Marie O'Day

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

ENDING 1

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

ENDING TWO

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

ENDING THREE

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

1

This is the way she told me it happened and from what I pieced together long afterwards. It was a day long ago, the day of her murder.

She rocked her arm admiring the beauty of the jade bracelet circling her slender wrist. Twenty-two perfect globes, deep green and most certainly from exotic China. Not that she had any knowledge where China was. Not that she could tell real jade from fake. Yet, the glorious deep color and weight of the stones gave her hope that it was the real deal. A genuine jade bracelet that must have cost this guy at least a month’s pay.

As she moved her hand, the light from the shaded lamp angled on the stones. Yes, they were real. At last, she had gotten something expensive, something genuine from one of these bozos.

Do you like it? he asked.

She shrugged. She didn’t want him to know how thrilled she was.

It’s okay, she said flatly.

If he was waiting for a thank you he would have to wait until hell froze over she thought.

Yet her curiosity peeked. She wanted to know more about this prize.

Where did you get it? she asked slyly.

I’m a little embarrassed to say. He threw her a loopy smile.

Say it. I haven’t got all day, she said impatiently.

Pawn shop.

She smirked. It figured. A guy like this wasn’t going to shop at a genuine jewelry store.

He was standing there looking at her. His body held at an awkward angle. He was staring at her, gawking really with his mouth open. She looked back at the bracelet allowing him to simmer. She had seen that mesmerized look before, from other men, men from long ago, men from just yesterday and now from this man.

The same light highlighting the bracelet slanted on the side of her face. God, she was beautiful, he thought. The light set aglow a wedge of her shoulder-length hair, illuminating its rusty color. He’d heard that redheads have a temper. She did have a temper, but not the yelling kind. Her temperament the dictionary would call aloof. Still there was something there under that cool façade, something below the surface smoldering. He didn’t know what to make of her. He wanted to please her. He hoped the bracelet that had cost him a pretty penny would thaw her. He didn’t know how long he was willing to wait to bed her. He had been patient; weeks had turned into months. His eyes shifted to her ruby red lips. He longed for her to whisper his name through those lips. His name on her breath…Jerry…maybe even Gerald although no one ever called him that. Jerry, I’m yours, she would whisper. And then he would kiss those lush ruby red lips, lips hot and smoldering.

Her eyes shifted catching him staring at her. She was born with good looks…a natural beauty the movie magazines would say. Just her luck that no Hollywood columnist was writing about her. She didn’t have the connections for the movie star route. She had never met the right man to get her somewhere. She doubted when he first asked her out if he had the mojo to do it. Get her somewhere. He had asked her where she wanted to go. She threw him anywhere but here. She learned fast he wasn’t the one to help her go places.

Truth be told he had thought at the time, she didn’t have the ambition to go places. Just surviving day by day took up all her ambition.

She turned her gaze back to the bracelet. Let him stare at her. She didn’t mind. The price she had to pay for this little trinket. Maybe he saw the pleasure in her eyes as she admired the bracelet. Yeah, she was glad to have it, but she wasn’t going to sleep with him as a thank you. She didn’t know why she was such a prude…maybe it was her spiteful mother. The same mother had told her that she was no good. The words stung even after all this time had passed. Hurtful words. Slut! Whore! Stupid! She heard the words ringing in her ears.

How could she prove otherwise? How could she prove she was good? Men staring at her wasn’t her fault. She had grown into a shapely woman…tall and slender with firm breasts and long legs. She was a dish, as they say, and her copper color hair was natural. The eyes staring at the bracelet were the same rich green color. Her mother was an ugly little woman both inside and out. Her father was long gone, a blur of features in her memory. How she turned out to be such a beauty was nature’s mystery. A blessing and a curse. Men looked at her, men noticed her. Women too, of course, some envious, others awed.

He was still staring at her. She could feel his eyes on her. She wanted to leave. Her mind searched for ways she could exit gracefully. What excuse could she make? I gotta go to work wouldn’t work. This Jerry knew it was her day off from her waitress job at the diner. Yeah, times were tough, and she had to make a living. That’s where they had met, that’s where she had met all the Joes, Harrys and Sams. Slim was her boss…an old guy, despite his age he had a crush on her. Watched her. Watched her walk, watched her clean the counter, watched her sip a cup of coffee during her breaks. Yeah, he had it bad. Lovesick. Love stupid. He didn’t approve of the guys that came into the diner who stared at her before asking her out on a date. He had sold a lot of coffee and donuts to those guys. Each struggling to get his nerve up and filling the till with jingling coins.

Maybe she could tell Jerry that her grandmother died, and she had to go to the funeral. It was a wild idea that flashed through her mind. She didn’t know her grandmother. She never met any of her kin growing up poor on a dirt farm. Funny, until this moment, she had never thought about anyone in her family dying. How could she feel sympathy for people she didn’t know? She had felt a strange sympathy for a death a long time ago. However, the recipient wasn’t human. When she was a skinny kid, she had seen a dead dog in the road, probably hit by a car, long dead stiff and mangy, filthy and neglected, a piece of rot to be collected with the day’s garbage. The sight had disgusted her. She had turned her head away. Yet the profound loss she felt in that moment overwhelmed her, stayed with her, festered in her dreams. The feelings rose in her now. Grief. Longing. Loss.

She swallowed hard, steeling herself from such emotions. Death had nothing to do with her. Death couldn’t touch her…never, ever, but she was wrong, oh so wrong. Death was near, closer than she could ever imagine.

She didn’t have much of an imagination and that was not serving her well now. She couldn’t conjure up things in her mind like rockets blasting to the moon, gnomes populating mythical realms or dinosaurs walking the earth. Fanciful things had no place in her mind. Whenever she dreamed, it was of practical things…where she was going to get her next pair of silk stockings…how she was going to pay the month’s rent…how many losers she would have to date before Mr. Right asked her to marry him. Oh, there were plenty of hands-on guys. Those lookers. Those pretenders. Those feelers. They wanted it all when they offered less than nothing in return.

Yet, this time she had scored. One of those bright boys had come through. No, not with a marriage proposal…but it was a start. She wasn’t inclined to say yes to this one even if he did ask. He wasn’t much of a climb up the social ladder. A garage mechanic. His hands were greasy. They were greasy even after he washed them. A grease monkey wasn’t that what people called them. He was medium height, short dark hair and large brown eyes under straight eyebrows. She had seen him at the gas station working on the cars. He was wearing only an undershirt, the scooped kind without sleeves that showed the toned muscles in his arms. Not unpleasing. He was nicely built; a slim athletic body. The crisp white shirt that he had put on to pick her up today was wilting now under the blazing heat in the room. He had pulled down the shades, but a slice of daylight peeked from under one shade not fully drawn. The reason he had pulled the shades made her suspicious. He had turned on the lamps inside the living room with two cheap overstuffed chairs and a small sofa with torn upholstery. The fireplace was out, a cold black hole. It was the only cool looking thing in the hot stifling room. Maybe, to him, the lamps and shades drawn were mood lighting. Creating a romantic mood so she would put out.

You’re not saying much, said Jerry.

Whatta you want me to say? she answered dryly.

I don’t know. Thank you would be nice.

Look, you asked me here, she said, adding sharply referring to the bracelet. I didn’t ask for this.

I know you didn’t, honey.

He had called her honey before he handed over the gift. She had held her tongue then but now she erupted.

Don’t call me honey. I ain’t your honey or nobody elses.

Okay, you don’t have to get hot about it.

I ain’t hot about it. It’s damn hot in here.

Sweat was beading on her brow and the underarms of the thin dress she was wearing, wet. She was sorry she had agreed to come over. Sorry she had said yes to a drive. It wasn’t a smart move on her part – to be alone with him.

He had arranged to pick her up with the lure of a surprise. She didn’t like surprises usually they turned out to be a bad surprise…like guys with octopus arms. She had let down her guard. She was bored. It was her day off and she had nothing much to do. Her one room apartment over a grocery store was stuffy and hot. She wanted to get out. When the telephone rang, the ringing sounded like a call of escape. She answered it and accepted his invitation to go for a spin. He would pick her up in an hour’s time and so the countdown began.

She put on a simple dress of blue, one that wasn’t showy. Still the material couldn’t help itself, it clung to her curves and swished sassily as she walked. She put on a pair of high heels. They were new. She had saved up her tips and bought them at the shoe store on the corner instead of the 5 & 10 where she usually shopped. They were blue shoes and matched the color of her dress. She brushed her soft hair and fluffed it to frame her perfectly shaped face. She sat at her dressing table in her room looking into the pockmarked mirror adding a blush of rose to her cheeks, mascara to her eyelashes and deep red to her full lips. Her face belonged in a portrait gallery she thought as she admired the results of her primping.

The sound of a car honk pissed her off. He should have climbed the damn stairs and knocked instead of driving up and honking. Honking as if she was some kind of dog to come to his whistle.

She went down the long narrow stairway slowly in her high heels, her weight causing a squeaking sound on each worn board. Jerry threw her a bright smile as she neared the car. A convertible all shined up. She liked the car, clean and motor rumbling. She wasn’t so sure about her feelings for the driver. Well, at least he was wearing a crisp shirt and tie.

She slid into the passenger side without a word to him. In a perfect world, he should have opened the door for her. Well, it wasn’t a perfect world, was it? She was still pissed over the honking. She could have told him so but kept still. It really wasn’t worth the effort. She had things more pressing on her mind like how she was going to handle this bozo.

They drove off into the warm sunny day, kicking up dust on the road. She wore a hat, a floppy sun hat with a dark blue chrysanthemum accent. She had all she could do to hold it on her head as he picked up speed.

I’m glad you came, he said.

Yeah, was all she answered.

She took off her hat, letting her hair loose. Jerry noticed the beauty of her red hair blowing in the wind. He just liked looking at her, most men did. She didn’t look at him once. Her eyes were on the road ahead. A two-lane country road, going where? She immediately regretted her decision to go with him.

What’s the surprise? she asked.

You’ll see, he replied with a side-glance.

I’ll bet, she said tartly.

They drove along the main drag on the way out of town. Not much of a place in her opinion, hot and dry, a grocery store, a funeral parlor, a bank, two diners, all held together by spit and baked in the sun. Coming from the Midwest, she had been heading to California when she first saw the place. How many times she wished she had kept on going?

California. The land of milk and honey. She had heard someone say that when she was a kid. She wasn’t sure what it meant exactly. The phrase had stuck with her. She couldn’t recall who said it, a woman she thought. She did recall a certain note in the voice, a note of envy, of longing, of desirability, of hope. She had run out of hope at a young age without a father in sight and a mother that drank herself to death. When she turned nineteen, she headed for the land of milk and honey, but her bus ticket only got her so far. She had landed instead in the middle of Utah. Dry and dusty…where her dream came to die.

She wasn’t a believer in making the best of things…lemons into lemonade crap. You just do what you have to do to survive. She soon learned that most folks in the state were big on religion. Mormons they were called when not using the longer fancier name something about Latter Day Saints…whatever the hell that meant she had thought at the time. She had no use for the holy-roller thing. She had been to gospel meetings long ago with her mother. The Bible thumpers had promised her mother salvation. They had given her a whole list of Do’s and Don’ts. Don’t drink yourself to death wasn’t on the list. The don’t’s didn’t stick; the do’s never done.

Not all Utah residents were zealots she learned. The village where she had landed was an outpost where people kept their religious beliefs in check, despite naming it Ascension. She could admire that about the people that lived there at least.

The village was a hot, dusty place south of the Great Salt Lake. She had seen a help wanted sign in the grimy window of a diner on the sunbaked main drag. As soon as Slim looked up from wiping the counter and saw her, the job was hers. She could have asked for more that day. He would have given her the keys to the place and followed her around like a loyal hound dog. He had apologized that he couldn’t pay her more. Being broke, any salary suited her at the time. She had grown up when the Great Depression was making headlines. The lesson took, a job, any job was better than trolling for rat stew at the village dump. New headlines promised better days ahead now that the war was over. Pockets of depression remained, hidden in small towns and hidden deep in distraught minds.

Three years had passed since that bus ride landed her in the middle of a desert. Lots of guys had passed in and out of the diner since then. Lots of dates, lots of wrestling matches, and five proposals of marriage…all from losers in her opinion…the kind that cheated on their wives. She shook her head, as they drove along as if to shake out such regrets.

Jerry pulled up at his house, a ramshackle kind of place on the outskirts of the town. She supposed it was a ranch of some sort, although no cattle were in sight. Mostly junk vehicles populated it. Cars, pickup trucks and even buses in various stages of disrepair were scattered over the scruffy acres like so many sun-bleached cattle bones. He had told her once that he repaired cars and sold them. As she nonchalantly looked around, she didn’t see anything worth repairing. It looked like rusted scrap metal to her. He had told her he had a son. He had probably told her the kid’s name, but she didn’t remember it. She did recall that the kid was eight years old. Eight was her lucky number. She had once won a pencil at school by guessing the number eight in a raffle in her classroom.

Jerry had told her that he took the kid hunting. Yeah killing animals was a big deal to father and son. They butchered their own pigs…lots of knifes must be lying around. When they pulled up in front of the house, she looked around the yard as Jerry cut the engine, but she didn’t see the boy. Probably out killing a pig, she had thought.

She waited for him to open the car door for her. He started to go up the porch steps and then realized she was still sitting in the car. He doubled back with an embarrassed grin on his face. Well, she thought he had put on a clean shirt and shaved, even plastered on some god-awful smelling cologne. He had gone through some trouble to impress her. She swung her legs out of the car, the silk of her stockings shimmering in the sunlight. He watched, appraising her long shapely legs and watched her sashay up the porch steps. He scrambled up the steps in front of her to open the screen door that squealed on rusty hinges. She chuckled to herself. Maybe, just maybe there was a glimmer of a gentleman there.

The house was dark as she entered a narrow hallway with a stairway ahead. To the right was an archway to a room deep in shadow. The light from the doorway caught the outline of chairs, a long table, and the glint of hanging bobbles on a small chandelier. To the left, also in shadow, was the living room.

What’s the matter? Didn’t you pay your electric bill? she asked drolly.

No, no, he said as he scurried into the living room. Reaching a round table, he turned on a lamp for proof. I just think it’s cooler inside with the shades drawn.

She strolled into the room that smelled musty from the stuffed furniture and sour with some kind of lingering odor of cooking greens. She was getting bored with the whole deal. She didn’t like Jerry and she didn’t like the room. She had seen the soft lights approach before and didn’t like it now.

So what is it? she said.

I just want to spend some time with you, he said.

Is that the surprise? she barked harshly. Cause if it is…

He cut her off. No, no he said. Look why don’t you relax?

She crossed her arms. He was nervous and plastered a smile on his face. She hoped a proposal wasn’t forthcoming. She would rather swallow a cockroach than spend the rest of her life with this loser in his loser of a house in this loser of a town.

Look, I haven’t got all day, she said.

Okay, okay. You wanna sit down?

No.

Come on, sit down and have a smoke.

I don’t want a smoke.

He stood there awkwardly not knowing what to say. A crazy thought entered his mind. I thought we could go on a picnic.

That notion got a rise out of her. You moron, she shrieked. I’m wearing high heels.

You could take them off, you know, go barefoot.

I don’t go barefoot.

Jerry wanted to build up to it, to the surprise. He wanted the surprise to soften her mood. She was glaring at him. It wasn’t working, in a minute she would bolt demanding to go home.

I got it here, for you, he said nervously.

He crossed the shadowy room to a desk with a pile of old newspapers on top. The desk was by the window where sunlight set aglow the closed green shade. He opened the middle drawer and took out a small white box.

She lifted a perfect eyebrow. She liked small boxes, good things came in small boxes like ruby brooches and diamond rings. She would like him better if he gave her something like that. She might promise to marry him and then break the promise and keep the ring.

Jerry walked slowly toward her; the box held out in his raised palm like an offering to an ancient goddess. She kept her eyes on the box. He stopped close to her taking in a whiff of her perfume. Something flowery…gardenia, rose or lilac? He couldn’t tell. The tinny scent of cheap perfume slithered in, but he didn’t care. If he had the money, he would buy her the most expensive French perfume, ermine coats and those foreign luxuries he had seen in The Saturday Evening Post. Well, he didn’t have that kind of money, but he did have this offering. He was holding it in his hand. She noticed that his hand was shaking