Page 22 of The Bane Witch
22
Feeding
I hear her in the night, scratching like a rat through the kitchen cabinetry. At first, I try to roll over and ignore it, but after a couple of softly muttered curses, I throw the covers back and walk to the kitchen. When I flip on the light, she blinks at me like a wide-eyed baby doll, all lashes and surprise.
“What are you doing up?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” I take in the room, every cabinet door standing open, the fridge light spilling onto the floor as condiment bottles begin to sweat. Her long nightshirt in blue and green plaid sags forward from bending over. Her braid has begun unraveling. “Looking for something?”
She purses her lips.
“In the dark?”
She turns away, contemplating how much to tell me. Finally, she says, “Poet’s daffodil. Azalea brought me some bulbs when she came for the conclave, but I can’t remember where I put them.” Her shoulders hang off her spine in despair. “I must have left them in the shelter.” Her eyes dart to the windows, thick with night.
I close the refrigerator unceremoniously. “You’re feeding.” It hits me like a splash of lemon in a cut, the sting of truth, of knowing that she is more than the kind old woman who’s taken me in, the granny in the woods. She is deadly. She has killed and will kill again.
She watches me close each cabinet door, resignation lowering over her like a theater curtain. “Yes.”
“Since when?” I sit at the little table.
“I first felt the hunger this morning,” she admits.
I nod. “Our lesson in the woods, that wasn’t for my benefit, then?”
She sighs, a world of feeling slipping out on her exhale. “Yes, of course. But also, I was searching.”
“ Flos mortis, ” I whisper. Flower of death.
She does not meet my eye.
“Why not eat the yellow wart you collected?”
“It wouldn’t do.”
“The tawny grisette then,” I suggest. I’ve seen her stores, overflowing with specimens from around the country. Even without them, she must have dozens of options living out here in unspoiled wilderness, no one around for miles to catch her foraging except the occasional moose or porcupine.
“No, it’s even less useful,” she says with more force than needed. Her jaw grinds. It’s getting to her, the craving, the need to feed. “Besides, no fungi. Not this time.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Why ever not? It’s abundant and effective. You said so yourself—” And then it sinks in. Because of me. Because of the man in the café.
She sees the truth steal across my face and throws out a hand, letting it slap her thigh as it drops. “Exactly. I can’t risk alerting Sheriff Brooks with any… overlap. This kill must look wholly unrelated. He’s already got mushrooms on his mind. This will need to be cleaner, less obvious. Poet’s daffodil is unexpected, not terribly toxic. I can combine it with another emetic and something to draw them both out. With any luck, they’ll pass it off as a terrible case of food poisoning. We’re miles from any hospital out here. It wouldn’t be the first time someone died of an otherwise perfectly treatable condition in these mountains.”
“Who’s the mark?” I ask, willing my voice not to cave.
Her eyes slide to mine. “I don’t know yet.”
“You said we often have a class, a type. What’s yours?”
She folds her arms beneath her breasts, clutching her elbows. “I have two.” Her eyes flicker away and back again. “Most of my marks are incestophiles.”
I drop my head into my hands. “Like the man who built your shelter?”
“Yes.” She drags the chair across from me out from under the table. The legs make a loud juddering sound against the wood, echoing my discomfort. She sits down. “And my first mark. The one in the deli.”
There’s a sick twist of poetic justice to an incestuous father being killed by a girl barely old enough to have entered puberty. But the weight of her life’s work sits over me, ugly and squalid and stinking, a carcass of deeds. The horrible things she must have seen in their eyes, in her own mind. “Oh, Myrtle.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she’s quick to say. “I have no qualms about what I do. I put an end to a particularly virulent strain of suffering for many children that will not come any other way before they reach adulthood. In some cases, not even after.”
My stomach flops and my mind starts looking for exit points. “You said most of your marks.”
“I have a second class,” she admits, a touch wary. “It’s unconventional.”
I laugh humorlessly. “Isn’t all of this unconventional?”
Her smile is tight, hovering at the height of her mouth. “It’s not a class any other bane witch has shown a leaning for. It’s a first among our kind. So, it’s been controversial, you could say.”
I imagine Rose and Barbie and the rest gathered in some back room raking Myrtle over the coals for whatever she’s about to tell me. “Go on.”
“Mercy killings.”
I don’t know what I was expecting—pipe bombers, dog fighters, those guys who put rat poison in envelopes and mail them to government buildings to create anthrax scares—but it wasn’t that. I blink, too stunned to comment. After a long pause, I gather my wits enough to mutter, “I don’t understand.”
“It goes against the nature of our… creation. We are defenders, protectors of the vulnerable. That has always been women and children. Some have argued that killing a man for his own sake, to end his own suffering, is a distortion of our duty,” she tries to explain.
“Let me guess. Rose?”
She looks taken aback. “No. Rose has been a staunch supporter of mine, in fact. It was my grandmother, actually, who protested the loudest—Hellen.”
Her own grandmother? The betrayal had to slice deep, but she sits before me, discussing it as if it were a disagreement over a family pot roast recipe. “And you? What do you say?”
She shrugs as if it’s simple. “Remember how I told you we were evolving? All species do it. They adapt to survive. Why shouldn’t we? We no longer live in the time or country where we began. Our justice system may leave much to be desired, but it certainly deals out more punishment than was seen in thirteenth-century France. Women enjoy freedoms unheard of in past centuries. Including access to defenses once inconceivable to them. Obviously, there is still work to be done if our venery continues. But we’ve seen one line die out already. And perhaps it is time for some of our gifts to shift, to meet the calling of the times.”
“But these men—the mercy killings—they’re innocents, right?” I blink at her.
She smiles softly, as if remembering a caress. “Yes. They are effectively innocents. Maybe the most innocent of all. Wounded, hurting, chewed up by the world and spit back out. Desperate for release. I give that to them. The rules are different, of course. When the intent changes, so do the parameters. Never too young, too strong. The life force must have already waned to an irrecoverable point.”
“And you can sense that?”
“Yes.” Her eyes drift over to me. “I told you it was unconventional.”
But I know Myrtle. I know her kindness and her humility, the strength of her resolve, the largess of her heart. Were it anyone else, I would certainly question the motive, the discernment. But because it’s her, I don’t. Instead, I ask, “Is that where bane witches started—thirteenth-century France?” I recall Bella’s brief and passionate reference to the first bane witch, her rape at the hands of a nobleman, her miscarriage after.
“So it has been said for as far back as anyone can remember,” she answers me. “And so we shall go on saying. Women killing in self-defense, particularly with poison, is hardly unique to us. Who can say when the first battered wife or angry mother dosed someone’s cup or meal? There have been widely documented cases of course, primarily in France and Italy, but those women didn’t invent the wheel, they just gave it a good turn. Neither did we. But we are a distinctive instrument of delivery, and as such, we do have an origin story.”
“I’d like to know it.” I imagine fireside chats, multigenerational, the glow on a grandmother’s face, girls cross-legged at her feet, staring up, riveted. The way all stories are passed on, family legends, myths told and retold. An ache opens up inside me yet again for the childhood I missed. The camaraderie. The sense of tribe. But then what sits at the heart of ours burns through it, and I think maybe I was better off alone.
“She was a cunning woman,” Myrtle begins. “The first of our kind—a midwife and a healer in her village. And worse, a widow, having lost her husband to side sickness the season before, what we now call appendicitis. Late one evening she was called to the bedside of a noblewoman who’d gone into early labor. The child, sadly, could not be saved, but the woman was spared thanks to the healer’s efforts. Her husband, however, was not so grateful. Drunk and enraged at the death of his son, he raped her brutally and turned her out. She staggered to her horse to ride home, clutching her womb, but never made it. She hemorrhaged, falling unconscious, the horse wandering deeper into the woods with her draped over its back.
“She would have died if the old witch hadn’t found her. A grizzled old woman most avoided, but that the midwife often left food for.” Here, Myrtle’s eyes begin to sparkle, the storyteller inside waking up, stretching her limbs. “But when is a witch ever just a witch? This one was a fée—a fairy or woman of herbs and stones. Or a demoness, depending on who’s telling the story. What’s clear is that she was not human. She recognized this healer who’d shown her kindness and chose to grant her a dying wish. The midwife did not ask to recover, or even that the life of her unborn child be restored. Her dying wish was for revenge. And so the bane witch was born, resurrected with a potent, toxic ability, the nobleman her first and most deserving mark. But like many gifts of the fay, this one came with a terrible cost. For generations her daughters would be born killers, sons poisoned in the womb or soon after unless given up, with gifts both feared and hated. We’ve had to hide for hundreds of years or be driven from our communities, even savagely murdered for daring to deliver justice where it is due.”
It seems too glossy to be real, spun a little too tight. I whistle low, teeth buzzing with the sound. “That’s some story.”
She gives a small dip of her head and smiles broadly. “It may sound like a fairy tale, but mark me, Piers, it’s all true. We’re the living proof.”
Certainly, there must be truth in it. But I imagine unseemly details lost over the years, like jagged edges sticking out, catching at loose skin. Perhaps not food but offerings the midwife left, seeking the power of life and death. Or maybe fairy woman is a euphemism for something older and more sinister, a Lovecraftian presence brooding among the trees, slogging from the swamp, pestilent and hungry. A Faustian bargain was struck, something traded away from the eyes of men, the prostitution of the soul. In any case, it is my story now, the origin of my kind. The notion of my trading places with Myrtle someday, sitting in her chair as I retell it to another, ignorant and disbelieving as I am, strikes me with such violent clarity that it forces the wind from my lungs, and I double over.
“Piers?” Her voice is high, worried.
“It’s nothing,” I say, pushing myself up, head in a daze. “Just a passing sickness. I’m fine.”
She studies me as if she can smell the lie but leaves it alone. “I’ve kept you long enough,” she says quietly, admonished. “You need to sleep. Your hunt is more important than mine.”
That’s not what she means. She means more dangerous. More exhaustive. More precarious. But I listen just the same. “What will you do?” I ask, rising. “To feed?”
Her eyes twitch toward the window as if the darkness sets them itching. “I’ll find the bulbs,” she says, patting my hand. “Don’t worry about me.”
Stepping to the wall, I hit the switch, and we both stand in sudden shadow, staring across the house to the uncovered windows, straining to see what lies just beyond our sight. We are so still even the dust begins to settle, silence thick enough to drown thought, the tick of our hearts syncing, keeping time. Who knows how many minutes pass, our eyes adjusting moment by moment, pupils growing large enough to swallow stars. Somewhere beyond the cabin, I feel him, gazing back, locked in a stare down, holding until one of us breaks. I think he is too far to see me, but I know he feels it, the thing that ties us together, like gossamer twine.
Myrtle would call it magic. I call it death.
Something slides around inside me, slippery and unmoored, a slug in a jar. “Don’t go out there,” I whisper. “Not tonight. Wait until morning. Promise me.”
I see her throat bob and glide as she swallows her nerves. She nods once. She will stay inside tonight, but she’s right. The hunt is beginning, and my prey is out there, hunting me in return.
T HE NEXT MORN ING, I find her at the table with a cutting board and a utility knife, slicing up daffodil bulbs like they’re shallots and eating them raw. Her flannel hoodie is partially unzipped like she forgot what she was doing halfway through; her hair isn’t yet pulled back. Fleshy, lavender pockets bulge beneath her eyes. The corners of her mouth are cracked and bleeding.
“You found them.”
“I trekked to the shelter this morning,” she says without looking at me. “But I waited for the sun to rise.”
“You should have waited until I was awake,” I scold, but she goes on eating, untroubled. I watch her from the corner of my eye as I set the coffeepot and wait for it to brew. Normally, she would have done this already. “Has anyone opened the café?”
“I told Ed to unlock the door and put the cereal and bowls out. I programmed the coffeepot last night.” She pops a final papery, brown nub of bulb into her mouth and chews like it’s a piece of homemade caramel, licking her fingers.
“I can go over and make some oatmeal,” I tell her. “Let you… finish here.”
Her eyes finally snap to mine. “I can do it. This will last me for a while.”
Coffee steam invades the air, bringing the cabin to life. I pour her a cup and add milk, setting it before her. “Shouldn’t you refrain from… you know, handling things for a bit?” I say, gesturing at the empty jar with the pot. I wonder how she’s done it all these years, alone in this untethered circle of mountains, overcome with hunger and the need to take a life while still maintaining her Pollyanna presence in the community.
She grunts, lifting a limp pair of white cotton gloves. “That’s what these are for. Everyone thinks I have palmoplantar psoriasis. When they see the gloves come out, they assume I’m experiencing a flare-up.”
“Let me help. It’s the least I can do.” I wiggle my fingers. “I’m toxin-free at the moment, safer than you.”
She picks at a gap in her teeth, then agrees. “Fine. I’ll head over in a bit. Just need some time to get myself together.” She looks down and notices her zipper, tugging it up.
“Will that be it?” I ask her as I sip my coffee. “Or will you have to feed again?”
“Don’t know,” she says, rising to set the jar in the sink, fill it with soapy water. “Hard to say when I don’t know who it is yet. But he’s close.” She turns to me, gaze down. “I can feel him nearby, dull and ever present, like a sound that’s always been there but you’re only just becoming aware of. The daffodil won’t be enough on its own anyway. I need to visit my stores one more time, make a couple of adjustments, eat more.”
“I hope he comes soon,” I tell her, a shiver tickling through me. I don’t like seeing her this way.
“So do I,” she says. “So do I.”
W HEN I MAKE it to the café, I find Ed inside reading the Adirondack Daily Enterprise while he eats Cheerios out of the box, stooping to feed one to Bart every now and again. I walk over and pat Bart’s head, giving him a good scratch around the ears. “No dogs in the café,” I tell Ed with a warning tone. “You know how Myrtle feels.”
“Isn’t anybody here,” he complains. “He’s a good boy. You know he is!”
I give Ed the side-eye, fighting back a smile, and park myself behind the counter, getting a pot out for oatmeal. “It’s Myrtle’s place, so it’s Myrtle’s rules. But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“Rules,” he grumbles, folding his paper up as he approaches one of the barstools. “Where she at anyway?”
“Just a little stiff this morning,” I tell him as I fill the pot with water. “She’ll be in soon.”
“Well,” he says begrudgingly, “I gotta clear some downed limbs from that last storm. She’s been after me to take care of them for weeks.”
“Okay.” I turn and give him a bright smile. Ed is a lot like his dog. He doesn’t always mind, and he can be a bit smelly—and Myrtle’s right about his drinking too much, though he tries to hide it—but something about him grows on you. I can’t imagine the motel and café without him. He’s a fixture, and I’m grateful he’s been here for Myrtle over the years when no one else has. If I thought he’d like a scratch behind the ear as much as Bart, I’d probably give him one. “Will I see you later?”
“Gotta get my dinner from somewhere, don’t I?” He lifts a small resealable baggie from his front overalls pocket and waves it at me. “Hope you don’t mind. I made myself the lunch special to go.”
“What are we serving?” Yesterday’s foraging trip seems to have thrown me off schedule. I can’t remember what Myrtle had in store, even if I did run the last trip for groceries.
“Ham and cheese,” he tells me, waddling to the door. “With mayo! Mm-mmm !”
I watch him leave, Bart prancing beside the stains on Ed’s denim overalls, before turning back to the stove to get the water boiling. I like the café when it’s quiet. If it weren’t for all those tables, I could pretend it was my own little hut in the woods. But a prickling sensation lingers behind my skin, like ants on the inside, and I can’t get comfortable. The door sounds and I assume Ed has forgotten something important. Most days he wanders off without his keys or glasses. He’s left his phone behind for whole afternoons.
“What did you forget this time?” I call out, stirring the oats into the water with a knowing smile. “Huh, Ed?”
When he doesn’t respond, the baby hairs at the nape of my neck begin to rise. “Ed?” I turn just as the door sounds again. The café is empty, the front clear of anything but spotted grass and a few paved parking places outside, the clear morning sky. Whoever came in has left.
I grab a kitchen knife, feeling suddenly naked. The weight of it in my hand—the dry wooden handle sanded smooth, the cold lip of tang—is something to hold on to. I should walk to the front, check outside, see if a guest needs help. But I just stand there while the oatmeal congeals, wishing I weighed a hundred pounds more, that I was foot taller, that I’d taken up martial arts as a hobby a decade ago.
Not only is the Saranac Strangler circling—circling me if Myrtle is to be believed—but another mark is coming, any day, any minute now. Someone who has tortured children and would feel nothing about hurting me. I think of Azalea in her platform heels and cat-eye sunglasses and understand her bravado. This life requires an iron spine, the ability to look death in the face again and again without flinching. Not only theirs but yours.
It takes me a long time to turn back around. By then, the oatmeal has clumped together, sticking to the bottom in an umber crust. I have to scrape it out with a metal spatula and start over. I’m just getting my second pot going when the door sounds again. My skin lights as if it’s electric, every pore tingling. I hold my breath, but like before, there’s no cheerful greeting, no heavy footfalls. Only that noiseless knowing that I am not alone.
I reach for the knife I’d set down between the burners so I could stir. Holding it stiff before me, I spin around, nearly slicing Regis open from one oblique to another.
“Shit!” He jumps away before the blade can make contact.
Something ejects from my mouth like a scream, but there’s no sound to it. I stand there gaping as if I expect it to arrive late, unable to draw a breath.
He reaches out and plucks the knife from my hand, clattering it on the counter. “You trying to gut somebody?”
Oxygen finds me all at once, and I suck in a pitchy, terrified breath as if it will be my last. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” I squeeze out. “Not with that maniac running around, choking women.”
He leans down, elbows on the counter, and blows out. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I wanted to see you, is all. You left so quickly the other day, after…”
I glance toward the oatmeal, the heat of our exchange “the other day” riding up my legs, filling my belly like warm honey. I don’t know where to put my eyes. It all happened so unexpectedly, the rush of want and the press of skin on skin, a desire I didn’t know I could still feel. And then it was over, and I was scrambling to pull my clothes on, unable to look at him on the drive back to my car. I didn’t think about after —the uselessness of words when bodies have been joined, the pretense that there is nothing more between us than investigator and witness, the utility of sex without commitment. A soft pop sounds and I look down to see the oatmeal forming opaque bubbles that burst into creamy craters. I grab the spoon.
“Are you sorry that we—” he starts to ask.
I stick the spoon in the gruel and turn to him. “It’s not that.”
Relief plays across his lips, causing them to curl like pencil shavings, a little unruly. “I was afraid maybe you didn’t like it.” The words jam together on their way out of his mouth, so that I have to decipher them.
My toes ball in my shoes, the grooves that separate his muscles coming back to me like a landscape I want to get lost in. I slide a finger between the buttons of his shirt and look up into his eyes, like the feathers of a great gray owl. “I liked it very much.”
His hands slide up and down the tops of my arms. “I like you very much.” He bends slowly, letting his lips glance over mine before closing the space between us, folding over me as our mouths greet each other again.
I put a hand on his chest and push him away, breathless. “Not here.”
I don’t want Myrtle to see. It’s not just the venery, the risk. There’s something possessive in me, a need for custody over my own heart and body. I want him to belong to me in a way he cannot belong to anyone else. I want what we do to exist in an autonomous sphere, like a snow globe, a world under glass, perfect and separate, outside of time. A place only we can enter. When he is with me, he’s not the sheriff, and I’m not the bane witch. We are private entities, reborn in each other’s arms, regenerated everywhere our bodies touch. Every meeting an introduction, an act of creation.
The door chimes and we leap apart, my fingers easily finding the spoon, stirring the oatmeal as if it is my whole purpose in life.
“Sheriff Brooks,” I hear Myrtle croon. “What lucky turn of events has brought you to our door again?”
He clears his throat and my mind flashes to the pattern of stubble where his beard meets his neck, the trace of my lips across it like a surveyor drawing a boundary, careful not to miss a step. I take a steady breath and relegate the image of him naked and trembling beneath me to a dusty corner of my mind. That I can fool Myrtle, keep what is between us to myself, is lunacy. But I have to try. Because I cannot tell her, and I cannot refuse him.
“Learn anything else about what happened to Beth Ann?” she asks.
He eyes her warily. “I can’t discuss the details of an active case. You know that.”
“Well, we all know who did it,” Myrtle carries on unhindered. “That Saranac Strangler’s getting a little too close for comfort.”
I pour a cup of coffee and hand it to him. “You don’t have any idea who he is? These are small towns. Surely someone’s seen a strange face around.”
“Tourists pass through here all year,” Myrtle tells me before Regis can answer. “Most of the houses in the area are empty, but they’re not for sale. City dwellers like to buy up the real estate and save it for vacation or rent it out to travelers for passive income.”
“Unfortunately, she’s right,” he agrees. “Whoever this guy is, I don’t think he’s local, but he’s got a home base, somewhere he’s lying low between murders. A place he’s renting seasonally or even squatting in. Some of these homeowners don’t come up here for years. They’d never know if a person was living on their property temporarily.” He sets his cup down without taking a sip. “Ladies, I better get going.”
I open my mouth to say something, but the words glob inside, and he stalks out as I stare after him.
“Damn shame we don’t have anyone here who could help that man by shedding some light on this mysterious killer,” Myrtle says flatly.
I look at her. “Do you mean I should help him?”
She eyes me sidelong. “I mean that he should help you. The more you get out of him, the greater your advantage over this monster. And you need every advantage. But you gotta scratch a back around here to get yours scratched in return.”
“Who says he’ll believe me?”
She shrugs. “Don’t overthink it, dear. Chalk it up to women’s intuition. Besides, something tells me he’d believe just about anything that comes out of your mouth. Better hurry,” she adds dryly. “He’s leaving.”
I drop the dish towel I’m holding and rush out the door, throwing myself at his patrol car before he can back away.
Regis rolls his window down.
“Let me help you,” I tell him, panting.
He looks bewildered.
“You said the other day… I mean, I did feel something when we were at Beth Ann’s place.” I take a deep breath. “Take me to the other crime scenes. Maybe I’ll get something else—a sense or a premonition. You don’t have to tell anyone. We can keep it unofficial, off-the-record. But it might be useful.”
He looks pale, jaw flickering with tension. “You’re some kind of psychic after all, aren’t you?”
“In a way.”
He sighs.
“I can help,” I insist as he quietly deliberates. “Let me prove it to you.”
“Acacia, it’s not that I don’t believe you…” he starts.
I squeeze my eyes shut and burrow deep within, feeling for the pulse that isn’t mine, the flicker of another presence, dull but persistent, like a clock ticking through a very thick wall. I put myself back at Beth Ann’s place, the way I found it that morning, littered with the invisible debris of what occurred there. The first flash is dim, muddled in a way I don’t understand, but I can see her tromping down her porch stairs through the branches, unaware she is being watched. Suddenly, the shift in his MO makes sense to me. I open my eyes. “It was an accident,” I blurt.
“What?” Regis looks confused.
“He wasn’t looking for another victim when he found Beth Ann. He came upon her place by accident. But the need was so strong, and the opportunity presented itself—he couldn’t resist.” It spurts out of me like a balloon deflating. I grip Regis’s door and sigh. My eyes meet his. “He’s losing control. Slowly, incrementally, but still. He’s going to make a mistake soon. You need to know what to look for, or you might miss it.”
Regis stares at me like I’ve just confessed to killing Beth Ann myself. After a moment, he relaxes.
“Look, I don’t know what this is, this thing you’ve got. Maybe it’s a gift, maybe it’s all bullshit. But I know you’re not a liar. I know you believe it. I have some time this afternoon. I could take you to one of the spots, but it would have to be just between us. Understand? I wouldn’t even consider this if I wasn’t so desperate to catch this bastard—if he wasn’t so good.”
I glance back to the café. I shouldn’t leave Myrtle to tend the guests alone. Not when she’s feeding. No matter what she says or how long she’s managed without me, but if I can convince her to close early, I can leave without worrying. “Can you come back around four?”
“It’s a date.”
T HE SIGNPOST PROCLAIMS TRAILHEAD he could see easily without being seen.” I take a step, wait, take another. Slowly, I make my way down the center of the trail until I feel his energy dissipate. I step back into it, like crossing a fence, and turn to face Regis. “She came late, and he watched her pass. He took her on her way back to her car. By then it had grown dark. He likes the cover in this region. The way people trust the landscape even when they shouldn’t. The beauty puts them off their guard. It makes his job easier. He could kill a hundred women out here and people would still show up to these trails. They can’t resist what nature has wrought. It’s a playground for him.”
Regis lifts a hand to his head. He looks troubled, as if I’ve said something incriminating or nonsensical, eyes narrowing, mouth tight. “You got all that from taking a few steps?”
I can feel the killer’s appreciation for this spot like a rug burn. It is etched into the land around me, the leaves, the cool brushes of air. A flame ignites in my chest, like hunger, sex, adrenaline, but it’s none of those. It is its own fuel, an acute drive bordering on pain, the need is so great. I want to bite down on my knuckle until the taste of blood, warm and metallic, fills my mouth. If Regis weren’t here, I’d scream. I’d tear my clothes off and race down this trail, frothing at the mouth. The nearness of the Strangler incenses me. To step where he stepped—the hunt dilates my veins, a flood of instinct. “Do you believe me now?” I ask Regis. “That I can help you?”
“I believe that you have a… an ability. Some kind of knack for this. I don’t know what it is. I’m willing to listen, though.”
I nod. There’s a turkey vulture circling overhead, gliding on invisible hoops of sky, blotting out the sun in lazy turns. Its wings are scarecrow straight, a boomerang returning to the same point again and again. Something died here since the woman. “So, what can you tell me?”
“Tell you?” He looks confused.
“He doesn’t use his hands,” I say frankly. “What is he strangling them with?”
His eyes jump from mine. “Parachute cord. He ties it like a tourniquet using a stick so he can tighten the loop with one hand. It gives him total control over the victim.”
I nod, press my lips together, scent the air around me like a bloodhound.
Regis continues. “We assume because he’s using his hand for other things. ” He looks like he’s bitten into something foul.
The truth floats around me now, the smell of his sweat. “He masturbates,” I blurt with enough objectivity to curdle milk. “He holds something around their necks with one hand while he gets off with the other.” My lack of squeamishness inculpates me. I see the way Regis’s brows rise with alarm, the part of his lips at my uncanny criminal insight. I’m a far cry from the nervous woman he questioned that day in the café.
“Yes, that’s true. But we never find any biological evidence at the scene,” he informs me.
“You mean semen?”
Regis turns a funny coral color across his nose and cheeks, a wave of strawberry passing under his beard. “He likes to clean up after himself. Which is why we think he’s chosen such out-of-the-way locations like this one, so he can take his time, tidy up the crime scene without risk of being interrupted. But it’s like you said—something has changed since Beth Ann’s murder. Something pushed him, tipped him over the edge just enough that he abandoned his usual penchant for planning and order.”
I know what that something is. My allure has been at work all right.
“It hasn’t caused him to make that mistake you promised yet, but it’s only a matter of time,” Regis continues.
“And why this trail?” I ask. “There must be hundreds of ‘out-of-the-way locations’ like this one out here.”
His bottom lips juts out. “We’re pretty far north,” he says. “Fewer tourists up this way. But…”
My brows arc, waiting.
“It’s easy. One of the more moderate climbs with stairs at the worst part, which means he doesn’t want to work too hard for it.” Regis stands beside me, glancing around. “He’s not into the chase. And he’s not from here. Not used to the elevation, the terrain. He’s protecting himself.”
“He likes to watch,” I tell Regis. “Not run. It’s the power he’s after. Watching makes him feel powerful. Running reminds him of his humanity, his mortality, his limitations. He’s probably not a large man. Not small necessarily, but not an athlete. The woman wasn’t small in stature, but she wasn’t large.”
He shakes his head. “Not especially. But she was a bit older, in her late fifties. And she had an on-again, off-again limp, arthritis in one knee that sometimes bothered her, which is likely why she chose this trail. She was looking for easy, too.”
I breathe in the faint aroma of lemons, too sugary to be real. Likely a shampoo or detergent. It’s not her I’m smelling. It’s his memory of her smell breaking off, drifting back to me, like a trail of dandelion seeds. “He likes to find the ones with a weakness. Wolves hunt like that.”
“Because they’re easier to kill?”
A snaking grin slides across my face. “Because they make him feel more powerful.” I turn to Regis. “Did Beth Ann have any physical disabilities? Anything that would have slowed her down, given him an advantage?”
He frowns. “No. She was strong. She took care of her body—worked out and ran. She was in good shape.”
I push aside my own niggling sense of comparison and self-doubt. “He’s gaining confidence.”
“Getting bolder, sloppier,” Regis agrees.
I shake my head. “No, not sloppy. This is arrogance, not carelessness. His confidence is gained from experience, but he’s not infallible. He grows with every kill. Beth Ann was a kind of leveling up, like in a video game. He’s training himself. You understand?”
“I think so.” Regis glances behind us to where a young couple are starting up the trail, laughing. Her leggings are a jaunty red, his cap a little offset. They’ve foregone backpacks for a small utility bag and a water bottle between them. They don’t expect to sweat. As they pass with easy smiles, greeting us, unaware that they are treading on a murder scene, Regis tips his hat.
“Just don’t underestimate him,” I say once they’re out of earshot. “This is not just a man becoming impulsive. This is a killer getting better, more efficient. This is a boy becoming a man.”
Regis doesn’t look comforted by my help. His teeth grind behind his beard, eyes pointing into the trees, sharp as blades. His drive to catch this man is nearly as raw and eager as my own. But there’s purity behind his motives, altruism. I wonder if his version of justice is really so different from ours. Why should this man live when he has killed so many? I don’t believe Regis wants to spare him, but he will because he is a rule-follower. His nature is to color inside the lines. Mine, I realize starkly, is to stand just outside them, stuffing my face with forbidden fruit.
Maybe I am like the venery after all.