A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Trapped is always working and scrimping and hoping to put enough money together so that someday we won’t have to worry about outliving our money. And now, just when it’s almost within my grasp, you—”

He broke off in midsentence. They were sitting across from each other in the tiny kitchen nook. Agnes met and held Oscar’s eyes, her gaze serene and unwavering. He could see that nothing he said was having the slightest effect.

Suddenly it was all too much. How could Agnes betray him like that? Oscar lunged to his feet, his face contorted with outraged fury.

“So help me, Aggie…”

He raised his hand as if to strike her. For one fearful moment, Agnes waited for the blow to fall. It didn’t. Instead Oscar’s eyes bulged. The unfinished threat died in his throat. The only sound that escaped his distorted lips was a strangled sob.

Slowly, like a giant old-growth tree falling victim to a logger’s saw, Oscar Barkley began to tip over. Stiff and still, like a cigar store Indian, he tottered toward the wall and then bounced against the cupboard. Only then did the sudden terrible rigidity desert his body.

His bones seemed to turn to jelly. Disjointed and limp, he slid down the face of the cupboard like a lifeless Raggedy Andy doll.

Only when he landed on the floor was there any sound at all, and that was nothing but a muted thump — like someone dropping a waist-high bag of flour.

Agnes watched him fall and did nothing. Later, when the investigators asked her about the ten-minute interval between the time Oscar’s broken watch stopped and the time the 911 call came in to the emergency communications center, she was unable to explain them. Not that ten minutes one way or another would have made that much difference. Oscar Barkley’s one and only coronary episode was instantly fatal.

Oh, he had been warned to cut down on fat, to lower his choles-terol, but Oscar had never been one to take a doctor’s advice very seriously.

The day after the memorial service, Gretchen Dixon popped her head in the door of the RV just as Agnes, clad in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a straw hat, was tying the strings on her tennis shoes.

“How are you doing?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m fine,” Agnes answered mechanically. “Really I am.”

“You look like you’re going someplace.”

Agnes nodded toward the metal box of ashes the mortician had given her. “I’m going out to scatter the ashes,” she said. “Oscar always said he wanted to be left along the banks of the San Pedro.”

“Would you like me to go along?” Gretchen asked.

“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

“Is someone else going with you, then? The girls, maybe?”

“They caught a plane back home early this morning.”

“Don’t tell me that rascal Jimmy Rathbone is already making a move on you.”

“I’m going by myself,” Agnes answered firmly. “I don’t want any company.”

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Sorry.”

When Agnes Barkley drove the Honda away from the RV a few minutes later, it looked as though she was all alone in the car, but strangely enough, she didn’t feel alone. And although Oscar hadn’t told Agnes exactly where along the riverbank he had found the pot, it was easy for Agnes to find her way there — almost as though someone were guiding each and every footstep.

As soon as she reached the crumbled wall of riverbank, Agnes Barkley fell to her knees. It was quiet there, with what was left of the river barely trickling along in its sandy bed some thirty paces behind her. The only sound was the faint drone of a Davis-Monthan Air Force Base jet flying far overhead. Part of Agnes heard the sound and recognized it for what it was — an airplane. Another part of her jumped like a startled hare when what she thought was a bee turned out to be something totally beyond her understanding and comprehension.

When Agnes had arrived home with Oscar’s ashes, she had immediately placed the pot inside the metal container. Now, with fumbling fingers, she drew it out. For one long moment, she held it lovingly to her breast. Then, with tears coursing down her face, she smashed the pot to pieces. Smashed it to smithereens on the metal container that held Oscar Barkley’s barely cooled ashes.

Now Agnes snatched up the container. Holding it in front of her, she let the contents cascade out as she spun around and around, imitating someone else who once had danced exactly the same way in this very place sometime long, long ago.

At last, losing her balance, Agnes Barkley fell to the ground, gasping and out of breath. Minutes later she realized, as if for the first time, that Oscar was gone. Really gone. And there, amid his scattered ashes and the broken potsherds, she wept real tears. Not only because Oscar was dead but also because she had done nothing to help him. Because she had sat there helplessly and watched him die, as surely as that mysterious other woman had watched the surging water overwhelm her child.

At last Agnes seemed to come to herself. When she stopped crying, she was surprised to find that she felt much better. Relieved somehow. Maybe it was just as well Oscar was dead, she thought. He would not have liked being married to both of them — to Agnes and to the ghost of that other woman, to the mother of that poor drowned child.

This is the only way it could possibly work, Agnes said to herself.

She picked up a tiny piece of black pottery, held it between her fingers, and let it catch the full blazing light of the warm afternoon sun.

This was the only way all three of them could be free.

The River Mouth LIA MATERA

From the time of Wilkie Collins, a large number of crime fiction writers have been drawn from the ranks of lawyers, but the past twenty years have seen a veritable flood of attorneys hoping to escape the billable-hour rat race and emulate the success of John Grisham and Scott Turow. For a time, legal fiction, and indeed the practice of law itself, was largely a male province, but recent years have changed that. Lia Matera (b. 1952), who was born in Canada to an Italian-American family, received her law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, where she was the editor in chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. She was later a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School. The author of two separate series about lawyer sleuths, Matera is one of the best of the lawyers-turned-mystery-writers. Her first series, beginning with Where Lawyers Fear to Tread (1987), which draws on her background as a law review editor, introduces Willa Jansson, the daughter of fiercely left-wing parents. The family political background gives a political charge to the series that often results in widely divergent critical reaction. As Contemporary Authors (volume 110, 1999) points out in a discussion of Hidden Agenda (1987),

“Though a reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that the novel ’is angry, and devoid of humor or emotions other than hate,’ a Booklist critic praised the novel as ’offbeat and very funny.’” The Smart Money (1988) began a shorter series about a sharper-edged, higher-profile advocate, Laura DiPalma.

Matera has written relatively few short stories, and several of those few were originally envisioned as novels. All her stories to date are collected in Counsel for the Defense and Other Stones (2000).

In introducing that collection, she identifies “The River Mouth,” an outdoor account of gathering menace, as among those stories that have “given [her] a welcome break from writing about lawyers.”

To reach the mouth of the Klamath River, you head west off 101 just south of the Oregon border. You hike through an old Yurok meeting ground, an overgrown glade with signs asking you to respect native