Runner-up 3

Evelyn was heavily sedated most of the time. It had worked, too. Life with Tony was bearable. All this changed the day Hermann Hauser moved into the neighborhood.

She had been tending her roses, which by now she had named individually. Hester needed a good pinching, her shriveled petals were sucking the life from the rest of her body. Evelyn had moved on to Ruby when she spotted Hermann taking out his trash, his muscles bulging as he pushed the can laden with palm fronds.

“Look what we have here, girls,” she said to the inattentive flora. “It’s a man who actually cares about nature and he’s quite a hunk.”

Evelyn giggled like she was at a slumber party with her girlfriends. Today she had been mixing gin with her medication. She dusted off her knees and smoothed her shocking pink Lacoste tennis shirt. It had been years since she and Tony had actually played tennis but her wardrobe had been impeccably preserved. She had Izods in every color of the rainbow, in fact.

“Hello there,” Evelyn chirped from behind the hedge. She thought it was so cute that Hermann had clutched his heart when he saw her. She knew it was love at first sight, never realizing that she had, in fact, scared the bejesus out of him.

Evelyn learned later that Hermann had almost pulled a gun out and shot her. The fact that he was an FBI man only heightened the attraction she felt coursing through her body.

After exchanging a few pleasantries, Hermann went back into his sprawling ranch house and she to her towering Tudor, but Evelyn’s mind remained locked on his visage like a rabid pit bull.

Tony paced back and forth in the den, murmuring into his cellphone. He had lots of secrets from Evelyn and some things he thought were secrets. She was well aware of his recent affair with a woman named Carmen, for example.

One afternoon when Evelyn had been neatly rolling Tony’s laundered socks and lining them like soldiers in the top drawer of his Chippendale dresser, she came across a cellphone wrapped inside some silk boxers, neither of which she recognized. She entered his pass code number and voila! There were text messages that would have made Harold Robbins blush, and then Evelyn went into the saved voice mails.

“So Carmen was a Latin spitfire, eh?” Evelyn had thought to herself while listening to each lurid detail of their sordid affair.

Grabbing the nearby nail scissors, she began snipping holes in the heels of each sock, rerolling as she went. This was the moment she stopped caring about Tony and began to think only of sweet revenge.

Tony would be in the den for a while. Lately he had even taken to sleeping in there. Evelyn welcomed the peace and quiet. Unfortunately, that’s also where the gin was kept. She had a little Tanqueray stashed in a Cole Haan boot in her closet upstairs.

“First things first,” she thought, merrily trotting upstairs. Hermann was just turning on CNN when there was a knock on his door. He checked the peephole and saw the distorted face of Evelyn Falco clutching a bouquet of flowers.

“Great. The welcome wagon of Wisteria Lane,” thought Hermann, annoyed by the interruption. But by the time their visit ended, he no longer thought of her as an intruder.

” . . . and Tony has beaten me repeatedly in places unseen by the naked eye!”

A damsel in distress was just what appealed to Hermann’s chivalrous nature. That bastard was smacking around a defenseless woman! It’s bad enough that a United States congressman was cheating on such a fragile creature, but Hermann would not let her be a punching bag for this political blowhard. He not only agreed to set up surveillance, he welcomed it.

They were watching when Tony and Charlie Bonner were having a face-off across the large conference table, unaware of the gun until Charlie pointed it at Tony’s head. Evelyn should have felt sorry for her husband, but all she could think was “pull the trigger, please pull the trigger.”

“I’ve got to go over there!” Hermann said, strapping on his gun like Elliot Ness. “We’ve got enough on tape to hang both those bastards, but no one needs to die!”

“Why not?” Evelyn thought, but what she said was, “Be careful, Hermann!” and watched him bolt out the front door. She continued to watch as Hermann crossed her own manicured lawn and knocked on the door. He was greeted by a bullet to the head.

“Nooooo!” Evelyn screamed, falling to her knees.

Jeri Greene is an actress and playwright living in Hemet, “where no one can hear you scream.”