That night, in the deputy's headphones, a woman's voice said, “Is this where you went? This writers' retreat, is this where they tortured you?”
It was the voice of Mrs. Clark saying, “I'm sorry, but you should've stayed missing. When you came back, you weren't the same.” She says, “I loved you so much more when you were gone . . .”
Tonight, telling her story to the rest of us in the blue velvet lobby, Mrs. Clark says, “I did it with sleeping pills.” Sitting halfway up the wide blue stairs, she says, “The moment I saw the microphone hanging there, I ran.”
That night in the canyon, she could already hear the sheriff's deputy crashing through the brush, coming to arrest her.
She never went back to that clean house, with all those jobs she hated to do, done.
With nothing in the world but her winter coat and her purse, Mrs. Clark called the phone number on Cassandra's handwritten note. She met Mr. Whittier, and she met the rest of us.
Her eyes moving from our bandaged hands and feet to our ragged hair to our hollow cheeks, Mrs. Clark says, “I never was his . . . anything. I never loved Whittier.”
Mrs. Clark says, “I just wanted to know what happened to my daughter.”
Really, it was Mr. Whittier who killed the girl she'd given birth to.
She says, “I only ever wanted to know why.”
22
The Matchmaker is alone in the Italian Renaissance lounge when we find him. Most days, while the lights are on, he just stands there at the long, black wood table with his zipper open and the meat cleaver in one hand. In his eyes: to chop or not to chop.
“Shooo-rook,” the sound from his family ritual.
Proof that one day your worst fear might just disappear. No matter how terrible something looks, it might not be around tomorrow.
The Matchmaker, he's stopped asking the rest of us to swing the cleaver. Why should we help him hog the future spotlight? No, if he wants to be mutilated so bad—let him do it himself.
The table, each leg is carved to look like different sizes of balls, all balanced or beaded together in a straight line. The balls that touch the floor or the tabletop look the same size as apples. The ball in the middle of each leg is the size of a watermelon. All four legs, the same greasy black color. Long and narrow as a coffin, the table looks carved out of black wax. Long and flat, and smudged, so it reflects nothing.
Same as always, the Matchmaker stands there, hatchet ready. His chin pressed to his chest. His eyes watch his dick poke out his open zipper the way a cat would watch a mouse hole.
The Italian Renaissance lounge is the same old green satin wallpaper since the white van dropped us in the alley. Since forever ago. The green satin looking wet. Slick. The edge of gold paint outlines every carved chair-back and baseboard molding and bracket that holds an electric candle to a green satin wall.
Sunk into little caves in the wall, little open closets or green satin niches, inside there stand statues of naked people so padded with muscle and breast they look fat. These are statues taller than most people and standing on plaster pedestals painted the black-green you want to be malachite stone. Some holding spears and shields. Others stick out their white plaster butts, standing with their feet close together and their lower backs arched. Muscle or butt, from their feet up, their plaster is smudged with fingerprints, or scarred, gouged down to clean white by fingernails, but only as far as people can reach. Only about waist-high.
We come up the stairs from the imperial-Chinese promenade, rushing from the red to green, and today the Matchmaker has his dick flopped out.
Panting, coughing, with one hand on his chest, the Reverend Godless says, “They're coming, people . . . You can hear them in the alley, outside.”
From behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, “If you're cutting it off, cut it off now.”
And, cleaver in hand, the Matchmaker says, “What?”
The poor Matchmaker, compared to the bug-eyed, big-nosed, sunk-cheeked rest of him, his dick looks big as a statue. He's the last one of us still intact. So dirty he's pasted to the inside of his shirt, his tight skin looks cracked and shattered with the veins and arteries vined around his bony hands. Veins bunch and worm under the skin of his forehead. Tendons jump and twitch, webbed with the skin of his neck.
“Some people outside,” the Missing Link says, his mouth hidden behind the fat end of his nose, tucked somewhere above the big nutsack of his hairy chin. He says, “They're drilling the lock. We're about to be famous.”
Well, all of us—except the Matchmaker, the man with no scars to show, no signs he did anything but not eat.
The table all around the gray head of his dick, the wood is crisscrossed with practice swings, every chop at a new angle. The chopped wood gone pulpy with our blood. The pulp pounded to slivers and splinters and knocked off, onto the floor.
Our ears and toes and fingers fed to the cat. Cora Reynolds fed to Miss America. Miss America and her child fed to us. That food chain, complete.
Every one of us fighting to be the last one in that chain.
The camera behind the camera behind the camera.
The Earl of Slander, he holds up one hand, wiggling the three bloody fingers still there, the fingernails torn off, missing, and he says, “Hurry and give me the chopper.” He says, “I still have time to suffer some more.”
Chef Assassin flops down in a gold palace chair and kicks off his shoes. Grabbing each sock by the toe, he stretches it longer, longer, longer, until it snaps off his foot. Looking at his toes, he says, “Me first. I got way too
