Throwback Thursday: ‘The Poison Pen Affair’ by Mel Anastasiou

A whisper of sound awoke Stella. Or did not exactly awaken her, but made her aware that she was awake. She felt a frisson between her shoulders and an inexplicable sense that something was approaching her room. “I’m getting up,” she told her mother, who had died so long ago. Stella pictured her leaning out at the gold bar of heaven. Stella’s mother held three lilies in her hand, and she was saying, Stella, stir the porridge.

Stella shook herself. Imaginings like that one in a younger woman might feel poetic, but at eighty-two they sounded cuckoo. Therefore Stella employed Holmesian investigative techniques to impose order on her early morning thought processes. The scope for investigation inside her little institutional bedroom was narrow, but in Fairmount Manor, a person used what she had or used nothing. So, lying quite still with her eyes shut tight, Stella strained to hear whether the whispering sound would come again.

What was that? Just the quack of a weighted door shutting itself somewhere in Daffodil Corridor.

And now, the mewing of Ollie’s trolley wheels nearing and then passing by Stella’s room.

But, the strange little noise that had wakened Stella in the first place had sounded more like a snake’s hiss, although snakes were obviously unlikely early callers in Fairmount Manor. The
whisper didn’t come again, but nobody — not even Mrs Perdita Warren, the Director of Fairmount Manor, with all her administrative powers — could stop Stella enjoying this small mystery.

She opened her eyes and looked about her. Room 34 had not been built to please, but early sunshine shone through the window over her bed. She dipped her hand into the square patch
of sunlight that warmed her belly and turned her nightgown from white to soft yellow. She retrieved her glasses from their resting place on the laminate bedside table that Fairmount Manor provided for residents. She put them on. Her gaze rested upon the soft red cover of The Prisoner of Zenda. This was the book that Cassandra had given her in the effects closet a few days earlier, just before locking Stella inside. Stella was enjoying rereading this elderly copy of Zenda, as much for its thick, cottony pages as for the ripsnorting story it told.

She straightened her glasses. And that was when she saw it: a white rectangle on the grey linoleum floor. The intriguing whisper of sound had heralded its delivery into her room, under her door.

Somebody’s written me a letter.