His hands—reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching—
Her mind flitted away.
“Nicole?” JeanJenniferJodi said to her. “Are you all right?”
No, of course she wasn’t. She was wearing a brace for God’s sake, speaking with an electronic voice, clutching her father’s chair because she no longer had the wherewithal to have her own chair.
But she needed to be grateful. Grateful, because, as her mother had said, women had been attacked on that spot for centuries (think of it, her mother had said.Centuries. There are reports of dead girls in the river since New York was New Amsterdam), and those girls had all died. But modern medicine had saved her. Modern medicine and her own damn gumption, her father had said with something like pride. Gumption. In other words, she was too stubborn to die.
“Nicole?” JosieJackieJune said.
Nicole nodded. The fewer words the better. The nod meant:I’m fine. Then she added, “I’ll try,” in that horrible new voice of hers.
I’ll try.
And for the first time, she would.
* * * *
x
It took concentration not to flit. Concentration and a willingness to pay attention. What was it that made her change channels, set down a book, close the newspaper? What made, her walk away from her mother or shut off the radio? What made her look away?
Of course, there was nowhere safe. Not really.
That thought brought her back to the river and the cold, smelly water, oily against her skin.
Nowhere safe.
Why had she cared about safe? At that moment, when she was dying, what made her think of safety?
She was here, dying, at the hands of the man she had chosen to keep her safe.
Safe. She had thought Bryan was safe. She had researched him, observed him, learned all she could about him—although not as much as JuneJamieJade because then she would have seen the pattern of the missing girlfriends, the ones who fled.
The ex who had moved all the way to Nebraska.
What had Nicole said to him that night? They were jogging. She could remember that—or maybe she was remembering another trail, another jog. Under the lights, the river sparkling, the trail opening around them.
She felt safe because Bryan was with her. She wasn’t alone like the Central Park Jogger, like all those other women—the ones attacked throughout the centuries. She wasn’t alone, and she knew how to defend herself, and she was young and strong and she felt safe.
And then his voice, filled with fury: What the fuck did you just say?
What had she said?
She had researched him—not because she wanted to date him. She didn’t. She liked him, but not that way. He was nice, but not—
Her mind flitted.
Nice, but not—
Flitting.
She made herself breathe. Focus.
Nice, but not someone she wanted to date. She’d said that up front. The day she first asked him to jog with her.
I’m not looking for a boyfriend. All I want is a friend.
I understand, he said with a smile. His smile really was lovely. Warm and sympathetic.
Which’ll make him hell in front of a jury, the prosecutor—Judith, her name was Judith. Judith Melman—said. He’ll smile and they’ll love him and they’ll think how can such a bright, reasonable, attractive man hurt this woman? She must have misremembered. In the trauma, she must have confused him with someone else.
But Nicole hadn’t confused him with anyone else. The therapist, the one the hospital sent to talk with her when the amnesia became clear, said that the memories she had—what few she had—were real. The key was recovering the others in her own time.
The others, the therapist had said, were somehow harder to accept than the attack itself.
Because he was safe. He had been safe.
Her mind started to flit, and she held it, willed it in place.
She trusted him. Believed in him.
They had been jogging, talking about a case of his, the first real win on his own. Then he’d put a hand on her arm—lightly, just a touch, really, friend to friend—and he had said,
How about dinner on Friday?
A celebration? she asked, looking at the lights. Like diamonds floating on the blackness of the river. A thousand diamonds.
Yes, he said.
With friends? she asked, happy to met his friends, finally. People outside her own narrow circle.
With friend, he said, emphasizing the last word.
It took her a minute. She felt a little cold. A date?
Yes.
Didn’t he remember their conversations? Why did men always do this, transform something fun into something awkward?
Thank you, she said, but no. I’m not interested—
In dating, she was going to say. I’m not interested in dating anyone right now. It’s not you. It’s that I’d like to establish myself first, and then maybe...
But she didn’t get to any of it. His light touch turned into a grip, his genial expression into a scowl, his voice into something filled with fury.
What the fuck did you just say?
She responded calmly to a man she trusted, a man she considered her friend. I said no.
He slammed her against a tree, so fast she didn’t have time to catch herself. Then his hands—reaching, grabbing, pinching, pulling, clutching—
And before she had a moment to think, to reflect, torespond, she was dying.
Dying.
And if it had been even twenty years earlier, she would have. She would have died.
So she was grateful, grateful, grateful that she had survived.
* * * *
xi
In the end, she didn’t testify. She sat in the court, behind the prosecution— not Judith, but the senior prosecutor, a man named Rutherford—and acted as an exhibit of what one man’s fury could do.
The other women spoke, the ones they could find, the ones they promised to protect.
Their stories were the same.
All I said was no...
and then his hands were on my throat...
he looked so mad, I thought he would kill me...
but some woman [man] [kid] screamed...
and he let go...
He let go.
But he hadn’t let go of Nicole. He had squeezed until he thought her dead, and then he had the presence of mind to toss her in the river.
To hide the evidence, Rutherford said.
Rutherford said other things—or brought in people to say them for him— like
It’s a pathology peculiar to men, similar to stalking... maybe he did stalk, although he’s bright enough to know that stalking is now a crime... the word ‘no’ from a woman he’s attracted to is a trigger...
like
He’s a particularly smart offender. He knows better than to leave evidence in his wake...
like
If you set him free, it’s only a matter of time before he does this again. And the next woman will die. Guaranteed.
Guaranteed.
* * * *
xii
She didn’t look at him throughout the whole trial, not even at the end, when the jury came back with some lesser charge. Assault? Second degree?
She couldn’t remember. She didn’t want to remember.
She no longer wanted to think about him.
She needed to be grateful.
Grateful she could go back to her couch and not think. Flit through the channels, watch Ellen and Oprah and the soaps, and concentrate on getting better.
If there was such a thing as better in a world where she could no longer trust, no longer feel safe.
And then she chided herself:
She couldn’t expect safe. No one could.
Safety was an illusion, like the diamonds on the river, sparkling in the distance, hiding something cold and greasy and terribly, terribly dark.
I love Poe. In my other life, I’m a mystery writer
(Kris Nelscott for the novels), and Poe is the father of the mystery. So I chose “The Murder of Marie Roget” since I knew others would do “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe wrote Marie Roget to answer his critics that in “Rue Morgue” he had cheated. They said he set up the puzzle and then solved it, which wasn’t hard. So he had Dupin try to solve a fictionalized version of an existing case. My first two attempts at this were mysteries, but Ellen wanted horror. So I looked at the story again, and found this: “This is an ordinary, although an atrocious, instance of crime. There is nothing particularly outré about it.” This is Poe talking to his critics. It’s also true. What happened to Marie Roget (Mary Rogers in the real world) happens to women all the time. And to me, that’s horrifying.
<
* * * *
Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and lives in Vancouver, Washington. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Writers Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
His latest books are a non-fiction book about Honduras,Christmas in Honduras;a short novel,Softspoken; and a short fiction collection,The Iron Shore.Forthcoming are two novels: tentatively titled The Piercefields andThe End Of Life As We Know It,and two short novels:Beautiful Blood, Unknown Admirer,and The House of Everything and Nothing.
* * * *
Kirikh'quru Krokundor
By Lucius Shepard
Had it not been for my affair with Dr. Nubia Borregales, I might not have embarked upon the study of history, that most fabulist of disciplines, and would certainly never have traveled to St. Gotthard. My interests lay in determining the larger movements of time, in great tidal shifts and patterns, whereas she was fascinated by small, apparently idiosyncratic events, claiming these localized bubbles were released from a current that undercut the flow of what we perceived as history and thus were more revealing of its actual nature. To my mind, places like St. Gotthard were aberrations, curious human footnotes, exceptions that proved the rule... though the specifics of that rule as yet elude me.
When I met Nubia I was a graduate student in the University of Miami’s Department of Latin American Studies and she was thirty-one, a rising star in the academic world. She had just published her first book (an account of her immersion in candomblevoodoo intermixed with the history of a temple in Belem) to raves from the academic community and a surprising degree of commercial success. Venezuelan by birth, her features betrayed a mixed Spanish and Indian heritage. She was on the plain side of pretty, her nose too hawkish and prominent, her mouth too wide, with an average figure (a few pounds overweight, as they say on singles websites) and a puffy face rendered forgettable and nerdish by wire-rimmed glasses and an aversion to make-up. However, her charismatic personality and quick mind more than compensated for this. She overwhelmed me, evincing a voracious sexuality unequalled by any woman I had known. We were involved for nearly four years, at which point she dropped me without a word of explanation, breaking off all contact, and moved on to an affair with a teaching assistant. Following the completion of my doctorate, I moved on as well, to an assistant professorship at Portland State, where I embarked upon a tenure track at that green and pleasant, yet undeniably second-rate institution.
It had been six years since I’d spoken to Nubia, seven since our relationship ended, but for all intents and purposes I was still in her life, still obsessed, and I wasted uncountable hours trying to determine what had happened, going over details again and again. I could have written books analyzing her behavior. I could have taught seminars on her body language, her attitudes toward other women (put simply, she would turn on them less quickly than she would a man), and her preference in hand soaps. Of course I tracked her career—it would have impossible to do otherwise. Four consecutive best sellers and frequent appearances as a TV pundit had earned her the envy of academia and, naturally, its scorn. Her work was now dismissed as sensationalist and superficial, and scurrilous stories were told about her omnivorous sexual appetites and casual cruelty, particularly as it related to grad students and TAs; thus when the department secretary informed me that Nubia was waiting in my office, she did so in a suggestive tone.
Nubia was standing by my desk, a jacket over one arm, gazing at the campus through the branches of the fir that shaded my window. I had observed changes in her during a recent appearance with Larry King, yet seeing her close at hand, I was stunned by her transformation. Gone was the chunky, schoolgirlish drone who had worn baggy T-shirts and thrift shop skirts, and hacked off her hair in lieu of a visit to the salon; in her place stood a slim, stylish brown-skinned woman with long, lustrous black hair, dressed in tailored slacks and a frilly cream-colored blouse that made her look like an orchid rising from a stem. The years had pared away the baby fat and she presented the image of a comely, confident Latina. As far as I could tell she’d had no work done. Her prominent nose was still her worst feature, yet it seemed to suit her now, to be emblematic of a vital and commanding presence, the sort of presence, I imagined, that attracts women to rich and powerful men.
“Jon!” she said, hurrying to embrace me. “You look wonderful! It’s so good to see you!” She was wearing perfume. That, too, was a change.
I disengaged from her, said, “Nubia,” and took a seat. “How can I help you?”
She gave no sign of being put off by the coolness of my reception; she settled into the chair opposite me and began telling me about her upcoming trip to St. Gotthard. I listened with half an ear, astonished by the depth of emotion she had dredged up in me, and when she was done, remaining civil, I inquired what this had to do with me.
“I’d like you to join me,” she said. “As a colleague. If a book comes of Saint Gotthard, and I think one will, I want you to co-author it. I reserve the right to edit the final draft, but only as regards style. You’ll agree, I think, that I’m a more polished writer than you.”
I responded angrily, but she cut me off.
“I’m sorry for the way I treated you,” she said. “I was young. I thought severing our relationship would be less painful than a measured retreat.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “You hopped into bed with someone else the next day. For all I know, you were sleeping with him before we broke up.”
“The reason I slept with Ben was to underscore my decision. I didn’t want you to have any doubts about it. If you recall, I didn’t stay with him long.”
“I’m astonished you remember his name, there’ve been so many.”
She examined her nails.
“You were arrogant and cowardly,” I went on. “And self-absorbed. That’s why you handled things the way you did. Now you waltz in here and throw me a bone. Is this some kind of make-up call?”
After a pause she said, “I’m not going to discuss this now. I will, if you insist, but not now.”
“Why not now? Isn’t seven years long enough to come up with an explanation?”
“Everything you say is true. I am self-absorbed and arrogant. I was happy enough with you, but happiness was interfering with my work. I had career concerns. Departmental concerns.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Do you know how much flak I took about my personal life from McIntyre? He wanted to fire me. But I’m not getting into this. You’re too emotional. If you accept my proposal, we’ll have an opportunity to talk things through.”
She stood and came around to my side of my desk and perched on the corner, her perfume mixing with the smell of the evergreens.
“You’re partly right about this being a make-up call, but that’s not germane,” she said. “I value your opinions, even though we’re diametrically opposed in our approach. I see the book as a dialogue between us, both on a professional and personal level. Perhaps in writing it we’ll become friends again. At the least it should be an exhilarating experience.”
She had no reason to play me, yet I k
new I was being played. She wanted me to touch her, to make some rapprochement—that was why she positioned herself so near—but while I felt a flicker of interest, it didn’t rise to the level of arousal. I was both relieved and saddened that she no longer had that affect on me.
“Come on, Jon,” she said, trying to jolly me. “Don’t stick me with some tedious old man for a co-author.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Anger clouded her face. She went to her chair and retrieved her jacket. When she turned to me again, she was smiling.
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