Death in the Family by Carolyn Smith - HTML preview

“Thank you,” I said. “This is perfect.”

“What are you making dear? A quilt?” she was back at the counter now tapping buttons in to the till.

“Yes.” I really didn’t know what they type of thread would be used for, so I just followed her lead.  I paid the 2.99 and left, feeling a little bit ripped off. 2.99 for a roll as thin as this? You’d need a hundred of them to be able to make a quilt. Then I remembered that I only needed one, so it’s ok really. As I stood outside the shop gathering my bearings I heard the clicks of the heavy bolts on the inside. She obviously didn’t want me to come back in having forgotten something or needing something else. She was quite safe. I had what I needed now. I was prepared for Plan B.

As with Tuesday, the rest of the week seemed extremely long and taxing but Saturday morning came eventually as we all knew it must. Mum didn’t come with us to Nana’s this week. Maybe she was still getting over their argument from last week, or maybe she was just tired from working so late last night. We didn’t see her at all that morning. The car ride was quiet with all of us ‘men’ being lost in our own thoughts. When Dad dropped us off on the doorstep and Nana invited him in for a cup of tea he declined, got straight back in the car and left. Now that was strange. I didn’t spend too long deliberating over it though. I was determined to ensure that Nana had something nice and fattening inside her straight away (in case she had been watching what she ate during the week) and so I made her a cup of tea and dug some Mr. Kipling. Cakes out of the cupboard and brought them to her in the living room. She was used to me helping out in the house now so she didn’t question anything I did. I could now roam freely around the house under the pretence of helping with jobs.

So when the time came on Sunday afternoon to put Plan B into action it was almost too easy. I asked Nana if I could polish the furniture in the living room for her. She had no objection, in fact she was delighted at the offer. So I set to work cleaning the side board under the window. This side board was quite close to the living room door, too close for my needs, so as I ‘polished’ it I leant my weight against it and moved it ever so slightly away from the door. I kept doing this until inch by inch it was positioned exactly where I needed it to be. Just far enough so that when Nana fell she wouldn’t be able to grab it for support, but also  close enough that she would hit her head on the corner of it.

After polishing the wooden table and dusting the top of the T.V. I told Nana that the skirting board could do with a bit of a clean. I told her that I would get on with that while she and Karl hung out the washing in the garden. When I was sure that they were both out of the way and busy I knelt down by the living room door and began to inspect the telephone wire which ran along the top of the skirting board. It was kept in place by those little white plastic thingies which you hammer into the wood to keep the wire against the wall. I saw that there were a couple which were not completely secure. I took the thread from my pocket and tied one end of it tightly around one of the plastic things ensuring that when pulled it stayed in place. I measure across the threshold of the doorway so that I would have the exact amount of thread to be pulled tort and reach across to the plastic thingies on the skirting board on wall opposite. I cut the thread with a pair of scissors and left it hanging loose in the door way for now. I wouldn’t be able to attach it until we had all evacuated the living room and Dad and Karl were safely outside. I couldn’t have a repeat performance of Plan A.

Dad arrived about 30 minutes later and he was in a big rush to get back home so he didn’t come in for a cup of tea again. Nana looked quite hurt by this, but Dad said he was running late and needed to stop for petrol on the way home. Karl and I grabbed our bags and left the living room. Nana was stood at the garden gate talking to Dad and Karl went straight out to join them. This was going so well. I kneeled down at the living room door and attached the thread to the wall. If anyone came back I would pretend to be doing up my shoelace. The thread was now a very tight, perfectly placed tripwire. When Nana returned to the living room she would trip, fall and hit her head. Because she was so heavy she would fall harder and the impact would be more severe. The thread wouldn’t be able to withstand the force and would snap meaning that there would be no evidence should anyone suspect foul play. It was fool proof.

I stepped over the wire and walked out to meet everyone at the gate. As we said our goodbyes I could barely look Nana in the eye. I didn’t feel guilty about what I was doing, I felt justified. But I thought she might see deceit in my eyes and know that something was different. As we all piled in to the car and began to drive away my heart began to beat faster.  Watched out of the rear window as Nana stood at the gate and waved. I didn’t wave back. She turned and then as if in slow motion began to walk back into the house. We had turned the corner at the end of the street before her front door had closed. “That’s it,” I thought. “It’s done!”

My mind was racing now, but not with thoughts of shame and guilt, like I had expected, but with excitement. I was so elated. This was it! We would be rich. I could finish school and never have to see those bullies ever again. I let out a deep sigh and felt the weight of all the stress that I didn’t know I had been carrying leave my shoulders.

That’s when Dad’s phone rang.

We hadn’t even pulled in to the petrol station yet. They couldn’t have found her body already. Unless…Maybe the neighbours had heard the crash as she fell. Maybe they heard her scream. Everything happened so quickly. Dad pulled to the side of the road and answered the phone.

“Mum? Mum, calm down,” I heard him say. My head began to swim, I felt very dizzy and faint. ‘Mum?’ that is Nana. Nana is on the phone. Nana can’t be on the phone, she’s dead. A wave of nausea swept over me and I had to get out of the car and stand on the side of the road. I gulped in fresh air, but I couldn’t stay on my feet and I fell to the ground. Dad was out of the car in an instant still talking on the phone but picking me up in his strong grip at the same time.

“We’ll be there in 5 minutes Mum. Just stay where you are and don’t try to move.” He hung up the phone and used both of his hands to steady me. He knelt down and looked into my eyes.

“James? Are you alright? What happened?” His readable face was filled with the lines of worry. He was worried about Nana and now he was also worried about me.

“I’m alright. I think I got car sick,” I said. My mind was starting to clear again now. I had one thing on my mind. The tripwire.

“Is Nana ok?” I asked as we got back in to the car.

“I don’t know. She’s had a fall. We’re going back there right now.” Dad turned the car around in the middle of the road pulling a perfect 3 point turn and sped off back up the road towards Nana’s.

I had one priority. Make sure the trip wire was not intact and not noticeable. So as soon as we pulled up outside the house I was the first out of the car and racing towards Nana’s. Dad mistook this for concern for Nana and shouted after me, “Slow down James. I’m sure she’s fine.”

I threw the front door open and took in the scene. Nana was sitting on the living room floor, her back propped against her comfy corner chair and her legs sprawled out in front of her. She was holding the phone which she must have pulled off the sideboard using the wire.  My eyes immediately glanced down to the doorway and breathed for what felt like the first time since I heard Dad’s phone ring at the side of the road. Panic over. The trip wire had broken just as I had predicted it would and could not be seen at all. I went over to Nana and sat beside her, I took her hand to show concern. The performance had begun.

All of this had taken mere seconds and Dad and Karl came running in behind me. Dad looked visibly shocked as he began asking her questions about what had happened. He helped her to her feet and she winced and let out a yelp as she tried to put weight on her right foot. He sat her on the settee with her foot propped up with cushions. While he did this Karl and I were told to put the kettle on and make Nana a cup of tea, which we did. Karl didn’t even complain, he must have worried about Nana.

Dad had called out the doctor who came quite quickly (maybe due to Nana’s age, although she’s not that old really). I remember when I had appendicitis when I was ten we had to wait for hours for the doctor to come to us. I was in agony and kept throwing up in a bucket. When he finally did arrive I was rushed to hospital so they could remove my appendix before they exploded. I thought that my exploding appendix which could kill a person were more important than Nana’s sprained ankle and I felt bitter towards the doctor for not recognizing this. How could he come so quickly to tend to Nana and yet leave me writhing in agony?

 Nana’s ankle was wrapped up in a bandage and she was told not to put any weight on it for a couple of weeks. Dad said that seeing as how Nana was so poorly (poorly? It’s a sprained ankle!), we weren’t allowed to come and see her for a while until she felt better. Disaster! 

When we left Nana she looked perfectly fine to me, sitting on the couch with her feet up, drinking tea and watching telly, without a care in the world. I had been foiled again and now as I thought of her sitting there I was starting to be filled with a new emotion that I hadn’t felt before. Resentment. I resented the fact that she was still alive and I had to continue going to that school with those people and Mum had to work double shifts and we had to eat Dad’s cooking. I resented even more that she would be here for two weeks enjoying being lazy while we slave away at our prospective jobs. But most of all I resented that she had defeated me twice.

Well she wouldn’t be so lucky next time. Next time I would make sure that there was no way she could escape the death that I now believed she totally deserved.

At home I sat upstairs in bedroom inwardly fuming. I could not face sitting downstairs with Mum and Dad listening to them expressing their anxiety for Nana. She was fine! What were they getting in such a tizz about? As I had predicted almost a month ago now, Nana was not the dying type. She would be around for a long time unless I could find a way to do her in properly. My mind wandered back to the list of possible ways to commit murder which had been saved on my computer. Shooting, stabbing and car accident. It would be true to say that any one of them would indeed be extremely effective, but the flaws I originally identified still hold true as well. I could never get away with a murder like that. It is essential that it look like an accident. I’m just going to have to be even more devious and cunning than I have been thus far.  With renewed determination and vigour I set my mind to creating Plan C.

It was as I was brushing my teeth getting ready for bed one night later in the week when the inspiration hit me full in the face. I had been routing around in our bathroom cabinet looking for dental floss. It was on the top shelf at the back behind all number of bottles in all shapes and sizes containing a large variety of prescription medications. It occurred to me that old people are being medicated for just about everything under the sun. Just imagine therefore how many medicines Nana would have stashed away in her bathroom cabinet. I could easily create a deadly concoction which she would then unwittingly feed to herself. Sheer brilliance.

This would of course mean that I would have to wait until I could get in to her bathroom to her medicine cabinet, which I wouldn’t be able to do for at least another week or so yet because of Nana’s twisted ankle.

As it happened I wouldn’t have been going to Nana’s this weekend anyway. Mum had been given the weekend off from work and so, as I anticipated, we were all called upon to spend some time together as a family. It actually wasn’t so bad this time. We played ‘Space Crusaders’ which is an old board game Karl had received for his 7^th Birthday from Aunty Margery, not long before she passed away. Seeing as how Karl was 7 and I was only 6, we were too young to play it. It was put away in a cupboard in Mum and Dad’s room where it gathered dust and hadn’t been brought out since. Dad found it when clearing out the cupboard during spring cleaning on Saturday.

One of the other reasons Karl and I usually try to find reasons to get out of family time is because, apart from chats and board games, it also involves a ‘good tidy up’. I hate tidying up and cleaning. It’s a woman’s job. I know men who say such things are held in rather poor disregard, but it’s true. Women are better at it. Men fix things and invent things and women clean things and cook things. That’s the way of the world. I could never say this to my mum of course. I would be put on chore duties for the rest of my life, even when I’ve grown up and got married, Mum would be around my house all the time making sure my wife wasn’t lifting a finger to help me with the house work. Anyway, this particular Saturday there was no getting away from it. We were each designated a room and we were not allowed to leave it until it was pristine. I opted for the bathroom. It is true that I would have to clean the dreaded toilet, but it was worth it t o be left alone for a few hours with the medicine cabinet.

Our cabinet consisted of Paracetamol, Claratyn (for hay fever), Zantac (for indigestion and heart burn) and something with an unpronounceable name which were sleeping tablets. Mum would take the occasional sleeping tablet when she had a migraine, which was not very often. I wondered how lethal a small dose of each of those all mixed together would be. I had no way of finding out of course. I could hardly test it out on anybody. If I went down this route with Nana I would just have to hope for the best. I did notice however that all the tablets looked different. They were different colours, shapes and sizes. Putting the wrong pills in the wrong bottles wouldn’t work. It would take a very long time for an overdose to occur and what about the side effects? The doctor who is so quick to respond to Nana’s every whim would identify the problem immediately and then fix it. Nana would certainly know that someone had been messing with her pills. For Plan C to work I would need to mix the pills in with her food or something. I’d have to work on this later.

“James are you finished?” Mum called up from downstairs. Finished? I’d hardly started.

“Nearly,” I shouted back picking up the cloth and beginning to give the sink a wipe. It only took me 40 minutes in the end to leave the bathroom at a standard which would meet Mum’s expectations. Once we were all finished we sat around our newly polished dining table and set up the game. It took almost 3 hours to set up, what with all the tiny pieces which needed to be popped out of their plastic holders and placed in various places around the board. There were also tiny cards which needed to be distributed to various sections of the massive game board. After we had set it up we were all a bit tired so we sat in front of the telly and put an a DVD. Mum and Dad let me and Karl pick one so we chose one with Bruce Willis. He always makes films which are guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat and are action packed.

We played the board game on Sunday and it really did take the whole day to play, but wasn’t the least bit boring. At least I didn’t think so. Karl has a low attention span (probably due to all the television he watches) and so he struggled a bit. Apart from cleaning the toilet, it was a very pleasant way to spend the weekend I thought. However, then we had to pack the game away. That took almost as long as it did to set the damn thing up in the first place. Clearly this isn’t the kind of game you play on a whim like Ludo, you have to be prepared in order to play this game, bring in food supplies and stuff.

On Monday after school I was the first person home so I went to the medicine cabinet and brought two of each tablet back to the kitchen. I was experimenting to see which, if any, could be smashed up into a powder easily. As it happens, none of them were easy to smash up. I used the flat side of a knife (as I have seen people do on television countless times) placed over the top side of a tablet and then I pressed down with all my might. Some broke up in to smaller pieces which then needed to be ground down with the same amount of force on each in turn; others pinged out from under the knife and ended up halfway across the kitchen. It took a few attempts but I learned that the knife needed not to be square on top of the tablet, but actually at a diagonal angle with part of the knife touching the counter top. Once I had this figured out I was able to crush up the tablets quite quickly and effectively.  I decided everything would run much more smoothly next weekend if I took the tablets with me pre-crushed. Then there was no chance of me getting caught crushing them at Nana’s. As good a liar as I had now become, I don’t think that even I would be able to lie my way out of that one.  

To avoid detection at home I made sure I got the early bus home every day that week and spent the first 15 minutes, before anyone else came home crushing up tablets and collecting the powder in a little measuring cup (the kind for administering medicine) before transferring it into a plastic sandwich bag with a ziplock top. By the end of the fourth day I had quite a sizable amount. But would it be enough? There was only one way I was going to find out. Dad came home early on the fifth day (Friday) when I was just making a little extra to be on the safe side. I had actually just finished transferring the powder into my ziplock bag when he walked through the door. I shoved the bag quickly into my pocket and made a poor attempt at covering up the mess I’d made on the counter with a tea towel.  Dad looked at me suspiciously, probably because I looked like I had been doing something…questionable.

“What are you doing?” He asked his eyes flicking between the tea towel and me.

“Nothing,” I snapped a little too quickly.

“Really?” Dad said his left eyebrow raising, a clear sign that he did not like being spoken to like that.

“Sorry,” I said, again too quick to be natural. I tried to have a word with myself to calm myself down and take it easy. Say the right thing and he’ll walk away I was thinking when he said, “Ok. My hands are sweaty; pass me that tea towel will you?”

My fingers involuntarily clenched around the tea towel. “What? This one?”

“Yes please, if it isn’t too much trouble. I can come and get it from right there next to you if it is going to put you out,” Ah father! Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. 

“No. Here you go,” and I threw it at him, deliberately missing by a mile so that he would have to bend down and pick it up from the floor. As soon as he moved my hand was on a sponge in the sink which I brought up swiftly to the counter top and in one swipe wiped off the remaining powder before dropping the sponge back in to the sink, all in the blink of an eye before Dad had returned from the floor with the tea towel. I wiped a trickle of sweat from my brow as it threatened to run directly in to my eye. This murder lark is not easy. I do not know how serial killers manage to do it over and over again without getting caught. I have had two unsuccessful attempts on a person’s life and I think I’m going to go mad with nerves.

“Thanks. Next time why don’t you just drop it at your feet and I’ll come and kiss them for you while I pick it up,” he said before throwing the tea towel on the table and storming out in a huff. I nonchalantly walked out after him and walked up the stairs slowly, covering my pocket with one hand so that the bag of powder wouldn’t fall out. I hid the bag under my mattress and got changed out of my school uniform and into something infinitely more comfortable, namely jeans and a baggy t-shirt.  Then I went downstairs to join Dad in front of the television. This is where I stayed until I could no longer keep my eyes open, so I took myself off to bed.

After all that planning and preparation I almost forgot my bag of powder the next morning. Dad and Karl had to wait in the car while I ran upstairs to get ‘my book to read at Nana’s.’ I shoved it into by bag and shouted “Bye” to Mum before racing back out of the house again. Once in the car Dad had a little talk with Karl and I.

“Nana still isn’t too good on her feet,” he explained.  “I’m relying on the pair of you to look after her this weekend. Don’t let he go running around after you, alright?”

“Ok, Dad. I never do anyway,” I said defensively.

“I know you’ve been helping her out a lot more around the house James and that’s great. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. She can’t stand up for too long. Ok?”

“Yeah I know,” Karl said. He was quite defensive too. I don’t think he liked being told what to do, especially when it involved helping with house work.

“Good.”

We pulled up outside the house not long after. Nana was not stood in the doorway to greet us like usual. As much as I knew this was going to be the case and I knew it was my fault, it was still disconcerting. Karl went straight in, sat on his favourite chair and put on the television. Some things never change. Dad put on the kettle and made the first cup of tea, which Nana accepted thankfully. I was reminded at this point about how much tea Nana actually drinks and I knew that this would be the way I could administer the powder to her, in her tea. I could do it bit by bit over the course of the weekend, every cup of tea she drinks could be laced with a mixture if drugs from our bathroom cabinet. Excellent.

Dad only stayed for the duration of his cup of tea as usual and then headed off back home. While they were saying goodbye I noticed that Nana seemed to have put on even more weight over the last two weeks, if that is even possible. I guess with the lack of movement because of her ankle she had no way of burning it off.

As sson as Dad had left I took my opportunity.

“Would you like another cup of tea Nana?” I asked innocently, patting my pocket and realizing that the bag wasn’t in there. I had left it in my bag which was in the doorway of the living room.

“Ooh, yes please James. That’s kind of you.” She smiled.

“Me too,” said Karl without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Ok, I’ll just take my bag upstairs out of the way and then I’ll put the kettle on.”

I picked up my bag from where it lay and ran up the stairs taking them two at a time until I was in the bedroom that Karl and I shared here at Nana’s. I threw the bag on to my bed and rummaged for the bag, being careful not to be too rough incase it split open and the powder went everywhere spilling over the contents of my bag and ruining yet another chance to get my hands on that illusive money.

Once back in the kitchen I laid out three mugs on the counter while I waited for the kettle to boil. Two of the mugs were of the same green and black swirl design. The other was a white mug which matched no other crockery in the kitchen. Nana would be given the white mug. I poured in the tea and added a splash of milk to each, except Nana’s. She doesn’t take milk she has her tea black, which I think is bitter and disgusting. I took the bag out of my pocket and shook it so that its powdery contents fell to the bottom and settled evenly. I used the tea spoon to gather a tiny amount on the end of the spoon. I didn’t want to overdo it all in one go. I couldn’t have Nana keeling over and dying right now with Karl and I in the house. I also had no idea how strong a concoction this was that I had made. I put the powdery spoon in the black tea and gave it a stir. After a few seconds the powder floated back to the top of the tea and settled in the middle of the mug. I stirred it again and watched in horror as it floated once again to the surface. I did notice that there was a little less of it this time though. I stirred for a third time, making the strokes large and continuous. I stirred frantically for what must have been 30 seconds. When the tea had finally stopped spinning I could see that there was no more powder floating in clumps on the top. Thank God. I put the three mugs on the tray and carried them into the living room.

I handed Nana hers first, I didn’t want to look at her as she drank it. I might have been the mastermind behind these various ‘accidents’ that Nana kept having recently, but I always tried to arrange that I wouldn’t actually be there to see it. Watching as someone died was not the same in my eyes as just orchestrating it and then letting the event take place. This final attempt was going to mean that I was up close and personal as it played out. Karl as well of course, but he was blissfully unaware of any of it. I passed Karl his tea and then deliberately sat with my back to Nana. I could hear her take every sip. I had never realized before what a noisy tea drinker she was. She was a slurper, how had I never noticed this before? This is exactly the type of thing that gets on my nerves. It’s so common. I inwardly tutted and heaved a sigh as I sat there listening to the slurp, gulp, pause, slurp, gulp, pause, slurp taking place behind me. I suppose the one good thing to come from it was that she never suspected that anything was in her tea. She couldn’t taste any difference, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so eager to gulp it down. How did she not burn the roof of her mouth when drinking tea like this? I always had to blow on mine and wait for it to cool somewhat before I could even attempt a sip. Not Nana though. She was straight in there asbestos mouth and all.

I made sure that I made every single one of Nana’s cups of tea over the course of the weekend. Even if Karl had offered, which he didn’t, I would have taken over the duty instead. I kept count too of how many cups of tea she had. She had no less than 18 cups of tea in two days. 18! Each one had the tip of a tea spoon dipped into the powder in my bag. As far as I could see it wasn’t having much of an effect on her. She did fall asleep in front of the T.V for a while during her favourite Saturday night program. I put this down to the sleeping tablets mixed with the hay fever tablets. She wasn’t happy because she missed pretty much the whole thing. At one point on the Sunday she said that her ankle was feeling much better and she attempted to put some washing on. She was still a little w