Lizzie Borden, c. 1890
That blasted fog bank in my latest opus, THE MAGIC OF THE BIKE PATH (A Jack Miller Senior Moment: Book Six), is the gift that keeps on giving. This particular life form that Jack encounters will make him a bit…er, uncomfortable.
Finally, something different: the fog didn’t exactly dissipate, but it did back away to the point where I could see about a yard in all directions. I picked up the pace a bit but remained cautious.
“I didn’t do it!”
Now, given all of the aforementioned deathly stillness, the loud voice that uttered those words almost caused an accident in my nether regions. I nearly pulled a muscle in my neck as I glanced in all directions before I spotted the source of the utterance.
Off to my right, a woman emerged from the fog. Short, a bit stocky, dark hair in a taut bun, no makeup on a rather plain face that displayed a look of distress. She wore a flouncy magenta day dress with wide pagoda sleeves. This woman may have stepped out of the engulfing mist, but prior to that she had surely materialized from the latter half of the 19th century.
Stopping barely a foot before my front wheel, both hands behind her back, she looked up at me with anxious eyes and repeated, “I didn’t do it!”
“Uh, hi, I’m Jack,” I said, rather stupidly. “What didn’t you do?”
“My name is Lizzie, and I didn’t murder my father and my stepmother, like they all said!”
She didn’t murder her father and step— Holy shit, this was Lizzie Borden, one of the most controversial figures in American history! An old rhyme that I’d first heard as a kid suddenly emerged from the back of my brain:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
In 1892 Lizzie Borden, age thirty-two, was charged with the brutal murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. She swore her innocence all the way through her subsequent trial in 1893, a three-ring circus of an event for its time, where the jury acquitted her. Still, the court of public opinion found her guilty of the violent murders, and she became a pariah in the town, even though she spent the rest of her life there. (Can’t imagine why or how.) The case itself was never solved.
“Jack?” she said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
Her hands, which had been hidden behind her back, now appeared. In one of them she held an axe. Oh shit!
“Yeah, sure…I do,” I managed to croak. “They found you not guilty and everything.”
“And see?” She shoved the axe in front of my face. Gawd, my poor boxers! “No blood on it anywhere.”
I nodded. “Definitely innocent.”
She gave me a hug…the axe barely missed my shoulder. I guess she was neither an effigy nor a ghost.
“Oh Jack, thank you!” Lizzie exclaimed. “I wish they could all believe me, like you.” She began backing away into the fog. “Besides, I know who did it.”
That got my attention. “You do?”
She continued backing away, almost gliding. “Yes. The person who murdered my father and stepmother was…”
Not to sound melodramatic, but the fog swallowed her. Dang! I could’ve helped solve a 130-year-old cold case. Then again, who would possibly believe me?
At least you guys will believe that I nearly got whacked by an axe in the hands of Lizzie Borden.
Won’t you?