Mud Season
It arrived on a damp Friday afternoon in mud season, among the patches of soggy black earth that sucked at people’s boots and the lingering snow piles that slumped and shrank and whose melt froze at night so that the roads were more treacherous than in the depths of winter.
Though she had no way of knowing so at the time, Cynthia Wilson was the first to see it while hanging laundry on her back porch. Shaking with rage and indignant disbelief, she stomped inside and down the hallway to her kitchen to call the O’Connors. She barely managed to keep herself from yelling through the receiver when Jim O’Connor picked up. “Your goddamn dog is sniffing around my chicken coop again,” she said, “and if you don’t come get it I’m within my rights to start shooting.”
Mr. O’Connor, whose dog lay next to him on the kitchen floor hoping to lick his lunch plate, assumed a case of mistaken identity. He knew better than to say anything to Cynthia about her failing eyesight or the fact that her chickens had gotten into his garden again just the other day. Instead he explained that he was looking at his dog right now, while they spoke, as he had done the entire time it had taken him to eat lunch. Mrs. Wilson, however, refused to believe it, seeing as the O’Connor dog was quite distinct in having only three legs and that white spot shaped like a kidney on its back and a taste for her rare heritage laying hens. The dog she just chased out of her yard could be none other, and none of Jim’s protests could dissuade her.
A short time later, in town, Delores Fielding caught a glimpse through the tailor shop window of Jackson Svenson leaving the movie theater with a young woman she did not recognize. Although Delores could not claim Jackson as her boyfriend, owing to the fact that they had not yet had the conversation, she nonetheless felt a sense of impending exclusivity. And anyway, Jackson was not bold enough for such indiscretion. Rather than chase him down and risk a messy confrontation in the street, she decided to give him the benefit of doubt. Perhaps he was entertaining a visiting cousin? But when she called him later that night and asked as casually as she could manage who the young lady was that had accompanied him to the theater, he claimed to have been up in Creekside with his father all day dealing with a misplaced shipment for the garage.
When Delores insisted she had seen Jackson in town, he summoned his father to the phone. Mr. Svenson, who seemed mildly offended by the suggestion that his hardworking son could be caught loitering at the movies on a Friday afternoon, confirmed Jackson’s whereabouts.
A few blocks over, from his rocker out front of the gas station, Old Man Charles thought he saw two black foxes, like shadows of each other, slink side-by-side down the alley and duck between the dumpsters. Because he did not trust his rheumy eyes, he kept this observation to himself.
No one thought to question the odd occurrences and mistaken identities that piled up across town until Frank Hobert spotted his wife sunbathing in their front yard and, on his way to confront her indecency, found her sitting at the kitchen table mending his shirt. Confused, he leaned over the sink and looked out the window and then turned to his wife, then to the window, then to his wife, his head swiveling back and forth until he was convinced he was not hallucinating.
“Harriet,” he said, “what the hell is going on? Who is that in our yard?” And when she came to the window, she was shocked to see herself out on the lawn in full view of the neighborhood, draped across a lounge chair in a scandalously small bikini. Her shock was compounded into disbelief when she realized that the scene before her was a perfect replica of the recurring fantasy she’d been nursing, involving a handsome young neighbor and a July heat wave. But this was April and the sun was barely strong enough to melt the snow, let alone warm the exposed skin of a lonely woman.
Harriet had no idea who could be lounging on their brown and soggy lawn and said so to her husband. What she did not say was that she had a very bad feeling, what she imagined it must feel like to be awoken by the phone ringing in the middle of the night and finding her husband’s spot in the bed cold and empty. She was overtaken by a sudden urge to hide, to pull Frank into the broom closet with her and wait until…until what? She raised a hand to grab his sleeve, but Frank had already moved out of reach.
When they opened the front door and stepped out onto their stoop, the woman was gone. The lounge chair remained, however, its round metal legs sunk firmly into the marshy thawed ground from the weight of its now-missing occupant. Oh yes, it seemed to say, that really did happen.
“What the hell was that?” Frank exclaimed, but Harriet said nothing. She watched as he marched across the street to the Bradshaw house and knocked on the door. The door opened and Frank spoke to Mrs. Bradshaw, then pointed back toward the yard and the lounge chair. Mrs. Bradshaw nodded, seeming to agree with him.
“I’m calling the police,” Frank said when he got back. “Mrs. Bradshaw saw the whole thing. She’ll confirm we aren’t crazy.”
“Why? What will the police do?” Harriet asked. She felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable, as though she were the one in trouble.
“Well we damn well can’t have strange women in swimsuits treating our yard like it’s their own,” Frank said. “What if she’s dangerous?” Harriet couldn’t dispute this point and made no further arguments.
Officer Petty, who visited the Hobert’s house to take their statement and file a report, thought the whole situation was probably blown out of proportion and, though he would never say so out loud, a waste of time. That is, until he responded later that evening to a call at the new grocer’s market on the east end of town. A woman had been caught trying to smuggle an entire Easter ham out of the store, wrapped up in her rain jacket and tucked under her arm.
The register clerk brought Officer Petty back to the store office where the woman had been made to wait, but when they opened the door, she was gone. Officer Petty asked for a description of the offender and became silently dismayed when the clerk described a tall, red-headed woman in a sky-blue rain slicker and dirty red muck boots who spoke with a very slight lisp. This description matched exactly that of Officer Petty’s own sister, Jenny. Jenny, who had been a strict vegetarian ever since joining up with that odd little church last year, was not one to steal and an even less likely candidate to burgle ten pounds of slaughtered pig. But the clerk was sure, and his story was backed up by witnesses.
Jenny Petty, for her part, had been home sick all afternoon and could barely rouse herself from bed to answer the door when her brother came by. After seeing the state of her, and satisfied that his sister could not possibly be guilty of the burglary, Officer Petty decided not to file his report. It would be possible to keep this quiet, he thought, as Jenny stayed close to home most days and had no reason to shop at a store across town when there was another just down the street. Even still, he advised his sister not to visit the east end grocer for a while.
Had it not been for Officer Petty’s strange day, Eliza Shoubert would surely have been charged with murder. Despite the fact that she had been at lunch when the crime occurred, with a table full of her lady friends at the tea house across town. Despite the fact that Eliza’s mother-in-law was still just barely breathing when the ambulance arrived, and so the timeline could not have worked to account for Eliza’s presence at the tea house except for Eliza to be in two places at once.
For indeed, three different neighbors had seen Eliza drag her mother-in-law out of the house, kicking and screaming, onto the sidewalk. Three different neighbors had come running when Eliza plunged the kitchen knife into the old woman’s back once, twice, three times, silent and methodical and precise. And three different neighbors had shouted and called for help as Eliza walked calmly back into the house she shared with her husband and his mother.
The same three neighbors also swore Eliza was still in the house when the police arrived, for none of them had seen her come out the front and she would have had to climb a tall fence and go through a neighbor’s yard to get to the alley. But when the police swarmed the house they found no one inside. Nor did they find Eliza hiding in the bushes of any neighbors’ yards.
A while later, after lunch, Eliza arrived at the scene in her shiny blue car, from which she emerged in a smart green pencil dress and sparkling diamond earrings. Ducking past the caution tape, she ran up the driveway, the clacking of her designer heels ringing out like an urgent telegram.
“This is my house,” she said to the officer who intercepted her. “What on earth is going on?” Eliza craned her neck to see past him, then screamed. Although the old woman’s body had been taken away, the blood remained, pooled and dark at the end of the driveway. There was so much of it that a brighter red rivulet ran down to the gutter where it mixed with the muddy remnants of a snow pile.
“Not Justin? It wasn’t Justin, was it?” Eliza cried. And then, remembering her husband was away at a conference, reassured herself. “No. Not him. Not him, thank god.” She looked up at the officer who restrained her, but saw no sympathy or kindness there. He stood broad and wall-like as she struggled against him, and when he pushed her back, his fingers dug bruises into her shoulders that would remain tender and yellowed for days.
“Who was it?” she begged, but the crowd of gawking neighbors looked away when she called to them. No one would tell her what was going on. No one was saying anything. And then, through her panic, Eliza noted the curious absence of running commentary, the silence where there should have been a never-ceasing prattle of criticism and direction. She grew still with the realization.
“Alice?” she asked then. “Was it Alice?” For surely if her mother-in-law were alive and well, the old battle-axe would be right in the center of things, scolding Eliza to contain herself, ordering the officers about, and demanding to speak to the person in charge. But when Alice did not emerge from the chaos, Eliza found herself adrift and uncertain, desperate for someone to tell her what to do.
And so she raised her wrists when directed and let the officer cuff her and guide her toward a waiting squad car. She nodded when a man in a suit explained what would come next. She did not speak or resist, for she no longer knew how. And when she was finally delivered, stunned and crumpled, into the holding cell, she wondered—Who will call Justin? What will they tell him? What do I say when I see him?
After a long night and the entire following day, the primary witnesses to both the murder and to Eliza’s alibi had been interviewed. The town’s two detectives, whose range of experience was limited to property crimes and domestic disputes, grew weary under the heavy knowledge that this murder would not be solved quickly.
Not wanting to bring in the State Police just yet, the detectives called a strategy meeting at the next shift change. They gathered up the beat officers and the emergency phone operators and even the desk sergeant—anyone who might illuminate a connection, however tenuous. It was at this meeting that Offer Petty, seeing an opportunity to protect his sister from potential trouble, suggested that an imposter was running about town, committing crimes in the guise of other people. He supported his claim with details from the strange incident at the Hobert’s house two days prior. And though he did not bring up the incident involving his sister, he was relieved to hear similar accounts from his fellow lawmen regarding the past few days.
Indeed, it seemed the whole town was run amok with disappearing doppelgangers and strange accounts of people behaving badly. There was even a report of a fully grown oak tree sprouting up overnight in the Anderson Gravel Pit and collapsing the embankment with its roots. But it was gone without a trace when Mr. Anderson arrived, and he’d been left with no other option but to assume one of the men had done the damage and they were all covering for their colleague.
Eventually Eliza was released, as the police could not produce sufficient evidence to refute her alibi, and by then the theory of an imposter had taken hold in the detectives’ imagination. Justin came to the station to take her home, but when she ran to him and cried out his name and threw her arms around him, he stood stiff and distant, saying nothing.
He did not talk on the drive, nor when they pulled into the driveway, except to say that there was no food in the house so he’d go to get takeout. He did not turn off the car when she opened the door, and she barely managed to close it behind her before he backed out again, leaving her bewildered and alone on the sidewalk. The blood was gone, she noted, and Eliza wondered if someone had come to clean it, or if it had been washed away by the rain.
She went inside and showered and changed, then wandered the house waiting, unsure of what to do. She touched the ugly orange vase on the mantle, the one Alice had picked out, and thought how nice it would be to put something else there. How easy it would be to do it, without anyone around to question her taste.
Justin did not talk when he returned, nor when they ate. He did not talk as they changed and climbed into bed, nor did he say Goodnight darling when he switched off his lamp as he had done every night of their marriage. She could not bear to think of him sleeping next to her in all that silence and so she asked him, even though she dreaded what he would say.
“Are you angry with me? Please just say something! Surely you don’t think… You know I couldn’t ever do that.”
His breath was sharp in the darkness, a knife that cut the air between them.
“Couldn’t?” he asked. “Or wouldn’t?” He turned over, his back to her.
Eliza knew she should respond, tell him she misspoke. But she could not bring herself to lie to her husband, even now. For hadn’t it been only last week that the old woman once again commented on Eliza’s housekeeping and cooking, and Eliza had thought to herself, if only I could be rid of this old woman once and for all?
And hadn’t she often daydreamed—as she stared at that haughty back, those prim shoulders that never hunched, even as the woman wrung out the dish cloth and demonstrated how to hang it over the faucet to dry, or stirred the risotto and explained that you couldn’t step away, even for a minute or it would burn—hadn’t Eliza often daydreamed of grabbing a kitchen knife and plunging it deep into the perfectly starched linen shirt and into that straight and proper back?
Indeed, she had fantasized, and often, about this exact scenario, of the look in the old woman’s eyes, the sweet release of giving her exactly what she deserved, and, most of all, getting away with it. And though she was relieved to be cleared of the heinous crime—of which she was fully innocent—Eliza was also afraid. For if her most terrible desire could be fulfilled by a stranger wearing her face, might she also be the subject of another, equally terrible wish?
Eliza thought of strange Mr. Allen at the end of the street, the way he watched her from his front room when she passed by on her morning walk, and how he boarded up his basement windows, and the row of locks on his door. She thought of old Hildy Eastman and her withered hands and how Justin had swindled her out of her small bit of land (now being developed into shops and apartments), and used the resulting bonus to buy Eliza a shiny new car.
She thought of every hurtful thing she had ever said or done, whether on purpose or by accident, of every girl she’d made fun of in school, of the boys and men she’d seduced and rejected, of the waiters and workers she’d failed to tip (or even be kind to). Lying there in the dark, her well-appointed home closing in around her, Eliza thought of all the people she had stepped over or left behind on her way to bigger better things, and she was very, very afraid.
Amelia Valasek lives a quiet life in the fly-over state of Idaho (USA) where she shares a home with her husband, 30 lbs of cat, 100 lbs of dog and a never-ending supply of fur. She has forsaken her social media accounts due to recurring dreams about her teeth falling out. You can find more of Amelia’s work at Halfway Down the Stairs (June 2024), and Necksnap Magazine (Issue 0).