SMOKE TEST

by John M. Floyd

It was ironic, Larry thought. Susan always liked the fact that he could fix things. Nice to have a handyman for a husband, she used to tell her friends. It was probably one of the few things she did like about him.

And now it was going to kill her.

Larry hummed to himself while he knelt in his swimsuit on the bedroom carpet beside the closed bathroom door. On the other side he could hear his wife's singing, and the steady hiss of the shower. An added benefit: the noise covered the sound of his tools.

Forget about that, he told himself. For the moment he had to ignore the singing, and the shower, and the ticking clock, and the roar of the night surf outside the window, and anything else that might distract him. Susan had always said he was absentminded, and maybe it was true. He was always forgetting to take his TV dinner out of the oven or turn off the sprinkler or some such thing. On one memorable occasion, Susan's dog had died when she was out of town because Larry had forgotten to feed him.

The truth was, he usually had other things on his mind.

But tonight he couldn't afford to let his attention wander, not for an instant. There would be no trial run, no "smoke test." This would be the real thing.

Finally he was done. The waist-high light switch on the bedroom wall was wired and ready. Larry stood, put down his tools, turned off his flashlight, and admired his work. In the darkened room the light switch looked just like it always had. There was no way to tell that the plastic on/off toggle was now metal, and wired directly into the juice.

Larry grinned. Ten minutes from now, give or take, Susan would finish her shower and put her robe on and open the bathroom door the way she always did. Then she would step barefoot through the door onto the carpet and turn on the bedroom light, also the way she always did.

But when her finger touched the switch this time, she would get the surprise of her life. The last surprise of her life.

Okay, Larry thought. So far so good. Susan was still singing, the shower was still showering. And he had one more thing to do.

Sweating even in his swim trunks, he hurried to the kitchen, filled a bucket with water from the sink, lugged it back to the bedroom, and emptied it onto the carpet outside the bathroom door. The water was a nice touch. The hot switch alone would deliver enough current to kill her, but standing in a pool of water would guarantee it.

Afterward, he would repair the wiring, throw away the metal toggle-switch, fill the tub and flood the bathroom as well, and dash back out to the beach for a midnight swim. He had already made sure he was seen an hour ago, strolling to the beach by the usual path, but had then crept back to the house through the shadowy underbrush, and would soon sneak out again by the same route. The next time he left the beach, an hour or so from now, he would once more make sure he was noticed. He might even decide to scream and carry on a little, for the benefit of the neighbors, once he "discovered" his wife's body. He could picture it now: It was terrible, Officer. I came in from my nightly swim and there she was, lying there . . .

He would give a fine performance, of that he was certain. He'd been out of work for a while (a condition of which Susan regularly reminded him), but he was an actor--a good actor, in his opinion. With the right money and the right connections, he would someday be a great actor.

And tonight was a step in the right direction, at least in the money department. Dear old Susan might not be much to look at anymore, but she was obscenely rich. And Larry had made sure the will was written the right way.

Suddenly he heard the shower cut off. He checked his watch. He had about three minutes left--it always took her that long to towel off, slip the bathrobe on, step through the door. Quickly he took the empty bucket back to the kitchen, refilled it, left it there on standby, and returned to the bedroom.

One last time he padded to the area outside the bathroom door, making sure everything was set, that everything looked and felt right. He stood there a moment in the dark room with his back to the door, the wet carpet cold on his bare feet, imagining what was about to happen and relishing the idea of living with Susan's money but without Susan.

Then he realized, with a lurch of his heart, that he'd left all his tools scattered on the floor. He didn't even remember where he had put his flashlight. None of that would matter to Susan, of course--she'd never see any of that anyway, in the darkened room--but it might matter if someone heard her scream or saw a flash of sparks and called the police and caught him here. His whole plan depended on his fixing the switch afterward and getting out of the house fast and unnoticed, and he couldn't do it without his pliers and screwdriver and flashlight.

He couldn't believe he'd been so careless. He'd have to locate and gather his tools now, and do it quick. Good God, he said to himself, I really am absentminded.

And with that thought in his head, he switched on the light so he could see . . .

This story originally appeared in the April 20, 1999 issue of Woman's World