I was a fly on the wall, she thought, seeing everything and hearing everything and noticed by nobody. She looked down at the pages filled with her report: clear, legible, concise handwriting, all in a secretary’s precise style.
It was, she imagined, a totally different way of standing up and being counted. You don’t have to make a loud noise or be extra-special beautiful, she told herself. You don’t have to be six feet tall, or have red hair like the women going into the book. When you have words at your disposal, it automatically makes you special. It was wildly seductive for her, magical and utterly romantic. She looked at the notations stretched across the lined pages in front of her and hoped that her language was descriptive and accurate.
She suddenly realized that her husband had never asked her to write something for him before. This made it even more special. That she had been trusted with the task of attending the service was deeply satisfying.
“It’s crucial for everything that’s going into the new book,” her husband had said as he watched her get ready, picking out a simple, nondescript gray jacket, dark slacks, and a pair of tinted glasses-not quite sunglasses, but just dark enough to obscure her eyes. “I can’t be there, but I need to know everything that happens.”
She had not asked why or questioned him when he’d told her that she had to avoid being recognized at all times. Instead, she had fixed her hair, combing it in a completely different style than usual. She had been surprised when she looked in the mirror at how the woman staring back at her wasn’t her.
He had also coached her on what to say if someone did recognize her. “Just act surprised, and say that you knew Sarah’s husband from some years ago, when he was a student. That will work. No one will ever ask a follow-up question.”
Smiling, he had told her what school the dead husband had gone to and where he’d done his undergraduate work before joining the fire department. He also told her that Sarah’s husband had been taking some night school graduate writing courses at the local community college. “Just say that’s where you met him,” he told her. “A shared interest sadly cut short by accident.”
She had followed every instruction to the exact letter, and, she believed, done it better than he could ever have hoped for. She congratulated herself. You should have been an actor. A performer. This may have been your first time on a stage, and you nailed it.
For an instant, it felt to her like she was writing a chapter of her own that would go, word for word, directly into his book. This gave her a great thrill.
She could hardly sit still as she bent over her notes, rummaging through every memory of the service, adding every element that popped into her head, because she knew that even the smallest observation might be the one that made the entire description work, and that might make the scene work, and then the chapter, and ultimately the whole book.
Looking up, she suddenly saw headlights cutting through the night, turning into their driveway. She pushed herself to her feet, excited.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf went to the front door to open it for her husband. It was as if her years reaching to the early edge of old age dropped away from her in that moment. She was no longer the quiet, sickly, worried woman who occupied the hidden, unimportant position at his side. She was as filled with intense passion as she’d ever been on any night since they’d first met. She was, she thought, Mata Hari. A femme fatale.
Now that they knew something, it only frightened them more, because it underscored how little they actually did know.
The three Reds argued shrilly.
“There’s absolutely no reason for her to be there, which means there’s only one reason,” Jordan said forcefully. “She has something to do with this.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Karen responded fiercely. “Damn it, Jordan, we can’t go jumping to every conclusion we think is obvious, because maybe it’s wrong.”
“That woman only connects two of us-not three,” Sarah said, jumping into the midst of the fight. “Three. All of us. That’s what we would need to understand who the Wolf is.”
“The fact that you don’t know who she is and we do, that’s all we need,” Jordan snorted.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Karen responded.
“So, let me ask you this: Does stalking and killing three strangers who just happen to all have red hair because you’ve got some kind of fairy fucking tale obsession make sense? Really, does it?”
“It must. Somehow. Some way. It does.”
“Great. What you’re saying is we’re no closer to finding out anything and doing something about this fucking Wolf because we’re not sure? That’s just great. I mean, just fucking wonderful.”
Jordan paced around the room, waving her hands in frustration. She knew one thing only: She wanted to do something. Anything. The idea of waiting to die was, she thought, killing her. The irony of this was lost on her. She knew she was being impulsive. She just no longer thought it was a mistake.
Sarah plopped herself back into a chair, trying to discern why a stranger had come to her funeral and why this would make her so upset. She told herself that there had to be funeral groupies who occupied their own desperate lives with attending every sort of service they found advertised, so they could shed false tears and think they were lucky because their own lives, as miserable as they might be, hadn’t ended.
She stared at the computer screen, where the woman’s partially obscured face was frozen. Why couldn’t she just be someone like that? Of course she could. But she might be someone else entirely. Sarah looked over at Karen and Jordan. The two of them represented polar opposites. One was in a hurry to strike back. One was being overly cautious. It would have been nice, she thought, if she had fit in between, a force for reason. This wasn’t the case. A part of her wanted to run, right at that moment, take advantage of her new Cynthia-life and leave the others behind to face the Wolf. She could be safe. He would be satisfied with the remaining Reds. She could be free. A wave of selfishness nearly overcame her.
She fought it off. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said briskly, a schoolteacher imposing order on an unruly class. “We do some stalking of our own.”
Jordan waited until she heard the sound of the closing door echo through her dormitory. She went to her window and watched until she saw the teacher who doubled as a dorm parent scuttle off into the evening darkness.
Right behind her was a gaggle of teenage girls, her dorm mates. They were all heading over to a dance at the school’s art gallery. She could already hear the raucous chords of a local rock group covering the old Wilson Pickett song In the Midnight Hour wafting over the campus. She seized a small screwdriver, the type designed for fixing electronics, and her plastic-encased school ID card. She had already removed her shoes so she could move quietly down the hallway.
There was a notable advantage to living in a hundred-year-old Victorian that had been converted to single rooms for upper-class students. The door locks were notoriously ancient and flimsy, and a bit of common knowledge passed down from student occupant to student occupant was how to use the stiff plastic edge of the ID card to jimmy open any lock.
She hoped that the door to the dorm parent’s one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor would have the same lax security.
It did.
She flicked the edge between doorjamb and lock, twisted her card with a practiced motion, and the door popped open. She was even lucky enough that the woman had left her desk light on, so that Jordan could move rapidly through the rooms without stumbling over the unfamiliar furniture arrangement.