Tea for Two

I didn’t mean to kill her. Well, that had been the plan, but I didn’t expect it actually to work. But there, I found myself in the tiny, overstuffed apartment with her dead body.

Dead body. I had always wondered at that phrase. Couldn’t a body be alive? Were they always dead? And if they were always dead, why not just say body? Wasn’t it redundant to say dead body?

So there I was in the tiny overstuffed apartment smelling a mixture of cat piss and almond cookies with a body. Her body.

The old woman had never been nice to me. She’d never been nice to anyone. Quite the opposite, actually. She’d been outright mean and nasty. Never a nice word to anyone, always leaning out her window to shout something horrible to the children playing in the street. To the postal worker and the meter reader. Not to mention the venom she reserved for her neighbors. Her complaint about Jack that had gotten him booted from the complex had been the last straw. All Jack had done was practice his music. As the first chair in the Chicago Orchestra, he practiced daily. No one would expect anything less. And it wasn’t as if his playing were wretched. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I had even heard. So when she complained and got him kicked out of his apartment, I was livid. I knew something had to be done about the old bird.

It wasn’t hard to take the cyanide from the lab. Having it vanish in quarter-gram increments was easy. That much could go missing while conducting a test or experiment. No one suspected a thing.

After getting the cyanide home, I had made the cookies. Almond ladyfingers to cover the scent of the cyanide. Fun fact: not everyone can detect the odor of cyanide, but I wanted to be extra careful.

I went to her door and offered her the cookie tin purchased from a second-hand store years ago—no way to trace it to me. To my surprise, she bade me inside, and I entered the hoarder’s paradise. Stacks of yellowed newspapers and aging magazines lined the narrow passage leading to the living room, where decaying towers of boxes nearly filled the space. In the center sat a tiny round table and two chairs. Before each chair was a place setting, neat and tidy as if she had expected me, a steaming teapot held court at the center of the table, and she motioned for me to sit.

I mentioned the place setting and she replied that she always set the table for two, just in case one of her children came by to see her. My heart sank a bit in my chest. Her children had been dead for decades.

I smiled demurely and took my seat. We drank tea, and she ate cookies. I stayed until she died, then slipped on a pair of dish gloves and pulled a roll of tape from my pocket to remove any fibers and hair from the back of my chair. I then took my dishes to the sink, washed them, and placed them back on the table in case someone knew that she set the table for two. From my other pocket, I took a sheet of notepaper I’d grabbed from a bank across town and taped it to the top of the tin directing the cookies to a neighbor down the hall, making it appear as if she’d stolen the cookies from their doorstep. I then waited until late into the night, until the complex was deep asleep, and slipped back into my apartment.

The landlord discovered her body two days later when he inspected the smoke alarms. The police questioned the whole complex, but nothing ever came of it as it usually does with those society has forgotten. The best part of all of this was that Jack got his apartment back, and now I can listen to his beautiful music all day without worrying that someone will complain.