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Memorial Service Planned for Teacher Saturday
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Red Two asked herself, What should you say about your own death? Or, maybe, what would you like someone else to say? Was I a good person? Maybe not.
Sarah struggled with the ideas that flooded her head. She felt trapped between life and death. The muffled sounds of gunfire were like distant thunderclaps, penetrating the thick ear protectors she wore. In the booth next to her, the Safe Space director was banging out quick shots from a Glock 9 mm, filling the air with angry explosions. Sarah lifted her dead husband’s weapon, held it out steadily with both hands the way she had been shown, and aimed down the sight at the black cartoon of a fierce man grasping a large knife, wearing a snarl and a scar, and painted with a target in his chest. She pulled the trigger three times. She doubted if the target looked much like the Big Bad Wolf.
The recoil sent shock waves through her arms, but she was privately pleased that it didn’t make her stagger back or fall to the ground as she’d expected.
She looked up, squinting down the firing range. She could see that two shots had landed just outside the target, but a third had torn the paper 285
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dead center. She didn’t know whether this was the first shot or the last, but she was pleased that at least one would have proved fatal.
“Attagirl,” the director said, leaning around a small partition that separated the shooting galleries. “Try to get a handle on how the weapon will pull one way or the other when you’re rapid-firing. And, you know, empty the chamber. Fire all six rounds. You better your chances that way. We’ve got plenty of ammo and plenty of time.”
Plenty of ammo is right, Sarah thought. Plenty of time isn’t. She cracked open the cylinder to reload from a box on the shooting platform at her waist.
Sarah Locksley, born thirty-three years ago. Happy once. Not so much anymore. Dead in a river, killed by a psychopath who drove her to further despair by threatening to murder her, except she had nothing left to live for anyway because some goddamn out-of-control fuel truck driver ran through a stop sign.
She lifted the gun and aimed again.
That won’t work. This is a memorial service. A little sadness and mainly nice, safe things said about someone whose life was cut short by tragedy.
That’s me. I’m the someone. Or maybe, it’s the ex-me.
The target loomed in front of her. She narrowed her eyes and hummed to herself to block out the noise of other weapons being fired.
Not a word about the truth of Sarah Locksley.
She smiled. A part of her wished she could go to the service. It would certainly help for her say goodbye to herself. So long, Sarah. Hello, Cynthia Harrison. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. And I’m delighted to take over your life.
She could hear the gunshots echoing around her, and the gun jumped in her hand. Cynthia Harrison, she thought, I wonder if you would be embarrassed or disappointed or angry to know that the very first thing I do with your name is kill a man. A very special man. A wolf who most assuredly deserves to die. After all, he’s killed me once already.
This time four of the six shots landed dead center, and the fifth tore a hole in the target’s forehead.
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* * *
Twenty minutes before the service was to begin, Red Three took the video camera she’d obtained at the mall and placed it in a spot where it was trained on the people who would come through the doors, stop and sign a
“remembrance” book, then take their seats in the small room. It was set to record two hours’ worth of video, which Karen had insisted to the funeral director be the length of the service.
She glanced toward the front of the room. Karen had put together a montage of photographs of Sarah and her dead family. There were bouquets of white lilies on either side of the pictures, which were mounted on a sheet of white poster board and placed on a tripod in front of the few chairs the funeral home had put out. There was a small podium with a microphone.
A part of Red Three wanted to stay. She imagined she could hide behind a curtain, remaining still, holding her breath. But she knew there was danger in staying behind, even if hidden. So instead she ducked out minutes before the first people pulled into the funeral home parking lot. She wore a dark hooded sweatshirt beneath her old parka, and she pulled this up over her head and walked away as quickly as she could from the funeral home toward a nearby bus stop.
For the first time in days, she knew she wasn’t being followed. This didn’t make sense to her, but Jordan wasn’t about to reject the sensation, because it made her feel like she was doing something that might just help save her life.
When the bus wheezed up beside her and its doors opened with a familiar hydraulic whoosh, she climbed in. Jordan was aware that she was breaking any number of school rules by being off campus on a Saturday without permission. She did not care. She imagined that breaking a few onerous regulations was the very least of the trouble she was racing toward. Breaking rules is bad, she thought. Killing is worse.
This notion made her smile, and she had to fight to keep herself from bursting out in laughter.
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* * *
Karen was in a side room, dressed in a trim black dress, looking as proper as a Puritan, poring over two sheets of paper on which she’d written a small speech, using details that Sarah had given her about her life.
The words on the page streamed together. She felt like a dyslexic, every letter jumbling and tumbling across the paper willy-nilly, threatening to short-circuit everything she planned to say. Just as she did before going on stage with a new comedy routine, she did some breathing exercises. Slow in. Slow out. Settle the racing heartbeat.
“I know you’re here,” she whispered. One of the funeral directors, across the room from her, looked up with a practiced, hypocritically wistful look, and Karen realized that he thought she was speaking to her dead friend, not a killer.
“People are starting to arrive,” the funeral director said. He was significantly younger than the man she’d spoken to earlier in the week, but he already had down pat the solemn, sonorous tones of loss. She guessed he was a son or a nephew being shepherded into the family business, and this particular memorial service was definitely not a funeral home challenge.
No need for the boss to be there. No casket. No body. Few flowers. Just some random sentiments.
If he’s out there, it will be because he needs to know and he wants to see and he wants to hear. Karen could feel her pulse quickening at the thought that she was going to be standing up in front of the Wolf. “I’ll go out now,”
she replied, weakly.
Earlier, she had placed a stiff-backed chair near the microphone. Smiling, nodding her head to people streaming in out of the parking lot, she went to it. She knew none of the faces that returned her smile. Each stride she took was walking deeper into a spotlight. As if speaking some oriental mantra, she kept telling herself that he wouldn’t kill her right there. Not now. Not now. She had never heard of anyone murdering someone at a funeral home in front of assembled mourners. Bringing death to a place of 288
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death. This seemed so unreasonable that she tried to use its improbability as a reassurance.
Karen had never given a eulogy before, and certainly not for someone she barely knew and who actually wasn’t dead. She thought the whole thing would be comic if it weren’t the only thing she could think of doing that might keep her alive.
Don’t speak ill of the dead, she thought. She wondered where that maxim had been coined.
Karen was pleased at the turnout. She had not known whether there would be five people or fifty. Zero had been a possibility, but the number was going to exceed her top guess. That was good. Perfect, even. Large numbers will make him feel safe. He will think he can blend in. If no one had come, he probably would have shied away, not willing to risk standing out in an empty room. She could feel electricity, not unlike what she felt going on stage.
Be good. Be persuasive. Make Sarah seem dead. She had given many performances, but none, she thought, had been nearly as important as this one.
Karen glanced over at a woman and a man. The woman was holding the hand of a small boy wearing a white shirt that was too tight and a red tie that had already come loose around his neck. The boy was leaning against an older sister, probably thirteen or fourteen, who was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. The family paused in front of the photo display and spent a respectful few moments looking over the collection of pictures before taking seats. A former elementary school student, she realized, and a younger brother who doesn’t want to be here at all.
Not a wolf.
The room began to fill up—a great variety of men and women of all ages, accompanied by a few children. The phony solemn music the funeral home piped in with hidden speakers flowed around her like smoke, almost as if the music could obscure her vision. She waited until the stream of people pausing to sign the remembrance book dwindled, and then she 289
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stood. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the young funeral director throw a small switch on the wall, and the music stopped in mid-note. She looked out over the gathered crowd briefly and launched into her speech.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming. This is a great turnout, and my dear friend Sarah would have been pleased to see so many people.”
She wanted to make eye contact with every person in the room, on the off chance that she could recognize the Big Bad Wolf just by the glint in his eyes. But instead, she kept her head down, as if moved by the emotion of the fake service, hoping that Jordan’s camera was doing the job for her.
She read words that meant nothing, trying to sound deeply respectful when what she wanted was to scream.
It was all a gamble, she understood. Maybe he’s smart enough to stay away and this is all for nothing.
But maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s drawn here, because the scent he’s been pursuing is just too strong and he’s not able to stop himself. That was what the three Reds were counting on.
She thought of the old saying: Curiosity killed the cat.
Maybe it can kill a wolf, too.
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The funny thing, he thought, is that with all the killing I’ve done, I just don’t much like attending funerals. They make me really uncomfortable. They are too filled with excessive emotion and phony sentiments.
He found himself whistling a series of disconnected notes, not a recognizable tune. Real people like the Reds. Made-up characters in my books. Lots of different types of dying at my hands. But whether it’s on a page in prose or laid out on a slab in a morgue waiting for the hearse and a trip to the cremato-rium or a berth six feet under, you are still stone cold. Whether you were killed by old age, illness, or sudden death, by a knife or a gun or even by an author’s whim, in the end it’s all the same.
He snorted and thought he sounded like a preacher giving himself a sermon. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust,” he said in a mock, deeply sonorous tone.
The Big Bad Wolf believed that he had perfectly blended his fictional worlds with reality. He was a killer in both. He considered himself equally a master of the real and the make-believe. To be so adept in both arenas fueled his excitement.
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“Tick-tock, tick-tock. Clock is running, ladies,” he said to himself. He laughed a little, and wondered which would be ultimately more tantaliz-ing: killing or writing about it. They were both wildly attractive.
His only lingering concern was exactly how to express Red Two’s death.
This was the sort of challenging knot that all writers liked to undo, he thought. James Ellroy. L.A Confidential. He likes to tightly wind things into complicated scenarios, and then dance his way out with compelling language.
And violence. Lots of violence. Can’t forget all that savagery he brings to the ending. The Wolf knew he had to make her final moments on the edge of the bridge seem as alive as the ones he was about to deliver to Red One and Red Three. His problem was he hadn’t been there. “Goddammit.” He had to make sure that readers knew that when Red Two threw herself into the dark waters below, it was his push that sent her.
“You know enough. You have the details. It’s just a matter of the right description,” he said. It was always reassuring to speak to himself in the second person.
He made a mental list: Panic: You know that. Doubt: You understand it.
Fear: Well, who has a better handle on that than you? Bring them all together in Red Two’s mind, and there you have it.
He made a mental note to draw a bath when he returned home, immerse his head completely beneath the water, and try to duplicate the sensation of drowning. It won’t be the same. No black water and fierce currents pulling me under. But I’ll get just enough of a little piece of comprehension to make it work on the page.
Hold your breath. When you start to black out, you will know. That should do the trick.
Know about what you’re writing. Hemingway knew war. Dickens knew the British class system. Faulkner knew the South. All good fiction writers have a little journalist inside them.
He had pulled his car into a small dirt parking area adjacent to a wild-life preserve not far from Red One’s home. The preserve abutted the back end of her property. There was a hiking trail favored by local granola-and-boots types that led back into the forest and up a steep but manageable 292
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path to a hill that afforded fine views of the valley that he and all three Reds lived in. It was a popular spot. On a nice Sunday morning it was likely to be jammed with a dozen or more cars, and you could hear laughter penetrating the trees and scrub brush as people cheerfully made their way up and down the trail. But on weekdays, it was almost always empty, as few people wanted to take a hike, even a something-less-than-grueling one, after a long day at a boring job. This afternoon, there were only three cars in the lot, even though it was the weekend. The gray, overcast skies threatened rain soon, and the air was chilled deep enough that he could see his breath when he rolled down his window; higher elevations might see snow flurries. This concerned him. He did not want to leave tracks in frozen ground. Slick, damp mud would obscure his footprints. Mud that froze as the temperature plummeted would encase the patterns on his shoe soles almost as well as a plaster of Paris mold. He had read of more than one killer identified by a distinctive shoe print, and he was aware that even the most rural police force knew how to identify shoe prints and tire tracks.
He glanced around. He wanted to be certain that none of the few hik-ers saw him as he awkwardly changed from a cheap blue suit into jeans, fleece top, and waterproof shell, rapidly going from funeral attire to outdoors gear. He had to contort his body in the front seat of his car as he slid out of his pants, and he was reminded that he wasn’t getting any younger.
His knees creaked and his back tightened, but it couldn’t be helped. He shucked off his wing-tip shoes and slid his feet into thick woolen socks and sturdy waterproof boots.
After changing, he double-checked his fake mustache and goatee in the rearview mirror, to make certain that it was still fixed to his face and hadn’t become ridiculously skewed when he’d slid into his turtleneck sweater.
He had once read—back in the days before security cameras and video monitoring systems—of a bank robber who never wore a mask to obscure his identity, but who routinely used some Hollywood makeup to place a savage fake scar on his face, extending from above the eyebrow and across the cheek to below the chin. Someone who truly understands the psychology 293
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of crime, the Wolf thought. Every time the police had asked the bank tellers and other witnesses for a description of the robber, they had all uniformly responded: “You can’t miss him because he’s got this damn big scar,” which they then described in great colorful detail. The fake scar was all they saw. Not his eyes or hair color, and not the shape of his cheek-bones or the curve of his nose or the square of his chin. He had always liked that. People only see the obvious. Not the subtle, he told himself.
But subtle was the religion he worshiped.
Out of the trunk of his car, he took a common bright pink backpack purchased in a chain drugstore. Decorated with a prancing white unicorn, it was the sort favored by kindergarten girls. He also removed a knotty wooden hiking staff, around which he’d placed a rainbow-hued scarf that was a staple dress item for the local gay and lesbian community. He pulled a navy-blue knit cap emblazoned with the logo of the New England Patriots football team onto his head.
The Big Bad Wolf knew that all of these items taken together created an eccentric, incongruous package, one that, like the bank robber’s scar, would make him invisible to anyone he might happen upon in the forest.
They will remember all the wrong things, he told himself.
In the pink backpack he had placed six items: a sandwich, a small flashlight, a thermos with coffee, a pair of night-vision binoculars just in case he decided to stay until after the sun set, a folding spyglass, and a copy of Audubon’s Birds of North America.
The book—which he’d never opened or bothered to read—was for anyone curious enough to stop him, such as a park ranger, although he doubted any would be up on the trails this afternoon. But it wasn’t a bald eagle or a white-tufted owl he actually intended to spy upon.
He started whistling again. A carefree happy tune. He glanced at his wristwatch. Timing is important, he reminded himself. He waited until the sweep hand hit 12, and then the Wolf started rapidly up the path toward the preserve, looking for the small notch in a trailside tree that he’d made in the trunk to mark a route down through the woods that stretched behind Red One’s home.
