This Bird’s Gonna Fly

“They’re at it again,” Dana Dunaway says to her husband, Matt.

Matt cocks his ear toward the kitchen window.

“They’re probably arguing about him spending too much time at his plastic surgery practice,” Matt comments.

“Maybe he told her she needs some work done,” Dana jokes.

“She doesn’t.”

“You’re not supposed to notice.”

“And you have no reason to be jealous,” Matt counters. “Man, she’s got some set of lungs.”

“And a salty vocabulary,” Dana adds.

“Not everybody’s as perfect for one another as us. You think we should intervene?”

“It might not look good for a detective to allow a donnybrook to happen right under his nose, and your presence might calm them down.”

Matt walks out the front porch. A fit thirty-five and a hulking and rugged six-foot-four inches, one resolute stare from Matt’s dark eyes is usually enough to end any altercation.

With a receding hairline, bug eyes, and a prominent nose, nerdy Clement Doleman is five and a half feet tall and weighs maybe 140 pounds while holding an anvil. Despite having the personality of a harpy, his wife Daria is an intoxicating beauty, with mesmerizing ice-blue eyes and a compact and fit frame, topped off with wavy, waist-length hair.

Clement’s shoulders slump with embarrassment when he notices Matt is watching them. He walks away from Daria as she’s yelling, “If you were half the man my first husband was, we wouldn't be having the troubles we're having! And another thing!...”

“What’s this all about?" Matt asks.

“She says she needs more space. Based on how she’s been acting lately, I’m more than happy to give it to her.”

The two men glance at Daria, standing with her hands on her hips, boring a hole in the back of her husband’s head with her cold stare.

Clement pulls Matt out of earshot of his wife.

“I’ve got something important to tell you. If I die, Daria did it.”

“Aw, come on. I see the way she looks at you. She’s crazy about you.”

Clement glances at Daria as she paws at the ground near the shed with a hoe. The wooden shed, surrounded by yellow, white, and red roses, serves as Daria’s studio, where she creates abstract paintings and unwinds from her stressful job as a bank loan officer. No one, including Clement, is allowed inside the shed.

“She’s not crazy about me – she’s just plain crazy. You’ve heard us. We’ve been fighting a lot lately. I never thought I’d be afraid of a woman barely five feet tall.”

The pair watch Daria push a wheelbarrow toward the garage. Clement lets out a sigh of relief when she disappears from view.

“I heard her talking to herself the other day while she was gardening. She laughed and said, ‘This bird’s gonna fly. I think that means she’s leaving me.”

“You’ve only been married four years,” Matt notes. “Maybe you should try counseling.”

“She says it’s beneath her and that it didn’t help her first marriage. I’m fifty-five. She’s fifty. I don’t want to spend my senior years looking for love like some naive teenager.”

Dana waves at Matt. “C’mon, hon. We’re going to be late.”

“Lunch with the in-laws,” Matt says. “We all have our crosses to bear. Try and relax, Clem, and talk to her.”

Matt passes Daria as he heads back to his house. She gives him a long, creepy look, smiling as if she has the upper hand.

“You feeling all right, Daria?”

“This bird’s gonna fly,” she replies, smirking.

Matt takes note of the silver container in the wheelbarrow.

“Manure?”

“Lye,” Daria answers, moving on.

Clement takes the container out of the wheelbarrow, setting it down next to the shed.

“Can’t we at least try and work things out?”

“There’s nothing I’d like more,” Daria replies. “I tell you what. I’ll make your favorite dinner tonight. We’ll open up a bottle of wine and talk.”

Dana leaves the pizzeria a few days later with a Mexican-style pie, her favorite guilty pleasure dinner.

A train barrels past the nearby train station heading southbound for Wilkes-Barre. Dana looks up as it speeds past, blowing discarded circulars and flyers in the air.

Taking a glimpse at the platform, she sees Daria sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee.

It’s only three o’clock. Dana wonders what Daria is doing home so early. She usually doesn’t get home from her job at the bank until five o’clock or later.

“I saw Daria at the train station this afternoon,” Dana says to Matt in between bites of pizza.

“I thought she was at the bank in the afternoon?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking. I know she doesn’t want to spend time with Clement, but he’s at work in the afternoon, too. So why not relax at home? She’s up to something.”

Matt scoffs. “I recognize that tone of voice. A train station is too public a place to carry on an affair.”

“It’s something more serious than that,” Dana answers. “It’s the unsettling looks she gives me when I say hello. It’s that shed she says she paints in that nobody’s allowed in. So, when I came home today, I googled her.”

Matt groans.

“Did you know her records only go back ten years? Addresses, work history, voter registration, social security, everything.”

Matt’s brow crinkles. “What about her birth certificate?”

“Nada. And I found it interesting that about the same time a Daria Maxell died in Van Nuys, California, one popped up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Maxwell is Daria’s maiden name. Or at least that’s what she told Clement.”

“Did you call Clarice and ask for her help?

“…We might have spoken…”

“She works for the police, not for you,” Matt scolds.

Dana reaches across the table, grabbing one of his hands with both of her own. A one-time gymnast, the inquisitive brunette still has an athletic figure and a firm grip.

“Don’t you think it’s suspicious?”

“Maybe she’s a ghostwriter on the side.”

“She’d brag about it if she was. The only people who use fake names are criminals, someone in witness protection, or some Gen X kid on Facebook.”

“I need a motive or proof Daria’s a bad actor in order to go poking around in her real or imagined life.”

Dana lets out a dissatisfied grunt.

“Ah, that’s the no sex for you, grunt. I’ll speak with Clem about her past.”

“That’s another thing,” Dana says. “I haven’t seen him since they had that big blowout in their backyard four days ago.”

Dana crouches behind the tall bushes that divide the two yards.

“So, you want proof, Matt? I’ll bet it’s in that shed.”

Dana crawls along the property line until she reaches the point where she can sneak behind the shed. She tries to peek inside but is foiled by the black curtains covering all the windows. She also notices that the shed has an alarm system.

“Have to try something else,” she says.

Dana ducks for cover behind a tree when Daria comes outside with a garbage bag.

Dana waits until the lights go out upstairs before tiptoeing to the garbage can. Quietly prying off the lid, she takes out the bag and opens it.

She quickly realizes that blindly reaching into a garbage bag is a bad idea when she latches onto a mound of overused kitty litter. Resisting the urge to gag, she reaches in again, pulling out an empty can of Coca-Cola.

Matt gazes indifferently at the can of soda.

“I should arrest you.”

“For what? Theft of trash?” Dana counters. “Grabbing a handful of kitty crap is punishment enough.”

“I think you’ve been watching too many BBC crime stories.”

“Just humor me. Call one of your F.B.I. buddies and have the can tested for fingerprints,” Dana says.

“The last time you had a hunch…”

Dana cuts him off. “Yeah, yeah. I thought I saw Billy Bradshaw dumping a body in a dumpster outside of Wendy’s.”

“It turned out to be a mannequin. And the time before that when you insisted the Bennetts were selling drugs?”

“There were a lot of people going in and out of their place. Besides, who sells Amway from their house anymore? I’m telling you, Matt, this time it’s different. You’ll see.”

Clarice Hopkins, the precinct's administrative assistant, tracks Matt down in the breakroom as he lifts a vile cup of burnt coffee to his lips.

“That can you sent out with Daria Doleman’s prints? It came back hot,” she says. “The prints actually belong to Lucinda Tennyson, formerly Lucinda Polk. Follow me, I’ve got her record up on the screen at my desk. It makes for surreal reading.”

The lithe redhead’s freckles seem to dance with glee as she points at the screen.

“I remember this case,” Matt says, feeling the adrenalin coursing through his veins.

“Happened in Arizona,” Clarice replies. “I think it’s the dry heat. It breeds a special kind of psycho.”

“She’s still on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list.”

“Which means you’re living next door to a professional nut job.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“You can ask her when you slap the cuffs on her,” Clarice replies.

As Matt and half a dozen police officers speed to Daria’s house, Matt wonders what motivated her to kill her family…

Lucinda Tennyson closes the front door, leaning against it as if hoping to keep the outside world from getting in.

She remembers when she was Elly Mae Fingleheimer, living in Poca Fork, West Virginia. She was so dirt poor that he wore shoe boxes for shoes. Her field-hand father was seldom around, and when he was, he was drunk and abusive. He also took the two hundred dollars she’d saved from working at the Piggly Wiggly. That’s when Elly Mae honed her interest in poisons. A few months later, her father disappeared, never to be heard from again. At eighteen, Elly Mae legally changed her name to Lucinda Polk. But she couldn’t alter her desire to be rich, and the men she met with money were as abusive as her father.

The mansion she lives in with her husband and two children is a far cry from the shotgun shack with no electricity and an outhouse that she grew up in. It has two dozen rooms, including a library, game room, theater, marble fireplaces, and a Tiffany skylight.

Lucinda knows her job as an accountant for URK Software will end when one of her colleagues looks closely at her books. But between the $50,000 she’s embezzled from work and the money her husband’s saved as a criminal defense attorney, she’ll live extravagantly for the next five or six years.

Lucinda’s two children, four-year-old Myrtle and five-year-old Steinway rush into her arms. She wants to push them away and brush off the scent of grass and bubble gum, but pretending to be warmhearted and playing the dutiful career woman, wife, and mother is worth it until she can open the safe, strip it of valuables, and leave.

Her husband, Roderick Montague Tennyson II, pecks her on the cheek. Scrawny and pasty with a chronic limp from childhood polio, Roderick is a devout Catholic and expects Lucinda to be the same.

“We’re having lamb tonight,” he says, happily rubbing his hands together. “Then we’ll go to mass.”

Lucinda barely controls her urge to stamp her feet in protest.

“Again? We’re in church three times a week!”

“We’re in the service of the Lord.”

“How about you service your wife instead?”

“Don’t be vulgar, Lucinda. Control yourself.”

“Control myself? That’s all I do. And when I’m not stifling my emotions and desires, you are. I’m sorry, Roddy, but a monk would laugh at having sex only once every three months.”

“The landscaper doesn’t keep you busy enough?”

Lucinda backs away. “That’s a lie!”

“I’ve got pictures.”

“You had me followed? And you call yourself a Christian!”

“So do you, my dear, so do you,” Roderick replies. “You can either stay married to me, attend all the boring church functions you hate, or you can go out on your own. But that will be after I tell the police how much money you’ve stolen from URK Software.”

Lucinda lets out an exasperated yelp.

“I never said I didn’t love you.”

“No, but you’ve shown it. But I’m willing to keep pretending we’re happy little millionaires for the sake of our image. The Lord frowns upon disharmony and sends divorced couples to hell, and he blesses thriving families. You want to go to heaven or hell, Lucinda?”

“…Either way is hell…” Lucinda mutters.

Lucinda sends the maid home early. She gives her extra money and tells her to take the next two weeks off since the family will be going to Aruba.

In an effort to show good faith, Lucinda says she’ll handle serving dinner herself.

She makes sure to give her family extra Béarnaise sauce, sacrificing her portion.

Roderick starts to choke first. He clutches at his throat, foaming at the mouth, his eyes bulging as the poison rips through his intestines.

“…Damn you…” are his final words as he pitches forward into his mashed potatoes.

“Such language for a pious man,” Lucinda prods. “Sorry, Roddy. This bird’s gonna fly.”

The boy is next. Steinway wails and screams like the spoiled brat he is. Jumping up from the table, he runs around the dining room without knowing where he’s going until his heart stops.

“Play on, Steinway,” Lucinda comments as she watches her son’s body twitch.

Lucinda has one regret, and that’s killing her daughter. Sticking her with her mother-in-law’s archaic name wasn’t bad enough. Myrtle was forgotten by her father in favor of Steinway. He only paid attention to her when she was dressed up like a doll for mass.

Myrtle looks up at her mother with dewy, anxious eyes.

“Am I gonna die too, Momma?”

“I’m afraid so, Myrtle.”

“You could have killed them and spared me. I thought you loved me.”

“I do, dear. That’s why I’m keeping you from having to live a cruel, loveless existence like I did.”

Lucinda cancels all deliveries and boosts the air conditioning to slow down the decomposition of her family’s bodies. She leaves the lights on to make it look like her happy family is at home, and then she empties the safe.

Dragging the bodies into the library, she places crosses in their hands.

Lucinda turns on the radio, finding a station that plays religious hymns.

As she leaves, her bag filled with cash, Lucinda considers calling herself Daria Maxwell…

“No one’s home,” Matt declares after he and the officers search the Doleman’s house. “I’m surprised we haven’t found Clement. Lucinda Tennyson put her victims on display.”

“Maybe she’s changed her way uh doin' thangs,” Officer Garth Houston drawls.

Matt dials Clarice. “Can you check the Doleman’s bank account? I bet it’s empty.”

“I’m not taking that bet because I already did it,” Clarice replies. “A friend at the bank told me she was fired shortly after she transferred $300,000 from a joint account into a private account in her name.”

“That’s legal. Why was she fired?”

“His signature looked hinky, and she got greedy. She not only transferred her and Clement’s money, she stole seventy thousand from the bank.”

“So that’s why she pretends to go to work every day and ends up sitting at the train station. She doesn’t want Clement to know she’s not working. Thanks, Clarice.”

Matt looks out the dining room window at the shed.

“…Oh, my god…”

Their eyes watering, Matt and the police officers cover their noses as they enter the shed.

A loud, grating alarm goes off.

“Oh, oh. We’re in a peck’a trouble,” Officer Houston comments.

“The alarm company will call the police. And guess what, Garth, we’re already here.”

Exasperated, Matt yanks the alarm box off the wall, tossing it outside.

On the walls are portraits of Roderick, Steinway, and Myrtle Tennyson. One wall features a lurid recreation of the family sitting at the kitchen table, smiling as they eat their last meal.

A half-finished painting of Clement sits on an easel.

“Smells bad enough in here to gag a maggot,” Officer Houston says as the team tears up the floor. “What do you reckon it is?”

“A combination of lye and Clement Doleman.”

Matt grimaces as Clement’s body is carried out of the shed.

“I should have listened to him more closely. He told me Daria was going to kill him.”

“It’s ain’t your fault,” Officer Houston says. “He should have high-tailed it if he knew she was fixin’ to do him in.”

Matt’s ringtone, a hair-raising scream taken from Spooky Tooth’s “Dream Me A Mountain,” sounds off.

“What fresh hell is this?” Matt laments, answering the phone.

“…Matt?.. It’s Dana…”

“I’m kinda busy, Dana.”

“I thought you would want to know I saw Daria at the train station again about an hour ago.”

“What? Where are you now?” Matt asks.

“Coming home.”

“Good. Keep coming.”

“You sound tense. What’s up?”

“Let’s just say I owe you an apology.”

Matt hustles out of his car so quickly that he forgets to shut the door.

Dana is standing on the platform.

Breathless, Matt says, “I thought you were going home?”

“And miss whatever you’ve got in store for Daria? By the way, what did she do?”

“Her body count is up to at least four,” Matt replies, looking around the station. “Well, where is she?”

“She got on the train this time. She’s gone.”