“Can I sit down here?” Jennie asked. She intended to sit anyway, but the lady by the window had an imposing look about her. “I gotta sit down,” Jennie added, pressing past the aisle woman’s knees.
Finally squeezed into place between them, she hawked her elbows close to her sides to keep contact with them minimal. Tacos, hot sauce, refried beans. Sweat, greasy hair, unwashed clothes. Jennie gagged at the revulsion that crept up her throat.
When Jennie finally unlocked her front door, she was beyond exhaustion. Before unwrapping the birthday present, she went to the big rocker in the corner and put her stockinged feet on the blue vinyl hassock.
Closing her eyes, she relived the day and found it partially rewarding. The pie and coffee were good. The umbrella girl was a stroke of good luck. But the rides back and forth!
She woke with a start and realized she must have fallen asleep. She still had the box in her hands. Glancing at her feet she saw the brief rest had helped the swelling. As she began to unwrap the figurine something stopped her fingering through the tissue paper. A premonition. A chill that rolled down her spine.
She held still for several seconds, pondering the feelings. Sloughing it off as a bad case of birthday nerves, she finished pulling tissue from the umbrella girl. Getting slowly to her feet, Jennie took the figurine to the front window and set her on the sill looking out at the ending of the day.
Then the premonition returned. Someone was in the house! She knew it without turning around or searching the rooms. She knew it in her old aching bones. Fear took over, but she fought for control. She watched her hands begin to shake as if they no longer belonged to her, but she would not succumb to irrational fear. How dare someone come into her home! How dare they lurk in the shadows and deliberately frighten an old, defenseless woman!
She whirled and saw a split-second imagine of a man’s head as it pulled back around the door facing in the hall. A surge of indignation carried Jennie across the room. She had her hand on the doorjamb exactly where she had seen the face seconds before. Peering into the darkness beyond the hall, she could see nothing that might be a man. To reach the light switch she would have to step into the darkened room. She hesitated, then called out, “What do you want?”
The silence that followed made her falter. Why had she not run out the door rather than toward this fearful confrontation? Someone was hiding and what was it he might do to her? “Answer me! Answer me this minute! You come out of there. I don’t have nothing worth stealing.” Her voice was strong and steady, but that wasn’t how she felt.
She supported herself against the wall. Tension held her erect, but there was a fuzzy line creeping up her vision. She could feel the blood in her head thumping wildly. Quick bites of pain slicing through her chest.
She thought she would rather die than endure this horrible, waiting, creeping silence.
“You have something worth stealing. You have your life,” a voice said from the darkness.
He came to the door, the game at an end; the serious time of killing had arrived. He found her on the floor in a faint. He checked the pulse in her bony wrist. At least he had not been cheated.
He lifted her light body and carried her outside. He had to get out of the house, have her on his own, in his own way, not surrounded by the putrid smell of rotten oranges and dust. He put her in the car and left the neighborhood. They were on a little used highway in an industrial area bordering southeast Houston before she awoke whimpering.
“Shut up, old woman,” he snapped.
She sat up in the back, looking around her in confusion. Gray hair spread untidily around her gaunt face and a tic began in her left eye. He could hear her breathing hard, and her fear thrilled him.
“You let me out of here,” she said, but it was a whimper, not a strong command. “What do you want with me? Where are you taking me?”
He smiled at her, and she was stayed quiet.
Ahead was a barren spot. He pulled onto the shoulder of road where a beaten grass path led to a wide drainage ditch.
“Where are we going?” Jennie cried as he hauled her out onto gravel. She spoke into his face, his strange, expressionless face. “I don’t believe this.” She searched through her mind for a code, a bit of advice, some reasonable argument that might stop the man from harming her. She giggled and sobbed at the same time.
He had her hidden behind tall grass. He let go of her arm and fiddled with his shirtfront.
Jennie backed away from him on her hands and knees, scurrying backward like a startled crayfish. There was a clay-like mud in the ditch that stuck to her hands. Horrified at the filth she was in, she looked up at the monster in the last light from the setting sun. There was something swinging back and forth, back and forth from his right hand. It hypnotized her and she stopped, staring.
He was speaking to her. She strained to hear. “This is merciful and clean,” he whispered. “Tell them I sent you home.”
She struggled for breath. None of his words made any sense to her, no sense whatsoever.
The killer stepped behind her and wrapped the wire around her shivering throat. She fought very little, surprisingly little, but it might have only seemed that way to the killer, whose strength had met no real match. Bones cracked and blood flowed, leaped to meet the ground, flowed once more.
The killer stood quietly for several minutes. Sated. He imagined himself within the old woman’s blood as it seeped into the ground, dripped, streamed, seeped. Finally he walked three feet to his left and picked up her head by the spiky gray hair. Then carefully, fondly, he positioned the head on her flat chest. She had fallen back gracefully and looked as peaceful as any corpse in a silken casket.
He hiked a shoulder, squatted beside the body, and peered at her eyes. “I don’t want you on my land,” he told her quietly. “I’ll leave you here for them to find. All of you. Only you.”
He chuckled and tapped two fingers lightly on her hair. His hands scooted down the length of her still body, straightening the cotton dress. The head suddenly unbalanced and rolled from her chest. He reached for it beside her arm and pressed it down into the sunken rib cage until it was lodged in place. He noticed one brown support hose sagged around her calf and pulled the stretchy material up tight. Finished. When they found her, no one could complain he had left her in a mess. She was as neat as death by garroting could leave her. Except for the odd placement of her spiky gray-haired head, she might only be asleep and dreaming of apple pie and strong good coffee.
Jennie Sargosie had been dead two weeks before her body was discovered. Two surveyors stumbled across her lying stiff and decaying in the drainage ditch. One of the surveyors turned his back and retched miserably before scrabbling up the slight hill to the highway. The other surveyor stooped and curiously poked at the severed head, which still miraculously sat on the chest cavity. He could tell it was an old woman because of the dress, but without it he would not have been sure. There had been too many warm days in February, and maggots and ants had eaten away part of her face to expose the right cheekbone. But none of the desecration was as terrible to contemplate as the open empty neck. The surveyor would not pursue his morbid instinct to look at it closely.
Yet during the hour and a half before the police arrived the curious surveyor satisfied his thirst for gory detail by looking over the rest of the corpse from every conceivable angle. He even got on his hands and knees and turned his head upside down to stare up into the shriveled hole of her nose to see if he could catch sight of the brain. He lifted her skirt with a stick to see what she wore underneath. Her slip stuck to her thigh, however, and he let the skirt drop back into place.