The cover was of a gravestone, the book’s title engraved into the stone above the author’s name: Mark Darling.
“Is anybody else sharing the room with you?” Lucy asked.
He tilted his head slightly, like he couldn’t comprehend the question. “No, just me.”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
“Right through that door.”
“Would you sign this for me while I pee?”
“Um, sure.”
She gave back the book and walked into the bathroom and closed the door.
“Write something good!” she called out from inside.
She did have to pee actually, and when she’d finished, she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and took all of her clothes off. She folded them and stacked them on top of her black Chuck Taylors on the toilet basin under a towel, then turned her attention to her handbag.
The marble of the sink was cold against the soles of her bare feet. She walked down to the end and crouched down beside the door.
She’d been in the bathroom more than five minutes already, and she crouched there another five, her legs beginning to cramp, before Mark’s voice passed finally through the door.
“Lucy?” he said.
She brought her hand to her mouth to suppress the giggle. She’d imagined this a hundred times, and something about the moment finally being here struck her as funny and surreal. It was the strangest thing. Her body felt all tingly, like whenever she had been around Bobby Cockrell, the first boy in high school she’d had a major crush on.
“You’ve been in there awhile,” Mark said. “Everything okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“Lucy, I need to get back down to the lobby.”
Silence, Lucy smiling.
“I’m opening the door, all right? Are you um…are you decent?”
She watched the doorknob turn and the door ease open.
Mark’s head appeared.
“Lucy?”
She was right beside him, well within reach, but he didn’t see her. Kept looking at the toilet, and then the shower, as if trying to piece together how this girl had vanished through the walls.
Lucy reached out and pulled the blade of her dead father’s Zwilling J.A. Henckels straight razor through his windpipe in a quick, delicate swipe and the blood from his carotid artery sprayed her face and she squealed with delight as Mark clutched his throat and stared wild-eyed at her.
He staggered over to the sink and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and all of that blood pouring out of his throat down the front of his white Oxford with a kind of disbelief, Lucy giggling as Mark tried to physically squeeze the opening in his neck back together but the blood kept coming and he gave up and started toward Lucy with a madness in his eyes but the floor was slicked with his blood and his feet shot out from under him.
He slammed flat on his back and his head cracked against the tile.
Lucy slid off the sink and stepped carefully across the floor, dodging the bigger pools of blood and watching a puddle widen around Mark’s head, his eyes already beginning to glaze and his hands at his side.
She stood there watching him bleed out and when he finally stopped twitching and blinking, she set the straight razor on the sink. Lucy weighed eighty-three pounds at her last physical, and she figured Mark had at least a hundred on her, but the shower wasn’t far. She only had to drag him over a two-inch lip and the blood on the floor provided decent lubrication for the job.
When she’d crammed him into the shower, she closed the glass door and looked at the bathroom.
Blood everywhere. Spots and spatters and streaks on the mirror, the walls, even the ceiling.
What a mess.
What a beautiful mess.
She got down on her knees and flattened herself across the tile and rolled through the pools of blood which were sticky and cool and gave off a dank metallic smell like a thunderstorm coming.
Lucy stood for a long time watching herself in the mirror, kept thinking it looked like she had the most lovely body art imaginable, how she wanted to walk naked through the lobby just like this and soak in the stares. What would Andrew Thomas think to see her like this? She suspected he might love her.
The blood was growing cold and beginning to congeal on her skin when she slid open the shower door and stepped inside. Bending down, she pushed Mark up against the wall and curled up to him, her spine against his chest. She draped his arm around her and closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Woke in the middle of the night, cold and shivering. Turned the shower on full blast and let the hot water pound the blood out of her hair and her face. She collected her clothes from under the towel atop the basin—not a drop of blood on them—and grabbed the robe off the back of the door and slipped out of the bathroom.
Mark’s wallet sat on top of the television, and she went through it and pocketed two key cards and two hundred in cash. She dressed and left the room. Rode down to the lobby which was mostly empty now save for a handful of die-hards who’d persevered beyond last call to sing drunken show tunes on a leather couch.
Outside, the autumn air was cool and scented with the spice of a city she did not know.
Wind blew between the skyscrapers.
The sidewalks were empty.
The streets were empty.
It felt strange to be out here alone, no sound but her footsteps on the pavement. Impossible that her father’s funeral had happened today. She wondered if there were people still at her house comforting her mother and brother, or if they had all gone home.
The glow of a payphone caught her attention on the other side of the street.
She ran across to it and dug some change out of her wallet, dialed the number.
Her mother answered on the fifth ring in a tired voice gone hoarse from crying.
“Hello?”
Lucy said nothing, just listening, her eyes filling up.
“Hello? Lucy, is that you?”
“Hey, Mom.”
“Oh my God, where are you? Are you okay?”
“I just wanted to tell you something.” She was beginning to tremble.
“What, honey? What?”
Lucy shouted into the phone, “He loved me, you stupid bitch! He loved me! I wish you had died! He’s the only thing I ever fucking loved!”
She slammed the phone down on the hook and screamed inside the booth until her throat burned.
She’d left her mother’s car in the only parking space she could find—a three-hour meter four blocks from the hotel that had long since expired. There were five orange envelopes under the windshield wipers, and the right front tire had been booted.
She unlocked the car and dragged the guitar case out of the backseat, started back to the hotel.
The keycard worked on the second try, and she slipped into her room and locked the door after her. Stowed Mark’s suitcase, his shoes, his wallet, and his sports jacket in the closet.
She’d left home in a hurry, jamming her favorite books, clothes, and a few toiletries into the first thing to cross her path—her brother’s guitar case. Now she flipped open the clasps, opened it on the bed, and dumped everything out. Set to work choosing outfits for the convention and smoothing out the wrinkles.
Before bed, she went back into the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat just watching Mark lying motionless in the shower. She got down on her knees and stroked his hair, caressed her finger through the gash in his throat.
By four a.m., she was in bed in her nightgown, and already dreaming of what tomorrow might bring.
The hotel was crawling with people in the morning and Lucy had to wait five minutes to catch an elevator down to the lobby. She picked up her name badge and book bag from registration, bought a latte, and headed off to the first panel of the morning.
“Walking on the Dark Side: What Makes a Bad Guy Bad?” featured five mystery writers, only one of whom she’d heard of. But they were all entertaining. After the panel and with Mark’s money, she bought each of their books from a cranky Milwaukee bookseller named Katz.