Full Dark, No Stars(63)

“Say I hit my stupid face on the newel post at the bottom. I could even…”

Even put a little mark on the post, of course she could. Possibly with the meat-tenderizing hammer she had in one of her kitchen drawers. Nothing gaudy, just a tap or two to chip the paint. Such a story wouldn’t fool a doctor (or a sharp old lady detective like Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society), but it would fool sweet Patsy McC, whose husband had surely never raised a hand to her a single time in the twenty years they’d been together.

“It’s not that I have anything to be ashamed about,” she whispered at the woman in the mirror. The New Woman with the crooked nose and the puffy lips. “It’s not that.” True, but public exposure would make her ashamed. She would be naked. A na**d victim.

But what about the women, Tessa Jean? The women in the pipe?

She would have to think about them, but not tonight. Tonight she was tired, in pain, and harrowed to the bottom of her soul.

Deep inside her (in her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. The man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment’s hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger.

- 18 -

She chipped at the newel post with the meat-tenderizing hammer, by then so tired she felt like a dream in some other woman’s head. She examined the mark, decided it looked too deliberate, and gave several more light taps around the edges of the blow. When she thought it looked like something she might have done with the side of her face—where the worst bruise was—she went slowly up the stairs and down the hall, holding her gun in one hand.

For a moment she hesitated outside her bedroom door, which was standing ajar. What if he was in there? If he had her purse, he had her address. The burglar alarm had not been set until she got back (so sloppy). He could have parked his old F-150 around the corner. He could have forced the kitchen door lock. It probably wouldn’t have taken much more than a chisel.

If he was here, I’d smell him. That mansweat. And I’d shoot him. No “Lie down on the floor,” no “Keep your hands up while I dial 911,” no horror-movie bullshit. I’d just shoot him. But you know what I’d say first?

“You like it, it likes you,” she said in her low rasp of a voice. Yes. That was it exactly. He wouldn’t understand, but she would.

She discovered she sort of wanted him in her room. That probably meant the New Woman was more than a little crazy, but so what? If it all came out then, it would be worth it. Shooting him would make public humiliation bearable. And look at the bright side! It would probably help sales!

I’d like to see the terror in his eyes when he realized I really meant to do it. That might make at least some of this right.

It seemed to take her groping hand an age to find the bedroom light-switch, and of course she kept expecting her fingers to be grabbed while she fumbled. She took off her clothes slowly, uttering one watery, miserable sob when she unzipped her pants and saw dried blood in her pubic hair.

She ran the shower as hot as she could stand it, washing the places that could bear to be washed, letting the water rinse the rest. The clean hot water. She wanted his smell off her, and the mildewy smell of the carpet remnant, too. Afterward, she sat on the toilet. This time peeing hurt less, but the bolt of pain that went through her head when she tried—very tentatively—to straighten her leaning nose made her cry out. Well, so what? Nell Gwyn, the famous Elizabethan actress, had had a bent nose. Tess was sure she had read that somewhere.

She put on flannel pajamas and shuffled to bed, where she lay with all the lights on and the Lemon Squeezer .38 on the night table, thinking she would never sleep, that her inflamed imagination would turn every sound from the street into the approach of the giant. But then Fritzy jumped up on the bed, curled himself beside her, and began to purr. That was better.

I’m home, she thought. I’m home, I’m home, I’m home.

- 19 -

When she woke up, the inarguably sane light of six AM was streaming through the windows. There were things that needed to be done and decisions that needed to be made, but for the moment it was enough to be alive and in her own bed instead of stuffed into a culvert.

This time peeing felt almost normal, and there was no blood. She got into the shower again, once more running the water as hot as she could stand it, closing her eyes and letting it beat on her throbbing face. When she’d had all of that she could take, she worked shampoo into her hair, doing it slowly and methodically, using her fingers to massage her scalp, skipping the painful spot where he must have hit her. At first the deep scratch on her back stung, but that passed and she felt a kind of bliss. She hardly thought of the shower scene in Psycho at all.

The shower was always where she had done her best thinking, a womblike environment, and if she had ever needed to think both hard and well, it was now.

I don’t want to see Dr. Hedstrom, and I don’t need to see Dr. Hedstrom. That decision’s been made, although later—a couple of weeks from now, maybe, when my face looks more or less normal again—I’ll have to get checked out for STDs…

“Don’t forget the AIDS test,” she said, and the thought made her grimace hard enough to hurt her mouth. It was a scary thought. Nevertheless, the test would have to be taken. For her own peace of mind. And none of that addressed what she now recognized as this morning’s central issue. What she did or didn’t do about her own violation was her own business, but that was not true of the women in the pipe. They had lost far more than she. And what about the next woman the giant attacked? That there would be another she had no doubt. Maybe not for a month or a year, but there would be. As she turned off the shower Tess realized (again) that it might even be her, if he went back to check the culvert and found her gone. And her clothes gone from the store, of course. If he’d looked through her purse, and surely he had, then he did have her address.