Page 26 of The Bane Witch

26

Feather

Kathy is gone, bagged and loaded, headed to the coroner’s office for postmortem, but her killer is not. I’d be lying if I said I wanted to get here in time to see her discarded on the corroded concrete, face ashen and still as stone, maybe not so different from my own. But I see her anyway, as he did, eyes fading to a lifeless horizon, a heap of parts.

He’s still here—the Saranac Strangler—in the earth, in the air, in the weeds that grow in the cracks of the parking lot. And he’s hungry. His appetite has doubled, tripled in the last few weeks, and he can’t understand why. It unnerves him, makes him feel out of control. And that makes him angry. Kathy’s death was more violent than the rest, more brutal. I see it play behind my eyes in cinematic flashes. He didn’t stop squeezing until the skin around her throat began to split and her eyes bulged from their sockets like balloons. Her lungs are swimming in fluid, her skin freckled with hemorrhages. And still, he is not satiated. The craving is overpowering him. He thinks that makes him weak, but it only makes him more dangerous.

In answer, my own cravings begin to kick in, a tickle at the back of the throat, the memory of destroying angel on my tongue, the bitter spores of yellow wart. It’s time for me to feed. He’s so close, so present, it could be any day, any moment, when we collide.

Police tape wraps the back lot, strung between the building, a patrol car, and a couple of traffic barrels they’ve set up. I look for the little plastic stands used to mark evidence, but there aren’t any. Which means our Strangler, true to form, left this scene as clean as the last. I skirt the edge of the yellow tape, scanning the ground, the cars, the back wall of the Drunken Moose with its pitiful gray siding, and scrutinize my surroundings, examining the faces of everyone nearby.

There are a few curious onlookers—a woman and two men—too unabashed to realize how inappropriate their presence is. The woman meets my eyes, impassive. Her nylon jacket has faded from a deep cranberry to a sickly lavender over the years, and the coffee-stain of her boots has been scuffed tan on the toe. She’s a nosy resident, nothing more. I break eye contact with her and study the nearest male—in his seventies and leaning on a quad cane, too old to be a threat. The second man is wearing a thermal under his T-shirt and a stupid grin across his face. He’s still in his twenties. This is probably the most exciting thing to happen in his hometown for years. He doesn’t have enough life experience to know he’s making a spectacle of himself.

If the Strangler is still nearby like I believe, then he’s not letting himself be seen.

I stare at the concrete and think, this is what Henry was becoming. This is what he wanted more than anything. Who will he asphyxiate now that I have gone if my plan fails? What woman will suffer Kathy’s fate, the one meant for me? What a disservice I have done the world to kill myself and leave him alive.

“Acacia?”

I look up and see Regis walking toward me from the other side of the police tape.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

I lift a shoulder. “I was drawn.”

He glances behind him where an officer is snapping pictures of the ground.

“I didn’t know if you’d be here,” I tell him.

“Crow Lake is very small,” he says. “Makes more sense for them to contract with us than maintain their own police force.”

I should have realized as much, especially with all his trips to the café. But Myrtle’s place is at the edge of town. The Drunken Moose, however, is located squarely in the center of it. It’s another departure for our killer. He’s closing in.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he tells me. His lips depress into a thin line behind his sandy facial hair. His eyes remain wary.

“Shouldn’t I?” This is a prime opportunity for me to collect as much information on our common foe as possible, while the scene is fresh. He had to know I would come.

His head dips, eyes cast down. “Look, about last night—”

“Don’t,” I tell him before he can go on. I don’t blame him, knowing what I do, what he doesn’t. It sits at the surface, ready to tumble out of me, the truth. For a second, I think it might. My mouth opens, lips poised, tongue stiff with it, and his eyes are on mine, searching, waiting. I bite it back. It’s impossible. Why would he ever believe me? And yet, there is something between us already, an unspoken understanding, a yoke of intuition. “I know how it looks from where you stand, but I promise you, Aunt Myrtle and I—we’re not the enemy here. We’re on your side.”

He hangs his head, then lifts it to cut through me with those impossibly gray eyes. The officer behind him calls his name and he waves over a shoulder. Turning back to me, he adds sadly, “You should go.”

I cross my arms, annoyed to be shut out when we both know I could tell him more about this murder than any of his officers could. “I hear she looked like me, the victim.”

Irritation flashes across his face. “Who told you that?”

“Terry.”

He rolls his eyes. Everyone knows Terry can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. “Maybe a little,” he says impartially. “Same age. Same coloring. Similar hair. But it’s coincidence. You have nothing to worry about.”

I have plenty to worry about. “We all have something that keeps us up at night.” The words are so loaded they drop like bullets. I hope he understands. I need him to understand. We are hunting the same person.

His eyes are penetrating. I can feel the pressure building in his chest, his hands, creeping up his neck. “I guess we do.”

“I’ll go,” I finally say. “But I’ll be back tonight, after your officers are done here.”

He sighs. “It’s not safe. Especially so soon.”

I sharpen my gaze on his. “One A.M . See you then?”

His nostrils flare, and his Adam’s apple bobs against the restraint of his throat. There’re so many things he wants to say to me, all fighting to get out at once. “Miss Lee,” he says instead, dipping his chin.

“Sheriff.” I turn and walk away.

A STING SHARPENS the midnight air, already brisk by day. I glance around, make sure no one is looking, and duck easily beneath the police tape. The Drunken Moose will stay closed tonight, but by tomorrow those barstools will be topped with denim-clad rear ends, the lights over the pool table giving off that amber glow, the buffoonish chatter of men like Terry drowning out the crickets outside. This is my only chance.

I kick at a pebble, shuffling my feet as I walk, so I don’t overlook anything. The soft light of my phone illuminates a tiny circle around my feet and nothing more. I’d use the flashlight, but I don’t want to alert anyone to my presence. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I only know that I don’t believe our resident serial killer truly leaves nothing behind. Maybe the sheriff’s department thinks that, but it’s only because they don’t know what to look for. They’re trying to find the usual suspects, the typical evidence one might find at a murder scene like this—hair, semen, a broken fingernail, clothing fibers. But our Strangler isn’t typical. His cleanliness has made them complacent, too willing to accept that he will have outsmarted them. But he’s too controlling to leave nothing behind. The places where he kills belong to him. He will mark them as such, somehow. Just not in a way a cop would notice. I know because I know Henry.

Shortly after we moved into the new house and his mother died, I took on the role of designer for our space. I used all the professional skill at my disposal to perform the job I had excelled at for years for us as a couple. I wanted to impress him, to show him my work carried a quiet importance. Maybe not the obvious prowess of an engineer, but it was more than the frivolous, superficial “hobby” he’d deemed it. Spaces impact us, define us even. Who we become inside them is an art I had mastered manipulating. I took pride in that, in the way I lingered at the edges of the rooms I designed, influencing their occupants. I thought if I could do the job with enough splendor, he would see me, love me again, that he would return to the man I first met.

But I was wrong.

They were small, the things out of place. I noticed the first one on a shelf in our living room—a bronze paperweight, pre-mid-century, smaller than my hand and in the shape of a naked woman. She was on her back, legs spread, knees up. Tiny breasts marked her chest, and a slit ran between her legs. The patina was thick, and she was crudely formed but a collectible, nonetheless. When I asked him about it, he said casually, “Don’t be invidious, Piers. It doesn’t suit you.” But his eyes were ice chips.

A few days later, I found the banana salt and pepper shakers in the kitchen. Vintage ceramic and completely out of place, they stared me down as I stood at the gas range, stirring the spaghetti sauce. This time, I didn’t ask any questions. When he said, “Let’s eat at the bar,” I sat beside him, both of us facing the counter where they rested, shiny and golden, centered in our view.

It went on like that for days, one item after another, like a strange game of hide-and-seek. There was the melting desk clock that turned up in the study, a Salvador Dalí wannabe. And the soap dispenser shaped like a rubber ducky in the guest bathroom. And the garden statue of a toad that appeared in the garage. At first, I didn’t understand. They were harmless enough, but there was something sinister in the way he placed them one by one, drawing it out, never mentioning them. Henry was not the sort of man to want a duck soap dispenser or banana salt and pepper shakers. It was over a week later that I realized what the message was—he was mocking me. My work, the pride I’d taken in carefully curating our home. It was a joke to him.

And he was reclaiming the space as his, despite my presence in the design, daring me to remove what he’d placed there, reminding me who was in charge. Soon I began to find them in my own personal space, and they got darker—less overtly funny, more threatening. The bullet-shaped lighter on my nightstand beside my favorite candle. The coffin decal on my bathroom mirror. But the worst and final one was in my closet. A palm-sized windup skull. It went off on its own one afternoon when I was folding sweaters, nearly scaring me out of my skin. I snatched it down from the shelf where it was perched and threw it into the bathroom trash. The next day, it was there again, staring at me with gaping sockets and hideous, happy teeth.

So, I know, standing here in the dark as I am now, that the Saranac Strangler has left something behind. Something only I will recognize. Because, like Henry, he believes he is in charge, and though he must remain hidden, he desperately wants everyone else to know it, too.

The light of my phone pours over two small stains on the concrete, rust in color, opaque, like liquid brick. It’s her blood—Kathy’s—a little piece of her here. I want to bend down and set my finger atop one, feel her last moments, the fear coursing through her. But it’s not her I’m after. The dark presses in on me, squeezing. I feel it washing down my throat, pricking my eyes. He is in it, the dark. If I breathe in, he’ll slide into me like a spirit, take possession.

The hunger gurgles through my abdomen, nips at my ribs, insistent as a puppy. It doesn’t want me to be caught unawares. It is growing inside me, the appetite for death; I won’t be able to resist it much longer. I shouldn’t, even if I am able. It’s only the thought of Regis’s lips on mine, his skin sticking to me on his living room floor, that holds me back now.

I shine my phone out, drawing a line with the light from my feet to the edge of the lot. And then I see it, just beyond the pavement. It is sticking up from the dirt at an angle like a tilted gravestone, the iridescence catching the light, flashing green. I walk over and squat down beneath the police tape. The feather can’t be more than three inches long, its shaft thrust forcefully into the ground. Among the leaves beginning to fall, it’s easy to miss. The posterior vane is the same drab gray as the siding of the bar. But it’s the anterior vane that dazzles, black to green, shining in the light like a miracle. I reach out and brush the barbs with a finger, tiny threads of silk, and I pluck it from the earth.

The second my skin makes contact with the shaft, the world tilts. I see her clearly now, lying underneath me, so tranquil. It calms and infuriates me. I want her to rise up, to resist, to push back. I want to kick her and watch her body bounce off my shoe. But there is no time to play cat and mouse, and it’s no fun when the mouse is dead. The plastic baggie around my penis has slipped, leaving marks in the skin where the ridges of the zip closure are, but I don’t care because the release is so spectacular it hardly matters what comes after, and the petroleum jelly has smoothed the action so that I didn’t even notice. I seal it carefully and tuck it into a pocket next to the rebar and electrical wire I used. This one might have fought harder than the rest, might even have landed a blow or two, clawed grooves into my skin, but she was too drunk. And so surprised she hardly knew what was happening before it was over. Still, it’s progress, and I have brought something to mark the occasion. I bend at the edge of the lot and plug it into the ground with a black-gloved hand, cut resistant and coated in nitrile. I’ve no sooner stood up when the scent finds me, like cinnamon cream and homemade dough, the breakfasts my aunt Esther used to make. I can see the sheer pink fabric of her robe now, her breasts like withered apples underneath, and feel the smarting slap across my cheek, bloodying my lip, when I dared to reach for them as she leaned over me. It was a game with her, always a game. To look but not to touch. To shame me for the erection she deliberately caused. To beat me when she caught me masturbating into her pantyhose. To wrap those same nylons around my throat and squeeze the tears from my eyes. The corners of my mouth dip down as my cock stiffens. This one was close, but she’s still out there, the one I’m really seeking, the one that will make Aunt Esther finally disappear. And when I find her, I’ll destroy the power she has over me, once and for all.

I drop the feather and gasp, stumbling back a couple of steps.

“Acacia!” Footsteps stampede behind me as Regis runs up. He’s in civilian clothes tonight, a black fleece pullover and jeans. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I stare at the feather where it fell, the green gleam calling to me, taunting. “I—I’m fine,” I tell him as I turn. “You came.”

“Of course, I came,” he says, almost angry with himself. He spots the feather where I dropped it. “What’s this?”

“Something he left,” I tell him. “A kind of signature.”

He picks it up with a tissue and rises beside me, spinning it in his fingers. “It’s from a green-winged teal, a species of duck. Both the males and females have these beautiful green stripes on their wings. They’re transient here, passing through on their migratory route in the spring and the fall.” He looks to me. “What does it mean?”

“That we are a detour on his journey. And…”

Regis wraps the feather in the tissue, puts it in his pocket, and it’s like a line snaps, freeing me, the fish caught on the hook. “And?”

“He’s looking for a mate. That’s what this is, a search.”

He runs his fingers back through the short waves of his hair and forward again. “A mate ? Are you kidding me? How is that possible?”

“This one was close,” I tell him. “The closest he’s come. He thinks if he finds her, if he kills her, it will put something to rest inside him, something a woman he knew stirred in him as a child and fanned into a roaring fire.”

Regis faces me with his hands in his pockets, elbows angling out like wings. “How do you know?”

Fatigue zaps through me, taking my need to convince him with it. “I don’t have the energy to explain. Believe me or don’t. Take it or leave it. It’s all I’ve got.”

As much as his logic begs him to hold out against me, his expression is more resigned than angry. He’s caving with every encounter. The allure plays a role, sure. But the allure isn’t the only thing drawing him to me. There are deeper things forming there now—respect, admiration, feelings. They tell him I am worth listening to, even when everything else says he shouldn’t.

“Why do you care so much?” He looks around the empty parking lot as if he’ll find the answer there. “No one else is out here at one A.M . risking their ass.”

I sniff. The cold has stiffened the tip of my nose and it tingles. “If I tell you, you won’t believe me.”

“Try me,” he dares.

“Not here.”

He pulls a hand free and grabs my elbow with it, leading me to his truck. When we get to it, he opens the passenger door.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“Where do you want to go?”

I stare into his eyes until my own burn and tear, until the reticence leaves me like a virus vacating the body, until I am as certain of my answer as I am his. “Your place.”

I T’S TIM E FOR the truth. As much as I can reasonably give. Here, in his space, with the rest of the world shut out, I feel it pressing against my teeth. I cannot continue to hold so much back. Not when we are alone, when the tender shape of him lies against me, when those eyes brush against my heart.

“I was married before I came here,” I tell him as I walk slowly around his living room, scanning the varnished cypress wall clock, the brass brads on the arm of the suede sofa, the places we made love. I turn and sit down across from him, perched on the edge of an armchair. “I told you that already.”

“You did,” he agrees. “You implied it.”

I smile, but it skates off my face like snow on glass. “He wasn’t a kind man.”

“You implied that, too,” he tells me, leaning forward on his sofa, elbows to knees.

“Did you know that it only takes ten seconds of cutting off someone’s airway to cause unconsciousness? That fifteen seconds can cause a stroke and thirty, cardiac arrest? Within minutes a person can die. But even if they don’t, lasting damage—fatal damage even—can be done. Permanent damage to the brain—vision changes, seizures, memory loss, tears in the arteries—these are just a few of the side effects someone might experience for years to come after one, seconds-long event. And even with all of that, there are rarely glaring signs of injury. Bruising can be minimal, visible only under the skin, or take days to show up.” I level my gaze on him, green on gray, and wait for a response.

“We learn some of this when we go into law enforcement,” he says quietly. “Those aren’t facts the average person is aware of though. How do you—”

“Seven hundred,” I say, cutting off his question. “Domestic violence victims who have been strangled are seven hundred times more likely to be killed by their abuser.”

He’s quiet, but his brows raise in the middle, giving a sad slant to his eyes. His hands rub together slowly because he doesn’t know where to put the energy cresting inside him, the anger he feels, the useless desire to protect when it’s already too late.

“It’s funny, because I remember when I first read that statistic. I was in a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and a couple of free-for-use laptops zip-tied to a hickory-wood bar. I don’t know what possessed me to type strangulation into the search engine. Maybe the burn in my throat from the night before, or that one tiny vessel that ruptured in my eye. But I didn’t actually need a website to know that Henry would kill me, that he wanted to. He’d already made that clear so many times before.”

“Jesus.” Regis rubs his hands over his face, tries to absorb what he’s hearing.

“He’s brilliant, my husband,” I tell him. “Really. I’m not just saying that. He’s tactical. He’ll think of things you never will. I think that’s what drew him to me in the beginning—my eye for detail. He liked that I noticed. He didn’t want his particular brand of genius to go unrecognized. It’s hard when you specialize in destruction because so often you must operate in the shadows. I was his shadow for two years. He practiced on me. It made him feel strong, omnipotent. But my time was running short.”

“How did you break free?” he asks, barely able to speak.

“I took a leap of faith, you could say.” I look down at my hands, knotted in my lap. “And now I’m the one who operates in the shadows. You asked why I care so much about the Saranac Strangler. I care because I know him. He is Henry. He is every man who needed to squash the life in a woman in order to feel like a man. I left Henry behind—he is my past—and I came here to start again. But Henry will never stop being Henry. Another woman will take my place. She will suffer and she will pay for my escape. I can’t go back and bring Henry to justice; there is no justice for men like him. But I can stop this man, this killer, because I understand him in a way you never will. I am that woman you found on the pavement behind the Drunken Moose. And the one along the trail. And the countless others men like this have left in their wake of self-discovery. And I have the power to make sure there are no more after me. I intend to use it.”

He doesn’t fully understand what I’m referring to. My power, he likely thinks, is akin to parlor tricks, a keen eye for the little things, honed by years of interior design experience and the bad fortune of being married to an exacting, inhuman man. He doesn’t know a huntress lives within me, a predator born of untold magic and unspeakable violence, who must kill or die. He doesn’t know that when I say I can stop the Saranac Strangler, I don’t mean it euphemistically, but literally. That I will take him in hand, lips to lips, and watch him as he convulses, the existence draining out of him, sinking into the forest floor.

But he doesn’t need to. He only needs to know that I have ample reason to be interested in this case. That I am here to help.

Regis stands and moves toward me slowly, kneeling at my feet. He looks up into my eyes as he kisses one knee and then the other, taking my hands in his, placing the palms to his lips. “I will never hurt you,” he tells me.

And I know it’s true. I feel it in him like a nougat center, how soft he is for me. My eyes flood with tears. “What about Ed?”

He looks at me, the fear he once displayed abandoned. “What about Ed? Ed is not here. But you are. And I am. What happens out there, it can’t touch us in here. In here, there is no past, no future. In here, we’re no one.”

He leans toward me, kisses me slowly, waits for me to unzip the pullover he is wearing, slip it over his head. Piece by piece, we shed our identities until we are nothing but skin and bones and heat. We press our bodies together like pages in a book, a story unfolding line by line, each in the telling of the other. And when we are done, we lie in the dark a long, fragile while, listening to our breathing, praying the night will never end. Because out there we are hunters, and a killer is waiting, hoping we will make a vital mistake.

At last, he rises, drags his pants on, sits beside me. “Can I ask you something?”

I nod, curling to one side.

“You said the Strangler left that feather. Do you think he takes something, too? Lots of killers keep mementos from their murders.”

“No. To keep something of theirs is to give them power over him. He would never allow it.”

Regis scowls, thinking. “If power is what drives him, then why women? Wouldn’t killing a man make him feel even more powerful?”

I brush the hair back from my face with my fingers and look up, thinking of Henry’s mother. “Because it was a woman who made him feel small in the first place.”