Iron Lady (701 words)

The smell of coffee reached Edith’s nostrils, and her blind eyes turned instinctively toward the door. The sound of footsteps followed, muffled by the thick tapestry on the walls. (Why hadn’t the door been locked?) 

“I have been expecting you.”

The visitor did not respond as he took a seat on the couch directly across from her. The cushion sighed as the man’s massive posterior sank into it, throwing dust scented with age into the air, mixing death and coffee.

“Your ear is as good as ever.”

Edith lowered her head slightly, and her glazed eyes disappeared into the shadow of her hat. She wore a hat on most days, even indoors. It made her feel less apt to lose her wits.

“What is it you want?”

The man shifted on the couch, and put his feet up on the coffee table.

“I have come here to enjoy your hospitality, of course.”

Edith’s eyes remained in the shadows. She did not have much in the way of hospitality to offer anyone anymore – not since… 

There was a time when she had been the Mrs. Brooks, the envy of all the ladies in the city, the central presence at every important party. If Mrs. Brooks was not present, then going there was to fall several rungs on the social ladder.

“Edwin,” she said, as if just remembering her interlocutor’s name. It was his father who had named him, not she, and she had never had great love for either man. “I still have a few years left in me.”

Coffee breath reached her nostrils in dull curls, and she knew Edwin was sneering at her.

“You’re ninety-three. I would start packing, if I were you.”

Edith’s face remained impassive.

“I hear that you cannot enter rooms these days without sidling through the doorway, in your typical shifty manner. I should be worried about being outlived by my mother.”

“Stepmother,” Edwin corrected, “though my mother only in the matter of the inheritance.”

“Your birth mother left you nothing.”

“But I know that Father left you everything, to be handed down to me when you died.”

Edith coughed softly into a handkerchief that she always held in her hand. She could feel Edwin’s satisfied smirk at this sign of her mortality.

“My will is iron. As for your father’s, that is a different matter. The little he had in life went to the grave with him.”

“But his lawyer is still alive, and his will remains alive in the eyes of the law.”

Edith sighed softly. She could hear Edwin shifting on the couch again. Just a few inches more…

“I see you haven’t taken down that dreadful portrait of yourself. What joy does it give you to leave up on the wall images from your youth? It’s not like you can see what you were then and what you have become now.”

There was no response from under the hat. Just a spasm of the aged arm in the elaborate sleeve, followed by a deathly silence.

“Marguerite!” Edith called out.

The maid scurried in from the next room, and let out a small gasp.

“Our visitor seems to have drunk himself to death.”

“Of coffee, my lady?”

“So it would seem.”

She could hear the blood drip onto the expensive couch from the corpulent face where the dagger had buried itself. There was no doubt. No doubt at all.

“He had always had a fragile constitution. He got that from his mother.”

Then she rose, and with the aid of a walking stick, embarked on the interminable journey out of the room. 

Marguerite stood in the doorway a while longer before leaving to gather a mop and the butler. A body of that size would take at least two people to haul into the basement, and the mess on the furniture would have to be cleaned up.

“Where should I put him, my lady?”

“Next to Mr. Brooks’ bones in the basement.”

Marguerite understood.

“I had always wondered whom the second casket was meant for.”

Edith laughed, and her hat fell off her head. Her face was white and cadaverous under the thin gray hair.

“You know mine is upstairs in my bedroom.”