Poison Ivy
As I watched the real estate agent place a FOR SALE sign on the lawn of a three-story house on Ocean Avenue, I felt my throat constrict with unshed tears. I had been away from Nantucket for more than fifteen years.
I should have stayed in touch, but I didn't. No one was at the old woman's bedside to say goodbye, not even me, the closest thing she had to a friend. Staring at her vacant home, I remember the first time I saw her. I was only a child at the time ...
* * *
Three young boys walked down South Shore Road en route to Ocean Avenue, the road that ran parallel to the Atlantic. It was a hot summer day, and the boys wanted to cool off with a short swim before going to Ernie's house to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees. First, they had to walk past the big house on Ocean Avenue.
"There she is!" Ernie cried, stopping so quickly that his two friends nearly collided with him.
"Who's that?" Taylor inquired.
"You don't know?" Theo asked with disbelief. "That's Poison Ivy."
The woman, who had walked outside to put fresh water in the terracotta birdbath that stood in the center of her garden, was withered with age and was much older than Taylor's grandmother.
"I thought everyone knew about Poison Ivy," Theo said. "She murdered her husband, poisoned him."
"Really?" Taylor asked with awe, for he had never seen a murderer before. "Why isn't she in prison?"
"She probably had a good lawyer, maybe that Perry Mason guy on television."
"She doesn't look like a killer," Taylor declared. "All the killers in the movies and on TV are young."
"She wasn't always old, dummy," Theo teased.
"Who said she killed her husband?"
Taylor was skeptical of most stories Ernie told.
"My brother. And there must be something to it because my parents have always warned me to stay far away from that house."
"My mother said the same thing," Theo declared, coming to his best friend's defense. "She said the old lady was crazy and that she ought to be locked up."
Taylor watched the woman until she disappeared behind the front door of her house.
"I still say she doesn't look like a murderer," he insisted.
* * *
As the youngest boy in his class, Taylor Fairbanks had to constantly prove his worth. To be admitted to Theo's tree house, where the others occasionally gathered to look at discarded issues of Theo's father's Playboy magazine, Taylor first had to perform a dare. It was an initiation as old and established as fraternity hazing.
"What do you want me to do?" Taylor asked.
"I don't know," Ernie replied. "What do you think, Theo? Should he have to spend the night in the Old North Cemetery?"
"Nah, we did that dare last time."
"Okay. Maybe he should pull the fire alarm at school when Mrs. Applegate gives us our weekly math test."
"No, I've got a better idea. To be one of us, he has to go inside Poison Ivy's house."
Taylor's face paled.
"What about it?" Ernie asked. "Have you got the nerve to go in there, or are you going to be a chicken?"
The gauntlet had been thrown down. If Taylor did not accept the challenge, he would forever be branded a coward and would be subjected to years of ostracism and verbal abuse from his classmates.
"I'll go," he announced bravely. "But how will I know when she's not home?"
"We'll let you know," Theo promised. "Doug lives right down the street from her. He'll call you when he sees her leave."
"So be prepared," Ernie added. "You'll have to be ready to move at a moment's notice."
* * *
The call came in less than a week. Taylor was ready for it. He had loaded a new film cartridge into his Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and there were enough flash cubes to take a dozen pictures: ample proof to the others that he had explored most, if not all, of the rooms in Poison Ivy's old house.
Nearly bursting with excitement, Taylor stuffed the flash cubes into his pockets, grabbed the camera by its wrist strap and ran toward the door.
"Where do you think you're going, young man?"
Darn it! He had forgotten about his mother.
"You've got chores to do before you can go out and play with your friends."
"Ah, Ma. Theo's dog is having puppies," he lied. "I want to take pictures for science class."
Taylor silently congratulated himself. His mother was constantly nagging him to take a greater interest in his schoolwork. Now it was up to her to "put up or shut up" as his father often said.
"All right," his mother sighed. "Just this once you can let your chores go."
The boy beamed and headed out the door. His mother called to him once more as he neared the end of the driveway.
"Don't get any ideas about keeping one of those puppies! You've got a cat, a parakeet and two goldfish already."
* * *
Four young boys stood in Poison Ivy's backyard, looking up at the imposing three-story mansion.
"How am I supposed to get inside? Both the front and back doors are locked."
"See if you can get in through one of the windows on the ground floor. If not, we'll break the glass."
Taylor hesitated. While he had no problems with entering the house, breaking in was another matter. All he wanted to do was take a few pictures. He had no desire to destroy the old woman's property. Luck was with him, though. The kitchen window in the rear of the house had been left open. Taylor easily removed the screen and climbed inside.
"We'll meet you down the street at Doug's house," Ernie said, anxious to get away from the creepy old place.
"Aren't you guys gonna wait here for me?"
"Why? Are you afraid?" Theo taunted.
It was a clever move, making Taylor out to be the frightened one, but Taylor did not respond to his friend's jibe. Instead, he took a flash cube out of his pocket, stuck it on the camera and snapped a picture of the kitchen.
As he walked through the rooms of Poison Ivy's house, Taylor's fears faded. The place reminded him of a museum. The furniture was old, what his mother called antique. There were paintings on all the walls and curios in cabinets scattered throughout the house. Poison Ivy, Taylor was surprised to discover, was a packrat, a collector of books, old newspapers and back issues of magazines.
"I wonder if there are any pictures of her husband here," Taylor mused when he found boxes of photographs neatly stacked on a shelf in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
As he crossed the hall to what appeared to be a den, he took the last flash cube out of his pocket. Four more pictures and he could leave, having successfully met the terms of the dare and demonstrated his worth in the eyes of his peers.
Suddenly, he heard a key turn in the front door lock. The old woman had come home. Why hadn't his friends given him some kind of signal? Taylor quickly ducked behind a door. He waited and listened closely until he heard the old woman's footsteps head toward the kitchen. Maybe he could sneak out undetected. He slowly crept down the stairs, careful not to make any noise. Within inches of the front door and freedom, the boy heard a voice.
"And just what the hell do you think you're doing in my house?"
Both Taylor's heart and feet instantly froze.
"Well? Give me a truthful answer, you little bastard, and I won't call the coppers," the woman bargained.
Had he not been terrified of being caught by an alleged murderer, the boy might have laughed at the old woman's salty language. Despite her age, there was nothing remotely grandmotherly about her.
Taylor turned and faced Poison Ivy.
"My friends dared me," he declared bravely, though his voice quivered and his knees felt weak.
"Did they now? And why didn't any of them have the guts to come inside with you?"
Taylor shrugged.
"Kid, you need to find yourself some new friends," the old woman advised with a laugh.
"Are you going to call the police on me?" the boy asked.
"Hell, no! I don't want them lousy flatfoots around here any more than you do."
"What are you going to do with me then?"
"I could let you go," she said, toying with him, "or I could kill you."
Poison Ivy laughed at the look of terror that came over the boy's face.
"Don't pee your pants, kid. I'm only teasing you."
The woman's fearful reputation and coarse words notwithstanding, there was something Taylor liked about her.
"It's been a long time since I've had any visitors," she said, softening somewhat. "In fact, I don't believe anyone has come to see me since I sent that damned fool Jehovah's Witness lady running out of the house four years ago."
"Why did she run?" Taylor asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. "What did you do?"
"I went after her with a meat cleaver. Don't look at me that way. I'm not Jack the Ripper. I was cooking at the time, and she showed up on my doorstep. I had to find some way to get rid of her."
The boy and the old woman both started to laugh.
"I wish I'd seen that," Taylor said, holding his side and doubling over.
In that moment of shared laughter, two souls separated by more than half a century formed a connection that would stand the test of time.
* * *
When Taylor walked out of the old house nearly an hour later, his friends eagerly waited for him down the street at the end of Doug's parents' driveway.
"What took you so long?" Ernie demanded to know. "We were about to go to the police."
"Police?" Taylor echoed. "Why would you want to call those lousy flatfoots?"
"We thought Poison Ivy killed you."
"Her name, for your information, is Adeline."
"Oh, yeah? You don't say," Ernie said, valiantly trying to retain his superiority over the younger boy. "Well, let's take that roll of film down to the one-hour photo and get the pictures developed. Then we can go to Theo's tree house and look at his Dad's old magazines."
With the confidence and maturity he had lacked before going into Adeline's house, Taylor pushed past Ernie with an air of contempt.
"I've had enough of your childish behavior. I'm going home to do my chores."
From that day on, there was a change in the pecking order at Nantucket Intermediate School. Ernie was no longer the top dog. Instead, the pre-teen students looked upon Taylor Fairbanks as their hero. Not only did he not fear the old lady known as Poison Ivy, but he boldly walked into her house and visited her regularly.
"What would a ten-year-old kid and a hundred-year-old woman have to talk about?" Ernie once asked.
"Lots of things. Adeline's interesting. She's lived in places like Kansas and Chicago. And she's not a hundred years old, you ignoramus."
Ernie bristled at being called an ignoramus, especially by a boy who was younger and smaller than he was. But he did not dare object. If he alienated Taylor, he might become an outcast at school.
"Adeline tells me stories about outlaws in the Old West and gangsters in Chicago."
"I thought old ladies spent most of their time knitting and baking cookies for their grandchildren."
"Not Adeline," Taylor said proudly, as though he shared a close family tie with the old woman. "She's cool! She's got tons of old newspaper clippings she brought with her from Chicago. They're all about gangsters knocking each other off for trying to chisel in on another's territory. Do you know they had actual wars there back in the 1920s?"
"You mean the Army fought battles in Chicago? We never learned about that in school."
"No, not the Army—the gangs. One mobster's family would go to war against another mobster's family."
While the exploits of "Scarface" Al Capone, Big Jim Colosimo, Johnny Torrio, Frank Nitti, Dean O'Banion, Bugs Moran and other notorious criminals stirred Taylor's youthful imagination, it was the stories he did not share with his friends that he cherished most. His favorite, by far, was that of the Guthrie family.
"Back in the days before the First World War," Adeline had told him, "the Guthries lived in a rural part of Kansas, where they owned a small tavern—nothing much, just a couple of tables and a spare bedroom in the back for the occasional overnight guest. There were four of them: Ma and Pa Guthrie; Laird, the son, who was a big hulk of a boy but somewhat of a simpleton; and Greta, the younger child. People said little Greta Guthrie was not only the prettiest girl in those parts but also the smartest. That might have been true because she was the one who came up with the idea to improve the family's fortunes."
"What was that?" the boy asked eagerly.
"Robbery," Adeline replied with gusto. "Whenever a customer showed up with a bit of money, Greta would hold his attention by flirting with him, and then Laird or Pa Guthrie would come up behind the unwary traveler and bash his skull in. There was a trapdoor beneath one of the tables, and the body was tossed into the cellar until the men could bury it. For several years, the family's crimes went undetected. Then one day an Army colonel showed up at the tavern with a small detachment of men. He was looking for his brother, who was last known to be heading for the tavern."
"Was his brother one of the Guthries' victims?"
"Yes, he was. The family lied to the colonel—naturally. Told him his brother had stopped for the night and then left the following morning. But the colonel was suspicious. He swore if he didn't find his brother, he'd come back and take the place apart board by board. The Guthries feared he'd find the bodies they'd buried out in back of the tavern, so they gathered their belongings and left. They didn't realize the colonel had set a trap for them. He and his men were about a mile up the road, hiding in wait for the fleeing family."
Taylor was sitting on the edge of his seat, listening intently to Adeline's every word.
"Did the colonel and his men catch them?"
"Yup. The Guthries continued to proclaim their innocence, but their flight was a sure sign of guilt. The colonel didn't bother to get the sheriff. He wanted revenge, not justice, so he ordered his men to string up his brother's murderers. Ma and Pa Guthrie and their son Laird were hanged on the spot."
"And Greta? What did they do to her?"
"She was a beautiful young woman by then, and as such, she managed to convince the colonel to let her live."
"How did she do that?"
Adeline laughed and shook her head.
"Sorry, son, but you're too young to hear that story!"
* * *
The strange kinship between the boy and the old woman continued for several years, although as Taylor passed through puberty and became a young man, his visits to the house on Ocean Avenue became less frequent. Eventually, however, he graduated from high school and moved to the mainland to attend Harvard.
Before he left for Cambridge, Taylor stopped to say goodbye to Adeline.
"Let me look at you," the old woman cried, eyeing him with appreciation. "You look like a lawyer already."
"Aren't you rushing things? I still have to go to college and law school first."
"It's hard to believe that the little ragamuffin who broke into my house all those years ago is going to study law."
"I owe it all to you," Taylor said affectionately.
A startled look came over Adeline's face.
"What are you talking about?"
"If you hadn't spent all those hours telling me about cutthroats and gangsters, I'd probably have settled on becoming a fisherman like Ernie or a plumber like Theo."
"Then I'm glad I was such a good influence on you," the old woman said with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. "You've been like a grandson to me, the closest thing I have to family."
Such an admission would have brought a tear to any other woman's eye, but not to Adeline's. She was made of much stronger stuff.
* * *
While he was away at school, Taylor regularly received letters from Adeline. Unlike those his mother sent, Adeline's letters did not report the latest gossip in Nantucket. Through her correspondence, the old woman continued to regale the young student with stories of bootlegging, Prohibition, corrupt politicians, diamond-bedecked mobsters and gun-toting molls. Surprisingly, Taylor was able to keep up with the correspondence. Thanks to a scholarship he had received from the Nantucket Rotarians, he did not have to work to put himself through school.
"I've always wanted to ask you," he wrote not long after he had graduated from Harvard and entered law school. "What did you do when you were younger? How did you support yourself?"
The reply he received surprised him.
"How did I support myself?" the old lady wrote back. "I was a dumb blonde by profession. I made being attractive and empty-headed an art. In that way, I was able to succeed at whatever I did. During my years in Chicago, I worked as a cocktail waitress, a hatcheck girl, a dancer in a chorus line and many other things. The pay was never much, but the tips and fringe benefits more than made up for it."
Taylor smiled when he read the letter. It was hard to imagine the eighty-year-old woman in a short skirt, low-cut blouse and silk stockings.
* * *
It would be another ten years before Taylor went home to Nantucket. The disillusioned man who returned to the place of his birth bore little resemblance to the idealistic student who had left years earlier. After stopping at his parents' house for one of his mother's pot roast dinners, he walked down South Shore Road toward the house on Ocean Avenue. He rang the bell of the three-story mansion, and while he waited for Adeline to answer, he remembered the time he climbed in through her kitchen window on a dare.
The woman who answered the door looked older and frailer than ever.
"How have you been feeling?" he asked, after giving her a gentle hug and kiss on the cheek.
"The same. So far, that god-awful doctor has managed to keep me alive, but I don't want to talk about myself. How have you been? What's life in Washington like?"
"Not as good as I'd hoped it would be."
"Why hasn't your wife come with you? I so wanted to meet her."
A look of pain came over Taylor's face.
"She's having an affair. When I found out, I threatened to divorce her. She laughed in my face and told me she'd take me for every cent I had."
"That's not very likely if she was the one committing adultery."
"There's more to it than that. She has information on me that the IRS would be interested in learning, not to mention the Justice Department."
Adeline's laughter was reminiscent of happier times.
"That's my boy!" she howled. "Not entirely on the up and up, are you? I'm proud of you." When her laughter died down, Adeline turned to Taylor and asked, "What do you intend to do about your wife?"
"There's not much I can do, really."
"Haven't you learned anything from me?" the old woman asked with mock disgust. "You don't have to lie down like a dog and take everything the world throws at you. The little boy who broke into my house with a camera wouldn't have run away with his tail between his legs."
"That little boy never had a wife like Monica."
"She can't be any worse than my husband was."
"What? You never told me you were married."
"I was once, a long time ago."
"What happened to him?"
"I killed him. I didn't get the nickname Poison Ivy for nothing."
Taylor was flabbergasted. Not only had Adeline known of the sobriquet given to her by the youth of Nantucket, but now she admitted it had been deserved.
"Once the Stock Market crashed and Prohibition came to an end, the easy-flowing money in Chicago dried up. I still had my looks and my figure, but they wouldn't last forever. So I married the first millionaire that asked me."
"A millionaire?"
"Naturally! I may have acted the part of a dumb blonde, but I had a good head on my shoulders. Unfortunately, my past came back to haunt me. When my husband learned my secrets, not only did he want to divorce me, but he also intended to turn me in to the police. I wasn't about to let that happen, so I killed him."
"Did you poison him?"
"Poison is for little old ladies and spineless cowards. No, I killed him with a dash of panache: two bullets in the brain at point-blank range."
"And you got away with it."
It was a statement, not a question.
"Of course, I did. No one would suspect a dumb blonde of murder, any more than they would suspect a sick old woman."
* * *
That was the last time Taylor saw Adeline alive. After he left Nantucket later that week, he traveled to Pennsylvania on business, where he was informed that his wife had been killed in a robbery attempt gone wrong. Two bullets had been put in her brain at point-blank range. His marital and legal troubles were erased instantly, and he was free to start again. After he returned from Pennsylvania, he buried his wife, took his ill-gotten gains and moved to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where he opened a seafood restaurant.
Taylor continued to receive regular letters from Adeline, but he rarely replied. His conscience would not permit it. While he had not pulled the trigger himself, he believed he was nonetheless guilty of his wife's murder, for he had told Poison Ivy of the threat Monica posed.
When he received word of the old woman's death, Taylor's first feeling was one of relief. He never even considered returning to Nantucket for the funeral. It was only when he was told that he was the old woman's sole heir that he went back home. Taylor did not expect much, even though Adeline had told him she was once married to a millionaire. He assumed maintenance on the house and years of living expenses and medical bills had taken their toll on her finances. He was wrong. In addition to the house on Ocean Avenue and all its contents, he inherited nearly ten million dollars, which had been kept in a safety deposit box in a bank in Boston.
Of far less value but far greater interest were Adeline's diaries that had been locked away with her cash. Those diaries were much more intriguing than the old woman's stories had been. The tales she had told him over milk and cookies were but the tip of the iceberg. The stories about murderous tavern keepers, flappers, gangland wars and bathtub gin were told from the memory of her firsthand experiences. True, she had worked as a chorus girl, a cocktail waitress and a hatcheck girl, but those jobs were just a cover for her real occupation: a paid hit man—or hit woman—for the Capone organization.
Although a blonde, Adeline had by no means been dumb. She invested her blood money not in the doomed stock market but in real estate. The million dollars her husband brought to their marriage only added to her fortune, which was by no means small.
* * *
... As the real estate agent drove away, I continued to gaze at the FOR SALE sign on the lawn of the house on Ocean Avenue. My throat was still constricted with unshed tears for Greta Guthrie, the child who lived in abject poverty with her parents and half-witted brother behind a small tavern in rural Kansas; for the young girl who, after seeing her family hanged before her eyes, bartered her body for her life; for the desperate woman who changed her name to Adeline and fled to Chicago where she made her living out of meting out death.
No doubt most people would see Greta Guthrie as a monster, a heartless murderer who showed no mercy to her victims. But I saw a side of her no one else ever had. The old woman I knew as Adeline may have been a killer, but buried deep within her there had been a heart. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loved me, for not only had she secretly paid for my Harvard education, but she also murdered my unfaithful wife.
After much consideration, I decided to sell the house on Ocean Avenue. I doubt I'll remain long in Nantucket. Now that my parents and Adeline are gone, there's nothing here but memories, and I'm still young enough to look ahead, not back. Who knows? I may even get married again someday. As I turned and walked back up North Shore Road, with the ocean behind me and an unknown future ahead, the tears I'd held back were finally shed: one for Greta, one for Adeline and one for Poison Ivy.
The Guthrie family in this story is based on the Bender family who owned a small tavern in Kansas and killed several of their customers for their money.
What? You've never heard of the notorious Massachusetts mobster Baby Face Salem?
