AHMM, June 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And each night, he lay awake, remembering the body in the spring, how she floated. He remembered the officer taking pictures, the glare of the flash. The men hauling the body in. He remembered the one who found her, his downturned hunter's hat pulled low over his eyes, shaking his head. Was he crying? Yes, he was crying.

  * * * *

  And then one morning a little girl got away. She'd been missing for just under a day and when Armand arrived, she was cowering in a corner of the station, knees drawn up to her chin. She was eight, maybe nine, and had run down the dark streets of Westport in her bare feet and nightgown. He sat with her in the playroom, a woman from psychological services at his right. “What do you remember about him?” the woman asked. “It's okay."

  The girl shook her head. She'd been home already, spent the night with her parents, wore clean clothes, a new pair of shoes, and her parents watched from the other side of the one-way glass. “It's okay,” the woman said. “You don't have to say anything."

  The girl shook her head.

  "Would you like to draw a picture? We could draw a picture.” She knelt beside the girl with a pad of paper and a new box of crayons.

  And the girl began to draw. First an inscrutable house—lopsided windows, an arch for a door, yellow walls—then a man in a green jacket with big eyes and a red mouth. She drew a tower in the background.

  "That's a very tall tower,” the woman said.

  The girl kept drawing.

  "What kind of tower is it? Is it a stone tower?"

  The girl shook her head. She drew intensely.

  "Well, it's a very nice tower."

  "It's not a tower,” the girl said with finality. “It's a Christmas tree."

  The woman nodded.

  "Well, it's a very nice Christmas tree. Is this where you were last night?"

  The girl kept drawing. She winced, though, and her hand tightened over the crayon. Armand missed nothing.

  In the car, hours later, Franklin shook his head. “Who has a Christmas tree in March? We should arrest that guy for unseasonable conduct."

  Armand smiled.

  "I saw that,” Franklin said. “You're just full of joy and goodwill these days, my man. Full of smiles."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  They drove up and down the streets of Westport, looking at yellow houses. There were more than he'd expected—it seemed every fifth house was some version of yellow. Tan, beige, goldenrod.

  And then, parked in front of one with an arch for a door, Franklin said, “Gotcha."

  "Gotcha what?"

  "Gotcha.” He pointed out the car window, into the air.

  "What?” Armand said. “I don't see anything."

  "The water tower,” Franklin said. “Look at its legs.” Armand looked. Three legs rose from behind the row of low-income houses, meeting neatly at three points at the reservoir's base. “I don't see it as a Christmas tree,” he said.

  "Look closer.” And Armand looked, narrowing his eyes until he could make out a coil of wires running up each leg. “Lights?” he said.

  "Lights,” Franklin replied.

  "Oh, hell.” Armand leaned back in the seat.

  "Downtown beautification,” Franklin said. “Spruce up this ugly shit with colored lights. No doubt it looks like a giant Christmas tree all night long."

  * * * *

  They found him in the bedroom, reading a book, which he did not put down even as the detectives entered. He turned the page and they pointed a gun at him, cuffed him, and led him from the house. They sealed the house with yellow tape. The woman with the camera arrived and took pictures of the room, the little row of photographs pinned to the wall, a smudge by the baseboards, a tiny yellow shirt. She took picture after picture while Armand leaned against the wall and watched until his eyes hurt from the flash.

  Once they'd brought him in, locked him away, the redhaired man became meaningless. He went the way of any criminal, in fact or fiction. Caught and thus of little consequence except to those he harmed. An abstraction, a bit of bone for the cogs and wheels to grind away.

  That night Armand lay in bed, remembering the woman in the spring. Her hands had floated so softly by her sides, and when a wave crested beneath her, her body seemed to ripple with it. He recalled how a pole had caught her at the neck and pulled her slowly through the reeds and the grasses to the shore where the woman with the camera waited.

  And the man who'd first found the body, how he shook Armand's hand gently. “I didn't know her,” he'd said. Armand grew sleepy. He put his empty glass on the bedside table. “I didn't know her,” though in the fog of half-sleep the man smiled slightly, a cruel red gash for a mouth. “I didn't know her,” he said again, smiling openly now, squeezing Armand's hand. “I didn't, sorry. No.” And Armand breathed heavily now, asleep, remembering, also, his wife's car tipped over, the scattering of glass. “No, no,” the man said, smiling broadly. “I just saw her there, floating, out of the corner of my eye.” He shook his head. From beneath his downturned hunter's hat, a tuft of red hair.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Prufer.

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  The Method in Her Madness by Tom Savage

  She knew she shouldn't be in here. This was his sanctuary, his private domain, his holy of holies. If he found her here, he would not hesitate to call the police, or worse, and he would be back any minute. Still, she had to do this. The voices had told her to do it, and the eyes were watching her.

  A sudden flash of light at the big window of his oak-paneled, book-lined study was followed almost immediately by the sound of crashing thunder. The muted noise of the rain continued from outside, beyond the leaded glass and the red velvet curtains that framed the casement. She stood in the center of the room, the water from her wet blond hair and her stolen black trench coat slowly dripping onto the Oriental carpet, listening. The rain, the echo of thunder, the heavy pounding of her anxious heart: otherwise, nothing. For now.

  At the moment, she didn't hear the voices.

  "I really shouldn't be in here,” she said aloud, and then she focused on what she must do and went over to his desk. She knew everyone else in the house was gone. His wife, Dolores, was playing bridge at her club in town, as she did every Saturday night, and the servants had the weekend off. He was alone here.

  Or so he thought.

  She was in this house with him, in this thunderstorm, and anything could happen to her when he discovered her presence. Even so, she knew she must confront him now, tonight, and make him understand. She had to persuade him to do the right thing and tell everyone the truth about her, admit to them that he'd lied about her to get rid of her and save his marriage. So much depended on convincing him to do this: her reputation, her happiness, her freedom, her very sanity.

  Sanity. That word again. How many times had she heard that word in the last three years? Those three long, long years in that awful place, with its constant stream of doctors and nurses and specialists. The drugs to make her sleep, the drugs to wake her up, the drugs to keep her calm and prevent her from harming herself or others. That was the excuse, anyway. The drugs were really to make her docile, manageable, unable to tell her story clearly and ask for help. He had ordered this treatment of her, and the doctors and nurses readily obeyed him. As well they should: he was one of the mental hospital's major benefactors, and he had easily convinced the judge that she belonged there after she'd attacked him.

  Attack, indeed! It had been a fight, just an ordinary lovers’ quarrel, and it had taken place in this very room. He'd told her they had to stop seeing each other, that his wife had found out about them, that he loved his wife, that it had to stop, and she—well, she had resisted the idea. They'd said ugly things, and he'd slapped her, and then she'd picked up the letter opener on his desk. It wasn't really a knife, just a silly letter opener, and she hadn't cut him badly, only a scratch. A few stitches and he was fine. But to hear what he'd told the police after he summon
ed them, you would have thought she'd assaulted him with an axe. Later, at the hearing, he told the court all about their most intimate conversations, how she'd admitted to him once or twice that she sometimes heard voices and felt eyes watching her.

  She never should have told him about that, but how was she to know he'd one day use it against her in his zeal to be rid of her? He was Clifton Taggart III, America's leading Shakespearean scholar. She was merely Jessica Loman, a poor, gullible college girl, an English major who dreamed of someday being a novelist. She'd only taken the part-time job as his personal assistant to help pay her tuition. She was nobody, really—but she'd had a record of psychiatric counseling for chronic depression, and fighting with other children in school, and a brief bout with anorexia.

  The depression had been with her, on and off, since she'd lost her father, and the fighting in school hadn't been her fault. That stupid Sally Denning shouldn't have called her a weirdo in the playground, right in front of all the other kids. She hadn't meant to hit Sally quite so hard, and the dentist had fixed Sally's two broken teeth, so what was the big deal? The eating disorder in college had only lasted a year. Well, two years...

  Mrs. Parker, her high school guidance counselor—and not a professional analyst—had been called as a witness, and the nasty old bag had offered the court her ridiculous opinion that Jessica was “a borderline schizophrenic with tendencies toward paranoia.” Then the dean of her college had testified, telling everyone about the anorexia and that other little incident in college, when she'd threatened the psychiatrist. The judge, not surprisingly, had accepted all this and announced that Jessica would be remanded to Northern State Hospital. When he'd asked Jessica if she had anything to say in her own behalf, she'd been sobbing too hard to utter a single word. The final bang of his gavel still echoed in her ears these three years later, mingling with the sounds of rain and thunder from outside.

  They'd only let her out once in all this time, to attend her mother's funeral, and even then she was under heavy guard. Her father had died when she was nine years old, and her mother had always been in delicate health. The shock and stress of Jessica's commitment to a mental facility had sent Mother to an early grave. She'd stood in the freezing cemetery, flanked by hospital attendants, staring down at her mother's cheap pine coffin, the only one she could afford, silently cursing the man who had caused all this. The man whose testimony had caused her to be institutionalized. The man who had murdered her mother as certainly as if he had shot her. He'd told her mother and everyone else in the courtroom—in the world—that she was insane.

  But I'm not insane, she thought. I'm not!

  She allowed these thoughts to register, and then she reached down and swiftly pulled open his desk drawer. A memory of his old habits came back to her, and his old phobia, his constant fear of robbers. Well, with his fortune—or, rather, his wife's fortune—that was quite understandable. He'd mentioned to her once, back in the good times when she was still his part-time secretary and full-time lover, before their abrupt parting of the ways three years ago, that he kept a loaded revolver in this drawer.

  Papers ... pens ... yes. Here it was. She felt the cold metal touching her fingers, then grasped the handle and slowly pulled the gleaming black object out and held it up to the light. She stood there behind his desk, peering at the alien thing in her outstretched hand, feeling its chill. It was then, in that suspended moment, that she experienced the distinct, familiar feeling, as frightening as it was welcome. She became aware once more of the eyes watching her, and she heard the voices.

  They weren't speaking, not words that she could hear, at any rate. They were merely whispering, gasping and hissing in the darkness over there, just beyond her vision. Their noises of shock and outrage were informing her that she was bad, that what she was doing was wrong. The disembodied voices were her frequent companions in the hospital, some days her only companions, and she had mastered the self-preserving art of subverting them, of ignoring the sounds and pretending they weren't there, particularly when the doctors were with her. Tonight, away from the hospital, the voices seemed unusually agitated.

  She would not listen to them. Not now.

  As another bolt of lightning flashed and thunder cracked outside, she slowly lowered the heavy revolver to her side and slipped it into the pocket of the black trench coat. She gazed carefully around the room, orienting herself, making a new catalogue of this familiar environment. She'd been in this place many times in the days when she was his secretary. Over there was the door to the kitchen at the back of the ground floor, the way she had come in tonight. On the opposite side of the room was the bigger door, the one that led to the central hallway and the rest of the house. In one corner of the room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, was the five-foot marble column on which rested his most prized possession, the huge marble bust of William Shakespeare. She stared at the gaudy tribute, shaking her head slowly and smiling in mild disgust at the arrogance of the man who had placed it there.

  He was upstairs, probably planning his evening's work—some new and brilliant essay on some Act Three speech by Feste or Hotspur or Beatrice, no doubt, to be included in his next major tome, which would have some title like “The Origins and Interpretations of Gesture and Regional Grammar in the Bard's Second Period, 1595-1601: A Consideration.” He would be changing out of his dinner clothes into his silk pajamas and red satin smoking jacket. Smoking jacket: his fancy phrase. It was a bathrobe, for heaven's sake! But Clifton Taggart III, America's leading Shakespearean scholar, didn't wear a mere bathrobe. Oh, my dear, no! Clifton Taggart III wore a smoking jacket.

  She hadn't made any sort of plan before coming in here. She'd managed to slip out of the hospital undetected, which had actually been much easier than she'd imagined. She'd simply swiped the trench coat and a nurse's cap from the closet nearest to the dorm, thrown them on over her nightgown, and walked right out the front door, nodding to the doddering old security man at the front desk as she went. He'd actually glanced up from his newspaper and waved to her as she passed him. Then she'd made her way here, to this house. A little over a mile in the rain, but she'd kept to the fields and woods beside the roads, and no one had seen her.

  Well, no one had noticed her, anyway. Why should they? A tall young woman in a belted black coat, hurrying through the light rain that would soon grow heavier was hardly an astonishing sight. The two remarkable details of her appearance, had the people in the passing cars been close enough to see, were the white cotton nightgown under the coat and the fact that she was barefoot. The only shoes she could find in her haste in the pitch-black dormitory were her slippers, paper-thin little things, fuzzy and insubstantial. She hadn't put the slippers on, and she hadn't dared to feel her way over to the communal closet and rummage for her sneakers for fear of waking one of the others.

  So, a plan. Well, she could hide in here, but where? She looked around her, assessing each section of the room for potential places of concealment. Another flash of lightning at the window made her look over there again, and her gaze slowly lowered from the red velvet curtain-framed glass to the matching red velvet upholstered cushion on the deep shelf at the bottom. She smiled.

  The window seat. She'd forgotten all about it.

  With a swift glance over at the door to the hallway, she moved quickly away from the desk and over to the window. She reached down, feeling the soft texture of the rich crimson material on the cushion, then grasped the edge firmly in her hands and lifted. The entire top of the seat came up on its silent hinges, and she rested the cushioned shelf against the window frame, gazing down into the large, empty storage space inside the seat.

  She was standing there, staring down, when she became aware of the new sounds. Not the voices, not this time. These sounds were different in quality, and they were not products of her fevered imagination. Someone was coming down the main staircase to the hall. Clifton. She glanced over at the door, then down at the open window seat. She could get inside t
here and hide, wait for him to leave the room again, or—

  No. She hadn't come all this way to be a coward. She would stand her ground here, now, in this room. She would do what she'd come here to do. She was Jessica Loman, and she would confront her enemy. With a decisive little nod of her head, she slowly closed the lid of the window seat and walked forward into the center of the room. She stood there, facing the door that would open at any moment, aware of the eyes watching her, and the whispers. They were waiting here with her, waiting to see what would happen next, and Mother was with them. She could feel her mother's intense, loving gaze upon her. Yes, Mother was here with her, and everything was going to be all right...

  The door opened, and he came striding confidently into the room. Her heart leaped and her stomach lurched when she saw him, and she willed herself to control them. He hadn't changed much, she noted instantly: tall and handsome, with his dark eyes and trim mustache and the attractive streaks of gray at the temples in his otherwise glossy black hair. And yes, indeed, he was wearing the red satin smoking jacket over his silk pajamas. She'd known he would be wearing it.

  When he saw the young woman standing in the middle of his study, he froze. He actually emitted a small gasp and took one awkward little step backward, toward the open door behind him, staring. There was a single second of pure terror on his face, and she felt a thrill of triumph surge through her at the thought that she had caused him even this momentary distress.

  He recovered quickly. In the next instant the vision registered on him, and he recognized her. He sucked in a long, deep breath, and his dark eyebrows shot upward in what might have been quizzical amusement. He apparently decided that he was not in danger, and he carefully shut the door behind him and stepped forward again, immediately taking charge of this new situation.

  "'Most sure the goddess on whom these airs attend!'” he announced in his rich, deep voice, flashing that deceptively easy, offhand smile that had once thrilled her. Now she found it repulsive. She found him repulsive, and more than a little ridiculous. He stood there, smiling at her, and she could feel his gaze raking over her, making a study of her from her wet hair to her dripping trench coat to her naked feet. He took it all in slowly, seeming almost to savor every peculiar detail of her. Then he drew in another long breath. In a surprisingly gentle tone of voice, he said, “Jessica, what on earth are you doing here?"