Whisper to Me(8)

That was it. The extent of our conversation.

Of course I had no intention of taking the bus, even if there was a murderer in town. I mean, I didn’t fit the victim profile. So far, the killer had targeted what the media called “sex workers.” Prostitutes, a girl from a massage parlor, a stripper. And it was morning—not really a time of day conducive to serial killings.

I grabbed a bagel and went out the front door. It was still early—in the east, out over the ocean, bundles of pink clouds were gathered, achingly beautiful against the blue sky. I barely noticed.

Jagging right and then left onto Fourth, I headed toward school. I started eating the bagel and imagined I was on an interstellar transport and it was a space-age snack, designed to fuel my body and provide all my nutrients, the old-fashioned mess of a meal crammed into something convenient and tasteless.

I walked through layer three, the long strip of suburban houses between the boardwalk and the empty lots, the faceless wide streets of malls. I passed a couple of people getting little kids into cars, someone pulling a suitcase on wheels, just back from a business trip maybe. I wasn’t really concentrating, but then something made every detail snap into focus, and I was standing by an orange Chevy Camaro, on the back a Calvin-pissing-on-a-Ford logo.

The something was the voice, and it said:

“I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. It’s all your fault.”

It goes without saying by this point that there was no one around me. Just another fake-clapboard house, that orange Chevy, a bike lying on its side in a brown yard. I wish I could describe what the voice sounded like. A real person, but not someone I knew. About forty, maybe? It’s also impossible to convey the tone. When you write words down there are gaps between them, spaces, but spoken they run like liquid, merge together. It was a middle-aged woman with a New Jersey accent, that’s pretty much all I can tell you.

One thing though: the voice was angry. Very, very angry.

I didn’t think; I was tired. I just talked back. I don’t know why.

“It’s my fault you’re dead?” I said. “Who the hell are you?” I was kind of aggressive. This will become relevant.

The voice didn’t say anything. I held tight to my bag and kept on going to school. I was shaking, my heart racing. I don’t think it crossed my mind then that something was wrong with me. I just thought: It’s a dead person. Or an angel, or something.

A strange angel, yes. But I don’t know. I just assumed it was supernatural, a phantasm of some kind. Which frankly scared me a hell of a lot. I was shaking as I continued the walk to school, past the long-dead FRANKIE’S GO KARTS with its vast cracked parking lot, furred with weeds, its broken neon sign pointing to the ticket office and its fading painted race courses.

At school I was distracted. That didn’t make a big difference from usual. I was pretty much coasting through my junior year. It drove my dad mad. He kept saying, “You’re a smart girl, Cass. You spend half your life in the library. Why are you wasting your abilities?” I told him once that using my abilities at school would be the biggest waste of them, and he dragged me to a kitchen chair and made me sit there till my assignments were done, so I never said that again.

Anyway, when I arrived at school, a few people turned and spoke low to each other when they saw me. I saw others glance at me and kind of raise their eyebrows. I figured the news was circulating about the foot on the beach, and me being the one who found it.

And underneath the buzz of curiosity, something else. Fear. I sensed it as I walked up the stairs, especially from the girls. That anxiety that had been there in the town, silent but present, like a tumor, since the killings began. That anxiety that said, So far it has been sex workers, but what if he starts on other girls?

Even as I walked, I saw people pulling away from me. Like I was a bad-luck charm. Like getting too close to me might get you killed.

Great. Another reason to be ostracized. It had to be me who found it. Just had to be.

Weirdly, though, I could swear a couple of kids looked at me enviously, hesitating, almost like they wanted the scoop, wanted to know if I knew anything. I mean, it was national at this point. How fourteen young women had disappeared in the last couple of years, never to be seen again. How the cops supposedly didn’t care enough to solve it because the victims were in the sex industry, and if it were ordinary girls then the murderer would have been apprehended long ago.

I don’t know how “Houdini Killer” got started. But by then it was already being used by news anchors, commentators in the New York Times, everyone. Because of the way that the bodies never turned up, like the killer was a magician.

Except that now, part of one had. And it had been me who found it, me who hit the jackpot with a severed foot. Even so, I was surprised by the speed with which it had gotten around, my discovery. Dad had told me it was hush-hush. I guess the officers, at least one of whom was FBI or something, didn’t know how small New Jersey towns operate. Someone at the station would have told his wife, who told their neighbor, who told Marjorie the school secretary, and that was it. Someone has probably written an equation for the speed of gossip.

I walked up to the main doors, and that was when someone tripped me. I felt the foot hook my leg, and I went sprawling. I put my hands out and landed on them, hard, the jolt fizzing electric up my arms and into my shoulders. I cried out, involuntarily.