She stepped toward the wall. Her eyes centered on a single picture. She saw red hair.
“But that’s Doctor Jayson,” she whispered out loud.
She stepped closer, peering at another picture. More red hair.
“Jordan?” she asked, although she knew the answer.
She reached out like a blind person to touch one of the pictures. “Who are you?” she demanded of the third picture. It was a redheaded woman standing in an empty, anonymous parking lot on a summer afternoon. She could not see the woman’s face very well, as the photograph’s subject had buried it into her cupped hands.
She saw sheets of paper with the words Red One, Red Two, and Red Three and outlines of schedules: History Class, Academic Building #2, 10:30 MTWTF. She turned and saw Patients 830 to 1230 hour break. Frequent lunch spots: Ace Diner. Subway. Fresh Side Salad Store. Return at 130. More patients.
Another sheet of paper was divided into three sections. Beneath Red One was a Favorite Places list that had businesses and nightclub addresses. A similar list-though shorter-was provided for Red Two. Beneath a picture of Jordan and the identifier Red Three was a basketball schedule.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf stepped back.
She was unsure whether she was speaking out loud or not, but the word Why? seemed to reverberate loudly through the room.
This was followed by something clear and whispered: “I don’t understand.” The photographs seemed slippery and elusive. She couldn’t see a reason for them. Not spoken out loud but ricocheting around within her was the weak rationalization: There’s got to be a simple, safe explanation.
She racked her imagination. Some clear-cut writerly vision of storytelling. Some essential part of the mystery process that she didn’t comprehend, but which made utterly perfect and totally reasonable sense to an author. He had to be using real people as models for characters. That has to be it, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf insisted. You just don’t get it. You’re not the creative sort that understands these complex things.
But the pictures seemed too explicit and far too provocative. And as she stared, she could tell each was taken from some vantage point that shouted of concealment. From behind a tree. From inside a car through an open window. From around a brick wall. From an upper window in an office building. There was not one picture that even vaguely implied that the subject knew she was being photographed.
A stalker would take these pictures. An obsessed fan or a deranged lover might create this wall of fascination. But she couldn’t find these words within her. It was more as if reason and observation had been replaced inside her by some white, burning light and crashing, screeching discordant noise.
No, no, no, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf thought. The word, repeated like some oriental mantra, calmed her a little.
She staggered back, still unsteady but trying to reassure herself with every step, and turned toward the computer. On a corner of the desk next to the printer there was a facedown stack of papers in an 8 ½-by-11 box.
It shouted novel.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf picked up the top sheet and turned it over in her hands.
She read a single line from the top of the page: Only a fool thinks just of the ending. It’s the process of killing that incorporates true passion. I can hardly wait for that moment to arrive.
Her hand shook as she slid the page back onto the pile. For the first time in her marriage, she did not want to read more of her husband’s work. Her mind seemed to have gone into a black vacuum that refused to process any information-especially the information that was right in front of her-or to draw conclusions. There were ideas, thoughts, suppositions racing about within her shouting for attention, but she ignored all of the shrieks and cries they made.
“I don’t understand,” she said out loud. Then she was scared, as if the question would somehow scar the room.
“This just can’t be right,” she whispered. But she was unsure what right was or wasn’t.
She looked at the computer. Her fingers shook as she rolled the mouse. A prompt filled a black screen: Enter Password.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf stepped back. A part of her insisted that she could figure out the password-Maybe it’s my name-but a louder part yelled that she didn’t want to open up the portal to the computer because she didn’t want to know what she would find there. Carefully, she shut the computer back down. This felt illicit.
Her mind was working rapidly, soaring on tangents that led her nowhere. It was a little like coming across a secret stack of pornographic images that were truly questionable. Images of children. Except these weren’t dirty, illegal pictures.
They meant something else.
She turned toward the wall of photographs, but before she could really focus again on what it amounted to, she shut her eyes. If there was something to see, she no longer wanted to see it.
The only thing she could tell herself to do was to retreat slowly, carefully, making certain that she did not disrupt anything so that there was no lingering sign of her intrusion. Step back out and everything will be as it was just a few minutes ago, she told herself. But her eyes were drawn to a large red leather-bound scrapbook that dominated a shelf of books, towering over paperback copies of her husband’s novels and popular nonfiction accounts that detailed in great degree sensational modern crimes.
The scrapbook was identical to one she had on her bureau. Hers contained wedding pictures and a copy of the invitation and the menu at the small country club where they’d had their modest reception. She suddenly recalled her husband buying the two scrapbooks in a leather goods store on their brief honeymoon. He had given her one and kept the other for himself.
Pictures of our wedding.
She was drawn to it. She reached out, and as if seized by someone else, the scrapbook fell open in front of her.
Her first glance reassured her. No, not the wedding, which would have been a relief, but collections of reviews. Of course, she insisted to herself. Why not? This made complete sense, and she could feel herself slowly exhaling.
Then she looked a little closer. Intermingled with the reviews were newspaper clippings about prominent murders.
She wanted to shrug. Another of course. Has to be research, she insisted.
But the newspaper stories seemed to be off-point. She couldn’t see the relationship between book reviews and the seemingly unconnected homicides. There has to be a connection; you just can’t see it, she told herself. There were some grisly, large-type headlines, and grainy pictures of police cars. Names and dates leapt out at her. For another moment, she shut her eyes. When she blinked them open again, she was afraid they were watering.
It was a little like staring at a picture obscured within one of those geometrically designed multicolored artworks that had been popular in the ’80s. A trompe l’oeil. There was some image that she couldn’t quite recognize, but knew was hidden there.
It had been many years since Mrs. Big Bad Wolf drove recklessly. But that was what she felt: out of control, swerving wildly, tires skidding sickeningly on wet pavement. She seized a blank note card and a pencil from her husband’s desk and rapidly wrote down the dates and locations of the newspaper clippings and the names of the murder victims that screamed from the headlines. She took the note card and slipped it inside her shirt, so that it was up against her skin. It felt clammy, like the touch of something dead.