“I’ll go,” I finally say. “But I’ll be back tonight, after your officers are done here.”
He sighs. “It’s not safe. Especially so soon.”
I sharpen my gaze on his. “OneA.M. See you then?”
His nostrils flare, and his Adam’s apple bobs against the restraint of his throat. There’re so many things he wants to say to me, all fighting to get out at once. “Miss Lee,” he says instead, dipping his chin.
“Sheriff.” I turn and walk away.
ASTING SHARPENSthe midnight air, already brisk by day. I glance around, make sure no one is looking, and duck easily beneath the police tape. The Drunken Moose will stay closed tonight, but by tomorrow those barstools will be topped with denim-clad rear ends, the lights over the pool table giving off that amber glow, the buffoonish chatter of men like Terry drowning out the crickets outside. This is my only chance.
I kick at a pebble, shuffling my feet as I walk, so I don’t overlook anything. The soft light of my phone illuminates a tiny circle around my feet and nothing more. I’d use the flashlight, but I don’t want to alert anyone to my presence. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I only know that I don’t believe our resident serial killer truly leaves nothing behind. Maybe the sheriff’s department thinks that, but it’s only because they don’t know what to look for. They’re trying to find the usual suspects, the typical evidence one might find at a murder scene like this—hair, semen, a broken fingernail, clothing fibers. But our Strangler isn’t typical. His cleanliness has made them complacent, too willing to accept that he will have outsmarted them. But he’s too controlling to leave nothing behind. The places where he kills belong to him. He will mark them as such, somehow. Just not in a way a cop would notice. I know because I know Henry.
Shortly after we moved into the new house and his mother died, I took on the role of designer for our space. I used all the professional skill at my disposal to perform the job I had excelled at for years for us as a couple. I wanted to impress him, to show him my work carried a quiet importance. Maybe not the obvious prowess of an engineer, but it was more than the frivolous, superficial “hobby” he’d deemed it. Spaces impact us, define us even. Who we become inside them is an art I had mastered manipulating. I took pride in that, in the way I lingered at the edges of the rooms I designed, influencing their occupants. I thought if I could do the job with enough splendor, he wouldseeme, love me again, that he would return to the man I first met.
But I was wrong.
They were small, the things out of place. I noticed the first one on a shelf in our living room—a bronze paperweight, pre-mid-century, smaller than my hand and in the shape of a naked woman. She was on her back, legs spread, knees up. Tiny breasts marked her chest, and a slit ran between her legs. The patina was thick, and she was crudely formed but a collectible, nonetheless. When I asked him about it, he said casually, “Don’t be invidious, Piers. It doesn’t suit you.” But his eyes were ice chips.
A few days later, I found the banana salt and pepper shakers in the kitchen. Vintage ceramic and completely out of place, they stared me down as I stood at the gas range, stirring the spaghetti sauce. This time, I didn’t ask any questions. When he said, “Let’s eat at the bar,” I sat beside him, both of us facing the counter where they rested, shiny and golden, centered in our view.
It went on like that for days, one item after another, like a strange game of hide-and-seek. There was the melting desk clock that turned up in the study, a Salvador Dalí wannabe. And the soap dispenser shaped like a rubber ducky in the guest bathroom. And the garden statue of a toad that appeared in the garage. At first, I didn’t understand. They were harmless enough, but there was something sinister in the way he placed them one by one, drawing it out, never mentioning them. Henry was not the sortof man to want a duck soap dispenser or banana salt and pepper shakers. It was over a week later that I realized what the message was—he was mocking me. My work, the pride I’d taken in carefully curating our home. It was a joke to him.
And he was reclaiming the space as his, despite my presence in the design, daring me to remove what he’d placed there, reminding me who was in charge. Soon I began to find them in my own personal space, and they got darker—less overtly funny, more threatening. The bullet-shaped lighter on my nightstand beside my favorite candle. The coffin decal on my bathroom mirror. But the worst and final one was in my closet. A palm-sized windup skull. It went off on its own one afternoon when I was folding sweaters, nearly scaring me out of my skin. I snatched it down from the shelf where it was perched and threw it into the bathroom trash. The next day, it was there again, staring at me with gaping sockets and hideous, happy teeth.
So, I know, standing here in the dark as I am now, that the Saranac Strangler has left something behind. Something only I will recognize. Because, like Henry, he believes he is in charge, and though he must remain hidden, he desperately wants everyone else to know it, too.
The light of my phone pours over two small stains on the concrete, rust in color, opaque, like liquid brick. It’s her blood—Kathy’s—a little piece of her here. I want to bend down and set my finger atop one, feel her last moments, the fear coursing through her. But it’s not her I’m after. The dark presses in on me, squeezing. I feel it washing down my throat, pricking my eyes. He is in it, the dark. If I breathe in, he’ll slide into me like a spirit, take possession.
The hunger gurgles through my abdomen, nips at my ribs, insistent as a puppy. It doesn’t want me to be caught unawares. It is growing inside me, the appetite for death; I won’t be able to resist it much longer. I shouldn’t, even if I am able. It’s only the thought of Regis’s lips on mine, his skin sticking to me on his living room floor, that holds me back now.
I shine my phone out, drawing a line with the light from my feet to the edge of the lot. And then I see it, just beyond the pavement. It is sticking up from the dirt at an angle like a tilted gravestone, the iridescence catching the light, flashing green. I walk over and squat down beneath the police tape. The feather can’t be more than three inches long, its shaft thrust forcefully into the ground. Among the leaves beginning to fall, it’s easy to miss. The posterior vane is the same drab gray as the siding of the bar. But it’s the anterior vane that dazzles, black to green, shining in the light like a miracle. I reach out and brush the barbs with a finger, tiny threads of silk, and I pluck it from the earth.
The second my skin makes contact with the shaft, the world tilts.I see her clearly now, lying underneath me, so tranquil. It calms and infuriates me. I want her to rise up, to resist, to push back. I want to kick her and watch her body bounce off my shoe. But there is no time to play cat and mouse, and it’s no fun when the mouse is dead. The plastic baggie around my penis has slipped, leaving marks in the skin where the ridges of the zip closure are, but I don’t care because the release is so spectacular it hardly matters what comes after, and the petroleum jelly has smoothed the action so that I didn’t even notice. I seal it carefully and tuck it into a pocket next to the rebar and electrical wire I used. This one might have fought harder than the rest, might even have landed a blow or two, clawed grooves into my skin, but she was too drunk. And so surprised she hardly knew what was happening before it was over. Still, it’s progress, and I have brought something to mark the occasion. I bend at the edge of the lot and plug it into the ground with a black-gloved hand, cut resistant and coated in nitrile. I’ve no sooner stood up when the scent finds me, like cinnamon cream and homemade dough, the breakfasts my aunt Esther used to make. I can see the sheer pink fabric of her robe now, her breasts like withered apples underneath, and feel the smarting slap across my cheek, bloodying my lip, when I dared to reach for them as she leaned over me. It was a game with her, always a game. To look but not to touch. To shame me for the erection she deliberately caused. To beat me when she caught me masturbating into her pantyhose. To wrap those same nylons around my throat and squeeze the tears from my eyes.The corners of my mouth dip down as my cock stiffens. This one was close, but she’s still out there, the one I’m really seeking, the one that will make Aunt Esther finally disappear. And when I find her, I’ll destroy the power she has over me, once and for all.
I drop the feather and gasp, stumbling back a couple of steps.
“Acacia!” Footsteps stampede behind me as Regis runs up. He’s in civilian clothes tonight, a black fleece pullover and jeans. “What happened? Are you okay?”
I stare at the feather where it fell, the green gleam calling to me, taunting. “I—I’m fine,” I tell him as I turn. “You came.”
“Of course, I came,” he says, almost angry with himself. He spots the feather where I dropped it. “What’s this?”
“Something he left,” I tell him. “A kind of signature.”
He picks it up with a tissue and rises beside me, spinning it in his fingers. “It’s from a green-winged teal, a species of duck. Both the males and females have these beautiful green stripes on their wings. They’re transient here, passing through on their migratory route in the spring and the fall.” He looks to me. “What does it mean?”
“That we are a detour on his journey. And…”
Regis wraps the feather in the tissue, puts it in his pocket, and it’s like a line snaps, freeing me, the fish caught on the hook. “And?”
“He’s looking for a mate. That’s what this is, a search.”
He runs his fingers back through the short waves of his hair and forward again. “Amate? Are you kidding me? How is that possible?”
“This one was close,” I tell him. “The closest he’s come. He thinks if he finds her, if he kills her, it will put something to rest inside him, something a woman he knew stirred in him as a child and fanned into a roaring fire.”
Regis faces me with his hands in his pockets, elbows angling out like wings. “How do you know?”
