The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

Terry and Miriam stood perfectly still, watching Aunt Griselda cross the dining room and move out of view.

“We’ll never get it,” Miriam hissed, “until the day she dies.”

“She knows she’s got a grip on us,” Terry said.

“She’s made slaves of us,” Miriam added.

“Even slaves rebel and take what’s rightfully theirs...”

It was out in the open, the tantalizing, overpowering prospect.

Terry stole a glance at Miriam. The cold determination in her face gave him a slight shock. He realized that Miriam was way ahead of him. Miriam had been thinking about Aunt Griselda’s demise from the moment the old lady had revealed her financial status.

“She’s had her years,” Miriam said. “It wouldn’t be any great loss.”

Terry struggled with a single word: “How?”

“She’s going to take her morning shower right now. We are witnesses for each other. No one can dispute our words. Aunt Griselda is going to slip and fall in the bathroom. Start mustering your grief for your dear, departed aunt, Terry,” Miriam stated abruptly.

While her decision retained its initial iron hardness, Miriam hurried across the dining room, shoulders square. She didn’t look back.

Terry stood with everything inside of him drawing tighter and tighter. He heard a door open, voices speak. A muffled scream. The thuds of a struggle in a remote part of the house. Another scream, longer, higher in its wailing pitch.

Terry clamped his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears. The silence seemed endless. Then a form materialized in the hallway arch. It was Aunt Griselda. She was wriggling and jerking smooth the wrinkles in a blue silk dress which she had just slipped into.

She looked across at Terry with the degree of frosty contempt that only the very worldly-wise person can muster.

“My dear boy, through a sense of graciousness I’ve endured the boredom of this house, with nothing but stupid TV programs and the oblivion of catnaps to sustain me. I’ve eaten your wife’s atrocious cooking to pay her an unwarranted compliment. I have taken more brandy than is proper in order to lull the gastric destruction resulting from the selfsame cooking and boredom. I have forced an interest in your stupid little ideas and talk. I accepted it all...” her eyes clouded briefly, “because the weight and loneliness of my year suddenly crushed me, when the General passed on. I, who have traveled every continent and consorted with princes, came here resolved to get down to your provincial level, to appreciate the things you do, to be at last the little old auntie someone might take to their heart.”

She was moving briskly to the front door.

Terry broke his paralysis. “Aunt Griselda, we didn’t mean—”

“I know quite well what you meant. But you’ll never inherit five million dollars.” She opened the front door. “By the way, Miriam was quite awkward in her attack. It took, you know, a superb woman to attract a man like the General. One had to know how to sit a spirited horse, fire a big-game gun, strike a golf ball, and appreciate the fine points of a bullfight. One was never far from danger in the exotic, far corners of the earth — and the General taught me karate a long time ago. I never had to use it until today, when the twisted streets and swarthy villains are so far behind me...”

Terry stumbled after Aunt Griselda to the doorway. He watched the delicate victim walk coolly to the sidewalk and start watching for a taxicab. He knew he would never see the trim figure again.

With a sort of rudderless manner in his actions, Terry somehow got turned around and headed for the bathroom.

Miriam was on the floor, looking stringy-haired and half-drowned. Her face was white with pain and the shock of returning consciousness.

Terry’s stomach turned over as he stared at her right arm. It had been broken just below the elbow. He saw the ragged ends of bone that almost burst the skin.

Miriam stirred; moaned; gibbered a scream, and then another.

“Oh, shut up,” Terry said in a nastier tone than he’d really intended. “Now we’ll have to throw my severance pay away on a lousy hospital bill...”