Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

The Premium on a Parcel by D. P. Roy-Myers

© 1995 by D. P. Roy-Myers

As we might have guessed from her fiction, First Stories author D. P. Roy-Myers is an avid gardener and birdwatcher. She makes her home in Pasadena, California, and currently works in advertising. In her previous employment at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, she was responsible for all of the museum s general interest publications and wrote many nonfiction articles. With this first story, she launches a new career as a fiction writer.

No day was so bright, no hope so sunny, that my old neighbor Mrs. Whelan couldn’t cast a blight on it. Say you were going to plant a rose and she’d tell you what it was subject to: mildew, aphids, white fly. Plant a tree and she’d tell you what a mess the blossoms made, what a trial it was going to be to rake up the leaves. She was a pessimist, a grump, and a nonstop complainer, with the pinched and pickled expression of someone who had been hard done by since birth. But no one is all bad, and Mrs. Whelan was hygienic; the “Mrs. Clean” realtors describe in ads for homes that don’t have much else to recommend them.

Occasionally, I amused myself imagining her tombstone:

The stone would be white, of course, white as a kitchen sink, and crowned with a sour little angel, wielding a vacuum cleaner.

Though I could think of a lot of reasons for wishing her dead, I never imagined killing her. Never. Never.

Not everyone can retire at twenty-eight. I’d been a mortician, one of the first of my sex licensed in the state, but I sold the family mortuary the week I inherited it. When I bought the house next-door to Mrs. Whelan’s, I was determined I was going to live a life devoted to... well, life, I guess.

In the sixties, our street was all one-story clapboard beach houses, with broad verandas, pedestal lavatories, tubs with claw feet, and outside showers to wash off the sand. The house was nothing much, but I loved the ancient sycamore spreading over it, the wisteria draping the porch, and the swallows nesting in the eaves.

The house was a bonus.

The first morning it was so still I could hear waves breaking in the distance, and nearer, leaves rustling, the squeak of swallows’ wings, and the fervent chirps of nestlings. It was better by far than anything I’d ever popped, smoked, or snorted. Then, I heard a scraping sound, thumps, and bangs. Just outside my living-room window I caught a little woman flailing at the eaves of my house with a long-handled rake, while the birds swooped and cried.

“Hey, you! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Stop that! Stop that right now.”

She dropped the rake and clutched her aproned bosom. “Goodness! You gave me such a start! I didn’t know anyone had moved in yet.”

“What are you doing?”

“Damn birds” — she bent down to recover the rake — “only way to get rid of ’em is knock their nests down. Otherwise they’ll be perching on the telephone wires over my driveway, doing their business, leaving their mess.”

“I don’t want to get rid of them. I like them.”

“But they’re dirty,” she said. “Dirty! I don’t want them staining my driveway.”

I looked at the mud, the bits of shell littering the ground, and the tiny naked bodies, some still moving. I was stunned. “You did this on account of a few bird droppings?”

She drew herself up. “You’ve got a lot to learn about being a neighbor, young lady.”

Through the summer, Mrs. Whelan and I largely ignored one another. Occasionally, I saw her out in her front yard, eyeing the guys working on my house. Sometimes we ran into one another at the mom and pop grocery store up on the highway. Once, when we were waiting in the checkout line, she asked me if the man I’d hired to replace the old-fashioned knob-and-tube wiring in my house was reliable.

I grinned. My electrician had long scraggly hair, a sexy off-center smile, and tattoos in places I’d never seen them before. “Reliable. Yes. Very,” I said aloud. Also inventive. And damn near inexhaustible. I’d even bought a water bed. I gave Mrs. Whelan his business card. Why not? Robbie had done wonders for my knobs and tubes.

But Robbie didn’t last a morning with Mrs. Whelan, who was so overwhelmed with the mess he was making, she couldn’t let him work.

“I’d go out to the truck for something and when I came back, there she was with her dustpan and broom. I tried to tell her to just leave it be till I was finished, but no. Kept saying she didn’t know why I couldn’t be more careful! Said she’d never seen such a mess. More she cleaned, madder she got. At me! Who was only trying to do what she was paying me for!”

“Please,” I said. “You’re making the bed slosh.”

“Like I was supposed to rewire her damn walls without a little wood or plaster falling. She said she was gonna tell her son on me.”

A son? Mrs. Whelan had a son? Amazing she’d done anything so untidy as to marry, let alone have a kid.

The second autumn I lived there, a freak storm stripped the blond leaves from my sycamore and dumped almost all of them on Mrs. Whelan’s front yard. The morning after, she stood out there ankle-deep in wet leaves and indignation.

I knew she was lying in wait for me because I saw her from my living-room window; saw her and went back for another cup of coffee.

Finally, of course, I had to go out.

“Look at this mess!” Her rigid finger pointed down. “Will — you — just — look! I suppose you think I should clean it up. Well, I won’t. It’s your tree. Your leaves. Your dirty mess.”

She was near seventy; I might have been kinder. But she’d reminded me of my swallows. The mature birds had vanished; even the ones on the far side of my house.

“You have a rake,” I said. “Use it.”

Unlike the swallows, my golden-haired electrician still came back. When I told him about Mrs. Whelan, he suggested I put a contract out on her. “Guy knew what he was doing could make it look like an accident. Old bat like that. Be doin’ the world a favor.”

I swung my legs out of bed. “Want some tea?”

He rolled over, propping his head up with his hand. “Forty-five percent of domestic fires are ‘unexplained.’ Bet I could do one. Trick is not to be fancy; work off something that’s already there.”

“Tea,” I said again.

“Old clothes. Papers. Oily dust rags. She’s got a pile a those, for sure.” He grinned. “Make you a deal. Fix your wiring and hers for one low, low price.”

“Red Zinger. Or Sleepytime?”

A few years later, Wendell, Mrs. Whelan’s son, showed up. He worked around the place while his mother sat in state on a peeling lawn chair and crabbed. “There’s a spot you missed,” she’d say when he was painting, or raking, or watering, or washing down her driveway — didn’t matter which. “Look at that,” she’d say, pointing her finger. “Right there! Don’t know why you can’t be more careful.”

And he’d sigh and say, “I’ll get around to it, Mama.”

“What?” she’d say. “What?”

I don’t think he enjoyed it much — but I sure did. By then, my beautiful electrician was into somebody else’s knobs and tubes, but looking at Wendell was compensation enough. I’d see him, tanned and glistening with sweat, spading his mother’s side yard, and I’d wander over to pass the time of day. Mrs. Whelan didn’t like it much. I once heard her tell Wendell I wasn’t so damn neighborly when he wasn’t there.

The freeway came through in ’71, connecting our little beach town with the city. Home prices soared and the old-timers cashed out. At first, the newcomers were content with refurbishing the old bungalows, but as the decade wore on the neighborhood went condo.

Huge three- and four-story buildings shot up, sprouting flags and banners: Colonial Builders present SEABREEZE TOWN-HOMES: Two bedrooms, two baths, a/c, forced-air heat, and all amenities including a “greenhouse” window (two foot by three). People bought them. Camped out for the chance.

And because of them the town changed, too. The burger-and-shake stands along the highway were shouldered out by brokerages, boutiques, and trendy restaurants where ladies wore hats to eat lunch.

One morning I found myself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mrs. Whelan watching a Colonial Builders bulldozer attack the last old bungalow across the street. Belching smoke, kicking up gravel with its treads, it charged the porch. For a moment, the house seemed to resist, then it groaned, splintered, and gave way with a crack I felt in my heart.

I looked at Mrs. Whelan and she looked at me. “I won’t sell to those damn Colony boys if you won’t,” she said.

In the decades that followed, I grew more shade plants as the ones that loved sun dwindled and died in the shadow of the four-story condominium to the south of my property.

I replaced my waterbed with a Sealy Posturepedic.

I voted for Reagan.

Wendell got married. His new wife, Earlene, was in real estate. She was thirty years younger than Wendell and twenty-eight years younger than me. She had a baby voice, sheep hair, and fingernails longer than any I’d seen outside a Barbra Streisand movie.

I was a little disappointed in Wendell.

Mrs. Whelan changed, too; tiny and twisted, she looked like one of those little Appalachian folk dolls with a dried-apple face, button eyes, and one shiny tooth. The minute she saw me watering my flowers, she shuffled down the driveway in the tattered old bedroom slippers she had taken to wearing the last few years: swish, swish, swish. “You hear anything funny last night?”

I shook my head and went on watering.

“Damn so-and-a-who rang my front doorbell again last night. Rang it and ran away. You sure you didn’t hear anything?”

I nodded. She looked hopeful. “You did?”

“No. I mean... Yes! I didn’t!”

“What?”

“I DIDN’T HEAR ANYTHING!”

“Don’t have to shout,” she said. “I can hear perfectly well, if you’ll just talk in a normal voice. Mutter like that, how can anyone hear you?”

I’d been discounting Mrs. Whelan’s doorbell ringer for so long it gave me a start when I saw a real man on her veranda. I came around the corner of my house to put seed in my bird feeders and there he was, pushing a business card through her screen door. He was wearing a regimental tie and a three-piece suit, but I recognized him at once.

After he finished with Mrs. Whelan he slipped through the camellia hedge. “Been awhile, I know,” he said, taking off his sunglasses. “Always meant to call.”

I had to laugh: Trees had grown high since I’d seen him last but the heat in his off-center smile was the same. “You still into knobs and tubes?”

Grinning, he handed me his business card. It read: Robert “Robbie” Kester, Colonial Builders, Acquisitions. When I tried to give the card back, he waved it away. “How’d you like to sell this place? I was just telling Mrs. Whelan, if she sold to Colonial Builders, I’d see to it she got one of our condos rent-free, for the rest of her life.”

“She’s ninety-five!”

He raised his eyebrows. “Two bathrooms. Kitchen with everything: garbage disposal, two ovens, a microwave, dishwasher, trash compacter. Air conditioning in the summer, forced-air heat in the winter. Two-car garage—”

“She hasn’t driven a car since nineteen forty-four.”

There wasn’t a second’s pause. Like a fly, Robbie could sketch comers in the air. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Something inside me stumbled and stopped dead. “No.”

But Robbie went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Give you the same money as I’m offering her: $700,000 — even though this isn’t the comer lot. What I need, what I’ve got to have, is a parcel big enough for eighteen units. Help me with the old lady, and I’ll see you get the premium on the deal.”

“The what?”

“There’s a premium of ten to twenty percent on top of your asking price if you can get Mrs. Whelan to sell along with you. Your end of the deal could come to as much as eight hundred forty thousand dollars.”

Wonderful. And an apartment so tiny, so airless, all it would take is brass handles and I could be buried in it. While I was thinking, Robbie’s mind made another left-hand turn. “She’s nuts, you know. Ought to be in a home.”

“She is in a home.”

“You know what I mean. For her own protection.”

“She’s doing okay.”

“Been nuts for a long time. Just didn’t see it before. Thought she was ornery. Remember the fight I had with her over the wiring? She ever get it replaced? That old knob-and-tube stuff is a real fire hazard.”

That summer Wendell and Earlene spent every Friday night attempting to convince Mrs. Whelan that it was time to sell her house. They sat out back in the old lady’s warped gazebo and shouted at one another. Wendell and Earlene shouted because the old lady couldn’t hear them if they didn’t, and the old lady shouted because nothing made her angrier than the suggestion that she couldn’t hear, unless it was the idea that she should sell her property.

“This is my property. Mine,” she shrieked. “No damn so-and-a-who is forcing me to give up what’s mine. Who the hell do you think you are? Telling me what to do. As if you were the only one had a brain in his head. Talking to me — to your own mother, like she was nuts or something!”

“Oh God, Mama. All I said was—”

“Well, I won’t put up with it. How dare you talk to me like that after all I’ve done for you. Worked my fingers to the bone! Gave you everything. Everything!”

Earlene’s baby voice slid under Mrs. Whelan’s harangue, but it wasn’t Mrs. Whelan she was talking to, but Wendell. “Wennndull,” she said, “the problem isn’t your mother’s hearing, it’s her brain.”

Wendell didn’t say anything, but recognizing Earlene’s intent, if not her meaning, the old lady stopped screaming at Wendell and rounded on Earlene. “You got something to say about me, young lady, you can say it to my face. Rude to be whispering to one another.”

“Oh God,” Wendell sighed.

“Nothing the matter with my hearing. Nothing the matter with me, if that damn so-and-a-who would stop ringing my doorbell in the middle of the night. He rings the doorbell and rings and rings, and when I get up to go see who it is, he’s run away.”

“Have you seen him, Mother Whelan?”

“Can’t think of who it could be wants to talk to me at two in the morning.”

Then Wendell spoke up. “Your neighbor never hears him, Mama. Why is that?”

“HAS ANYONE EVER SEEN HIM?” Earlene shouted.

For a shocked moment, it was quiet on their side of the fence and quiet on mine. I sucked the finger I’d just bloodied with my clippers and wished they’d left me out of it.

Mrs. Whelan rounded on Earlene. “Just who the hell do you think you are, yelling at me like that?”

“Isn’t it... strange, that nobody but you has ever—”

Mrs. Whelan turned on her son. “You think I’m nuts? My own son calling me nuts?”

“No, Mama. Of course not.” Wendell back-pedaled. “But you may be, well, hearing things.”

“Swear to God, Wendell, if you don’t shut up, I’ll see my lawyer. Don’t think I won’t. Then we’ll just see. Leave my property to anyone or anything I want to leave it to. And it don’t have to be you.”

There was a long silence on the other side of the fence. Then Earlene spoke. “Would you like your ice cream now, Mother Whelan? It’s Rocky Road.”

“Huh?”

“ICE CREAM, NOW?”

“Well, you don’t have to shout!”

One night last March, Wendell woke me up pounding on his mother’s front door. Mrs. Whelan had reported her phantom doorbell ringer so often the past month the police called Wendell, instead of sending a patrol car.

I couldn’t sleep. I got my flashlight and went out to my garden to pick slugs (you can only get them at night). A half-hour later, I heard a thump and moan from Mrs. Whelan’s side of the hedge. I flashed my light through and caught Wendell.

“Get that damn thing out of my eyes! Damn! I thought you were Mama’s midnight doorbell ringer. What the hell are you doing out here this time of night?”

“You woke me up when you drove in.”

Though he’d been in retirement for some years, Wendell could still make my heart turn over. I invited him in. Over a cup of tea and a slug of whiskey he told me what had happened.

“This time Mama said she got up to go to the bathroom and when she passed the living-room door she saw a stranger sitting at her drum table. She ran into the bedroom and pushed the sewing machine against her door and piled a chair on top of that.”

“Poor lady.”

Wendell’s cup rattled in the saucer. “We’re starting proceedings to have my mother declared incompetent. Earlene’s been to see a lawyer.”

“And her house?”

“Sell it.”

I heard the clock ticking in the comer. “She’s ninety-five, Wendell, can’t you just wait?”

He gave a despairing smile. “They’re going to send somebody out to talk to her; to make an evaluation. He might want to talk to you.”

“No,” I said.

“You wouldn’t want her to hurt herself.”

“Get her a companion.”

“You think anybody could live with her? Could you?”

It was spring. In my iris bed, sharp little swords of green were coming up. I’d started that bed thirty years ago. I wanted to be here to see them come up and flower this April. And next spring, too. And the one after that. And all that stood between them and Colonial Builders’ bulldozers was one demented little old lady.

Two weeks later, it rained and our sewer system backed up.

Quicker than you could say “quality of life,” the remaining owners of single-family homes in our little beach town petitioned the city council demanding a limit to growth, a limit to the number of dwellings that could be put on one city lot. They were aided by a startling number of condo owners who were all for slow growth now it meant keeping other people out. And they won.

But the builders didn’t exactly lose, either. “We still have ninety days,” Robbie told me the next day. “Sell to us now — Now! — while we can still get a permit under the wire. You wait and the value of your property is gonna drop like a rock!”

I looked from Robbie to the vine at the edge of the veranda where the wisteria’s drooping buds were a haze of violet. I knew what a bulldozer would do to my wisteria.

He offered me a clincher. “Mrs. Whelan is gonna sell.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Won’t be up to her. We’ve contacted the son and his wife.”

“Earlene.”

“She’s for it. You can see why. With him retired and her struggling to make ends meet...” He smiled again but it didn’t strike me the same as it once had. His teeth seemed longer.

Wendell and Earlene began visiting more and more frequently. Their visits were usually at night, so I didn’t hear much of anything till they came out to their car.

“Wish you’d just accept it that she’s nuts and go on from there,” said Earlene.

“Go where from there?”

“Sell the house, Wendell — the property. Take it away from your mother — just take it! — and sell it while you can!”

“She doesn’t want to.”

“It’s not like she was rational, you know.” Earlene came around to the driver’s side of their car, opening the door with that awkward, stiff-fingered gesture peculiar to women with long fingernails.

“You’re going out tonight? Again?”

“Yes, Wendell, I am. I’m not retired. I show people properties at their convenience, not mine.”

“Haven’t been home one night this week.”

“One of us has to make some money.”

The following morning, the day before the fire, Mrs. Whelan and I met out by the curb on the parkway, both of us hauling our bags of rubbish. We walked back down the drive together, Mrs. Whelan’s tattered slippers swish-swish-swishing on the pavement.

“There’s someone gets into my house in the night,” she confided. “Makes noise. Plays loud music. I yell at him to stop making all that noise, but he keeps on. Bad last night.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“I keep the doors locked. Don’t know how he gets in.” Her face brightened. “You heard him?”

“I HEARD YOU.”

She looked confused. “Oh,” she said.

Later on that morning, I heard hammering. When I went around my house to look, I saw her standing on her rusty lawn chair, swinging a ballpeen hammer, nailing shut the windows in her house. I was stunned. “You sure you want to do that?”

She went on hammering. She wasn’t particularly good at it, but connecting once every four or five times was enough to do the job. She was concentrating so hard, she didn’t even look up. I patted her shoulder and, leaning close to her ear, I gestured at her window. “What are you doing?”

She gave a nail angled into the window frame a last whack, driving it into the sill. “This’ll keep ’im out,” she muttered, “dirty so-and-a-who.”

“How are you going to breathe?”

I called their home and got the answering machine. Wendell was out. Earlene could be reached at the office for Seaview Townhomes.

When I got there the office was closed for lunch, so I took the elevator up to look at the “decorator” penthouse on the top floor.

In the ads, Colonial Builders said the view from the terrace was “breathtaking,” and it sure took mine. The sky. The ocean. And four floors below, a man in a three-piece suit giving a sheep-haired woman’s buttocks a sneaky squeeze. When he got into his car, the woman blew him a kiss and waved bye-bye like a baby with both hands, her long red fingernails glinting in the sun.

Robbie knew Earlene all right. I stood there in that sterile, over-decorated penthouse and felt something like ants crawling up my spine. She’s for selling. You can see why. With him retired and her struggling to make ends meet.

I walked back inside, and listened to the maid in the master suite, humming as she made the bed. When I asked her why sheets and pillowcases were needed in a model apartment, she laughed a little and shrugged.

While she was in the kitchen, I slipped into the master bedroom. I’d seen Earlene waving good-bye to Robbie. I knew what I was looking for.

On the way down in the elevator I thought about Mrs. Whelan’s phantoms. Maybe one of them was real. She ever get her wiring fixed? That old knob-and-tube wiring can be a real fire hazard.

When I showed Earlene what I’d found, I expected denials, excuses, bluster. In fact, the moment I showed her what I’d found and told her where I’d found it, I regretted it. In the silence that followed, I wondered if I could be sued. She could have lost that fingernail in any number of perfectly legitimate ways. She was showing the place, wasn’t she? It wasn’t really proof of anything. But as I waited for her reaction, I discovered how much I had overestimated her. Earlene melted and ran like a cube of butter in a microwave.

I thought we were safe: Mrs. Whelan, my garden, and me. I thought Earlene’s fear of what I knew was our guarantee of safety, but I was wrong.

The fire started around two the following morning. One moment it was a flicker, the next, an inferno. It roared and crackled and I watched in horror while flaming embers swarmed like bright bees into my sycamores.

Later, when the house was gone, firefighters removed a small body wrapped in black plastic and remorse opened up like a cavern in my soul.

A chatty fellow with a clipboard and badge showed up at my door that morning. He was full of talk, and stories, and smiles that never reached his eyes. Though a pall of gray ash lay over everything, I went through the motions of hospitality.

I told him I was out in my backyard picking slugs when the fire started.

“Picking what?”

“Slugs. Do a lot of damage if you don’t keep them down. I don’t poison them because of the birds.” I could see he wasn’t a gardener or a bird lover. “Go look! There’s a coffee can full of them out on the service porch.”

I heard rather than saw his reaction. But when he came back into the kitchen he had something else in his hand, holding it in two fingers under the head, instead of by the handle — a ballpeen hammer.

We looked at one another for a moment. His eyes seemed narrower and colder than before. The tea kettle howled and I turned off the heat. “I was going to tell you about that.”

As I poured the water into the pot, I heard a door open at the back of the house and shuffling footsteps coming down the hall to the breakfast room; the swish, swish, swish of tattered old bedroom slippers on bare wood.

Mrs. Whelan’s face was dark with soot, her hair — what there was of it — stood on end. She paused beside the built-in buffet. Then, drawing a twiglike forefinger along a surface gray with ash, she lifted it. “Look at this!” she said. “Will — you — just — look!”

I motioned her into a chair. She sat down muttering and I went to the sink to wash another cup and saucer. The investigator followed me. “Who is she? Who’s that woman?”

“I was in my backyard when I saw a wavering light on Mrs. Whelan’s kitchen blinds. Then the back door opened and I could see her silhouetted against it. Seconds later, the kitchen seemed to explode. When I found her, she’d fallen off the back steps and the kitchen was nothing but flames. I grabbed her and brought her over here. Then I called nine-one-one.”

“And the hammer?”

“She was carrying it. I didn’t see what was on the end of it till this morning.”

The investigator looked at Mrs. Whelan, who was now using the sash of her robe to polish a clean space on the breakfast table. “Disgusting. Don’t know how you can live like this.”

The investigator drew a plastic sack from his pocket and slipped it over the head of the hammer. “She say anything to you, about what happened?”

“Same as she’s told anybody who would listen for the last few years. She said there was someone in her house, making noise, making a mess. This time she took care of him.”

Only it wasn’t a him. It was a her. Poor sheep-haired, sheep-witted Earlene. Even now I don’t think she started the fire. I scared her so badly she went into Mrs. Whelan’s house alone that night to try to undo whatever Robbie had set up. But she was too late, or too awkward. Or maybe her remaining fingernails got in the way.

Robbie was charged, but not with arson or attempted murder. My ex-lover with the off-center smile is serving time for bribing four of our seven zoning commissioners. Because of the slump in real estate, Wendell and I leased our parcel for a vest-pocket park. My sycamore now arches over a sandbox and the wisteria has begun to wind around a new gazebo with high, steeply pitched eaves.

Perfect for swallows.