hair that was hanging loose down her back.
Sarah screamed with both terror and pain as he yanked savagely on the fall of her hair, dragging her backward to the ground. She reached up, instinctively trying to grab his hands, but he wrapped her long hair around his fist and dragged her across the floor. She was screaming in pain now, fighting and clawing and trying to get at him, but the worst damage she could do was a few scratches to his hands. He hardly seemed to feel them.
“You cannot steal a man’s family away! I will get the law after you!” he was saying.
“The law is on their way right now!” Sarah cried. “I sent for Detective Sergeant Malloy! He knows what you did!”
Twisting in a vain attempt to free herself, Sarah caught sight of the poker she kept beside her kitchen stove. If she could reach it…
But Otto jerked her head back and put his face right against hers so that she could feel the spittle when he shouted, “What did I do, you whore? Tell me what I did!”
“You killed Gerda!” she shouted right back.
She shocked him so much that he reared back, loosening his hold on her just enough that she could lunge for the poker. Her fingers closed around the cool metal just as he dragged her back again, wrenching a scream from her throat.
But she had the poker now and the element of surprise. She swung it, aiming for his knee, the most vulnerable part of the leg. The angle was poor, but she felt the satisfying thump of solid metal hitting solid flesh and heard his answering grunt of pain.
He swore as she lunged for freedom, but she hadn’t hurt him badly enough or else his fingers were too tightly woven into her hair, because he pulled her back with a howl of triumph. She swung the poker again, unable to aim, just hoping for a good, solid hit, but this time he grabbed the end of it with his free hand.
Although she clung with both hands, he was stronger than she, in spite of his lanky frame, and he wrenched it from her fingers and flung it away. Lars Otto didn’t need a weapon to hurt a mere woman.
When she looked up, she saw his eyes blazing with a hatred she could only imagine. He drew back his fist, and Sarah covered her head with both arms.
“If you hurt me, they’ll know who did it! I left word at the police station that you’re Gerda’s killer!”
“You’re lying!” he cried, but at least he didn’t hit her.
“Agnes told me you killed Gerda! She said you came back that night with your hands all bruised and bloody. She said you were nervous, and you’ve been angry ever since Gerda died.”
“She was a whore! I saw her that night. She was in an alley with a man. She lifted her skirts for him like it was nothing! She had no shame!”
“And she wouldn’t lift her skirts for you, would she?” Sarah guessed. “Is that why you killed her? Because she wouldn’t give you what she gave others so freely?”
“You do not know what it was like. You do not know how she fomented me. Showing herself like a harlot, telling me the things she did with other men! She wanted me to lust after her. She was not happy unless every man lusted after her.”
“And so you started hitting her, just the way you hit your wife, but you couldn’t stop yourself, could you?” Sarah said. “You kept hitting her and hitting her until she was dead.”
“She deserved to die!”
“And what about Agnes? Does she deserve to die, too?” Sarah tried, trying to break through his blood lust. “Are you going to kill her next?”
Sarah watched in horror as his expression changed from fury to evil satisfaction. “No,” he said, suddenly very calm. “I am going to kill you next.”
Sarah screamed as loudly as she could as she watched his doubled fist draw back to strike her, and she lashed out herself, aiming a punch at the vulnerable area between his legs.
He howled with pain and released his grip on her hair enough that she was able to scramble to her knees. Still his fingers tangled in her hair too tightly for complete escape, but ignoring the tearing in her scalp, she made a lunge for the poker, now lying in the comer where he had flung it.
This time she caught it with both hands and swung wildly, hoping for any kind of contact that would allow her a precious second to escape. But once again, he caught the other end of the poker, and for what seemed an etemity, they struggled for it, Sarah grasping the pointed end with both hands while he grasped the handle with one and tried to tear out her hair with the other.
Her eyes streaming with tears from the pain, Sarah hung on for dear life, until, from out of nowhere, his boot struck her in the ribs. The pain knocked the breath from her body, and he easily wrested the poker from her now nerveless hands.
The expression on his face was chilling, eyes gleaming with pleasure, teeth bared in a feral grin. Holding her fast by the hair of her head, he raised the poker over his head while she struggled helplessly, fighting for the breath for one last scream. In the second before the poker came slamming down into her head, her last thought was that at least Malloy would know who’d killed her, and she threw up her hands in a futile effort to ward off the blow.
The sound was like nothing she could have imagined, a dull thud and oddly far away. She waited for the searing pain and instead felt nothing at all. Then something very large and very heavy came toppling over on top of her.
“Mrs. Brandt, Mrs. Brandt, are you all right?”
Sarah needed a second to realize that the large, heavy weight lying on top of her was Lars Otto’s now unconscious body, and the voice she was hearing was… no, it couldn’t be!
“Mrs. Brandt, did he hurt you? Can you help me get him off of you? He’s awfully heavy!”
“Mrs. Elsworth?” Sarah said, still not quite certain she wasn’t mistaken.
Suddenly her strength returned, and she was able to push herself free of Otto’s weight. His hand was still tangled in her hair, but Mrs. Elsworth’s nimble fingers quickly freed her, leaving an alarming number of broken strands still locked in his motionless fist.
Only when she was free could Sarah finally see that Lars Otto did, indeed, lie unconscious on her kitchen floor.
“How on earth…?” she started to ask, and then she saw that Mrs. Elsworth still clutched her cast-iron skillet in her other hand. “Did you hit him with
“He was going to hit you with the poker!” Mrs. Elsworth replied defensively. “What else could I do?”
Sarah looked at the back of Otto’s head. His skull didn’t seem to be misshapen, so perhaps he was only unconscious and not even very seriously injured. Gingerly, as if touching a live snake, she placed her fingertips on the inside of his wrist and found a pulse.
“We’d better get him tied up before he wakes up,” Sarah said. “He won’t be in a very good mood when he does, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, my,” Mrs. Elsworth said. “Perhaps I should hit him again.”
Sarah felt an hysterical urge to laugh. “I’d much rather let the police take care of him. I’m sure they’ll be more thorough. Now, let me see, I think I have some clothes rope around here somewhere.”
MOTHER, REALLY. I think you should go home. All this excitement can’t be good for you,” Nelson Elsworth said for what Sarah guessed was the tenth time in as many minutes.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Elsworth said to her son, also for the tenth time. “I’ve never felt better in my life. Besides, I have to tell Detective Sergeant Malloy what happened, don’t I?”
“He can come to our house to speak with you,” Nelson insisted. Nelson Elsworth was a tall, slender man approaching forty who wore wire-rimmed glasses and was trying to disguise the way his hair was thinning on top by growing the hair on the sides longer and combing it over the bald spot. He’d arrived home from his job at the bank a short while ago to find his neighbors gathered in the street in front of Sarah’s house and his mother inside enjoying the attentions of a red-faced police officer who didn’t quite know what to make of the entire situation.
“Officer O’Brien,” Nelson said to the policeman, “Can’t you tell my mother it’s all right if she goes to her own home? We only live next door.”
O’Brien shrugged. “I’d stay around if I was her. Malloy can be awful testy if he’s irritated, and it irritates him to have to go chasing down witnesses.” He’d used a call box to notify police headquarters of the incident, and they were trying to track down Frank Malloy to handle the investigation.
