LoveMurder

by Saul Black

  Two inches she had to find out of impossibility.

  One inch.

  She couldn’t. Her arms would dislocate.

  But she reached it.

  She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold the position for long. The labor now was carefully separating her feet to make a pincer for the stool’s nearest leg. Get it wrong and you knock it farther away. Millimeters would put it absolutely beyond her. But for the open shirt and severed bra her clothes were intact. Jeans and sneakers. Sneakers, you can run. Adidas. In high school she’d run the fifteen hundred, made the track team for a couple of years. The good smell of mowed grass and the lime-marked lanes and the sweetness of going past someone, knowing you had enough in the tank. Then parties, drinking, boys. Her and Valerie and all the ordinary deviance they hid from their parents. Too long ago. Beneath the adrenaline her body was filled with honest warnings of its exhaustion. How fast could she run? How far?

  Fuck that, Cass, Valerie said. You can run forever.

  She trapped the stool’s leg between her feet. Dragging it toward her was worse: her legs could take less of her weight than on the outward stretch. She had to do it in short jerks, every one of which risked her losing her grip and being forced to watch the stool topple and roll away from her. She was making too much noise. If he was right outside, he’d hear.

  Her concentration silenced her. Then she thought the silence would draw him more surely than sound. He would have the requisite sixth sense. Valerie’s face when she’d talked about Katherine and her lover always went the same way: a sort of remote fascination with how smart they were.

  Do exactly as I say, or this goes into you and you’ll never see your family again.

  She got the stool close to her. Closer. She twisted a second time and used her thighs to wedge it up against the pipe. Odd thoughts flickered: she’d bought these jeans on last year’s vacation in Mexico. Owen saying, in the neutral tone he used for compliments: Your ass is beautiful. That’s not right, at your age. The kids like sunlit sprites on the beach, going about their kid business with great intent and obliviousness to everything else. She’d only ever imagined dying in a bed, with her family near her and the impersonal comfort of medicine. All those times you heard on the news: The body of an unidentified woman was found … Please, God. Please, God, let me see my children again. Let the last time not be the last time. I’ll do anything.

  It wasn’t easy, but she got her knees up onto the stool. It wobbled under her. She slid her hands a little way up the pipe. Gripped. Hauled herself to her feet. Balance. Her legs were cramped, the jammed blood dragging back into circulation, like someone being forced to get out of bed after not enough sleep. Every second she expected the door to open. His face—the face she’d thought she’d known—changed. He would see her. He would take stock. He would move toward her. He would put his hands on her.

  Hurry.

  Hurry and do what?

  Oh God, please. Please.

  She had had, she supposed, some wild idea that the bracket would be loose, that with an unholy effort she could work it free.

  But the screws holding it to its backplate were big, rusted, immovable. There was nothing she could do. Her whole body was trembling. Her hair was sweat-stuck to her face. There was nothing.

  There was one thing. Her hands were now at the level of her head. She worked her fingers toward herself around the pipe and wrenched the gag from her mouth, nearly tearing her bottom lip off in the process. The relief was instant and disproportionate. An illusion of liberty. But still, it was a relief. Even if he walked in she would have a brief space for language, for an appeal, for something. A purely practical part of her had wondered if she could seduce him, somehow convince him that she could make it better for him if he untied her.

  But this was the Man in the Mask. Compliance wasn’t what he wanted. It would only be good for him if it was bad for her. And the worse it was for her, the better it would be for him. The thought sickened her. The plainness of it. The simplicity.

  She grabbed the pipe and brought her knees up and set her feet against the bare brick and pulled with all the strength she had. For five seconds, ten, twenty. You will survive. You will survive.

  Nothing. The pipe didn’t budge. She imagined him watching her. Smiling.

  She stood back down on the stool. The effort had nearly made her pass out again.

  She rested her head against the pipe. Fresh tears welled and fell. For a few moments she had nothing, just a complete surrender to her own powerlessness.

  But she thought of her children again. The times she’d caught herself telling them what her own mother had told her: You don’t have to be the best, honey, you just have to do your best. The memory broke the feeling of surrender, and the breakage hurt, the not being allowed to give up. It measured her weakness and hopelessness all over again.

  In something close to rage she lifted her head. A scream—of despair, of fury—was coming whether it brought him or not.

  She stopped.

  Not by choice.

  By what she’d seen.

  27

  About two feet above her head there was a small, rusted crack in the side of the pipe. Perhaps a couple of inches long, with a gap of only a few millimeters between each of its eaten-into edges. Not, she could see immediately, big enough to threaten the metal’s integrity, but if she could get her hands up to it …

  She examined the ties on her wrists. Knots. A confusion of knots. She didn’t know. It would be blind luck if she could break through the right one.

  If.

  It was hopeless. The time it would take. The twine was the rough sort her mom used to tie parcels with in the old days. But there was nothing else. She felt Valerie seeing this, urging her on: You can do this, Cass. You have to do this.

  She slid her hands up the pipe. It took several attempts, but eventually she got one of the stands wedged into the crack. Her calves burned. She wouldn’t be able to do this.

  The physics were appalling. Saw through. After the first three or four strokes the twine drew blood. She made a curious decision to keep going into the pain until it made her pass out. She made a deal with the pain, dragging her wrists back and forth, every movement insisting it would have to be the last, that the fire in her skin had a weight of blackness to draw down on her, that surely it was unbearable, unbearable, unbearable. But she made the deal: If you want me to stop, then make me unconscious.

  The twine broke.

  One of the strands broke.

  Her hands were still fastened.

  Her face was wet with tears and sweat.

  The unbearable made bearable because the one broken strand said yes, it works. Do it again. Don’t stop.

  But for a few seconds she had to stop. Get off her tiptoes and rest her calves. Breathe through the agony in her wrists. She remembered giving birth to Jack, the sixteen-hour labor, the pain so bad that everything dropped away. Owen had meant nothing to her in those moments. If anything, she wanted him to stop trying to make his love for her somehow help. He’d kept saying, you’re doing great, angel, breathe, just breathe.… To her he might as well have been a complete stranger speaking a foreign language. Afterward, when it was all over, she’d felt sorry for him, that she’d been to a place where even their love meant nothing. She felt bigger than him, owner of an experience that had, whether she liked it or not, given something of her self’s privacy back to her—

  Something snapped outside.

  She froze.

  Footsteps coming nearer.

  Oh God oh God oh God …

  The footsteps stopped.

  She didn’t breathe.

  Please … Please … Please …

  The footsteps receded.

  Cassie knew nothing after that, only the endless sawing against the pipe and the pain in her wrists growing to a white light and time being an eternal Now, no future and no past, nothing but the silent scream of going on, anything anything anything as long as she got free and coul
d run, with the whole world to run into away from here, away from him.

  When the ties broke, she almost fell. The abrupt return of her body pitched her into precarious balance. The stool wobbled, tipped—she flailed and just—just—grabbed the pipe in time. The stool settled back on its legs.

  Her hands were free.

  Vaguely, as from a long way off, she was aware of her mind working, telling her to be quiet, that any sound now could ruin everything. But she couldn’t listen to it. Her body or soul or supreme animal instinct overrode it. She dropped from the stool and twisted to get her feet in front of her. The knots were tight and many. Her hands had fevers of their own and within seconds her fingernails ached.

  Valerie, behind the wheel of the Taurus, driving, searching. The information would come to her. She would make the information come to her. Stay alive, Cass, I’m coming.

  One knot undone. Her jaws were clamped. Ferocious pins and needles filled her arms now, all the unlocked blood shocked back into its flow. Three knots picked. Time boiling away like water in a forgotten pan. Now more than before she was convinced the door would open. She would look up. She would understand in a split second that everything she’d done had been for nothing. His weight and strength would fall on her.

  When the last knot went, all the constriction disappeared with a kind of intimate magic. Agonizing seconds of frantically untangling the slack twine—then she was free. She had her arms and legs and voice back. In the midst of the nightmare the bare fact of being able to move through space was a blissful drug.

  The impulse to bolt through the front door all but threw her toward it, but the image of him standing only a few feet away outside—the image of running straight into him—checked her as if God had reached down and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. Her legs were weak with the need to run. But she had to know where he was. Valerie, watching this, speeding toward her. Don’t panic, Cass. Cold. You have to be cold.

  She crept to the window. Very slowly, in tiny increments, eased the curtain an inch open.

  A bright hot day in a forest clearing. She saw a shallow wooden porch. One step down onto bare ground. Fifteen feet away, at the edge of a dirt track that cut through the trees, the silver car. Somewhere they’d switched vehicles. In the trunk she’d been continually jolted. Hit her head on the jack.

  Did he take the keys when they’d stopped? He must have. He must have.

  But she didn’t know. If you get to the car and the keys are in it, you’re free. You drive. You put miles and miles between you and him. The vision of this was almost a physical sense, her hands on the wheel, the vehicle’s obedient acceleration, the trees racing backward, him darting out, seeing her getting away, joy filling her limbs and the sweet knowledge that she would hold her children in her arms again.

  And if the keys aren’t there? You’re out in the open, and he sees you. You start to run and the space behind you fills with his speed, his determination. His hands on you again, the strength and the wind knocked out of you when you hit the ground.

  It was too much. Whatever the risk, she couldn’t wait. If the keys weren’t in the car she would run as fast and as far as she could. Nothing else mattered.

  She went to the cabin’s front door and tried the handle.

  It was locked.

  28

  Of course it was locked. What had she expected? She went back to the windows. Newly fitted security bolts. For which keys were required. Could she break the glass? Aside from the noise that would make, the windows themselves were small, divided into four panes each by wooden cross-frames. Even if she demolished them, getting herself through would be a tight, broken-glass-edged squeeze. All that time for him to hear the crash, and for her to wriggle through, gashing herself. All that time for him to get to her.

  She went quickly to the door that led off into the other room. Empty but for a sleeping bag and a backpack.

  The back door, identical to the one at the front, was locked.

  One window. Slightly bigger than the others, a sliding sash. It looked out onto a small space of roughly cleared ground, blazing in the sun, before the dense trees began again. Opened by releasing a screw clamp where the upper frame met the lower.

  No visible security locks.

  She began unscrewing the clamp. It was rusted tight. A grinding squeak with every turn. She glanced behind her. Nothing.

  She put the heels of her hands under the horizontal length of the sash. Pushed. The wood ticked, but it didn’t move. She pushed harder. Was it locked from the outside? Oh God.

  She was about to give up when the sash shot upward with a screech. It startled her, this sudden tear in the silence. The shock of it weakened her legs again, discharged fresh adrenaline: if he was anywhere near he would have heard that. Move. Now. No time.

  Shoving herself over the sill, something in the bottom of the frame gouged her belly, snagged her navel, briefly. She bit back the scream. Twisted and lifted herself, felt the weathered wood of the narrow back porch and the sunlight’s brash heat on her flesh. Her hips crossed the sill and she toppled forward awkwardly. More noise. Run. Forget the car. Just get into the trees. Hide.

  Reflexively, she pulled her shirt together and fastened it. It was a minute relief, a precious portion of integrity reclaimed.

  The trees climbed uphill, with no sign of a trail. Knotted undergrowth and a few small blue flowers, nodding. It went against her instincts to go that way. She imagined the road—a road, any road, traffic, people, civilization—lower down.

  A few paralyzed seconds of her weighing it up.

  Then he stepped out from behind a tree, twenty yards away, up to her left.

  They looked at each other.

  Everything imploded.

  She moved without thinking. The world blurred as she went, stumbling, around the cabin’s flank. Birdsong and the trees like arrested giants, precise black shadows and the bristling light. In the nausea, she knew he’d lost a moment computing his surprise. She’d seen it in his face: How the fuck…? But even as she’d registered it she’d known that the face would change, that his look of ambush would morph into one of focus.

  She rounded the cabin’s front. The car. It would lose her seconds, but if the keys were in it she was home. It glowed in the sun like a symbol of happiness.

  Dust kicked up around her as she skidded to a halt at the driver’s door and yanked it open. The familiar smell of warm vinyl, the dash instruments ready to light up into life. Please, please—

  The keys weren’t there.

  She could hear him crashing down the slope behind the cabin.

  She ran.

  29

  Every step jolted her blood. Within twenty strides her lungs were burning. The forest was full of dense heat, the dirt track strewn with brambles. Through the fear a weird strand of joy to be running, to be unraveling space between them. Her body was coming back to her, her body was working. Sun-shafts through the trees, the bright leaves shivering. Home was a remote gravity, pulling her on. Jack and Vincent, the taken-for-granted miracles of negotiated bedtimes and the feel of them leaning against her hip and the crazy things they said. There’s this kid at school whose head’s pointy like a wasp’s butt. Their young voices and limitless energy and her own guilty bliss when they were asleep and she could think about the disordered vague desires for things she hadn’t yet done in her life.

  Run, Mom. Run.

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  He was close. Maybe thirty or forty feet.

  How could he be so close?

  Even in the glance she saw the dead resolve in his face, the dark eyes focused, the mouth open in the gray beard. His combat jacket flapped behind him. For a split second the sunlight made a gold nimbus around his hair. It was as if she saw every individual strand.

  Cassie screamed. Half reflex, half because her brain told her there might be someone—anyone—within earshot. Her imagination willed it: a couple walking their dog; a family picnicking by a fallen log;
a dedicated jogger in top-of-the-line gear and a sports watch. She saw all of these in a vivid rush. But the forest’s softly abrasive sound track went on, undisturbed.

  He was faster than her. She was dehydrated and aching and her body wouldn’t lie: in a straight line he would run her down. He would get to her. She could feel the reality of it in her own legs. The trees and the ground and the distant sky confirmed it, with a smiling neutrality.

  Lose him, Cass, Valerie said, as if in her ear. Hide.

  She cut to her right, off the trail. The forest was thick enough. A branch whipped her face. Ferns and bracken grasped at her ankles. There were loose stones underfoot. Twice, she nearly fell. But she kept going, zigzagging between the trees, left, right, always downhill. Her quads and calves trembled with the effort of keeping her on her feet.

  She didn’t want to look back—it would take her further off-balance and cost her breath—but she had to know where he was. She looked over her shoulder. She couldn’t see him. Her breathing was loud in her own head. She had the sick feeling that he had somehow gotten behind her, that she would turn to find him right there at her shoulder, close enough to touch.

  Then a twig snapped uphill over to her right and she picked him out. He had the knife in his hand now and his drawn face was moist. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking in the wrong direction, thirty degrees off. He’d left the trail too early. It thrilled her, that he’d gotten that calculation wrong.

  Despite which she had to move. She was visible. If he turned his head he’d see her. The undergrowth had given way to moss here, knuckled through by ancient roots and, in places, dark stone. She backed toward the nearest tree, five feet behind her, treading softly. She kept her eyes on him. At any moment he would look to his left. She could feel Valerie’s attention on her, the Taurus windshield bouncing sunlight. She was aware, too, of the brightness and heat of the day, that regardless of everything the natural world went on. As a child she’d believed in God, the benign old man with an incalculable beard and hurtable feelings. Adolescence and education had done away with that, but there had remained a sense that beauty was somehow on our side, the human side. Sunsets poured out grand love. Bluebells dipped their heads in shy affection. Adulthood hadn’t quite erased the idea. But now she saw with absolute clarity that beauty was either oblivious or self-involved. It was nothing to do with us. Our sufferings meant nothing to it.