So many men had motives that it became less and less likely that there was any connection with the serial killer. It had to be one of these wealthy men who couldn’t stand the thought that his carefully constructed lie was going to be revealed.
The bread got soggy way too fast. What had I done wrong? Damn. It was the water. I’d forgotten to drain the water.
I threw it out. Opened a second can. Drained the water. Then grabbed the bread. But all that was left in the plastic bag was the heel. Great. Out of bread. There was, however, a bag of prewashed lettuce. So I put that in a clean bowl, added the tuna and tossed it up with my fork.
It was dry. I found some dressing in the fridge, shook it and drizzled that on the salad. Better but by no means good.
I had another salad in my mind. One I had seen in Gourmet magazine, a Niçoise salad served poolside at a five-star hotel in the south of France. With tiny black olives glistening in the sun and elegant string beans layered with anchovy fillets on top of the mélange of lettuce.
My best intentions were never realized. I could never translate the artful into the actual. Not as a cook, a decorator, a craftsperson or a sculptor. I had worked at stone and wood for years, in art school and after, to chip away and find the object I could see so clearly in my mind. But my fingers could never bring the vision forth.
There was one thing I was good at. Listening. Listening very hard to words and nuances and pauses and silences, and understanding and taking what I’d understood and helping someone to understand it for themselves.
When the phone rang at eight, I jumped. The whole day had been so quiet. I picked it up, hoping it was Dulcie. When she was at Mitch’s I tried not to call her more than once every day. It was hard but I usually held out, knowing that she was safe and sound with her father.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Snow?” A man’s voice.
A little breeze of disappointment that it wasn’t Dulcie blew over me.
“Yes?”
“It’s Noah Jordain. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”
“So then why are you bothering me at home?” It came out more harshly than I meant, but it was how I felt.
“We have another murder on our hands. A third woman.”
“Oh. No. That’s awf-Do you know who she is?” Is it Cleo? was what I’d wanted to ask, but I was still under my self-imposed gag rule.
“She’s not your patient, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“I think we should talk, though.”
“Now?”
“I’m not asking you to come down to the station house. I can come to you.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. I hadn’t even taken a shower that morning. “It’s Sunday night. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
He didn’t seem to care at all that I was both annoyed and indignant. “The thing is, I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. I’m up against time. This one came faster than the last. I’m afraid we may soon have another one. I know that you assisted our department before, and my partner says your insight into profiling sexual deviants was stellar.”
“But you have your own forensic psychologist, Detective.”
“This girl was twenty years old, Dr. Snow. Her scalp was shaved like a nun’s. She was wearing a hair shirt. Do you know what that is? An instrument of torture that religious zealots used to martyr themselves. But she didn’t want to be a martyr. That was the role our perp assigned to her. He tortured her.” A pause. “In more ways than one. And most of it we think while she was still alive. Her back was flayed open. Slivers of skin hung like ribbons.”
He had obviously paused for effect. And it had worked. Shivers pinpricked my skin, up and down my legs and arms. I shut my eyes against the vision, but of course that didn’t make it go away.
26
It was going to take the detective twenty minutes to get to my apartment, he said, and I spent one-third of that time figuring out where to hide Cleo’s manuscript pages. It was unlikely that he was bringing a court order to search my house for the book. It was unlikely he even knew that the manuscript existed. But now that I had read it all and studied it so carefully, I knew how explosive it was.
I wanted it put away. Safe.
I wanted it hidden.
The pages had taken on an unearthly glow. They hummed. They emitted an odor. A dog trained in searching for explosives would run right to them.
There was a doll’s cradle on the floor of a storage closet. An old toy of Dulcie’s that she hadn’t looked at in years and wouldn’t ever look at again. It was made of rough-hewn wood, about two feet long, standing about eighteen inches high, filled with a doll resting on a mattress made of flannel. I lifted the doll and the mattress and placed the manuscript on the bottom wooden panel, then put the two-inch-thick bedding back in place.
In the remaining time I exchanged my T-shirt for a fresh one, brushed my hair, washed my face and then put on some lipstick, mascara and blush. I looked at myself in the mirror. The makeup had helped, but I couldn’t erase the worry from my eyes or the fear from my expression. My nerves were showing. I added some concealer under my eyes to try to hide the circles. I wasn’t primping for him; I’d do this even if one of Dulcie’s friends came over. Just to be presentable. Just to be cleaned up.
And then I waited. Getting more and more nervous as each second passed. I went into the living room to make sure I’d put everything away and stopped to look at the photograph of my mother on the étagère. It was a shot of her with me, when I was just two years old. My head against her shoulder, her fingers playing with my hair.
She was still so lovely in that photo. Before the pills and the booze started to wreck her looks. It didn’t really surprise me that I was thinking of her again. Most of the time she was a distant memory that blew across me once or twice a month. But since Cleo had gone missing, since Dulcie had been accepted into drama school, my mother was more on my mind.
She is lying on the couch, and I am trying to pull her back from the limbo of the pills’ effects. Nothing else has worked, and so I decide to act out a story for her. One of the many extended stories I will make up about The Lost Girls.
The Lost Girls was a television show about two orphaned teenagers who were taken in by a married couple-both professors-at an Ivy League school in Boston.
The girls always got into terrible trouble, and then one of them-either my mother or her co-star, Debi Carey-would solve the insurmountable problem and save the day. Mean-while the charming but clueless elderly couple never guessed how close the girls had come to danger and sometimes death.
The Lost Girls ran from the time my mother was sixteen to nineteen, thirty episodes in all. And then it had been dropped. My mother did a few movies after that but was never the success she’d been on TV.
The year I was six, the series was in reruns. And night after night at 7:00 p.m., I sat rapt in front of the TV, not moving, entranced as I watched my very own mother be someone I did not know.
Every Thursday night, for one hour, I watched a kind of magic I could not understand. For years I have been searching for copies of those shows. But the company who owned them has been sold and sold again, and I haven’t been able to track down anyone who knows about them. But I remember them.
And after my mother left my father and took me with her, we went to live in a tiny, messy apartment in a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Some nights, when my mother lay on the couch in her selfinduced haze-which at eight I did not understand-I retold her the story of each episode. And when I ran out of real ones, I made them up.