1 Aunt Bessie Assumes by Diana Xarissa

“Aunt Bessie, this is our younger son, Donny.   Donny, Aunt Bessie is a neighbour who
came to pay her respects.”
    “And she’s the one who found
the body,” Donny repeated himself.
    “Are you?” Daniel said,
looking at Bessie with confusion on his face.
    “Well, yes, technically,”
Bessie admitted, not knowing why she should feel guilty about that.
    “I didn’t realise,” Daniel
told her.   “I don’t know that it
really matters.”   He shook his head
and then headed towards the bar.   “Anyone else need a drink?”
    “You shouldn’t be drinking
this early in the day,” Donny told his father.  
    “I’ll have a nice glass of
white wine.”   Mrs. Pierce had
followed her husband to the bar.
    “And you shouldn’t be
drinking at all,” Donny said in an exasperated tone.   “You’ve been given a load of medication
that doesn’t mix with alcohol.”
    “I’ll only have one,” Mrs.
Pierce promised her son as she reached for the glass her husband held out to
her.
    “But….”
    “Oh, leave them alone,” a
bored voice sounded from the doorway.   “Let them get drunk if they want,
they’re in mourning.”
    Bessie studied the young
woman who now entered the room.   She
was young, maybe twenty-five, blonde and very pretty, but she had a spoiled and
petulant look about her that rather ruined her natural attractiveness.  
    “You aren’t helping, Sam,”
Donny sighed.
    “I wasn’t trying to help.”   The woman shrugged her shoulders and then
turned to Bessie.   “So who are you
then?”
    “I’m Elizabeth Cubbon,”
Bessie answered.   “I live just down
the beach from here and I came to pay my respects to Mr. and Mrs. Pierce.”
    The girl raised an
eyebrow.   “Being neighbourly, not
nosy?”
    Bessie found herself almost
liking the young woman.   “Just
neighbourly,” she assured her.   “You
haven’t told me your name,” she added.
    “Oh, I’m Samantha Blake, but
everyone calls me Sam,” the woman shrugged.   “I’m Donny’s girlfriend, I guess.”
    Donny made a sound that
Bessie couldn’t even begin to interpret.  
    “The children all came for my
husband’s birthday,” Mrs. Pierce told Bessie.   “He turned sixty on Sunday and we had a
small family party here.   There was
supposed to be a bigger affair back in London next month, although I don’t
think we’ll go ahead with that now.”
    “We never should have come,”
Daniel Pierce muttered darkly into his drink.   “Danny would be okay if we had just
stayed home.”
    “Really?” Bessie couldn’t
keep the doubt from her voice.   There was no polite way to press the issue, though.   Luckily, Daniel continued.
    “He must have stumbled across
some homeless person or maybe a drug deal or something on that beach,” the man
told Bessie.   “And he got stabbed
because of it.”
    Bessie counted to ten before
she replied, carefully working to keep her voice even.   “I’ve lived on that beach since before
you were born,” she told the man just a little sharply.   “We don’t have homeless people or drug
dealers spending time there.”
    Daniel shrugged and then swallowed
the rest of his drink.   “We should
have insisted that they honeymoon somewhere warm,” he muttered.   “And we should have insisted on a proper
wedding, too.”
    “Was the wedding a small
event, then?” Bessie asked, letting the subject change.
    Samantha laughed and then
answered for Daniel.   “The wedding
wasn’t much of anything,” she said.   “Vikky dragged poor Danny off to the registry office and got him locked
down before he knew what hit him.”
    “Sam, that’s enough,” Donny said
tersely.   “Danny loved Vikky very
much.   They dated for six months or
so before they got married and they were going to have a proper bash in a few
months, once the weather was nicer.   The thing was, neither one of them wanted to wait to actually get
married and start their lives together.”
    “Didn’t turn out to be