The Butter Thief, Chapter Two

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

            “I’m not happy, Liam,” she said.
            “You’re funeral was poorly attended,” Liam said, facing the same direction as her, looking out at the sun setting on the edge of the Pacific ocean. 
            “I wasn’t expecting anything else.”
            “Charlotte,” Liam began, but the young woman cut him off.
            “Charlotte Wilson is dead,” she said without emotion. “Don’t forget that.”
            “Who are you, then?”
            “For now, I will be Jenny Hark. She’s only wanted in France and Armenia.”
            “False identities get confusing,” Liam groaned. 
            Jenny turned on him and said sharply, “Don’t you dare complain about false identities! I had to kill someone today because your plan was full of holes!”
            “And I’m sorry about that,” he said, “but you still got away! And what does it matter? It’s not like he’s your first.”
            “I’m not an assassin, Liam! I am a thief. I only ever use a gun if it’s in the plan, and only if I  approve it.”
            “You’re right,” he sighed.
            “Of course I am. And that, Liam, is why I am going to have to leave you.”
            “Char-Jenny!” Liam exclaimed. “I’m your partner! You can’t just leave me!”
            “Of course I can,” she said, bending down to grab two backpacks. “Here’s your half of the money.”

“So that’s it?” Liam asked. “We just go our separate ways?”

“Yes. I can’t risk being a part of your lopsided plans anymore, or your inane excuses,” Jenny told him. “Don’t ever let me see you again.” She tossed him one of the backpacks, then walked off.

*

Two weeks had passed since Jenny had departed ways with Liam. In the short span of time, Jenny had traveled across the country to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and had begun research on a new heist. Of course, she still had to find a partner to help as the job was a bit more complex, but that would not be a problem for her. She knew a guy who knew a guy who would be perfect for the job and who could really use the money she could offer him. If things went according to plan, she would be on a plane to Belize in another week.

*

Liam sighed to himself. He had always done things haphazardly. Even though his plans were not always terribly good ones, he had gotten away with every singe one, until that night, at least. Perhaps Jenny had been smart in leaving him, although at the time he believed that it had been because she had to kill a man, albeit a very corrupt one who was heavily involved with slavery. No, she had left him because the man’s murder was not in her plans, and if things could go askew like that, she had realized that she might one day get caught, just like he had.

“Please, Liam,” the policeman said calmly. “Any help you can give us about your past partner would greatly help your case.”

“Even if I felt like cooperating,” Liam laughed, “I’d be in danger. My... partner has a lot of power.”

The officer frowned. “I can’t promise anything, but it might be possible for you to enter Witness Protection.”

Liam smirked. The day he met Jenny, she had threatened to hunt him down if he ever talked to authorities about her hobbies. About a week later, when they were a bit closer, they were relating past stories. She had told him about a past villain she had faced who tried to testify against a past partner of hers. He was well protected by Witness Protection. On the car ride to the courthouse, he had mysteriously disappeared, only to turn up a couple months later, refusing to go onto the stand.

“I’d rather not,” Liam answered. “Not only do I know that she would find and slaughter me, but I have too much respect for her. Here’s what I can tell you: in a very small ring of the more elite thieves, she is known as the Butter Thief.”

Of Murdering Dead Bodies

  Some things truly boggle the mind.  There are, of course, different levels of bogglement; for instance, the brutal murder of an innocent gummy bear is a very innocuous and easily discerned bogglement:  after all, the gummy bear is stupendously delicious, and one cannot really prevent oneself from finding it irresistible to the palate. Other things, however, fall into (or rise onto?) the very highest levels of bogglement.  The foggiest, most boggling and bewildering event which has ever befallen me, your humble servant (or would I be an informant?), was unquestionably the circumstance which precipitated me into my present condition of lifelong imprisonment. 

  "It is she!"  the butler shrieked as I quietly entered the drawing room in which my mother's half brother's youngest son's household was gathered.  I was rather taken aback by his hysterical mein--the poor man had left off his usual quiet butling and was standing dramatically in the center of the room with his clothes askew, his hair straggling limply past his ears, his face blanched, and a smashed teapot clutched in his left hand--but I am well-known for my ability to remain polite under the most adverse of circumstances.

  "Yes, James," I agreed pleasantly.  "It is I."

  This reassuring and eminently genteel speech apparently had the opposite effect than I had intended it to, for no sooner had I uttered it than James collapsed onto the expensive burgundy rug with a loud thump and a strangled squawk, and lay there unmoving during all that followed.  I turned in utter bewilderment to the assembled family of--for the sake of convenience, let us call him--my cousin, who had been sitting like a waxwork display of a socio-economically fortunate English family dressed in mourning captured in a moment of horror and consternation.  Since the entire lot of them looked rather gormless with--whatever emotion they were gormless with--and not one had made a move to help the stricken man, I chose to ignore them, and bustled forward and knelt beside James to ascertain the cause of his infirmity.  My motion broke the spell of immobility that lay upon the socio-economically fortunate waxworks exhibit, and they stirred with life.

  "Do not touch him, you fiend of Satan!"  This odd and rather offensive remark was made by my cousin, Sir Diggory Wallace Crimswaggle IV, and, although none could ever say that he was an intelligent man, he certainly had excellent manners and a very kind and social (and not terribly religious) heart, and we had always been on the best of terms; therefore, I was exceeding astonished that he should make such an aggressively antagonizing remark, and, perhaps, even more astonished that it would be addressed to me.  At first I believed that he had been addressing another.

   Next moment, however, Sir Diggory's wife, the Honourable Lady Blanche-Maria Rivershall Crimswaggle, removed all doubt that my own cousin, whom I loved like a simpleminded younger brother, had just called me a fiend of Satan.  Although Milady was just as simple as her husband, she had rather more imagination, due to spending all of her waking hours not devoted to pleasant social engagements and the arrangement of her elaborate toilette in reading lurid Gothic novels.

  "Indeed, Miss Dorice Perywinsel!"  Her voice was a soprano scream, edged with hysteria and a hint of vindictiveness.  "Have the pits of Hades grown dull to you?  Must you now come and steal away all of our loved ones?"  So saying, she theatrically turned on her youngest child, a very small lad of ten summers, and clasped him to her capacious bosom.

  An inkling of the truth began to dawn on me. "Why, Blanche-Maria," I began.

  "Lady Crimswaggle to you!" she howled over the blonde head of the child she was affectionately suffocating.  He kept making little mews of distress and struggling futilely to free himself, but she was too occupied with glaring at me ferociously to notice these signs of discomfort.

  I rolled my eyes.  "Well, then, Lady Crimswaggle, I am afraid that you are labouring under a misapprehension.  Your dear late father-in-law had already--ah--passed on when I arrived here last night.  In fact, he had, if you will recall, been dead for two days.  Therefore, this accusation on your part, that I am robbing you of your loved ones, is entirely misplaced."

  Milady stared enraged daggers at me, her pleasant, round face contorted, her cosmetics streaked with passionate tears, her double chins quivering.  Pushing away her squirming, red-faced child (little William flopped over and lay gratefully gasping on the divan), she struggled to extricate herself and her skirts from her seat, and, succeeding, rose and took a step toward me.  I rose as well, to take full advantage of the difference in our heights (I am nearly six feet tall, and Milady is only five foot four), as well as to mitigate the awkwardness of holding a discussion while kneeling beside the supine form of an unconscious butler.  We stood beside the fallen body of poor James, toe-to-toe, two middle-aged women dressed in jetty garments, like provincial performers playing before an audience of statues.  Gormless, breathing statues.

  Then, Milady threw down the cause of all my present mind-boggling grief, the accusation which led to such unbelievably senseless suffering.

  "Oh, you can't fool me with that glib tongue of yours.  You think that you are so much better than we, with your education and your sophisticated literary tastes.  Well, you haven't fooled us.  We have seen through your lies.  We know that you killed Papa after he was dead."

 

~Hugo