“That’s better. Fucking skank.”
Felicia was shaking with anger, but she held back her tears. That fucker wasn’t going to see her cry. Now she just had to do it, and then she could go home.
She bent down and opened her mouth. He put his dick in. His thrusts were rhythmic and hard, and every time he was pulling out it seemed that he was sucking something out of her. He moaned each time. Then he came. She wanted to turn away, but he held her head and made her take it all in her mouth. But she didn’t swallow. When he was emptied, he released her, and she fell back on the bed. She got up as fast as she could. Grabbed her dress off the floor and pulled it over her head. Then she put on her shoes. Shaun was lying on the bed with his hands clasped behind his head.
“I hope it was as good for you as it was for me,” he said with a laugh.
She still had the semen in her mouth. She spit it out and hit him square in the face.
“Fucking piece of shit,” she said, calm and cool. Then she turned and ran out of the house. She was relieved that he didn’t come after her.
19
Felicia walked all the way home to Monument Avenue Park. She was shivering all over despite the warm night, alternating between rage and an almost paralyzing feeling of emptiness, which several times made her stop short. A question kept surfacing, over and over: How could she have been so wrong about a person? Nice eyes, sort of. But a sick asshole. And she had just let him do it. What did that make her?
When she entered her family’s apartment on the second floor, she saw that a light was on in the living room. Her father had come home from the swing shift. He was a policeman and sitting right there, but there was no way she was going to tell him that she’d almost been raped. She just couldn’t. It suddenly dawned on her that Shaun knew that too. He knew she would never go to the police. He knew she’d never tell her own father about it. This thought made her feel even more nauseated. She sneaked past the living room archway and into the bathroom. There she stuck a finger down her throat and threw up, trying to do it quietly, so her father wouldn’t hear. She wasn’t worried about her mother. She always fell asleep with sleeping pills in her bloodstream. After throwing up, Felicia brushed her teeth. She rinsed her mouth and spit out the water at least twenty times before she slipped out of the bathroom and into her own room. Dad is going to think I came home drunk, she thought. But what does it matter now?
That night she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, sweating and freezing at the same time. She thought everything was ruined. Soon she’d be eighteen, and she was supposed to graduate from high school in a few weeks. But now she wasn’t sure she’d be able to go back to school. The thought of seeing Shaun Nevins again was intolerable, of course, but she didn’t know if she could look her friends in the eye either. Not after this. A strange mixture of shame and rage filled her when she thought about Susan and Holly. In a way, she’d retained her virginity but had lost everything else. She was due to start college in the fall, meet new friends, maybe find a new boyfriend, and travel. But how was she going to face all that now?
At five in the morning she crept into the bathroom and stole two of her mother’s sleeping pills. She fell asleep soon afterward and slept until late morning. Neither of her parents woke her.
A rushing sound noise had settled in her ears. It reminded her of the sound you hear in big conch shells, which people say is the roaring of the sea. The trembling in her hands had subsided to a sort of numbness. The nausea came and went, and each time she tried to get up from the bed she felt dizzy. Like a hangover in reverse, it got worse as the day progressed. When Felicia still hadn’t emerged from her room for Sunday dinner, her mother came in and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. Her hand felt ice cold.
“Are you sick, Felicia?” she asked, genuinely concerned. She must have noticed that there was no sign of drunkenness in her daughter’s room.
“I just don’t feel good,” replied Felicia, hoping her mother would stop stroking her hair before she burst into tears.
“Do you want me to bring your dinner up here? We’re having roast veal.”
“No, I have an upset stomach. But a glass of water would be nice,” she said.
Her mother came back with the water and let her stay in bed for the rest of the day.
* * *
She stayed home sick from school for three days. She stole pills from her mother to get to sleep at night. By the fourth day some of the vertigo was gone, but not the numbness. She had begun to appreciate the numb sensation, and wanted more of it. She wanted it to seep from her fingertips and the outer layer of her skin all the way into her nervous system, so she wouldn’t feel anything. Right before she fell asleep, after taking a sleeping pill, she felt like she was floating away. That was how she wanted to feel. On the fourth day she pretended to be well and went off to catch the school bus. But she was planning to meet her neighbor, Brad Davis, the pothead.
As usual, he stood waiting for the bus as he did some small deals with teenagers who needed something to fortify themselves on an early Thursday morning. Felicia gave him a friendly hello for old times’ sake. Oddly enough, he was the first boy who had kissed her. Or maybe she had stolen the kiss from him, since he was too shy to do anything like that. It happened in the tree house in the Davises’ backyard, when they were around eight years old. The kiss had felt wet and nice and Brad had been so happy with the kiss she had stolen from him that he gave her a lollipop the next day. They had never kissed again, but they stayed friends. Until they were around thirteen, that is, and Brad got zits and started smoking weed, while Felicia got her tiny boobs that never got any bigger and started reading poetry. But they still said hi to each other every morning at the bus.
Now Felicia went right up to Brad. The decision had been made in advance. He gave her a surprised look when she handed him twenty bucks. Their hands hadn’t been close to each other in years.
“I need something to calm me down,” she said.
“Got the jitters about finals?” he said.
Felicia gave him a confused look. She’d completely forgotten that final exams were next week. And the week after that was the graduation ceremony, where they would get their diplomas and stand there wearing a gown and a cap with a tassel, and Holly would give the commencement speech in front of all the parents.
“The strongest you can get hold of,” was all she said.
“It’s going to take some time,” said Brad.
“I’ll come back tomorrow morning.” Then she went back to her brick apartment building. But she didn’t go up to the apartment on the second floor. Instead, she went down into the basement. She made her way to a room at the end of a corridor. On the door into the room, childish letters were painted in bright colors: “Secret club! Admission only to Holly, Susan, and Felicia!” Felicia still remembered when she painted those words eight years ago. Inside the walls were painted with princesses and horses and stars and planets. There was a table in the middle of the room with a candle burned all the way down in a bottle covered by hardened drips of wax. Along one wall was a sofa beneath a basement window that allowed daylight to seep through a gap in the flowered curtain. Felicia Stone, soon to be eighteen, lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling without the slightest hope that she could fall asleep. At noon she heard her mother leave the house to go to her part-time job at the branch library. Then she sneaked up and stole more pills. She took three pills, realizing that it was only a matter of time until her mother noticed something.
Brad would have to come through.
* * *
He did.
Valium has an anesthetic effect on most people, and if you take more than the recommended dose, your emotional life can really be paralyzed. Felicia got enough Valium from Brad to get her through finals and the graduation ceremony. She lied to her girlfriends and told them everything was fine, and that nothing had happened between her and Shaun Nevins, even though he had probably blabbed to the whole school about it. She
told her friends that she no longer cared about sex, and wanted to wait until the time was right. In her own mind she thought that would be never.
Luckily she wasn’t in the same room as Shaun during finals, and she got a seat far enough away from him at graduation that she wouldn’t ever have to look him in the eye again. He eventually disappeared on a Eurail vacation, then to some Ivy League college in New England, and she stayed behind in Richmond with her pills.
In the weeks that followed, the anesthetizing effect that had helped her get through the last terrible days started to diminish, and she began taking the pills with beer or bourbon. She spent hours in the basement, half wasted from pills and alcohol, while her parents thought she was at Holly’s house, and Holly thought she was at Susan’s, and Susan thought she was at home.
But the numbness would occasionally leave her, and then she could almost taste Shaun’s dick shoving into her mouth. A rank, ammonia-like smell. The gag reflex when the head of his dick pressed against the back of her throat and the suction when it pulled back for a new lunge. She could remember how she wanted to bite it, clamp down on it as hard as she could when he was all the way in, and maybe bite off the whole fucking thing. But she hadn’t dared. Once in a while she would lay there thinking about it for hours, not noticing that she was grinding her teeth or tensing her jaw muscles so tight that they started to ache. Then she would realize that she needed more pills or beer or booze. In the beginning she only drank in the morning, so the smell would be gone by the time her parents got home from work. Then she would manage to get through the rest of the evening with pills. There was no problem getting a ready supply. Brad was helpful. Felicia got them so cheap that even she realized that Brad was taking a loss for her sake. But he never mentioned it. He must have concluded long ago that she was worrying about something bigger than finals. Still, it was obvious that Brad thought he was helping her. And he was.
Eventually she stopped caring. She would drink all day long and try to avoid her parents in the evenings. Either she stayed in her room or pretended that she was out late, and she made sure to come home when her father was at work and her mother had gone to bed. But it was only a matter of time before someone noticed something. She was getting less and less able to hide her situation. Even through the haze, she was aware of that. But as the summer progressed she grew increasingly indifferent, and escaped more and more from real life. Luckily, both her girlfriends went off on vacation before they managed to grow too suspicious. This was something she didn’t mention to her parents, so that she could still use her friends as alibis. But even her parents were going to find out soon. She knew that, and she also knew what they would do when they found out. She’d be sent to rehab. What Felicia feared most of all was that there might still be hope for her. That somebody could actually help her escape from this world of fog she was living in now, which meant she would have to live with the taste of Shaun Nevins’s prick in her mouth for the rest of her life. At last she realized that there was only one way out.
One morning in early August she opened the mail her mother had left for her on the kitchen table. It was an answer from the university in Richmond. Felicia had been accepted to the bachelor’s program in English literature. She crumpled up the acceptance letter and stuffed it in her pocket without feeling a thing. Then she went out. She went next door and rang the doorbell at the Davises’ house. As she had hoped, Brad opened the door.
“Did you run out again?” he asked. He invited her in.
“No, this won’t take long,” said Felicia. “I’m not here to get pills this time.”
“No?”
“No, I came to ask if you could get hold of something else for me.”
“What would that be?”
“Heroin,” she said flatly.
Brad gave her a long look, his pupils tiny.
“Heroin? Are you trying to kill yourself?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Felicia, realizing that that was exactly what she was thinking of doing, but the slow way.
20
Richmond, September 2010
September looked like it was going to be as hot as August, the air heavy with humidity. After the police got the results on the five-hundred-year-old piece of human skin that Efrahim Bond had sent to VCU for analysis, the investigation of the murder took a new turn. The volume that Mrs. Price had observed without a leather spine came into focus, and both the book and the binding were quickly located by Laubach in one of the desk drawers in Bond’s office.
“A book bound in human skin. Have you ever heard of something like this?” Felicia Stone asked her boss, shaking her head. They were sitting alone in her boss’s office, and Morris was loudly eating a carrot.
“Actually, I have. I’ve even seen one,” said Morris, a bit smug about the answer. She gave him an expectant look. She had long ago given up being surprised by Morris’s vast store of knowledge.
“The book is in the anatomy museum at Edinburgh University. My wife and I went there on our honeymoon a long time ago. That museum is unforgettable.”
“Really? What poor soul did the skin come from?”
“Not a poor soul—William Burke, a serial killer. One of the first we know of. You’ve studied serial killers—haven’t you heard of William Burke and William Hare?”
“Yes, that does ring a bell. They were grave robbers in Scotland in the nineteenth century, weren’t they? They sold corpses to anatomists.”
“That’s right. In Great Britain back then they could only perform dissections on people who’d been executed. But that couldn’t meet the increasing demand for corpses from a medical field that was rapidly expanding. So anatomists bought corpses from grave robbers to use in their studies and lectures. The authorities turned a blind eye to this practice. The problem with Burke and Hare was that they gradually switched from stealing corpses to producing their own. Altogether they killed at least seventeen people, and they sold the corpses to a doctor named Robert Knox. To this day we don’t know whether or not Knox knew where the bodies came from.”
“But how did Burke’s skin wind up on the spine of a book?”
“Well, the law finally caught up with Burke and Hare, and they were executed. Since they’d been sentenced to death, their bodies were legally available for dissection, ironically enough. During the dissection of Burke’s body, his skin was stolen. It resurfaced some weeks later as decorations on a number of objects, among them the notebook that I saw.”
“I have goose bumps!” said Felicia, looking at her arm. Her thoughts shifted to Ed Gein, the murderer Laubach had mentioned the first time they saw the body of Efrahim Bond. She recalled that after Gein was caught, they found a whole bunch of things at his home that had been made of human skin. Among them was a woman’s dress that Gein used to put on to play his dead mother, but also lamp shades and chair upholstery.
“Pretty creepy,” said Morris. “But Burke was probably not the only one in history that had happened to. The museum guide told us that there was a famous anatomical atlas written by an Italian Renaissance anatomist, Vesalius or some such name, and the nineteenth-century edition was bound in human skin. There’s also supposed to be memoirs by a noted robber named James Walton, also known as The Highwayman. The memoirs were apparently bound in his own skin.”
“Please tell me that you looked this up right before I got here, and that you don’t remember all this from your honeymoon,” she said.
“A policeman has to have a good memory, you know. It was a fine trip, otherwise. And now we’ve got another example of this macabre form of bookbinding. I think we ought to have a talk with the curator of the Poe Museum ASAP,” Morris said. “The first priority should be to find out more about the Lord Byron book with the missing spine, and the human skin that was attached to it. The big question, after all, is why Efrahim Bond removed the spine from the book.”
“Where do I find the curator, and what’s his name?”
“Just a minute,” said Morris, r
otating a half-chewed mass of carrot in his mouth as he searched through one of the big notepads he used to record his notes. Only an investigator who rarely left his office for fieldwork would take notes in such an impractical way.
“John S. Nevins,” he said eventually. “His office is in the Boatwright Memorial Library on the campus of the University of Richmond.”
Felicia Stone had a sudden feeling of weightlessness. She was not only dizzy, but she was also trembling. A feeling she thought she had learned to control was about to get the upper hand.
“John Shaun Nevins,” she said dully, mostly to herself.
“Yes, I think the ‘S’ is for Shaun. Curator, professor, and something of a book collector, I noted here. Fifty-nine years old. That’s all we’ve got. Do you know him?”
“I knew his son, Shaun,” she replied.
“I see. He must be about your age, right?” said Morris, apparently in the mood for some small talk.
“Yes, unfortunately,” she said, her voice ice cold. She was not in the mood to chat.
“Not a pleasant acquaintance, in other words,” he said. “But I hope you won’t mind talking to his father. You’d be the best person to follow up this lead. Since you pointed us in this direction.”
She thought about it and felt her vertigo begin to subside.
“I’ll do it,” she said and got up, surprised that her knees didn’t buckle. “Have you transferred your notes on Nevins to the case file?”
“We haven’t started a separate file on him, if that’s what you mean,” replied Morris. “He’s hardly a central figure in the investigation. For the time being I thought we’d regard him as a specialist. For consultation purposes.”
“OK,” she said.
“Do you think he’s involved?”
“I have no idea. It’s just an uneasy feeling.”
“This case is wide open, so why not?” said Morris. “I mean, human skin that’s five hundred years old. What does that make you think of?”
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