The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating, J C Laird [best books to read for success txt] 📗

Stanley pushed back his chair and stood. Suddenly he grunted and plopped back down in his chair, leaned forward, and grimaced.

Viola turned, feigning concerned surprise. “What’s wrong, you okay, hon?”

“Just a cramp, musta ate too much too fast.” He tried rising again only to fall back heavily with a groan, almost doubling over. “Jesus, it hurts. My guts are on fire.”

“Anything I can get you, baby?” she cooed, smiling. Stanley seemed oblivious to her tone. Another minute passed as he rocked and groaned in his chair. “Maybe you should go and lay down for a while,” she suggested.

He groaned loudly before hissing through clenched teeth, “I don’t think I can get up; everythin’s a little numb, and my heart is racing like a jackhammer.” In between his back and forth rocking, Stanley managed to get his cell phone out of his pocket and toss it on the table. “You’d better run down the driveway and call me an ambulance; somethin’s really wrong.”

“Okay, Stan, I’ll be right back,” she said, scooping up the phone and hurrying out of the kitchen. Viola slowed and walked leisurely into the living room, throwing the phone onto a chair before falling onto the sofa and putting her feet up on the coffee table. Waiting. Long minutes passed while the groaning and moaning from the kitchen grew louder. Finally, there was a large crash as Stan the Man fell to the floor, taking the table with him. Viola listened to the patter of his feet on the linoleum as he convulsed the last seconds of his life away. When silence finally ruled the house, she waited another five minutes before returning to the kitchen.

Viola rose and began edging back towards the kitchen slowly. Her teeth clenched, lips a thin, nervous line of consternation, she was no longer smiling as the enormity of her actions confronted her full force. Turning through the open doorway, she faced the irrevocable results of her deed. The small kitchen table had overturned, pulled over by the death throes of her dying husband, strewing the remaining items of their dinner on the floor. Stanley was lying on his back like a beached whale amidst the clutter, his face frozen in a rictus of death, bulging white eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, mouth wide in a silent scream of agony, milky froth pooled and cooling by his head on the floor from his poisoned body and draining mouth.

Viola staggered back a step, a hand unconsciously flying to her mouth in revulsion, and grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself before sitting down heavily. For several minutes she struggled to get her breathing under control. You can do this, she mentally screamed at herself. You’ve got this all planned out. Just stick with the plan! The ticking of the cheap, battery-operated clock on the kitchen wall, loud in the surrounding silence, helped slow her thudding heart. Nervous energy soon had her out of her chair.

First, she covered Stanley’s face with a dishtowel secured by duct tape from the junk drawer in the utility room. It was horrible to look at his face, now frozen in its ghastly death mask. Finished, she righted the table, grabbed his arms, and began tugging, pulling, and dragging his dead weight through the house, out the front door, and down the steps. Exhausted from the effort, Viola had to stop and rest as the surrounding twilight slid into darkness. She finished dragging him to his truck before being forced to rest again.

She would have preferred putting Stanley in the bed of the pickup, but there was no way she’d be able to hoist his body high enough to get it in. So, grabbing him under the arms and summoning all her adrenaline-fueled strength, she managed to lift him high enough to get his fat ass to rest on the passenger side running board. Going to the driver’s side, she reached across, grabbed his arms, and pulled and yanked at his body until it was inside the cab far enough to get the door closed. Viola grimaced as she accomplished the distasteful job of rummaging through his pants pockets to find his keys. She pushed him with her feet into a contorted sitting position, so the body wasn’t blocking the pedals or gearshift, fired up the truck and headed down the driveway.

In the beginning, before he had morphed into his curmudgeonly state, Stanley had taken her fishing several times at a secluded, deep spring-fed lake farther up in the Ozark foothills. It was another four miles past their cabin along the dirt road. Stanley had kept a small wooden rowboat there, now rotting at the bottom of the lake. He never knew if the lake was on private or public property, but you could get fairly close to the bank with a vehicle. It had been a long time since Viola had been there; she hoped she didn’t miss it in the darkness with only the truck’s headlights to guide her.

She found the lake fifteen minutes later and the spot she was looking for in another ten. She pulled the truck near the edge to double-check the location. The bank was about 20-feet above the lake’s surface, its rock-strewn slope angling down at a 45-degree angle towards the deep, cold, and silent depths. She backed the truck up to the dirt roadway, about 75-yards distant, calculating the path of travel through the trees and the point at which she would have to exit the vehicle. At the last second, she remembered to remove the dishtowel from Stanley’s face and throw his cell phone on the seat.

Viola took a deep breath, said a silent prayer, and gunned the truck forward. The speedometer read 35 when she opened the door and jumped. A second later the truck cleared the edge, went airborne, and splashed down several feet beyond the lake’s edge. Viola rolled on the leaf-covered ground, missed the surrounding trees, stopping short of the drop. She stood and took inventory. Nothing seemed broken, although it felt as if she might have strained her bad knee and wrenched her shoulder when she landed. She limped to the bank's edge and watched the truck, still illuminated by its head and taillights, drift farther out into the lake, propelled by waning momentum. She held her breath and watched it fill and sink, its lights growing dimmer as it submerged. It reminded Viola of a diving submarine she had seen in a war movie on TV. She finally relaxed and grinned into the darkness. “Bye-bye, Stanley. I’m glad you enjoyed your pudding. You fat pig.” She turned and began her four-mile walk back to the trailer.

Viola was exhausted and lapsed into a deep but fitful sleep when she finally fell into bed almost two hours later. Upon rising the next morning, still tired and unrefreshed, she cleaned the kitchen and began a search for Stanley’s hidden stash of “emergency” money. It took most of the day, but she eventually discovered his hiding place: the bottom of a coffee can of nails in the storage shed out back of the cabin. She counted several rubber-banded wads of bills: a little over $7,000. “You son-of-a-bitch, Stan. Emergency fund, my ass. You saving up to run out on me, wasn’t you?” she asked in the rising heat of the shed.

But this was the unexpected, last piece of the puzzle completing her plan of escape. It was now Monday. She’d relax on Tuesday and putter around in her garden. Then on Wednesday, she’d flag down the postman, asking for his help because her husband was missing—last seen driving down the road towards Toccoa. She’d make the necessary missing person police report, of course, praying they wouldn’t drag the lake for any reason. If they did and found Stanley and the truck, she hoped they didn’t do an autopsy and find evidence of the aconite poisoning. Odds were on her side; the area around Toccoa in the Ozark Mountains wasn’t exactly a high crime area. She’d spend some of Stanley’s stash at Malcolm's Used Car Emporium, a highfalutin name for a tired, used car dealership in Toccoa that never had more than a dozen rust buckets on the lot at any one time. She’d pick up a set of wheels from ol’ man Malcolm. And when the local interest, if any, over Stanley’s disappearance had died down and his affairs were settled, she’d quietly sell the trailer and land and hit the road. She’d be free, have money, and would eventually get a job when she finally landed somewhere. Life would be good.

Viola finished the cleaning and tidying of the cabin late on Tuesday afternoon and made several visits to the shed toting boxes of Stanley’s belongings. Out of sight out of mind, she figured. When Viola finally returned from her last trek it was near sundown. She had an uneasy feeling as she walked past her flower garden but couldn’t identify the source of her anxiety, and she was too tired to worry about it. After a long, hot soaking in the bathtub, she donned her nightgown and crawled into bed, almost immediately falling asleep.

Viola woke with a start in the middle of the night. Her sleeping mind had abruptly remembered the cause of her angst by the flower bed; something had been different. And now she recalled what. There had been fewer aconite plants there than she remembered. Some of them could have died over the last few days, her waking mind mused. Maybe the abrupt memory was part of a forgotten dream. Or maybe the memory was just a dream her still foggy mind volunteered. She felt the urge to go outside with a flashlight and check. She looked at the alarm clock, 2:37 a.m., and peered at the shadows cast by the tree limbs waving at her bedroom window. It was windy outside, a storm was rising, and the nights were still a springtime cold. She tamped down her unease; she could check on the plants in the morning.

She was almost asleep when she heard the first thump. She rolled over, thinking it a branch from the tree outside the window smacking the house in the storm and tried to relax. Then came a second thump, and she realized that it wasn’t outside her bedroom but farther away, nearer the front of the house. Her mind was suddenly on red alert; animals, maybe a bear disorientated in the growing squall, was seeking shelter. Viola jumped in startled surprise as a third bang, louder than the first two, reverberated through the house. Silence followed; she could hear nothing but the cold, howling wind churning around the cabin.

The last crash had been loud enough to cause damage, Viola worried. She decided to investigate. She turned on the lamp, donned her robe, and crept down the hallway to the living room, turning on lights as she went. She made a cursory inspection of the room, the small adjoining dining room, and the second bedroom where Stanley often slept. All seemed in order. The front door was still locked and undamaged. Viola’s nerves were frazzled. She wasn’t used to being alone in the house at night. She decided to have a shot or two of whiskey to help her sleep and headed for the kitchen. The lights went out before she made it.

“Dammit and tarnation, the storm musta took down one of those rickety ol’ power lines somewhere,” Viola muttered in dismay. It had happened before, and Stanley had installed a gas-powered generator in the shed, but there was no way she was going to brave the screeching wind in the dark and stormy cold; it could wait till morning. Viola fumbled her way across the room to the old hutch and rummaged through the drawers until she found a thick candle and matches. She lit it and made her way to the kitchen, pulled down a saucer from the cupboard, and