Meadows
by Michael P Calligaro
"You killed him!"
Nathaniel jerked his head back to see a striking young woman standing at the mouth of the alley. Her unusual combination of dark brown hair and blue eyes drew his own eyes from her long legs and proportionate build. Her sun dress, though not low cut, was tailored to show off her curves and performed its job flawlessly. Only the obvious fear on her face kept her from looking beautiful.
"No, wait! You don't understand."
She screamed and ran off yelling, "Help! Police! He just shot someone!"
A red stain spread slowly across the jacket of the man on the ground before Nathaniel. At that point he felt the weight in his hand. He looked down to find the proverbial and, unfortunately, literal smoking gun clenched in his right fist. It was an old 9mm, from back in the days when a gun had to be big and heavy to pack a punch.
He could still hear the woman yelling for the police. Well, at least he had some time to figure this out. The police were never around and certainly never moved quickly to apprehend an armed murderer. A high pitched whistle nearby and the sound of men in boots running toward him contradicted this.
"Damn!" Nathaniel took off down the alley, taking care not to step on the body or in the pool of blood forming near it. Though he didn't waste time taking in too many details, Nathaniel couldn't help but notice how clean the alley was. As far as he knew, alleys could only be found in big cities like New York or Los Angeles. But who had ever heard of anything in either of those places being this spotless? The stench from rotting garbage should have made his head spin. Instead, the place smelled as fresh as a meadow. Maybe it was just his adrenaline masking out the place's odor. If he slowed down and looked closely he'd undoubtedly find the dirt and grime. No time for that now.
"Freeze!"
Without slowing, Nathaniel glanced back and saw three uniformed police officers rush into the alley. One of them drew a gun and aimed at him. Nathaniel turned a corner just as a bullet blasted into the wall behind him. So much for his right to a warning shot. He willed his legs to remember the far off days of high school track as he raced down the alley. He had to turn again before the police got to the end of the first alley or he'd never lose them. He approached an intersection and his instincts told him to go right. He went left. The police undoubtedly knew the instincts of men on the run.
It felt good to run again after all those years. A nagging thought wondered why he hadn't pulled or strained something yet, but he brushed it aside. Panting hard, he burst out onto the sidewalk and curved left--almost running down a little old lady pushing a cart full of groceries. Someone screamed--probably saw the gun. So much for fooling the police as to which direction he had gone. What now?
At the end of the street he saw a woman in a sun dress getting into her car. She wasn't in it yet, but the windows were down! Who left her car parked in the middle of a big city with the windows down? With no time to ponder this, he pictured the car as a finish line and imagined competing runners breathing hot on his back. Just like in high school, his legs turned to lead as he pumped them furiously, begging for even a trifle more speed. It felt like he stopped moving forward, though people and storefronts blurred by in his peripheral vision.
He arrived at the car just as the woman started the engine. In one motion he opened the door, slid in, and slammed it behind him. Her eyes went wide. Nathaniel recognized the woman who had called the police.
"Go!" he cried.
She did nothing of the sort. "Or what, you'll kill me like you did that guy in the alley?"
"No, I didn't kill him. You've got to believe me!"
She crinkled up her face in disgust. "You're very convincing, holding that gun on me and all."
Nathaniel looked down and noticed the gun again. "Would it make you feel better if I put it away?" He slid it into its shoulder holster. How did he know he had one of those? And why hadn't he noticed it before? "Please, miss." He pleaded.
She paused to consider and her face became a mask of confusion. Down the block, the police burst out of the alley. Nathaniel's heart beat wildly. "Look, those guys are going to kill me. I need a chance to explain. Please."
Her look saying explicitly "I can't believe I'm getting myself get into this" she sighed and said aloud, "Okay, but you'd better crouch down. That black leather jacket is pretty conspicuous." A hint of derision crept into her voice.
Nathaniel slid down to the floor. A black leather jacket? Why am I wearing leather? The arms of his jacket were made of a tough leather and a line of silver studs ran down to his wrists. He glanced down at his faded blue jeans and did a double take, quickly looking back at his hands. They looked wrong. Didn't those jet black hairs used to be gray?
After a minute or two the woman spoke. "You can get up now. I don't think they saw you get into the car. Now, explain yourself."
He climbed back up and fastened his seat belt. "I didn't kill that man."
"Oh really? I heard a shot and walked around a corner and there you were standing over him with a gun. If it wasn't you, then who was it?"
"Someone else." She fixed him with a disbelieving stare and he continued hastily. "Look, I don't know where I am. I don't know where we're going. I don't even know where I've been." He looked down at the leather jacket and his hands. "I'm starting to wonder who I am."
She frowned. "Well, who you are is obvious. We've been trying to stamp your type out for years now and have almost succeeded. You're criminal days in my society are numbered. You can mark me on that."
He frowned. "You know me pretty well for having just met me, don't you?"
"Oh, come on. Even if you didn't kill that guy. You're running around town with a drawn gun, you haven't shaved in days, and, from the smell of you, you haven't bathed in weeks." She turned up her nose.
"No, I just shaved this morning! Nathaniel felt his chin and, much to his surprise, found a few days' stubble there. His beard didn't even grow that fast when he was young. He pulled down the visor and looked in the vanity mirror. He almost fainted. "Oh, my God."
"What?"
"Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen a face other than your own?"
"Of course not!"
"This isn't my face."
The car jerked forward as she jumped on the brakes and pulled it over to the side of the road. Furiously, she turned to him. "Listen. If you're planning to shoot me, you might as well do it now. Because I'm getting tired of this. If you're not going to shoot, then you've got ten seconds to make some sense. After that I'll kick you out of the car and forget I ever saw you."
Nathaniel sighed. "I'm not a young punk. I'm a scientist. An old one, with gray hair and everything. I've been working on a terahertz imaging scanner for the last ten years. One night I burned myself with the soldering iron, see?" He held his hand up, then put it down on noticing no scar. "Oh yeah, this isn't my body. Well, I burned myself and hit the scanner's coarse adjustment when I jerked away. Do you know what I saw on it? Do you?" He didn't wait for a response. "A meadow!"
"A meadow? So what?"
His voice rose in volume as his excitement mounted. "Don't you see? I wasn't supposed to see meadows through the scanner! I was supposed to see things in the terahertz frequency range. I thought the undergrads were playing a trick on me. Maybe they had hooked a digicam up to my display or something. But I checked and there was nothing strange connected."
"What's a digicam?"
He gave her a puzzled look. "You know, a device for capturing digital video to tape? Oh never mind. Anyway, I discovered that I could change the fine adjustments and move the image on the display. I thought maybe I was somehow picking up an image somewhere on the planet. At least, that made the most sense. But then I found a forest at the edge of the meadow with something amazing inside."
"What?"
He paused for effect. "A spotted owl!" When she said nothing, he continued. "You don't look very surprised." She shrugged. "But spotted owls are extinct!"
"No they're not. I'd have heard."
"Yes, they are. At least they are where I came from. But there was one sleeping peacefully in the trees. I figured I had to be seeing the past, but that changed when I found cities. They looked very similar to my cities, but some things were different. The cars looked wrong and the architecture on some of the buildings was too distinctive to exist in my world without me knowing about it."
"Wait, are you saying you're from a different world?"
"Yes! That's exactly right!"
Her voice laden with disbelief, she asked, "And how did you get here?"
"I'm getting to that." He paused to collect his thoughts and looked out the window. A police officer stood on the corner chatting amicably with some kids. There was no apparent animosity and it didn't look like he was going to arrest anyone. They were just talking to him because they wanted to. What a strange world.
"Well?" his unwilling companion asked impatiently.
Nathaniel reached up to adjust his glasses. The shock of realizing he wasn't wearing any unsettled him for a moment, but he regained his composure and continued. "I studied the images on the scanner for weeks. I searched through a New York City that was similar to my own, but much different. People dressed differently than me, but in most other ways we were the same. Then, one day, I saw Sara walk by."
"Who's Sara?"
"My wife!"
"You're married?" Did he notice a hint of disappointment there? No, couldn't be.
"Yes, see?" He held up his hand then gasped. "My ring? What happened to it?" After a second he took a deep breath. Living in a new body was going to take a considerable amount of getting used to.
"Well, if you saw your wife there, then you couldn't have been looking at a different world."
"No you don't understand. Sara's...." His voice cracked, "Sara's dead."
He stayed silent for a while, just staring at his new hands. The woman started the car and merged back into traffic. "What did you do then?"
Much more reserved now, he replied, "I sat in shock for a moment, then as she moved off the display I jumped to the fine adjustments. My trembling fingers almost made me lose her, but I managed to keep her in view. I watched her walk all the way home and discovered that she lived alone. She was single!"
"So, you spied on your own wife."
"But, I had to. Sara was ... this kid needed drug money and ... well, I didn't have enough ... so he shot her." He sniffled. "Right there. He shot her in the head." He felt a warm tear roll down his face. "I wish he'd shot me too." With this, he put his face in his hands and wept quietly. The woman said nothing.
Some amount of time later, he looked up. "So, don't you see? I had to follow her. It's been so hard without her. She was everything."
"That still doesn't explain how you got here."
"I got greedy. I became obsessed with touching her again. I so wanted to run my fingers through her long hair. She used to love that. I studied my scanner and figured out what it was doing. I then worked for an entire year to make a second scanner, one that could maybe transport matter instead of images. I carefully set its controls to match the other scanner, or at least I thought I did. Then I stepped through and apparently appeared inside the body of a thug who had just killed someone." He sat back in his seat and sighed. "Now I'll never see her again."
She drove in silence for a long while and he just stared out the window at the passing city. It became more surreal by the moment. Someone came out of an office building and actually held the door open for the next guy. Someone else dropped a stack of papers and two separate people stopped, looked at their watches, and helped him collect the papers before rushing off. In the reflection of the window he noticed the driver repeatedly glancing furtively at him.
She spoke quietly. "I'm trying to come up with a reason for you to be making all this up, but I can't."
He sighed again and looked at her. She was exceedingly attractive and his new body surprised him again by reacting to this. Slightly embarrassed, he replied, "That's because I'm not."
"Well, I'm not saying I believe you, but what will you do now? Go look for her?"
He shook his head sadly. "No, I did something wrong. This world is not the one I've been studying. Were are we, anyway?"
"New York City."
He whistled, "No question. The world I was studying was almost the same as my own, and this place is far from either."
"Well, if your Sara exists in two worlds, maybe she exists in three."
He shook his head. "Even if she did, how could I possibly find her in a city of over a million people? She might not even live here. It's hopeless."
For the first time since he'd met her, the woman smiled. "You obviously don't know very much about my world." She drove for a while longer then a disturbed look came over her face. "Look, you're not just telling me all this so I'll take you back to my place where you can rape me, are you?"
He frowned. "Don't you think I'm a little too old for that, miss?"
"Not from where I sit, and it's Michelle."
Looking down at himself, he shook his head. "Michelle, I assure you I have no intention to rape or hurt you."
With a nod, she muttered, "I guess anyone who could come up with such a crazy story would be a science fiction writer, not a thug." She paused. "But, 'Nathaniel'? That's a mouthful. Do you mind if I call you Nathan?"
He shrugged. "I don't see why I should. If I have a new body I might as well have a new name. Thank you for helping me."
"Yeah, well my mother always told me I was insane for wanting excitement in my life. We won't be telling her about this."* * *
Michelle pulled into her driveway and turned off the car. She refused to tell Nathan how they would find Sara, but she was brimming over with excitement in wanting to show him. She slammed the car door behind her, leaving the windows down, and skipped up the path to her house. It was a nice little condo nestled in the middle of a long row of identical units. A thick patch of trees and a wide grassy area separated the condos from the parking lot and made the whole place feel more like a park than high density housing.
She pushed open her door. Despite everything he'd seen before, Nathan was still surprised that it was unlocked. Her condo was small but comfortable, consisting of a kitchen and a small living room, with a flight of stairs running up to a second floor. It was nicely furnished, with tasteful furniture and numerous artsy prints hanging on the walls.
"First off, you will not spend another moment in my home unless you clean yourself up. Get upstairs and into the shower. Leave your clothes in the basket outside the door and I'll throw them in the wash. Now go." She went into the kitchen.
Nathan took off his jacket and looked down at the shoulder holster. How weird to be carrying a gun. He unfastened the straps and tucked both the gun and holster into the sleeve of the jacket. He hung it in the front hall closet and went upstairs. Deciding it would be prying to look in her bedroom, Nathan went straight to the bathroom. He left his clothes in the basket and closed the door. Would he ever get used to looking in a mirror and seeing this person instead of himself? Part of him said no, but some deeper part wondered what was so strange about the sight he was seeing. At least he ended up in a good looking body. Sara would smile if she could see him like this.
A few moments into the shower he jumped out of the stream of water. Since when did he take cold showers? The strange thing was, it had felt "normal" and he only jumped out when he realized it mentally. With a shrug he stepped back into the stream and rinsed off the last of the soap. He was using soap? He usually just used the shampoo from his hair to wash the rest of his body.
Drying himself off with a towel, he considered looking in the medicine cabinet. No, that would be too much an invasion of his hostess's privacy. He did notice, however, that there was only one toothbrush. A pair of sweats and a T-shirt were hanging on doorknob and he pulled them into the bathroom. The sweats didn't reach his ankles, and she probably used the shirt for a nightgown, but they would do.
He found Michelle making dinner in the kitchen. She looked up and smiled. "There, now you look and smell much nicer."
He glanced down at the pink sweats and the teddy bear shirt and frowned slightly. "I hope your washer runs quickly."
With a laugh, she asked, "Can I get you anything to drink?" She had a nice laugh.
"No. Thank you, though."
"Well, make yourself at home. I'll be able to throw this in the oven soon and then we can talk about finding Sara."
He wandered over to the living room. She had an RCA stereo and a brand new Zenith TV. It was weird to see things he recognized, but that were obviously different. Zenith went out of business years ago in his world and RCA had been bought out by Sony even before that. A large bookcase covered one wall and he ran his eyes over a few spines. He stopped on an American History book and grabbed it.
For Sara to have existed in both his world and this one, they would have needed a common history, with a split coming after he and Sara were born. He started at 1900 and scanned forward looking for differences. Being a physicist, he didn't know his non-scientific history very well, but he was able to verify some of the major happenings. Prohibition, World War I, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor on December 7th, they all seemed to fit. Coming close to the year he and Sara had been born, he began to read carefully. Then his eyes went wide.
Michelle walked into the room saying, "Okay, I won't need to do anything with that for another hour. Now, you've got to see this."
He closed the book and put it back. Just before turning around, his eyes fell on a Heinlein novel named The Evil Inside. There were others there as well, few of which had recognizable titles. A number of "new" Heinleins to read. This whole mess might be worth it just for that. Michelle motioned him over to the couch and he sat down. She sat on the opposite side absently holding an overstuffed pillow in her lap. Though he couldn't help but notice that she kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. Was this pretty young lady actually looking at him? It took him a moment to remember that he no longer looked like a prune with white hair.
"I don't see any pictures of your boyfriend or husband or whatever." As soon as he said that, he realized how bad it sounded. He was too used to being an old man who could say anything that came to his mind because his age showed he obviously wasn't making a pass.
She shrugged. "The young men are exciting, but childish. The old men are more refined, but their frail bodies don't let them do the things I want to do. I'm just hard to please and will probably die an old maid."
The thought of someone who looked like her dying alone was the best evidence yet that this universe was out of whack with normal reality.
With a shrug, she brushed his last question aside and picked up the TV's remote control. "Watch this." The excitement in her voice was unmistakable. She pressed the power button and the TV sprang to life. She clicked the remote again and it changed to channel 1. This consisted of a list of names. "We're all on here, everyone. See." She clicked a few more times and "Michelle Gentry" came up. "That's me!" The phone rang. "Damn. Here, you play with it while I get that." She tossed him the remote and ran into the kitchen.
Nathan tried not to listen in on her conversation, but he couldn't help but hear the tone of her voice. She was excited about something as she spoke in hushed tones. Did he hear his own name? He concentrated on the TV. Quickly figuring out how to scroll around within the "Michelle Gentry" record, he started reading. He gasped in amazement. The TV told him Michelle's address and how much she paid for her house. It also told him where she worked and how much she made each year. Even more amazing, it had lists of everything she had ever bought, including where she bought it and how much she paid.
Michelle hung up the phone and returned. "So, what do ya think?"
Nathan looked up at her in shock. "Why do you keep all this information about yourself?"
She looked confused. "What do you mean? This happens automatically. Look, here's my neighbor." She took the remote back and punched a few buttons. Another name came up and this entry had the same level of detail as hers.
"Why do you have access to her files? Do you work for the police?"
She laughed. "No, silly. Everyone has read access to the database. We'd have been pretty naïve to amass this much information about people and then limit access to it. Those who did have access would have become all powerful and that would have been very bad."
"But why?"
"Because power corrupts."
"No, why amass the information in the first place?"
"How do you think we've all but eradicated our crime?" Her tone also asked, "what are you, stupid?"
He shook his head.
"Think. It's tough to get away with stealing anything because people would know you never bought what you have. You can't even steal something and sell it, because only authorized dealers can take debit cards and they have to be able to show where they got their merchandise."
"What about cash?"
"What's cash?"
"Money--something that lets you buy things anonymously."
"No such thing. In my world, nothing is anonymous."
Nathan shuddered.
Michelle continued. "And in my country there are almost no thefts and fewer than a hundred murders a year."
With a frown, Nathan conceded, "You do have a point. I'd say drug dealers kill more than a hundred people an hour in my world."
Now Michelle frowned. "But why would they do that? Don't they worry about losing their licenses?"
"What, did you legalize drugs here too?"
"Of course we did! Back in the '20s we tried to criminalize alcohol and did far more damage than good. We learned from our mistakes."
Nathan nodded. "We had prohibition too, but the people of my country aren't as practical as you folks."
She sat up straight. "So we do have some common events in our history. That's interesting. I've been wondering how any two worlds could be different but still have the same person in both."
Nathan nodded. "I've been reading your history book. It looks like we have the same past and then our worlds diverged near the year Sara and I were born.
"When was that?"
"1945."
"The year we invaded Japan...."
Shaking his head, Nathan exhaled loudly. "So what the book said was right. You really did invade?"
"Yes, Germany fell and we directed our efforts to stop Japan. What did you do?"
"We annihilated Tokyo with a fission bomb. They surrendered after that."
"Your way sounds better. We lost so many people in the invasion. And when they counterattacked us here...." She shuddered.
Nathan started to speak but she hastily cut him off. "But none of this is helping you find Sara. What's her last name?"
"If she's married to me, it's Burgund."
Michelle keyed this in and it turned up blank. "Let's try her maiden name."
"Mitchelson."
Ten entries came up and Michelle moved to the start of the first.
"Yes! That's the right birth date and the place she was born! It must be her!"
Michelle scanned through the rest of the information quickly, changing pages faster than Nathan could read them. Her face set into an unreadable mask as she read on. When she arrived at the last page she turned to him. "I'm sorry Nathan. She's married to a guy named Fred Simoni."
Already dizzy from learning that she was alive in this world, this information sent Nathan reeling. "I've got to see her."
Michelle frowned. "Nathan, are you sure that's a good idea? What are you going to tell her? That you're someone from another world, only you're in a different body, but in your world you two used to be married until someone killed her? I don't know why I believe you. I can't imagine she will."
"Michelle, she died in my arms. I've got to at least see her. Please take me to the address."
Frowning, she stood up and paced back and forth in front of the TV. "Okay. I think this is a really bad idea. But it can't be worse than listening to you in the first place. At least wait until your clothes are dry and we've eaten dinner. As cute as you look in the pink sweats, you probably shouldn't meet your pseudo-wife in them. And I get irritable on an empty stomach. You wouldn't like me when I'm irritable."* * *
Sara lived in a very nice neighborhood, with big houses spread far apart. Michelle and Nathan were parked on the street at the end of her driveway arguing over how he would go about seeing her. Still arguing, they got out of the car and started up the long, curved driveway. They rounded a tree and came into view of the house. A light was on upstairs and Nathan could see Sara in the window! He stopped and stared, his heart lurching. To think, she was this close, but still so far away. Although she was the same person he loved, she was not his Sara. She had a husband here who probably loved her as much as he did. How could anybody not?
Michelle laid a comforting hand on his slumped shoulders. He absently touched her hand. "What am I doing here?" he asked rhetorically. Before she could answer another person moved into view next to Sara. That must have been her husband, Fred. Fred looked extremely angry about something. He was shouting, but Nathan couldn't hear him through the closed window. Sara cowered away and he slapped her face!
Nathan's eyes went wide and he started for the house. The soft hand on his shoulder became a tight grip. "Nathan, where are you going?"
He spun around. "That bastard just hit my wife!"
"She's not your wife, Nathan, she's his wife. There's nothing you can do."
He looked back to see Fred hit Sara again. She was crying. "I've got to do something. Let's call the police."
Michelle let go of his shoulder and looked down at her toes. "They won't believe us."
"How do you know?"
She twisted her toe, as if she was trying to smash her next sentence into the ground. "Sara's reported her husband beating her three times before. It was in her file, but I brushed past it before you could see."
"Why didn't the police do something?" he asked incredulously.
"They took the husband's story over hers. They usually do."
"Why for God's sake? I'm sure she'll have bruises after that." He pointed back at the window.
Michelle continued to silently grind her frustration into the driveway with her toe.
"Well, if the police aren't going to help, then she should leave."
"That won't work either, I'm afraid."
"Why not?"
"Where would she go? The first time she bought food her husband would see on the database where she is."
Nathan steamed. "So the woman I love is being beaten regularly by her husband and there's nothing she can do about it?"
A tear ran down Michelle's cheek and she shook her head. She refused to look up from her feet to meet his eyes.
Something snapped within Nathan. As a frail, old scientist worried about his career, he'd have never even considered this next action. But he was no longer frail and his career was absolutely meaningless. He now occupied the body of a murderous thug who dealt with his problems much differently than Nathan ever could have in his past life. Maybe part of that thug remained in the body when Nathan evicted the rest? Of course, he didn't think through all of this at the time. Instead, he just spun around and stormed off toward the house. Michelle yelled, "Nathan, wait!" but he ignored her.
He marched up the porch stairs and kicked in the door. It was a pathetic, thin little thing--the result of a society used to living with minimal overt crime. In Nathan's world the door would have been made of two-inch thick hardwood with steel reinforcements. Here, his newly-acquired young legs smashed it off its hinges with one kick. The door blasted aside and he tramped in.
Fred yelled out from upstairs. "What the fuck?" He came to the top of the stairs dressed only in a pair of shorts. He was a short, beady-eyed man with unkempt hair and a thick five o'clock shadow. He wore a huge gold crucifix that hung down over the carpet of dark, curly hair covering his chest. He pointed at Nathan and descended the stairs. "Who the fuck are you? Get out of my fucking house!"
Nathan skipped up the stairs two at a time. Just before they met in the middle, he stopped, reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun. Fred's eyes went wide, but he had no chance to move away. Nathan's eyes bored into Fred as he stuck the barrel against his forehead and pulled the trigger. Fred's body, now missing the back of its head, fell to the stairs in a crumpled heap.
Sara screamed from the top of the stairs. Nathan looked up at her and exhaled the breath he had been holding since kicking in the door. He returned the gun to its holster and finished his ascent of the stairs. She dropped to her knees crying. "Please. Please don't hurt me."
Nathan reached out to touch her silver hair and she cringed. The cringe felt like a bullet through his heart. Even if this had been his Sara, he was no longer her Nathaniel. He ran his fingers through her hair once, saying, "I'm sorry Sara, I just couldn't let him hurt you anymore." Then he leapt over Fred's body, ran down the stairs, and raced out the door. Michelle had the car running and took off as soon as he got in.
They drove in silence for a long time. Nathan didn't know where they were going and didn't feel like asking. Eventually, Michelle spoke in a quiet voice, "what will you do now?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. I suppose the police will catch me and I'll just spend the rest of my life in jail. Or do you folks kill your criminals?"
She nodded. "The only effective way to deal with criminals is to eradicate them. But you won't necessarily be caught, especially if you stole that gun instead of buying it. Any decent thug would do that. I think it all depends on how good a description Sara gives the police."
He shrugged and just stared ahead at the empty road.
"So you won't be trying to get back to your world?"
"No. I'd never find it. Even if I could make a new scanner, I don't know the settings for my world. Besides, there's nothing for me there."
After another long silence, Michelle spoke in her quietest voice yet. "So you probably need some time to figure out who you are and how to cope with this world."
His motion was a cross between a nod and a shrug.
Michelle waited again then asked. "And you probably need a place to stay during that time. Right?"
Neither said anything.
"You can stay at my place."
His head spun to look at her. "Are you sure?"
She met his eyes with hers. "No, but I'm making the offer anyway."
He faced forward and stared at the road ahead, saying nothing. After two mile markers went by he said. "Okay."* * *
The next day, Fred's murder was all over the TV. They interviewed Sara, whose tears made her heavy makeup run. Still, her bruises did not show through. She told them she hid in the closet when the burglar broke in. He must have run after killing her husband, because she never saw him. The cops seemed to want to prosecute her, but the database showed that neither she nor Fred had ever owned a gun. Besides, they couldn't figure out how such an old woman had knocked the door off its hinges. Eventually they closed the case as one of the three unsolved murders that year.
The End
Copyright Michael P. Calligaro
All Rights Reserved
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