Priscilla pulled back the yellowed sheer curtain over the window in her tiny kitchen and looked out over the parking lot in the back of her apartment building. That damn Mr. Berriman was supposed to have shoveled the snow and salted the walks yesterday afternoon, but of course he’d not taken care of it, and when Priscilla stepped outside last night for a breath of fresh air, she’d been nearly upended by the icy concrete. Now, she noticed, the walks were clean.
An overfed tabby cat jumped from the breakfast table to the counter and rubbed his face along Priscilla’s forearm.
“Well, Doodles,” she cooed, gently scratching the cat’s ears as she looked outside. “It looks like that awful man might actually have done his job for once.”
She leaned down into the furry face, rubbing noses with him as the cat purred happily. “Yes, Doodles, we can go get our paper now.”
Behind her, another cat at least twice the size it should be rubbed her shoulders against the doorframe. Her yellow hair was so long it draped on the linoleum and was equally thick and well-combed. Priscilla turned.
“Hello, Prissy,” she said. Priscilla picked up her cup of herbal tea and downed the last inch of it, then set the cup in the sink. She pulled her overcoat off an enameled cup hook she’d screwed into the plaster at a skewed angle. At the door to her apartment, she leaned down and gingerly pulled on a pair of rubber boots over her thick wool socks. Then she hooked her purse over her shoulder and walked down the two flights of stairs and out into a freezing late February Sunday in Nashville.
She walked to the corner of Cherokee and West End Avenues, then waited cautiously for the light to change so she could cross the five-lane street. Like many Nashvillians, Priscilla was terrified of driving in the snow, so much so that at the slightest hint of frozen precipitation, she bolted to the grocery store, stocked up on enough food to last a month, then fought her way back to her apartment and locked her car for the duration.
The temperatures had risen into the high thirties, and with the Sunday church traffic jam, much of the ice on the road had turned to dirty yellow-gray slush. Her boots alternated a plopping sound with a sucking noise as she trudged across the street and up onto the sidewalk. It was another three blocks to her favorite bookstore, which occupied a building that had once been a grand, Art Deco movie palace that had fallen on hard times. If the Bookstar hadn’t moved in, the building would have faced demolition and, no doubt, been replaced by another twenty-four-hour Walgreens or Eckerd drugstore.
It felt good to be out of the apartment. Priscilla hadn’t had a walk since the latest snow had started falling the previous Friday. She was in her third day of hibernation and starting to get a touch of cabin fever. At seventy, Priscilla still considered herself in good shape, and she liked to walk.
Ten minutes later, she crossed the barely passable parking lot of the Bookstar and stepped into the lobby. The archi-tects who supervised the conversion from movie palace to bookstore had done a wonderful job of preserving the look and feel of the building. A grand staircase curved to the right up to what had once been the balcony, but was now the children’s books section. To her left, Priscilla stopped and glanced-as was her habit-at the framed pictures and autographs of the stars who had once visited the theater. Her favorite was Errol Flynn, although the photograph of Johnny Weissmuller in a business suit was also very appealing. And next to the framed pictures of movie stars was a white stone tablet mounted on the wall in a clear Plexiglas box covered with the autographs of famous authors who had visited the building since it became a bookstore. Priscilla’s favorites, as always, were the mystery writers, especially the women: Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Sharyn McCrumb, Deborah Crombie. She loved mysteries; they were her life. She read eight to ten a week.
“Hello, Miss Janovich,” the young, pretty girl behind the cash register said as Priscilla passed the counter.
Priscilla turned, smiled. “Hello, Karen,” she said.
“The new Grafton just came out in paperback,” the clerk offered. “I pulled a copy for you, just in case.”
“Bless you, my dear,” Priscilla said. “And did you save me a copy of the Sunday
“Didn’t have to.” The girl walked around from behind the checkout counter and stepped over to the pile of newspapers in a rack by the wall. “With the weather like this, we haven’t had much of a run this morning.”
“You know, I have to have my Sunday
“I will,” the clerk said, picking up a copy of the newspaper with both hands so as not to spill any of the inside sections.
As she handed the newspaper to Priscilla, she suppressed a giggle. Her boss had told her how Priscilla Janovich had made a single three-day trip to New York City once in her entire life, back in 1965, and ever since had considered herself both an authority on and a native of the city.
“Thank you, dear,” Priscilla said, handing the exact change for the newspaper across the counter.
“See you Wednesday, Miss Janovich,” the girl said.
“You be careful in this weather, dear,” Priscilla warned as she walked away.
Twenty minutes later, Priscilla Janovich carefully measured a pony of vodka into her steaming cup of chamomile tea. The vodka cooled it off just enough to swallow and en-hanced the already relaxing effect of the herb.
The fat yellow longhair padded into the living room just as Priscilla sat down on the couch and put her cup on the end table to her right.
“Hello, Prissy,” she said. “Where’s Doodles? Where’s Doodles, baby? We’re all going to sit together and read now.”
In a gesture of Pavlovian feline behavior, the obese cat managed to hop up onto the couch with only a minimum of panting. Priscilla leaned over and rubbed her hand across the top of the cat’s head. The cat purred like a tiny motor-boat.
Priscilla unfolded the first section of the
She read thoroughly, thinking over each issue, each statement, and painstakingly formed an opinion in an election in which she would never be allowed to vote.
She finished the jumps to that article, then turned back to the front page. There was an in-depth story on the latest unfolding Israeli peace initiative, followed by an interview with a senator who had unleashed yet another scathing attack on the president.
“Don’t they ever get tired of it?” Priscilla asked Prissy out loud. “You’d think they’d leave the poor man alone.”
Prissy raised her head and purred loudly.
“Yes, Prissums, that’s right,” Priscilla agreed. She finished the front-page lead story, then turned to page two of the first section. Most of that page was covered with a long feature story headlined:
SERIAL KILLER, DUBBED “ALPHABET MAN” BY FEDS, ELUDES CAPTURE FOR SEVEN YEARS
Priscilla smiled. She was particularly fond of serial killer stories. Was it Mary Higgins Clark who’d written that wonderful novel about the serial killer, or was it that Patricia Cornwell?
“No matter,” she whispered. After a while, they all began to run together.
Priscilla read on:
CINCINNATI, OHIO: On a blustery June Monday in 1995, nineteen-year-old Susan McCrory left her home in a suburban Cincinnati neighborhood and climbed into her Ford Escort station wagon en route to her summer job at a nearby McDonald’s. She never made it.
Priscilla Janovich read the news account as if it were a novel, creating visual images in her mind as the story unfolded of a young woman home from college on summer vacation who worked the morning shift at a local fast- food restaurant. The young woman disappeared, and for several days there was no trace of her. Then two teenage boys who’d rented a storage unit to store their fledgling garage band’s instruments opened the door and found the young woman’s body on the cold concrete floor. She’d been horribly murdered, tortured slowly and for a long time before death mercifully released her. On the cinder-block wall behind the drum set, a letter had been painted on the wall in blood: the letter A.
Priscilla shuddered. What a horrible story, she thought, and continued reading. Nine months later, the
