Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

Picking Daisies by Edie Ramer

I had been looking for wildflowers. Instead I found a bone — a human bone.

It was late August. The humid air clogged my sinuses and fogged my head. My blouse stuck to my back, and when my cocker spaniel pulled on the leash, the bursitis in my right shoulder gave me hell. But Honey was only two years old, a teenager in dog years, and she could go on for another five miles. I was forty-five, with a human’s two legs instead of a dog’s four, good for maybe a half mile more.

We reached the swamp. Birds squawked at Honey. Crickets sang. Honey stopped to do her business on the edge of the road. Two boys, about six and seven, played catch across the street. I waved to their mother, then turned away. That’s when I saw them.

About three yards in. Milk-white petals, butter-yellow insides, twice as large as the daisies in my rock garden. I wanted them. I could picture them in my Chinese vase on my dining room table. My mother-in-law was coming to dinner that night, looking down at me as usual for being an unpaid poet and a housewife. I would show Helen that homemaking could be an art form.

Honey finished and strained at the leash. I took a step onto the green edge. Water squished under my shoes. Muddy water. I hesitated, and Honey hesitated, too. Was I actually letting her in this special place after pulling her out of it for months? I thought of my white Reeboks. I thought of the bath Honey would need, the burrs in her curly hair. A car honked at the family across the street — someone from our subdivision, probably, because the road was less than a mile long. I looked at the perfect daisies again. I stepped forward.

I separated weeds and long grasses. Honey sniffed the ground. Bugs hovered over her head and her tail. I brushed some from my short hair. We reached the daisies and I bent down. Honey sprinted after a squirrel, jerking the leash. Off-balance, I fell. My hand pushed through wet grasses and wetter ground, and when I came up I had a bone in my hand.

I didn’t pick any daisies. On our trudge home, Honey kept jumping up, trying to snatch the bone from me. I wondered if I should take a bath before calling the police. But I didn’t.

“Annie, what’s going on?”

I was watching the deputies comb the swamp across the street and had to blink twice before I recognized the man sticking his head out of the blue van as my husband.

After I had shown the deputies where the bone had come from, the woman across the street had called me over. Now Carol and I drank iced tea and lounged in our back yard seats while the boys played with Honey and the deputies in the swamp slapped mosquitoes.

“Annie!” Brad frowned at me.

“I found a bone in the swamp.”

Brad’s frown deepened.

“A human bone.” I struggled out of the lawn chair’s webbing. “The deputies have been finding more.”

“To think it was right across the street from me.” Carol shook her head. “For years, Don said.”

Brad’s mouth tightened. “All right, who is Don?”

“One of the deputies.” I flexed my sore shoulder. “Carol’s lived in Rivers End all her life. She knows everyone.”

Carol lowered her eyelids modestly. “Not everyone. Not the new people.”

The new people: that was us. Brad and Lainie, his first wife, had moved into the subdivision almost twenty-five years ago, both commuting to work on the new expressway. After Lainie left, Brad had stayed for Emily and Tommy’s sake. I’d moved into Brad’s house twenty years ago, quitting my librarian job to take care of the family, writing my poetry between loads of wash. After a few years, the only reminders that Lainie had ever lived there were her infrequent letters to the kids.

I’d grown from young womanhood to middle age in the community. Emily, designing furniture in Chicago now, had been born here. Carol’s younger sister had once dated Tommy, a stockbroker in New York for three years already. Brad still commuted to the West Linden hospital where he was an anesthesiologist and I was still a poet and homemaker, and we were both still “new people” to the natives of Rivers End.

A sheriff’s car honked at the van. Brad revved the engine. “I’ll see you at home,” he said.

“I’ll be right there,” I yelled after the moving van.

Carol called to the boys, and they brought Honey to me. “Gosh, to think if I picked flowers I’d’ve found the bones,” she said wistfully.

She had told me her husband was a traveling salesman. (“No jokes, please.”) With the children at home, she didn’t want to work. I had the feeling she was as bored as I was — as I would have been without my poetry.

“Call me if you hear anything.” I waved to the boys and tugged at Honey’s leash.

Carol nodded. “I’ll buzz Don later tonight. See what he knows.”

Walking home with Honey, I remembered that Helen would be over. My steps slowed. Then I remembered the bones, and my steps quickened.

Helen headed an advertising agency and had more in common with Brad’s first wife, who’d sacrificed her family for her career, than with me. In Helen’s company, my accomplishments — raising two children who weren’t mine and selling my poetry for free copies — seemed less important than a polka dot on one of Princess Di’s dresses. Not tonight, though. For once Helen looked to me for information. She was as fascinated with the bones as Carol and I were.

Talking, I felt myself expand. Every word I said was listened to with the attention Barbara Walters gave to her interviewees. Come to that, Helen resembled Ms. Walters with her dyed and styled hair, her madeup face, her thin-to-the-bone figure.

She picked at the roast, though it was leaner than she was. “Was it a woman’s body or a man’s?”

“I don’t know. All I saw was that one bone. The deputies wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“Probably a woman. They’re usually the victims.” She said it as if she didn’t belong to the sex.

“For Christ’s sake.” Brad’s fist crashed down and my good china jumped. Under the table, Honey barked.

I looked at Brad with more surprise than trepidation. His bursts of temper had come less often as the years had passed. The last time had been when we received our tax bill, and he kicked a hole in the pantry door.

In the beginning of our marriage, I’d been afraid he would turn the violence on me. But he always took his anger out on things. And never in front of his mother.

“Is there a reason for this display of bad manners?” she said, her mouth tight.

Brad looked at her with dislike. I bit my lip. Anything I said would make Brad’s mood uglier.

“I work with death every day,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it dissected over my dinner.”

“My dear son, this isn’t a person we’re discussing. It’s a skeleton. A handful of bones. A mystery.”

I nodded. Exactly. I could hear the award-winning advertiser in Helen’s choice of words. As a poet, I couldn’t have said it better. Why hadn’t I realized before how much we had in common?

But Brad’s face darkened. I took my cue and started chatting about the latest vice-presidential blunder. That always distracted him.

After dinner, Helen rose to help me clear instead of drinking a martini with Brad in the living room as usual. Brad looked as if he were unsure whether to join us or catch the news. In the end, he stomped into the living room, Honey prancing at his heels. It would take more than a few bones for Brad to lift a dirty dish.

I stifled the spurt of bitterness. I’d thought I’d gotten through all that two decades ago, when every one of my friends was talking about women’s rights and I was running a four bedroom home and raising two kids without any help from Brad — except his love and appreciation. After all, wasn’t that what every person wanted, really wanted? To be loved, to be appreciated? Add my poetry, and I was a fulfilled woman.

Helen zoomed in and out of the kitchen as if she were twenty-some years younger than I was instead of at an age to consider retirement. I followed her, my teeth gritted.

In the kitchen, I rinsed the dishes and Helen stacked them in the washer. I turned on the machine. She sat at the table while I poured coffee into two mugs. Neither of us mentioned joining Brad.

“Tell me everything,” she said, leaning toward me.

I swelled again. “That’s all I know so far. Carol, the woman across the street from the swamp, knows one of the deputies. She’s calling him tonight. She promised to tell me if she finds out anything.”

Helen smiled her approval. “You’ll call me then? God, I feel like Nancy Drew’s mother.”

Grandmother, I thought, but laughed with her. Sobering, I said, “I don’t know what Brad will say.”

“Does my son keep a whip and a chair in the closet?” Her mouth turned down. “I never raised Brad to be traditional.”

She hadn’t raised Brad at all, according to him. His second grade teacher father had until his death when Brad was fourteen. After that, Brad was on his own. All he ever got from Helen was money. But I couldn’t say that to her. Not now. Not before.

“All right, I’ll call you.”

Helen smiled. “That’s better. I don’t know why, but this mystery fascinates me.”

I nodded. Me, too. Even to the point of defying Brad.

“They found a bullet hole in the skull, behind the ear.” Carol shifted on the lawn chair in her back yard. She turned to watch her oldest son throw a ball to Honey. “Where the ear should be, I mean. Of course there’s no ear any more.”

I shivered pleasurably, although the sun’s rays made my pores clog with sweat and the humidity made my eyes and ears stream. I had used up a packet of Kleenex already, and was blowing my way through another bundle.

One of the boys shouted. Honey barked, zooming after the ball. Two sheriff’s cars were parked across the street. Four men squished through the swamp, getting grass and mud stains on their tan uniforms.

Carol leaned over her firm twenty-seven-year-old legs. “They’re looking for more bones. Don doesn’t think they’ll find them. You know — animals.”

I shivered again. A mosquito landed on one of the blue veins on my flabby forty-five-year-old legs. I splatted it.

“They didn’t find the bullet, either,” Carol went on. “They think the victim was killed somewhere else, then dumped here. The skull’s getting a dental examination today, and the coroner’s conducting an autopsy later this week. Though I don’t know what she can see in a bunch of old bones.”

“Can’t they reconstruct the body?” Brad would know: the one person I couldn’t ask. “Find out what the victim looked like from the shape of the skull, that sort of stuff?”

Carol shrugged. “That costs money. Don said the sheriff is hoping to match the victim with dental records. He seems to think it might be someone who knows the area.”

“Of course!” I sat up straight. “Valley View Road just connects this little stretch to the main road. Even people from town get lost trying to find it. The murderer has to be from around here.”

“I’ll tell you what else.” Carol lowered her voice. “It’s a woman, and the coroner thinks it’s been buried there anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years. She’s not telling the press, because she’s just guessing. But Don heard the sheriff telling the district attorney.”

“Does Don know the woman’s age?”

Carol frowned. “No, dammit. Someone came and Don had to leave the hallway before they got to that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We at least know she’s an adult. This is a small town, less than five thousand people. Fifteen or twenty-five years ago it was even smaller. It shouldn’t take the sheriff long to match the skeleton’s teeth with the dental records. How many missing women could there be?”

“My mother would know.” Carol looked toward the house. “She’s living in Florida now. I wonder if she’s home.”

I pushed off the lounger. Twenty-five years ago Carol had been two; I’d been twenty. I straightened, the pain in my shoulder another reminder of my age. It was time to go. These old bones needed air conditioning.

Honey and I walked home. Tired from her romp with the boys, she flopped on the kitchen linoleum and slept. I watched her for a moment, half regretful. For once I had time to play. We were having leftover roast for dinner, the house was clean, the wash done. I had a poem about a balloon to finish, but who could rhyme balloon with blue moon when your mind kept shouting “Murder! Murder!” Then I remembered Helen, and I looked up her office number.

Before she came on the phone, I regretted my impulse. Helen wouldn’t thank me for calling her at work. But I had already given my name to the receptionist. I grimly hung on.

“Ann! I’ve been thinking about you. What have you heard?”

I breathed easier, and plunged in. She sounded young on the phone, interjecting encouraging comments at all the right places. I wondered why I had ever disliked her.

“I knew it was a woman.” She tsked. “The poor girl.”

“It’s her parents I feel sorry for. All these years... never knowing...” Honey twitched and stretched, her eyes opening to slits. “That reminds me, Emily called after you left last night. She sold her chair design to a large manufacturing firm. She’s pretty excited.”

“Good for her! Frankly, I’m amazed my son supported her career. Given his views on women, that is — which he never got from me.”

“It’s not so amazing.” Honey ambled over to lick my swollen ankles, and I chuckled. “What he wants for his wife isn’t necessarily what he wants for his daughter.”

“My dear Ann, don’t you mind?”

“Not at all. I have my poetry.”

She sighed. “Well, if that satisfies you... Although I think every woman should be prepared to support herself.”

“So does Brad. That’s why he’s heavily insured.”

“Very foresightful, my son.” She paused. “Still, there are other reasons besides widowhood why a woman would need to support herself.”

“Divorce, you mean.”

“Not only divorce. Brad could have a long illness. The stock market could plunge. Your bank could go belly up. Anything could happen.”

“Brad and I won’t get divorced, our bank account is insured, we have excellent health insurance, our investments are diversified.” Even though she couldn’t see me, I shook my head. “It’s not as if I wash the floor every day for something to do. I have my poetry.”

“Then why are you so interested in the skeleton?”

“I found it. Why are you?”

Carol’s mother knew of six women who’d disappeared under mysterious conditions. Two had been in their teens, the oldest forty-three. The disappearance of three of the women, according to Carol’s mother, had been reported, and the sheriff’s deputies were probably all over their families. That left three who were free game.

“I went to grade school with Ginny,” Carol said, her eyes on the twisting lane. Her two boys were with a cousin; Honey was in my basement. The road straightened and Carol pressed down on the gas pedal. “Ginny’s family belongs to a church in West Linden. No dancing, no drinking, no fun. My mom says Ginny’s sister drank, danced, and had a lot of fun. Her dad kicked her out when she was seventeen. Ginny was a baby when it happened, but I don’t know anyone else in the family. They keep to themselves.”

After that I expected to meet someone in a long black dress with her hair covered. But the young woman who welcomed us into the living room with a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and an oak entertainment center wore shorts and a brief top.

Carol introduced me, saying we were collecting old clothes for our church. Ginny had just dropped off two bags of clothes at Good Will, but she invited us in for iced tea.

We sat in the living room while Ginny checked her baby, then clinked glasses in the kitchen. I admired the beamed ceiling and the leather furniture. Carol told me Ginny’s husband — a member of the church in West Linden — was a plumber.

Ginny had barely returned with a tray of iced tea when Carol began. “Did you hear about the skeleton by my house? Ann found it.”

“Did you?” Ginny’s face lit with interest. “Mike and I were talking about it last night. Isn’t it terrible?”

Carol nodded. “Terrible. Sheriff Brooder thinks it’s someone from around here.”

“No kidding.”

“That’s right. I’m surprised you haven’t been contacted.”

“Me!”

“Your parents, anyway. Because of your sister, you know.”

I winced. Carol was as subtle as a bolt of lightning.

Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t talk about Margaret.”

“That’s your prerogative.” Carol shrugged. “After all, it’s not me you’ll have to make the explanations to.”

“You really think the police...” Ginny glanced around the room, as if searching for spies. Her voice a whisper, she said, “But Margaret’s alive.”

“Alive!”

“She writes me. It would kill Mom and Dad to know.” Ginny’s chin lifted a fraction. “Mike knows about it. He understands. It’s just that—”

“Where is she?” Carol asked.

Ginny hesitated, and Carol sliced her hand across the air. “Come on, Ginny. We won’t tell your parents.”

“Why are you asking me these questions?” Ginny’s jaw hardened and she stood. “Margaret lives in Chicago with her husband and two children. I’ll give the police her address, but it’s nothing to do with you.”

My face burned. Carol and I walked to the door, carefully not looking at each other. On the stoop, Carol turned around.

“Ginny, I don’t understand. If your sister’s respectable now — a husband and two kids — why are your parents still shunning her?”

Through the crisscross pattern of the screen, Ginny blinked. “Because Margaret turned Catholic,” she said, and closed the door in our faces.

“I’m so embarrassed,” Carol said.

“Me, too.”

“Do you think we should go home?” She took her eyes off the S-curve coming up and looked at me.

“If you think that’s best...”

I turned around to put the beans on the counter and caught Brad glaring at the platter of baked chicken. I started, so busy with my thoughts I hadn’t heard the back door. Outside, Honey barked excitedly, wading in to greet her daddy.

“Rough day?” I asked.

“I stopped off to get my oil changed.” Brad’s fists bunched.

“Oh.” I thought of the garage owner ranting at his missing wife, his red face turning purple.

“Goddammit!” Brad shoved the platter with his fist. Chicken flew, skidding across the floor, smacking into the wall. “You know I don’t want you mixed up in this business.”

The counter edge dug into the small of my back. Honey’s barks were reaching hysteria. “I was just out for a ride with Carol. She asked Mr. Hoxmeier a few questions. That’s all.”

“That’s all!” The serving fork bounced off the wall. My plastic water glass followed it. “Don’t lie to me, Annie. I gave you a home and a family. If that’s not enough to satisfy you, you know what you can do about it.”

“Brad... Brad, come back!”

He stomped out the door. I ran after him. Honey strained against her leash, her barks high and piercing.

“Brad!” I called.

The van screeched out of the driveway. I called after him once more, but it was useless.

“I’m sorry, Honey.” Brad kissed her head and tickled her ear. She rolled over, her four legs spread. He rubbed her stomach. I kept my eyes on the TV weatherman, not looking away when he was replaced by a commercial for California oranges.

“Sweetheart?” Brad ruffled the back of my hair — much as he had done to Honey — and dropped a kiss on my forehead. “Forgive?”

The oranges changed to a movie preview. Mel Gibson waving a gun. Emily was a Mel Gibson fan. Me, I still lusted after James Garner.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart: Don’t be mad.” Brad moved in front of me, dropping to his knees. Honey jumped up and licked his face. I laughed. I laughed and I laughed.

“Oh, baby.” He rose and took me in his arms. In a moment I was sitting on his lap. “Say you’ll forgive me, Annie. I keep thinking about the woman in the swamp, and I’m so afraid you’ll be next. To you it’s a game, but someone played it for real. Promise you’ll stop snooping? Promise you’ll forgive me?”

I nodded, and he pulled me closer until my head lay on his shoulder.

“I don’t deserve you,” he whispered into my ear.

On the floor, Honey whimpered.

I made my last call as an amateur detective. I owed Helen that much.

“My dear,” she said, “you’re an adult. Isn’t it time you made your own decisions? If Brad starts one of his tantrums, call me and I’ll back you up.”

“Brad’s right. It’s none of my business. I’ll stick to my poetry from now on. Besides, it was all so sad. The last woman I talked to...”

“Yes? What did she say?”

Helen’s eager voice made me smile slightly. “Her mother disappeared sixteen years ago, when the woman — girl, really — was only six. She hired a detective, who found her mother living with a second family in San Francisco. The girl flew down last March for a reunion.”

“That’s not sad, Ann. That’s happy.”

“The sad part is she couldn’t tell anyone. She was afraid of hurting her stepmother’s feelings. I can’t help but wonder if Emily and Tom have flown to Palm Springs to meet their mother without telling me.”

“They’d be wasting their time. Didn’t Brad tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Brad asked a friend to write those letters to keep the children from feeling abandoned. Brad never knew where Lainie went. She’d been threatening to leave for months, and one day she just disappeared.”

“He’s never heard from her?”

“Never. Neither did her family, although that wasn’t surprising. Lainie didn’t get along with her parents.”

“Haven’t you ever thought something might have happened to her?” Such as death? Such as murder? I felt numb, my fingers cold. Such as your son — my husband — killing the wife he hated? I tried to reject the thought, but it came back.

“Perhaps we should have called the police.” The excitement drained from Helen’s voice, leaving it muted. “But you have to remember, that was over twenty years ago. We didn’t automatically think of foul play in those days.”

“Excuse me, Helen. I have to go.”

“Something important?”

“Deadly,” I said.

I hesitated, my hand on the phone. Honey, sleeping at my feet, made snuffling noises. When I called the police, if I called them, it would be over. My life as it was now. Brad would hate me, the children would hate me. Our money would go for his defense. I would have to work. My qualifications as a librarian were twenty years out of date. I would be lucky to get a job as an aide.

How could I think about that at a time like this? Why wasn’t I worrying about the husband I was so crazy about? How could I be so positive he killed Lainie anyway?

It was the only answer. The swamp so close. Brad’s fits of violence. The wife he hated — still hated. Oh yes, oh yes, I knew he’d killed Lainie the way I knew he would kill me if he knew I knew.

But he didn’t know. He would never need to know, and my life could go on as before.

All our assets were in Brad’s name. The house, the bank accounts, the stocks and bonds. Even Honey’s adoption papers were made out to Brad.

The children were his, not mine.

Then I thought of all the years I had felt so smug, looking down on women who worked, telling myself my real job was taking care of Emily and Tom. For intellectual fulfillment, I had my poetry, didn’t I? Even though my income from it didn’t cover my postage.

I pulled my hand from the phone. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the bones weren’t Lainie’s’ Maybe she was heading a Fortune 500 company in New York City right this moment. And maybe... maybe someday the skeleton in the swamp would be... me.

The deputy asked my name. I hung up. Brad might guess I turned him in, but he couldn’t prove it. The children wouldn’t believe it of me. No one else would. Except, perhaps, Helen.

Honey barked at a car stopping at the top of our driveway. As if it were any normal day, I hooked Honey’s leash on her collar and walked her to the mailbox. The editor of Nature’s Rhythms had written, asking for a poem on wildflowers.

I threw the letter in the trash.