Mr. Wallin. Nice of you to care, though.”
Her sarcasm was evident now. Carl’s eyes narrowed. He was beginning to feel himself losing control of the interview. The tension was seeping back into his muscles, knotting his stomach, and making him sweat more profusely. “You can’t prove a thing, lady!”
Ms. Erinyes’s sigh seemed to convey her pity for anyone who could be so obtuse. “Did our brochure not assure you that we had years of experience, Mr. Wallin? Years.” She withdrew a half-letter-size envelope from his folder, and took out a stack of photographs. “We are not a shoestring operation, Mr. Wallin. You have been observed by a number of Matchmaker employees, who took care that you should not see them. Here is a nice telephoto shot of you entering Patricia Bissel’s apartment building. A concealed camera snapped this one of you knocking on the door of her apartment. Didn’t the number come out clearly? And there are the two of you in the doorway, together for the first and last time.”
Carl stuck out his hand, as if to make a grab for the pictures.
“Why, Mr. Wallin, how rude of me. Would you like this set of prints? The negatives and several other copies are, of course, elsewhere. You do look nice in this one. No? All right, then. Where was I? Oh, yes, the police. So far they have no leads in the Bissel case, but I think that if pointed in the right direction-
Carl had the closet feeling again. He knew that he must be a good boy and sit quietly, or else the feeling would never go away. “What are you going to do?” he asked in his most polite voice.
Ms. Erinyes put the pictures back in the envelope and slid it into Carl’s folder. “Ah, Mr. Wallin, there’s the question. What shall we do? We’ve spent the past week looking into your background, and there is no doubt that you have had a rough life. Your grandmother-well, let’s just say that some of your rage is entirely understandable. And it’s true that Patricia was self-programmed to die. So for now, we will do nothing.”
Carl exhaled in a long sigh of relief. He could feel his muscles relaxing.
The director shook her head. “It’s not that simple, Mr. Wallin. You understand, of course, that this cannot continue. You have no right to take the lives of people who don’t want to die. So we will keep the evidence, and we will watch you. If you ever strike again, I assure you that you will be caught immediately.”
Carl returned her stern gaze with an expressionless stare. The director seemed to understand. “Oh, no, Mr. Wallin, you won’t try to harm any of us here at the dating service. For you, it has to be passive, powerless women.”
She stood up to indicate that the interview was over. “Well, I think that’s all. You won’t be coming here again, but we will keep in touch. You were one of our greatest successes, Mr. Wallin.”
Carl blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You were going to be a serial killer, but we have stopped you. Oh-one last thing. We will keep your description in the active file of our computer. If anyone should come in with your particular problem-the urge to kill-and you happen to fit his or her victim profile…” She shrugged. “Who knows? You may find yourself matched up again.”
OLD RATTLER
SHE WAS A city woman, and she looked too old to want to get pregnant, so I reckoned she had hate in her heart.
That’s mostly the only reasons I ever see city folks: babies and meanness. Country people come to me right along, though, for poultices and tonics for the rheumatism, to go dowsing for well water on their land, or to help them find what’s lost, and such like, but them city folks from Knoxville, and Johnson City, and from Asheville, over in North Carolina-the skinny ones with their fancy colorless cars, talking all educated, slick as goose grease-they don’t hold with home remedies or the Sight. Superstition, they call it. Unless you label your potions “macrobiotic,” or “holistic,” and package them up fancy for the customers in earth-tone clay jars, or call your visions “channeling.”
Shoot, I know what city folks are like. I coulda been rich if I’d had the stomach for it. But I didn’t care to cater to their notions, or to have to listen to their self-centered whining, when a city doctor could see to their needs by charging more and taking longer. I say, let him. They don’t need me so bad nohow. They’d rather pay a hundred dollars to some fool boy doctor who’s likely guessing about what ails them. Of course, they got insurance to cover it, which country people mostly don’t-diem as makes do with me, anyhow.
“That old Rattler,” city people say. “Holed up in that filthy old shanty up a dirt road. Wearing those ragged overalls. Living on Pepsis and Twinkies. What does he know about doctoring?”
And I smile and let ’em think that, because when they are desperate enough, and they have nowhere else to turn, they’ll be along to see me, same as the country people. Meanwhile, I go right on helping the halt and the blind who have no one else to turn to.
The first thing I do is, I look at the patient, before I even listen to a word. I look at the way they walk, the set of the jaw, whether they look straight ahead or down at the ground, like they was waiting to crawl into it. I could tell right much from looking at the city woman-what she had wrong with her wasn’t no praying matter.
She parked her colorless cracker box of a car on the gravel patch by the spring, and she stood squinting up through the sunshine at my corrugated tin shanty (
“Come on up!” I called out to her, smiling and waving most friendly-like. A lot of people say that rural mountain folks don’t take kindly to strangers, but that’s mainly if they don’t know what you’ve come about, and it makes them anxious, not knowing if you’re a welfare snoop or a paint-your-house-with-whitewash con man, or the law. I knew what this stranger had come about, though, so I didn’t mind her at all. She was as harmless as a buckshot doe, and hurting just as bad, I reckoned. Only she didn’t know she was hurting. She thought she was just angry.
If she could have kept her eyes young and her neck smooth, she would have looked thirty-two, even close-up, but as it was, she looked like a prosperous, well-maintained forty-four-year-old, who could use less coffee and more sleep. She was slender, with natural-like brownish hair-though I knew better-wearing a khaki skirt and a navy top and a silver necklace with a crystal pendant, which she might have believed was a talisman. There’s no telling what city people will believe. But she smiled at me, a little nervous, and asked if I had time to talk to her. That pleased me. When people are taken up with their own troubles, they seldom worry about anybody else’s convenience.
“Sit down,” I said, smiling to put her at ease. “Time runs slow on the mountain. Why don’t you have a swig of my herb tea, and rest a spell. That’s a rough road if you’re not used to it.”
She looked back at the dusty trail winding its way down the mountain. “It certainly is,” she said. “Somebody told me how to get here, but I was positive I’d got lost.”
I handed her the Dixie cup of herb tea, and made a point of sipping mine, so she’d know I wasn’t attempting to drug her into white slavery. They get fanciful, these college types. Must be all that reading they do. “If you’re looking for old Rattler, you found him,” I told her.
“I thought you must be.” She nodded. “Is your name really Rattler?”
“Not on my birth certificate, assuming I had one, but it’s done me for a raft of years now. It’s what I answer to. How about yourself?”
“My name is Evelyn Johnson.” She stumbled a little bit before she said
