[ - ]
Table of Contents [Report This]
Printer Chapter or Story Microsoft Word Chapter or Story
- Text Size +
Peter Crofton murdered Margie Hannaford by giving her a massive overdose of sleeping pills in some hot chocolate.  Then he tucked her into her bed, told her that he loved her and went sailing for the weekend.  When he arrived back on the dock Sunday at noon, he was greeted by George Hannaford and a man that Pete did not recognize.

“Hey, George!”  Pete waved at him from the boat and then jumped lightly down on the dock.  He walked three steps closer and then stopped.  “What’s up?”

George Hannaford pressed his lips together.  He didn’t know how to say it.  “It’s Margie,” he said simply.

Pete nodded and looked past George.  “Where is she?”

“She’s supposed to be here?” asked the other man.

Pete looked him over.  He figured he was a cop or something.  That didn’t surprise Pete.

“Yeah,” he continued, “she was going to bring a cab down, and we were going to have lunch and go look at…”  Pete paused, thinking, then went on, “…flowers, I think.  Or maybe invitations.”

Pete took a deep breath.  Slow it down, he told himself.  Slow it down.  He looked around him again, as if expecting Margie to show up.

George Hannaford also took a deep breath.  “She’s not here.  She won’t be here.  She’s…”

Pete managed to look confused.  “She’s what?”

“She’s had a…there’s been a…she’s…”

“Sick?” suggested Pete, letting his voice crack and his eyes blink. 

“No,” said the other man, “it’s worse than that.  She’s…”

Pete shook his head wildly, not allowing the horrible thought into his head.  But the truth was much worse than he could ever have imagined.

“…in a coma,” said the other man.

“A coma?”  Pete hoped his outburst of disbelief sounded like concern for Margie rather than for himself.  “That’s not possible,” he said.  “She was doing so well.”  He looked at George with pleading eyes that reflected a hint of tears.

“It’s not the…disease,” said George, quietly.

Pete realized he was on very thin ice.  He figured the other man was either a cop or a private detective.  Both he and George were watching Pete’s reactions very carefully.  Shit!  Why wasn’t Margie dead?!  Pete had given her enough barbiturates to kill a horse!

“I don’t understand,” said Pete, finally. 

Let them talk, he decided.  Safer that way.

The other man explained.  He told Pete that Margie had not arrived for lunch with her mother on Saturday and had not answered her phone.  Her parents had gone to her apartment and found her in bed unconscious.  They had called an ambulance and had her rushed to the hospital where her stomach had been pumped.

“What for?” asked Pete, interrupting the cop. 

Oh yeah, he was definitely a cop.  He spoke in short, clipped phrases and used police jargon.  Pete figured he’d be hearing the word ‘perp’ shortly.  He hoped it wasn’t in the same sentence as his name.

“She took an overdose of sleeping pills,” said the cop.

“No, she didn’t,” retorted Pete, emphatically.  Then he turned to George.  “Margie knew what her medications were.  She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”  His eyes begged his future father-in-law to tell him that she would be okay.

The other man rode over Pete’s words.  “We don’t think it was accidental.”

“Who are you?” blurted Pete.  His demeanor suggested that this man should go away and not be here telling Pete such horrific news.

Out came the badge.  The man was Detective Sergeant Randy Atkins of the Cape Coral Police Force.

Pete looked at George.  Carefully.  Trying to gauge his mood.  Was he suspicious of Pete or merely trying to break bad news gently?  Pete figured he was suspicious. 

“What are you saying?” he demanded.

Detective Atkins flipped his badge shut.  “Miss Hannaford ingested a large amount of barbiturates…probably enough to kill her.”

Then why isn’t she dead? wondered Pete.

“It's difficult to see how she could do so accidentally.  So either she did so herself deliberately…”

Pete cut him off again.  “She’d never do that,” he insisted curtly.  “She was getting better.  We were getting married.”

“Exactly,” said Detective Atkins.  “So if she didn’t do it herself, then someone helped her along.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Pete, “Margie didn’t have any enemies.”  He dismissed the cop with a wave of his hand.  He turned to George Hannaford.  “Where is she?”

“Cape Coral General,” replied George.  “We’re waiting for her to stabilize, and then we’ll move her…”

He got no further.  Pete pushed past him.  “I’m going to see her.”

“Just a minute, young man,” said Detective Atkins.  “I’ve got some questions.”

“Fuck you,” said Pete, “I’m going to Margie.”

Pete didn’t wait for the cop’s reaction.  He moved past him and strode up the dock.  Think, he told himself, think!  And shut the fuck up!  Say nothing!

Pete reached the parking lot and fumbled in his pants for his car keys.  Then he looked around him, searching for his car.  He couldn’t see it at first, and he swiveled his head back and forth.  His shoulders started to shake, and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.  He wanted to hit something…hard…  A sob escaped him, and he pressed his lips tight together. 

C’mon, he told himself, keep it together.  Don’t panic!

Pete felt an arm around his shoulder. 

”Come with me, Son,” said George, kindly.  “I’ll take you to her.  Robert’s got the car right here.”

Pete allowed himself to sag against the older man for a second.  Then he straightened up but still kept the confused look on his face.  “But my car…I…”

“Randy will drive your car, if you’d like.  He can follow us to the hospital.  Maybe you shouldn’t be behind the wheel right now.”

Pete considered that for a moment.  Then he nodded and muttered, “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”  He handed his suitcase and the keys to the cop and said, “It’s a silver BMW.  The licence number is on the keychain.”  He climbed into the back of the car with George, nodding at the chauffeur in recognition. 

Pete knew that the cop would take the opportunity to search the Beemer carefully.  After all, Pete had given him permission to be in it.  Pete didn’t care.  He knew there was nothing in there that was incriminating and plenty of stuff that spoke of his great and profound love for Margie Hannaford.

Pete kept silent all the way to the hospital.  So did George Hannaford.  Pete tried to tell himself to stay calm and think things through, but it wasn’t possible.  All he could hear was a loud buzzing sound surrounding his head.  Pete could easily identify it as panic.  He forced himself to breathe evenly and tried to push the buzzing sound away.

Pete did all the right things at the hospital, protesting loudly that this couldn’t have happened, demanding to get ‘straight answers’ from the doctors, praying aloud for Margie's recovery.  Pete went down the list of the steps of grief and checked them off one by one:  denial…negotiation… anger…  

Meanwhile, Pete got his story straight in his head, and he never wavered from it.  He was steadfast in his declaration that Margie would never have done this to herself deliberately and that he loved her and was going to wait for her to return to him. 

In fact, Pete’s greatest fear was that Margie would return and tell everyone what she knew… which was that the last thing she had ingested was a mug of hot chocolate handed to her by her loving fiancé.

In order to prevent that happening and also to solidify his position as ‘grieving but bewildered and most definitely innocent fiancé’, Pete spent every waking moment sitting by Margie’s bedside.  He knew that Margie’s parents were suspicious, and they had enough pull in the community to make sure that their suspicions were passed on to the police.  But the police came up against the brick wall of Pete sitting by the bed, holding Margie’s hand and looking confused and beleaguered.

Pete had made sure that the half million dollars that Margie had given him had come from several different sources within Margie’s portfolio, all sent to different bank accounts in the Bahamas.  He knew that there was no way they could trace the money to him.

He also knew that now there was no way he could spend it.  George Hannaford had been all over Margie’s accounts like a duck on a June bug, and he knew there was approximately half a million dollars unaccounted for.  And he figured he didn’t have to look much further than the man sitting at her bedside to find that money.

Pete knew George was watching.  George knew that Pete knew he was watching.  It was a waiting game…a high stakes game of chicken to see which one would blink first.

George was way out of his league on this one.  No one had ever made Pete blink. 

Pete settled himself at Margie’s bedside and didn’t budge.  He dipped into his legitimate Bahamas account and paid for his living expenses.  He watched his account balance dwindle, and he watched the police interest dwindle along with it.

In the beginning, police interest had been high.  George and Margaret Hannaford had protested loud and long that their darling daughter would never try to kill herself.  And joining in the protest was the prime suspect, the erstwhile fiancé…the one that the Hannafords were pointing their fingers at, albeit behind his back. 

The police searched Pete’s finances, Margie’s background and finances, the parents’ background and finances…and they came up empty.  Especially against Pete.

Yeah, maybe the guy was marrying her for her money, but he never got that far.  Having her turn up dead or in a coma wasn’t working for him.  He didn’t have any motive for that.  And if that’s all it was, looking to get rich quick, if there wasn’t any real love there, why didn’t he just stand up and say, ‘sorry about your daughter, folks’ and move on? 

And as much as the father carped about the missing money, there was nothing that pointed to the fiancé, who seemed determined to bring Margie out of the coma by sheer force of will and prayer.

Pete was determined all right; he was determined that this would blow over, and he would be free and clear and able to afford the boat of his dreams.

It took him over a year to get to the point where he knew two things:  the most important was that Margie was never going to come out of the coma.  She was going to lie there for another sixty years unless someone had the guts to do something about it.  The second thing Pete knew was that George Hannaford was never going to take his eyes off Peter Crofton.

So Pete decided that two things had to happen.  Margie had to go…and so did Peter.  Pete began to carefully devise a new identity for himself.  And he began to prepare for Margie’s demise.

Spending every day at Margie’s bedside had taught Pete everything there was to know about her condition, her medications, her prognosis.  He knew exactly what it would take to kill her.

Margie’s mother came to the hospital four times a week…every other day.  Pete thought this was a most hypocritical schedule, and he loathed Margaret Hannaford for it.  Margie had been reduced to an item on her to-do list.  But still, Margaret loved her daughter, and Pete used that to his advantage, making oblique remarks…never more than one a week…about how poor Margie would hate her present circumstances and, if able, would demand that her soul be set free.

Margaret Hannaford fell under the spell of Pete’s charm and his words and told her husband that, although at the moment, Margie was stable and ‘merely sleeping’, should circumstances change and ‘heroic efforts’ become necessary, she didn’t believe that Margie would want those. 

After two months of effort, Margaret managed to get George to sign the DNR order…Do Not Resuscitate.. 

Pete protested vehemently.  Did they really think it would come to that?  I mean, look at her, she just looks like she’s sleeping.

George and Margaret patted his hand and said they were sorry but they felt this was best.  They left the room, and Pete put his head down on the bed, caressing Margie’s hand.  When he was sure they were gone, he put his head up and put his plan into motion.

Pete had spent over a year becoming a fixture in Margie’s room.  He was part of the furniture, except that he was even more than that.  He had taken over most of her care, giving her baths, washing her hair, even helping with the changing of sheets and monitoring the levels on various intakes and outflows of her body.

He’d also done his homework on the Internet.

It didn’t take more than three weeks to gradually introduce certain drugs into her IV that destabilized Margie.  Two or three instances of placing a pillow over her face and pressing down gently until she stopped breathing and then pushing the nurse call button and going into panic mode had given Pete all the leeway he needed.

The final night when Margie stopped breathing and couldn’t seem to fight her way back was a denouement that Pete considered a masterpiece of theater.  There were the doctors on one side, unable to explain what had happened but shrugging and mentally projecting that they were surprised she’d lasted so long…over here was the grieving fiancé, crying and wailing that there must be something they could do…and over there, the parents, staring down at the order they had signed, holding each other up, hopeless in their despair.

Margie died. 

Pete stood at the graveside, trying not to laugh or dance.  He’d made it.  Goddammit!  He’d won!  He’d spent a fucking year of his life acting out a scene that made Oscar winning actors look like amateurs in summer stock.

Pete stood with his head bowed as the final words were said over Margie.  He knelt down and placed a yellow rose on her coffin before it was lowered into the grave.  He knelt as if in prayer… two, three, four…and then he rose, having carefully counted off the seconds…not too much, not too little.

Ashes to ashes…dust to dust…

The final words were spoken; the mourners lined up to shake their hands.  Pete mumbled thanks and gripped people’s hands sincerely.  When it was all over, he took a special moment to say goodbye to Margie. Then he turned to leave.  Standing in front of him was George Hannaford.

“I didn’t believe you for a minute,” said Margie’s father.  “I’ll be watching you.”

Pete managed to look sorry for the old man.  “I’m sorry, George,” he said, as if the other man had not just threatened him, “I’ll miss her too.”

“If it’s the last thing I do…” said George Hannaford, and he turned and walked away.

Pete watched him go.  Shit!  Now he’d have to wait even longer before he could have his boat.