Dear Killer (18 page)

But I still felt frozen. I couldn’t talk my way out of it. I didn’t have the words.

“I am so sorry,” he breathed, hunching his shoulders so he appeared smaller than he was. I moved to the wall and leaned against it. I stared at my feet. Numbness seeped through me like a disease, like a quiet flame, overtaking me insidiously. Pure numbness.

“So this is what you are,” I said senselessly.

The words struck him, one by one, and I could see they were hurting him. But it was his own fault. I looked into his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Alex whispered

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” I replied.

Or would be sorry.

He clenched his hands tightly around the cup. For a moment I thought he was going to break it. A silence opened up between us, as I drew into myself, counting my breaths, and he struggled with a thousand different virtues within himself.

My heart began to pound out a quick one-two-one-two, like drums. I stared at Alex. My eyes were wide, and all I had was a faint hope nestled between my ribs that perhaps he valued me more than his need to follow his superiors’ orders. Oh, Alex. He couldn’t know.

“It doesn’t matter to you,” he begged.

I shook my head, very slightly. I couldn’t tell him that it did matter. I couldn’t tell him that it mattered so much, that he almost literally held my life in his hands. I wanted him to understand, but I knew that if he understood, everything would be lost in the same way that things would be lost if he walked out the front door with that cup in his hands.

I stared Alex down with immense regret.

He shuddered, his fingers twitched, and then he was still. He breathed out, clasping the cup in white knuckles, and this time I was nearly sure he would break it.

“It’s not worth anything,” he said unconvincingly.

Put it down, put it down, put it down, put it down.

I pleaded inwardly, screamed out at him, trying to somehow make him understand what I needed.

And then, very slowly and suddenly, with a last broken glance into my eyes, he took the teacup and set it down on the hall table. He walked away out the front door, slamming it shut behind him.

It was quieter with him gone, but strangely it seemed louder. With soft footsteps, I walked down the hall, took the cup, and went into the kitchen. I walked to the sink, meaning to wash the cup, meaning to wash it all away—

But as I stood over the sink, the cup slid out of my fingertips and fell, shattering on the white porcelain near the drain, splitting into shards, and I couldn’t even bring myself to care.

Two weeks later Alex invited me to lunch again. It was a mostly silent and awkward meal, but I appreciated the invitation. Not, of course, that I didn’t know why I had really been invited.

It was a surprisingly sunny day, with blue skies all around. As he ate a ham sandwich, I made a point to finish my tea and pasta early. I laughed at his jokes as best I could; slowly, the ice that had formed between us was beginning to crack again. But every now and then I saw the darkness, the fear, the misery creep into Alex’s eyes. Because, of course, he had to follow orders, no matter the law—since sometimes the law did get lost, in cases like this, when the police got anxious about things. He still had to get that DNA sample from me, because he had been told to. He had failed once but was not allowed to fail again. I sometimes forgot that he wasn’t really in charge. It was not a good thing to forget.

But I was ready for him this time.

Slowly, smoothly, with confidence, so he didn’t realize what I was doing, I took each piece of tableware that I had touched and brought it down one by one into my lap on top of my napkin. I had prepared two bottles beforehand. I slipped them quietly out of my purse. One, hydrogen peroxide, and two, a human DNA sample I had stolen from a science lab at school, diluted in water—there was a student in my grade who was doing an independent research project with it, and he had a few extra samples he wouldn’t miss too badly.

Alex chatted at me, and I gave innocent replies.

But beneath the white tablecloth, with small, unnoticeable movements, I put hydrogen peroxide on each piece of tableware to destroy my own DNA, dried each with my napkin as best I could, and put a small amount of the bottled DNA on each where my own DNA would have been. I put each back on the table with care. And Alex, nervous as he was, was too distracted to notice a thing.

As we left, he carefully slipped my fork into his sleeve. I think he thought he was being secretive, but I noticed. A part of me wondered if he
wanted
me to notice and catch him like I had caught him at the house. But no, I wouldn’t confront him again.

As he walked stiffly away down the sidewalk, in the opposite direction from me, I decided to forgive him. I would forget this. We would still have lunch, talk like friends, confide in each other. I wanted that. I wanted to forget this. I wanted us to go on beyond this. He would forget too, because that was who he was. Alex was Alex, after all. He loved to think well of others, loved to be their friend. His morals were impressive. He was nothing like me.

I envied him his naïveté.

And somehow, I told myself, despite everything, he might still prove to be useful.

Maggie and I sat on a bench overlooking the Thames, silent as we ate identical vanilla ice creams even though it was probably too cold for it. I hadn’t seen Maggie for a few weeks; I had been preoccupied with Henry Morrison’s murder and Alex’s suspicions. I was calmer now, less tense, because things with Alex had been cleared away. It was cloudy today again, a brownish sort of cloudy, pollution tainting the sky like it often did when there hadn’t been quite enough rain.

Maggie’s cheeks were redder than usual, and her hair seemed darker than when we had first met. Her clothes were tighter, her eyes were older and more alive. I found myself looking at her feet as we sat in silence—she had small feet. Unusually small, almost, tiny feet in small brown boots crossed at the ankles.

“Kit?” she asked, brushing some hair off her cheek. I looked up and saw her bared wrist and, for a moment, imagined the blood throbbing through it, the blood I would someday spill.

“Yes?”

“Do you think Michael really loved me?”

It was an unexpected question, and it caught me off guard and without words. Michael? I hadn’t thought about him in a couple months. She caught my expression of surprise and shrugged.

“I mean he was sick, if he did. But in his strange way . . . I was wondering. I never really knew, I suppose. He told me he did, and he was really attached to me for some reason, but I never really knew if that was love or just obsession. I think there’s a difference between those two things, don’t you? I was just wondering what you thought.”

I stared into my ice cream, looking at the melted bit at the bottom of the paper bowl.

What could I say? I didn’t know. His letter had said that Maggie had broken his heart. But what did that mean? Michael had been unstable, irrational. Did any of his words ever mean anything? I could never tell anything from his actions. I don’t think he had ever said what he thought, or, perhaps more accurately, I got the feeling that his thoughts had changed so quickly that it had been impossible for him to say what he really meant when he had meant something different every three seconds.

“Does it matter now?” I asked eventually.

She looked at the Thames as it bobbed and splashed against its banks.

“I suppose not.”

She didn’t sound satisfied.

I sighed and leaned against the back of the bench. I breathed in and closed my eyes. I could hear cars and the faint lapping of the Thames and smell the musty unnatural smell of the dirty water; I could taste the acrid taste of pollution and feel the coldness of ice cream under my fingertips. Had Michael loved her? How was I supposed to know?

“Why are you asking now?” I asked her.

“I suppose now I’m just ready to face it.”

This surprised me.

“You were facing it pretty well when it happened,” I pointed out, opening my eyes. “I remember you were laughing.”

She shrugged. “I was. But I don’t think I really
got
it back then, you know. I sort of understood but I didn’t, really. I thought I understood what his death meant. It meant freedom for me, I thought. He scared me. But he was a person too, I suppose. He was more than a body when he died, he was a dead person too. I think I’ve realized that. Oh, I don’t know. I’m not making sense. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

I stared at her feet again, vaguely remembering the face of Michael’s mother.

It occurred to me that Maggie was wiser now. In the same way I had changed, she had changed, and because she still had the same stupid smile and made the same stupid sort of conversation and laughed the same stupid way, I had thought she was the same stupid girl I had befriended those months, years, centuries, eons ago. But she wasn’t. In this moment, I could see she wasn’t. She wasn’t wise yet, she was still only brushing the surface, but I could see that now she had the potential to be wise someday. She was finally beginning to ask the right questions. I met her eyes. She stared back at me.

“What do you think?” she asked again, almost sadly.

I broke eye contact and looked at the Thames and felt the coolness, coldness, iciness, freshness of the ice cream under my fingertips.

“I think he loved you,” I said quietly.

All I could hear was the sound of water and Maggie’s breathing, slowing, thoughtful.

Chapter 19

I
killed abundantly and well. My murders echoed through the city. Six more people died before the end of that month. Two women and four men, only one of them over the age of forty. The first one died smashed against a mirror, one more was knocked out a window, three I killed with my bare hands, and the last one I pushed against the sharp edge of a table, too strongly and too quickly for him to escape. I was picking up the killing pace now—I was sure of my motivation and my abilities, and I felt no need to kill far fewer people than I was able to. Maggie would die too, eventually, of course, but before that could happen, I had to let Michael be forgotten completely. If people really made the connection between Maggie’s murder and his, it could be dangerous. So I waited. I killed, and I waited.

Sometimes, in the darker nights, Michael haunted me. I awoke on the verge of a scream, tangled in my blankets. Only in the darker nights, but there were enough of those to put me on edge.

The seasons changed. Late fall slowly turned to true winter. The skies changed from a mild gray to an angry one and the streets turned white, coated with ice and snow. It was odd, that snow—usually we just got the fading sort that lit on the sidewalk for a few hours a few months a year and then vanished. But that year’s snow was a different sort altogether. More permanent, more stubborn, more erratic—melting into water, freezing into ice, covered by new snow in an endless unpredictable cycle.

The sidewalks were slippery and the air was cold, and I took my heaviest jacket out of storage earlier than usual, because winter seemed to be in a hurry.

I saw Cherry Rose in Harrods once.

It was a shock. I was only killing time when I saw her—I realized that it was probably best if I didn’t buy anything from Harrods even though I had the money, because everything there was so luxurious and people would ask questions—but I liked to go there anyway. I liked to pretend I would buy things. I tried on jackets and dresses and asked to see pieces of jewelry in cases, but I never brought anything home.

When I saw her, I was standing at a table of colored hats, trying on one after the other, looking critically at my reflection in the mirror standing a few feet to my left. The red hat overpowered my features, the blue hat made my skin look sallow.

I was just putting on a yellow fedora with a wide brim when she came into view twenty feet away. And of course, I was staring at her before I even really knew I was looking in her direction. My eyes, staring out from beneath the yellow fedora, were like brown cameras, watching, recording her every move. I was transfixed and stunned. I studied her. She didn’t know.

She looked washed-out beneath the glow of the recessed lighting. Her red hair was bright, seemingly impossibly so, brighter even than I remembered. She was looking thoughtfully at a rack of gray coats.

Action went on around Cherry Rose, but she was still, and she was all that mattered.

It was almost strange, though, seeing her. It felt unnatural. Her existence for me was anchored firmly in the night I’d considered suicide off the Waterloo Bridge. Seeing her anywhere else felt almost sacrilegious. She had been a mythical creature to me then, and sure, even here, in Harrods, I could feel her faint inhumanity in the way she stood like a foreign creature next to the gray coats; but she wasn’t quite as inhuman now.

I wanted her to look over at me. I wanted to meet her eyes, and I wanted her to meet mine. I wanted to see whatever it was in her eyes that was so spectacular and be reminded. Because, as I looked out at her from beneath the brim of the yellow fedora, she seemed nearly human.

But she didn’t look up.

She put a gray coat back on the rack and walked away toward the escalators and past them, retreating, and my eyes followed her until she disappeared behind a long shelf of silk shirts. I felt like shouting after her as she vanished, but of course I didn’t. I let her go.

It left a sour taste in my mouth.

Soon the city was thrown into a Christmas fervor. Lights went up and Christmas trees appeared everywhere along with other things, small Nativity scenes in houses and wrapping paper advertisements in newspapers and cartoons of Santas pasted in drugstore windows. Couples strolled hand in hand down Kensington High Street, snow dusting their hair like sugar. It really was a cold winter. I checked my mail in late November and killed four people from that batch of letters between then and Christmas. The ones I left outside froze quickly, leaving them like human-shaped statues. I was more confident now, but still—there was something about their eyes in the snow that unsettled me a bit. Wide, wild, staring. Unseeing. Cold.

The first one I killed in the snow was named Stacey Hill.

Dear Killer,

Stacey Hill is my older sister. She lives at 68 Dahlia Drive, in Mayfair. We were never close. Honestly, she was always a massive bitch. I could never stand her. But until about three weeks ago, I could deal with that. Until three weeks ago, I was engaged to someone.

But Stacey, being the massive bitch she is, stole him. She literally just took him. Waltzed off to Rome with him wrapped around her pinkie finger. I mean, he’s halfway to blame, he’s a bastard too, but how could she do that? She’s my sister. Sisters are supposed to have each other’s backs.

Well, I guess if she’s going to play mean, then I’ll play mean too.

Kill her. Kill her. I can’t stand the fact that she’s even alive. The bitch.

She had clouds of light-blond hair, like wheat. I remember her especially because she begged for mercy. They never begged for mercy. She reminded me strangely of Cherry, who was the first one to ask why. It was strange to hear her words—“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, don’t kill me”—because, honestly, I had never heard them before. No one except Cherry had ever spoken to me as Diana, and Cherry didn’t count. But of course the begging didn’t help. I slammed her in the head with a brick and put her in a Dumpster with her letter tucked within her jacket collar. I’m not sure if the police ever found her.

I walked down Kensington High Street a week before Christmas, staring into shop windows, considering Christmas presents.

I shivered inside my blue down coat. It was winter break now, so I was shopping at noon in hopes that it might be warmer than later in the day. It wasn’t really. I was wearing several layers and I was still cold; I had cut my hair short so it looked almost like my mother’s hair, though it didn’t curl the same way. The new haircut revealed the nape of my neck. Wind blew across it, sending chills down my spine. It had been a good idea to cut it. Short hair had looked silly on me when I was younger, but now that I was older, it made me look almost chic.

I had to get my mom something, but I didn’t know exactly what. A scarf, maybe? But I got her one last Christmas. Oh, I didn’t know. Whenever she wanted something, she bought it for herself. She was impossible to shop for. And my dad. I would just get him a tie, like always. It wasn’t like he would use anything I bought him anyway. He seemed to make it a point not to. Something for Alex too. I should probably get Maggie something as well, I guessed, since she was basically my best friend. Oh, that was sad. My best friend was a victim.

I stopped in front of a shiny window, staring inside at leather purses slung over the shoulders of slim mannequins.

Maybe a purse for my mom. She’d like that, if I picked the right one. And I had a lot of money now that the mailbox had been so full lately. Maybe something red. She liked red. I’d probably have to get something less expensive for Maggie so she wouldn’t get suspicious. And definitely something much cheaper for Alex.

I gazed at the window display thoughtfully. The mannequins were twiglike, painted white and twisted into strange, unreasonable, grasshopper-like positions.

My phone rang suddenly. I jumped at the sound. I took it out of my pocket and picked up without looking at the caller ID, still staring into the window.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Kit?”

“Oh, hello, Maggie.” A squabbling couple passed by me, their voices shrill and shrieking.

“Where
are
you right now?” she asked, hearing the fight.

“Kensington High Street. Shopping.”

“Oh. I was wondering if you wanted to go shopping with me later this afternoon, but I suppose not,” she said with a casual laugh.

“Ah, sorry,” I apologized. “If you’d called me just a bit earlier, we could have gone.”

“Yeah, I missed my chance.”

“Do you want to do something tomorrow instead?” I suggested.

“I can’t—I’ve got to go visit my grandma, remember?” she reminded me.

“Oh yeah, I forgot. How about later this week? We’ve got the week off, anyway.”

“Maybe. I’ll have to see what happens with my family, what they want to do—they’re all coming to visit after we visit my grandma, you know. They’re likely to want to do something.” She sounded excited. Her home life was usually boring, I remembered. Good. Excitement would be good for her.

“Well, hopefully we can go do something. I’ll have already done my shopping, but I’ll window-shop with you.”

“Hmm.” Maggie was thinking about something.

“Yeah?”

“Are you having any family come in for Christmas?”

I shook my head and then remembered that she couldn’t hear that over the phone.

“No, no one’s coming,” I said.

“Oh no, why?”

I laughed. “Don’t sound so worried. My mom and I will have Christmas together, just us two. Like we always do. It’s nice.”

“Why isn’t anyone coming? What about your dad?”

“Well . . . my dad isn’t really the Christmas type,” I said slowly, not feeling the need to explain. “My mom doesn’t have any surviving relatives on her side of the family, and we aren’t really close with my dad’s side of the family. Alex might come over. He’s staying in London for Christmas, though I think he’s spending most of Christmas with some other friends of his. His family’s sort of far away, up in the north, and he doesn’t have time to visit them.” I could hear Maggie breathe in, about to launch into some sort of speech. “Really, don’t sound so worried, though. It’s fine,” I said quickly, stopping her. She was uncertainly silent for a moment.

“Are you sure?”

I laughed.

“Of course I’m sure. I’ll have a wonderful Christmas. I always do.” And it was true. Most people’s Christmases were loud party-type events with screaming and piles of presents and lights strung on window ledges, but my mother and I just had quiet ones. And they were wonderful.

I remembered being twelve years old, sitting under the lit Christmas tree on Christmas Eve with my head on my mother’s shoulder, singing “What Child Is This?” under our breaths so we didn’t wake my father, who had gone to sleep upstairs. I remembered mugs of eggnog and warmth. I remembered a fire that flickered from across the room, sending brilliant light cascading across the floor. I remembered never wanting to sleep, never wanting anything to change, and I remembered falling asleep at two in the morning with my head in my mother’s lap.

“All right,” Maggie said, deciding to believe me. “Well, we’ll try to coordinate shopping for later this week.”

“Sure thing.”

“Sorry, I have to go, my mom’s calling me from the other room.”

“No worries, go.” I smiled cheerfully. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Right, laters,” Maggie said, and hung up.

I heard the dial tone and pulled the phone away from my ear. Slowly, I lowered it down in toward my legs, staring at the screen that told me “call ended” and thinking. The screen lit up my blue jacket with glowing light.

Michael’s memory had vanished from everyone’s mind, even from Maggie’s, mostly. She hadn’t mentioned him in weeks, not since that moment by the Thames. Maybe it was time. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I was floating away. I was like a boat adrift on a lake with no way home, and I didn’t regret it.

“I’m home.”

The house was empty, and no one responded. My voice echoed through the hallway loudly. At the end of the hall, the grandfather clock struck four.

Sometimes the house seemed so big.

I felt like a child. The steep stairs and the expensive photographs loomed over me like something unfamiliar. My feet, like always, sank too deep into the hallway rug. My feet made no noise. I could see only shadows now. Shadows of pale curtains and sleek polished wood tables. Shadows of glass vases and fresh roses and spare, modern bookshelves. Shadows of a place, nothing more.

With effort, I carried my bags upstairs, doing my best not to crunch them together too much. In the end, I had gotten a purse for my mom, a tie for my dad, a wallet for Alex—I had noticed the last time we had lunch that his was falling to shreds—and a beautiful dress for Maggie. It hung down in watery drapes from a wide neckline, trimmed in at the waist, and flowed out into a graceful skirt, longer in the back than in the front; it was made of ice-blue silk and chiffon and looked like it would rip when you held it, even though it was actually quite sturdy. I had tried it on for size in the dressing room, because we wore the same size even though she had more curves than me—I was taller than she was, so it balanced out—and when I twirled, the dress caught the light and glimmered like moonlight on the Thames. Maybe it was a bit too expensive, but when I saw it, I absolutely had to get it. It was just exactly her. I’d had Harrods wrap it in an icy-blue wrapping paper that almost exactly matched the color of the dress itself.

I put my bags on my bed, shed my jacket, and went to the bathroom. As I washed my hands, I stared in the mirror. My light-brown eyes, which changed color just a bit from day to day, were flecked with the faintest touches of gray around the edges, like Alex’s eyes. They looked nice today. Pretty. I combed my hair back behind my ears neatly, enjoying the look of my new cut.

The house phone rang, jolting me. It rang again. Remembering that I was the only one home, I walked into the hallway—where it was—not in any particular hurry, and answered it. It was probably someone trying to sell something. No one ever called the house phone anymore except for people trying to sell something.