Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Many a Pickle Makes a Mickle by DeLoris Stanton Forbes

When Uncle Willis died and left her all he had, she began to think that she didn’t despise him after all.

Of course he didn’t know she despised him, that seemed pretty obvious. Otherwise he would have willed his worldly goods to someone else. He’d have known for certain if he’d given her more cause, but a few close (very close) hugs and a touch (accidental?) every so often weren’t enough to make her flat out tell him to knock it off. She knew he was getting his kicks all right, she knew that, she wasn’t behind the door when they handed out smarts, but she was just a kid and she couldn’t come out and nail him, so as soon as she was sure (and that took a couple of years, like her mother said, look before you cut off your nose), she did the next best thing, she stayed away from Uncle Willis. And she despised him because if he was into kiddie porn he didn’t have the guts to make an honest (dishonest?) run at it. Even kids get totally turned off by gutless wonders. Maybe kids get turned off sooner. No rose-colored shades, at least none for her. Plus, if she said anything to her mother, her mother would have put it down to her “overactive imagination.” What mothers didn’t know didn’t hurt them. Did it?

He wasn’t really her uncle. He was either her grandmother’s cousin’s son or her step-grandmother’s brother’s nephew, something like that, but he was known as Uncle Willis by everyone in her family so that’s what she called him, too. Her Great-aunt Louise once drew her a diagram of relationships, and she could reason it out to the extent that uncles and aunts had to be Mom or Dad’s brothers or sisters while children of her parents’ siblings were her cousins, but after that, when it got to second cousin once removed and all, she was completely out of it, and besides her folks were only children so it ended right there with her. Funny thing though, now she had relatives she’d never even heard of until Uncle Willis made her his heir. Then the distant, very distant (sixth or seventh twice removed?) cousins began to come out of the woodwork and look sad-eyed at the coffin. All they got out of that was a wide-eyed stare and a weak handshake; if they expected anything else they had the wrong girl.

She and her mother had lived in Uncle Willis’s house when she was young. Her father had vanished somewhere into the wild blue yonder (he’d been a pilot in the Air Force, quite dashing if you go by the old snapshots) before she was a year old, and Uncle Willis took pity on them, so her mother said, and gave them a roof over their heads, said that with moistened eyes and a dabbing of the nose with a Kleenex, she talked like that, very dramatic was her mother. They lived there until she was in her early teens. She never thought much about Uncle Willis until she got old enough to understand that sometimes things that look like they mean one thing really mean some other thing, and it was right about then that he turned generous and began doing nice things for her, that would be when she got to be ten or so.

Until then Uncle Willis was just part of the scenery like the picture of the Indian chief on horseback that hung in the hallway, he wasn’t around all the time because he worked for the railroad and was in residence only on his week off, which came every five weeks or so. One time he came home with vacation plans in mind, would somebody like to take a trip to the seashore, he had an extra week coming and railroad passes, and her mother said, “Oh my, just imagine,” and she poked her and she said, “Me? Do you mean me, Uncle Willis?” whereupon he said she could come along if she liked.

Oooh, said her mother. “Isn’t that nice of Uncle Willis?” She poked her again. “Tell Uncle Willis thank you very much. Tell him you certainly would like to go.”

Of course she liked, there was a big world out there and she hadn’t seen any of it. The next year it was the mountains and after that a world’s fair, wasn’t it nice of Uncle Willis, her mother kept saying, but by age thirteen she was just a little more worldly (all that travel broadens one, they say, must be true), so she said yeah, sure, and after that she kept her distance. Her mother wondered why, but she never told her, merely said she preferred to stay home with her friends, and after awhile Uncle Willis stopped inviting and Mother stopped asking. Her mother was a very sweet, very simple person who eventually met a very sweet, very simple man and they got married and the three of them moved to a rental duplex where they all lived fairly happily ever after.

In due time she all but forgot Uncle Willis. In due time he died and left everything he possessed to her. So what did she get for the hugs and the touches and the eventual rejection? She got the house she’d lived in as a child (much in need of repair by now, it seemed much smaller than she remembered, and the Indian picture had faded to yellows and blues), a bit of money (not a heck of a lot) in a savings account, and the Betamax.

The furnishings that came with the house were mostly familiar, the same sofa looking every year of its age, the same well-used beds and scratched tables and almost-springless chairs, but one modem touch was the video recorder and its television. She could imagine Uncle Willis sitting in front of the TV watching films, and she was briefly rather pleased for him because she had swallowed a little guilt pill when she saw how drab his life had been, visualized his loneliness. When it came to loneliness, she knew the way, and she was not strictly from the freezer.

She’d sell the house, she decided, for whatever she could get and give the furniture to the Salvation Army but keep the money and the VCR. It wasn’t until she turned it on that she realized it was a Betamax, and she thought, boy, that was just like Uncle Willis to leave her a video recorder that was passe, they didn’t make Beta tapes any more, Beta bet on the wrong system and lost so she was stuck with a VCR that she couldn’t use. Par for the course for Didi Becker.

Except that she found tapes. Dozens of tapes in dusty sleeves, reprints of old movies starring John Wayne and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and Bette Davis and Cary Grant and Deanna Durbin (who the heck was Deanna Durbin?), tapes of Spencer Tracy and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Barbara Stanwyck, and even Shirley Temple when she was young (that figured since he went in for little girls) and, like they used to say, a cast of thousands, people she knew and people she’d never heard of. It seemed that Uncle Willis was a cinema buff, a collector, and maybe these were valuable, if not now, later, so she took them all home. Including some blank Beta tapes for future recording. If she couldn’t buy Beta tapes, she could at least make her own. Start her own collection? Stephen King movies? Hmmm?

She set up the Beta, turned her set and the machine on, stuck a tape into its tape slit.

The usual rental tape begins with a warning about counterfeiting, and her blank tapes began with a message, too, but instead of a warning they contained taping instructions thusly:

This cassette contains an experimental tape; do not use in conjunction with regular television programming.

(Great. Not even the blank tapes were usable.)

To activate, insert cassette and press BX REC MODE.

(Bx? Yes, there was a BII and a BIII and a BX. She pushed the latter.)

Give vocal command.

(Give vocal command? What vocal command? These instructions were even more confusing than the usual VCR instructions. Didn’t any of the people who wrote these things speak basic English?)

Be sure to indicate time as well as PLACE.

Time? Place? Feeling foolish she said, “Yesterday. One P.M. Uncle Willis’s house.” Expecting nothing, she activated PLAY.

A picture came on her television screen. The camera was focused on the exterior of Uncle Willis’s house; someone was coming up the walk. The someone was she. She saw herself open the door and go in, she saw herself walk through the rooms, end up with the Beta and the TV, pick up the tapes... she pushed the STOP button, thought a moment, rewound.

She said, “Uncle Willis’s house, July 4, 1963,” a date chosen completely at random. She pressed PLAY.

It was a hot day, there were high, thin clouds way up in the yellow-white sky. There was a long-legged girl-child wearing a short dress printed all over with strawberries, she was barefooted and she carried a brown paper sack. In the sack were firecrackers called ladyfingers because they were so small and two boxes of sparklers. She went into the house through the back door, into the kitchen. The kitchen was furnished with a refrigerator with a round white dome, a lineoleum-topped wooden table with chairs, and a stove held up by white legs more shapely than the girl’s at each of its corners. On top of the stove was a big box of matches. The girl stood on tiptoe, added the box to the collection in her sack.

A voice from another room called, “Is that you, Didi?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’m going upstairs to clean the bathroom. After that we’ll have lunch.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So don’t go away.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I won’t be long.”

“No, ma’am.”

“What?”

“I said I’ll just be out in the back yard.”

“All right. But don’t go away. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

The girl hesitated, heard footsteps on the stairs, shook her head, and went outside. When she figured she was out of earshot, she took out a pack of the ladyfinger firecrackers; they were all strung together like tiny frankfurters. She held the package in her hand, had to put it down to get a match from the box, picked it up again, and struck the match on the box side. Bobby Griffin said only sissies shot off ladyfingers one at a time. The thing to do, he said, was let the whole pack go off in your hand. That proved you were no baby, that proved you knew the score.

She touched the lighted match to the mud-colored string that held the crackers together, smelled the char, saw the flame run, heard the sound, felt the explosion, and screamed.

From an upstairs window her mother called out. “Didi! Didi! What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mother. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Somebody’s shooting off firecrackers.”

“Yes, Mother. It’s the Fourth of July.” Her mother was a good mother. But dumb.

“You’re not shooting off firecrackers, are you, Didi?”

“No, Mother. I have sparklers.”

“Well... don’t light them yet. I’ll be down in just a little bit.”

“Yes, Mother. I’ll wait.”

When she’d left the window, the girl went into the house and slathered butter on her palm, thought she’d pay Bobby Griffin back but good when she ran into him tomorrow. Only sissies, huh? She’d show him sissies.

“That you in the kitchen, Didi?”

“Yes, Uncle Willis. I didn’t know you were here. When did you get home?”

“Oh, a little while ago.” He came into the room, a slight man of medium height with thinning reddish hair. His skin was very dark from the sun, and his eyes were small and very pale behind his glasses. Watching him on the Betamax, she realized she’d forgotten what he looked like. She’d forgotten this entire day, it seemed. (Or had she?) All she vaguely recalled was the firecrackers. She sat back. It was like watching a TV film with a familiar cast of characters, but somehow it made her nervous. Somebody strange was writing the script, that was it, maybe Steven Spielberg? and she had this strange feeling that something... bad?... was about to happen.

“Oh, Willis. There you are.” Mother came into the kitchen, too, her eyes were bright, over-bright, Didi thought, had she been crying? Mother crying? What had she got to be crying about? Maybe she’d gotten soap in her eyes while cleaning the bathroom — and what was wrong, not quite right, with her dress? It was hanging funny, it was buttoned wrong...

Uncle Willis went to her, put his hand on her shoulder. “Your mother wants to tell you something,” he said, smiling. He had one gold-filled tooth. Right in the middle.

Suddenly Didi’s hand stopped hurting, some other pain took its place, a pain near her heart. Maybe because her heart stopped beating? Like a clock that’s stopped ticking? Sudden silence?

“Uncle Willis has asked me to marry him,” said Mother. He kissed her hair. She stared at Didi, eyes pleading, eyes — frightened? Mother frightened? Of what? What did Mother have to be frightened about?

“No,” she shouted aloud at the television. “No, no! Never! Never, never, never! Ever! I’ll kill myself first!” She put the Betamax on PAUSE and they were frozen there, the three of them. Uncle Willis — was that a sneer of self-satisfaction on his face? Mother — some kind of fear? Yes, absolutely. Some kind of fear. And she... she’d never known she could look like that. Maybe now. When she knew how to keep score. But then?

Memory was returning. Full force.

Didi hadn’t screamed at Uncle Willis. Didi hadn’t said, “No, no! Never!” or any of the rest of it, Didi’d smiled. She could remember how hard it had been to smile. She punched PLAY, and the scene went on.

Didi went up to Uncle Willis and hugged him hard. She was tall for her age (how old had she been — ten? eleven?). She was almost as tall as he was, and in the hugging she managed to smear some of the butter across the back of his coat. Didi looked into his eyes and smiled some more. His sneer faded, was replaced by an expression that she now recognized as doubt followed by confusion, but then she’d told herself, I’ll play-act for you, Uncle Willis, but you’ll marry my mother over my dead body.

After that when he’d come home she’d go up to his room after supper while Mother was doing dishes and maybe mixing up a batch of bread dough (she made great homemade bread from scratch, her mother was a fabulous cook), and they’d have “evening chats.”

“You tell me about what you do during the day, and I’ll tell you what I do, Uncle Willis. I just go to school, that’s all, but what do you do when you’re away with the railroad? I just love railroads, Uncle Willis. I’d love to take a long trainride someday. Trains are so romantic. Don’t you think trains are romantic? Not like airplanes. Everybody rides on airplanes, but riding on a train is different, don’t you think? You get to see a new part of the country.” And she’d smile at him and lean her chin on her hand and listen to whatever he chose to tell her.

At first he seemed a little uncomfortable, but after a few nights he began to tell her a lot. About how his mother died when he was a baby and how he was raised by his father and two uncles and how he never graduated from high school but had worked from the time he was fourteen, worked always on the railroad working his way up on the maintenance crews until now he was foreman and had privileges and would one day be able to retire with a pension, he was, he told her, a self-made man of substance. To which she’d replied (spoken with wide eyes), “Isn’t that something! Isn’t that really something!” Not much in the way of brilliant repartee, but then she was only eleven. Or was it ten?

It was good enough for Uncle Willis. He ate it up, and it wasn’t long before she’d get a hug when she said goodnight and the trip invitations began. At first she’d asked, “Mother, why don’t you go with Uncle Willis, wouldn’t you like to see Pike’s Peak?” and Mother had shaken her head and answered, “Then who would take care of you while I was off gallivanting? No, you go, honey. You can tell me all about it. It will be much better that way.”

And then she thought, Mother doesn’t want to be alone with him, that’s what it means. Refusing to go away with him meant Didi was right, she didn’t want to marry him, not at all. She must have agreed to marry for some other reason because it was plain to Didi that she didn’t love him. She must have said yes to keep a roof over their heads, that was it. She must have said she’d marry him for Didi!

She couldn’t honestly say that when she started buttering Uncle Willis up (both literally and figuratively) she knew what would come of it. She wasn’t a born Lolita, not at all (in fact in later years she won the title Miss Frigidity). But she had this feeling that being nice to Uncle Willis would better achieve her goal than kicking and screaming and holding her breath until she turned blue, her goal, of course, being the separation of state (Willis) and church (Mother). She didn’t know then and she didn’t know now what had passed between them, why they had called the whole thing off (she supposed she could find out on her magical Betamax if she knew just when it happened, but she didn’t know and she really wasn’t interested in details — God forbid — only in results). She guessed it could be said that she stole Mother’s fiancé. So be it.

By the end of the third summer (she was entering high school by then and beginning to have a life) she’d had quite enough of Uncle Willis, but then she worried that things might return to status quo. What to do, what to do? A permanent solution? Under no circumstances, no matter what the cost, Uncle Willis and Mother... she picked a date, she might be off a day or two, a week or two even, but somewhere around “September 1, 1967, Uncle Willis’s house” and hit the PLAY button.

It was early morning, a hot and muggy early morning made even hotter in the kitchen by the big kettle on the stove that Mother was tending. She was pickling, an annual ritual. Mother made delicious pickles, she made bread-and-butter pickles and she made watermelon rind pickles and she made dill pickles and sweet chunk pickles and today she was making End-of-the-Garden pickles, God, could that woman make pickles, bless her simple heart!

For Uncle Willis she always made a few jars of dill pickles kosher, he’d picked up a taste for kosher pickles on his travels and though Mother and Didi thought them too highly spiced, he loved them, so she always made a batch just for him. She saw them now, a dozen of them cooling in their Ball jars ready for their permanent seal. Uncle Willis’s pickles. A dozen of same. On the assumption that he went through one jar a month. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. It depended. But sooner or later in the course of a year he ate twelve jars of Mother’s dill pickles kosher, she couldn’t ever recall one jar too many nor one too few. He started with twelve jars in his little cubbyhole in the cellar, when pickling time came again it was like the ten little Indians, and then there were none.

Pickles. Row after row of the finished product sat on the kitchen counter, all the varieties encased in clean and sparkling glass looking like blue ribbon samples in a magazine picture. “Whew,” said Mother, wiping her brow with the hem of her apron. “This is the end of it, thank God. I don’t know why I keep on pickling, Didi, store-bought pickles don’t cost that much.”

“But they don’t taste like yours do, Mother.” Fourteen-year-old DiDi (do note the new spelling, she’d changed it from just plain Didi on departing the ninth grade, nobody at the high school would question that spelling of her name, and she’d be a new and infinitely more interesting person with two capital D’s) was mesmerized by the pickles, such an array.

“Let me finish this last batch, will you, Mother? I need to learn how. You learn by doing, that’s what my teacher said. May I, Mother, may I, please?”

“Well...” She fanned her flushed face with the flap end of the apron. “I really could stand a shower, a nice cool shower...”

“All I do is take the jars out of their bath with this thing...” she waved the tongs her mother used, “and let them cool. I’m capable of that, don’t you think?”

Mother smiled and said, “Leave them in just ten minutes longer, Didi” (she still used the old spelling, dear stick-in-the-mud Mother). “I’ll tighten the seals when they’ve cooled.”

DiDi smiled back. “Ten more minutes. Easy as pie. Take your time in the shower, Mother. Better yet, have a relaxing bath. See you later, alligator.”

She chuckled. “See you later, alligator. You kids.” And she left.

And DiDi trotted out to the barn where such things as the lawn mower, rakes and hoes, her outgrown bicycle, old cans of paint, fertilizer for Mother’s roses, et cetera, were stored and found what she’d thought she’d find, the remains of a tin of rat poison Mother’d used last year to rid the tomato patch of varmints.

Back in the kitchen DiDi gingerly lifted the flat metal lid atop one of the jars of Uncle Willis’s pickles. Her heart was beating so loudly she could hear it thumping in her head, the here-and-now Didi thought she could hear the then DiDi’s heart through the television. The pickles smelled spicy, the pickles looked perfect; even after she sifted rat poison into the jar, they looked good, since the fine powder sank to the bottom, disintegrated, disappeared.

Was it enough? Should she do another jar? As she debated (Did she really want to do this, any of it? It wouldn’t kill him, would it? Just a little rat poison? Make him sick, that’s all it would do. Make him seriously ill and he’d have to go to the hospital and... no, that wouldn’t help. Mother’d just nurse him back to health, DiDi knew how she was, she was Florence Nightingale reincarnated when it came to ailments. DiDi’d just have to go ahead and...), the screen door banged, someone was coming. Watching the scene unfold, she could swear she heard music, ominous music, Alfred Hitchcock music rising up and over like in Psycho when danger is on its way...

DiDi moved quickly, doused the pickle jar with powder once more and thrust the rat poison tin into a jeans pocket, replaced the lid, and picked up the tongs. Judging from her armchair she rated young DiDi’s hand and eye coordination A-one.

Uncle Willis came into the kitchen. “Lucille... oh, it’s you, Didi. I thought it was your mother. Making pickles, I see. You’re being mother’s little helper. That’s nice.”

Didi smiled, nodded, “Yours are over there.”

“So they are. And just in time. I’m on my last jar.”

Mother’s voice came down the stairs, “Didi, are you taking the pickles out of their bath? The ten minutes are up.”

“Yes, ma’am. Excuse me, Uncle Willis. You might get burned if you come too close. And we wouldn’t want to get burned, would we, Uncle Willis?” What an innocent face, what a sweet innocent face, no wonder he’d willed Didi (small d) his belongings, suspecting that child of ill will was unthinkable. Such a sweet girl. Such a sweet pretty girl. Should have the world at her feet. Should have.

She remembered the months that followed. Great gobs of guilt followed. In her bed at night she thought of ways to undo what she’d done. What she’d done was terrible. Horrible. Unthinkable.

So why was she thinking of it? Why had she chosen that (random?) date... with a sudden movement, she hit the stop, hit the power, turned it off. All this nostalgia stuff, sure, she could relive joyful days... if she could remember when they were, there must have been some, there must have been many... Relive... how about anticipate? Could her Beta foretell the future? Aha, that was the question — the lottery number was drawn on Saturday nights. If, say, she had the number in advance... why not? If she could see next Sunday’s newspaper... on Sunday mornings she always read the newspaper from cover to cover, and on page two the lottery numbers were listed... yeah, hey, that was the deal!

She found a pen and pad, calculated, and gave Beta the Sundaycoming date. “Turn it on first, you dope,” she said aloud, then followed suit. Date repeated, she sat back to watch.

The TV screen said NO FILE FOUND.

She said aloud, “What do you mean, no file found?”

The screen blinked. NO FILE FOUND.

She tried again, something easier, tomorrow’s date. Again the message came, No file found.

Great. No future from Beta. Only the past.

The G-d past.

You can’t run away from the past, Didi, she could hear her mother saying that. Her mother had a litany of trite sayings, tried and true was among them. Certain beliefs were “tried and true.” Such as, “What goes around comes around.” She’d asked her once, “What the heck does that mean?”

“You’ll find out,” she’d said. “One day you’ll find out.”

Mornings when Uncle Willis was in residence he’d come down for breakfast and watch Mother, watch DiDi with his little beady eyes, and she’d reconsider anew. He deserved a poisoned pickle, the dirty old man... no, no, he doesn’t, no one deserves that. But how to undo what she’d done? By ruining all the pickles, how could she explain that, the jars had leaked? Mother had closed the jars herself, checked them thoroughly. The best plan, destroy the offending jar was the best plan, but which was the one? She should have marked it somehow, that’s what she should have done, but she hadn’t and now when she sneaked down to his cubbyhole (Uncle Willis’s pickles were kept in that special place, dark and cool, a little cave behind the chimney in the basement because it was thought that things kept longer and better there) and looked at the jars — how many, eleven, now ten, then nine, eight — he was working on jar number four, was it the one? He seemed all right — yet was number four, his current jar, the one? No signs yet of any illness, but would he suddenly gasp for breath, clutch his throat, keel over right then and there and die?

“Didi, are you feeling all right? You look so funny...”

“No, I’m fine, Mother. Just fine. How are you, Uncle Willis? Are you fine, too?”

“Yes, Didi. I’m fine.” And so he was.

So — which of the remaining eight? They all looked alike. She took them out and even shook them, could see no sediment that looked unnatural. How about if she carried all of them away somehow (in what to where?) and claimed that they’d been stolen? Come now, DiDi, be sensible. Undecided, she pondered and puzzled and watched, half-hoping (damn you, Uncle Willis) and half-fearful (damn you, dreadful DiDi).

It was during the eighth jar that it happened. (Total agony as he chewed his way through the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh), the dinner table was the scene, but what was the date? Think hard, think hard, it was in autumn, after Halloween, she thought, how about November... sometime in early November, she called out a date, and a scene came to life.

Mother looked nervous, DiDi thought. Strange, Mother was always so calm. Partly because Mother wasn’t prone to wild imaginings as DiDi was but also because she was a naturally accept-things-as-they-are person. What did she have to be nervous about?

“I have an announcement to make, Willis,” she said suddenly, causing Uncle Willis to pause forkful in mid-air to say, “Yeah?”

“Didi, I should have told you first, but to tell the truth it’s all seemed so unreal, I couldn’t believe it myself. I’m going to get married. On Monday. To Ronald Brent. You know, Didi, that nice man at the supermarket. The one in charge of the fruits and vegetables. With the dark hair. You know the one.”

“Is that so.” Uncle Willis put his forkful of gravied potato in his mouth and chewed.

“The fat one?” DiDi asked. “That’s getting bald?”

Mother looked hurt, and DiDi apologized. “I’m sorry, he’s just a little — plump, Mom. And just a little bald. Actually he’s very nice looking. When did you two — become friends?”

Mother blushed. “Oh, it’s been a long time coming. He always had a kind word when I came marketing, and he’d save some extra nice tomatoes when my plants had stopped producing, and then he began to walk along with me and we’d talk a little, you know, just pleasant conversation and I found that he’s never married because he took care of his mother, who recently passed away, poor thing, she had cancer, it was a slow and painful death and I felt so sorry for Ronald. He looked drawn and thin, yes, he did, Didi, too thin, so I made a casserole for him and, well, one thing led to another and he’d take me out for a soda or an ice cream on his break and...” She smiled, and she looked suddenly as young as one of DiDi’s friends. “Yesterday he proposed, and today...” she held out her hand, “he gave me a ring.”

“Congratulations,” said Uncle Willis, cutting into his chicken-fried steak.

“But I thought...” DiDi stopped, bit her lip.

“Oh.” Mother blushed again. “You mean — Willis and I...” Suddenly flashing fire, she looked at Uncle Willis. “I guess you could say your Uncle Willis changed his preference.”

“Your mother and I called the other thing off awhile back,” said Uncle Willis between bites. “Figured it might not work out. Pass me the peas, will you, Didi?”

Oh my God, thought DiDi. Oh my God. It worked. I really did come between them. But surely he didn’t think, he couldn’t think... “Where will we live, Mother? Here?”

“Oh no. Ronald has a very nice little house. Over on Market Street. You’ll like it, I’m sure.”

Watching Uncle Willis, DiDi said, “If you say so.” He didn’t even look up, sopped a piece of bread into his gravy.

On the day they moved away... that date she thought she did remember, well, maybe not exactly, but near enough... if she told the Betamax what to do, would it do it? Would it show DiDi stealing down to the basement, picking up the hammer that was kept on a bench, smashing Uncle Willis’s pickles, watching the pickles flop like dead fish onto the dirt floor, watching the juice soak into the soil?

She closed her eyes and saw without benefit of telecommunications. “Didi? Are you ready? Where are you, Didi?” Mother’s voice from upstairs.

A swift ascent of the steps. “Here, Mother. I’m ready. I’m ready now.”

At the front door Mother looking backward, “It’s been a haven,” saying to Ronald, “I do feel bad about Willis. No one to look after him now. I do hope he’ll be all right.”

“He’ll be all right, Mother,” DiDi, coming between them, had assured her. “Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.”

And he had been. Obviously. For years. Until his recent demise. What had Uncle Willis died of, anyway? Old age? He couldn’t have been that old. Cancer? Stroke? Heart attack? She realized she didn’t know the cause of her benefactor’s death. Natural causes, she supposed that’s what it came down to. Natural causes.

But not from poisoned pickles. Whatever the cause, not that.

For God’s sake, that was years ago. If her doctored pickles had caused trouble, that would have happened ages ago...

What day had Uncle Willis died anyway? She had the obituary in her bag, she took it out and read the date, relayed it to Beta, and there she was, looking in on Uncle Willis’s last day of life on earth.

He looked much the same, sparser of hair and thinner, maybe the lenses in the glasses were thicker but actually much the same. He was in the kitchen, he had one of those plastic and foil packets of lunchmeat and a loaf of bread on the counter, he was making a sandwich. Not much of a sandwich. Just luncheon meat and bread. Plop on a plate. Biting into it standing up. Frowning. She didn’t blame him. Sighing. Recalling Mother’s cooking? Yes, in a way, he said it out loud, “I’d give a lot for one of your pickles, Lucille.”

Another dry bite of sandwich. “Guess they’re all gone.”

He chewed, swallowed, picked at his teeth. False teeth. Ugh.

“It was quite a while back,” said Uncle Willis. “Not much chance that there might be just one jar still hanging around...”

Of course not, she assured the Betamax. She smashed them all. Ages ago.

What was Uncle Willis doing?

He was heading for the basement. Are you senile, Uncle Willis? she asked him. There’s nothing down there but spiders and dust and old junk long forgotten...

He made his way down the stairs, blinked in the semigloom. There were shelves holding old tins and empty jars and wadded up cloths, there was the cubbyhole behind the chimney, yes, he was heading for it, the man had lost it, obviously the man had lost it, looking for pickles almost thirty years later...

He bent over, reached in, and found nothing, she could tell by the look of disappointment, he reached in farther, as far as his arm could go and... brought out a filthy container of something, he rubbed at it like Aladdin’s lamp and uncovered glass, he cradled it in his arm and struggled back up the steps as fast as he could go, in the kitchen he rubbed at it with a dishrag until there it was for Uncle Willis and Betamax and Didi (back to the small d again) to see...

She blinked her eyes, shook her head, stopped, rewound, began again. There was Uncle Willis and the sandwich just as before, but that was all. No pickles. Just Uncle Willis eating his sandwich, rinsing off the plate, wiping it and putting it away (he had always been neat), going up to his room for his afternoon nap, going to sleep, a restless sleep, tossing, turning, making sounds, gurgles and choking noises and at last the death rattle... Uncle Willis had died in his sleep! That’s all. Just as she’d thought. Natural causes. She’d imagined the pickles. She’d dreamed the pickles. (Just as she’d imagined the smashing of the pickles? Why don’t you bring that day back, Didi? The day of departure. Did you really go down and smash the jars of pickles, did you really? Why don’t you look and see?)

“Didi has a very vivid imagination,” her mother was fond of saying. “She’s going to do something very artistic when she grows up because she has this wonderful imagination. Not like me, not at all like me. If I can’t see it, I can’t picture it but Didi can.”

Yeah. Right. Something artistic. Like selling undergarments in the local Penney’s. As for imagination, people who see pickles that aren’t there are in serious trouble, she had to be sure and she was afraid to run the tape again because this time maybe the pickles would be there. What she needed to know was — why had Uncle Willis died?

Who could tell her? The doctor who’d signed his death certificate had the answer, there had to be a doctor, that was the law, but who was he and whom could she ask?

Ask? No one. It would seem very strange if she went around asking what killed Uncle Willis. “Beta, do your thing,” she commanded and began the tape on the day after Uncle Willis died.

It was evening, and there was someone standing on Uncle Willis’s porch as the police cruiser drove up. The someone was a woman, a woman with a child, the child was whining and pulling at his mother, his mother was saying, “Shut up, Gordon.” She had no idea who they were.

Two uniformed policemen got out of the car and went up to the porch. “I rang the doorbell, and I knocked, and I looked in the windows,” the woman told them. “He’s pretty old, you know, and I think something must be wrong.”

“Mama,” wailed Gordon.

“Shut up,” she said without emotion.

“You live next door?” one of the policemen asked.

“Yeah. Over there. I come in a couple of days a week and vacuum and clean, this is payday, he always pays me on Fridays, but he don’t answer. I just know there’s something wrong.”

The cop banged again on the door. The other cop peered in the window. “Why can’t you just bust the door in?” asked the woman.

“Can’t do that without cause,” said the cop. “Private property.”

“I’ll have a look-see around back,” the second one announced.

“I should think you would just bust the door in,” said the woman. “I know something’s wrong.”

“Hey, Smitty,” his partner called from the rear of the building.

Smitty clomped down the steps and disappeared around the corner of the house.

“Mama,” wailed the child.

“Shut up,” his mother commanded. Muttering (“Seems to me he could just bust the door in”), she pushed at the front door, twisted the knob, and the panel swung open. “Hey,” she called. “Hey!” She went into the house, and Beta went with her.

She passed through the rooms calling his name, the child trailing after her. In the kitchen she saw the policemen peering in through the window, went to the back door, and let them in. “The front door was open,” she told them. “You should have busted in.”

“Lady,” began the cop called Smitty. The other one shushed him. “No sign of him, huh?”

“He’s here somewhere,” the woman said. “I know he is. I think he’s dead. I’ll bet you — and I’ll never get my money. Gordon, shut up, will you. Well go home when I’m ready.”

They found him upstairs in his bed, all curled up in a ball. “What do you figure?” Smitty asked his partner.

“How should I know? Heart attack? You never can tell with these old guys. The doc will know. Guess we’d better call him.”

“You can go along now,” Smitty told the woman. “You were right. Something was wrong.”

“I told you,” she said. “But what about my money?”

His partner bristled, said, “Lady...”

“Come on, Gordon.” She jerked at the child’s arm. “We’ve been gypped again. Twenty bucks I’m out. Twenty bucks down the drain. Every time something starts looking good, it turns to...” and her voice faded as she disappeared down the stairs.

“Come on, Beta,” Didi exhorted, “get on with it. Bring on the doctor.”

When he came, he was brisk and brusque. “Can’t tell much, but I’ll put down coronary. That’s what got him, that’s what gets us all one way or another. The old ticker stops. Okay, you can haul him off. I’ll do an autopsy sometime tomorrow. When I get to it. He’s number three or four, I figure. Any of you guys got a match? I know I ought to cut out smoking but...”

She turned off the Beta.

Turned it back on and started it up again; Beta, please take me to the morgue, take me to Uncle Willis... she had to shut her eyes, she couldn’t bear to watch. But she could hear. “Uhmm, pretty well preserved considering... uhmm, something here in the vascocon-stricter sector, can’t tell for sure without testing... what did you say, Ernie? Well, could be. High blood pressure, no doubt... these oldtimers never had much medical attention, you know, thought doctor was a dirty word and say hospital to ’em and they run like the devil was on their tail... Well, if you agree, I’m going to let it lie. Coronary, period. Okay? Okay. Next.”

Exhausted, she turned off the Beta and went to bed. Somewhere in the middle of the night she awakened, she’d heard noises? In the kitchen? She listened to silence. Dreaming. Just dreaming. Stop, brain. Go to sleep. Let it lie.

Many a pickle makes a mickle. A stray rhyme from some dark place. Whatever it meant. Pickles and mickles, pickles and mickles, Uncle Willis tickles, Uncle Willis tickles pickles, Uncle Willis had me in a tight embrace...

In the morning she went back to Uncle Willis’s house, let herself in. The stair to the cellar was steep and straight down into muggy darkness, the air below smelled of mold and long-dead things. She clicked the light switch but nothing happened, the electricity had been shut off, of course. Who wants electricity in the house of a dead man?

In her handbag she carried a tiny flashlight attached to a police whistle, a whistle for use if accosted by muggers and or rapists, that was the kind of world her mother could never have managed so just as well that she’d died in childbirth in her forty-second year. (Mother, how could you, how could you have wanted a child at your age? Wasn’t I enough? Wasn’t I good enough?) She shone the pinpoint of light on the steps and on what lay at the bottom of them.

Just as well, she thought, that she couldn’t see what lay in the shadows. (“Didi, you do have such an overactive imagination! I don’t know where you get it from. Must be from your father. That’s all he did leave, bills and a baby with a wild imagination. There are no vampires in your closet, there are no monsters under your bed, there never were and there never will be. Now, go to sleep like a good girl, and maybe Uncle Willis will bring you something nice when he gets back from the railroad.”)

She found the chimney, she found the cubbyhole. Her light wasn’t bright enough, she had to put her hand in, she had to reach through the muck and the cobwebs, was that something crawling up her arm? Was that something soft and sticky and palpitating just beyond her fingers?

What she found was nothing. She took a minute to breathe deeply, then she hurried up and out.

Sitting on the countertop was a jar of pickles. Kosher dill pickles. She panicked and ran, through the little back porch, down the steps past the garbage pail (knocked that over), ran through wet sheets on the clothesline of the next yard before she stopped.

A small boy with thumb in mouth was barring her way.

A woman, a familiar woman, came out of the back of the house yelling, “Hey, what are you doing to my laundry, what are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Here, Gordon.” From the wallet in her bag she produced a bill. “Here’s the twenty dollars. My uncle owed your mother.”

The child clutched the money in grubby little fingers, the woman said, “Your uncle...?” and she fled. Back to Uncle Willis’s house. Back, picking up the garbage pail (empty, of course), onto the little porch (hooking the screen after her), into the house.

There were no pickles on the kitchen counter. No pickles at all.

For the time being.

Thanks, Uncle Willis, she said aloud. Thanks a lot. And she blew her police whistle shrill and loud for ever so long a time, and as she blew, she thought, when I get home I’ll run the Beta again, I’ll look at the day we left, I’ll make certain about the hammer and the pickles, that’s what I’ll do and I’ll see for myself and that will be that but the trouble is... the trouble is... I can’t remember the day... tweet, tweet, shriek...