The Face of Death

artist looks at clay, and that I was his sculpture. He even had a name for the sculpture, a title.'

'What was it?'

She closes her eyes. 'A Ruined Life.'

The scritch-scratch of Barry's pen pauses. I gaze at Sarah, trying to digest what she's just said.

Organized, I think to myself. Organized but driven by something specific and obsessive. Revenge is the motive, and destroying her is a piece of it. A big piece.

She continues talking. Her voice is a little bit faint and faraway.

'He does things to change my life. To make me sad, to make me hate, to keep me alone. To change me. '

'Has he ever told you why?'

'He said, when it all started: 'Even though it's not your fault, your pain is still my justice.' I didn't get it then. I don't get it now.' She looks at me, searching, inquisitive. 'Do you?'

'Not specifically. We think this is about some kind of revenge for him.'

'For what?'

'We don't know yet. You said he does things to change your life. To change you. What kind of things?'

A long, long pause. I can't tell what's moving through her eyes. I only know that it's sorrowful and huge and that it's not new to her.

'It's about me,' she says, her voice small and quiet. 'He kills anyone who is good to me or could be good to me. He kills the things I love and that love me back.'

'And no one's caught on to this before?'

She goes from calm tones to a low roar in an instant, startling me. Those blue eyes are blazing. 'It's all in my diary! Just read it. How many times do I have to tell you? God! God! God!'

She turns away, back to the sun once more, trembling and twitching and overflowing with rage. I can feel her pulling away, going inside herself.

'I'm sorry,' I say, soothing. 'And I promise, I will read it. Every page. What I need to know now is what happened yesterday. In the house. Anything you can remember.'

Another long pause. She's not angry anymore. She looks tired, right down to her molecules.

'What do you want to know?'

'Start at the beginning. Before he came to the house. What were you doing?'

'It was mid-morning. About ten o'clock. I was putting my nightgown on.'

'Putting it on? Why?'

She smiles, and that old hag Sarah keeps inside herself is back in full force, chuckling and ugly.

'Michael told me to.'

I frown. 'Why did Michael tell you to?'

She cocks her head at me.

'Why, so he could fuck me, of course.'

15

'YOU AND MICHAEL WERE HAVING SEX?'

I'm proud of myself. I've managed to keep my voice steady and judgment-free at this revelation.

'No, no, no. Sex is something that happens between two people that are equal. I was fucking Michael. So he wouldn't lie to Dean and Laurel and make them send me away.'

'He was forcing you?'

'Not physically. But he was blackmailing me.'

'With what? What had you done?'

She shoots me a look of incredulity. 'Done? I hadn't done any- thing. But that wouldn't have mattered. Michael was the perfect son. Straight As, track team captain. Never did anything wrong.' The bitterness in her voice is like acid. 'Who was I? Just some stray they'd taken in. He said if I didn't have sex with him, he'd plant pot in my room. Dean and Laurel were nice people, and they were good to me--

but they didn't have much tolerance for anything . . . unusual. They would have sent me away. I figured I could hold out for another two years, till I was eighteen, and then I'd be a legal adult and I could leave.'

'So you . . . had sex with him when he asked you to.'

'A girl's gotta eat.' Her voice drips with sarcasm, and a hint of selfloathing that makes my heart ache. 'He just wanted me to blow him and he liked fucking me.' She looks down at her hands. They tremble in counterpoint to the hard face she's showing me. 'Hey, I haven't been a virgin for a long time. What's the big deal?'

'The Kingsleys didn't suspect?'

Sarah rolls her eyes. 'Please. I told you, they were good to me--but they really liked thinking that everything in their life was perfect.' She hesitates. 'Besides . . . they were good to me. I didn't want them to know about Michael. It would have hurt them. They deserved better.'

'So, you were putting your nightgown on. What happened then?'

'He showed up at my bedroom door.'

'Michael?'

'No, The Stranger. He just appeared there. No warning. He was wearing panty hose over his face, like he has in the past.' She chews her bottom lip for a moment, caught up in a memory. 'He had a knife in his hand. He was happy, smiling, relaxed. He said hello, acting all jolly and normal, and then . . . he said he had a gift for me.' She pauses.

'He told me: 'Once upon a time, a man deserved to die. He was an amateur poet, this man, a gifted one. He made pretty words, but he was darkness inside. One day I came to the man, I came to him and I put a gun to his wife's head and I told him to write her a poem. I told him it would be the last thing she'd ever hear before I blew her brains out. He did what I said and I killed them, praise be to God. Once they were dead, I pulled their insides out, so the world would see their darkness.' '

The message, I think. He disembowels them so that we will see who they really are.

I note the religious bent as well. Fanaticism in serial killers is nearly always a sign of insanity.

But not in this case. His faith wasn't sparked by his desire for revenge. It's something he grew up with.

'Did he give you this poem?' I ask. 'Was that the gift?'

'A copy, yeah. He said he retyped it for me. I put it in the pocket of my nightgown after he made me read it.' She nods toward the table next to her hospital bed. 'It's in the drawer. Go ahead. He was right, it's pretty good, when you consider the circumstances.'

I reach over and open the drawer. Inside is a folded square of nondescript letter-sized white paper. I unfold it and read:

I T  I S  Y O U

When I breathe

It is you

When my heart beats

It is you

When my blood flows

It is you

When the sun rises

When the stars shine

It is you

It is you.

I'm a barely casual reader of poetry, unqualified to judge what I've just read. I only know that I like its simplicity, and I wonder about the moment in which it was written.

'It's true, you know,' Sarah says.

I look up. 'What's true?'

'If he says it happened that way . . . then it happened that way.' She closes her eyes. 'The Stranger told me that the ink on the original is smudged because the poet cried while he was writing it. It also has his wife's blood on it. 'Beautiful pinpoint drops,' he said, 'because the blood misted from her head when I shot her.' '