Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

Promises to Keep by Sharon Hunt

Sharon Hunt’s first story for EQMM, “The Water Was Rising,” appeared in the August 2015 issue and went on to receive nominations for both the Thriller and Arthur Ellis awards. The Canadian author has had stories in a number of literary magazines, and in our sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

The second time her name was screamed, Constance Hunter stopped walking. People stared at her, most likely thinking she was too well dressed to be one of them. The irony was not lost on her. Too well dressed or too shabbily dressed, she had never been one of them despite growing up here. She would hardly become one of them now, nearing the end.

She hated this town as much as she longed for it, with an intensity that made her legs weaken, even though Amelia was nothing much. It was hard to find on a map and didn’t even show up on some, just another small town in the woods, dotting the northeast coast. Over the past forty years it, like most of its neighbours, hollowed out as the anchors of the local economy — here, a pulp and paper factory — closed or moved somewhere else. The middle-class life most worked for disappeared overnight and those who didn’t pack up to chase after it retreated behind doors kicked shut more often than quietly closed, waiting out their time in mended clothes and bitterness.

Constance’s mother, Ruth, eventually retreated behind the doors her daughter’s fame purchased, but the bitterness had set into her and leached into Constance long before that.

Both times, Constance’s name was screamed, not shouted, screamed the way girls at school screamed “Paul,” “John,” “George,” and “Ringo” fifty years ago. Feckless girls, they had no shame about embarrassing themselves in public. Now perhaps one of them, grown as old as Constance, had no shame about embarrassing her, again.

She was in no mood for attention, working hard at being anonymous whenever she was here, especially on this last visit.

After the first scream she kept walking, never encouraging public displays even though they were few and far between anymore. Forty years ago she couldn’t walk around anywhere alone. Like the Beatles, she would have been mobbed, although not with the same ferocity or as much by adoring fans as photographers hunting pictures of a movie star for whom tragedy in love became her real fame.

There had been a Paul, John, and George in her life — two actors and a producer, not the iconic musicians — with whom she created the tragedies, but the public frenzy for them was out of all proportion. Even in Amelia, people had tragic love affairs, she knew only too well.

Upon hearing her name the second time, she watched a woman in a red caftan running along, her sleeves flapping as if trying to lift her across the street. The woman’s helmet of silver hair was yellowed, reminding Constance of tarnished cutlery.

Resigned to endure whatever was approaching, she removed her sunglasses and smiled. When the woman removed her own glasses, Constance’s smile broadened.

“Oh Constance, it is you. I just knew from that regal bearing and there was talk in the coffee shop that someone saw you at the airport.”

The woman, Constance’s age but failing miserably at looking younger, smiled broadly. Her thin caftan was something for the beach, not running around the main street of town.

She never had any class, Constance thought.

“I’m sorry but I’m not good with faces or names anymore. I’ve become forgetful in my old age,” she lied, extending her hand to Brenda Connors, who clasped it like a drowning woman being hauled to shore.

“Please, I understand completely. Brenda Sampson, well, Brenda Connors when we were friends at school.”

“Oh, Brenda, of course. Hello.”

By the time Brenda Connors — Sampson — said goodbye, Constance had agreed to dinner at her home the next evening.

That was easier than I imagined, Constance thought, walking to her car.

Whenever she came back, Constance felt the same choking anger that drove her onto that bus at seventeen, the last of her mother’s savings in her pocket. The fact that Constance made it in Hollywood — for a short time, at least — meant little in Amelia. It caused flutters of recognition — like this morning — but no real pride. She was still just one of those Hunter women who never knew their place, thinking they could slink up the mountain and settle in with the ones living there.

The mountain was cut through by a narrow strip of road with fresh blacktop and no potholes, while you could sink in the cracks and craters in the rest of Amelia’s streets.

Amelia’s founding families and their sycophants lived up there, behind grey stones and iron fences with pointed finials that assured you would puncture something if you tried climbing over them. The descendants of these families might have arrived penniless but didn’t stay that way for long. The matriarch of the Sampson clan, Amelia, lost no time in naming the town for herself and declaring the Sampsons a dynasty, when all they were was thieves, drunkards, and worse. She bought the forest for as far as you could see for a pittance, wrapped up the logging rights in perpetuity through intimidation, and settled behind those grey stones, plotting alliances and controlling who was allowed into her family. When she died, that job fell to her son and his son, after that. For five generations, there were only male Sampsons born to women who were carefully selected to be part of the dynasty.

Constance was never going to become a Sampson, any more than her mother before her. Even if Roger, Jr., was in love with Constance, although Ruth assured her he wasn’t, love wasn’t going to dance her into the Sampson mansion. Roger, Jr., was just using her, the way his father used Constance’s mother. Even on her deathbed, the specter of that Roger’s betrayal blotted out everything else in Ruth’s life. Her final thoughts were of him, venomous and poisoning her coming eternal rest as they had her ending life.

Constance took the old Lake Road, navigating the sharp turns and fissures as easily as when she drove Roger’s convertible that last summer, before she left town and he fell in line about Brenda. The Connorses weren’t as rich as the Sampsons but the fathers belonged to the same club and worked at the same law firm, unlike Constance’s father, who neither golfed nor worked and finally drifted away in an alcoholic haze.

Pulling onto the shoulder, she stared at the peaked roofs among the silver birch and red maple trees. People down here longed to live in one of those mansions, like Brenda Sampson did. Although Constance lived in another mansion on the west coast, these mountainside ones, with their steep pitched roofs like steeples jutting up to God, remained the prize, even for her, after so many years. No amount of time away had changed that and her weakness sickened her.

She felt a stabbing pain in her chest as, closing her eyes, the humiliations and cruelties her mother and she endured came back, with nauseating clarity.

Although her mother trained as a teacher before coming here, the only school in Amelia was run by small-minded people who saw John Hunter’s drunkenness as a mark against his wife. They couldn’t entrust their children to such a woman, although they did entrust them to women like Miss Pennington, Constance’s fourth-grade teacher, who went out of her way to humiliate her students, especially Constance. Once she refused to allow Constance to go to the washroom and when it was evident Constance had had an accident, Miss Pennington alerted the other students by holding her nose and pointing at the girl.

The others turned, following the wooden stick and staring as Constance’s face became redder. They waited for her to cry and when she did, turned back to their teacher’s nodding head.

Only Brenda Connors had a pitying look and, after school, she kept the bullies away by screaming she would have her father tell Roger Sampson’s what they’d done.

“Mr. Sampson will fire your fathers,” she said.

It was a bluff the bullies couldn’t afford to call, because people had been fired from the factory for less.

Constance’s mother refused to work there, although she was offered an easy, well-paying job in the office, instead cobbling together work in coffee shops and restaurants, and at the Majestic Hotel, where she was forced to serve Roger Sr. and his wife. Some nights, Ruth would come home from the hotel raging, her hands tight, hard fists that found a target on Constance’s arms.

“If it wasn’t for you, I would have gotten away from here,” Ruth said during the worst of her rages, and although she always apologized, insisting she didn’t mean it, the words lingered, souring things between them.

When Constance was back in Amelia, everything played, over and over, like a reel that wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t gird herself with her successes since leaving. It was as if all of that evaporated once she was here, and Constance became the same frightened girl, hunching her shoulders and waiting for the next blow.

She knew she should leave — should never have come back again — but couldn’t turn away from the promise she made her mother.

The Sampsons would pay.

Twilight had set in when Constance got back to the hotel. In her suite, she pulled off the short red wig and shook out her own tarnished silver hair. Scrolling through the movie channel, she settled on Rear Window. Meeting James Stewart at a party was one of her best memories of Hollywood, the man gracious and kind.

The Hollywood of the 1970s was a different place from when he was one of the town’s biggest stars. When Constance became the next “big thing,” it was only because she had a face and body the industry wanted at the moment. For a while, she was more than willing to use both to distract people from her lack of talent and, for someone who always had to scrape to get by, the money she was paid was irresistible.

Still, like most young women in Hollywood with few skills to make their careers last, she went from being the next “big thing” to “Who is that?” with alarming speed. Roles dried up the closer she got to thirty and men were happy to save her further tragedies in love by turning their eyes elsewhere.

None of this bothered her much, since she had never been comfortable in Hollywood and hated feeling like a commodity. She was happy enough to take her money and run.

When Rear Window finished, she turned out the lights and sat by another rear window, looking at the manicured lawns that sloped down to tennis courts and an outdoor pool. Being a guest here was more than she could have imagined growing up, but even now, she felt out of place.

All the money in the world couldn’t make you comfortable in a world of people who didn’t want you.

Pouring another glass of wine, she felt the familiar catch in her chest and chased her evening pill with the smooth burgundy.

Sleeping fitfully, she awoke early, panicked and unable to get her bearings. The heavy brocade draperies were shut tight against the moon and the room was so black that, for a moment, she couldn’t see her hand when she wiped perspiration from her forehead.

After breakfast, she drove back to town for a bottle of good wine for dinner, although she and Brenda had happily shared the yeasty homemade wine Constance snuck out of the house. They were fifteen then and still fooling themselves that they could stay best friends, together forever, despite the money and privilege separating them.

Constance watched the merchants open their stores for the day. Some of the buildings had been boarded up since she was last here and the bright trim on others looked desperate, like a too-wide smile masking fear, just like her own. The street was anchored by grey-stone buildings, the church to the left and the library to the right.

St. Thomas, with its red doors and bell imported from England, beckoned the faithful inside, although there were few faithful in Amelia when Constance was growing up and, she imagined, even fewer now. Still, they trickled through those doors, taking their place behind the Sampsons, who filled the front pews.

Sampson money built the church just as it built the library, which also had few faithful, but both endured as evidence of the family’s devotion to God and culture.

Constance hadn’t been in the church since her mother’s funeral. A few others had been scattered through the church that morning, but more for the reception afterwards than in sympathy for her loss. Roger Sampson, Sr., slipped into a back pew, leaving before the final benediction, and her own Roger had shown up too, with Brenda and their son, but when Constance followed the coffin outside, they too were gone. It was just as well, as she couldn’t imagine, in her grief, what she would say to them.

Brenda had given her directions to the house, but both knew there was no need. Constance had snuck into it with Roger many times that last summer.

She chose a royal-blue dress for dinner, the color he said he loved her wearing. Then, the blue complemented her strawberry-blond hair. Now, after a rinse thrown into her hair this morning to mask the yellowness, the blue would complement silver. The dress was form-fitting, the expensive wool expertly tailored. Pearl earrings and an accompanying string around her neck completed the look she wanted Roger to see: elegant, in control, and worthy of walking through that front door, her face gleaming in the polished wood as she passed, instead of sneaking through the dimly lit pantry.

Still, for all her outward confidence, Constance parked by the lake, trying to steel her courage. As she sat there, lines from a favorite poem came to her, with its images of dark woods and promises to keep, and like the passerby in that verse, she had much more to do before she could shake this place from her shoulders and sleep.

Sighing deeply, she pulled back onto the road and started her climb up the mountain. Beside her was the wine she brought for herself and Brenda, as well as a bottle of single-malt scotch, the favorite brand of the Sampson men. She’d tucked the pills into a pocket of her dress, hidden behind folds at the waist, a lethal combination for people, like her, with heart conditions. It was frightening how easily people’s health records could be obtained, for the right amount of money.

Constance knew she would be caught and the murders would be her legacy, eclipsing any other notoriety or success, but that didn’t matter anymore. She would finish things between the Hunters and the Sampsons tonight and then wait out the few months remaining to her, since the doctors were unable to fix her heart and she refused a transplant.

Pulling up to the gate, she noticed the rusting metal and missing finials. The gate was open, so she drove through and along the circular driveway. As she neared the house, it too seemed tired and unkempt.

Constance shuddered, suddenly longing to just drive off before anyone knew she was here, but Brenda was already on the step, waving for her to stop.

“Roger and his father are at the club and suggested we have dinner there,” Brenda said, opening the passenger door and getting inside.

“Well...”

“It will be a nice treat for you, the club,” Brenda said, snapping her belt in place. She looked in the liquor bag by her feet. “What lovely wine. Remember that horrible sludge your mother made that we drank?”

Sitting by the lake, they would stare at the peaked roofs, like this one, imagining themselves queens of such castles, although Brenda insisted she wanted nothing more to do with people up here, including her own family who lived here, although on the other side, where the houses were less grand.

“I’m getting out of Amelia as soon as I finish school and not coming back,” she vowed then, but her attitude changed quickly after Constance confided that she and Roger Sampson were seeing each other. First feigning support for the couple, it wasn’t long before Brenda spent less time at the lake and more at the club with the ones she’d wanted to get away from.

“You did the right thing leaving here,” Brenda said as Constance slowed for a turn.

“I didn’t leave by choice, or don’t you remember?” Constance said, her voice growing tinny and thin to her ears. “I was forced away.”

“Believe me, you would never have been happy here.”

“You mean in Amelia or up on the mountain?”

“He was never going to marry you, Constance. Why did you think he would? Sampson men...”

“...didn’t marry Hunter women, right?” Constance looked over at Brenda, wondering if it was a sigh or chuckle she’d just heard. Blood pounded in her ears as the pain in her chest grew worse.

“Watch the road,” Brenda said.

Instinctively, Constance turned the wheel left. Her forehead grew clammy with sweat.

The mountain had become dark quickly. There were few lights visible from behind the trees. Constance put on the high beams, flooding the darkness ahead with an eerie glow.

“I never like driving this road in the dark. Roger insists I’ll drive myself over the edge one of these times.”

The sharpest turn was coming up fast, the one Roger’s mother hadn’t negotiated that night she careened off the road and plunged into the lake. The drop from that spot was straight down to the water, a few hundred feet below.

As much as the road was kept in good repair, there had never been a barrier at these dangerous turns, not that a piece of metal would offer much resistance to a speeding car and a heavy, determined foot on the gas, Constance thought, pressing down harder.

Brenda cried out, trying to grab Constance’s arm, but it was too late.

Together forever, an old promise, now kept, Constance thought. Brenda’s terrified face would be the last thing she saw, before closing her eyes.