House of Skin (21 page)

He was about to drive home when he remembered the market guide checked out in his name, still sitting on the desk next to the computer at the library. They’d probably check it back in for him, but he couldn’t be sure.

The library seemed deserted. When he got to his former workstation, he scanned the area but couldn’t find the book. He walked along the aisles, searching for the grandmotherly woman who’d helped him the day before.

When he got to the circulation desk, he saw the girl.

Her back to him, she sat on her knees, sticking magazines into red plastic containers behind the desk. Her white, form-fitting shirt crept up her back each time she leaned forward, revealing smooth copper-colored skin. The artificial light glimmered there, made the flesh look warm and moist.

He thought of clearing his throat, of letting this exotic woman know he was there, yet the voyeur in him blanched at the notion. Why ruin a good thing? He watched in fascination, calculating which would be worse: startling her and risking her discovering him and his ogling, or being the good guy, making his presence known, and losing the free show he was enjoying.

The band of her tight black pants slid lower as she adjusted her position on the floor. A satiny line of pink panty peeked out over the seam of her pants. A trifle lower and he might see even more.

Then she was standing and speaking, not looking at him but talking to him nevertheless. How long had she been aware of his presence? He felt sick to his stomach and all at once he knew this girl was the same girl who’d come to his house in the night, the one who wore a white negligee in the pouring rain. She was repeating her question, but he couldn’t calm down, couldn’t hear over his jangling thoughts.

Eyebrows raised, she watched him, impatience clearly stamped in the set of her mouth and the flare of her nostrils.

God she was beautiful.

“Well?” she asked.

His hand rose, started scratching the back of his neck, but he forced it down. It wouldn’t do to let her know how self-conscious he felt. As if she couldn’t already tell.

Saying anything was better than nothing.

“I didn’t know you knew I was here.”

Hell. He sounded like a stalker.

“What I mean,” he said, averting his eyes, “is that— You ever come up on someone, and you know that they don’t know you’re there? You don’t want to scare them, but you know you’re going to anyway. Like there’s no good way to tell someone you’re there?”

She waited, her green eyes burning him.

“I mean, you’re waiting, and you’re indecisive. And it becomes funny, sort of. Because you know, but they don’t, that you didn’t mean to—don’t want to frighten them, yet it’s inevitable once you’re there. Unless you were to go out and come back in, which is just about impossible because then they’d hear you leave and be startled by the sound anyway.”

The ghost of a smile played at her lips.

“So you start to laugh, inside at first, because if the laughing gets out, gets loud, then that’ll become the sound that scares them. But the laughter came from the absurdity of the situation, from the irony of it. So at the moment you’re the least threatening, you become the biggest threat to startle them. And then you do, and they jump.”

She crossed her arms, her smile broadening.

“And the fact that you’re laughing at them,” Paul went on, smiling now himself, “makes them mad because they think you meant to do it, but the truth is the opposite, that you’re only laughing because the last thing that you meant to do—scaring them—became the only thing you could do, and all because it was the last thing you wanted to do.”
 

The look on her face might have been amusement or annoyance. His smile faltered.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

He chuckled. It came out harsh in the silence.

“I’m sorry about that. I should have made more noise on the way up to the desk.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“I didn’t?”

“Uh-uh.”
 

He liked her voice. Smooth like the curves of her lower back.

“Good,” he answered, a trifle too brightly.

“Are you looking for a book?”
 

“Yes. Sort of.”
 

She watched him.

“I got the book I needed yesterday. The older—the other lady helped me.”
 

“Good.”
 

“So,” he shrugged, forgetting why he’d returned, “I guess I have no real reason for coming.” He tried to eat his stupid, vacuous smile, but nerves kept his mouth from closing.

The girl nodded slowly. Why, he wondered, did he think of her as a girl? Maybe it was the lack of wear-and-tear on her unlined face. Or the intimidating tightness of her body. Minus his flab, Paul fancied himself a fairly attractive man. But this. This woman was out of his league.

“I guess I’ll just look around,” he said, and backed away from the desk.

“Are you a writer?” she asked.

Her interest, as she leaned on the counter, seemed genuine. Rather than feeling emboldened by her question, he felt both guilt and shame, as if she’d caught him in some immoral act.

“I checked in your book for you. Since it was about publishing, I thought you might be a writer. If you’d rather not tell me, that’s okay.”

“No.” His eyes widened. “That’s not it at all. Thanks for doing that, by the way. It’s just that I’ve never talked about my writing before.” He grunted and stared at his tennis shoes. “Of course, up until this week, there’s been nothing to talk about.”
 

“So you
are
a writer.”

His eyes rose to meet hers. “I might be. We’ll know sometime soon, I’m hoping. I really don’t know.”

She watched him with something that might have been exasperation.

“The fact is, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but until very recently inspiration never struck.” He ventured to take a step toward the desk.

“I didn’t think it worked like that.” Her triangular chin sat poised between her fists. The long lashes over her green eyes didn’t seem to move.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I guess I wouldn’t know how it works. Except in my case that’s how it did.”

“What were you ‘inspired’ to write?”
 

“It’s about a serial killer.”

“Really.”

“Yes,” he said and forced himself to maintain eye contact.

“Whom does he kill?” Then, in a lower voice, “Or is it a she?”
 

Paul laughed, “Aren’t all serial killers men?”
 

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, mine is.”

“Typical.”

“You haven’t even read the story.”

“I don’t have to.”

He drew back a little.

“Your novel—I assume it’s a novel?”

“That’s right.”

“—is about a jaded cop who lives alone with a dog—probably a bulldog named Rodney or Freddy or something—who gets a call about a gruesome double murder in the suburbs. The victims are a lawyer and his wife—maybe even their two little kids. We get a lot of internal monologue, a lot of his thinking that the human race is full of scum, that he wants some storm cloud to come and wash us all away so the world can start over.”

Paul listened to her, enjoying it.

“The cop looks around, but neither he nor forensics—I hope you do good research, by the way. It’s easy to spot a bad crime writer a mile away. They’re always talking vaguely about fingerprints and dried semen, but anybody can throw out generic terms. That doesn’t mean they know a thing about criminal science.”

She pushed herself off the counter and he was a little alarmed to see that the girl was nearly as tall as he. He only had three inches on her, maybe four.

“How do you know about criminal science?” he asked her.

“I minored in it.”

He nodded, tried not to be intimidated. “And your major?”

“Poetry. There’s no trace of the killer, nothing to incriminate the murderous psychopath that chopped the family up and arranged their bodies in some cryptic pattern. Pictures of eyes clipped out of magazines and placed on top of the victims’ empty eye sockets. One-word messages carved between their breasts.

“At the end of the first chapter, your cop is sitting in his office at the station after having an argument with his superior. The phone rings and one of his fellow cops tells him, ‘You better get down here, Tom.’”
 

“That’s the cop’s name?”

“Yeah. Or Rick, maybe. So Tom or Rick goes down to the crime scene—it’s raining—and there’s a cop in a yellow parka shouting over the rain that he’s never seen anything like it. He walks inside, past one or two younger cops who’re very pale and shaking their heads like they can’t believe what they’ve just witnessed and you just know by looking at them that the gruesomeness of the crime scene is too awful to be imagined, that it’ll haunt them for the rest of their lives.

“But Rick is too jaded to show much emotion as he steps past the cop who’s breathing hard into his hand after having just vomited. Rick ducks under the line of yellow tape and looks around the room at the blood smeared on the walls, smears that are either handprints or words. When he steps around the bed, which is also drenched in blood, he sees the woman lying there on the floor, her entrails removed and her shocked eyes open and staring blankly. Rick doesn’t gasp or cry out like a scared old woman, but he’s definitely shaken. You show us this by having him mutter a single word. ‘Jesus’, probably. Or ‘Christ’.”

“What about ‘Hell’?”

“‘Hell’ would work, but ‘Jesus’ is better.”

“You got all of this just from me saying the story was about a serial killer.”

“Am I wrong?” She tilted her chin, challenging him.

“As a matter of fact, you are.”

“Okay, what it’s about?”

“Tell it right now?”

“You probably have better things to do.”

“No, but this counter makes me feel like I’m in the way. Isn’t this for checking out books and asking about the new Danielle Steel novel?”

“You read Danielle Steel?” she asked.

“I used to, but they just got to be too depressing after a while. Even though the women in the books end up happy, my ship never seems to come in.”

She smiled and Paul felt some of his tension drain away.

“It’s good that you gave them up then,” she said.

“I’ve been much happier since.”

Her broader smile showed her teeth. They were very white, very straight.

“Would you like to talk somewhere else?” he asked.

“Where?”

“Over lunch, maybe?” He held his breath.

“I ate already.”

He took a deep breath. “Supper?”

“That’s a little fast.”

“I’ll buy.”

“That’s even faster.”

“Then you’ll buy.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I’m not buying a stranger supper.”

“But I’m not a stranger. You already know all about my book.”

She smiled again. He knew she was sizing him up, putting her common sense up against her mild curiosity in him.

She bit her lip. “Can we make it lunch tomorrow?”
 

“Sure.”

“But we’re going Dutch.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That was the right answer.”

He put his hands in his pockets and asked, “Do you want me to meet you here?”
 

“No. At Redman’s. Eleven-thirty sound fine?”
 

“Perfect.”

“Do you want to know my name?” she asked.

“Can I guess?”
 

“It’s Julia.”

“That’s what I was gonna guess.”

He made to go, was halfway to the door, when he stopped and turned. She’d gone back to her magazine filing. Before she could disappear below the desk, he said, “My name is—”

“Theodore Paul Carver,” she answered without turning around.

“How do you—” he began to ask when it dawned on him. He answered his own question, “Library card.”
 

She glanced at him over her shoulder.

“I go by Paul,” he said.

She returned to her filing. “Have a good day, Paul.”
 

He tore his eyes off her body. Walking down the steps outside, he suppressed an urge to raise his fists and bellow in triumph. She’d said yes, which was amazing. Even better, she’d looked at the registration he’d filled out yesterday to get his name.

Maybe, he thought as he drove home, that wasn’t such a big deal after all. Really, how many new customers did the library get in a given day? In a town the size of Shadeland, probably no more than one or two.

Yet she had to be curious to have scanned the cards after hearing the older woman describe him. Unless she was there yesterday when he came, somewhere out of sight. The thought of her spying on him from the shadows was exhilarating.