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

Afraid All the Time

NANCY PICKARD

Nancy Pickard (b. 1945) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism, working for a time as a reporter and editor before turning to freelance writing.

Her series about Jenny Cain, foundation director in a small Massa-chusetts town, began with the paperback original Generous Death (1984), graduating to hardcovers with the third book, No Body (1986).

Noted from the beginning for their humor, the Cain books gradually became darker in tone and theme. In an interview with Robert J.

Randisi (Speaking of Murder, volume II [1999]) Pickard explained why, using Susan Wittig Albert’s term, the “‘mega-book’ mystery series…a new phenomenon…which denotes a series of novels which are essentially one long book. Each novel in the series is rather like a ‘chapter’ in the mega-book.” Unlike the series of writers like Agatha Christie and John D. MacDonald, in which sleuths like Miss Marple and Travis McGee remained essentially the same from book to book, “in a ‘mega-book’ series, you can’t count on each succeeding book being much like the last…It’s more like real life (if…any amateur sleuth is ever like real life), because the protagonist goes through some real changes…As we (and they) mature, things do come to assume a more substantial feeling, a weightiness, which can sometimes carry a feeling of greater ‘darkness.’”

In several books, beginning with The 27 Ingredient Chile Con Carne Murders (1993), Pickard has adopted the character of Eugenia Potter, introduced in three novels by the late Virginia Rich. Pickard’s continuation of the series, the first based on Rich’s notes and the later ones on original stories, brought a sense of pace, craft, and complex-ity missing from some cooking mysteries and others in the domestic cozy category. Asked by Randisi if she is a cozy writer, Pickard has fun with the concept: “I don’t know what I am. What’s between cozy and uncomfortable? If mystery writers were chairs, I wouldn’t quite be a chintz rocking chair, but I wouldn’t be a hard metal folding chair, either. A nice, swivel office chair, perhaps?”

Some novelists who also write short stories produce the same sort of narrative, only shorter. Others use the short form to experiment with theme, mood, and subject matter. Pickard is in the latter category, as shown in her collection Storm Warnings (1999) and in the Edgar-nominated story, “Afraid All the Time.”

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 in-secure, 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.