Mask Market

“You’re not being arrested,” I told her. “I’m just going to take you—”

“No!” the girl begged. “Please. I never did anything to you, did I? And I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Just don’t take me back.”

“Back where?”

“You know,” she said, accusingly. “Back home.”

I woke up coated in sweat. I felt a white-hot wire somewhere in my brain, writhing like a stepped-on snake.

Unless Beryl’s father was deep underground, any of the Internet “public records search” services would turn him up in an hour. Their best customers are stalkers, and they cater to their clientele with a wide variety of options. They’ll give you access to DMV records—there’s an extra charge for states where that’s against the law—tax rolls, employment history, student-loan databases. If you want, they’ll even send you some photos of the target’s house.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to make the list. There are humans who worship property rights. Their property. Some of them see therapists with their “abandonment issues.” Others visit a gun shop.

All stalkers have one thing in common: a profound, overwhelming, all-encompassing sense of entitlement. Leaving them is worse than an affront; it’s an act of deadly aggression, a threat to their core. Punishment is required.

Most people who flee don’t have the resources to really get gone. They have to work for a living. Open a bank account. Rent an apartment. Get a driver’s license.

Ex-cons talk about “getting off paper,” meaning no wants, no warrants, no detainers, no parole, no probation. But the one paper nobody ever gets off is a stalker’s “to do” list.

For some disturbos, the relationship they think was “broken off” never existed in the first place. A true erotomaniac can construct the illusion of reciprocated love out of a celebrity’s autograph, a form-letter answer to fan mail, a “shared moment” during a public appearance. Or from secret messages the victim sends in a magazine interview, a line he writes in a novel, a gesture with his hand during a TV show. Messages only the “special one” can decode.

There’s nothing so dangerous as an armed narcissist, but the gun’s no good without an address. That’s why the highest level of threat assessment is reserved for the ones protection experts call “travelers.” Some stalkers get their rocks off writing letters; travelers always deliver their messages in person.

The search services never ask customers what they intend to do with the information they buy. After all, people are entitled to their privacy.

“When I was in high school, girls got a name for what they’d do.

Or wouldn’t do,” Loyal said.

“It was a small town?”

“That’s right. But I don’t see why that would make any difference. When I was in school, if you ever went all the way with a boy, just once, every other boy in school would expect you to do the same with him.”

“How old were you when you figured that out?”

“I didn’t have to figure it out; it all got explained to me.”

“By your mother?”

“Nope. Not my father, either. They didn’t talk about things like that. It was my brother, my big brother. Speed told me—”

“Your brother’s name was Speed?”

“Yes, it was,” she said, hands on hips, as if daring me to make something of it.

I held up my hands in surrender.

“Speed told me how boys talk. See, I always thought it was just girls who did that. I remember him saying it: ‘There’s some things I can’t protect you from, sis. Talk like that, once it gets out of the bottle, you can never put it back in.’ I never forgot that.”

“He was a good protector, your brother?”

“Oh, he was just the best! Some of the boys I went to school with, they could get a little rough, be too free with their hands, especially when they’d had some liquor in them. But none of them wanted to get Speed mad. He wasn’t the biggest boy in the school, but he was just so…willing. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure. I came up with guys like that. You might be able to beat them, but they’d make you do it. Cost you something to try, too.”

“That’s him exactly!” she said, clapping her hands. “It’s like you knew him.”

“Maybe I will, someday.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Speed’s gone. A year after I left, he was killed in an accident over to the mill. About killed my mother, too. She didn’t ever seem to get over him dying. She kept saying it wasn’t right—the parent is supposed to go first.

“In the beginning, she was just plain mad. Mad at everyone and everything. Stopped going to church. Told the preacher if taking Speed was part of God’s plan she didn’t want any part of it. Or Him. Then, one night, she went to sleep and never woke up. Never let anyone say you can’t die of a broken heart, Lew. Because my momma did, sure as I’m standing here today.”

“Didn’t you want to go—”

“Home? Well, sure, I did. I mean, I did go, for Speed’s funeral, and to stay with my mother for a bit. But it was her, her and my father, who got me to leave. They said Speed would have wanted me to try. I knew, the minute they said those words, it was true. Speed was always willing, and I had to be, too. Because I loved him so much.”

“He’d be proud of you, Loyal.”

“For trying? Yes, I guess he would be. Even if I didn’t succeed, I tried and tried.”

“You make it sound past-tense, girl.”

“It kind of is,” she said, as if really considering the idea for the first time. “Remember what I was talking to you about? My apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s kind of my exit line. I am going back home. And I guess I could, you know, just sell out and go. That other plan—the one I told you about?—that’s only a good one if there’s a reason for me to stay.”

“You mean, like, a part or something?”

“More like a ‘something,’” she said, looking up at me through the veil of her long lashes.

“Spring came in like treachery,” the precise-featured man next to me said. We were sitting on an outdoor bench on Central Park West. “It popped up like a mugger out of the dark, pounced, and stole away with the cold. Get it?”

“Nice,” I said. He was wearing a black quilted jacket, left open to display a turquoise turtleneck jersey over black narrow-cuffed slacks and black slip-ons just a half-glisten less shiny than patent leather. I knew four things about him: he went by “Styx,” he was a writer, and he was plugged into a bunch of data banks.

The other thing I knew about him didn’t matter to me, and that mattered a lot to him.

All he knew about me was that I get paid for what I do, and I pay for what I want.

“You ever hear of Surry, New Hampshire?” he said.

“No,” I told him. Talking with this guy, the less words the better.

“There’s no ‘e’ in it. You spell it like it was ‘Furry,’ only with an ‘S’ in front, all right?”

“Sure.”

“If there was an ‘e’ there, it would be like those hansom cabs in the park. You know, a ‘surrey with the fringe on top.’”

“Ah.”

“It’s not far from Keene…?”

“Is that anywhere near Hinsdale?”

“Hinsdale? What’s up there?”