Distemper Read online

  She shot up off the couch but didn’t take a step forward. “What do they want?”

  “Hmm… How to put this? Well, darling, the fact is they want to make sure you’re alive.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Just as you say. Apparently, they have received eight phone calls in the past three hours identifying you as the body in the woods based on that dreadful sketch. I told them you still have a pulse, but they remain unconvinced. So you tell them.” She crossed the room and delivered the phone.

  “Uh, hello? Yes, this is Marci Simmons. Detective who… ?” She walked off to the kitchen with her finger in one ear and the phone in the other.

  “So what did I tell you?” C.A. said. “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

  “Do you think there’s any way she might be right?” Steve asked. “Do you think there’s some guy out there who likes…”

  “Look,” I said. “If I were Marci, I’d be creeped out too, and so would anybody else. But I’m sure the truth is a hell of a lot less interesting.”

  “Don’t you wonder what she went through?” C.A. said, apropos of nothing. “I mean, don’t you think about it? What exactly happened to her?”

  “I try not to,” Emma said.

  “Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot, wondering how he grabbed her or whatever, you know.”

  “How very morbid.”

  “No, I know what she means,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it too—trying to decide whether she did something stupid, drove around with her car doors unlocked maybe.”

  “Or hitchhiked,” C.A. said. “Or let the wrong guy into her apartment to read the meter.”

  “Or parked next to a van,” I said.

  “Good God,” Emma said. “Do they teach this sort of thing in high school?”

  “Try sixth grade,” C.A. said.

  “Dreadful country.”

  “So you’ve remarked,” I said as Marci came back in. “What’d the cops say?”

  “Half my first-year anatomy class called to ID me. A couple of people from tap class too. Which is pretty stupid since they know I was alive and well as of last Sunday.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.” She sat back down on the couch and one of her three cats jumped heavily from the arm onto her lap. Marci didn’t even notice, which is quite an accomplishment since Frank—a black-and-white tuxedo cat named after Sinatra—is fifteen pounds if he’s an ounce.

  “Come on, what did the cops say?” Steve prodded.

  “That there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “So there you go.”

  “They said there was no reason to believe it wasn’t… what did they call it? ‘An isolated incident.’ And her looking like me was just a coincidence, and I’m not in any danger, and anyway I wasn’t the only girl on campus who got misidentified.”

  “That should make you feel better,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t. I guess I… I don’t know. Sympathize with her more.”

  “Perfectly natural. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. But you know what? Pretty soon they’re going to catch the guy and send him someplace where he’s dating guys named Spike. You’ll see. It’ll all be over in a couple of days.”

  I was trying—and let’s face it, failing—to sound tough. But the truth was that the whole situation got to me, like it got to all of us. I’d seen death before, up close and personal, but it didn’t make it any less frightening. The dead girl in the snow was about our age, could have fit right there in our living room. The thought of her made us feel both stronger and more fragile. More than anything, she made us think about how lucky we were just not to be her.

  We stayed up absurdly late that night talking about it, maybe a little bit scared to go to sleep because of what we might dream. And we might have stayed just a little bit scared if there hadn’t been another dead girl, then another and another. And we might have had more midnight talks, thinking of the whole business in the third person, if I hadn’t found the second body myself.

  2

  IT WAS A SATURDAY NEAR THE END OF MAY, JUST OVER SIX weeks after the chemistry professor’s ski trip from hell. I’d picked up my mountain bike from its spring tune-up the night before and gotten out the door at nine; my housemates were all still unconscious or snuggled up with whoever they’d gone to bed with. In upstate New York, May is not to be confused with summer (sometimes it can’t even be confused with spring), and I was wearing my heavy Vassar sweatshirt and a pair of biking tights. I’d only recently traded halfhearted jogging for halfhearted mountain biking, and it was the first ride of the season. My muscles were flaccid from not enough time on the Lifecycle over the winter, so even though I’d promised myself twenty miles I knew within two minutes that I’d be lucky to do ten. Since we live downtown in the flats between three hills, I had exactly one choice of where I could head without doing some serious uphill. I wound my way on back roads until I got to Route 13, the kind of fast-food and chain-store strip that hulks at the edge of every American town, and headed south.

  I kept on the main drag for a while and turned off onto a country road that degenerated to dirt after a couple of miles. When I say mountain biking, I really mean road biking with fat tires and eighteen gears, but I usually try to go off into the woods a little just so I can say I did. There’s a nice gentle trail about fifteen minutes away, wide without too many rocks and roots to send a girl to her doom, and it’s just about my limit. Before I swung onto the path, I remember thinking that I was probably going to regret it. This turned out to be one mother of an understatement.

  It was a sunny morning, which is unusual for Gabriel (affectionately known as the place clouds go to die). There was bright light coming through the trees, dappling the ground and making it hard to distinguish the hazards from the dirt. Even though it was chilly enough to make me comfy in my sweats, there was a hint of afternoon heat; every soccer mom in town would be poised for a flower-planting frenzy.

  The path rose gently at first, with occasional muddy ruts and crisscrossing tracks that showed I wasn’t the first biker out there that season. I had my Walkman on, which the traffic law says you’re not supposed to do but I couldn’t possibly exercise without, and as the grade got sharper I was listening to Ben Folds Five and sweating hard.

  Ever since it happened, I’ve wondered how everything would have turned out if I hadn’t decided to stop when I did. It was all so arbitrary. I wanted to quit sooner, but didn’t; I could have kept riding longer, but I didn’t do that either. “Alice Childress” ended, and since the song was the only thing keeping me going, I stopped and got off. I leaned the bike against a tree and pulled the water bottle off its rack, and as I took a drink I saw something glinting in a patch of sunlight about twenty yards off. To this day I don’t know what made me walk over for a closer look; maybe after what had happened the month before, I already knew what I was going to find. But then again, I kind of doubt that; knowing myself, if I had any idea what was out there, I would have climbed right back on my bike and fled.

  The first thing I saw was her shoes, laid atop a stack of clothing. The shiny thing was the buckle on her Mary Janes, which were all the rage that spring, when every college woman seemed obsessed with dressing like Lolita. There was something plaid under the shoes, but that’s all I remember, because the next thing I saw was the girl herself. They talk about death being a peaceful thing, but there was nothing peaceful about this, and nothing natural, either. Her eyes were bugged out and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth, all splotched and purple. She was stark naked, with big breasts that rolled to either side and made her look not only vulnerable but invaded, as though someone had taken her life and her dignity at the same time.

  I’m not proud. I screamed my head off, before something made me clamp my hand over my mouth to shut myself up. In retrospect, maybe I was clued in by the fact that the scene was so obviously fresh. She was clean, not covered with leaves or mud; it had rained the previous night, but her
clothes didn’t look wet. Some instinct told me that she’d been put there in the past few hours—minutes even—and that meant that whoever did it could still be there.

  I spun around, checking out every direction, but I couldn’t see anyone. That didn’t mean anything, though; off the bike path, the woods are thick with old-growth trees big enough for two people to hide behind. He—they—could be anywhere, waiting to swap one victim for another. I stared down at the body, picturing myself lying there in her place, with my sweatshirt and tights and sports bra folded…

  A noise—a bird or an animal or something way worse—shook the trees and a branch went snap. Whatever it was, it sent me running, snagging my tights on the undergrowth. I was trying to watch where I was going and look around at the same time, and it didn’t work; I went sprawling over a log and landed on all fours. As I scrambled back up I was sure I could hear something behind me but I was afraid if I looked back it would be all over. Five seconds later I was by my bike. I forced myself to wait long enough to turn it around before I jumped on and went barreling down the hill.

  If I’d had time to think about it, I would have realized that even if someone was chasing me, there was no way he could catch me on foot when I was going twenty miles an hour, but all I could think of was getting away. I was coasting faster and faster, the trees whipping by in a gray-brown blur, my helmet swinging lamely from the handlebars where I’d left it when I got off. I must have hit a rock, because the next thing I knew I was somersaulting over the handlebars. I landed with a thud, and then I was no use to anybody.

  What happened right after that is sort of hazy, which the doctor tells me is perfectly normal for someone who flew ass over teakettle ten feet in the air. I was out for a while, how long I don’t know, but somehow I got back on my bike and drove into town. The police station is on Spring Street, a half-hour ride from where I fell, and I have a very dim memory of thinking I had to get there. I know I could have just gone out to the road and flagged someone down, but at the time it never even occurred to me. I rode all the way to the cops, ditched my bike, and dragged myself inside.

  There was a uniformed officer behind a heavy plastic partition. He took one look at me and disappeared, which in my altered state seemed the height of rudeness until I realized he was coming through a door to my left. Later, I found out he’d taken me for a battered wife.

  “I need to see the police…”

  “Ma’am, what’s happened?”

  “I need to report… a murder.”

  “Let’s have you sit down.”

  “No, I don’t want to sit down.” I was swaying on my feet, and everything hurt. “Please, she’s out in the woods. Someone has to go get her. Don’t you understand? It’s just like the other one. I found her. I found another dead girl in the woods. Please, you have to go get her.”

  The cop got it instantly; after all, we don’t see a whole lot of murders around here. The previous body was hanging over everyone, and I was telling him there was another. “Can you wait right here?” I nodded, which was a big mistake, since it made the whole hallway spin and start to fade at the edges. I wanted to sit then, but I was afraid if I took a step I was only going in one direction, which was down. I heard a door open behind me.

  “Miss,” said a man’s voice. “I’m Detective Cody. I need to ask you a few questions.”

  I turned around to face him, and that was it. I got a glimpse of reddish hair, and the next thing I knew I was keeling over in a full-out faint. The last thing I remember is someone catching me before I hit the ground, and the random thought that whoever he was, he smelled pretty good.

  I woke up in the hospital, which was exactly where I belonged. You always see in movies where the hero gets really badly hurt but he has to go save the world so he refuses to stay in bed and checks himself out against the advice of his doctor. All I wanted to do was lie under the covers and have some male nurse bring me sugar-free Jell-O. But the first thing I heard was yelling from out in the hall.

  “So when can I see her?”

  “When she wakes up. I told you, she’s had a damn good bump on the head.”

  “Don’t you have to wake her up to make sure she doesn’t have a concussion?”

  “We’ve already ascertained that. She doesn’t. But she’s got two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and thirty-two stitches. She needs her rest.”

  Jesus, I thought, they’d better be talking about somebody else. No such luck. “Doctor, that girl is a witness to a homicide. The last thing she said before she passed out was that she had found a body. Now, if she’s telling the truth, it means there’s a dead girl out there somewhere. The longer we wait, the more likely it is my crime scene will be compromised. That means the less likely we’re going to be able to find this son of a bitch. It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours. That means another night that somebody’s parents are going to go to bed not knowing if their daughter is alive or dead. Do you really want that on your head?”

  “Detective, I appreciate your situation, but I can’t…”

  “Five minutes. That’s all.”

  Silence. I opened my mouth to call out that I was awake and all their manly arguing was for nothing, but when I breathed in I got a sharp jab that almost made me throw up. “Your word?” I heard the doctor say.

  “Five minutes.” There was a light knock on the door and before I could even try to answer they came in. “See, she’s already awake.”

  The doctor had gray hair and a stethoscope around his neck, like something out of an ad for cough syrup. “Do you feel well enough to talk?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m Dr. Krauss. This is Detective Cody from the Gabriel police. He wants to ask you a few questions. I told him”—he turned to the other man—“to keep it short.”

  “It’s fine,” I croaked. “I want to talk to him.”

  “I’ll be back to check on you in an hour, and the nurses’ station is just down the hall. If you need anything, just ring the bell.”

  As soon as the doctor left, the detective pulled a chair up by the bed. “I’ll make this quick, I promise. What’s your name?”

  “Alex Bernier.”

  “Alex, I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll get right to the point. The desk sergeant said you mentioned a body.”

  “Out in the woods. It was awful. I was riding my bike and I found her.”

  “Where?”

  I told him. “It was just like they described the other girl last month, the one on Connecticut Hill. She was naked, and her clothes were next to her. She looked like she’d been strangled. She had these odd marks around her neck.”

  “Did you touch the body?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did you see anyone else out there?”

  “I’m not sure. I thought I heard someone, or some thing anyway. Maybe it was an animal. But I got so scared I took off down the hill on my bike and then I crashed.”

  “How did you get to the station?”

  “Bike.”

  “Six miles? Like that?” He aimed his little black cop notebook at the swath of bandages on my head.

  “I guess.”

  “Hold on one second.” He pulled a phone out of his jacket pocket and I could hear him giving directions to the crime scene. “Listen, I have to go. But I’ll need to get a formal statement from you later.”

  “Okay.”

  “One more thing. I need your word that you won’t discuss the details of this case with anyone.”

  “Sure.”

  “An officer will be in here in a minute to get your name and number. Your parents must be worried sick.”

  “My parents? They’re in…” I tried to remember. “Colombia. Or maybe it’s Panama by now. They’re on a cruise.”

  “So who are you staying with?”

  “Huh?”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Who’s taking care of you?”

  “Taking care of me? What are you talking about?”

  H
e stopped short. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six. How old are you?”

  His skin was tinging red around the scalp. “Never mind. Just never mind. Just tell the officer who we should call.”

  “Oh, man, my housemates. They must be going nuts.” I tried to sit up, and thought better of it.

  “Anyway, thank you for your help.”

  “You’re welcome.” He turned to go, and as he opened his coat to put his phone away I caught sight of a dark red splotch on his shirt. “Is that blood?”

  He stopped in the doorway and looked down at the six-inch stain. “Yeah.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s not my blood. It’s yours. From the police station.”

  “That was you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good catch,” I said, but he’d already bolted down the hall.

  3

  MY FRIEND MAD CAME TO PICK ME UP FROM THE HOSPItal. He drove his car, which made it quite an occasion, since Jake Madison pulls his ancient Volvo out of the alley behind his apartment roughly four times a year. Mad walks everywhere, not because he’s environmentally conscious but because he believes deeply in not going to jail for DWI. It’s no accident he lives 132 steps from the paper and 96 from our favorite bar.

  “Shit, Bernier, you look like hell.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure. Now will you get me out of here?”

  “You sure did fuck yourself up.”

  “Come on, Mad, it isn’t nice to blame the victim.”

  The nurse came and though I’d had visions of being wheeled out like Cleopatra, in the end the elevator was tied up and I had to hoof it down three flights to the front door. Mad offered to do the gentlemanly thing and bring the car around but it seemed silly since he was parked thirty feet from the entrance. He did open the door for me, however, and when I sat down a spring jabbed my rear end right through my jeans.

  “How many stitches you get?”

  “Thirty-two, divided evenly among my knees, elbow, and pretty little noggin. How’d you like my bald patch?” I parted my hair to show him. “They shaved me. Cool, huh?”