He would protect her.
He felt brave. He didn’t know why such a feeling had come to him, but it had.
While Winnie, gung-ho for glory at the start, had deflated, Bray had somehow gained in strength. Poor lamb. They would survive this night somehow. Then they’d go off and start a life together.
Her head suddenly twisted up, her eyes newly flaring. “Where’s that packet from Fronemeyer’s house?”
“In the car. Why?”
She slumped back down. “Great.”
“Except for this.” He reached into his tuxedo jacket and pulled out the thick sheaf of twice-folded paper. “In case we wanted to go exploring, I thought—”
“The map!”
He unfolded it like a flower coming into bloom. Four pages, stapled, the top one with a three-digit combination Bray guessed allowed the designated slasher, and him only, access to the school’s secret passageways.
“We could—”
It occurred to him too. “Of course.” Their means of escape. Why hadn’t he thought of it?
“—find him,” she said, “and reason with him.”
“It’s our way out.” Then Winnie’s words registered. “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not gonna let you get near our madman. He’s wigged out. He’ll kill us both.”
“No, listen.” Winnie paused.
Bray could tell she had been ready to go at him again. To attack his cowardice. But now her mind slipped into gear, more furious in its cogitations than he’d ever seen it.
Jonquil Brindisi stood at the mike. Two men were near the Ice Ghoul, hacking at the rope that held the dead sheriff aloft.
Winnie’s hands danced in colored light as she pieced things together. “We find him,” she said. “We sneak up on him, overcome him, maybe knock him out. Then we reason with him, we talk to him, for as long as it takes. We get in touch with his problem, soothe him, convince him he’s already done enough to solve it. Then we get him to confess, give himself up, make a speech to the press, go national.”
“Oh sure, Winnie. And he’s just gonna go along—”
“Yes. He will.”
Bray stopped speaking. Her certainty never ceased to amaze him.
“He will. No two ways about it. I can do it. I can convince anybody of anything.”
“I’ve got a better plan,” he said.
They blended into the crowd in a reasonable fashion. But Bray felt that a spotlight had been trained on them. At any moment, Jonquil Brindisi would point an accusatory finger at them and have them torn apart, futter bait for the frenzy that lay just beneath the surface for the poor panic-stricken kids around them.
“Here’s what we do,” he went on. “We escape into the hidden backways. We find the designated slasher’s private parking area. Using his car, we blow this town, this state, this whole wretched nation. And we start a new life together, plain and simple, somewhere else.”
“They hunt us down.” She said it as if she could see it. “They scapegoat us for tonight’s outrages. They toy with us on the tube. They tear us apart, they torture us. They put us on Notorious next year, an extra special three-hour version, a slow hellacious juicing.”
She made him see it.
The pauses between sentences, the stare full of import and meaning, made him see it.
Winnie’s arms came about him, her lips near his friendship lobe. “Bray, my strange lovely man, one way or another, they’ll fry us. Finding the killer is our only choice.”
Bray could hear Jonquil’s words at the mike. Tough talk, thrusting iron rods up into youthful backbones. Without looking at her, he knew she was brooding on them. Her accusation might come at any moment.
Winnie felt warm and solid in his arms.
“Do you understand?” she murmured.
He kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips. Her nape felt so perfect against his palm.
“Let’s go,” he said, determined. “Let’s find him.”
Winnie took his hand. They sauntered toward the door the two women had rushed out of.
Bray thought they’d be halted at any moment. “Wait a minute,” her stern sexy voice would rise, “where do you think you’re sneaking off to?”
But through his envelope of fear, past the refreshments and out the door to the hallway, Bray and Winnie walked hand in hand, toward a meeting Bray wasn’t looking forward to at all.
On the way to his office, Futzy wracked his brain for a suspect, sharing those that came to mind with meek mousy Miss Phipps.
Maybe Zane Fronemeyer had gone insane. But anyone acquainted with Zane would scoff at the very idea.
Might it be the mean-eyed, blubber-chinned cashier in the cafeteria, Skaya something, whose face looked as though she’d been pickled in bile from the moment she was born?
Or one of the newer faculty members, the untried, untested, unknown, indeed unknowable ones fresh out of college?
“Gerber Waddell,” Miss Phipps suggested.
Futzy stopped on the stairs.
The building smelled musty, layered with dust.
“Gerber,” he repeated, mulling it.
They continued upstairs. Futzy was deep in thought. He hadn’t seen the janitor since the lights dimmed and rainbowed. Had Gerber, in his years of subservience, finally somehow triumphed over the intent of his lobotomy?
Each year, Gerber changed the designated slasher’s combination to the backways. He wrote it on the map contained in the slasher’s packet. Did anyone else know it? No one at all. Gerber always surreptitiously slipped it in, last thing before delivery. Futzy himself made a special point to avert his eyes when he gaped the mouth of the envelope to receive it.
Futzy opened his office door for Miss Phipps. As she walked past him, he caught a hint of her perfume. Lilac? Some old lady scent. Her dress was dark velvet, swaying at the ankles. Old lady dress. A crime. Behind her gold-rimmed glasses, her young face made a thin oval.
“Find the snubnose,” he said. “Top drawer, I think. I’ll check the phone. Be careful with the gun. It’s loaded.”
“All right.”
He moved to the desk and lifted the receiver.
No dial tone.
The lines had likely been cut somewhere deep in the building. But it felt as if his lair had been violated.
Gerber, the shy feeb.
It had to be him. Somehow, Futzy would find him, put a bullet in what was left of his brain, spare him the torment of being sentient when the graduating class sailed into him.
Miss Phipps rummaged in the desk drawer and lifted something out. She raised it. Against her delicate fingers, Futzy saw the velvet backing. “Is this her?” she asked. “Your daughter?”
“How…” dare you, he was about to say.
She picked up on it, flustered: “I’m sorry, I—”
“No, wait. It’s all right.” Futzy approached Miss Phipps, her look of fright softening at his reassurance. “That’s her. Yes. That’s my little girl. My Kitty.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She is,” he said. “She was.”
Miss Phipps sensed the rawness in his voice. She set the picture facedown in its drawer, which she closed. Her eyes glowed with compassion. Her body moved closer.
“Now wait a minute,” he said.
Something was blossoming in her eyes, behind those prim frames.
“I don’t want to wait any more,” she said.
Futzy took in her ache, her mouse-beauty, the look he had always assumed meant nothing more than bland respect. Now, as she came near, that look softened into something else, something warm and inviting.
“You’re… I’m—”
She surged toward him, a velvet dream, her lobebag angling as her head tilted in. A tight lipline puffed and swelled and touched his mouth, tasty, warm, moistening beneath the flicker of her tonguetip.
Some women came at you, when the moment finally arrived for such a bold move, tentatively, their hips seemingly dead, their torsos not much better. Adora Phipps wasn’t like that.
Her whole body, behind its deceptive folds of old-lady velvet, exuded urgency, pushing against him in a solid wave of give me, give me.