BLACK-EYED BITCH
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
REPENT!!
TERRELL’S BLOOD, YOU’RE HANDS
Just one of the crazies.
I’m not relieved.
I have the sudden, certain feeling I’m being watched.
Charlie.
The house next door, still dark.
My feet tear up the ground to Effie’s. I bang hard enough on the front door that something inside clatters to the floor. There’s no answer.
I kick off my slippers on the porch and race to the back. I’m thinking of my monster, standing under my windowsill. Of my daughter, in her polka-dot pajamas.
I hurl my fist at Effie’s back door. More strangling silence. I survey the back yard, open my mouth again to scream Charlie’s name but nothing comes out.
My frantic gaze lands on Effie’s rickety garden shed in the back. In seconds, I am yanking open the door, ripping it half off its rusty hinges. Charlie is crouched in the corner by two bags of compost. The phone is pressed to her cheek, half-illuminating her face.
“Mom!” She is in my arms in seconds. A car has screeched to the curb. And another. Siren lights are filtering through the bushes.
A large shape is walking toward us, blinding us with his flashlight.
“I’m a police officer. Did one of you make a 911 call?”
“Yes, I’m Charlie. This is my mom. We’re OK.”
I nod, unable to speak. Gruff conversation floats from the front yard.
The policeman’s light continues to travel over us. When he’s apparently satisfied we aren’t hurt or dangerous, he turns it on the shed.
The light trickles like water into the corners, up and down the walls.
He sees nothing out of the ordinary because he thinks what he’s seeing is perfectly ordinary.
I’m seeing, but not understanding. I just know it’s not ordinary.
Row after row of garden diggers.
They hang neatly in every square inch of space.
Tessie, 1995
“Do you believe in the devil, Tessie?”
Great. Like I don’t get enough of this from Aunt Hilda.
“I mean it in a very metaphorical sense. I want to talk about the Black-Eyed Susan killer today. I think it would help when you’re testifying to understand him a little better. That he’s flesh and blood. Not mythic. Not Bluebeard. Not a troll under the bridge.”
My heart beats a little faster. My hand reflexively moves over the lump above my left breast, the metal chunk under my skin that keeps my heart beating at a minimum of sixty beats a minute. I run a nervous finger on the straight three-inch scar. Lydia is already looking for a bikini with a strap that will cover it up.
“We don’t know anything about the creep,” I say stiffly. “We never will. He isn’t talking. His family says he’s normal.” I don’t ever say his name out loud. Terrell Darcy Goodwin.
“I treated a serial killer once,” he says. “He was the smartest, most calculating person in the room. Could charm a million dollars out of an old lady, and did. He blended in, and stood out. He liked to get to know his victims and use that knowledge to scare them out of their minds.”
“The pig-and-daisy card at the hospital.” Out of nowhere.
“Do you think he sent that to you?” he asks.
“Yes. I think it made me go blind.”
“That’s good, Tessie. Excellent progress. Whether he sent it or not, it was a trigger for you. You control your mind, Tessie. Never forget it.”
I’m nodding. I’m flushing a little, embarrassed by his compliment.
“My patient understood right and wrong, he just didn’t care,” he continues. “He studied carefully how to behave. He was able to simulate empathy because he regularly sat in hospital waiting rooms and observed it. He spent a year selling suits at Brooks Brothers to figure out how to dress and speak. He used the newspaper to manufacture biographies about himself as he moved around. But serial killers make mistakes. This guy did. He carried the remains of his victims in the trunk of his car because he couldn’t help himself. The point is, they don’t think they are human, but they are.”
“I still don’t get… the why.”
“No one really knows. Maybe we will never know. For a while, doctors used to think it had something to do with phrenology. How many bumps you had on your skull. My patient turned out to be a cliché. He blamed his mother.”
“Because…”
“We’re getting a little off track here.”
“Were you trying to cure this guy?” I pester him. Or were you trying to figure out if he is the one who took your daughter?
“Yes, against all odds, against all the rules of psychiatry, I was trying to see if that was possible. But it didn’t turn out well. He is a psychopath, Tessie. He is perfectly happy the way he is.”
Tessa, present day
Jo has asked me to meet her at Trinity Park, near one of the running trails, about a half-mile away from the duck pond. It seems a little strange. Too close to the bridge. Too much of a coincidence. Did someone besides a home-schooled juvenile delinquent see me digging? Is Bill reporting everything I say to Jo?
The Susans are quiet this morning. It happens that way sometimes, when my paranoia roils into such hurricane force that they can’t catch their breath.
My body hasn’t stopped jangling since Saturday night when I clutched my gun and pointed it toward the ghostly shape on the front lawn. On Sunday, I tried to rebound and put my daughter’s life back in a normal place. I called Bill and told him to please not show up again on my doorstep with alcoholic beverages. That it was a mistake, that we had let overwrought emotion sweep us into the bed, that Swedish Scientist Girl and Assistant DA Girl would be more apt partners for him.
There was sturdy silence before he said: “We didn’t touch the wine. And you’re pretty apt.”
Later, Charlie and I had swept the aisles at Walmart in search of blue hair gel, peppercorns, licorice, and lima beans for her 3-D re-creation of an animal cell. She chattered about turning Fruit Roll-Ups into a Golgi body. I listened to soothing snatches of nearby conversation that floated in the fluorescent light like a country western song. My brother just lost his house in frozen foods and God will find a way by the potato chips and Daddy’s going to kill him in front of the boxed wine. Soothing, because it seems like very few people at Walmart are pretending that things are OK, or that the world is going to end just because they aren’t OK. I wheeled my cart through this stew of misfortune and daily kicks-in-the-ass and plain old tenacity. No one at Walmart cared a whit who I was. I arrived home with ten potatoes for $1.99 and churned out my mother’s recipe for corn chowder. All of this effort at ordinary seemed to work: Charlie slipped under her fluffy comforter at the end of the night, full of starch and bacon bits and her belief that our bad guy was just a coward of a sign-maker with bad grammar.
Now it’s Monday morning, and I want to say no to meeting up with Jo, but I can’t. As soon as Charlie leaves for school, I strap on ASICS and yank my hair into a ponytail, every movement angry. I woke up with a deep, persistent need to run, to sweat out every bit of poison. Running is the one thing that always works. I can still manage four miles before my ankle begins to ache, and then two more miles to spite him. But, first, Jo.
The south side of the park is almost deserted when I swing the Jeep beside a shiny silver BMW. It’s the only other car in this lot, which serves a small picnic area. I glance inside the BMW as I slam my door shut. A Taco Bell bag and an empty Dr Pepper can are tossed on the floor. A handful of change is mingled in the console with a movie ticket stub. Innocent enough. As I circle behind the car, heading for the path, I glance down at the BMW’s license plate: DNA 4N6.