3
Panic One.
Panic Two.
Panic Three.
After reading their letter, each Red panicked in her own unique way. Each Red mistakenly thought she was maintaining control over emotions that seemed suddenly explosive. Each Red imagined she was reacting to the threatening words appropriately. Each Red believed she was taking the right steps. Each Red felt that she-and she alone-could keep herself safe, if safe was what she actually wanted to be. Each Red assessed the stated threat to her life and reached a dizzyingly different conclusion. Each Red was unsure whether she was truly in danger or just ought to be annoyed, although neither alternative made complete sense. Each Red struggled to grasp the truth of her situation, only to be stymied. Each Red slid into confusion without knowing that was what she was doing.
None of them were completely right about anything.
Karen Jayson’s first instinct, after absorbing the shock delivered by the words on the page, was to call the local police.
Sarah Locksley’s initial impulse was to find the handgun that her dead husband had kept locked away in a steel box, hidden on a top shelf in the small room that had doubled as his home office.
Jordan Ellis did nothing except flop down and curl up on her bed, doubled over as if cramped and sick.
Karen’s conversation with the detective was brutally unpleasant. She had read the letter thoroughly twice, and then slapped it down on the kitchen table and angrily seized her telephone from a hook on the wall. Her imagination reeled with barely contained fury. She was not accustomed to being threatened and she hated the coy fairy-tale underpinnings of the letter, so the officious, determined, well-educated I’m not scared of anything or anyone side of her rapidly took over. So, who are you, some big bad fucking wolf? she thought. We’ll see about that. Without really considering what she would say, she dialed 911.
She expected the dispatcher who answered to be helpful. She was wrong.
“Police. Fire. Emergency,” he said.
She thought the voice sounded very young, even with the curt words.
“This is Doctor Karen Jayson over on Marigold Road. I believe I need to speak with a detective.”
“What is the nature of your emergency, ma’am?”
“Doctor,” Karen corrected him. She instantly wished that she hadn’t.
“Okay,” the dispatcher responded instantly, “what is the nature of your emergency, Doctor?” She could hear a tired end-of-shift contempt in the way he forced out the word.
“A threatening letter,” she answered.
“From who?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t signed.”
“An anonymous threat?”
“Yes. Precisely.”
“Well, you better speak with someone in the detective bureau,” the dispatcher said.
That’s what I said, Karen thought but did not say.
She was put on hold, presumably while the phone line was switched. The local police force was small and occupied a stolid brick building in the center of the closest town, just off the main common, adjacent to the town’s only ambulance and fire station and across from the modest town hall. She lived in the countryside at least five miles away and the only time she passed the police headquarters was when she took her weekly Saturday morning trip to the Whole Foods Market nearby. She guessed that most of the police work was dedicated to keeping the highways safe from bored and speeding teenagers, stepping between husbands and wives who had come to blows, and working with the nearby bigger city forces on drug investigations, because many dealers had come to understand that being out in the rural sections allowed them considerable peace and quiet while they cooked up crystal meth or chopped up rock cocaine for distribution on much harder urban streets and nearby colleges. Karen wondered whether there were more than ten actual police officers on duty at any time in her town and if any had even the smallest amount of sophisticated training.
“This is Detective Clark,” a sturdy, no-nonsense voice came over the line. She was relieved to note that this policeman at least sounded older.
She identified herself and told the detective that she’d received a threatening letter. She was surprised that he did not ask her to read it to him, but instead launched into a series of questions, with the most obvious first.
“Do you know who might have sent it to you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Does it have any identifying marks that might indicate-?”
“No,” she interrupted. “A New York City postmark, that’s all.”
“You have no idea who the writer is?”
“None.”
“Well, have you been through any personal issues-”
“No. Not in years.”
“Have you made any enemies at work?”
“No.”
“Have you recently had to fire an employee?”
“No.”
“Have you had any run-ins with neighbors? Like maybe a nasty dispute over a property line, or your dog got out and chased their cat, or something like that?”
“No. I don’t have a dog.”
“Has there been anything out of the ordinary in the last few days or weeks that you noticed, like telephone hang-ups, or vehicles following you on your way to or from work?”
“No.”
“Have you had any recent thefts, or a break-in either at your home or office?”
“No.”
“Have you lost your wallet or a credit card or some other type of personal identification?”
“No.”
“How about Internet? An identity theft, or-”
“No.”
“Can you think of anyone, anywhere, for any reason who might want to harm you?”
“No.”
The detective sighed, which Karen thought was unprofessional. Again, she did not say this out loud.
“Come on, Doctor. Surely there’s somebody out there you might have crossed, maybe even inadvertently. Did you ever misdiagnose some patient? Fail to provide some medical service that caused someone to get ill, or even to die? Ever been sued by some unsatisfied customer?”
“No.”
“So you can’t think of anyone…?”
“No. That’s what I told you. No.”
The detective paused before continuing. “How about someone who might want to play a practical joke?”
Karen doubted this. Some of the other performers she met at comedy clubs had what she considered pretty far-out senses of humor-and there was a style of punking other comedians with pranks that verged on the sadistic and cruel-but a letter like the one on the kitchen table in front of her seemed way beyond any comedian’s idea of good fun, no matter how twisted he or she was. “No. And I don’t think it’s very funny.”
She could imagine the detective shrugging on the other end of the line. “Well, I’m not sure there’s much we can do right now. I can have regular patrol cars frequent your street a bit more often. I’ll have an announcement made at our daily staff session. But until there’s some sort of overt act…” The detective’s voice trailed off.
“The letter isn’t an overt act?”
“It is and it isn’t.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” Detective Clark said in a voice that was probably designed for giving a lecture to a high school class about the law, “a written threat is a second-degree felony. But you say you have no enemies-at least, none that you are currently aware of-and you haven’t done anything to warrant a threat and no one has actually done anything, other than write this harassing letter…”
“I think, Detective Clark, that someone saying ‘You have been selected to die’ might register as more than merely harassment.” Karen knew she sounded overly stuffy and stiff. She hoped that this would energize the policeman in some way, but it had the opposite effect.
“Doctor, I think I’d just chalk it up to some bizarre moment, or someone with a lousy sense of humor, or someone who wants to mess you up a little bit for whatever reason and forget about it until something actually happens. Unless, of course, you see someone following you, or someone raids your bank account or something like that. Or else they demand money. Then maybe…”