawer and pulled out a revolver and placed it before her among the
violet-sprigged china and the near-empty bottle of bourbon and the remains of
birthday cake. The gun didn’t look very much at home.

Blanche was
jumping around now as if a fire were licking at her underpants. She whirled and
raced out of the room. Loubella could hear her battering at the front door.

“It ain’t no
use, Blanche,” she called. “The doors are locked, and Isaac put bars on the
windows last year. You might as well come on back in here.”

Blanche
blundered around a while longer before she did as she was told.

She was
whimpering. Big tears were rolling down her face. “No, no, no,” she whispered
over and over.

“You think you
can always get your own way, don’t you, Miss Blanche? Well, this time you can’t.”

“Why?” Blanche
wailed.

“Why what?”

“Why are you
doing this to me?”

“Why, Blanche, I
can’t believe you don’t know how
much
I hate your guts.”

Blanche reeled
around the room, scrabbling at the things on the kitchen cabinet, grabbed a
dish towel, and dabbed at the front of her dress.

“Don’t worry
about it being stained, honey. Ain’t nothing of it going to be left.”

Blanche began to
scream again. Someone would hear her. Surely someone would.

But it was the
night of July Fourth. Hardly anyone was home. And those who were, were mostly
drunk. Besides, nobody ever paid much attention to a woman screaming in this
neighborhood. They figured whoever she was she was getting what she deserved,
and if she didn’t, she either ought to get the hell out or pick up a skillet
and show the man what for.

“I didn’t mean
any of it, Loubella,
I’m
sorry.” And she started to cry again, not paying any attention to
her dripping nose. “I was gonna tell you tonight, just a while ago, that if I
had to do it all over, I’d do it different, I swear.”

“That may be
true, but those years are already long gone.”

“Oh, Loubella.”
Blanche fell to her knees, scratching on the floor at Loubella’s feet. “Please,
don’t do this.”

“Remember when
you baptized me in the river?” asked Loubella in a faraway, dreamy voice.

“Yes.” Blanche
was sobbing, her face buried in Loubella’s knees.

“Remember how
you prayed that if we drowned, the Baby Jesus would take us straight to heaven
with no stops in between?”

“Yes.” Blanche’s
answer was muffled. But in it was just a whisper of hope. Maybe if Loubella
could remember those days, when Blanche had been kind, she could find a bit of
mercy in her heart.

“Remember how
you poured the water over our heads with that old broken cup?”

Blanche nodded.
And with that she felt liquid pour all over her hair, dribble down her neck.

But it wasn’t
river water. It was gasoline—high test.

Blanche jumped
up and screamed. And screamed. And screamed. She couldn’t stop now. Liquid ran
down her legs too. Gasoline and urine mixed together, for Blanche had
completely lost control of herself.

“You never
should have done what you did, Blanche. Parnell may have loved me, but he
married you. He would have given you anything on earth you wanted.”

“I know. I know,”
Blanche moaned.

“He was too good
for you, bitch. You know, you’re the one who was the whore. I did it ’cause I
had to. You did it ’cause you liked it. ’Cause you wanted
everything.
You always was a greedy gut, even as
a girl. ‘That’s
mine
,’
you’d say. Licking a biscuit so nobody else would touch it.
‘Mine,’
no matter what.”

Blanche kept on
moaning. She had stopped twitching around the room and had fallen back in her
chair as if she’d returned for another cup of coffee, another drink, except
that her head was down on the table buried in her arms, and the liquid running
down her face was a mixture of gasoline and tears.

“And Parnell was
yours. But those years you took from me—those eleven years, six months, and
nine days—that quarter of my life I spent in jail, those wasn’t yours to take.
Those
were
mine.”

“I know. I know.”

“Say you’re
sorry, Blanche.” Loubella’s voice was very soft and very cold.

Blanche’s head
snapped up.

“I
am
sorry.”

“But not as
sorry as you’re gonna be.”

At that,
Loubella reached into her wrapper pocket and pulled out a box of wooden kitchen
matches. She struck one and dropped it. The floor burst into licking tongues of
red and yellow.

In that moment,
Blanche saw her chance. Quick as a snake, her hand grabbed the revolver sitting
on the table and she fired it without thinking, striking Loubella in the
breast.

Loubella reeled
backward. Laughter poured from her throat while crimson pumped from a hole in
the pale pink wrapper, from right near the spot where her cancer was now
cheated from its slower march toward death.

“Thank you,
Blanche,” Loubella whispered, and even as she died, she struck and dropped
another match.

It was then that
Blanche realized, too late, far too late, that she had shot the wrong person.
She should have shot herself.

For a bullet
through the brain was much quicker—why, it hardly compared to burning to death.

The gas can
exploded then, and flames engulfed her dress, her hair, her face.

She reached one
twisting hand toward the revolver, where she’d dropped it on the table. Maybe
it still wasn’t too late. But it was. For Loubella had loaded only one bullet
in the chamber. She’d known that whether she fired it or Blanche did, one was all
she’d want or need.

The curtains
were on fire now, the rugs, the sofa, the bed, the walls, the floor. And in the
midst of it, caroming from one small room to another, from door to window to
door, was the fireball that was Blanche. That didn’t last very long, though.
Soon she dropped and writhed, white teeth showing and glimmers of bone, as
beautiful Blanche, blackened like a redfish, fried and crisped and barbecued to
a turn, just a little before midnight on this evening of July the Fourth.

Back to table of
contents

Marilyn Wallace, former
English teacher and pastry chef switched to suspense after featuring homicide
detectives Jay Goldstein and Carlos Cruz in three novels,
A Case of Loyalties,
winner of a Macavity,
Primary Target,
and
A Single Stone
both Anthony nominees. She explores
the ideas of boundaries and how they’re violated when ordinary people find
themselves in the path of a crime in her four suspense novels,
So Shall You Reap, The Seduction, Lost Angel,
and the latest,
Current Danger.

In “A Tale of Two
Pretties” (with apologies to Dickens), two women decide to turn the worst of
times into the best of times.

He rolled onto his back
and she traced the
lines of definition along his
triceps. “Only a little while before you check into the drug treatment center.
Six o’clock. Three hours. I’m scared, Mickey. What am I gonna do without you?”

“You’ll be fine.
Vinnie promised me he’d keep an eye on you.” He ran a finger along her cheek. “You
don’t want me wired and wasted, or strung out and wrung out, right? This is a
no-fail program, babe. It’ll work for me.”

Cindy smiled and
slid her fingers down the valley of his breastbone. “Twelve weeks apart. At
least we’ll have plenty of time to think up some proper rewards. For both of
us.”