orley Munson killed his wife three months ago and, thus far, it had gone rather well. The main consideration for ‘well’ was, no doubt,
that he was still walking the streets and
a respected member of his community.
Of course he would occasionally suffer a sidelong glance from someone in the local grocery store or at church, but by and large there appeared to be no real fallout at all. You see, his wife had been suffering from cancer for quite some time—she’d had several bad relapses in recent years—and
so his coaxing her along toward her final moments of life had gone generally unnoticed (or at least unmentioned).Morley Munson was in love with another woman, that was the problem. He’d fallen for the wife of a business associate of his and this had greatly compounded the fact that he no longer loved his own wife. All of this had taken place more than five years ago but Morley Munson was slow to act upon his feelings and, later, upon his plan of action to remedy the situation. It took almost four years for him to realize that Constance Freeman (this was the woman in question) shared his passion and another year for them to speak about it in any concrete terms. Morley Munson knew — at least in his heart — that if the dark angel of cancer had not descended upon his wife that he probably never would’ve had the courage to act. The disease, however, had indeed come and spread its terrible black tendrils throughout her body during several repeat visits. Each time she grew weaker. Each time she appeared close to death. And yet she
didn’t die.
Morley Munson woke one morning to a cold, harsh fact: it was up to him to finish her off.
Morley Munson had decided poison was the way to go if he was going to do it at all. He had thought about this quite carefully — between his sticky, late-night fantasies about Constance Freeman — and he knew that with the amount of medicines already inside his wife’s body, poison was perhaps his greatest (and only) ally in the quest for marital freedom.
Morley Munson had stood in many a hardware store and pet supply warehouse carefully studying the ingredients in rat poisons, lawn fertilizers and various other seemingly-innocuous household items. If anyone was watching him — following carefully behind him at a distance — his apparently random domestic trips would’ve quickly begun to look rather suspicious. As it was, however, he appeared to any of the local passersby to be almost exactly what he was: a harmless, bespectacled man of little (or no) distinction.
Morley Munson had become a bit of a ‘hazard specialist’ in the last few months
as he looked for a way to ease his wife’s suffering and to enhance his own pleasure. A fast learner since he was a boy, Morley Munson quickly realized that it would take
a very particular and sensitive dose of the right ingredients over a period of months
to kill his wife so he rolled up his sleeves (figuratively, of course) and got down
to the task.
Morley Munson did not opt for one big dose but instead dozens of small ones in his wife’s food, using capfuls of a silver polish he’d found on a low shelf in the pharmacy and it had miraculously done the trick. It took its own sweet time, that shimmering goo, but in the end it had finished her off and Mrs. Munson passed away with barely a glance from the next-door neighbors. Dead.
.
..Chapter 3 — The Past
