The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Amorette shrank away, shocked and breathing hard. “Don’t you talk that way to me, Lucy Rhoads! I won’t listen to that kind of language in my car.” Back on moral ground, she flapped her hand frantically at the thick smoke. “And put out that cigarette. You don’t smoke.”

Lucy stared at her. “I do smoke. I am smoking. Just like you were screwing my husband. You and Prewitt were a couple of lying shits.”

Amorette rolled down her window and tried to gulp in air. “All right, if you’re going to judge us—”

Lucy snorted with laughter that hurt her throat. “Of course I’m going to judge you.”

“Well, then, the truth is...” Amorette was now nodding at her like a toy dog with its head on a spring. “The truth is, Lucy, your negativity and being so down on the world the way you are just got to Prewitt sometimes. Sometimes Prewitt just needed somebody to look on the bright side with.”

Lucy snorted again. “A shoulder to laugh on.”

“I think you’re being mean on purpose,” whimpered Amorette. “My doctor says I can’t afford to get upset like this.”

Lucy looked hard into the round brown candy eyes of her old bridge partner. Could the woman indeed be this obtuse? Was she as banal of brain as the tiny plastic mom down on the board waving at Prewitt’s electric train? So imbecilic that any action she took would have to be excused? That any action Lucy took would be unforgivable? But as Lucy kept staring at Amorette Strumlander, she saw deep down in the pupils of her neighbor’s eyes the tiniest flash of self-satisfaction, a flicker that was quickly hidden behind a tearful blink. It was a smugness as bland and benighted as Painton, Alabama’s, history.

Lucy suddenly felt a strong desire to do something, and as the feeling surged through her, she imagined the maniac from the mall bounding down this residential street and tossing his gun to her through the car window. It felt as if the butt of the gun hit her stomach with a terrible pain. She wanted to pick up the gun and shoot into the eye of Amorette’s smugness. But she didn’t have a gun. Besides, what good did the gun do the maniac, who had probably by now been caught by the police? Words popped out of Lucy’s mouth before she could stop them. She said, “Amorette, did you know that Prewitt was sleeping with Gloria Peters at the same time he was sleeping with you, and he kept on with her after you two ended things?”

“What?”

“Did you know there were pictures, naked pictures, of Gloria Peters locked up in Prewitt’s letter box too?”

Mrs. Strumlander turned green, actually apple green, just as Prewitt had turned blue on the ambulance stretcher after his coronary. Amorette had also stopped breathing; when she started up again, she started with a horrible-sounding gasp. “Oh, my God, don’t do this; tell me the truth,” she wheezed.

Lucy shook her head sadly. “I am telling the truth. You didn’t know about Gloria? Well, he tricked us both. And there were some very ugly pictures I found down in the study too, things he’d bought, about pretty sick things being done to naked women. Prewitt had all sorts of magazines and videos down in that study of his. I don’t think you even want to hear about what was in those videos.” (There were no other pictures, of course, any more than there had been an affair with Gloria Peters. The Polaroid shot of Amorette’s cupped breasts was doubtless as decadent an image as Prewitt could conceive. Every sentiment the man ever had could have been taken from one of his Mylar balloons or greeting cards.)

“Please tell me you’re lying about Gloria!” begged Amorette. She was green as grass.

Instead, Lucy opened the car door and stepped out. “Prewitt said my problem was I couldn’t stop telling the truth. And this is the truth. I saw naked pictures of Gloria posing just like you’d done and laughing because she was copying your pose. That’s what she said in a letter, that he’d shown her the picture of you and she was mimicking it.”

“Lucy, stop. I feel sick. Something’s wrong. Hand me my purse off the back seat.”

Lucy ignored the request. “Actually I read lots of letters Gloria wrote Prewitt making fun of you, Amorette. You know how witty she can be. The two of them really got a laugh out of you.”

Unable to breathe, Amorette shrank back deep into the seat of her car and whispered for Lucy please to call her doctor for her because she felt like something very scary was happening.

“Well, just take it one day at a time,” Lucy advised her neighbor. “And look on the bright side.”

“Lucy, Lucy, don’t leave me!”

But Lucy slammed the door and began to walk rapidly along beside the oleander hedge. She was pulling off fistfuls of oleander petals as she went, throwing them down on the sidewalk ahead of her. The teenage girl on Rollerblades came zipping close, eyes and mouth big as her skates carried her within inches of Lucy’s red face. She shot by the car quickly and didn’t notice that Amorette Strumlander had slumped over onto the front seat.