“Where are you going, Nell?”
Nell didn’t reply. She moved the walker toward the sink, and got herself a drink of water.
“I’m afraid my mother may not be well,” Anna said softly. “She was just telling me that the man across the hall murdered her sister, and she’s afraid that he’s after her.”
“Mr. Krupp? I wouldn’t think so. He’s been bedridden since he came here.”
“Maybe you should say something.” Anna stopped speaking as Nell turned around. Nell made her way back to the armchair. The nurse took her arm as she sat down.
“Nell, I understand the man across the hall frightens you.”
Nell looked up at the nurse’s round face, trying to remember her name without glancing at the name tag. “No. Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Your daughter was saying that he made you nervous.”
The name tag said DANA, L.P.N. “I haven’t even seen him and he’s very quiet. Why would that make me nervous?”
The nurse smiled and picked up the tray. “I was just checking, Nell.”
Anna waited until the nurse left before speaking. “Why did you lie to her, Mother?”
“I don’t know why you come visit me,” Nell said.
Anna slid her chair back and stood up. “I don’t know either sometimes. But I’m sure I’ll be back.” She picked up her coat and slung it around her shoulder. “And, Mother, it’s better for you to socialize, you know, than to stay locked up in your room. Talking to other people will give you something to think about, so that your mind won’t wander.”
She walked out. Nell waited until she could no longer hear the click of Anna’s high heels on the tile floor. “My mind doesn’t wander,” she murmured. But the nurse had said that Karl was bedridden, and he had looked so healthy to her. Nell sighed and then frowned. What would he be doing in Household 5 if he couldn’t get out of bed?
Nell picks up the bat and takes a practice swing. Her dress sways with her, but she won’t wear the knickers Karl gave her. Bess has been dead for a week, and Nell is lonely.
“What are you doing here?” Chucky asks. They are alone. The other boys haven’t arrived yet.
“Wanna play,” she says.
He frowns. “In a dress? Where are your knickers?”
“Threw them out.” She hits the bat against the dirt like she’s seen Pete do.
“You can’t run in a dress.”
“I can try.” Her anger is sharp and quick. She hasn’t been able to control her moods since Bess died. “I’m sorry.”
Chucky ducks his head and looks away. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again, and looks at the playing field. The grass has been ruined near the bases. Sometimes she thinks baseball is the only dream she has left. Now, with Bess dead and Karl gone, even that seems impossible. “I’ll just go home.”
“No,” Chucky says. “I mean, you can play.”
She smiles a little and shakes her head. “Not in a dress. You were right.”
“Wait.” He touches her arm and then runs to his house, letting the porch door slam behind him. She goes to home base and swings the bat again, pretending that she has hit a home run. It is a good feeling, to send the ball whistling across the creek. She loves nothing more. If only she were a little boy, she could play baseball forever. Karl once told her that she could turn into a boy when she kissed her elbow. She tried for weeks before she realized that kissing her own elbow was impossible. She will never be a boy, but she will be good at baseball.
Chucky comes back. He thrusts some cloth into her hand. “Here,” he says.
She unfolds it. He’s given her a pair of frayed and poorly mended knickers. “Chucky?”
“They don’t fit me no more. Maybe they’ll fit you.”
“But isn’t your brother supposed to get them?”
“Nah,” he says, but doesn’t meet her eyes.
“I don’t want to take them if it’ll get you in trouble.”
“It won’t.” He studies her, sees that she’s unconvinced. “Look, you’re the best hitter on the team. I don’t want to lose you.”
She smiles, a real smile this time, one that she feels. “Thanks, Chucky.”
Nell resumed her walks again, making sure that she took them around medication time.
Karl’s door remained closed for days, but she finally caught him in the hallway, switching Dixie cups on the trays.
“You’re switching my medication,” she said. She stood straight, leaning on her walker, knowing that he couldn’t touch her in the halls.
“Yes, I am,” he replied.
She swallowed heavily. She hadn’t expected him to admit it. “Why?”
“I guess I kinda feel like I owe you, Nell.”
“For killing Bess?”
He set the cup down on the tray marked with her room number. His hand was trembling. “I didn’t kill Bess,” he said quietly. “I killed Edmund.”
“You’re lying.”
He shook his head. “I was going to meet Bess that morning in the orchard. We were going to run away together. Edmund got there first, and he killed her. So I went and I killed him.”
Nell could feel the power of that morning, the sunlight against her skin, his bloody fingers across her lips. “Why—didn’t you tell somebody?”
“I still committed a murder, Nelly.”
That’s why he had told her to get her father. That’s why he had never come back to kill her, too. “Why—” She shook her head in an attempt to clear it. “Why did you come back here?”
“Wisconsin is my home, Nell.” He was leaning on the cart for support. “I wanted to die at home.”
“But your experiment?”
He smiled. “I’ve outlived most of my siblings for a good twenty years. And the formula wasn’t quite right for me at first. We’ve changed it, so yours is better from the start.”
“Mine?”
“Nelly.” He bowed his head slightly and ran his fingers through his thick, silver hair. The gesture made her think of the old Karl, the one who had taught her how to laugh and how to hit home runs. “What did you think? That I was poisoning you?”
She nodded.
“I’m not. I’m trying the drug on you. I know I should have asked, but you didn’t trust me, and it was just easier to do it this way.”
“Why me?” she asked.
“Lots of reasons.” The cart slid forward slightly and he had to catch himself to keep from falling. “I don’t know many people who still play baseball when they’re seventy years old. Or learn to walk again when the doctors say they can’t. You’re strong, Nelly. The power of your mind is amazing.”
“But what if I don’t want to live any longer?”
“You do or you wouldn’t be out here, trying to catch me.”
“I have caught you.” The hallway was empty. Usually it was full of people walking back and forth.
“I know,” Karl said. “What are you going to do? Call a nurse, tell them to arrest me? There’s no statute of limitations on murder, you know.”
Nell studied him for a moment. He was thin and his skin was pale. He was ninety-five. How much longer could he live?
“I don’t want any more of your medication,” she said.
He stood motionlessly, waiting for her to say something else.
She moved her walker forward, on the other side of the cart. “And I don’t want to talk anymore.”
She didn’t let herself look back as she slowly made her way down the hall. Imagine if she could walk without a walker, without pain. Imagine if she could live longer than her father, who had died when he was ninety-eight. She wasn’t ready to give up living yet. Some days she felt as if she had only just started.
When she reached her own door, she stopped and looked back at Karl’s. Once she had believed in Karl and his miracles. She did no longer.
The world has reduced itself to the ball clutched in Pete’s hand. “Throw it straight,” Chucky yells.
/> Pete spits. Nell barely notices. She watches that ball, knowing that when he throws it she will hit it with all her strength. Time seems to slow down as the ball whizzes toward her. She knows how the ball will fly, where it will end up, and she swings the bat down to meet it. There is a satisfying crack as they hit and time speeds up again.
“Holy cow!” Chucky cries, but Nell ignores him as she drops the bat. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the ball sail over the creek. She runs as fast as she can. Her right foot hits first base, and she keeps going, flying, like the ball. It disappears into the weeds behind the creek as her left foot hits second. Her glasses bounce off her nose between second and third, and she is navigating according to color. Her lungs are burning as her left foot hits the rock that is third base.
“Go, Nelly! Go!”
She runs toward the blurred shapes behind home. There is a stitch in her side and her entire body aches, but she keeps moving. She leaps on home base and her team cheers, but she can’t stop. She has run too hard to stop right away, and she crashes into Chucky, who hugs her.
“Great!” he says. “That was great!”
She stands there, savoring the moment. Karl would have been proud of her. But Karl would never know. She wipes the sweat off her forehead and says, “I lost my glasses.”
As Chucky trudges out to retrieve them, she realizes she can get no higher than this; her tiny girl’s body, for all its batting accuracy, will prevent her from going on. But she doesn’t care. If she can’t play on a real team, she will hit home runs until she is a hundred, long after these boys are dead.
“That was great, Nelly,” Chucky says as he hands her her glasses. “Really great.”
She checks the lenses, which haven’t cracked, and then bends the frame back into shape. “Not bad for a girl,” she says with a glance at T.J. Then she goes over to the grass and sits at the end of the line, hoping that she’ll get another chance at bat.
The sound of running feet woke Nell up. She had heard that sound before. Someone had died or was dying and they wanted to get him out before the other residents knew.
She grabbed her glasses and got out of bed, carefully making her way to the door. They were gathered in front of Karl’s room. Two men wheeled a stretcher out. The body was strapped in and the face was covered. Quickly they pushed him out of sight.
She crossed the empty hallway. The tile beneath her feet felt cold and gritty. They had left Karl’s door open, and she stopped just outside it, catching the smell of death under the scent of ink and books.
“Nell?” One of the nurses started down the hall toward her.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Mr. Krupp? I’m afraid so. I’m sorry if it disturbed you.”
“No, not really,” Nell said. She drew her nightgown closely about her chest. She was getting cold.
“He probably shouldn’t have been in this household,” the nurse said. “He was much too sick, but his family wanted him to have a private room.”
Nell wondered how the nurse expected her to believe that.
One glance inside Karl’s room made it obvious that he hadn’t been bedridden. Nell surveyed the room once more. The desk top was bare and the vials were gone, but otherwise it looked the same.
The nurse finally reached her side. Nell recognized her as the round-faced one who usually gave her her medicine, Dana, LPN.
“How did you get out here?” Dana LPN asked.
“Walked,” Nell said.
Dana LPN shot her a perplexed look. “Well, let’s get you back to bed, shall we?”
She put her arm around Nell’s waist and helped her back to the room. The support wasn’t necessary until they reached the door. When Nell saw her walker in its usual place beside the bed, her knees buckled.
“Nell?”
Nell straightened herself and pushed out of the nurse’s grasp. She made her way to the side of the bed and lightly touched her walker. “I’m fine,” she said.
She climbed into the bed and lay there until she heard the nurse’s footsteps echo down the hall. Then she got up and walked slowly around her room.
You’re strong, Nelly, he had said. The power of your mind is amazing.
She walked to the door and stared at Karl’s empty room across the hall. The drawing was still there, its spirals twisting like a malformed ladder. Beneath the stunned joy that she was feeling, frustration beat at her stomach. She would never know if it was her own determination or Karl’s bitter medicine that made her legs work again, just as she would never know if he had actually killed her sister or if he had been lying. She wanted to believe that it was the power of her own mind, but her mind’s healing took time. She had started to walk within days of receiving the medication.
Nell went back to the bed and sat down, wondering what Anna would say when she learned that her mother could walk again.
Then Nell decided that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that her feet which had run bases, chased two children, and carried her through decades of living worked again. Once she had vowed to hit home runs until she was a hundred. And maybe, just maybe, she would.
A Predatory Woman
SHARYN McCRUMB
Sharyn McCrumb (b. 1948), who holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and Virginia Tech, lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but travels the United States and the world lecturing on her work, most recently leading a writer’s workshop in Paris in summer 2001.
McCrumb’s Ballad series, beginning with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990), has won her numerous honors, including the Appalachian Writers Association’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature and several listings as New York Times and Los Angeles Times notable books. In the introduction to her short-story collection Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (1997), she details the family history in North Carolina and Tennessee that contributed to her Appalachian fiction. One of the continuing characters, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, takes his surname from ancestors on her father’s side, while Frankie Silver (“the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina”), whose story McCrumb would incorporate in The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998), was a distant cousin. “My books are like Appalachian quilts,” she writes. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I place them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the nature of the mountain south.” The sixth and most recent title in the series, The Songcatcher, appeared in summer 2001.
McCrumb describes “A Predatory Woman” as “my own medi tation on what might happen if 1966’s Moors Murderer Myra Hindley were released from prison in Britain. Although Myra never killed anyone (she was the girlfriend and accomplice of child-killer Ian Brady) she has now served more time in prison for her crime than any actual murderer in British history.”
She looks a proper murderess, doesn’t she?” said Ernie Sleaford tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women. With a self-conscious part of her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan nodded. Because she was twenty-seven and petite she had never been the object of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional reasons—a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that children would have trusted her in the first place.” “What did they know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?” Jackie studied the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry eyes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in anticipation of slights to come. Ernie had marked the photo “Page One.” It was not the sort of female face that usually appeared in the pages of Stella
r, a tabloid known for its daily photo of Princess Diana, and for its bosomy beauties on page three. A beefy woman with a thatch of badly bleached hair had to earn her way into the tabloids, which Erma Bradley certainly had. Convicted of four child murders in 1966, she was serving a life sentence in Holloway Prison in north London.
Gone, but not forgotten. Because she was Britain’s only female serial killer, the tabloids kept her memory green with frequent stories about her, all accompanied by that menacing 1965 photo of the scowling, just-arrested Erma. Most of the recent articles about her didn’t even attempt to be plausible: “Erma Bradley: Hitler’s Illegitimate Daughter”; “Children’s Ghosts Seen Outside Erma’s Cell”; and, the October favorite, “Is Erma Bradley a Vampire?” That last one was perhaps the most apt, because it acknowledged the fact that the public hardly thought of her as a real person anymore; she was just another addition to the pantheon of monsters, taking her place alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, and another overrated criminal, Guy Fawkes. Thinking up new excuses to use the old Erma picture was Ernie Sleaford’s speciality. Erma’s face was always good for a sales boost.
Jackie Duncan had never done an Erma story. Jackie had been four years old at the time of the infamous trial, and later, with the crimes solved and the killers locked away, the case had never particularly interested her. “I thought it was her boyfriend, Sean Hardie, who actually did the killing,” she said, frowning to remember details of the case.
Stellar’s editor sneered at her question. “Hardie? I never thought he had a patch on Erma for toughness. Look at him now. He’s completely mental, in a prison hospital, making no more sense than a vegetable marrow. That’s how you ought to be with the lives of four kids on your conscience. But not our Erma! Got her university degree by telly, didn’t she? Learned to talk posh in the cage? And now a bunch of bloody do-gooders have got her out!”
Jackie, who had almost tuned out this tirade as she contemplated her new shade of nail varnish, stared at him with renewed interest. “I hadn’t heard that, Sleaford! Are you sure it isn’t another of your fairy tales?” She grinned. “’Erma Bradley, Bride of Prince Edward?” That was my favorite.”