Obituary Page 2

What have I done? he thought dully.

  And standing alone in bleak sterility, he answered his own question.

  I’m dead, he thought. I’ve killed myself.

  The next afternoon, when Jimmy Cobb reported for work and found the store closed, he merely decided that Mr. Fleming was observing a brief period of mourning, and he went quietly away.

  It was, in fact, two days before Mr. Fleming was widely missed, and still another day before authority could be prevailed upon to enter the store. Inasmuch as the neighbors had been incited by anxiety to grim expectations, no one was greatly surprised when Mr. Fleming was found dead in his cooler, a tight little death chamber. There was a tin pail on the floor of the cooler.

  Beside the pail, empty, were a bottle that had contained bleach and a can that had contained toilet-bowl cleaner.

  Mr. Fleming’s body, thanks to the low temperature in the cooler, was very well preserved.

  It was considered both pitiable and romantic that Mr. Fleming, in his grief, had chosen to die deliberately by the same domestic devil’s brew that had killed his wife accidentally. But it must be remembered that Mr. Fleming, being a kind of poet, was given to poetic fancies.

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