“I had hoped I wouldn’t have to stand here again,” Vivian said. She turned the key in its slot and unlocked the deadbolt. “Yet, you insisted.”
Christine shrugged insolently. Vivian inserted another key into the doorknob below the deadbolt, turned it, and opened the door.
Vivian flipped the light switch. A lone bulb in its socket on the ceiling revealed a barren room except for several boxes and some furniture covered with transparent dust covers. Windows had been permanently painted shut and the shutters drawn. Vivian stood at the doorway and glanced around the room, then stepped aside to let Christine through. Christine wrinkled her nose at the musty smell.
“The picture is in that closet over there on the top shelf,” Vivian said. She pointed at the closet on one wall. “I don’t see what good it would do you.”
Why I even bother to keep it anywhere in this house is beyond my comprehension, she added as an afterthought.
“It would give me a sense of satisfaction,” Christine said.
“Well, let me know when you’re through. I’ll be downstairs working on my needlepoint project.” Vivian stepped away and went downstairs.
The eerie feeling of the room’s lack of inhabitation overwhelmed Christine. She could see the yellowed walls hadn’t been painted in years. She walked over to a large sofa and with her forefinger and thumb, delicately lifted the dust cover to sneak a peek underneath.
“Yech!” she said in disgust. “What an ugly piece of crap.” She let go of the dust cover and walked around the room. She went to the closet and opened the door, stood on her toes, and felt around the shelf for the portrait.
Unbeknownst to her, within the dark confines of the corner, her gun lay two feet away from the portrait. Her fingertips groped within the dark until they felt the edge of the picture frame. She pushed it around while she tried to get a good grasp of it, thus unwittingly pushed the gun farther aside an inch or two. She finally gripped the frame and dragged it off the shelf. The portrait no longer had glass in front of it and parts of the frame were busted. She held it before her and narrowly scrutinized every facial detail of the woman in the picture. Christine brushed her thumb over the woman’s autograph. A maelstrom of emotions rapidly boiled within her. Before she could stop herself, she excreted a large wad of saliva onto the face of the woman before her.
“Bitch!” Christine said. Her eyes burned with fury and hatred. She shoved the portrait back onto the shelf, closed the closet door with excessive force, left the room, and slammed the door behind her.
“Thanks, Viv,” Christine said as she came down the stairs. “I didn’t mean to slam the door. Sorry about that.”
Vivian nodded, put down the needlepoint canvas, and went up the stairs, keys in hand. Christine sat on the sofa, sipped some raspberry-flavored iced tea, and waited for Vivian to return.
“Well?” Vivian asked when she returned. She sat across from Christine.
“Well what?” Christine said. “I’m not gonna say that she was pretty. After all, I’m the pretty one, especially since I’m younger. Better yet, I’m as gorgeous as can be and it’s true. Hell, everyone knows it, even me.” Christine flashed a cold smile. “As far as I’m concerned, that ancient so-called work of art looks like a grotesquely disfigured doll, as if it had been held over a candle flame. If she were to smile, she’d appear as if she were terrrrribly constipated. Oh, incidentally, with that mouth of hers, and it’s apparent she’s had one too many face-lifts, it’s a wonder she had been able to crack a smile in the first place, let alone her ass.”
“Have you always been this narcissistic?” Vivian asked. “This insolent?”
“Sure. Why not?” Christine said. “I love me, very much so, I might add. I have a tendency to apply ‘me,’ ‘my,’ and ‘mine’ to just about everything I see with my own eyes, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
“Oh, and would you say that everything—” Vivian gestured about the living room with a sweep of her arm, “—you see here with your own eyes is yours? The whole house for that matter?”
“Not yet, but it will be.”
“And, what about me, hmm? What happens to me?” Vivian shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
“I want what’s rightfully mine.”
“And what’s that?”
Christine’s mind momentarily froze.
How do I answer that? Christine thought. What do I say? Now, that is a question I hadn’t been prepared to answer. Just exactly what is rightfully mine?
In an attempt to answer Vivian, Christine felt as if a serious case of writer’s block had come over her and she hated that feeling.
“What’s the matter?” Vivian asked.
Christine gazed at Vivian.
“Cat got your tongue?” Vivian asked.
“No,” Christine said.
“Well, I’d be glad to share all this with you, but it’s not rightfully yours and neither is it mine, either. It had been hers, just as she had left it all those years ago. It’s never been claimed and it’s been paid for.”
“I imagine she continues to pay property tax from her grave.”
“You truly are warped.” Vivian shook her head again with a quiet sigh.
“What? You want me to show the dead old thing an ounce of respect? She’ll never it get from me. Never. Why don’t you tell me about how you came back and got the house? That ought to be interesting to hear.”
“It’s kind of long, but I’ll try to make it short,” Vivian said. “I decided one day to confront the old woman and get it off my chest once and for all. I had even asked Rob’s parents to come with me. Naturally, they didn’t want to.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, about eleven or twelve years ago. I’ve only been here for about seven years now.”
“Why did you wait so long to come back?”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said with a shrug of indifference. She picked up the needlepoint canvas and laid it on her lap. “Time, I guess.” She worked on her needlepoint project as she reiterated about the day she came to confront Rose.
When Vivian had come to the house eleven or twelve years ago, there had been no one around. Vivian did what would have been expected of her. She knocked on the door, rang the bell, and called out Rose’s name. She even went around the side to the back.
To her surprise, when she pulled on the sliding glass door to the sunroom, it was unlocked. She entered and was even more surprised to see that the premises had been vacated and everything was covered with dust. As for how long the place had been vacant, she didn’t know. At first, she wondered what had happened and where Rose had gone, but, as time went by, she no longer cared because she had decided, since the old woman was no longer around, it might as well have been Vivian’s. Apparently, Rose had given it up.
“As a result,” Vivian said, “you can see that the entire property has been renovated. The house’s exterior used to be slate-gray with white trim. Now, it’s all white. The carpeting used to be dark cobalt-blue or something. This carpet here—” Vivian pointed to an area near her feet “—is very nice. I’ve always been partial to taupe.
“I also had new hardwood floors put in the dining room as well as a new backsplash in the kitchen and floor tiles in the bathrooms. Even all the windows have been taken out and replaced with new ones which have a more modern style that I like. Out with the old and in with the new.”
“Weren’t you afraid of her coming back?” Christine asked.
“Believe me, the thought occurred to me many times, long before I even dared move in.”
“Suppose she had come back and found you here?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you. I wouldn’t know how I would’ve reacted back then.”
“What about her death?” Christine asked. “How did you find out about that?”
“I had asked around,” Vivian said. “In fact, the first day I came here, I asked the Weavers next door. It surprised me that they were still around after all this time. They’re still here, believe it or not. Anyway, it’s kind of an interesting story.”
According to the Weavers, some time after midnight, a shrill scream pierced the halls of the Hutchins’s residence. The Weavers said it sounded like it came from Rose. Paramedics had been called and the ambulance came.
Charles Hutchins, the father of Vivian, Blaine and Christine, had been found lifeless at the foot of the stairs. The autopsy results showed that he had been drinking heavily. In addition to a broken neck, he had died of massive head and internal injuries. Rose had said she did not see anything; she had said she heard what sounded like someone falling down the stairs, then a thud. She came out of the master bedroom, saw Charles at the bottom of the stairs, and screamed. Presumably, in his drunkenness he had lost his footing. He had since been buried near Desirée Hutchins’s grave in the Whispering Pines section at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Sometime after that, Rose disposed of most of her belongings. The Weavers saw a large moving truck and several movers who loaded Rose’s furniture and many other paraphernalia into it. Rose told the Weavers that she would be in Europe for a while and didn’t know if or when she would return. She kept in touch with them but not often. Her last letter to them had said that she would be flying with a business associate from London to New York and that she would send them a postcard from New York. Yet, the plane she had been on never made it out of Heathrow.
Mrs. Weaver heard on the news that it had been cold that morning and one of the plane’s landing gears became inoperable during takeoff. Somehow it jammed while being elevated into its compartment and the plane had been forced to land. It skidded off the runway and slammed into a nearby shed. The plane exploded, but there were some survivors. Rose was not one of them.
Mrs. Weaver called and spoke with an airline representative regarding the accident, but had been advised that airline policy did not give out information to individuals who were not immediate family members of the victims. A similar scenario took place when she called a few local hospitals in London and spoke with several medical staff.
A few days after the accident, Mrs. Weaver had listened to a status report on the news. Rose Hutchins, 46, of Los Angeles, California, had been listed as one of the deceased.
“It’s all on record,” Vivian said now. “The information can be found at the local library. Just ask the librarian at the reference desk for the Los Angeles Daily Bulletin dated October 12, 1992.”
“Oh, so her body is not in the grave?” Christine asked.
“No. Just a gravestone marker with her name. It’s a commemorative thing. Symbolic, you know.”
“I would like to see it, though.”
“Oh, speaking of which,” Vivian said, “that’s the one person in particular I was thinking of earlier when I stood out on the veranda having my morning tea. I did all I could not to think of her.”
“You were thinking about her?” Christine asked. “As in willfully thinking about her?”
Vivian shook her head. “She invades my thoughts from time to time, no matter how much I try to quash it.”
“I see. You said Grandma Desirée, and our father, Charles, and your husband, Rob, are buried at Forest Lawn in the Whispering Pines section, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And . . . is her gravestone marker in the same section?”
“No.”
“Where is it then?”
“Slumberland.”
“Ooohh, I like the sound of that.”
“Naturally.”
Rose Hutchins’s three-foot-wide and two-foot-long gravestone marker lay before Christine. The patinaed bronze gleamed in the warm sun. Embossed on the face of the marker were the deceased’s name plus her birth and death dates.
Christine gazed at it while her anger and unbridled hatred fumed within. She looked about the cemetery’s grassy terrain and saw no one around. She squatted on her haunches, opened her handbag, and withdrew a tube of lipstick.
With her task completed, she casually walked away without a backward glance.
An angry inscription crudely scrawled in uppercase letters read:
HERE LIES A BITCH
As afterthoughts, Christine had added several other phrases replete with expletives.