Linda wept.
Chad felt sick and hollow. At the same time, his heart and profoundly his soul swelled with rage. The bastard. The…Whoever did this, when they find him…Chad imagined punching him, stabbing him, choking him until his tongue bulged, and at once remembered that Stephanie had been choked. He leaned against the car and couldn't stop sobbing.
Finally, after seemingly endless bureaucratic delays, they were given their daughter. Following a hearse, they made the solemn drive back to New York for the funeral. Although Stephanie's face had not been mutilated, Chad and Linda refused to allow a public viewing of her remains. Granted, mourning friends and relatives wouldn't be able to see the obscene marks on her body beneath her burial clothes, but Chad and Linda would see those marks – in their minds – as if the burial clothes were transparent. More, Chad and Linda couldn't tolerate inflicting upon Stephanie the indignity of being forced to lie in her grave for all eternity with that monster's filthy marks on her. She had to be cremated. Purified. Made innocent again. Ashes to ashes. Cleansed with fire.
Each day, Chad and Linda drove out to the cemetery to visit her. The trip became the event around which they scheduled their other activities. Not that they had many other activities. Chad had no interest in reading manuscripts, meeting authors, and dealing with publishers, although his friends said that the thing to do was get back on track, distract himself, immerse himself in his literary agency. But his work didn't matter, and he spent more and more of each day taking long walks through Central Park. He had dizzy spells. He drank too much. For her part, Linda quit teaching piano, sequestered herself in the apartment, studied photographs of Stephanie, stared into space, and slept a great deal. They sold the cottage in Connecticut, which they'd bought and gone to each weekend only so they could be close to Stephanie in New Haven if she had wanted to visit. They sold their Ford, which they'd needed only to get to the cottage.
Nothing will hurt you. The bittersweet song constantly, faintly, echoed in the darkest chambers of Chad 's mind. He thought he'd go crazy as he trembled from stress and obeyed the compulsion to visit places he associated with Stephanie: the playground of the grade school she'd attended, her high school, the zoo at Central Park, the jogging track around the lake. He conjured images of her – different ages, different heights, different hair and clothes styles – ghostly mental photographs, eerie double exposures in which then and now coexisted. A little girl, she giggled on a swing in a neighborhood park that had long ago become an apartment building. I can't stand this! Chad thought in mental rage and imagined the blessed release that he would feel if he hurled himself in front of a speeding subway train.
What helped him was that Stephanie told him not to. Oh, he knew that her voice was only in his mind. But she sounded so real, and her tender voice made him feel less tormented. He heard her so clearly.
"Dad, think of Mother. If you kill yourself, you'll cause her twice the pain she has now. She needs you. For my sake, help her."
Chad 's legs felt unsteady. He slumped on a chair in the kitchen, where at three a.m. he'd been pacing.
Nothing will hurt you.
"Oh, baby, I'm sorry."
"You couldn't have saved me, Dad. It's not your fault. You couldn't watch over me all the time. It could have happened differently. I could have been killed in a traffic accident a block from our apartment. There aren't any guarantees."
"It's just that I miss you so damned much."
"And I miss you, Dad. I love you. But I'm not really gone. I'm talking to you, aren't I?"
"Yes…At least I think so."
"I'm far away, but I'm also inside you, and whenever you want to talk, we can. All you have to do is think of me, and I'll be there."
"But it's not the same!"
"It's the best we can do, Dad. Where I am is…bright! I'm soaring! I'm ecstatic! You mustn't feel sorry for me. You've got to accept that I'm gone. You've got to accept that your life is different now. You've got to become involved once more. Stop drinking. Stop skipping meals. Start reading manuscripts again. Answer your clients' phone calls. Get in touch with publishers. Work."
"But I don't care!"
"You've got to! Don't throw your life away just because I lost mine! I'll never forgive you if…"
"No, please, sweetheart. Please don't get angry. I'll try. I promise. I will. I'll try."
"For my sake."
Sobbing, Chad nodded as the speck of light faded.
But Angela Lansbury's voice continued echoing faintly. Nothing will hurt you. No matter how hard he tried, Chad couldn't get the song from his mind. The more he heard it, the more a lurking implication in the lyrics began to trouble him, a half-sensed deeper meaning, dark and disturbing, felt but not understood, a further horror.
The Biter's next victim was found by a hiker on the bank of a stream near Princeton. That was three months later. Although the victim, a coed who worked for the university's library during the summer, had been missing for two weeks and exposed to scavenging animals and the blistering sun, her remains were sufficiently intact for the medical examiner to establish the cause of death as strangulation and to distinguish between animal and human bite marks. That information was all the police revealed to the press, but Chad now knew what "bite marks" meant, and he shuddered, remembering the chunks that the killer had gnawed from Stephanie's body.
By then, Linda had started taking students again. Chad – true to his promise to Stephanie – had forced himself to pay attention to his authors and their publishers. But now the news of the Biter's latest victim threatened to tear away the fragile control that he and Linda had managed to impose on their lives. Compulsively, he wrote a letter to the murdered girl's parents.
We mourn for your daughter as we mourn for our own.
We pray that they're at peace and beg God for justice.
May this monster be caught before he kills again.
May he be punished to the limits of hell.
In truth, Chad didn't need to pray that Stephanie was at peace. He knew she was. She told him so whenever he stumbled sleeplessly into the kitchen at two or three a.m. and found her speck of light hovering, waiting for him. Nonetheless Chad 's rage intensified. Each morning he mustered a motive to get out of bed, hoping that today would be the day when the authorities caught the monster.
What they found instead, in September, soon after the start of the fall semester, was the Biter's next victim, maggot-ridden, in a storm drain near Vassar College. Chad urgently phoned Lieutenant MacKenzie, demanding to know if the Vassar police had found any clues.
"Yes." MacKenzie's voice sounded even more gravelly. "It rained again. The Vassar police found the same tire marks." He exhaled wearily. "Mr. Dolan, I understand your despair. Your anger. Your need for revenge. But you have to let go. You have to get on with your life, while we do our job. Every police department involved in these killings has formed a network. I promise you, we're doing everything we can to compare information and – "
Chad slammed down the phone and scribbled a letter to the parents of the Biter's latest victim.
We share your loss. We weep as you do. If there's a God in heaven – as opposed to this Devil out of hell – our beautiful children will not have died unatoned. Their brilliantly speeding souls will be granted justice. The desecrations inflicted upon their innocent bodies will be avenged.
Chad never received responses from those other parents. It didn't matter. He didn't care. He'd done his best to console them, but if they were too overwhelmed by sorrow to muster the strength to comfort him as he strained to comfort them, well, that was all right. He understood. The main thing was, he'd assured them that he wouldn't rest until the monster was punished.