"Get off your high horse, honeybunch," said Gretchen Hawes.
"Eavesdropping at the door is like reading other people's mail. Do that, and you deserve what you get."
I met their eyes with as much contempt as I could summon, then, bursting into tears, ran back to our room and flung myself onto my bed. "How could she? How could she? How could she?" I screamed into the pillow. I wept and wept and wept.
Cindy turned up an hour later. She'd been drinking. I could smell the booze on her the minute she walked in. I pretended to be asleep. She was noisy as she undressed.
It was clear she wanted to disturb me. Finally she spoke: "Stop faking, Bev. I know you're wide awake."
"How could you do that to me?" I asked. "How could you?"
"You kind of let yourself in for it if you know what I mean," she said.
I sat up in bed. "Let myse@ in for it?"
"Sure. The way you've been slinking around all winter, trying to get into my pants all the time. I mean, now and then it's fun, but when I asked you to be my roommate, I didn't know I'd be taking the, you know, lezzy route."
"But it was you!"
"Uh-uh, Bev. was you started it. I never put the make on you.
I wouldn't want to." She snickered. "You don't turn me on."
I stared at her. This was my Best Friend! "I turned you on plenty as I remember," I whispered bitterly.
"Work your tongue around long enough you'll get a reaction. I'm just flesh and blood, you know." "So you never cared for me? Is that what you're saying?" "Frankly I like guys, but I try to understand other points of view. You know the saying 'Different strokes for different folks'? Right?"
I rushed at her then, attacked her with flailing arms and nails. I wanted to scratch out her eyes. Being bigger and stronger, she overpowered me easily. Finally, when I was exhausted, pinned to the floor, she looked down on me and smiled her unforgettable smile.
"Let's not make such a big deal out of this, huh? There're still a couple months till the end of the term.
Let's try and get along, Bev. I'm sorry about playing the tape for those guys. I really am."
Sorry about playing the tape! What about recording it? What else besides playing it did she have in mind when she taped me when I was most vulnerable?
It all had been a setup, that much was clear; I'd loved her as best I could, but to her I'd been little more than a pest.
The next day I packed up my stuff. She came into the room just as I was finishing.
"Leaving, huh?"
"What did you expect?"
She shrugged. "Well, it was nice while it lasted, Bev. It's too bad you had to sneak back early on the weekend." Sneak back! The girl was incredible.
"You hurt me, Cin. Hurt me a lot."
"If I did, I'm sorry, I really am. I'm sure you'll get over it.
When you do, I hope we can be friends." She shrugged again and left the room.
Twenty years ago, and I never did get over it, Mama. And I never loved anyone carnally again. I'd learned the risks the hard way and didn't like them. Cindy was the best lover I ever had.
That whole spring was miserable, that whole summer, too, not to mention the whole rest of my life. But as they say, you live and learn. And there was one good thing that came out of our relationship: Cindy steered me to my profession. On her advice I became a psychologist.
By the following autumn, tired of suffering, I decided to concentrate on my anger. And then I began to have fantasies, delicious fantasies of Cindy begging me not to hurt her the way she'd hurt me.
In response I shrugged and smiled and told her not to make such a big thing about it. I was going to kill her; that's all I was going to do. After all, she was only flesh and blood; isn't that what she'd said? And after she was dead, I was going to seal her up with glue.
No big deal, right, Cin? Different strokes for different folks, right? Hub? Right?
I'm looking now at the trophy Tool brought back from Seattle. The yearbook of our Bennington class. Nice book, though I'm not in it.
Nice picture of Cindy as she was then, tossing back her head to flick away the long blond hair that always used to fall across her face.
Reminds me a little of someone I've seen recently, same eyes, hair, same warming, radiant smile.
Carl's bedazzled reaction when you broach taking the tool into your house: "Sometimes you surprise me, Bev."
"I don't know what's so surprising, Carl. Diana's my patient, she's my responsibility, and since I've got an unrented basement apartment available, and she's going to be coming to me four days a week for therapy anyway… well, it just seems natural to throw in a little housing, too."
"Sort of like a halfway house for her. That what you have in mind?"
"Now that you mention it-sure, why not?"
His little eyes dance a jig. "And you were so against her being released."
"Never against it, Carl. Hesitant about proposing it, that's all."
You shrug. "I guess you could call me conservative when it comes to murderesses."
He strokes his beard, becoming grayer and more pointy by the month.
"What about a job?"
"There's a lot of possibilities right in the neighborhood-museums, institutes, archives. She's a trained librarian. She'll have no trouble finding a position."
"Small-town Connecticut girl-think she can hack it in the city?"
You put your hands on your hips. "I'm from Cleveland, Carl. I can hack it, so why not her?"
He fondles his beard again. "Want to know what I think? I think you're one superduper human being. How's that)"
You stare at him incredulously. "Well, thank you, Carl. I believe that's the first real compliment I've ever had from you. And we've worked together a lot of years."
"We have, Bev. And pardon me for not being one of those bosses effusive with the praise. But when I say something like that, I mean every word of it. I think you're an incredibly talented shrink and a terrific person, too."
Flattered and stunned, you shake your head. "I'm going to treasure what you're saying, Carl. It really means a lot."
When you first noticed the tall blond girl in Diana's artial arts class, you knew she reminded you of someone though you couldn't put your finger on exactly whom. It was only later, after you asked Diana to get to know the girl and cultivate a friendship, that it struck you whom she reminded you of Cindy Morse, of course.
Then you couldn't wait to get your hands on her. But you were patient. Patience, you might say, is your middle name. And Diana was clever about it, too, building the friendship slowly, exactly as you'd ordered.
You'll never forget the evening Diana reported that she and Jess Foy had gone out for coffee after class. As you'd instructed, Diana told Jess she worked part-time at the New York Society Library and confided, too, in a most casual way, that she was in intensive therapy with a female shrink. Jess, in turn, informed Diana that she was a student at Columbia, where she was also on the women's varsity fencing team. She herself had never gone to a therapist, she said, although there were times when she was sorely tempted, what with the pressures of college and all. The girls chatted about karate, gossiped about the sensei, and exchanged tales of their initial embarrassment at having to change clothes in the unisex dojo locker room. But then, giggling, each admitted to the other that she now deliberately took no special pains to conceal herself when undressing.
"Let the novice hard-ons drool, that's my motto," Jess told Diana.
Diana reported how much she liked her new friend and was pleased at your instruction to nurture the relationship and make it grow.
Beverly Archer and Diana Proctor both were aware that the stakes were high and that for each of them, in separate as well as connected ways, it would be a night of destiny. Depending on the outcome, Beverly would learn whether the course she had embarked upon obsessively so many years before would finally lead to the attainment of her goals. For Diana the night would prove whether her murderous passions, once raging and inco herent, now disciplined and honed, could be applied to the completion of Beverly's design.