“Little Jimmy Jones,” Willis said. “I like that even better.”
I got home in the early afternoon. Bonnie wasn’t there, but her clothes were still in the closet. I went to the garage and got my gardener’s toolbox. I clipped off all the roses, put them in a big bowl on the bedroom chest of drawers. Then I took the saw and hacked down both rosebushes. I left them lying there on either side of the door.
The little yellow dog must have known what I was doing. He yelped and barked at me until I finished the job.
I went off to work then. I got there at the three o’clock bell and worked until eleven.
When I got home, the bushes had been removed. Bonnie, Jesus, and Feather were all sleeping in their beds. There were no packed suitcases in the closet, no angry notes on the kitchen table.
I lay down on the couch and thought about Mouse, that he was really dead. Sleep came quickly after that, and I knew that my time of mourning was near an end.
Joyce Carol Oates
The Skull
From Harper’s Magazine
Contrary to popular belief, the human cranium isn’t a single helmet-shaped bone but eight bones fused together, and the facial mask is fourteen bones fused together, and these, in the victim, had been smashed with a blunt object, smashed, dented, and pierced, as if the unknown killer had wanted not merely to kill his victim but to obliterate her. No hair remained on any skull fragments, for no scalp remained to contain hair, but swaths of sun-bleached brown hair had been found with the skeleton and had been brought to him in a separate plastic bag. Since rotted clothing found at the scene was a female’s clothing, the victim had been identified as female. A woman, or an older adolescent girl.
“A jigsaw puzzle. In three dimensions.” He smiled. Since boyhood he’d been one to love puzzles.
He was not old. Didn’t look old, didn’t behave old, didn’t perceive himself as old. Yet he knew that others, envious of him, wished to perceive him as old, and this infuriated him. He was a stylish dresser. Often he was seen in dark turtleneck sweaters, a wine-colored leather coat that fell below his knees. In warm weather he wore shirts open at the throat, sometimes T-shirts that showed to advantage his well-developed arm and shoulder muscles. When his hair had begun to thin in his mid-fifties he had simply shaved his head, which tended to be olive-hued, veined, with the look of an upright male organ throbbing with vigor, belligerence, good humor. You couldn’t help but notice and react to Kyle Cassity: to label such a man a “senior citizen” was absurd and demeaning.
Now he was sixty-seven, and of that age. He would have had to concede that as a younger man he’d often ignored his elders. He’d taken them for granted, he’d written them off as irrelevant. Of course, Kyle Cassity was a different sort of elder. There was no one quite like him.
A maverick, he thought himself. Unlabelable. Born in 1935 in Harrisburg, Pa., a long-time resident of Wayne, N.J.: unique and irreplaceable.
Among his numerous relatives he’d long been an enigma: generous in times of crisis; otherwise distant, indifferent. True, he’d had something of a reputation as a womanizer until recent years, yet he’d remained married to the same devoted wife for four decades. His three children, when they were living at home, had competed for their father’s attention, but they’d loved him, you might have said they’d worshiped him, though now in adulthood they were closer to their mother. (Outside his marriage, unknown to his family, Kyle had fathered another child, a daughter, whom he’d never known.)
Professionally, Dr. Kyle Cassity was something of a maverick as well. A tenured senior professor on the faculty of William Paterson University in New Jersey, as likely to teach in the adult night division as in the undergraduate daytime school, as likely to teach a sculpting workshop in the art school as a graduate seminar in the School of Health, Education, and Science. His advanced degrees were in anthropology, sociology, and forensic science; he’d had a year of medical school and a year of law school. At Paterson University he’d developed a course entitled “The Sociology of ‘Crime’ in America” that had attracted as many as four hundred students before Professor Cassity, overwhelmed by his own popularity, retired it.
His public reputation in New Jersey was as an expert prosecution witness and a frequent consultant for the New Jersey Department of Forensics. He’d been the subject of numerous media profiles, including a cover story in the Newark Star-Ledger Sunday magazine bearing the eye-catching caption “Sculptor Kyle Cassity fights crime with his fingertips.” He gave away many of his sculptures, to individuals, museums, schools. He gave lectures, for no fee, throughout the state.
As a scientist he had little sentiment. He knew that the individual, within the species, counts for very little; the survival of the species is everything. But as a forensic specialist he focused his attention on individuals: the uniqueness of crime victims and the uniqueness of those who have committed these crimes. Where there was a victim there would be a criminal or criminals. There could be no ambiguity here. As Dr. Kyle Cassity, he worked with the remains of victims. Often these were badly decomposed, mutilated, or broken, seemingly past reconstruction and identification. He was good at his work and had gotten better over the years. He loved a good puzzle. A puzzle no one else could solve except Kyle Cassity. He perceived the shadowy, faceless, as-yet-unnamed perpetrators of crime as human prey whom he was hunting and was licensed to hunt.
This skull! What a mess. Never had Kyle seen bones so broken. How many powerful blows must have been struck to reduce the skull, the face, the living brain, to such broken matter. Kyle tried to imagine: twenty? thirty? fifty? A frenzied killer, you would surmise. Better to imagine madness than that the killer had been coolly methodical, smashing his victim’s skull, face, teeth, to make identification impossible.
No fingertips — no fingerprints — remained, of course. The victim’s exposed flesh had long since rotted from her bones. The body had been dumped sometime in the late spring or early summer in a field above an abandoned gravel pit near Toms River in the southern part of the state, a half-hour drive from Atlantic City. Bones had been scattered by wildlife, but most had been located and reassembled: the victim had been approximately five feet two, with a small frame, a probable weight of 100 or 110 pounds. Judging by the hair, Caucasian.
Here was a grisly detail, not released to the press: not only had the victim’s skull been beaten in, but the state medical examiner had discovered that her arms and legs had been severed from her body by a “bluntly sharp” weapon like an ax.
Kyle shuddered, reading the report. Christ! He hoped the dismemberment had been after, not before, the death.
It seemed strange to him: the manic energy the killer had expended in trying to destroy his victim he might have used to dig a deep grave and cover it with rocks and gravel so that it would never be discovered. For, of course, a dumped body will eventually be discovered.
Yet the killer hadn’t buried this body. Why not?
“Must have wanted it to be found. Must have been proud of what he did.”
What the murderer had broken Dr. Cassity would reconstruct. He had no doubt that he could do it. Pieces of bone would be missing, of course, but he could compensate for this with synthetic materials. Once he had a plausible skull, he could reconstruct a plausible face for it out of clay, and, once he had this, he and a female sketch artist with whom he’d worked in the past would make sketches of the face in colored pencil, from numerous angles, for investigators to work with. Kyle Cassity’s reconstruction would be broadcast throughout the state, printed on flyers and posted on the Internet.