“But what really convicts her is that we caught her passing Sillabus’s glass eye to Pryzic. He must have phoned her after the killing and they worked out a deal. While it was simple for Sillabus to travel abroad with the eye in place and escape detection, it would have been much harder for her if she was searched by customs. Better to sell the eye to Pryzic and let him take it out. You can see how skillfully it’s machined. Even a customs agent who knew about Pryzic’s eye arid examined it might miss the fact that it unscrewed. Today she had the eye with her at Seasons, and when she asked for change she merely stuck it under the bar next to Pryzic. I assume money arrangements had already been made. When we walked in there today and I saw Janice Casey paying the bill, that implied she chose the place rather than Wolfe. Having him along was a convenient cover for her.”
When Janice Casey finally told her story, it was somewhat different. She claimed that Sillabus had removed his eye to insert the valuable new microchip, obtained from one of his shady contacts in the computer world. When he stepped away from his desk for a moment she’d picked it up. He flew into a rage, thinking she was stealing it, and attacked her. She’d stabbed him with the letter opener in self-defense.
By the time he learned of this statement, Rand’s interests had shifted elsewhere. It was a new season, and all the icicles had melted.
Jeremy
by R. M. Kinder
R. M. Kinder is the author of a number of published short stories including a collection entitled Sweet Angel Band, the winner of last year’s Willa Cather fiction contest. As far as we know, this is the author’s first suspense piece, a vivid and memorable depiction of the genesis of a chilling crime...
More than anything else, the five-year-old boy wanted to be touched, but he didn’t actually know that. He felt it, a longing that made him draw near to his mother whenever she stood or sat still, which was rarely. Then he would wait a few inches away and if she didn’t seem tired or angry, which he recognized again by a sense he was too small to identify, he would eventually lean into her, or sit by her feet. Once, when he had been able to sit near her for a longer time than usual, while she spoke with a visiting neighbor, he had gently taken her hand and when she did not immediately pull it away, he had been so overcome with a pleasant feeling that he had kissed the back of the hand.
“For God’s sake, Jeremy,” she had said, “that’s sickening.”
He sometimes thought of that day, and felt her words, and it made him keep his distance as he knew he was supposed to do. He knew never to approach her when someone else was in the house. She was a busy woman and he understood busy very well.
He learned to cherish every gift she gave, and he thought they were many. “My mother makes me eat breakfast,” he told another child at kindergarten, and then enumerated each item he had eaten for dinner the night before and for breakfast just that morning. He tested her sometimes, going outside without a coat, or leaving part of his milk, or not brushing his teeth, and he would hear, “Jeremy,” and feel relief that she loved him enough to notice. He would turn back to complete his part of the communion, mimicking the angry walk of other boys.
She liked him to read, and he made a bond with her that when his father was home and Jeremy was not to watch the terrible shows on television, he could stay in the room if his eyes were down. He had a small reclining chair which she had herself upholstered, and he would rest his elbows on the arms and hold the book squarely before him, reading only enough to respond if she were to ask him what he read, and faithfully turning a page every few minutes.
Sometimes his father said, “Jeremy, want to...” and completed it with things Jeremy might have enjoyed, a trip to the store, a walk, an ice cream. Sometimes Jeremy did go with his father, but along came the uncomfortable awareness of her at home alone, impatient, announcing when they arrived how long-they had taken. If she came, it was worse. He might at any moment do something terribly wrong, spill ice cream on his clothing or the floor, sit in a ridiculous way. He preferred the comfort of the little recliner, an arm on each side, his eyes focused on one world, his ears on another. Other children occasionally had babysitters, he knew, and he thought that strange, that parents would risk their child to just anyone, which his mother had never done and would never do.
He became very adept at looking at one place and being in another, at taking his love and pleasure from nooks and crannies no one else knew.
When he was eight, she doled out chores and freedoms, since he was a big boy now. He came home right after school and she would assign the next few minutes, to sweep the porch, carry out the trash, stack the week’s newspapers in the garage. She never gave him too much to do, and when guests came she would introduce him and he would hear his name in their conversation, what he did, how well he did it. She urged him to play and named the boys she liked, and he would straggle down the street, stand in some yard, join in some game. He played the way she would have wanted him to, neatly, fairly. She bought him a watch so he wouldn’t come home too early or too late.
When she touched or kissed his father, or just sat beside him, Jeremy would watch without looking, intensely, feeling himself there between them, in them, and fearing discovery so that he sat rigid until they separated.
“What’s wrong with you,” his father said once, and Jeremy couldn’t speak because he wasn’t back together yet.
As he grew older he learned what this was, this leaving of himself, and he practiced in his room at night. First, he tried only his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to withdraw his fingers as from a glove. When he succeeded, it was in a dream, and he woke panicked and sweaty because he had been unable to slide back in. But as he was whole, capable of touching the blanket and turning on the lamp, the fear eased and he flexed his hands to rest them. Each night then, unless he was tired, he withdrew more and more from himself. He never left his room though, even when he knew he could, that he could grip the doorknob and turn it and stand listening. He learned to do it even while he read, and then, much later, to let the other read. Sometimes they looked at one another, and he grew accustomed to that face shaped much like his father’s, to the dour expression much like his mother’s. “Can you talk?” he asked, and heard the simple, “Yes,” with which he himself would have responded. He approved of the grace and restraint of the other.
They talked. Not often, but enough so that Jeremy understood their desires were not the same. Jeremy could see no reason to leave this place, though he admitted they would have to some day. Once he fell asleep with the light on and woke in complete darkness to hear, “I want to go now. I can’t stay here any longer.” The voice was so terribly sad that Jeremy threw back the covers and stumbled toward the sound. He felt his hand taken and himself drawn near, and was so touched that he stood there embracing the other till he realized they had joined again. “Come back out,” he said, but nothing happened. “Please.” He lay down and closed his eyes. “You don’t have to be ashamed,” he said. “Not with me.”
Each night now he woke to sobbing and he whispered reassurances that they would leave.
“When?”
“Soon,” he said. “I have to think where, how.”
“We just leave. I could, go now. No one would know.”
“No. Don’t. You can’t go without me.”
“But I can. I did.”
Jeremy turned on the light. The other was seated across the room, heavier, a dark stubble on his cheeks. He glanced quickly at Jeremy and then at the floor.
“I went into the hall one night. Tonight I went outside.”