Graveyard Plots by Bill Pronzini

attitude of oxide poisoning as she fell back against the headboard. The faint green color looked quite well on her, he concluded.
    This time Kenner did not arrange the scene in what he thought to be a natural manner. He also did not open the windows. He simply left the apartment and took a subway to Times Square, where he consumed a breakfast of indeterminate nature in a restaurant or perhaps a cafeteria. Once finished he browsed through a bookstore, purchased a candy bar, and finally took the subway home again. Upon entering his apartment, I think the time was 10:51 A.M., he proceeded directly to his wife's bedroom.
    She was still lying in bed, and she was still quite surprisingly dead. The scene, however, had, after all, been changed in certain ways. The coffee that he was sure had been spilled across the bedclothes had not been spilled at all; the cup, in point of fact, rested empty on the breakfast tray. Her color was not greenish, but rather a violent purple. The three cigarettes had become four, and each had burned down to skeletal fingers of gray ash. Her hands were clutched somewhat pathetically at her breast.
    Kenner stared at her for a long time, after which scrutiny he went to his room and attempted to write in his journal. I could not seem to think, I knew I would have to wait until later. Returning to his wife's bedroom once more, he paused to study the empty coffee cup and the remains of the cigarettes. It was then that he understood the truth.
    The cigarettes and the coffee, not Kenner, had done her in.
    What he did next is not clear. Very little is clear even now, many hours later. He does seem to have telephoned his wife's doctor, since the physician arrived eventually and pronounced her dead of a heart attack. Two or three interns also came with a stretcher and took her away. As I write this I can still smell the aftershave lotion one of them was wearing.
    One thing, therefore, is quite clear: she's dead.
    Damn her, she really is dead and gone forever. What am I going to do now ?
    Kenner murdered his dead wife for the first time on August 1, or possibly August 6, in the bathroom of their New York apartment.

SWEET FEVER
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    Q uarter before midnight, like on every evening except the Sabbath or when it's storming or when my rheumatism gets to paining too bad, me and Billy Bob went down to the Chigger Mountain railroad tunnel to wait for the night freight from St. Louis. This here was a fine summer evening, with a big old fat yellow moon hung above the pines on Hankers Ridge and mockingbirds and cicadas and toads making a soft ruckus. Nights like this, I have me a good feeling, hopeful, and I know Billy Bob does too.
    They's a bog hollow on the near side of the tunnel opening, and beside it a woody slope, not too steep. Halfway down the slope is a big catalpa tree, and that was where we always set, side by side with our backs up against the trunk.
    So we come on down to there, me hobbling some with my cane and Billy Bob holding onto my arm. That moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Ferdie Johnson's patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off toward the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the rundown shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the county sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.
    We set down under the catalpa tree and I leaned my head back to catch my wind. Billy Bob said, "Granpa, you feeling right?"
    "Fine, boy."
    "Rheumatism ain't started paining you?"
    "Not a bit."
    He give me a grin. "Got a little surprise for you."
    "The hell you do."
    "Fresh plug of blackstrap," he said. He come out of his pocket with it. "Mr. Cotter got him in a shipment just today down at his store."
    I was some pleased. But I said, "Now you hadn't ought to go spending your money on me, Billy Bob."
    "Got nobody else I'd