This second disappearance, no one tied yellow ribbons to anything. Nobody went door-to-door, searching. Or lit prayer candles. No psychics called.
Not even the television stations dropped by while Mrs. Clark cleaned and cleaned.
That's another night Cassandra waited in that canyon, across a stream, and halfway up a rocky slope, a long carry from any forest-service logging road. No footprints marked the path, and her bare feet looked clean, as if she'd been carried.
By then, it was too late to measure the potassium in her aqueous humor. Her arms could bend, so she'd been dead longer than two days. Rigor mortis had come and gone.
That first team of detectives, they hung a microphone in the curtain of hawthorn branches. The same way they'd mike a murder victim's grave after a recent funeral. Because the killer has to come back. The killer has to talk, to tell this story until it's used up.
Other stories, they use you up.
To the only audience a killer can risk having, his victim.
Cassandra on her bed of moss. The microphone hanging above her, connected to a tape recorder and a transmitter broadcasting to a sheriff's deputy perched on rocks across the canyon. Far enough away he can swat mosquitoes without giving himself away. The headphones over his ears. Sitting on the ground, crawling with ants. All the time, listening.
In his earphones, birds sing. The wind blows.
You'd be amazed how many of the killers come back to say good-bye. They've shared something, the killer and the victim, and the killer will come to sit at the grave and talk about old times.
Everyone needs an audience.
In the deputy's earphone, black flies buzz, here to lay their eggs around the damp edge of Cassandra's eyelids, her blue lips opened just a crack. The flies lay eggs inside her nose and anus.
At home, Mrs. Clark has wrestled the refrigerator away from the kitchen wall so she can vacuum the compressor coils on its back.
On the bed of moss, Cassandra's blood has settled to the lowest side of her, leaving the parts you can see, her breasts and hands and face, looking painted white. Her eyes open and sticky-dry from the sucking tongues of insects. Her blond hair. Her hair rolls out yellow and thick from the back of her head, but dull, the way hair looks cut off and dead on the floor in a barbershop.
Her cells are digesting themselves, still trying to do some job. Desperate for food, the enzymes inside start eating through the cell walls, and the yellow within each cell starts to leak out. Cassandra's pale skin starts to slip, sliding slack over the muscle underneath. Puckering and wrinkling, the skin on her hands looks loose-baggy as cotton gloves.
Her skin is marked with bumps beyond counting, a field of what could be tiny knife scars, every bump moving, grazing between skin and muscle. Every bump the larva of a black fly. Eating the thin layer of subcutaneous fat, tunneling just under her skin. The entire surface of her, of her arms and legs, a constellation of moving lumps.
In the deputy's headphones, the buzz of flies gives way to the crackle of grubs tunneling forward one bite at a time.
At home, a step from the silent telephone, Mrs. Clark sorts Christmas decorations in the choking dust of the attic, throwing out and repacking. Labeling each box.
The bacteria breathed inside Cassandra's lungs, the bacteria in her guts and mouth and nose, they split and split and split without white blood cells to stop them. They gobble the subcutaneous fat and the yellow protein leaking from her ruptured cells. Their numbers explode, bloating her pale stomach until her shoulders are forced back. Her legs are splayed open. Cassandra's belly swells tight, pregnant with the gas inside, the universe of bacteria eating and reproducing.
Her tongue swells, forcing her jaws apart and jutting out between lips swollen big as bicycle tires. The bacteria tunnel through the top of her mouth, breaking into the cranial vault, where her brain waits, soft and edible.
At home, Mrs. Clark carries the phone from room to room, scrubbing walls and washing the glass filled with dead houseflies covering each ceiling light.
After another day, Cassandra's brain would bubble, red and brown, out her ears and nose. The soft mass of it would melt and bubble out the sockets where her eyes have collapsed.
The microphone picks up the sound. Think of popcorn muted inside a microwave oven. Imagine slipping into hot water filled with bubble bath, the steady sound when all those bubbles burst. It's the sound of hard rain on a concrete patio. Hail hitting the roof of a car. That's the sound of maggots, by this time thick as white rice. The microphone picks up a rip and a squeal, the sound of skin coming apart and Cassandra's guts going flat.
Meat-eating beetles arrive. Mice and magpies. Birds sing in the forest, each string of notes bright as colored lights. A woodpecker listens with his head cocked to hear insects inside a tree. He knocks to peck a hole.
The skin sinks down, draped over bones, as Cassandra's guts leak away. Soaking into the ground. Leaving just this shadow of skin, this framework of bones mired in a puddle of her own mud.
In the sheriff deputy's earphones, the mice munched the beetles. Snakes arrived to swallow the squealing mice. Everything looking to be last in the food chain.
At home, Mrs. Clark sorted through the papers in her daughter's room, inside her desk drawers. The letters written on pink stationery. The old birthday cards. And, written in pencil, copied in Cassandra's handwriting on a sheet of lined notebook paper, the ragged perforations running up one side, a note said:
Writers' Retreat: Abandon your life for three months . . .
And she flushed her
