In the next instant, Nancy’s distraction and nervousness died away. She saw the events of the past two days and the next two days at once. She knew now that she should never have gone out and found Brian Corey. It had been a horrible lapse of judgment.
She knew that Mary was right about the picture in the paper. At seven tomorrow morning there would be copies on thousands of doorsteps. People would remember seeing her at stores and restaurants in the plaza, in the apartment building, on the nearby streets. Tomorrow morning might be optimistic. It was a sensational story, the kind that might turn up tonight on the local television news. She had to get out of Los Angeles as quickly as she could. It would take only a few minutes to pack her clothes and her money. But that wasn’t good enough. There was no time to get a car, and no time to build a new identity.
She looked at Mary. “You’re right.” She knew that what she was considering was a form of perfection. It would fend off all of the people who wanted to do her harm, and it would give her a way to supply all of her immediate needs. It was so right that it began to happen without her choosing to do it. She didn’t plan. She simply started.
“You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t really thinking clearly. In fact, I’d be doing them a favor too. Eliminating the need to investigate calls from fifty people is probably as good as a tip.”
“At least it helps. And if they’ve already been called about you, it might be important.”
Nancy gave an apologetic smile, and a shiver. “I’m actually a little nervous. I don’t know why.”
“Then let’s do it together. Here. Let’s have some iced tea. That’ll help us cool off and calm down. Then we can make the call.”
Mary walked to the small kitchen and Nancy followed closely. Nancy’s eyes and ears had been so sensitized by the excitement and agitation that they almost hurt. She saw Mary reach for the refrigerator’s door, and she saw the black grips of the kitchen knives sticking out of the slits in the butcher-block holder on the counter. She snatched a big one out and had it in motion before Mary’s hand could close on the door handle.
She stabbed it into Mary’s back in the spot below the left shoulder blade that she judged must be the heart, but it hit a rib and she had to push it upward and over before it would go in.
Mary’s arms flew out from her sides, she tried to turn, and she cried loudly, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Nancy had to silence her. She tugged out the knife, clutched Mary’s hair, wrapping it around her fingers, and jerked the head back. She drew the knife blade across Mary’s throat under the jaw. She had heard someone use the term “ear to ear,” so she did it that way, trying to make the slice as deep as she could.
Mary’s hands came up to her throat. There was a hissing, gurgling noise, and spurts of blood spattered the white metal surface of the refrigerator door like carnations, then streaked down to the floor.
It was horrible. Why wasn’t she dead? Nancy held her there, her hand still caught in Mary’s hair. She hooked her right arm around Mary from behind and plunged the knife into Mary’s torso just below the center of the rib cage. She knew she had missed the heart again, so she pushed down on the handle to lever the blade upward, then grabbed the handle with both hands and drew it toward herself.
Mary’s knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor. Nancy released her hair and stepped backward, leaving the knife in her. Nancy looked down and saw that her arms were covered with blood from the elbows to the fingertips, dripping into the pools that were merging into each other beside Mary.
Nancy turned and stepped to the sink. She ran the water to wash the blood off her arms, twisting every few seconds to see whether Mary had moved. Was she finally dead? Maybe she was, but it seemed that as long as the pool of blood kept growing, the heart must still be pumping it out onto the floor.
Nancy knew that her jeans and her top probably had droplets of blood on them somewhere, but she couldn’t see them and she was clean enough to accomplish the next tasks. She took the rubber gloves that Mary had left on the sink beside the cleanser and put them on.
Mary’s purse was easy to find. She had left it in plain sight on the counter near the telephone. Nancy opened it and examined the contents. There were Mary’s keys. The apartment key was exactly like Nancy’s. The car key had a black plastic sleeve stamped with an
Nancy stood in the kitchen and looked through the doorway at the rest of the apartment. Here was the grotesquely crowded living room, one bedroom, and a bath, all laid out facing hers across the hall. She knew she should spend very little time searching the place, but she knew she wouldn’t need much. If something of value wasn’t in the bedroom, it had to be hidden in the kitchen—in the freezer, or inside the pots and pans, or high on a shelf in a sugar bowl.
Being near Mary made her feel uneasy. She wasn’t really sure that Mary was dead yet, and she had the feeling that Mary was lying there awake, looking at her and listening to her as she went about her business. She had a curiosity about how Mary’s bedroom would look, so she chose to begin her search there.
Nancy hurried to the hall and stopped in the bedroom doorway. It was just as she had expected. The furniture was pseudo-Victorian, heavy and dark, with scrollwork all over it. The bed had six ruffled pillows propped on a flowered duvet. There were corner shelves with china and glass objects, and thick brocade curtains in an ugly green smothered the windows.
Nancy switched on the light. She knelt and looked under the bed, but found it was where Mary stored out-of- season coats and boots in see-through plastic boxes. She searched the closet, then moved to the dresser. She was disappointed to find that there were only clothes in the drawers, and the jewelry box on top contained nothing that was worth stealing.
When she moved to the nightstand beside the bed and opened the top drawer, she felt herself flush with excitement. In the drawer, where it would be ready and within reach while she was sleeping, was a small, short- barreled revolver. Nancy picked it up cautiously and examined it. The gun was silver-toned, with white plastic handgrips. She aimed it at an imaginary target and saw the brass bullet casings at the back of the cylinder. Mary had stored it loaded.
It occurred to Nancy that she was lucky she had chosen to kill Mary right away and in the kitchen. If Mary had been in here, or even in the hallway or the closer parts of the living room, Nancy might have been the one who was lying on the floor bleeding. The thought of it made her heart beat harder again. She had never imagined that someone like Mary would own a gun. She had been ambushed and lured into this apartment by a woman who had a gun hidden ten feet from the door. Nancy had narrowly saved herself.
Why would Mary even own a gun? But then Nancy remembered that in one of their first encounters at the mailbox, Mary had warned her that rapists sometimes waited in the dark parking lots behind big apartment buildings. It had sounded as though rapists were a regular part of the landscape, swarming around like hornets. In other conversations she had seemed obsessed with some horrible crime she’d seen reenacted on television that had happened to some unwary single woman. It was probably inevitable that she would have a gun.
Nancy looked deeper in the drawer. There was a box of ammunition, so she took it. There was also a key that looked as though it belonged to a safe-deposit box, but she couldn’t think of a way to use it. She found a canvas tote bag in the closet that had an ugly picture of a rose on it. She put the gun and the box of bullets inside, then moved to the kitchen and took the wallet, keys, and change purse.
She found a plastic bag in a drawer, took off the rubber gloves, put them in the bag, and dropped them into her tote. She moved close to Mary, careful to keep from stepping in the blood, and touched her bare leg. It felt cold. She had to be dead. Looking down at her now, Nancy realized that she must have been hysterical to have imagined that Mary was not dead before.
Nancy took one moment more to take two paper towels from the roll on the counter. With one she wiped off the handle of the knife that was stuck in Mary’s chest. As she passed the table she picked up the copy of the newspaper with her picture in it. She used her other paper towel to keep her hands from leaving prints when she turned the doorknob. She locked the door and went to her own apartment.
Nancy’s nervous energy was not an infirmity now. It was the power that might save her. She quickly packed her clothes and personal effects in her two suitcases, closed them, and took them to the door. She went to the sink and ran water over a dish towel. She began in the kitchen and wiped every surface with the towel, using the wetness to tell which surfaces she had wiped and which she had missed. She even cleaned the undersides of appliances, then put the few cups, dishes, pans, and silverware she’d bought in the dishwasher and ran it on the pots and pans setting.
She moved into the rest of the little apartment and wiped every window, every handle, all of the smooth
