I responded to
call for stories on revenge. The title of the anthology was Best Served Cold, title taken from a
line Ricardo Montalbán, playing the role of Khan Noonien Singh in the film Star
Trek: The Wrath of Khan—which Khan says is a Klingon proverb, but is
actually from a novel, Mathilde
written in 1841by French author Eugène
Sue ("La vengeance se mange très-bien froide"). A lot
had been on television and the internet on bullying those days, and I decided
to bring this in as an element in the story.
A woman with whom I play music worked as a document researcher for a
legal firm and told me how she spends hours going through old documents in the
basement of a building. This gave more grist for the story idea and it began to form
with those two elements to guide it.
 |
| Bonita and Friends |
The story begins
with the main character, Jeremy Blakely, examining graves in an old graveyard.
He is in a journalism class, and the assignment he has received is to find an
obscure name on a headstone and find as much as he can about the person—an exercise
in finding sources not for celebrities but for everyday people. He finds the
name Audrey DeJong. Being in graveyard saddens him because it reminds him of
the recent suicide of his friend, Catherine. As he is writing Audrey
DeJong's name, he sees Bonita Richardson, a classmate, and two of her friends
enter the cemetery. Things have been tense between Jeremy and Bonita since
Catherine Gabriel took her own life. The two women were rivals for the same guy
and often antagonistic. Jeremy considers Audrey vapid and ridiculous.
After talking with
her, he checks the internet and is surprised to find a reference to Audrey
DeJong. He goes to the records room of the local paper (the "morgue")
and finds out some facts about how Mrs. DeJong died:
Reading until the room closed at six, Jeremy pieced together
a composite of a local murder case. N. S. Thompson, a Grand Rapids physician,
poisoned three women in the early 1960s by giving them arsenic in the guise of
a prescription drug. He covered the crimes by doing the post-mortem
examinations himself (since the women were his patients). Number four on his
list was Marion Pachard, Audrey’s married daughter, who had been under Thompson’s
care for a case of infectious hepatitis. She recovered. Thompson gave her a
prescription, but her mother, who had somehow heard about two of the women who
had died in his care, took the pills to a drugstore for analysis. The police
tried to arrest Thomson. He eluded them, drove to Audrey’s home, and threatened
to kill her. The law arrived, a shootout ensued, and a stray bullet killed
Audrey.
As he is reading,
he smells the scent of lilac perfume and turns to see the ghost of Audrey
DeJong standing behind him. After the initial fright and denial that happens
when one sees a spirit, Audrey tells him that Catherine's spirit is not at rest
because she is angry at Bonita Richardson, who bullied her and drove her to suicide.
Like Hamlet,
Jeremy is skeptical of a message from a ghost but decides to investigate. Under
the ruse of helping Bonita with her writing assignment, he copies her computer
files and sees that she ceaselessly and viciously tormented Catherine over a
young man who left her for Bonita. Catherine finally cracked under the
bullying. Jeremy wonders what to do, but Audrey appears to him and tells him
she has a plan.
When Jeremy and Bonita
are together, the girl suffers from one of her migraines. He suggests they go
to Health Services. Bonita says it's not open this late, but Jeremy thinks it
is. They go there and she is treated by an old, thin doctor dressed in
out-of-date clothing and sporting a flattop haircut. He prescribes pills for
her. She takes a double dose of them and then begins to feel ill. She pleads
with Jeremy to call for help. He whispers to her that she is dying, he will
call Emergency but she will be dead by the time they get there, that he knows
what she did to Catherine, and that the hahahahaha
message now applies to her. She will have a lot to answer for, he says, when
she gets on the other side. All the while, the scent of lilac perfume hangs in
the air.
 |
| Catherine |
Bonita dies of
arsenic poisoning. Jeremy is a suspect (the police also note that he associated
with Catherine Gabriel, another woman who took her own life), but there is no
evidence he had anything to do with poisoning her. When he turned, Audrey DeJong
had vanished. Only a faint trace of lilac hinted she had been there. The public
reacts angrily to what they perceive as "police bullying," and the
authorities back off. Jeremy turns into a minor celebrity and gets to tell his
story on the Today Show. Best of all,
Audrey appears to him and tells him Catherine is now at rest. His revenge,
served up cold, enables a young woman who was wronged to finally find peace.
The story appeared
in the anthology Best Served Cold, Volume 1, which does not seem to be
available anymore.
For more stories and books that deal with ghosts and the paranormal, check out my Writer's Page.
A great read: Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part One. Nelleke Reitsma plays the lute very well. After all, she has had 300 years to practice.
I would love to hear your comments on the story and on the subject of revenge.
No comments:
Post a Comment