Refund for Murder

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After she had been out of the hospital for a week, Beth Talbott was able walk out in the garden behind her sister’s house. At first she had to lean heavily on Marian, but after a few days she could manage alone, walking slowly, easing herself into the striped deck chair, tucking the blanket around her legs.

Harry Palmer, Marian’s husband, enjoyed working in his garden. He had been able to create privacy by planting some high cedar hedges and, at the foot of the garden slope, had dug and cemented a wading pool for the neighborhood children, surrounding it with slightly formal flower beds. The red maples were beginning to be quite respectable trees. It was May, and the days were getting warmer.

It was enough merely to sit and become slowly stronger. She had always read a great deal. Now she had no desire to read. She watched the change of the flowers, watched the tree shadows.

She had suffered a depressed skull fracture, a coma close to death, intravenous feedings of glucose, hours of the most delicate brain surgery. It was odd, she thought, to imagine strangers’ hands doing precise and incomprehensible things to your gray brain cells. The bone wall had been broached, and the hands touched that part of you that was you, that part that made you Beth Talbott, an individual who thought and felt in a certain way.

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