She was a passionate lover and carried more hatred than anyone I’ve ever known. Ostensibly the nicest, most charming and certainly the most attractive girl I’ve ever met. She was the girl every guy wanted for his own and every adult wanted for a daughter. She once stayed up all night nursing a baby bird she found, back to health. Six hours later, she decapitated a dentist she didn’t know, feigning an emergency to get into his office. Yeah, Mary Agnes was quite a girl. I couldn’t help but wonder what was in store for her senior year of highschool.
Her spare time was spent volunteering at a senior facility, tutoring classmates and maintaining her perfect grade average, preparing for college. She once confronted a school bully privately and when she was rebuffed, stabbed him in the heart, cut him up in manageable parts, placing those cuts of beef in a large garbage bag. With next day being garbage pick up, well you get the gist. This was the only time I knew her to employ forethought in a murder. As all her other ‘scores’ were random and her alter-ego, so loving and caring, she was seemingly impossible to track or psychologically profile.
She would never speak of and certainly not brag, about any of the ‘situations,’ as she called them. That is, she never spoke of them, except to me. My name is Wally and I was Mary Agnes’ boyfriend. As the years went by, her body count grew. I became an attorney, she a Doctor in Behavioral Psychology. We were married thirty-five years when I, for the first and only time broached the thought with her, she might want to cut back on her hobby. She responded with a stare, that the thought of still frightens me. For a year she’d occasionally study me, with that quizzical, I’m watching you, look.
Father Time, was gaining on us and we came to live comfortably in a posh retirement home. Virtually, life’s every pleasure. We still loved each other each other fervently and would sit poolside each day, sipping wine and recounting our lives, which had long ago become one. Becoming quite mad, she began sharing some of her ‘situations,’ with Nurse Maddocks, her favorite nurse and best friend at the retirement home. I explained, my dear wife had been an amateur mystery writer and sleuth, she smiled knowingly.
The love of my life, no my life itself, passed on one evening in her sleep. After the funeral, I sat with Debbie, Nurse Maddocks, and we had a glass of wine. “Debbie, I don’t care to go on without her.” She smiled and gave me a hug, “she thought you might feel that way. Cheers.” We drank down our wine. Nurse Maddocks, on my wife’s previous instructions, had poisoned me. With a broad smile, I said, “the old girl thought of everything.” Nurse Maddocks smiled as well, “yes,” she said, “we shared the same hobby, I mean amateur sleuthing of course,” with a kind wink. Still smiling she said, “to be sure, Mary Agnes, was quite a girl.”
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