Empty Promises

designed to give them the easy life they envisioned. Later, each would blame the other for coming up with the idea of killing David for his insurance money.
    Teri and Carole realized they would have to make his death look like an accident—both to fool the police and to qualify under the double-indemnity clause in his policy. Killing a big husky marine drill instructor wasn’t going to be that easy. The only thing they had going for them was the fact that David was a home-loving, doting stepfather who never doubted his wife. He never asked why Teri was always around; he just figured Carole got lonesome while he was off training recruits.
    The first plan to kill David came from a television program they watched—an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. David always took a shower after a day’s duty out in the scorching California sun. They decided Carole would leave her hair dryer plugged in and throw it into the shower while David was standing there naked and wet. They knew this would work better if David was in the habit of taking a bath, but the shower would have to do.
    Carole did her part. She started to dry her hair and then pretended to stumble, and the hair dryer flew out of her hand and landed in the shower stall with David. Fortunately for him, there wasn’t much water in the bottom of the stall and David was standing on a rubber mat. He didn’t die. He didn’t even get a shock. He did give Carole a stern lecture on home safety, reminding her that it could have been one of her children taking a shower.
    The second plan to do away with David involved putting a hefty dose of LSD in David’s French toast. Carole and Teri had plenty of time to find and buy the hallucinogen while David was away on a bivouac. When he returned, they beat the LSD in with the eggs and milk and dipped slices of French bread in the mixture before they fried them in butter. David ate two helpings with plenty of maple syrup. They watched him expectantly, but he seemed fine. When he got to work that morning, though, he became nauseated. The medic said he just had a case of twenty-four-hour stomach flu.
    The general philosophy of their essential plan wasn’t what was wrong. Teri always maintained that they had to work David’s murder into his regular routine. They had to study things he did every day so that his death would seem, if not natural, a tragic accident. Up till that point, that’s what they had done. But David was proving to be far more impervious to attack than they had reckoned him to be.
    “Martinis!” Teri cried one night. “He drinks a martini every night of his life—sometimes two.”
    The two woman put household lye into David’s gin bottle, hoping that his next martini would be his last. Carole thought he’d probably spit it out when he realized he wasn’t drinking gin and vermouth, but Teri had an answer for that, too: “He’ll surely ask for water, and then you can hand him a glass full of lye water and he’ll swallow it. Then he’ll die and we can pour some gin on him and tell the doctor that he was drunk and accidentally drank out of the wrong bottle.”
    Carole didn’t think the plan would work. What if he didn’t die? Surely, after this he would be suspicious. As good-natured as he was, he wasn’t stupid—and once David lost his trust in her, their marriage would probably end. Then she would lose the insurance money even if he ever did die.
    Teri grudgingly agreed that this was something to think about. Carole said she had a plan of her own, and it was far more subtle than putting lye in David’s gin. She had owned a pet tarantula for some time, long enough that it was a familiar sight in its glass cage. (It was an apt pet for a woman with homicidal tendencies, given that many female spiders eat their mates after their union is consummated.) Carole said her spider still had an intact venom sac. She suggested they wait until David went to bed, and when he was asleep, they could slip the tarantula into bed with him. Sometime during the night, he was bound to roll over on the furry spider and be bitten. In light of his wife’s plans for him, David Hargis might have been better off going to bed with the tarantula than with Carole.
    Teri was enthusiastic about the tarantula plan, but she thought she could improve on it. She suggested they buy a blackberry pie and hide the venom sac from the spider in David’s portion. “It will look just like the berries—unless he looks really close, and