“So…” Karen started, then stopped. She felt herself choking, as if she had stage fright. When she continued, her words came out as cracked as dry leather. “We need to make some kind of sense of this.”
Jordan responded, feeling like someone else was speaking. “What do you mean, make sense? Some crazy guy wants to kill us because we’ve got red hair and he’s all obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood and we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do about it. I mean, what sense is there to make? And, while we’re trying to make sense of it all, maybe he’s stalking us and lining us up like targets on a firing range and getting ready to pull the trigger. Bang bang bang, y’er all dead.”
Jordan’s voice had picked up momentum with each word until it was racing, even as she dropped it to barely a whisper.
“Beat him to the punch, beat him to the punch, beat him to the punch,” the teenager repeated three times, once for each of them.
Karen reeled back. She had ignored the teenager’s homicidal suggestion the first time she’d offered it. But with the three of them gathered around the table, it wasn’t so easily dismissed. She did not know why she didn’t think this was a viable approach. She heard herself saying, “Look, Jordan, we’re not killers. We wouldn’t know what to do. And we can’t stoop…”
She stopped, because she thought she sounded foolish and she could see the youngest of them shaking her head violently in disagreement. She shifted in her seat. Be logical! a voice within her fairly screamed. But obeying this command took a great effort on her part. She could feel her throat closing up and her mouth drying. She licked her lips and took a swig of beer. “Look, the first thing,” she said. “Something locks us together.” She spoke as slowly as possible. “We need to figure that out.”
“Yeah, red hair,” Jordan said.
“No. It has to be something more than that.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah asked. She felt a little intimidated, as if the other two were more in control and had far greater resources than she did, although with the talk having shifted to killing, she remembered that she seemed to be the only one who actually owned a weapon.
“He had to find us,” Karen said. “So, something links us. It can’t just be random.”
“Why not?” Jordan asked.
The three women looked at one another. Each imagined that the other two were as different from her as possible. Other than their hair, nothing rang out loudly. No alarms, bells, or sirens sounded that announced a similarity.
Again, the three women were silenced by their thoughts. And again, it was the youngest who broke the quiet. “Yeah, but even if we can figure it out, what then? Call the cops?”
“I already tried that,” Karen said. “Of course, if we figure out who’s stalking us and we can take that name to the police, maybe they’ll be able to do something…” She hesitated. This most logical path seemed utterly unreasonable. When you’re tossed into insanity, she thought, what makes you think logic will help you?
She slumped in her seat. All her training and all her adult life had been devoted to reason, to making a diagnosis: Run this test and that test, take into account this symptom and that symptom, put it all together into the mix of education and experience, and come up with an answer. A reasonable answer. Maybe it wouldn’t be a happy answer, but it would be an answer nevertheless. She shook her head.
Jordan looked at the older woman. Karen Jayson was completely respectable-educated, responsible, and mature and Jordan had expected that she would know exactly what to do because she was the type of woman who always knew exactly what to do. She was the type of woman that teenagers like herself were urged to grow up and become. And so, when she saw the same confusion and doubt on Red One’s face that she imagined was on her own, it frightened her. She half-turned, to see if she saw the same look in Sarah’s eyes, but the third member of the trio was leaning back, staring at the ceiling, as if hoping for some thunderbolt of guidance from the heavens to penetrate the walls and strike her with a clear path forward. Jordan thought, It’s like being cast adrift at sea with two strangers.
She did not say this. Instead, she blurted out, “There’s only one way to protect ourselves.”
“How is that?” Sarah asked, as if sliding slowly down a ladder to earth.
“The Wolf has all the advantages over Little Red Riding Hood,” she said, “except one.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a prisoner,” she said.
“What?” Karen grunted.
“Of what he wants.”
“I don’t follow,” Sarah said.
“What trips him up? His own desires.”
Sarah and Karen looked at Jordan.
“I’ve read the fairy tale,” she said swiftly. “I went to the library the other night. I’ve read all the versions.”
“Yes,” Karen said, discouraged. “But that’s a fairy tale…”
Jordan persisted, leaning forward and talking quickly, as if the speed of her words would overcome the noisy buzz of the bar. She ignored Karen’s interruption. “And the only version where Little Red Riding Hood gets saved in the end is the phony, politically safe one that mothers tell their daughters. Sort of the sanitized Disney version. In the real story…”
She stopped. She saw doubt in front of her.
Jordan nodded her head. She imagined she sounded young, but she had youthful determination. “That’s our only chance. Turn the old story into the new one. The story where we all get eaten alive needs to change into the safe one where we get rescued.”
“Sounds nice,” Sarah said, bitterness that she did not want or think was helpful creeping into her voice. “I’m sure there’s a helpful strong woodsman just waiting to come running with his trusty axe…”
Jordan held up her hand. “We have to rescue ourselves,” she said. “It’s our only chance.”
Karen jumped in. “Okay,” she said, “but how do we do that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Jordan said. “But it seems to me that we won’t be doing any good for any of us if we all just sit around waiting for the Wolf to kill us. I mean, if he can stalk us, why can’t we stalk him right back?”
“A nice idea, but how?” Sarah asked.
Jordan didn’t know how to answer that question, but Karen did. “The way we started this. We find out what links us. And what I mean is, no one do anything that’s out of the ordinary. Do whatever it is you do on schedule and at appropriate times. Don’t let the Wolf know anything different.”
“I don’t get it,” Sarah asked.
Karen shut her eyes for an instant. She couldn’t believe what she was about to say. “At some point,” she said slowly, “we’re going to have to draw him in. Close enough so that we can see who he is.”
She almost gasped. This thought was too terrifying. She placed her hands beneath the tabletop, because she was afraid the others might see them quivering.
Jordan, however, smiled. “‘What big teeth you have, Grandmother,’” she said. “Makes sense.”
The three Reds were quiet for a moment. “How much time do you think we have?” Sarah asked.
This question went straight to the pit of each Red’s stomach. A day. A week. A month. A year. There was no way of telling.
The three women stared at one another. A physician with a secret life as a comic in a world where nothing was funny anymore, a widow lost in relentless grief, a teenager trapped by circumstances and failure.
“I don’t want to die,” Sarah said abruptly. The words surprised her, because up until that moment she had believed that this was all she really wanted to do.
18
In what the Wolf thought was a wonderfully serendipitous bit of good fortune, the following day he received a chain e-mail from the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, announcing a special seminar with the Massachusetts State Police’s top forensic analyst. Although he had joined the organization shortly after his first book was published, he had never attended any of its lectures, which were designed to help members with tricky issues that cropped up in their struggling narratives. He had felt above these “how-to” sessions and preferred researching on his own. The local police were always helpful, as were many criminal defense lawyers. He sometimes wondered whether they would be equally eager to speak to a real killer.