Photo Finish
Lila Purnell balked at the idea of going to the movie theater with her friends. All winter long, they went to the movies every Saturday night. Now that July had arrived, she longed to do something—anything—else.
"I'm sick of doing the same old thing, week in and week out," she whined.
"But now it's summer, and we can go to the drive-in instead of the indoor theater," her boyfriend said.
"Indoor, outdoor. It's not that big of a difference. Besides, nothing is playing that I want to see. Just war movies and westerns."
"I'd like to see that new Steve McQueen movie, The Blob."
"Me, too, but that doesn't come out until next week. What do we do tonight?"
Her question was addressed not only to Nick Bremmer but also to the couple sitting in the back seat of the Ford Thunderbird: Betty Jean Hagman and Donald Warrinder.
"There's always the roller rink in Dayton," Betty Jean suggested.
Nick vetoed that idea, saying, "I'd rather do something locally. My dad doesn't like me to take the car too far."
"We can go bowling," Donald offered.
"The bowling alley is too crowded on Saturday nights," Lila argued. "We'd have to wait to get a lane."
"What else is there to do?" Betty Jean asked.
"I'm starving," Nick declared, turning at the traffic light to go to White Castle. "We can think of something to do while we eat."
He pulled into the parking lot, went inside the fast-food restaurant and returned to the car with two bags of food and four milkshakes. As he handed out mini-sized hamburgers to his passengers, his girlfriend saw a cardboard poster tacked to a telephone pole.
"That's what we can do!" the high school junior with the blond ponytail exclaimed. "There's a carnival being held in the field beside the firehouse."
"I haven't been to a carnival in years," Betty Jean laughed. "Let's go."
"It might be fun," Donald concurred.
"If that's what you all want to do," Nick said, preparing to take a bite out of his third burger.
Once the teenagers finished eating, the driver tossed their trash into a garbage can and drove toward the carnival. As he neared the field, he saw cars parked along the main street. A sign indicated that there was additional parking in the rear of the firehouse. Once he pulled the Thunderbird into a space between a Buick Skylark and a Plymouth Belvedere, the passengers got out of the vehicle and walked through the grass of the open field.
The traveling carnival consisted of several rides including a Ferris wheel, carousel, tilt-a-whirl, scrambler and fun slide. In addition to the rides, there were concession stands offering food and games. The teenagers strolled along the midway, deciding what to do first.
"I want to go on the scrambler," Betty Jean cried.
"We should wait awhile," Donald advised. "I just finished six cheeseburgers, fries and a milkshake, and I don't want everything to come back up."
"All right," his date agreed. "We can wait, but before we leave, I want you to go on it with me."
For the next hour, the four friends tried their skill and luck in the games. Nick won Lila a stuffed teddy bear by knocking over stacked milk cans with a baseball, and Betty Jean won herself a Kewpie doll by popping three balloons with darts. Finally, they decided to test their stomachs on the rides, beginning with the Ferris wheel, a relatively "safe" option. From there, they went to the tilt-a-whirl and then the scrambler.
"I don't know about the rest of you, but I've got to go to the bathroom," Donald announced when the ride came to an end.
"Me, too," his date added.
"I think I saw some portable toilets in back of the ticket booth, near the parking lot," Nick said.
After a brief wait to use the port-a-John, the four friends headed back to the lights and crowds of the carnival. On the way, Lila spotted a small structure that seemed to be all but hidden in the shadows.
"Look!" she exclaimed. "It's a photo booth."
In the days before people could take selfies with their cell phones, such booths were popular with young and old alike.
"Let's get our pictures taken," she said excitedly. "It's only fifty cents."
Nick and Donald both reached into their pockets to hunt for change.
"This is a really small booth," Betty Jean noted. "I don't think it can hold more than one person at a time."
"Who wants to go first?" Lila asked.
"I'll go," Nick volunteered.
"All right, but no funny faces!" his girlfriend insisted. "I want a good picture of you to put in my wallet."
The seventeen-year-old entered the narrow booth, sat down on the seat and closed the curtain behind him. Then he put two quarters in the money slot, faced the mirror in front of him and waited for the flash. The machine took four photographs. After each flash of light, the young man changed his expression: a smile, a serious face, a profile and a raised lip sneer similar to the one Elvis Presley popularized. After the four photos were taken, there was a short wait for them to be printed.
"What's taking so long?" Donald laughed. "Did you fall asleep in there?"
"Nah, I'm waiting for the pictures to develop."
Moments later, the strip of photos came out of the machine.
I don't look too bad in these, Nick thought. I'd hate to have my steady girl carry around a picture of me looking like a ....
The teenager's train of thought was derailed when he noticed the machine spit out a second strip of pictures.
What's this? he wondered.
At first glance, he assumed he was seeing photos taken from a school filmstrip of World War 2 or the more recent Korean Conflict. (In the days before VHS tapes and DVDs, such an array of still photographs was a popular form of audio-visual education along with reel-to-reel movie projectors.) Upon closer inspection, though, he noticed the face of the subject in the first two pictures. Although slightly older, there was little doubt the man wearing the soldier's uniform was Nick Bremmer himself. The face in the third was obscured by an explosion, and the one in the fourth was unrecognizable. All that remained was burned, bloody flesh.
"What the hell?" he cried in horror.
"The picture can't be that bad!" Lila said through the closed curtain. "You're a good-looking guy."
"Come on out and give us a turn," Betty Jean called.
Moments later, Nick, pale and shaken, emerged from behind the curtain.
"Let me see," his girlfriend demanded, reaching for the strip of pictures. "You look good!"
The young man had wisely handed her the first strip only. The more macabre one had gone into his pocket before he left the booth.
"Me next," Betty Jean insisted, putting her open palm out to her boyfriend for two quarters.
When she disappeared behind the curtain, Nick took a deep breath to steady his rattled nerves.
"What is it?" Lila asked.
"Nothing," he lied. "Maybe I shouldn't have gone on the rides after eating so much."
"That settles it! No ice cream or cotton candy for you."
It was just some kind of joke, he told himself. A sick one, not even remotely funny, but a joke nonetheless.
It was a reasonable assumption. After all, the booth was located in a carnival, a place where one found mirrors that revealed distorted reflections which made people look like either emaciated giants or overweight dwarves. His hypothesis was confirmed when he heard a scream from inside the photo booth.
"She's such a drama queen," Donald laughed when he heard his girlfriend's shriek.
The curtain was suddenly yanked back, and Betty Jean left the booth in tears.
"What's wrong? Did you see a spider in there?"
"I ... I ...."
Unable to speak, she handed two strips of photographs to Lila. Again, the second strip showed an older, heavier, more haggard-looking version of Betty Jean. In this instance, the subject of the first two shots is consumed by fire in the third, leaving behind a blackened corpse in the fourth.
"I don't get it. How could such a thing be possible?" her friend asked with disbelief.
Nick then reached into his pocket, took out the second strip he had received and showed it to the others.
"These pictures aren't real," Donald decided. "I bet this photo booth is like Zoltar, the fortune-telling machine."
"These aren't your typical predictions of the future," Lila argued. "It doesn't show Betty Jean as a housewife with four kids or Nick pitching for the Cincinnati Reds. These are horrible!"
"That's right. They are horrible. Carnivals have a long history of horror and macabre attractions. Some of them still have freak shows."
To prove his point, Donald opened the curtain and stepped inside the booth. When he stepped out of it again, he handed them a strip of four photographs, the first two of which showed a bearded, middle-aged man behind the wheel of a car. The third showed him going through the windshield, and the fourth lying dead on the vehicle's hood.
"It's like I said," the somewhat shaken teenager claimed. "They're fake."
Having seen the ghastly photographs of her three friends, Lila ought to have turned tail and headed for the concession stands. However, she was no coward. Besides, she was curious about how the macabre photos might portray her.
"My turn," she announced, taking the quarters from her wallet and refusing to use her boyfriend's money.
"I wouldn't if I were you," Betty Jean warned.
"If you three can handle it, so can I."
There was no scream, no tears. When Lila stoically emerged from the photo booth, she appeared calm and collected despite having a strip of pictures that showed her blowing her own brains out with a pistol!
* * *
At the end of the week, the rides and concession stands were taken down and the carnival moved on to its next location. That Saturday night—date night—Lila and Nick went to the drive-in theater to see Steve McQueen in The Blob while Betty Jean and Donald went to the roller rink. By the time September arrived and the four teenagers returned to school, not one of them was worried about the ghastly images shown to them by the carnival's photo booth.
For Lila, her senior year of high school proved to be the best time of her life. Not only was she accepted into college—the first one in her family to seek higher education—but she also graduated second in her class. Sadly, the summer that followed graduation was a bittersweet one. Although excited about the new experiences that lay ahead, she would have to say goodbye to friends she had known since she was a young child—including Nick, whom she had dated since their freshmen year.
"I'll be home for Christmas break," she told him when they said their goodbyes on Labor Day.
"But that's not until December," he complained.
Unlike his girlfriend, Nick, whose grades were not good enough to get him into college, chose to enter the job market rather than further his education.
"We can write to each other," Lila suggested. "And there's always the telephone, as long as we keep our conversations short. What with paying for college, I don't have much money for long-distance calls."
"It won't be the same," the despondent teenager said with a pout. "I'll have no one to spend my Saturday nights with. All the other guys have girlfriends. I can't very well tag along on their dates like a third wheel."
"I'm sorry, but I can't let this opportunity pass me by."
"I don't see why you have to go out of state. You should have applied to a local college instead."
"None of the schools around here offer classes in computing."
"What good is that going to do you? It's not as though you'll be able to find a job working with computers."
"It's what I want to do. I don't want to be a nurse, secretary or teacher."
Despite the two high school sweethearts having promised each other they would remain in touch, the letters were few and far between. Lila spent most of her free time studying while Nick played sports and hung out with his friends. By the time spring break came along, he was seeing another girl.
I suppose it was inevitable, the jilted coed mused. It was selfish of me to expect him to wait for four years while I go to school.
She, herself, had no time for dating, nor did she have the inclination to get entangled in a romantic relationship. Although she found her computing classes fascinating, she had to take the usual academic courses as well to earn her degree. While she did not see how studying ancient history or reading plays written by William Shakespeare would help her prepare for her future, she put her best effort into getting good grades in all her classes.
While Lila worked hard at pursuing her education, the world around her continued to move on. Two months into her sophomore year, John F. Kennedy was elected president. However, since the voting age in 1960 was still twenty-one, she was too young to vote for him. Optimism over JFK's promised "time for greatness" was moderated by social unrest in the South over the Civil Rights movement and the looming threat of war in Southeast Asia.
In the spring of 1963, Lila graduated college and began working for IBM in New York. Despite no longer being a student, she did not stop her pursuit of knowledge. Computer programming was a nascent field and was expanding rapidly. In between taking postgraduate courses, she occasionally dated. Twice a month, she also phoned home to keep up with news of her old friends.
"Betty Jean and Donald got engaged over the Labor Day weekend," Jane Purnell, her mother, told her. "I'm sure you'll get an invitation to the wedding when the time comes."
"I'll have to call and congratulate the happy couple."
"And what about you? Have you met Mr. Right yet?"
Lila deftly avoided the question by changing the subject.
"I think I'll come home for Thanksgiving," she announced.
"That's wonderful!" her mother exclaimed. "I was hoping you would. It wouldn't be a happy holiday without you."
Sadly, Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1963, was not a joyous one despite the homecoming. Six days earlier, President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and the country was still grieving.
* * *
In June of 1965, Lila returned to Ohio to attend Betty Jean Hagman's wedding. She had expected to see Nick Bremmer there since he and the groom had been best friends since the second grade, but her high school sweetheart was not at the church.
"Didn't you know?" the bride asked when her friend inquired about him at the reception. "He was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam."
A chill coursed through Lila's body causing her to shiver. She was suddenly reminded of the macabre pictures taken at the photo booth that showed Nick in an Army uniform being blown up by a land mine.
"Creepy, isn't it?" the bride commented as though she had read her friend's mind. "As soon as Donald told me, I thought about that night at the carnival. We never could figure out how those pictures were taken."
"Don't think about it now. You don't want to ruin your wedding day!" the guest said, forcing herself to smile.
"You're right. Today is the happiest day of my life, and I don't want anything to spoil it."
Somehow the two women managed to enjoy the traditional festivities. The bride laughed as she and her new husband cut the cake, and she blushed when he removed the garter from her leg and tossed it into a crowd of eligible bachelors. Betty Jean continued to give the appearance of a happy bride even after she threw out her bouquet and left for her honeymoon in Niagara Falls. But despite the cheerful exuberance, the fear of death lingered beneath the surface.
As she had in the past, Lila put her nose to the grindstone and stopped worrying about the bizarre images she saw in the carnival photographs. This time, however, her efforts were geared toward advancing her career, not earning a degree. Since joining the workforce at IBM, she had already received two raises, and in September, she earned her first promotion.
"And what about your personal life?" Jane always asked when she spoke to her daughter on the phone. "Are you seeing anyone special?"
"No. Frankly, I don't have time for all that."
"You shouldn't work so hard."
"But I love what I do. I'm not like you, Mom. I could never be happy ironing my husband's shirts and cooking him dinner every night."
"Have you spoken to Betty Jean recently?"
"No. Why?"
"She's pregnant."
"Already? She just got married in June. She and Donald should have waited awhile and enjoyed being on their own before starting a family."
"Maybe they didn't want to wait."
"Or maybe they were careless. She should have been on the pill."
Jane was shocked by her daughter's casual reference to birth control. She would never have discussed such a delicate subject with her own mother, especially over the telephone.
Is that what happens when a young girl goes off to college? she wondered. Maybe Lila should have stayed home and gotten a job as a receptionist or salesgirl instead.
* * *
When Lila visited her parents in December, she was called upon to decorate the family Christmas tree.
"And tomorrow, we can bake cookies," Jane happily announced. "Just like we did when you were younger."
"I still have some shopping to do. I thought I'd see if Betty Jean wants to go to Columbus with me."
"I don't think she's up to going Christmas shopping," her mother said, a look of sadness eclipsing her previous smile.
"Why not? Is something wrong?"
"I didn't want to spoil your holiday by telling you, but she miscarried the baby."
The miscarriage was not the only bad news Lila received over her Christmas vacation. On December 30, she learned that Nick Bremmer had been killed in Vietnam.
"Did they say how he died?" she asked Donald, who was the bearer of the sad tidings.
"No. And I didn't ask."
"Don't the three of us already know?" Betty Jean cried. "We saw his death in the photographs."
"Don't start that again!" her husband shouted.
"Why not? Why do you insist on burying your head in the sand like an ostrich?"
"You know why. Hell! Every time I get behind the wheel of a car, I remember seeing the picture of myself lying dead on the hood, my face cut to shreds by a shattered windshield. Why do you think I take the bus to work instead of the Corvair?"
"It's only a coincidence," Lila declared, her voice barely above a whisper. "Nick died because he was fighting a war. His death had nothing to do with a strip of photographs taken at a carnival."
"How can you be so sure?" Donald argued.
"Because I don't believe anyone or anything can predict the future—not fortune cookies, horoscopes, tarot cards or gypsy fortunetellers. It's all just superstitious nonsense."
"I suppose we should listen to her. She's a college graduate," Betty Jean pointed out. "She knows a lot more than we do."
"I studied math and computing, not divination," Lila laughed, "but I pride myself in having a level head on my shoulders. We've just lost a friend, who died a tragic death at a young age. It's only natural that we're upset, but we mustn't go jumping to the wrong conclusions. We're not in any danger. You're not going to get killed in a car accident, your wife isn't going to die in a fire and I'm certainly not about to shoot myself in the head! Good God! I can't even stand guns! And I'm not the suicidal type."
"I guess you're right," Donald grudgingly admitted. "After all, we don't know for certain that Nick was blown up by a land mine. He might have been shot instead."
Ironically, the possibility of the deceased Army private having met his death via a Viet Cong bullet comforted the three former high school friends. If such was the case, then the images of their own deaths might not be prophetic.
* * *
The following decade brought Lila three more promotions. The unattached computer programmer devoted her life to her career, routinely working sixty-plus hours a week. Her trips home were limited to one a year, taken the last week of December.
In 1975, Jane Purnell, not her husband, met their daughter at the bus station.
"You got a car!" Lila exclaimed.
"Yes. We're no longer a one-car family."
"What made you decide to get a Maverick?"
"Your father picked it out. I wanted a Volkswagen Beetle, but he said repairs to foreign cars were too expensive and that I should buy a Ford or a Chevy. Do you still have that old Mustang?"
"No. I sold it when I moved into the apartment in the city. Now I take mass transit everywhere."
The ride from the bus station to her childhood home was the only thing that set that Christmas apart from the previous ten. The remainder of the week followed the customary routine. She put up the tree in the Purnells' family room. The next day, she went to Columbus and finished her holiday shopping. The day after that, she helped her mother bake cookies. And, as usual, she found time to visit with Betty Jean. Unfortunately, rather than a happy reunion between two girlfriends, it had become a grim obligation.
When Betty Jean opened her front door, Lila was astonished by her appearance. The normally well-groomed woman looked exhausted and unkempt. Her hair was a mess, and she wore no makeup.
"How have you been?" Lila asked, dreading her friend's answer.
"You know me. Same shit, different day."
As the hostess made coffee, she detailed her latest attempts to get pregnant.
"Last week, Donald and I saw a doctor who specializes in infertility."
"Oh? What did he say?"
"Doctors! They're all the same! He wants to run a battery of tests before he'll tell me anything. I've got to go back to him in January."
"Good luck."
"Thanks. I have a feeling I'm going to need it. I think something happened when I had that miscarriage."
Tears fell down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with a potholder.
"I don't know what I'll do if I can't have children," she cried. "Things aren't going too well in my marriage."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"I'm hoping a baby will keep us together."
Lila thought bringing a child into a bad marriage was a mistake, but she did not share her opinion with Betty Jean.
"How is Donald doing?" she asked instead.
"He hates his job, and he comes home at night pissed off at the world."
"Why doesn't he look for something else then?"
"Where's he going to do? He doesn't have an education like you do."
"He can get one. There's always night school."
"Let's face it. Donald is not too bright. He was lucky to get his high school diploma."
But there was no point in arguing. Betty Jean was not about to listen. She had wallowed in self-pity for so long that there was no cheering her up at this point. After finishing her coffee and a slice of barely thawed Sara Lee frozen chocolate cake, Lila wished the unhappy woman a good holiday and left.
The next time the two high school best friends would see each other would be at Donald Warrinder's funeral.
* * *
Wearing a cheap, ill-fitting black dress purchased from the clearance rack at Sears, Betty Jean looked as though she were in her forties, not her thirties. She had not bothered to color her graying hair, and she had put on almost thirty pounds. It was obvious she stopped caring about her appearance long before her husband was killed.
"A coincidence, you said!" the widow screamed when Lila entered the funeral parlor. "You said that when Nick Bremmer died. Remember?"
"I know you're upset, but this isn't the time or place to ...."
"You told us we weren't in any danger. Why the hell did we believe you?"
"Soldiers get killed in battle, and people die in car accidents. It doesn't mean ...."
"For an educated woman, you're a stupid fool! Donald went through the windshield, just like he did in those awful photographs!"
"Calm down," Betty Jean's mother said, coming to Lila's rescue. "Donald wouldn't want you to behave like this."
The widow broke down in tears, sobbing and wailing on her mother's shoulder.
"For years, all I wanted was a baby. And now, I don't even have a husband!"
Lila took refuge in the back of the room where she sat beside Jane Purnell and stared at the enlarged high school photo of the deceased that was placed beside the closed coffin.
"You mustn't be angry with Betty Jean for her outburst."
"I'm not."
"She's just upset. She doesn't mean what she says."
Yes, she does.
"She's hysterical," Jane continued. "Her mother says she keeps going on about some old photographs. Do you know anything about them?"
"No," Lila lied. "We can't expect her to be thinking clearly at a time like this."
"I suppose not."
By the time the graveside service came to an end, Betty Jean had regained enough composure to coolly thank Lila for attending. However, both women realized their lifelong friendship was at an end.
It's not my fault Donald and Nick are dead, Lila told herself.
But the widow thought differently.
You were the one who suggested we go to the carnival instead of the drive-in, and it was your idea for us to have our pictures taken in that photo booth.
* * *
The year 1984 did not see the dystopian society that George Orwell had predicted. It was a year of many changes for Lila, though. She quit her job at IBM and went to work for Apple, a career move that necessitated relocating to the West Coast. The following spring, her father retired, and he and Jane moved to a retirement community in Florida.
The annual Christmas visits continued. There was still a tree to put up, albeit a much smaller one than the seven-footer of her childhood. And there were Christmas cookies to be baked, but since her father had been diagnosed with diabetes, the women limited the number to only two dozen.
"There are a lot of things I like about living in Florida," Jane announced when she met her daughter at the airport. "No more scraping ice off the windshield and shoveling snow. But it doesn't feel like Christmas."
"You'll get used to it."
When they arrived at the retirement community, Jane stopped to get the mail before entering the house. There was a home décor catalog advertising the upcoming January white sale, a credit card statement and three Christmas cards.
"I'll make us some coffee while you put your things in your room."
Although it was her first visit to her parents' new home, Lila had no difficulty finding the guest room. It was a small, maintenance-free ranch meant for retirees who had no need for a three- or four-bedroom house with only three rooms at the end of the hall: the master bedroom, the guest room and a bathroom.
It's nice, but it's not home, she thought, missing the two-story colonial with its fireplace, attic, full basement and an acre of property. It's not much bigger than my apartment.
After unpacking her suitcase, she joined her mother in the kitchen (the house had no dining room). She could tell from the pensive look on Jane's face that something was wrong.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Mrs. Hagman included a letter in her Christmas card," she replied, handing a sheet of stationery to her daughter. "You better read it for yourself."
Several minutes later, the letter fell out of Lila's hands and fluttered to the floor. When Jane stooped to pick it up, she saw that her daughter's face was a mask of horror.
"I'm sorry," she muttered—what else was there for her to say? "I know you two haven't kept in touch, not since the funeral, but ...."
"I can't believe it!" Lila cried, not hearing a word her mother said. "She's gone, just like Nick and Donald."
Betty Jean Warrinder, who became an alcoholic after her husband died, passed out one night after a drinking binge. She was out cold when the rooming house she lived in caught fire, and she died in the blaze.
"It happened just like the photos predicted."
"What photos? What are you talking about?"
The two cups of coffee went cold as Lila told her mother about the images of death she and her friends had received at the carnival photo booth.
"It's not possible!" Jane insisted.
"Betty Jean, Donald and Nick all died horrible deaths that were foretold by the pictures."
"You don't know how Nick actually died, only that he was killed in Vietnam."
"Come on, Mom! You don't think I want to believe all this, do you? But I'd be downright stupid if I refused to accept the truth. That photo booth somehow predicted what was going to happen to us."
"All right. If what you say is true—and I'm not saying it is—you needn't fear for your safety. Your friends had no choice in their deaths. You say your photo showed you shooting yourself. It's a voluntary action. I think I know you well enough to swear you would never commit suicide."
"I suppose you're right," Lila agreed. "I hate guns. I refuse to go near them."
After a week of forced gaiety, the despairing young woman returned to California. Once she was in her apartment, she gave in to the fear that was eating her up inside.
"How can I stop the inevitable?" she cried, collapsing on her bed in tears. "I don't want to kill myself, but do I really have a choice in the matter?"
Four hours later, her body still on East Coast time, she fell asleep from exhaustion. She had not even bothered to shower or change into her nightclothes.
* * *
They say life can change on a dime. In Lila Purnell's case, it took a little longer, but the result was just as devastating. Rather than drown her fears in alcohol as Betty Jean did, she became even more of a workaholic than before. During her waking hours, she was able to successfully stave off the feeling that the Grim Reaper was waving his scythe in her direction. However, she had no control over the nightmares that plagued her sleep.
Temporary relief came not from a bottle of alcohol but from an amber-colored bottle of sleeping pills. Unfortunately, the oblivion she craved during the night came at a price. She was often lethargic the following day; and like many medications, the pills had side effects. Lila seemed to perpetually suffer from anxiety and a mild headache that made her irritable and overemotional. It was not long before her work began to suffer.
What can I do? she thought in despair. If I stop taking the pills, the nightmares will return.
In a clear choice between two evils, she chose the sleeping pills. It was a decision that led to a complete downward spiral. Six months later, she lost her job at Apple; her lifeline was gone and so was her reason for living.
Jane Purnell, unaware of her daughter's desperate situation, made plans for yet another family holiday season. As she debated serving turkey, ham or roast beef for the Christmas meal, her daughter sat on her bed, three thousand miles away, with a bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.
All I've got to do is swallow these, and my troubles will be over.
But would an overdose guarantee her death? She had heard stories of people vomiting the pills back up. She did not want to wind up in a hospital having her stomach pumped.
"Stop fighting it," she said, resigned to her fate. "You know what you have to do. You've known it all along."
Where does one buy a gun? she wondered.
At a gun store, of course. And, in America, a country that clung to its Second Amendment right to bear arms, they were not hard to find.
* * *
In a senior citizens community in Florida, Jane Purnell addressed her Christmas cards. She wrote the same thing in each one: We're enjoying our retirement. Lila is still single. It doesn't look like I'm ever going to be a grandmother. Hope you have a happy and healthy holiday.
She was halfway through the box of Hallmark cards when she got a call from the police in California informing her of her daughter's suicide.
That was more than twenty years ago. Jane has not sent a Christmas card since then.
You may recognize Salem's photo from this strip. It's the same one used on the wanted poster that hangs in our local post office.
