Full Dark, No Stars(83)

But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book…

What Doreen said at least once in every book was murderers always overlook the obvious. You may depend on it, dears. And even as Tess wrote about atonement, she realized it would be impossible. Because Doreen was absolutely right.

Tess had worn a cap so that she wouldn’t leave hair that could be analyzed for DNA. She had worn gloves which she had never taken off, even while driving Alvin Strehlke’s pickup. It was not too late to burn this confession in Lester’s kitchen woodstove, drive to Brother Alvin’s considerably nicer house (house of bricks instead of house of sticks), get into her Expedition, and head back to Connecticut. She could go home, where Fritzy was waiting. At first glance she looked clear, and it might take the police a few days to get to her, but get to her they would. Because while she had been concentrating on the forensic molehills, she had overlooked the obvious mountain, exactly like the killers in the Knitting Society books.

The obvious mountain had a name: Betsy Neal. A pretty woman with an oval face, mismatched Picasso eyes, and a cloud of dark hair. She had recognized Tess, had even gotten her autograph, but that wasn’t the clincher. The clincher was going to be the bruises on her face (I hope that didn’t happen here, Neal had said), and the fact that Tess had asked about Alvin Strehlke, describing his truck and recognizing the ring when Neal mentioned it. Like a ruby, Tess had agreed.

Neal would see the story on TV or read it in the newspaper—with three dead from the same family, how could she avoid it?—and she would go to the police. The police would come to Tess. They would check the Connecticut gun-registration records as a matter of course and discover that Tess owned a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver known as a Lemon Squeezer. They would ask her to produce it so they could test-fire it and do comparisons to the bullets found in the three victims. And what was she going to say? Was she going to look at them from her blackened eyes and say (in a voice still hoarse from the choking Lester Strehlke had given her) that she lost it? Would she continue to stick to that story even after the dead women were found in the culvert pipe?

Tess picked up her borrowed pen and began writing again.

… what she says once in every book: murderers always overlook the obvious. Doreen also once took a leaf from Dorothy Sayers’s book and left a murderer with a loaded gun, telling him to take the honorable way out. I have a gun. My brother Mike is my only surviving close relative. He lives in Taos, New Mexico. I suppose he may inherit my estate. It depends on the legal ramifications of my crimes. If he does, I hope the authorities who find this letter will show it to him, and convey my wish that he donate the bulk to some charitable organization that works with women who have been sexually abused.

I am sorry about Big Driver—Alvin Strehlke. He was not the man who raped me, and Doreen is sure he didn’t rape and kill those other women, either.

Doreen? No, her. Doreen wasn’t real. But Tess was too tired to go back and change it. And what the hell—she was near the end, anyway.

For Ramona and that piece of garbage in the other room, I make no apologies. They are better off dead.

So, of course, am I.

She paused long enough to look back over the pages and see if there was anything she had forgotten. There didn’t appear to be, so she signed her name—her final autograph. The pen ran dry on the last letter and she put it aside.

“Got anything to say, Lester?” she asked.

Only the wind replied, gusting hard enough to make the little house groan in its joints and puff drafts of cold air.

She went back into the living room. She put the hat on his head and the ring on his finger. That was the way she wanted them to find him. There was a framed photo on the TV. In it, Lester and his mother stood with their arms around each other. They were smiling. Just a boy and his mum. She looked at it for awhile, then left.

- 42 -

She felt that she should go back to the deserted store where it had happened and finish her business there. She could sit for awhile in the weedy lot, listen to the wind ticking the old sign (YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU), thinking about whatever people think about in the final moments of a life. In her case that would probably be Fritzy. She guessed Patsy would take him, and that would be fine. Cats were survivors. They didn’t much care who fed them, as long as the bowl was full.

It wouldn’t take long to get to the store at this hour, but it still seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlke’s old truck and do it there. But she didn’t want to splatter her painfully written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering all the bloodshed detailed within it, and so—

She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now selling a robot floorwasher), and dropped them in Strehlke’s lap. “Hold that for me, Les,” she said.

“No problem,” he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony na**d shoulder. That was all right.

Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the driver’s door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadn’t she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one—he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. “I didn’t want his battery to run down,” she said, and laughed.