Dear Killer (20 page)

I stayed with the group for a few more blocks before separating and walking home alone.

I found my mother in the living room again—it seemed to be becoming her place now—with a coffee-table book full of black-and-white photographs open in her lap. The sun came through the window and made the dust in the air glow as it lit on tables, couches, pillows, flowers, on my mother’s thin shoulders. The Christmas tree in the corner of the room, strung with colorful lights, made everything sing with brightness. Slim and quiet, sinking down into the ivory couch cushions, my mother looked so muted, as if she existed only in pastel colors.

She sipped tea silently. For a moment I stood in the doorway, just watching her—then I spoke to let her know I was there.

“I’m home.”

She looked over at me and smiled halfway, steam drifting across her face.

“Welcome back.”

She was in a good mood today. Whatever it was that had made her that way, she spoke with a gentleness I hadn’t heard for a long time. Her eyes were soft, and as she looked at me, I felt as if I were swimming in them—in their blue, their deepness, their knowledge.

Without thinking much about it, I crossed the room and sat down on the couch next to her. I leaned over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. A photograph of a candle against a black background, the flame flickering quietly, lighting the picture with a serene glow.

Her eyes flicked from the photograph to me, back to the photograph again, and then they skimmed over my hands, folded in my lap.

“Oh,” she said. She reached over to take my left hand into her right. As she touched it, I winced, and realized as she set it atop the photograph and turned it over that a purple bruise stretched over much of my lower palm.

She brushed her fingertips over the bruise, not hard enough to hurt. She didn’t say anything.

“He gave me a little trouble,” I murmured apologetically. She shook her head as if to say,
Don’t apologize
. She really was gentle today—and fragile-feeling too, as if she were about to float away.

“Any other bruises?”

“A few, I think. They don’t hurt. I’m fine.”

“Any other complications?”

I was silent for a minute.

“Nothing that’s dangerous.”

She gripped my fingertips suddenly, a reflex. A reaction.

“What happened?”

I leaned toward her and set my head against her shoulder.

“It’s fine, it’s not important,” I breathed. I didn’t want to explain, not now. She wouldn’t be angry about it, because it didn’t endanger either of us; but it would still worry her. And I didn’t want her to worry.

I willed her to be silent, to just let me be, just for today. I imagined she would, when she was like this, pale, a fading shadow of the past. . . .

She reached around and settled one arm about my shoulders, the other around my waist. She closed her eyes. We set our heads in the creases between each other’s necks and shoulders, a six-inch gap between our chests. I could feel her heartbeat radiating warmly out through her skin.

She held me like I was a child once again.

That night there was precipitation. But it wasn’t rain, and it wasn’t snow, it was sleet, just angry sleet that pounded down, destroying. It melted the thin snow into muddy puddles and beat a ragged tattoo into the roof of my town house and kept me awake until just before the dawn, when the sleet finally abated and there was snow, light snow, snow like fog that brought some peace to the world again.

The story of the murder was on the morning news, with the scandalous tagline “The Perfect Killer Escapes from under the Noses of Police!” Somehow the story had gotten out, unfortunately. Everyone was talking about it, in whispers, in shouts, and every newspaper I passed had something about it on the very first page. Chelsea, in particular, was spooked. I went to lunch with Alex that day, and I was especially quiet. He talked twice as much to make up for my silence.

He was the one who should have been quiet, not me. He had more reason to be upset than me. He had lost the Perfect Killer again, after all, and he was being ridiculed in the papers for it. I was free and nameless, so far as the public was concerned.

But I was the one who barely said a word.

Chapter 20

M
aggie ran in front of me, feet crunching through the thin, stiff sheet of snow with a sound like crinkling paper, a laugh on her lips. It was Thursday. Christmas was Sunday. Everything was winter.

“Bloody hell, I love snow,” Maggie called, as enthusiastic as a small child.

“It’s more like ice than snow—there’s not enough of it,” I said skeptically.

“No, there’s enough,” she replied, leaning over and gathering up a scarce handful of it in one pink glove. Without warning, she grinned and threw it at me. It landed on my shoulder, and a few icy drops of water splashed up my neck.

“
Hey
,” I said with mock annoyance, smiling. “Stop that.”

“What are you gonna do about it?” she teased. In reply, I picked up a handful of snow and threw it at her. I missed. The snow fell back onto the sidewalk with a small, pitiful hiss.

“Oh, that was awful.” She giggled. “Can’t you do better than that?”

“Hey—”

And suddenly we were throwing snow at each other in a flurry of cold, of sound.

After a while we grew tired of this and sat in the miserably small snow bank on the side of the road, the wetness of the snow seeping through our jeans. Neither of us really cared. We breathed deeply, smelling the scent of winter in the air. I laughed breathily.

“We’re having a party on Christmas Eve. My extended family just decided they wanted one. They’re a bit crazy,” Maggie said.

“Okay.”

“Do you want to come?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Your mom can come too,” Maggie added.

“That sounds fun,” I said. “Actually, I’d love that.”

“Really? Great,” Maggie said happily. “It’s at my house. I don’t know the exact time yet, but I’ll tell you when my crazy family figures it out.”

“Cool.”

“You weren’t planning on doing anything else?”

“Nah, my mom and I were going to stay at home, just the two of us, because it turns out Alex has to work for most of Christmas because he’s in hot water about the whole ‘Perfect Killer escaping from underneath his nose’ thing. And my dad’s got business to deal with, so he’s out of town. Going to a party sounds wonderful.”

“Your dad really isn’t coming home for Christmas?”

“No, he’s not.”

“Is he . . . I’m sorry if I’m prying, just tell me to stop if I am.”

“Nah, it’s okay. I don’t mind,” I said, shaking my head.

“Is he on bad terms with your mom or something?”

I shook my head again. I almost laughed. It was hard to be on bad terms with someone when you barely saw them—my mom and dad really weren’t on any sort of terms at all. I felt a surge of bitterness and irritation. My mom might be almost neutral about him, but I wasn’t. It angered me that he could be so emotionally distant from us both, so far away and empty. I couldn’t understand it.

“They’re on fine terms. He’s just not really a
home
person, you know. It’s not his thing.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Honestly, I nearly forget him sometimes.” An image passed through my mind—nighttime on the sidewalk, two shadows coming home at the same time, seeing each other, barely saying a word, barely in the same place at the same time. He forgot me too.

I realized that I was good at that. Forgetting. Forgetting Cherry, forgetting Dad, forgetting that I wasn’t normal.

We fell into silence. We were near my house, which sat next to a small residential street a block from a main thoroughfare. A car passed quietly through. I rested my head on curled-up knees.

“Oh!” Maggie said.

I raised my head up and looked where she was looking, back toward the larger street a block down.

“Oh.”

Down the street, waiting at a stoplight, was Dr. Marcell with groceries in her arms.

“Oh, it’s so strange seeing teachers outside of school. I always feel like they don’t have other lives, you know?” Maggie noted.

“Does she live around here? I’ve never seen her around here before.”

Maggie shrugged. “How should I know?”

“That’s so weird.” I giggled.

Silently, I remembered how Dr. Marcell suspected me.

She stood still at the corner, her no-frills hair swinging in the faint wind like stubby feathers. I watched her curiously. Maggie did too. Casually, Dr. Marcell looked around, trying to find something to look at to pass the time until the light changed.

She saw us. She paused; I saw the recognition in her eyes, and I smiled and waved.

“Hi, Dr. Marcell!” Maggie shouted.

She was too far away to be heard without shouting and she wasn’t really fond of shouting, so Dr. Marcell just raised one of her hands in salute. She couldn’t even really wave it, since she was holding groceries. Her arms shivered.

I wondered what she was thinking.

I wondered if, in some strange part of her, she knew, was certain, of what I was capable of.

I wondered if she knew what I was going to do.

The light turned and she walked away, across the street.

“Come on, let’s go back to my house,” I said with a smile, patting Maggie on the shoulder. “I’m cold.”

As we walked along the icy sidewalks back to my house, I realized that Maggie was my best friend. It saddened me. Because she
was
my friend, though some things about her I did hate, and I had so many secrets I kept from her. She was my friend. And I hadn’t had a friend in so long.

It was late at night. Maggie was gone. My mom was still out—she had a dinner, one of her many, many dinners—but she would be back soon. I was tired, but I didn’t feel like sleeping. I had just gotten off the phone with Alex. He sounded tired. I wasn’t surprised. He was working overtime nowadays, struggling to retain at least some semblance of the leadership position he’d once had in the Perfect Killer case. It was slipping away from him in the wake of my narrow escape and the newly increased frequency of the murders. He was trying to retain his usual good humor, or at least a positive outlook, but he was having trouble.

“It’s so frustrating,” he had said, “that these people don’t understand that I’m chasing a ghost. The Perfect Killer is a ghost, Kit. I’m never going to find him. He just walks through the streets killing people, and I can’t do a damned thing about it. But no one else can either. Bringing in new leadership won’t solve the problem. And this is my case. It’s mine to solve or not solve. I know it inside out.”

“But wouldn’t some outside opinions help you?” I replied uncertainly, not even sure what I wanted in this situation.

“But they don’t want new opinions, they want new leadership. This is
my
case. And I suppose they’re listening—they’re keeping me in charge, for now. But they’re getting desperate. And they’re just getting too anxious. They were anxious before, with the . . . teacup, you know, that whole thing, but now—I don’t know what they’re thinking, what they’re going to do.”

He sounded so stubborn—and for a moment, almost angry. But not quite. I wasn’t sure Alex really knew what angry meant. I changed the topic, and we talked for a few more minutes about other things. Weather, Christmas, et cetera. We talked about how much snow we were getting, and how Harrods had wrapped Kit’s gift for Maggie in that shade of pale-blue wrapping paper that matched the dress exactly, to an extent that it was almost eerie—and eventually his voice trailed off and he told me he had to sleep. I had been the one to hang up the telephone.

I flipped through my end-of-November letters one by one, sorting them, separating the requests I would grant from those I wouldn’t—I’d been a bit haphazard with my choosing recently, and I figured it was probably best if I took the time to do things methodically, like usual. Yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no. One by one, forming two piles on the bed on either side of me.

Neat piles. Orderly. Safe.

My mind wandered back, far away toward that first day, that first late-summer day, nearly fall, that had begun things. I looked at my bedside table—it was there, beneath the drawer’s false bottom, next to my latex gloves, the letter asking for Maggie’s death. Michael’s letter. It was waiting for her—and for me too. Our fates were bound together now, strangely and terribly.

Downstairs, I heard the door open. Briefly, I heard the sound of wind like a broken gas pipe and then the patter of footsteps. The door closed. My mom was home. I kept sorting the letters, one by one by one. I heard footsteps down the hallway and then footsteps up the stairs to her second-floor bedroom. Then I heard her pause as she realized my light was still on.

“Kit?”

I didn’t reply immediately. I gave it a few seconds.

“Mom?”

“Why are you still awake?”

“It’s not that late. It’s only eleven. And it’s vacation.”

“Eleven? It’s got to be later than that. Go to bed.”

“Fine,” I said. I didn’t really mind. But it really was only eleven.

My mom started walking again. I got up off the bed.

“Mom?” I called again. She stopped walking.

“What is it?”

“I’m really sorry, but I won’t be here Christmas Eve.”

“What? But we always have Christmas Eve together. It’s our thing.” I was surprised to find that she actually sounded dejected. I felt sorry. But it couldn’t be helped.

“I’ve got something I need to take care of,” I replied. “I’m really sorry.”

She hesitated. “Does it have to be that night?”

She knew what I was talking about just by the way I spoke. It was so obvious. She knew I was going to kill—and she was afraid. Afraid of something vague and unspeakable—and it was strange to recognize that in her voice. My mother, who had been so brave. My mother, the weak one, my mother the mountain, worn down by thunderstorms and mudslides and forest fires over time, broken down into something small and tame . . .

Somehow, it broke my heart.

Yes, it had to be Christmas Eve.

I couldn’t explain in words that she would understand why I felt that it had to be Christmas Eve. Any other day would have worked just as well. But Christmas Eve felt like an important day to me, and Maggie’s death had to feel important, and somehow the two seemed to go together.

“Yes, it has to be Christmas Eve,” I said.

In my dream Diana and I sat on a cliff top, our feet dangling over the edge. Both of us were silent. She stared out with vague anger in her eyes, and I watched her out of the corner of my eye, not daring to look exactly at her. She was beautiful, almost blindingly so.

There was a brisk wind that smelled faintly of cinnamon.

“Does it bother you?” she asked.

“What?”

“Does it bother you to not be me, sometimes?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’m always you.”

“No, I’m always you, but you’re not always me.”

We were the same person; her words didn’t make sense. But this was a dream, and it seemed, in the moment, to make sense to me. I nodded and stared down the sheer cliff face, down into the mist that obscured whatever lay at its base.

“It bothers me,” I said.

She laughed and traced my line of sight.

“Do you know what’s down there?” she asked, staring with me down into the murky darkness below.

“No. Do you?”

“It’s madness.”

She sounded sure, and I believed her. Our hair fluttered into our faces, and we pushed it out of our eyes with the same flick of our wrist. We were more alike than we seemed.

“Madness . . .” My voice trailed off miserably.

“We’re both ready to fall,” she said.

“We won’t fall.”

“We’re both ready to fall,” she repeated, more emphatically this time, as if she knew more than me, as if she were wiser.

“I won’t fall,” I murmured. She sighed. She knew I was a lost cause.

She laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and leaned toward me. Looking incredibly sad, she kissed my forehead like a mother, or a sister, and softly whispered, “Wake.”

And then unexpectedly her face morphed into Michael’s, and I did wake, and when I woke I was screaming and terrified, and Diana’s face was nothing more than a dull memory from a vague dream.

I stood near the window, near the stacks of old CDs in the sale bin, the ones they usually sold next to the cash register, the ones no one bought anymore because they were useless, of course. No one needed CDs anymore, not when everything was online. Behind me the grocery store bustled. It was Christmas Eve day tomorrow, and everyone was frantically shopping, trying to get the last pieces of their Christmas dinners before the things they needed went out of stock. I stood absently with my shopping basket slung over one arm, my jacket hanging over the other.

There was Cherry’s CD, right there, on the top of the nearest stack. There she was, just on the front. Dressed in a long red gown with red lips and hair like a cloud around her face. She was fascinating, even in a photograph. Deliciously otherworldly. More like the woman who had convinced me not to kill her in a dressing room than the woman staring at gray coats in Harrods.

I was too hot. I put the CD back in the bin and put my shopping next to my feet so I could take my sweater off, strip down to my T-shirt.

“Kit?”

Oh, I knew that voice. I put on a smile, put my sweater on top of the oranges in my basket, and turned.

“Dr. Marcell.”

“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

She was standing there with a few heavy-looking paper bags, looking almost confused, as if she couldn’t imagine why I would ever need to buy groceries.

“I live right nearby,” I said, gesturing uninterestedly in the general direction of my house.

“I figured. I saw you with Maggie.”

“Oh, yes.” I smiled. “That was funny.”

“I live near here too,” she offered, then hesitated, as if she was thinking twice about telling me. I nodded knowingly, eyeing the wedding ring on her finger.

“With your husband?”

“Yes.”

I looked pleasant, or at least did my best to look pleasant.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Getting Christmas groceries?” she asked, eyeing the oranges, tangerines, granola, chocolate, bread, and eggs in my basket. I giggled.

“Sort of. My mom bought a bunch of Christmas groceries—for the Christmas dinner itself—and forgot to buy anything else, so I’m stocking up on things to eat until then.”