SHORT STORIES

In this story Mary Maloney waits for her husband Patrick Maloney to come home from work. She offers to fix dinner and serve it to him so that he does not have to leave his chair, although they usually dine out on Thursdays. Patrick declines and confronts Mary, ‘‘So there it is. . . . And I know it’s a kind of bad time to be telling you, but there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course, I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss.’’  Patrick has decided to leave his pregnant wife. Mary goes into shock. At first she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. She moves automatically to retrieve something to cook for supper - a frozen leg of lamb which she returns to bring down on his head killing him.  She immediately sets up an alibi. She goes to the grocer, Sam, and says that she needs to vegetables to go with lamb that she is cooking for dinner.  When she returns home and sees her husband’s corpse again, she remembers how much she once loved him, and her tears of loss are genuine. She calls the police station, the one where Patrick has worked, to report what she has found. Mary knows the policemen, and Sergeant Jack Noonan is her comforter.  After checking out her alibi, Sam, no one considers her a suspect. The focus of the investigation is on finding the murder weapon,  which must be a large, heavy blunt instrument. She then asks her dead husband’s colleagues, knowing that they have worked long past their own mealtimes, to eat the dinner she had fixed for Patrick. The policemen eat in the kitchen and discuss the case, and they men agree that the killer probably discarded the massive murder weapon almost immediately, and predict that they will find it on the premises. Another police officer theorizes that the weapon is probably ‘‘right under our very noses.’’

Read the entire story, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”