999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [52]
“Ah-ha!” said Mrs. Yardley. “Why do you say ‘killed’? Is it because you don’t believe it was an accident?”
“I don’t know” Hooter protested, close to tears.
“I guess she must have killed herself,” Dampy said unprompted. “That’s what Mr. Fairfield says.”
“Oh, really? Who did he say that to? To you?”
“No, to me he always says it was an accident and not to think about it. But I heard him say to the new Mrs. Fairfield—”
“To Pamela Harper, that is? The lady who just went upstairs?”
“Mm-hm. He told her that no one can take so many sleeping pills by accident. He said he thinks she must of mashed them up in her Rocky Road ice cream. Sometimes she would eat a whole pint of Rocky Road all by herself. Especially if they had got in a fight. He’d apologize by bringing home the ice cream. No one else ever got a bite.”
The more Dampy explained to Mrs. Yardley about the ice cream and the liquor and the different arguments there’d been, the clearer it became to Hooter that Mr. Fairfield had probably killed his first wife by mixing up her sleeping pills with the ice cream. Then putting a bottle of whiskey somewhere she’d be sure to find it when he left her by herself. Clearly, Mrs. Yardley suspected the same thing.
Then there was a great ruckus when the new Mrs. Fairfield came storming down the steps and out of the house to accuse her husband of having stolen her four-carat diamond ring from her jewel case.
Hooter looked at Dampy with alarm, and Dampy tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling’s intricate pattern of overlapping water stains. Mrs. Yardley could coax nothing more from either of them, so she left them to themselves and went to stand in the front door and watch Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield scream at each other until Mr. Fairfield went from just verbal abuse to a whack across the face, and that was all Mrs. Yardley needed. Dampy and Hooter spent that night in a foster-care residence forty miles away from the Fairfield home, and they remained there all through Mr. Fairfield’s trial for the murder of his first wife. They were not qualified, legally, to be witnesses at the trial, and Hooter, for one, was glad to be spared such an unpleasant duty. What could he have said that would be any help to Mr. Fairfield? For all his faults, the man had been like a father to him, and Hooter would not have wanted to be there when the jury brought in their verdict of Guilty of Murder in the First Degree.
At the foster-care residence Dampy and Hooter had been discouraged from seeing much of each other. When they could get together it would have to be in the laundry room when no one was washing clothes or up in the attic, where they weren’t supposed to go. Even when they were able to spend a few minutes together, away from the other residents, they were both at a loss for words. Dampy was gradually slipping back into the sullenness and depression that had kept him from talking to everyone at the time before he’d met Hooter. And Hooter for his part spent a lot of his time, as he had in the basement of the Dutch Reformed Church, practicing the multiplication tables.
Neither of them would speak to Mr. Fairfield when he tried to phone, and Mrs. Fairfield never did ring up. Maybe she wasn’t really Mr. Fairfield’s wife, but just a girlfriend. Anyhow, she moved somewhere that didn’t have an address.
“Do you miss her?” Hooter asked Dampy one cold November afternoon when they were sitting behind the clothes dryer in the laundry room.
“Not really. Watching all those programs on the Home Shopping Channel got to be pretty dull. I didn’t like the first Mrs. Fairfield that much either, but she was more fun to be with.”
Hooter studied one of the big lint balls on the floor with a look of melancholy. “You know what? I miss him.”
“Oh, we’re better off this way,