Silence Of The Hams

“I’ll meet you outside. I have to find a bathroom.”

    “Just down that hallway,“ Grace Axton said, entering the kitchen and catching Jane’s words.
    Jane followed Grace’s directions. While she was washing her hands, she heard a crash. By the time she’d dried her hands and disposed of the paper towel, she could hear someone screaming. She stepped out of the bathroom.
    A crowd of people was descending on an open doorway along the hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen. As she neared the door, someone shoved a sobbing Sarah Baker out of the doorway and into her arms.
    “Sarah! What’s wrong!”
    Sarah was blubbering, “He’s dead! Oh, my God—“
    “Dead? Who’s dead?“ Jane asked, fearing the answer was Conrad.
    Grace Axton pushed through the crowd and grabbed at Sarah. “Honey, come away from here. Come on.”
    Somebody behind her gave a push and Jane found herself, against her will, in the room where somebody was dead. It was a storage room, as bright and clean as the rest of the deli. Cardboard cartons were neatly stacked on shelving that ran clear around the room except for the doorway where she stood and another doorway on the outside wall. A large chrome rack was lying on the floor. It had held hams, which had rolled all over the floor. Lying in the midst of the hams was a facedown figure. But nobody needed to see the face to know who it was. The showy, snowy white hair could only belong to Robert Stonecipher.

3

    Everybody in the hallway seemed to want in the room.
    Jane wanted out.
    Pushing her way gently but firmly, she struggled into the hall and through the kitchen and sales area. She found Shelley waiting outside.
    “What on earth’s happening?“ Shelley said. They could hear the wail of sirens, and the people still in the deli were standing around in worried knots.
    Shaken, Jane explained. “There was a big metal rack in the middle of the storage room that apparently fell over on Robert Stonecipher. It’s a madhouse in there.“
    “Was he hurt?“
    “I think he’s dead, but I didn’t get close enough to find out. Sarah Baker was crying and saying he was dead. I don’t know—“
    “Storeroom?“
    “Between the kitchen and the bathroom. I heard the crash.“
    “Poor Conrad and Sarah,“ Shelley said. “Stonecipher was an obnoxious bastard, but I wouldn’t wish that on him. Still, if he had to get himself killed or injured, why did it have to be here? And today, to wreck their grand opening? As if he hadn’t already given them enough trouble on purpose.”
    An ambulance pulled up in front of the deli. Shelley and Jane stepped onto the lawn so they wouldn’t be in the way of the emergency staff who leaped out and ran into the building carrying complicated equipment.
    “Let’s get out of here,“ Jane said. “We can’t be any help and I hate to stand around being a gawker.”
    They walked home, and Jane spent a depressing hour paying bills and tidying her small basement office. And trying very hard not to think about that sprawled figure lying half under the rack. What could have made it fall over? It looked as if it had been freestanding in the middle of the room, but surely something that large and heavy-looking doesn’t spontaneously topple over simply because somebody walks by it. Suppose it had been Mike in the room when it went over! Her heart went cold. No, she couldn’t bear to think about it.
    Instead, she looked longingly at the pile of paper sitting next to her computer. For nearly a year now she’d been working on what she called her “story.“ She was afraid to call it a book for fear that such a weighty word would get in the way of her ever finishing it. And, too, if it was a book, she’d have to think about what to do with it if and when she ever finished. Instead, she puttered with the story, enjoying the adventure of spending a few hours every week with a character she’d made up and enjoyed having adventures with. It had begun when she’d taken a “Writing Your Life Story“ class with her mother the previous summer. Jane hadn’t wanted to write her own story—she only took the class to do something with her mother during her visit—so she invented Priscilla and started telling her story instead.
    Now Priscilla, a woman of the eighteenth century who’d lived a long and exciting life, had become a friend, and Jane found herself wishing she could turn on the computer and spend the rest of the day with her. Instead, real life