LB Sedlacek - Issue 35

LB Sedlacek is the author of several poetry collections including "Unresponsive Sky"

(Purple Unicorn Press), "Words and Bones" (Finishing Line Press), "The Architect of French

Fries" (Presa Press), "Swim" (Alien Buddha Press), and "The Poet Next Door" (Cyberwit

Press).  She has been nominated two times for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry and has also

been nominated for Best of the Net in poetry. Her short stories books include “The

Jackalope Committee and Other Tales” and “Four Thieves of Vinegar and Other Short

Stories” both published by Alien Buddha Press. She also enjoys swimming and reading.

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Superjacent

I lay awake and night and wonder how it’s going to happen. I know it will. It’s just a matter of when, how. I know the why. You try being a half heir to a fortune when you don’t need the money, but the other half does. It puts a target on your head, chest, life.

I wait. I think of scenarios. I think of defenses. How do you defend yourself against your upcoming demise?

It’s not like treating a disease. It’s not like knowing your days, weeks, months, hours, years are limited. It’s not like you know anything.

When. Where. How.

I have a conceal carry. I know how to shoot a gun. I could defend myself. Would I be prepared enough to do so? I don’t own a gun. If I bought a gun, would that indeed ensure my demise rather than prevent it?

Have you ever read about those people who take other actions to prevent something from happening only to learn that what they did led to it after all. For instance, I buy a gun to protect myself only to have it used against me.

How much is on the line here? I don’t know. Probably thousands. Possibly millions. Enough to inspire me to stay out of parking garages even though there aren’t any here where I live in rural North Carolina anyway. I never liked parking garages. Too hard to move around in them driving, parking or otherwise.

Would it be a professional hit? Or by someone close to me or simply in proximity via air, water, land?

Who would it be?

What would it be?

I lay awake and wonder. I keep all the curtains closed. I lock all the doors, always. 

I carry a knife. Who wins in a knife fight? Since I was kid, I’ve always loved knives. I own several kinds. Would I win in a knife fight? 

I’m older now. So is my sister. She’s heavier, taller, older, and broke. She needs the money. She needs me to be gone.

I write for a living. For a newspaper, in print but now online. She teaches snowboard lessons, gets high, gets drunk, spends everything she makes when she gets it. She doesn’t teach much, only for the free pass so she can board on her own time. The rumor at the resort is that if she was any good, she wouldn’t be sitting around so much waiting on someone to take her lessons.

Still, she has her crew. She has her buds who will do anything for whatever she’s offering at the time even though she’s short, squat, blonde headed and plain. 

I’m not like her. I don’t look like her. We don’t look like we belong. But we belong together as the last living heirs to the houses, the cars, the belongings of our adopted parents. There’s an estate to fight over.

She needs the cash. She needs the infusion. Last I heard, she was squatting and hoarding.

I’m a minimalist. I don’t own anything except my van. I live in it. I camp for dollars a day. I cook my own food. I bulk shop. I thrift for clothes. It’s not an exciting life, but an easy one.

Even under the stars, in the mountains on the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee, I can’t sleep. I count stars. I sing. I read whatever book I found for a dollar or less at the thrift store. I plan menus. Nothing works. Not since I got the email.

Your parents were in a bad crash. You and your sister are to split everything of what’s left.

I stayed in touch always even traveling in the van. I used postcards, letters, deliveries like gifts, and the phone. My sister sent nothing, said nothing, never spoke to them again once she left. It was always snowboarding season for her. No one ever heard from her or knew how she was or where she was living or who she was doing.

I would miss my parents. I never considered them to be her parents, too, even though we came as a package from the same agency. We were supposedly blood related.

Too bad we couldn’t inherit blood. I would trade mine for my parents.

Harriet was a killer. Fran was not.

I lie awake waiting to see how Harriet will try to kill me, or have me killed. I lie awake and think of how to run, how to hide.

She’s nearby. I lie to myself and say she’s not, but I know she is. I’ve had to park the van in the tiny blip of existence known as Laurel Bloomery, TN. There are papers to be signed, calls to be made, so I have to stay in one place for once. 

I worry about Harriet’s satiety. How much will satisfy her? 

It disgusts me. I write on a piece of paper, Fran remains revulsed by Harriet. I wondered if our biological parents or relatives would crop up and stand by us at the funeral telling us what they wanted from my parent’s meager possessions.

There was a house. One car. All the stuff inside both. And I didn’t know what else. 

I would give up every bit of water, air, land, space to have them back. Real property is just stuff. 

For Harriet, this would be a buffet. I knew it would become all about her.

She wrote the obit. It was full of errors, and mostly about her. If you have to write about yourself in an obit, then your relationship with the deceased was obviously faked. 

She never called our parents. She never wrote. She never said thanks for the birthday or Christmas checks to the point they finally stopped giving her anything. She only used their home to stay in when she needed a place to stay in-between.

Harriet made the first move. Expected. I, though, expected it so I was nowhere near the memorial service, nowhere near the burial site. Unexpected.

There was no evidence of foul play. The crash was caused by icy roads, poor visibility, fog and other such phlegm that comes with living and especially driving in the mountains in winter. They were backing out of the driveway, heading down the steep curved road connection to the main road per usual. Something (or someone) caused their Dad to lose control in the mini-van, a vehicle she (Fran) had encouraged them to replace with one with four wheel drive but the other she (Harriet) always talked them out of it saying it cost too much money. I knew the tires were not in great shape. My/our dad had the car at the gas station constantly pumping air into the tires. The engine had been replaced with a used engine. 

I tapped my fingers on the slab of desk I shared in a cubicle at my banking job. I wondered “What else was replaced?” I sighed and kept typing in the data I am paid to type in. I knew I would be safe at the bank because of all the security cameras. It’s the drive to and from work, and then at home in to my one-bedroom apartment that worried me. I needed to make a plan. I dodged Fran’s first move by skipping the memorial services. How would I avoid move number two?

The reading of the will happened on a Thursday. The life insurance beneficiary payments arrived in the mailbox as a check. I had gotten so I’d drive the other way to the mailbox, not the closest way. I would use my back scratcher to reach the mail and never get out of the car. I knew Harriet was watching or had someone watching me. I’d seen a woman dressed all in black including a hoodie with the hood pulled over her head pacing back and forth in the parking lot staring in my office door. I’d seen the man with a clipboard staring at it as he skirted around the kudzu near the ditch that surrounded the office. 

The woman had come into the reception area asking for a loan to buy dentures. The man had sauntered into the lobby saying he was there to pick up a pizza. 

I figured they must’ve owed Harriet something and were paying her back. Or Harriet had made a promise of future funds.

On my breaks I read an e-book on Akido. I was halfway through it already and debating whether or not to take a live class when a policeman entered the building. He waited for my next scheduled break when he told me, the crash was not an accident.

The crash was not an accident. The car doors had been tampered with. She smacked her forehead muttering, “I should’ve known something was up when mom had that lump on her leg from hitting the car door.” 

The policeman nodded. “Can’t be proven. No evidence. Only the doors had been detached then reattached to fail. No fingerprints. Can you think of a motive?”

I scrunched my lips together. I squeezed my eyebrows into my eyes. “I can’t.” I sneeze. I breathe. I lie.

We’re in the same room together, but not alone. We’re in the firm of lawyer, attorney, lawyer, attorney, and someone else’s name I can’t remember. Our parents were thorough. After the bills of the estate are paid off, then the rest goes to us 50/50. 

Harriet won’t make eye contact. She needs the money. Fran does not. Fran cries. She’d rather have her parents than their stuff.

Harriet has a way of convincing others. She can weave a story and she does. She tells the policemen that Fran has been stealing her mail, that Fran has a key to her house, that Fran sneaks in while she’s sleeping and goes through her stuff and eats her Jell-O in the kitchen.

I am not surprised when a hired man shows up unannounced, after picking the lock, and waits for her in her bathroom. I yell “I won’t be run out of town” as I wait for him in my closet beside the gun safe. I took a course. I trained. I practiced. I dialed for help. He knows he’s done. He climbs out the window and jumps. He fires his gun at himself.

Move three. Estate lawyer meeting. Except I don’t plan on going. I will meet online, use email, or the phone to do whatever it is I need to do. 

I do one thing Harriet won’t think of. I put a tracker in Harriet’s car when she’s inside meeting with the Executor and the Estate lawyer. 

I rest easier. I move to a hotel suite.

It’s been two months. With the bad weather, logistics, Harriet’s made up delays, the burial is taking place in the summer, July. 

I stand behind a large grove of trees. I declined her invitation, politely, to the estate exec attorney and said I had to travel for business. 

But I did travel, booking a flight, rental car and hotel room in Raleigh. I flew there. Drove the rental car to my hotel and parked it in the complimentary parking lot. I checked in, and called the front desk a couple of times to ask questions about places to eat and the location of the ice machine. In the middle of the night, I hung the Do Not Disturb/No Maid Service sign on the doorknob and met my ride share a couple of blocks over at an all-night diner. I counted out the cash for the ride in small bills thanking the van’s owner for letting me hitch a ride all the way to the memorial cemetery.

The trees were large and dark. I fit behind them, but in case anyone was looking I wore coveralls, my hair shoved up under a hat and I carried a shovel. I inched my sunglasses down my nose. Harriet was leading the service speaking some drivel of nonsense from her childhood making a huge to do over her supposed close relationship with their parents. 

Fran mumbled. “Big enough plot. Room for one more.”

Harriet was laughing, grinning in her wide brim black coat, blouse and pants, fresh new purchases of course, she leaned forward then back roaring her head up and down having the best time at a funeral. No one moved or said anything. A common reaction to ignore those speaking at a burial ceremony, there’s so much emotion.

Looking away and disregarding the emotions of the loved ones left behind, another common reaction plus then there’s the subtle checking of the cell phone, too. The few gathered for the service were sitting in the lined up plastic seats, some underneath umbrellas planning on or praying for rain, don’t seem to notice a thing.

That’s when Fran aims. That’s when Harriet falls.

Harriet was a murderer. Now, self-preservation or not, Fran was, too.

The estate lawyer’s meeting took place three weeks later. Harriet’s service was on hold while things were being investigated. I had a solid alibi, as I was at work. My office cameras showed me entering the building and never leaving until the work day was done. There was no back door, no other way out. 

No one suspected me. Everything that was left would go to me. 

I am a minimalist with few expenses. I’d had enough to purchase the business next door leaving everything in place as if it were still operating even though it wasn’t. Then I bought a used handheld mini saw at an out of state bargain store paying cash. It took a while but I was able to cut a hole in the adjacent wall behind the air exchangers and make it resealable. I crawled through the wall and used the back metal door of the other office slipping down the bank to the river below where I swam down it far enough before hopping out and hiking to the rental car I’d parked in the field earlier in the week. I’d learned a lot about things like this from Harriet who had always been up to something in high school, but never got caught.

I would do good things with whatever was left. I would do something to honor my parents. I would do everything to erase Harriet for good.

They grew up in adjacent rooms with Harriet throwing temper tantrums and breaking things when she didn’t get her way. I lost so many opportunities not to mention stuff and sleep because of her. 

Fran’s eyes glistened at the reading of the will. She’d positioned herself above Harriet for good.

~The End