Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

The waitress appeared then, and the next few minutes were occupied with detailed instructions-“Iced tea. Very light ice.” “Is that low sodium?”-and so on. Miriam toyed with a pink packet of saccharin while these proceedings were taking place. She was trying to think about something else.

“How is Andrew?” asked Jayne, trying to make it sound perfunctory.

“He’s fine,” said Miriam. He doesn’t know that I know. I wondered if he suspected that you did. Andrew had forgotten that she had taken the university computer course for staff. As a professor, he had an electronic mailbox, and one day (just for fun?) she had accessed his “mail” on her terminal. The password was easy to figure out. True to his specialization, Andrew alternated between aquifer and mineral. Miriam did not know what she had expected to find on the university computer system. Love letters, perhaps, since Andrew had been preoccupied lately. She supposed, after all, that electronic mail was just as private as the other kind. Or just as un-private.

So she had found out about Andrew’s project weeks ago, and now that it was nearly to the press-release stage, Kathryn must have learned about it from gossip in the department of… Andrew’s co-conspirator. He had not discussed it with her, of course. He was going to present her with a fait accompli. He would make a lot of money from the sale, and as the letters from the other professor had stated, “There weren’t many people to be considered.” Chataqua County was not populous. She knew that sooner or later the weekly luncheon would be devoted to a discussion of Andrew and his project, but Miriam did not want to “articulate her feelings” with Kathryn and Jayne. They’d be on the same side for once, but she preferred to handle matters in her own way.

She had already talked the matter over with the garden club. A couple of the older ones had to have things like “toxic chemicals” and “groundwater” explained to them, but finally they understood why she was so upset about Andrew’s offer to sell the farm to the university for a landfill. She told them about some of the chemicals that certain departments couldn’t dump down the sink anymore, and what had happened to the pond on campus when they used it for dumping.

After that there had been complete silence for a good three minutes. And then the talk returned to gardening. At first Miriam thought that the issue had been too complex for them to understand. She wondered if she ought to explain about cancer and crop contamination, and all the other dangers. Listening to their calm discussion of plants, she thought that they had just given up considering the problem altogether, but looking back on it later, she understood.

“Cohosh sure does look nice in a flower arrangement, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Calloway. “Nice big purple berries that look like a cross between blueberries and grapes. There’s some up the hill behind our place.”

“You wouldn’t want to use them in a salad, though,” said Mrs. Dehart thoughtfully. “Bein’ poison and all. Course, they might not kill you.”

“We lost a cow to eating chokecherry leaves once,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “It almost always kills a cow if you let one in a field with chokecherry. I never heard tell of a human getting hold of any, though. We got some growing in our woods, but it’s outside the fence.”

“That ain’t nothin’ to hemlock,” sniffed Serena Walkenshaw. “Looks just like parsley, if you don’t know any better. They’re kin, of course. Wild carrot family, same as Queen Anne’s lace. But that hemlock beats all you ever seen for being… toxic?”

Miriam nodded. “I don’t suppose you find it much around here.”

Serena Walkenshaw shrugged. “I believe I saw some in the marsh near that little creek on your place. Course, it might have been parsley…”

Miriam felt a tug on her sleeve and looked up to see Kathryn peering at her intently. “Are you all right, Miriam? You’re just staring at your salad.”

Miriam smiled. “I was just thinking that I had to fix a salad for Andrew tonight, before I go off to the garden club.”

Jayne laughed. “The garden club! What can you possibly get out of that?”

“Recipes,” said Miriam softly.

A PREDATORY WOMAN

“SHE LOOKS A proper murderess, doesn’t she?” said Ernie Sleaford, tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women.

With a self-conscious pat at her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan nodded. Because she was twenty-nine and petite, she had never been the object of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional reasons-a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that children would have trusted her in the first place.”

“What did they know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?”

Jackie studied the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry eyes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in anticipation of slights to come.

Ernie had marked the photo Page One. It was not the sort of female face that usually appeared in the pages of Stellar, a tabloid known for its daily photo of Princess Diana, and for its bosomy beauties on page three. A beefy woman with a thatch of badly bleached hair had to earn her way into the tabloids, which Erma Bradley certainly had. Convicted of four child murders in 1966, she was serving a life sentence in Holloway Prison in north London.

Gone, but not forgotten. Because she was Britain’s only female serial killer, the tabloids kept her memory green with frequent stories about her, all accompanied by that menacing 1965 photo of the scowling, just-arrested Erma. Most of the recent articles about her didn’t even attempt to be plausible: “Erma Bradley: Hitler’s Illegitimate Daughter,” “Children’s Ghosts Seen Outside Erma’s Cell,” and, the October favorite, “Is Erma Bradley a Vampire?” That last one was perhaps the most apt, because it acknowledged the fact that the public hardly thought of her as a real person anymore; she was just another addition to the pantheon of monsters, taking her place alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, and another overrated criminal, Guy Fawkes. Thinking up new excuses to use the old Erma picture was Ernie Sleaford’s specialty. Erma’s face was always good for a sales boost.

Jackie Duncan had never done an Erma story. She had been four years old at the time of the infamous trial, and later, with the crimes solved and the killers locked away, the case had never particularly interested her. “I thought it was her boyfriend, Sean Hardie, who actually did the killing,” she said, frowning to remember the details of the case.

Stellar’s editor sneered at her question. “Hardie? I never thought he had a patch on Erma for toughness. Look at him now. He’s completely mental, in a prison hospital, making no more sense than a vegetable marrow. That’s how you ought to be with the lives of four kids on your conscience. But not our Erma! Got her university degree by telly, didn’t she? Learned to talk posh in the cage? And now a bunch of bloody do-gooders have got her out!”

Jackie, who had almost tuned out this tirade as she contemplated her new shade of nail varnish, stared at him with renewed interest. “I hadn’t heard that, Sleaford! Are you sure it isn’t another of your fairy tales?” She grinned. “ ‘Erma Bradley, Bride of Prince Edward’? That was my favorite.”

Ernie had the grace to blush at the reminder of his last Erma headline, but he remained solemn. “ ’S’truth, Jackie. I had it on the quiet from a screw in Holloway. She’s getting out next week.”

“Go on! It would have been on every news show in Britain by now! Banner headlines in The Guardian. Questions asked in the House.”

“The prison officials are keeping it dark. They don’t want Erma to be pestered by the likes of us upon her release. She wants to be let alone.” He smirked. “I had to pay dear for this bit of information, I can tell you.”

Jackie smiled. “Poor mean Ernie! Where do I come into it, then?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I think so. You want Erma’s own story, no matter what.”

“Well, we can write that ourselves in any case. I have Paul working on that already. What I really need is a new