Blog link: Check out my blog, Steps on the Journey. The link is under Home on the menu panel.
Also, check out “Rose, a Person of Interest,” a prose poem about frogs and princes under Poetry.
Pearl moved into line as soon as the casino bus pulled into the parking lot. One of the first to board, she slipped quickly down the aisle to her regular window seat on the left side a third of the way back. To discourage potential seatmates, she placed a thick paperback, Economic Alternatives in the War on Terror, on the seat beside hers, turned her face to the window, and closed her eyes.
She heard passengers shuffle past. Occasionally, someone paused in front of the seat occupied by her book. At such times, she kept her eyes closed as though she were dozing. After a moment, her lack of response was usually rewarded with an exasperated sigh followed by footsteps. The bus almost never filled to capacity, so Pearl’s strategies usually won her a comfortable, spacious ride up the mountain, giving her time to dream of life’s possibilities.
Sure, she’d made a few bad choices that had blocked her dreams, but she was only forty, with a lot of life left. Good fortune could still be hers. She was healthy and fit, spending thirty minutes on the treadmill every day. She considered participating in those walk-for-charity events; there seemed to be a new one every week. She imagined how her frequent participation would gain notice and people would recognize her for her good work. Her dedication to helping others would lead to interviews and party invitations. Alternately, she might get on one of those reality shows, win money and fame and meet the man of her dreams, or—
“Excuse me.” A male voice broke into her dream world.
She resisted the impulse to respond and kept her eyes closed and her face averted.
“Last seat, lady,” he said, sounding as though he saw through her feigned sleep.
She felt his presence as he reached down and picked up her book. She allowed her eyelids to flutter open and stretched her body a bit, arching her back as though in the process of fully awakening. “Oh,” she said and stifled a yawn. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She looked up to evaluate the man who would be her companion for the hour-long trip to the casinos. He was lanky and pale and needed a shave. Cleaned up, he might be presentable, even handsome, but she had no interest in cleaning up men. She’d given up that fantasy long ago.
Still holding her book, he folded into the seat beside her and began flipping through the pages. He paused at a chapter heading and spent a minute perusing the page. “So,” he said, looking up, “what do you consider the best economic alternative in the war on terror?”
“Well.” She blinked and scrambled for an answer. The few souls who had overcome the barriers to sitting beside her had never questioned her about the book. Her reading choice had, in fact, been made because she considered economics to be a mind-numbing subject and not one that would entice a conversation. Thankfully, the bus driver chose that moment to make his announcements: the trip to Black Hawk would take about forty-five minutes, there was a toilet at the back of the bus, be sure to hold on to the overhead rail when moving around the bus. By the time he finished, Pearl had found an answer to the economics question. “I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet.” She held out her hand. “I could start doing that now.”
There was a grinding of gears, and the bus lurched forward. The man ran his finger down the open page, as though speed-reading, and then closed the book and handed it to her.
He must be smart, she thought. Maybe below that rough exterior was someone worth knowing. You couldn’t always judge by appearances. There might be a reason for his pallid skin, and people rode buses for all kinds of reasons. Maybe he didn’t like driving in the mountains. Maybe—
“They want me to be President,” he said.
Puzzled by the assertion, she turned to look at him. “Of what?” she asked.
“The United States.” A bewildered expression spread across his face. “What else?”
It took her a moment to get past the claim. Her possibilities, president of a college or a corporation, seemed as fanciful and unlikely as the answer he had given. “Who wants you to be President?”
“The military.” He ducked his head and lowered his voice. “I work for them.” He raised his chin, and his eyes burned into hers.
Everything in her knotted at the intensity she saw in the pale blue irises and constricted pupils. She resisted the urge to rise up and glance about for an empty seat. There were none. He had told her so when he sat down.
“They want to take over and make me President. I’d impose martial law immediately and round up all the terrorists and send them to Gitmo.”
The bus rounded a curve and began the climb out of the canyon. The sun’s rays flashed in her eyes. She reached in her purse for her sunglasses, thankful for an excuse to hide her face, at least partially. His statement seemed to require something from her, so she asked, “Why have they chosen you?”
“They know I’ll do what needs to be done. I’ve worked for them for years.” He looked around as though worried that someone might hear him and leaned toward her. “Computer espionage.”
He then pressed his head against the back of the seat and launched into an intricate discussion of software and Trojan horses that left Pearl in a haze. If he weren’t so frighteningly insane, he’d be boring.
Pearl clutched her book as the man continued, plunging deep into a rambling monologue of past and future events, real or imagined, that no longer required her to respond. From Desert Storm to 9/11, Afghanistan to Iraq, he chronicled the flaws in the government and the need for change before another attack that would cripple our country.
“They want me to be President,” he affirmed again as the bus made the turn into Black Hawk. “I might have to do it.” He nodded his head as though to confirm his decision. “Might have to say yes and be President of these United States.”
There was a squall of brakes as the bus came to a stop in front of Bullwhackers Casino. The man straightened in his seat and looked around as though released from some spell, then stood in the aisle and made a space for her to squeeze in front of him. As they stepped off the bus, all his weirdness dissipated.
He took a deep breath of mountain air and declared, “Great weather, isn’t it. Good luck to you, now.”
Pearl swallowed and watched him clump his way uphill and enter one of the smaller casinos. She glanced around and then crossed the street to Fitzgeralds. Maybe some Irish luck would rub off on her. Maybe she’d hit the jackpot and be driving home in that new Mustang convertible they were displaying. She could already feel the wind in her hair.
My name is Hazel Hart, and I’ve been in love with writing since I was ten years old. I won’t tell you how many decades it’s been since I was that age, but I will tell you that I’ve written dozens of stories, long and short, along with a few poems. My spare room is filled with boxes of manuscripts and books for researching future stories. Some of my stories and poems have placed in contests, others have been published, and still others haven’t had an audience beyond critique groups.
Here is a sampling of what you’ll find here:
A small town police detective is frustrated by a woman who repeatedly confesses to murders she didn’t commit in “Confessions,” a story that placed third in the 2007 Kansas Writers Association short fiction contest.
A woman is intimidated by a man who takes the bus seat beside her and begins telling tales of government takeover in “Possibilities,” a story that placed second in the 2007 Kansas Authors Club short story contest.
A woman grows impatient as she waits for service in a hair salon in the poem “My Roots Are Showing.”
Hazel Hart teaches English online for Butler County Community College. She has won awards for her fiction and poetry from Writer’s Journal, Byline, Kansas Voices, the Kansas Writers Association and the National Writers Club. Her work has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Unity, and several small literary magazines.
While living in Colorado, Hazel co-edited Array, a small literary magazine. She is currently working on a third novel.
Hazel Hart teaches English online for Butler County Community College. She has won awards for her fiction and poetry from Writer’s Journal, Byline, Kansas Voices, the Kansas Writers Association and the National Writers Club. Her work has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Unity, and several small literary magazines.
While living in Colorado, Hazel co-edited Array, a small literary magazine. She is currently working on a third novel.
“April is the cruelest month.” Detective Tuttle’s wandering thoughts settled on the line from The Waste Land. He was seeking protection in poetry against the high-pitched monotone coming at him from the agitated woman on the other side of his desk. It was a defense he had learned from his high school English teacher, Miss Martin, who was the subject of Bitsy Barnes’s ramblings. It was April Fool’s Day, and the kooks were out.
Apparently, Bitsy had gone to work for Miss Martin after the retired teacher’s stroke a few years ago. Although Detective Tuttle thought of himself as a skilled interrogator, he had been unable to move Bitsy along to whatever had brought her to the Elm Grove Police Station. He had given her his full attention when she began her circuitous tale of her morning at Miss Martin’s house, but there was only so much a mind could take. The effort to understand her rapid speech with its occasional stutter had exhausted him in the first five minutes of her chatter about fighting her way through the bushes to retrieve the morning paper, the number of times she had called the newspaper office to complain, and how every morning, it was the same thing all over again. Young people had no respect.
Tuttle raised an eyebrow at the “young people” crack. Bitsy must be somewhere in her mid-thirties. Not young, but certainly too young for the “good old days” lament. That was his complaint. He glanced down at the cup of coffee growing cold in front of him. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” He mused over Eliot’s line and mentally thanked Miss Martin again. She had told him that losing herself in a poem often helped her survive the tedium of long faculty meetings where nothing but nonsense transpired.
Like this nonsense with Bitsy. He opened his mind for a moment to see where she was in her story.
“Miss Martin said I cooked the egg too long. She liked it poached, solid white, slight runny yolk, and I said ‘That’s what you got. I made that. I made that just like you like it,’ and she said, ‘Twenty-five seconds too long. Take it back. Fix another one.’ I did that. I made another one. I brought it. She poked it. Poked it. The yellow ran. Yes, it ran. And she said, ‘It’s a little underdone, but I’ll eat it.’ A good thing, too. Yes, a good thing. Because the cat started yowling for his food. He yowls just like her. Has to have everything just so. Just so.”
Detective Tuttle’s brain felt like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table.” He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on what Bitsy was saying, but his attention was intermittently spirited away by lines of poetry.
“And she said I didn’t know how to answer the phone and take a proper message. I been answering the phone and taking messages all these years, and every time, she tells me I forgot something. The number. The time. Who it was. I couldn’t take it anymore. I done it. I killed her. Yes, sir. I made her a cup of tea, just like she doesn’t like because it isn’t ever steeped the right amount of time. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I’ll drink in anyway because a body could die of thirst waiting for you to do it right.’ So I thought, well, you’ll die all right. I’m not having anyone yell at me ever again. Not like she did. Not like Mama did. So I killed her. Yes, I killed her.”
“I killed her” broke through Detective Tuttle’s poetic reverie. His eyes lost their glaze, and he sat up straight, staring at her as she continued her babble.
“Yes, I did. I got some of those leaves from the bush, and I made her some tea. I steeped it good and long.”
“The bush out front?” Tuttle had mowed Miss Martin’s yard when he was in junior high, and he remembered an oleander bush.
Bitsy nodded. “She drank it all. Every drop. She fussed about the taste. ‘Bitter,’ she said. But she drank lots of different herb teas for her health, so it wasn’t like she knew what any one tea should taste like. And then she got this awful look on her face and made a noise, and she’s sitting there now on the screened-in porch off the kitchen. Dead as a doornail. Yes, she is. Dead as a doornail. She won’t be hollerin’ at me no more. No, she won’t.”
#
Late the next afternoon, Bitsy Barnes was hurrying down Main Street. They had finally let her go. Yes, they had. They said Miss Martin had a stroke. Bitsy hadn’t killed her, after all. Detective Tuttle gave her a warning. He said she filed a false report. She told him no, she didn’t because Miss Martin drank the tea and then she died. Bitsy thought she had killed her because she was thinking so hard about how mean Miss Martin always was to her and how she wanted her to die, and then she did, so it was an honest mistake.
She stopped in front of Fred’s Fresh Food Market. She went in about once a month to get things for Miss Martin. Sometimes she saw Fred be mean to one of the girls working there just like he’d been mean to her when she worked for him. Cleaning the produce and keeping it stocked had been her first job ever. You’d think someone would be nice to you if it was your first job. But Fred always yelled at her. Retard. That’s what he yelled. Retard. Maybe she was a little slow, but not as slow as some people thought. Every day she watched The Nancy Nolan Show on TV. That’s where she found out that sometimes workers got bosses put in jail for acting like Fred. But not back when he was mean to her. That was a long time ago when she was only sixteen. Nobody cared then. But they cared now. If she saw him be mean to someone now, she’d talk to her and tell her to have Fred put in jail. Putting Fred in jail was one of Bitsy’s favorite fantasies.
#
It was mid-August, and Bitsy Barnes was in Detective Tuttle’s office again. This time she got straight to the point. This time she had killed Elvis.
“Yes, the real Elvis,” she said, rocking slightly in her chair as she talked. “Not one of those look-alikes. I mean really him. It was poison, you know.”
“Poison?” Tuttle raised an eyebrow. He had heard some news reports about fans descending on Graceland for the anniversary of Elvis’s death. Bitsy must have heard them, too.
“Drugs are poison, you know. They poison the body. Anyone will tell you that. Don’t you know that, Detective Tuttle?”
“I know that, Bitsy. I also know that when Elvis died, you were still in grade school and living right here in Kansas. You couldn’t have killed him.”
Bitsy stopped rocking. Her face went blank for a moment, and then came to life again. She looked like he had smashed her world. He guessed he had. He had heard of people like her: people who confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. Something about wanting attention. That thing with Miss Martin a couple of months ago must have set her off.
“Look, Bitsy, I guess you honestly might have thought you killed Miss Martin. You gave her tea and she died. But if you really believe you killed Elvis, a psychiatrist is going to commit you to a hospital somewhere. Is that what you want?”
Bitsy sat silently for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Finally, she said, “Well, okay. Okay. If you’re sure I didn’t do it. Well, I’ll just go home.”
She pushed up out of the chair and gave him a last forlorn look before shuffling out of the office.
Tuttle closed the door with a sigh of relief. It was almost time for his shift to be over, and he didn’t want any false confessions interfering with his plans. He recalled a line from Prufrock and smiled. “Let us go and make our visit.”
#
There was a new girl at Fred’s—a young girl like Bitsy had been when she worked there—a girl who didn’t know yet not to be alone in the store with Fred when he was closing. But sometimes you couldn’t keep away from him at closing. He could say, “The work isn’t good enough.” He could say, “Stay and do it again.” Then when everyone else was gone, he’d get nasty. Bitsy went in the store to see what Fred was doing. She was paying for a carrot juice when she heard Fred get mad. Then he saw her, and he yelled, “Get out of here, Retard.”
She got out. She waited outside for the new girl. The new girl was crying when she came out, and she was walking fast. Bitsy fell in step beside her, walking fast too. “He’s doing a crime,” she said. “You can send him to jail. Nancy Nolan said so on her TV show. She’s said it lots of times.”
But the girl walked faster.
Bitsy puffed to keep up, but the girl told her to go away. “I need this job. I can handle Fred. Leave me alone.”
Bitsy had to stop. She was breathing too hard. The girl was fast, but she wasn’t fast enough to outrun Fred. Girls who worked for Fred couldn’t outrun him.
#
It was November, and Bitsy Barnes was back. She had returned to her meandering means of getting to the point. Now and then, Detective Tuttle picked up on a word or two of her chatter, something about school or books, and he thought she was stuck on Miss Martin again. He glanced at the wall clock. The Waste Land came to mind. “HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME.”
Then the words “grassy knoll” penetrated his poetic musings, and he groaned. Kennedy. Now, she was confessing to killing JFK.
“Bitsy, this is even more preposterous than last time. You weren’t even born when Kennedy was assassinated. You’ve got to stop this, or I will press charges against you for filing false reports. Do you want to go to jail?”
“But I’m so sure. I can see it. It was a past life. Everyone’s heard of those. Haven’t you heard of those? You have, haven’t you?”
Tuttle nodded, forced to admit he had just to get Bitsy to move on.
Satisfied, she continued, “I saw this psychic on Nancy Nolan. Have you seen her show? It’s a good show. The psychic told all about how to remember past lives. I did just what she said, and I remembered. Yes, I remembered everything. The shots. How his body jerked when the bullets hit him. I remember all that.”
“That’s because of that special on television the other night. You watched that special, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Bitsy examined her hands and picked at the skin around her fingernails. “I guess I did. And I dreamed about it. It was so clear. It was. Just like I was there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I didn’t kill him. And even if I did, it wasn’t in this lifetime, was it? I guess it doesn’t count if it isn’t in this lifetime. Is that right? It doesn’t count if it isn’t in this lifetime?”
“No, Bitsy, it doesn’t count. So now you can go on home. No more confessing or I’m going to have to arrest you. Do you understand?”
“Okay. But I still think I did it. But like you said, it was another lifetime, and you can’t do anything about another lifetime.”
“That’s right, Bitsy. So if next week, or next month, or some other time, you remember that you killed Abe Lincoln or anyone else, and you do the math, and you couldn’t have done it in this lifetime, I don’t want you to come and tell me about it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
#
Bitsy stood across the street from Fred’s and watched the girl leave in tears again. Something had to be done. But that girl wouldn’t do it. There was no one else to do it. She wondered if Detective Tuttle would be mad.
#
Detective Tuttle was putting on his suit jacket when Bitsy entered his office.
“I don’t have time for you this morning, Bitsy. I have a real murder to investigate.”
“I know. Fred from the market. It just happened last night. And I was born so I could do it. I remember it. I remember going to the store and—”
“I said I don’t have time for this, Bitsy. If you don’t get out of here now, I really will have you arrested. Don’t you have family somewhere? Maybe you need to go visit someone. A long visit. Maybe that would help you get over this obsession that you kill people.”
“That’s a good idea,” Bitsy said. “Maybe I will. I can’t think of a relative, but maybe I can take a trip. That would be nice. Maybe see the ocean. I haven’t ever seen the ocean. Have you been to the ocean, Detective Tuttle?”
“No,” he replied and ushered her toward the door. “But I think you should go. I think you should definitely go.” He realized he was repeating himself. Good God! He was beginning to talk like her.
#
Bitsy sat on the bench outside the bus station, her hand gripping the handle of her suitcase. She was sorry she’d had to lie to Detective Tuttle about going to the ocean. He’d been nice to her. He’d helped her stay out of jail and out of the hospital. But when he found out she’d told the truth about Fred, he wouldn’t be nice anymore.
“My roots are showing,”
I tell the receptionist at the beauty shop
And she tells me it will be about fifteen minutes
But she doesn’t count on the teenage boy
Ahead of me with his shaved sides
And long mane down the middle
Of his head and fraction-of-an-inch
Consultations with his mother.
Thirty minutes later the dissatisfied
Boy begrudgingly gives up the chair.
It’s my turn. For the first time I see
The beautician close up. She has a pierced
Eyebrow. I cringe, feeling the pain she
Obviously doesn’t, and tell her
My roots are showing.
She brushes in the color, then leaves,
Returns with a middle-aged man,
And I’m sitting there with my hair
Standing on end and color smudges
On my forehead, looking like the hostess
Of a late night horror movie
But it’s what I have to do
When my roots are showing.
He takes the chair next to mine
Male pattern baldness has left him
With a few strands on top and a ring around the edges.
Half an hour later, it’s time to pull through my color
And the beautician is still snipping this guy’s hair
One wisp at a time, and I long for the days when
A man wouldn’t be caught dead in a beauty shop.
But my roots are showing.
“April is the cruelest month.” Detective Tuttle’s wandering thoughts settled on the line from The Waste Land. He was seeking protection in poetry against the high-pitched monotone coming at him from the agitated woman on the other side of his desk. It was a defense he had learned from his high school English teacher, Miss Martin, who was the subject of Bitsy Barnes’s ramblings. It was April Fool’s Day, and the kooks were out.
Apparently, Bitsy had gone to work for Miss Martin after the retired teacher’s stroke a few years ago. Although Detective Tuttle thought of himself as a skilled interrogator, he had been unable to move Bitsy along to whatever had brought her to the Elm Grove Police Station. He had given her his full attention when she began her circuitous tale of her morning at Miss Martin’s house, but there was only so much a mind could take. The effort to understand her rapid speech with its occasional stutter had exhausted him in the first five minutes of her chatter about fighting her way through the bushes to retrieve the morning paper, the number of times she had called the newspaper office to complain, and how every morning, it was the same thing all over again. Young people had no respect.
Tuttle raised an eyebrow at the “young people” crack. Bitsy must be somewhere in her mid-thirties. Not young, but certainly too young for the “good old days” lament. That was his complaint. He glanced down at the cup of coffee growing cold in front of him. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” He mused over Eliot’s line and mentally thanked Miss Martin again. She had told him that losing herself in a poem often helped her survive the tedium of long faculty meetings where nothing but nonsense transpired.
Like this nonsense with Bitsy. He opened his mind for a moment to see where she was in her story.
“Miss Martin said I cooked the egg too long. She liked it poached, solid white, slight runny yolk, and I said ‘That’s what you got. I made that. I made that just like you like it,’ and she said, ‘Twenty-five seconds too long. Take it back. Fix another one.’ I did that. I made another one. I brought it. She poked it. Poked it. The yellow ran. Yes, it ran. And she said, ‘It’s a little underdone, but I’ll eat it.’ A good thing, too. Yes, a good thing. Because the cat started yowling for his food. He yowls just like her. Has to have everything just so. Just so.”
Detective Tuttle’s brain felt like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table.” He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on what Bitsy was saying, but his attention was intermittently spirited away by lines of poetry.
“And she said I didn’t know how to answer the phone and take a proper message. I been answering the phone and taking messages all these years, and every time, she tells me I forgot something. The number. The time. Who it was. I couldn’t take it anymore. I done it. I killed her. Yes, sir. I made her a cup of tea, just like she doesn’t like because it isn’t ever steeped the right amount of time. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I’ll drink in anyway because a body could die of thirst waiting for you to do it right.’ So I thought, well, you’ll die all right. I’m not having anyone yell at me ever again. Not like she did. Not like Mama did. So I killed her. Yes, I killed her.”
“I killed her” broke through Detective Tuttle’s poetic reverie. His eyes lost their glaze, and he sat up straight, staring at her as she continued her babble.
“Yes, I did. I got some of those leaves from the bush, and I made her some tea. I steeped it good and long.”
“The bush out front?” Tuttle had mowed Miss Martin’s yard when he was in junior high, and he remembered an oleander bush.
Bitsy nodded. “She drank it all. Every drop. She fussed about the taste. ‘Bitter,’ she said. But she drank lots of different herb teas for her health, so it wasn’t like she knew what any one tea should taste like. And then she got this awful look on her face and made a noise, and she’s sitting there now on the screened-in porch off the kitchen. Dead as a doornail. Yes, she is. Dead as a doornail. She won’t be hollerin’ at me no more. No, she won’t.”
#
Late the next afternoon, Bitsy Barnes was hurrying down Main Street. They had finally let her go. Yes, they had. They said Miss Martin had a stroke. Bitsy hadn’t killed her, after all. Detective Tuttle gave her a warning. He said she filed a false report. She told him no, she didn’t because Miss Martin drank the tea and then she died. Bitsy thought she had killed her because she was thinking so hard about how mean Miss Martin always was to her and how she wanted her to die, and then she did, so it was an honest mistake.
She stopped in front of Fred’s Fresh Food Market. She went in about once a month to get things for Miss Martin. Sometimes she saw Fred be mean to one of the girls working there just like he’d been mean to her when she worked for him. Cleaning the produce and keeping it stocked had been her first job ever. You’d think someone would be nice to you if it was your first job. But Fred always yelled at her. Retard. That’s what he yelled. Retard. Maybe she was a little slow, but not as slow as some people thought. Every day she watched The Nancy Nolan Show on TV. That’s where she found out that sometimes workers got bosses put in jail for acting like Fred. But not back when he was mean to her. That was a long time ago when she was only sixteen. Nobody cared then. But they cared now. If she saw him be mean to someone now, she’d talk to her and tell her to have Fred put in jail. Putting Fred in jail was one of Bitsy’s favorite fantasies.
#
It was mid-August, and Bitsy Barnes was in Detective Tuttle’s office again. This time she got straight to the point. This time she had killed Elvis.
“Yes, the real Elvis,” she said, rocking slightly in her chair as she talked. “Not one of those look-alikes. I mean really him. It was poison, you know.”
“Poison?” Tuttle raised an eyebrow. He had heard some news reports about fans descending on Graceland for the anniversary of Elvis’s death. Bitsy must have heard them, too.
“Drugs are poison, you know. They poison the body. Anyone will tell you that. Don’t you know that, Detective Tuttle?”
“I know that, Bitsy. I also know that when Elvis died, you were still in grade school and living right here in Kansas. You couldn’t have killed him.”
Bitsy stopped rocking. Her face went blank for a moment, and then came to life again. She looked like he had smashed her world. He guessed he had. He had heard of people like her: people who confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. Something about wanting attention. That thing with Miss Martin a couple of months ago must have set her off.
“Look, Bitsy, I guess you honestly might have thought you killed Miss Martin. You gave her tea and she died. But if you really believe you killed Elvis, a psychiatrist is going to commit you to a hospital somewhere. Is that what you want?”
Bitsy sat silently for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Finally, she said, “Well, okay. Okay. If you’re sure I didn’t do it. Well, I’ll just go home.”
She pushed up out of the chair and gave him a last forlorn look before shuffling out of the office.
Tuttle closed the door with a sigh of relief. It was almost time for his shift to be over, and he didn’t want any false confessions interfering with his plans. He recalled a line from Prufrock and smiled. “Let us go and make our visit.”
#
There was a new girl at Fred’s—a young girl like Bitsy had been when she worked there—a girl who didn’t know yet not to be alone in the store with Fred when he was closing. But sometimes you couldn’t keep away from him at closing. He could say, “The work isn’t good enough.” He could say, “Stay and do it again.” Then when everyone else was gone, he’d get nasty. Bitsy went in the store to see what Fred was doing. She was paying for a carrot juice when she heard Fred get mad. Then he saw her, and he yelled, “Get out of here, Retard.”
She got out. She waited outside for the new girl. The new girl was crying when she came out, and she was walking fast. Bitsy fell in step beside her, walking fast too. “He’s doing a crime,” she said. “You can send him to jail. Nancy Nolan said so on her TV show. She’s said it lots of times.”
But the girl walked faster.
Bitsy puffed to keep up, but the girl told her to go away. “I need this job. I can handle Fred. Leave me alone.”
Bitsy had to stop. She was breathing too hard. The girl was fast, but she wasn’t fast enough to outrun Fred. Girls who worked for Fred couldn’t outrun him.
#
It was November, and Bitsy Barnes was back. She had returned to her meandering means of getting to the point. Now and then, Detective Tuttle picked up on a word or two of her chatter, something about school or books, and he thought she was stuck on Miss Martin again. He glanced at the wall clock. The Waste Land came to mind. “HURRY UP PLEASE, IT’S TIME.”
Then the words “grassy knoll” penetrated his poetic musings, and he groaned. Kennedy. Now, she was confessing to killing JFK.
“Bitsy, this is even more preposterous than last time. You weren’t even born when Kennedy was assassinated. You’ve got to stop this, or I will press charges against you for filing false reports. Do you want to go to jail?”
“But I’m so sure. I can see it. It was a past life. Everyone’s heard of those. Haven’t you heard of those? You have, haven’t you?”
Tuttle nodded, forced to admit he had just to get Bitsy to move on.
Satisfied, she continued, “I saw this psychic on Nancy Nolan. Have you seen her show? It’s a good show. The psychic told all about how to remember past lives. I did just what she said, and I remembered. Yes, I remembered everything. The shots. How his body jerked when the bullets hit him. I remember all that.”
“That’s because of that special on television the other night. You watched that special, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Bitsy examined her hands and picked at the skin around her fingernails. “I guess I did. And I dreamed about it. It was so clear. It was. Just like I was there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I didn’t kill him. And even if I did, it wasn’t in this lifetime, was it? I guess it doesn’t count if it isn’t in this lifetime. Is that right? It doesn’t count if it isn’t in this lifetime?”
“No, Bitsy, it doesn’t count. So now you can go on home. No more confessing or I’m going to have to arrest you. Do you understand?”
“Okay. But I still think I did it. But like you said, it was another lifetime, and you can’t do anything about another lifetime.”
“That’s right, Bitsy. So if next week, or next month, or some other time, you remember that you killed Abe Lincoln or anyone else, and you do the math, and you couldn’t have done it in this lifetime, I don’t want you to come and tell me about it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
#
Bitsy stood across the street from Fred’s and watched the girl leave in tears again. Something had to be done. But that girl wouldn’t do it. There was no one else to do it. She wondered if Detective Tuttle would be mad.
#
Detective Tuttle was putting on his suit jacket when Bitsy entered his office.
“I don’t have time for you this morning, Bitsy. I have a real murder to investigate.”
“I know. Fred from the market. It just happened last night. And I was born so I could do it. I remember it. I remember going to the store and—”
“I said I don’t have time for this, Bitsy. If you don’t get out of here now, I really will have you arrested. Don’t you have family somewhere? Maybe you need to go visit someone. A long visit. Maybe that would help you get over this obsession that you kill people.”
“That’s a good idea,” Bitsy said. “Maybe I will. I can’t think of a relative, but maybe I can take a trip. That would be nice. Maybe see the ocean. I haven’t ever seen the ocean. Have you been to the ocean, Detective Tuttle?”
“No,” he replied and ushered her toward the door. “But I think you should go. I think you should definitely go.” He realized he was repeating himself. Good God! He was beginning to talk like her.
#
Bitsy sat on the bench outside the bus station, her hand gripping the handle of her suitcase. She was sorry she’d had to lie to Detective Tuttle about going to the ocean. He’d been nice to her. He’d helped her stay out of jail and out of the hospital. But when he found out she’d told the truth about Fred, he wouldn’t be nice anymore.