Distemper (2 page)

I’d only lived with them since January, when their fifth roommate took off for a research job down South. I’d been looking
for a place since my housemate Dirk and his boyfriend Helmut had their commitment ceremony and moved in together. I know they
felt guilty about kicking me out, but it was really Dirk’s place, and besides it’s bad karma to get in the way of true love.
(I even let him have custody of our cats.) They found me my new spot through Steve, who’s Helmut’s ex, so it’s all very symmetrical.
I didn’t even have to carry a box. I just threw my dog Shakespeare in the car, and three hunky guys moved all my stuff. Life
could be worse.

“Of course they’ll catch him,” C.A. said. “What else have the cops got to do all day? They’ll solve it, they’ll convict him,
and ten years from now after he’s been living like Bill Gates on the taxpayers’ dime, they’ll finally get around to frying
the son of a bitch.”

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Marci said. “And you know they don’t fry them anymore. They
give them the needle, like a schnauzer. It’s veterinary science’s contribution to the justice system.”

“You Yanks do cherish your capital punishment,” Emma said from my BarcaLounger, where she was letting her dog Tipsy lick gin
and tonic off her fingers. He’s a standard poodle she got from the animal shelter when she moved here, and named him in honor
of her lush of an ex-husband.

“You know, Ems, I seem to recall that at the end of all those Agatha Christie mysteries, they took the killer out and hanged
him by the neck ‘til he was dead, so there’s no need to go all civilized,” Steve said.

Emma tossed back the rest of her drink. The dog looked depressed.

“So has anybody heard anything else about the murder?” C.A. asked, sounding like she was enjoying it more than decency allowed.
“How about you, Alex? You read the newspaper. Come on, you
are
the newspaper. What’s the scoop?”

“Nothing new,” I said. “Just a rehash. City editor’s going nuts. They still haven’t ID’ed her. They’re checking missing persons
for the whole Northeast. Ontario too.”

“I can’t believe they don’t even know who she is,” C.A. said. “Wouldn’t you think they’d at least have figured out that much
by now? She was out there for months. Someone must have missed her.”

“You’d think,” I said. “But maybe she wasn’t from anywhere around here. The cops said they have to keep widening their investigation,
which means exactly nothing.”

Emma plucked the newspaper from the coffee table.
“She was rather pretty too. Pity.” After the body was found, a police artist did a color sketch of the girl. She stared out
from beneath the
Gabriel Monitor’s
masthead like something not quite dead but not really alive either, as though whoever drew her didn’t dare add any sort of
expression that might have confused someone who could identify her. She had long, straight brown hair with bangs just above
her eyebrows, a smallish mouth over a pointy jaw, indistinct cheekbones, very large brown eyes. None of the features were
particularly remarkable, but they added up to a kind of sweetness. The description said she was five feet tall and 105 pounds.
When she was alive, people probably called her “perky.”

“She remind you guys of anybody?” C.A. asked.

“You think you know her?” I asked.

“Damn straight.”

“For real?” I was halfway out of my chair to call my editor. If we broke the ID of the girl, Bill would give me his firstborn.

“Look at those eyes. The totally vacant expression. Dye the hair blond, add a couple of pounds, age her a little, and who’ve
you got?” C.A. jumped off the couch with her brassy brown curls waving around like garter snakes and snatched the paper from
Emma. We stared back at her. “Hello.
Hell-o
, guys. Are you guys out to lunch or what? Take a look at her. It’s our very own girlie girl. It’s Marci all over again.”

Marci opened her mouth, let it stay like that for a minute, then shut it again.

“Christ, C.,” Steve said. “One of these days you’re gonna make me forget I’m a fuckin’ gentleman.”

“What? What’d I say?”

“Really, Cathy Ann,” Emma said. “That was quite uncalled for. Particularly the crack about the weight.”

“But just look at the…”

“Quit it,” Steve said. “I’m serious. She’s about to bawl.”

“OK, kids,” I said. “Can we calm down? She didn’t mean it. She’s just being a smart-ass. Come on, let’s have another drink
and…”

“She’s right.” The four of us stopped and stared at Marci, who was nose to nose with the newspaper.

“Who’s right?” Steve said. “Not C.A. C.A.’s
never
right. Trust me on this. I’ve done studies.”

Marci shook her head hard. “No, she’s right. Look at the drawing.
Look
at it…”

“Nonsense,” Emma said, taking back the paper. “It doesn’t look a thing like… Oh, dear.”

“Well, so what?” I said, plopping down on the couch next to Marci. “So you look like her. So what? I mean, clearly it’s creepy
and all…”

“Don’t you get it?” Marci said with a little croaking sound. “These people, they have types. What if whoever killed her is
still around here? What if he likes girls who look like… like us?”

“Whoever did it is long gone by now,” I said. “And besides, maybe that drawing doesn’t really look like her. It could be a
bad likeness, right?”

“You know, maybe you’re…” Marci started just as the phone rang and sent us hunting for the cordless. Emma found it first.

“Ahoy-hoy,” she said, and listened for a minute. “I beg your pardon? Oh, no. Certainly not… Yes, I see. But I assure you…
But really, there’s no need. She’s very
much safe and sound. She’s right here in this room, so you see… Really, sir, there’s no need to take that sort of tone… Oh,
very well.” She put her thin white hand over the receiver. “Marci, it’s, um, it’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s, well, it’s… the police.”

She shot up off the couch but didn’t take a step forward. “What do they want?”

“Hmm… How to put this? Well, darling, the fact is they want to make sure you’re alive.”

“Oh, my.”

“Just as you say. Apparently, they have received eight phone calls in the past three hours identifying you as the body in
the woods based on that dreadful sketch. I told them you still have a pulse, but they remain unconvinced. So you tell them.”
She crossed the room and delivered the phone.

“Uh, hello? Yes, this is Marci Simmons. Detective who… ?” She walked off to the kitchen with her finger in one ear and the
phone in the other.

“So what did I tell you?” C.A. said. “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

“Do you think there’s any way she might be right?” Steve asked. “Do you think there’s some guy out there who likes…”

“Look,” I said. “If I were Marci, I’d be creeped out too, and so would anybody else. But I’m sure the truth is a hell of a
lot less interesting.”

“Don’t you wonder what she went through?” C.A. said, apropos of nothing. “I mean, don’t you think about it? What exactly happened
to her?”

“I try not to,” Emma said.

“Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot, wondering how he grabbed her or whatever, you know.”

“How very morbid.”

“No, I know what she means,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it too—trying to decide whether she did something stupid, drove
around with her car doors unlocked maybe.”

“Or hitchhiked,” C.A. said. “Or let the wrong guy into her apartment to read the meter.”

“Or parked next to a van,” I said.

“Good God,” Emma said. “Do they teach this sort of thing in high school?”

“Try sixth grade,” C.A. said.

“Dreadful country.”

“So you’ve remarked,” I said as Marci came back in. “What’d the cops say?”

“Half my first-year anatomy class called to ID me. A couple of people from tap class too. Which is pretty stupid since they
know I was alive and well as of last Sunday.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.” She sat back down on the couch and one of her three cats jumped heavily from the arm onto her lap. Marci didn’t even
notice, which is quite an accomplishment since Frank—a black-and-white tuxedo cat named after Sinatra—is fifteen pounds if
he’s an ounce.

“Come on, what did the cops say?” Steve prodded.

“That there’s nothing to worry about.”

“So there you go.”

“They said there was no reason to believe it wasn’t… what did they call it? ‘An isolated incident.’ And her looking like me
was just a coincidence, and I’m not in
any danger, and anyway I wasn’t the only girl on campus who got misidentified.”

“That should make you feel better,” I said.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t. I guess I… I don’t know. Sympathize with her more.”

“Perfectly natural. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. But you know what? Pretty soon they’re going to catch the guy and send him
someplace where he’s dating guys named Spike. You’ll see. It’ll all be over in a couple of days.”

I was trying—and let’s face it, failing—to sound tough. But the truth was that the whole situation got to me, like it got
to all of us. I’d seen death before, up close and personal, but it didn’t make it any less frightening. The dead girl in the
snow was about our age, could have fit right there in our living room. The thought of her made us feel both stronger and more
fragile. More than anything, she made us think about how lucky we were just not to
be
her.

We stayed up absurdly late that night talking about it, maybe a little bit scared to go to sleep because of what we might
dream. And we might have stayed just a little bit scared if there hadn’t been another dead girl, then another and another.
And we might have had more midnight talks, thinking of the whole business in the third person, if I hadn’t found the second
body myself.

I
T WAS A
S
ATURDAY NEAR THE END OF
M
AY, JUST OVER SIX
weeks after the chemistry professor’s ski trip from hell. I’d picked up my mountain bike from its spring tune-up the night
before and gotten out the door at nine; my housemates were all still unconscious or snuggled up with whoever they’d gone to
bed with. In upstate New York, May is not to be confused with summer (sometimes it can’t even be confused with spring), and
I was wearing my heavy Vassar sweatshirt and a pair of biking tights. I’d only recently traded halfhearted jogging for halfhearted
mountain biking, and it was the first ride of the season. My muscles were flaccid from not enough time on the Lifecycle over
the winter, so even though I’d promised myself twenty miles I knew within two minutes that I’d be lucky to do ten. Since we
live downtown in the flats between three hills, I had exactly one choice of where I could head without doing some serious
uphill. I wound my way on back roads until I got to Route 13, the
kind of fast-food and chain-store strip that hulks at the edge of every American town, and headed south.

I kept on the main drag for a while and turned off onto a country road that degenerated to dirt after a couple of miles. When
I say mountain biking, I really mean road biking with fat tires and eighteen gears, but I usually try to go off into the woods
a little just so I can say I did. There’s a nice gentle trail about fifteen minutes away, wide without too many rocks and
roots to send a girl to her doom, and it’s just about my limit. Before I swung onto the path, I remember thinking that I was
probably going to regret it. This turned out to be one mother of an understatement.

It was a sunny morning, which is unusual for Gabriel (affectionately known as the place clouds go to die). There was bright
light coming through the trees, dappling the ground and making it hard to distinguish the hazards from the dirt. Even though
it was chilly enough to make me comfy in my sweats, there was a hint of afternoon heat; every soccer mom in town would be
poised for a flower-planting frenzy.

The path rose gently at first, with occasional muddy ruts and crisscrossing tracks that showed I wasn’t the first biker out
there that season. I had my Walkman on, which the traffic law says you’re not supposed to do but I couldn’t possibly exercise
without, and as the grade got sharper I was listening to Ben Folds Five and sweating hard.

Ever since it happened, I’ve wondered how everything would have turned out if I hadn’t decided to stop when I did. It was
all so arbitrary. I wanted to quit sooner, but didn’t; I could have kept riding longer, but I didn’t do that either. “Alice
Childress” ended, and since the song was
the only thing keeping me going, I stopped and got off. I leaned the bike against a tree and pulled the water bottle off its
rack, and as I took a drink I saw something glinting in a patch of sunlight about twenty yards off. To this day I don’t know
what made me walk over for a closer look; maybe after what had happened the month before, I already knew what I was going
to find. But then again, I kind of doubt that; knowing myself, if I had any idea what was out there, I would have climbed
right back on my bike and fled.

The first thing I saw was her shoes, laid atop a stack of clothing. The shiny thing was the buckle on her Mary Janes, which
were all the rage that spring, when every college woman seemed obsessed with dressing like Lolita. There was something plaid
under the shoes, but that’s all I remember, because the next thing I saw was the girl herself. They talk about death being
a peaceful thing, but there was nothing peaceful about this, and nothing natural, either. Her eyes were bugged out and her
tongue was lolling out of her mouth, all splotched and purple. She was stark naked, with big breasts that rolled to either
side and made her look not only vulnerable but invaded, as though someone had taken her life and her dignity at the same time.