7. Mustang Sally
Eileen picked pretty much the worse possible day to finally kill her husband, but there was no way she could have known, and really, there’s probably no ideal day to kill your spouse, and at least she didn’t do it on Valentine’s Day or his birthday or their anniversary or any of the other holiday minefields that litter the average longtime married couple’s year.
When Eileen got home from her assignation with Dolph she saw her husband Brent Munson’s truck, a brand new shiny black Ford Behemoth, parked in the driveway, which meant he’d stopped off at home for a long lunchtime quickie. She’d done the same at the grocery store, but even though she was just as unfaithful as her husband, at least she didn’t commit adultery in her own home, and at least Dolph was human. Eileen lugged her free groceries in through the front door and set down her burdens on the kitchen counter, then stepped to the door that led to the garage and put her ear to the wood.
From the other side of the door came the gentle squeak of a car rocking on its shocks, which meant she was right. Brent was at it again. He could at least have the decency to take his dirty business elsewhere. Today was as good a day as any to go ahead with her plans, she figured. Brent was here now. He hadn’t even started the radio yet, which meant he was still into the foreplay stage. She had some time, probably about an hour, before he came inside, and that was assuming he skipped the afterglow.
Eileen took her big sun tea jar down from the cupboard and rummaged around in the cabinets under the sink, removing a jug of bleach and the bottle of pure acetone she’d bought last week from the hardware store. She poured almost a gallon of the bleach into the tea jar—clear glass with a few pretty little flowers painted on—then went to the freezer for a big bag of crushed ice, pouring that into the jar too. It would be nice to just give Brent a big tall glass of iced bleach to drink when he came in all sweaty and spent, but he’d probably notice the smell, and there’d be questions after. Her original plan was better.
She measured five tablespoons of acetone and poured that over the ice, then leaned down to look into the jar. The internet said it could take anywhere from ten minutes to twenty minutes for the reaction to start, but in the meantime, she had to keep an eye on it in case the ice started to melt. Boring, but this was what you might call the calm before the storm, so she was trying to be mindful and live in the moment like her meditation books said. Before deciding on murder she’d tried meditation, which hadn’t worked out ultimately, but she’d gotten some useful things out of it, including more flexible leg muscles from all the sitting lotus position, and that stretchiness had come in handy with Dolph. Making love in the cramped office of a grocery store required a certain degree of physical fitness.
The ice started melting, so she topped off the jar a few times, keeping it full. Meanwhile the car radio in the garage started playing some power ballad by an ’80s hair band, Eileen wasn’t sure which one, but it was the usual, and that meant things were well underway with Brent’s ritual. He’d be nearing the climax—and his own climax, of course—before too much longer, but you couldn’t hurry chemistry.
Even if Brent came in and saw her and asked what she was doing and she said “Making ridiculously dangerous homemade chloroform from a recipe I found on the internet,” he’d probably just grunt and make a sandwich, since he never really listened to her anyway. He had no idea she was cheating on him with Dolph, that she had been for months, and she wasn’t entirely sure he’d care, though maybe he would—men were funny. Even with his own true love in the garage there, he might still have some possessive feelings about Eileen.
The liquid in the jar was getting good and cloudy, and the green tint from the bleach was gone, so now all she had to do was wait some more, half an hour or so. She put the groceries away, and loaded the dishwasher, and cleaned underneath the burners on the stove, and put a bowl of vinegar in the microwave and ran it for a minute, which was practically magic, it loosened all the nasty hardened gunk that stuck inside on the walls, she’d learned that on the internet, too, and took a soft sponge and cleaned out the inside and rearranged the cans in the pantry alphabetically and then let herself look at the jar again.
The ice was gone, and the liquid was settled and pretty clear again, and down at the bottom there was a good-size clear bubble that was, she knew, the denser liquid blob of chloroform. She skimmed off most of the top liquid with a spoon, and then carefully poured the remainder down the sink, holding her breath while she did it, because if she accidentally tilted too far and sent the chloroform down the sink, she’d have to start all over again. No wonder people shot each other. Trying to kill somebody less obviously was a lot of work.
Finally there was nothing left in the jar but the bubble of chloroform, assuming the internet had given her the right instructions, which was always a question. It would be funny if she’d just made oven cleaner or something, wouldn’t it?
Eileen opened up the big flour container and fished around inside until she found the plastic bag she’d hidden in there, and gently removed it. The bag contained a separation funnel, a funny looking piece of glassware she’d had to send away for special, and it was the only part of her plan that worried her, because what did a housewife in Lake Woebegotten need with a piece of special chemistry equipment? If anybody got suspicious… but she knew the town police, Harry and Stevie Ray, and they knew her. They’d never peg her for a killer, so she didn’t think they’d dig around too deep. Still, she wished she could have used an eyedropper or something, but apparently chloroform liked to eat plastic.
She was poised to try to use the separation funnel to slurp up the chloroform, though she wasn’t exactly sure how that worked, when she stopped. What was she doing? Why did she need to carefully slurp the stuff up anyway? She wasn’t going to store it. The recipe online said she needed a separation funnel, so she’d bought one from a chemical supply house, but for her purposes, what good was it?
Eileen remembered the old joke about the woman who always cut the ends off her roast before putting it in the oven, until her husband asked why she did that. “I don’t know,” she said, “that’s how my mother taught me. Let me ask her.” So she called her mother, who said, “I don’t know, that’s just how your grandmother taught me to do it. Let’s ask her why.” So they called up the grandmother, who said, “I always cut the end off the roast because my roasting pan was too small to hold the whole thing!” Eileen had made the same mistake, doing something because it’s how she was told to, without thinking about why.
She tossed the separation funnel in the trash can, and stuck a dishtowel down in the bottom of the jar, soaking up the chloroform.
Holding the cloth out at arm’s length, because even from here she could smell it, and knocking herself out wasn’t part of the plan, she opened the door to the garage.
Brent was in there, and as she’d assumed, he was screwing his car again.
The bitch was a cherry red vintage muscle car that Brent called Mustang Sally, and he’d lavished her with attention from the moment a desperate fella with a gambling problem brought her to Brent’s car lot for a quick handful of cash. He’d spent countless hours tinkering with her, buffing her, scavenging pick-and-pulls for slightly-shinier versions of her already perfectly acceptable fixtures and doodads, and at first Eileen hadn’t minded—anything that kept him busy and occupied and out from underfoot during the inevitable hours he was at home instead of at the dealership was fine with her. She first got suspicious the day she found him cleaning the leather upholstery in the back seat while buck naked, but he said it was hot in the garage, and it was, so she’d let it go, and anyway, what was she supposed to think?
She’d only realized what was really going on because Brent was so hopelessly non-tech-savvy, and he didn’t know how to clear his browser history or delete his cookies or otherwise cover his tracks online, so she’d gotten bored one evening while he was out caressing Sally’s undercarriage and started poking around through the history to see what kind of porn he was looking at; she didn’t doubt for a minute that he was looking, she only hoped he didn’t make a mess while doing so, but she didn’t skimp on the hand sanitizer after touching the keyboard just in case.
It hadn’t even looked like porn, at first, just support groups for people who called themselves objectophiles, which apparently meant people who liked to have sex with objects, and not even necessarily woman- or man- or even animal-shaped objects. There was a woman in love with a fire hydrant, and a guy who liked having sex with his specially modified juicer (which just seemed dangerous to Eileen, though maybe the danger made it hotter, that was certainly her experience with Dolph) and links to a whole separate site about people who were in love with their cars, called “AutoErotic Connection,” which was some kind of joke, she gathered. There were pictures, mostly crude drawings, fortunately, but some photographs, too.
Including one of Brent, wearing a cheap plastic Lone Ranger Mask, otherwise buck naked, with his nether regions displayed on Sally’s gleaming hood.
Never one to shrink from a fight, she’d confronted Brent about it, expecting denial, shame, tears, and begging in that approximate order, but instead he’d simply shrugged and said, “I’m a man, Eileen. I masturbate. Been doing it pretty regular since I was thirteen.”
“This isn’t playing with yourself, Brent. There’s another woman, and just because she’s a car doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“The heart knows what it wants, Eileen. If you feel like you need to leave me over this, go with my blessing. The kids are grown and it’s not like we’re spending Saturday nights slow dancing anyway. I like having you here, like how we can lean on each other, but I don’t have a lot of happiness in my life, and I’m not letting you take this away.” And he’d turned his back on her and gone out to the garage and they’d never spoken of it again.
That was back in September, and she’d been plotting his murder ever since. Killing him so soon before Christmas seemed a little cold, but it would spare them false attempts at holiday cheer, and it wasn’t like the twins were coming home, they were too busy going on ski trips with their college friends. In a way, the timing was good. Lots of people got depressed and did themselves in during the holidays, she’d read.
Brent had the trunk open and he was thrusting, having made some modifications to the trunk’s interior to accommodate such peculiar habits, and he was so deep into his groove that he never noticed when she put the chloroform rag over his face. He slumped and fell to the concrete, and she looked down at his naked unconscious body, expecting some twinge of remorse or regret, but all she felt was disgust. Brent spent all his time sitting behind a desk at the dealership, not like Dolph, who had to stay active moving boxes around in the storeroom and such. The difference showed.
She wrapped up the chloroform rag in a bunch of plastic bags to dispose of later, then started the car. Brent never ran the engine inside the garage for more than a few minutes at a time—though she knew he liked to put his privates on the hood while it was vibrating—because he said it was a vintage car with no catalytic converter, which meant the exhaust was about a quarter carbon monoxide, and that stuff could kill you. Apparently modern cars were a lot harder to commit suicide with. Sometimes old things were better.
Eileen got the car running good, purring away—the slut—stuffed some towels along the bottom of the garage door to seal any cracks, then went inside the house and shut the door. Maybe it would look better to put Brent inside the car, but dragging his body across the concrete would have been nearly impossible—he had about 80 pounds on her—and would have scraped him up enough to make even the town policemen suspicious if she’d managed it. No, the towels under the door would make it clear enough the death was intentional, though probably everyone would be polite and rule it an accident. She’d considered faking a suicide note, but Brent wasn’t one to pour out his feelings to anything that didn’t have an engine, so she figured the silent treatment would be more plausible. Everyone knew the dealership wasn’t doing well. Ford got a bailout from the government, but that didn’t really trickle down to the people who sold the cars, and even the Cash for Clunkers program everybody liked so much was a big hassle for the dealers, with the government taking forever to pay up and the paperwork was a nightmare. People might be surprised Brent had taken the coward’s way out, but not too surprised.
Eileen bundled up and went out to run some errands, including a visit to the Post Office to mail some last-minute Christmas gifts and a stop at the library to return some books, making a point of talking to people so she’d stick in their memory if the police asked later, not that she expected them to. She stayed gone about two hours—way longer than the internet said it took to die of carbon monoxide poisoning—then returned home, making a point of pausing by the garage and looking concerned about the sound of a car running inside, just in case one of the neighbors should be watching.
But then the fake look of concern became a real one, because there was a sound other than the engine running. There was a steady rhythmic thumping, like someone pounding on the inside of the garage door. Had a raccoon gotten trapped in there or something? But surely it would have died from the fumes, too…
She went to her car and dug around in the console for the garage door opener—why Brent had even given it to her she’d never know, like he’d let her park in there, ever—and pressed the button.
The door rose, and Brent lurched out, naked, into the icy driveway. He didn’t look good, in fact he looked dead, but he was unaccountably lively for a dead man, and the worst thing about it was, he still had an erection, and that was a sight she could have lived quite contentedly without seeing again.
When he came stumbling toward her, arms out, gray face slack, drool running down his chin, teeth gnashing, little soldier standing at attention, she screamed.
Then she put her car in gear and ran him over.