Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  Debra wasn’t sure how she felt about Cynthia, a clever and aggressive woman with a big mane of streaked and styled hair. She tried to remember if Cynthia had preceded or followed her own coiffeur changes: of such small details is our fate comprised. Cynthia had been around for two, no, three books. A glorious, full figured, modern, mature woman. And her prototype? Well, the illustration on the jacket cover had been based on a family photo of Debra, herself.

  But now it seemed to Debra that Lance was stressing Cynthia’s age, the maturity of her beauty, the necessity of her devotion to the gym. It was a rather too subtle characterization for Matt to find a blond hair on his cashmere jacket and to notice that it had a black root. Terrible sentence, anyway, Debra thought and scratched it out.

  The scene gave her a bad feeling, just the same, and she put aside her pencil and began flipping ahead to see if there was more about Fiona, “the Venus of Rodeo Road;” really that was trite. Fiona was raven haired, blue eyed, just nineteen, and, yes, she was certainly becoming more prominent. By chapter eight she was in bed with Matt and, by nine, she seemed to have supplanted Cynthia, entirely.

  Debra closed the manuscript and stared at the ceiling, asking herself, would he dare? Did he intend? Was this serious? It was a curious fact of their marriage that her husband often communicated his intentions and interests via his copy. And that was funny, because, while every critic that had ever deigned to open a Lance Aken had labeled it unrelieved and cliched pulp, a discerning eye could see that, in fact, he put a great deal of his life into his work. He really did, and Debra figured he was popular because readers knew that, even if the critics did not.

  Could this be serious, she asked herself again, as Jose unwrapped the bleached strands of her long, thick, hair. He fussed with his comb and blow dryer, inflating her locks, making her into Cynthia, who was about to be displaced by the Venus of Rodeo Road, AKA Gwen Romani, Lance’s current mistress.

  They’d met Gwen at the annual book and author festival, where Lance had been the keynote speaker and the big draw. Gwen was a literary groupie with a degree in English and a face and figure to die for. She was twenty-five, not nineteen like the old lecher’s Venus of Rodeo Road, but Debra had to admit to twenty years on her. This vision of youth and spring had worked in publishing, longed to return to the world of books, “absolutely dreamed” of being an editor.

  She thought Lance’s books were “wonderful,” a “breath of fresh air,” “the living thing;” she’d had enough of overly refined, overly theoretical “so-called literature;” Lance’s were “real.” Debra had struggled to keep a straight face through all this, but Lance ate it up. He was at the age to want to be serious, or rather, to be taken seriously, though, thank God, he was sensible enough not to change his style. Gwen offered, Debra belatedly saw, the best of both worlds: she burbled on about “literature,” but she didn’t expect him to change a line.

  Debra glanced at her Rolex, a very nice one with very nice diamonds, a gift from Lance after a previous indiscretion. She thought that she might stop by Lux, Bond, and Green; she felt like diamonds, something expensive. She’d seen a handsome choker in the window, but that was maybe too dowager empress. She needed young diamonds at the moment, perhaps a tennis bracelet. Perhaps. Sporty diamonds suggested flirtatious youth, but the calculation of compensatory gifts is a fine art; Debra didn’t want to settle too cheaply.

  She got home, hot in spite of the Mercedes’ air-conditioning, the super cool of the salon and the almost glacial confines of the jewelers’, to find her husband sitting by the pool checking her latest corrections and drinking a vodka cocktail red as blood. Debra dropped the chapter she’d finished on the glass table beside him.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Slow,” she said, though she knew as well as anybody that the correct response was terrific. “I only finished seven.”

  “Well, you have a tendency”— a pause in which Debra felt her temperature rise by several more degrees— “to overwork some of the copy.”

  “Since when,” asked Debra, “have I overworked anything?” Definitely, a tennis bracelet would be a mere bagatelle!

  Lance’s blocky features took on a sly and cagey expression. He looked like the Marlboro Man and schemed like Casanova. “I thought I might let Gwen have a look. You’re so busy, and she’s got plenty of time in between job hunting.”

  “She’s got blue eyes and sexy tits,” Debra said and cleaned manuscript, drink, pencils and pens off the table. His favorite Waterford crystal glass shattered on the tile with a satisfying crash and the manuscript pages, spidered all over with her neat script, spun languidly through the humid air to land on the aquamarine surface of the pool.

  Even over their straining air conditioners, neighbors three houses away heard angry voices and the bang of the house door slamming. Debra stamped up the stairs, swearing still. She charged into Lance’s office with murder in her heart. Downstairs the door banged again, as Lance followed her inside; he knew her habits.

  She’d thrown the finished copy of the manuscript out the window and had begun wrestling the computer into its assorted components, when she saw the day’s paper again. The Strangler’s Seventh? headline fairly jumped off the page, cutting through her hot, red anger, bringing a shock of realization, and stopping her momentarily, so that Lance arrived in time to save his monitor and his hard drive, though his modem was wrecked and his printer was already upended on the floor.

  “This is too much,” he said. “I damn well don’t have to put up with this, Debby. I really don’t.”

  She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “I suppose your books just happen by magic. You type half a day and, presto, semi-literate verbiage becomes polished copy.”

  “Editors,” Lance said, his voice corrosive, “editors are a dime a dozen. I can afford any editor I want. But can you get yourself another best selling author?”

  In that moment, Debra understood everything: him and Gwen and herself. She even had an inkling of what she was going to do next: she had no choice.

  The next day she visited the local library. They all knew her there as writer Lance Aken’s devoted research assistant. Debra found a table in the periodicals section, picked up the whole summer’s worth of papers, and began to read everything that had been written about the Strangler. She started with the earliest account, “Woman found Dead in Sigourney Street Apartment,” and continued right up through a pretentious Sunday magazine rumination on the Strangler as a projection of our hidden fears.

  What Debra was interested in was the Strangler’s MO. Of course, the police would have concealed some crucial detail: she had watched detective shows and understood (really, it was just common sense) that certain things would have been withheld. But she also figured that there would be a margin for error, especially in this heat, especially with the growing panic and paranoia, especially when, yes, the Strangler might, indeed, be the projection of our hidden fears. Debra smiled grimly when she thought of that.

  He struck at night. The first killing appeared to have been at dusk, but usually, the victims were surprised late at night or in the early hours of the morning; the hours of birth and death and very suitable, Debra thought. Typically, the Strangler gained access via an unlocked slider or porch door; several apartments had been entered through unlocked windows, and, in one case, the killer entered through the front door, but that was in the early days. No one opened her door now without a careful inspection through the peep hole and a precautionary check-up call to the pertinent utility or repair company. Any late night stranger could expect a woman home alone to call the police.

  Once inside, the Strangler throttled his victim with a nylon stocking and ransacked her lingerie drawer. Debra wondered if the Strangler brought a stocking with him or if he trusted to luck. There were lots of other questions. Had he visited the chosen apartment earlier? Did he scout neighborhoods? Were his victims pre-selected or did he operate at random and pick his targets by chance? The police c
laimed not to know.

  What they did know was that the murders were clustered in a semi-circle west of the river and that all the victims were under fifty years of age, single, and living in apartments, condos, or, in two cases, single family houses with access via backyard decks. The Strangler thrived on carelessness, on cheap locks and loose window fittings, on the anonymity of suburban apartment complexes, especially of “garden apartments.” Debra smiled again, for they’d been to see Gwen at her apartment in the Sedgwick Elms complex.

  At the time, Debra had considered the visit a pain in the ass, a typical example of Lance’s weakness for flattering women. Gwen had come by with some books that he had promised to sign. She had the first two Matt Dillard novels, brand new, Debra noticed, and two of his early books, The Money Changers and Blood Beach, both clearly second hand. She was thorough, Debra saw, and Gwen moved up in her estimation, although Debra was still pleased to be able to tell her that Lance was away on business.

  She should have put the books out in the trash, but that was in retrospect. Instead, Lance had come home to sign the title pages with funny remarks, for he was surprisingly witty off the cuff, charming with audiences, quick and amusing. His writing was another matter. Lance Aken prose bogged down unless strictly, strictly edited, and even then, you could scarcely say the novels bubbled. Scarcely.

  “Of course we’ll bring the books over! No bother. We’re out anyway.” That was Lance on the phone, being charming, being agreeable. Debra had gone along to make the situation clear to Gwen Romani, who was gushing and clever and had worked in publishing and wished so much that she could afford to work as an editor again.

  Debra leaned back in her chair and stared at the holes in the acoustic tile covering the library ceiling. Probably asbestos laden, she thought, and then she tried to remember the exact layout of Gwen’s small, neat apartment, and how the intercom buzzer worked. It seemed important to know. Debra remembered geraniums, pink and white, and lots of bookshelves and yet another of Lance’s early novels on the coffee table. Where were the doors located? Debra could see the couch and two doors to the right of the hall and straight ahead, visible through a sliding door, the pink and white flowers and a single chair on the minuscule deck.

  The Strangler would enter through the deck, approach the couch where Gwen sat reading her newest Lance Aken novel, loop a stocking around her slender neck, and— Debra’s hands clenched on the library table and jerked apart. It was very pleasing to imagine this scene and maybe it would happen.

  For Gwen, who was so careful about cultivating rich, successful authors, might be careless about other things like her personal safety, like locking her windows. Maybe her beauty would attract the Strangler, and once he was inside, how hard could it be? Debra found herself thinking several times a day about the Strangler and mentally directing him to Gwen’s apartment in the Sedgwick Elms complex. If he’d eliminate Gwen Romani, Debra would be quite willing to consider him a public benefactor.

  In late July, Lance had speaking engagements in Tulsa, Dallas, and Houston. Debra declined to go. They were still on bad terms and the heat out west was even worse than in the Connecticut Valley. Besides she still had a dozen chapters to edit, and Lance had sense enough not to mention Gwen Romani’s editorial talents again. He planned to be away for a week.

  The first night he was gone, Debra got into her car right at dusk and drove slowly toward Gwen’s neighborhood. She had no plan in mind; she just wanted to see how it would feel to roll down those leafy suburban streets where deep shadows were punctured in every yard by a security spotlight. When she got within two streets of the Sedgwick Elms, she parked and stepped out of the car. Her hair was pulled back with an elastic; she wore a black top and black shorts and running shoes like a serious jogger— and like the Strangler, too, Debra thought, who would, of course, wear black.

  Her feet made a steady thump along the sidewalks in the quiet suburban night. She ran back to the boulevard, orange tinged with high intensity lights, noisy with traffic, with motors and stereo systems, the air tainted with gasoline, fries, and pizza. Another corner brought the sudden darkness of heavy street trees and the shadows of the thick screen of pines around the Sedgwick Elms.

  Debra could hear voices; the complex had a pool, well lit at night, and a couple tennis courts which echoed with the hollow thock of the rackets, the shouts and laughter of the players. The black clad Strangler would wait until later, until there would be no one to see him glide along the shadow of the hedge and around the utility sheds to the back of the complex where Gwen Romani lived. He would pick out her apartment, he just had to.

  When Debra got back to her car, she was damp with sweat, thirsty, and exhilarated. She liked the sound of her own footsteps and the way her shadow surged ahead, dwindled to nothing, then rushed forward again. She liked the glimpses of lighted windows, of other lives, the half-caught sounds of laughter, of agreement, of anger. She hadn’t been running after dark because of the Strangler, but that was when she’d seen herself as prey. Now that she’d stepped to the other side, Debra had no reason to feel frightened.

  She began to go running every evening, later and later. It was too hot during the day, far too hot, and although these excursions were foolish in several ways, they were irresistible. The fantasy that she was preparing for something, for something which she carefully left unnamed, was almost as good as action.

  But though she passed the Sedgwick Elms almost every evening, Debra was unable to get a clear look at the decks and the windows. The day before Lance was scheduled to come home, she went into the office, searched the shelves for his early editions and found three copies of his first novel, A Dynamite Idea. A Dynamite Idea hadn’t done terribly well when it was first published but it was now a collector’s item. She wrapped it up and called to see if Gwen was home.

  “For your collection,” she said, when Gwen opened the door. Debra was dressed in her running clothes. “I was just passing.”

  “Surely you don’t run at night,” Gwen exclaimed.

  Debra smiled. “It’s so hot during the day. You’re lucky to have the pool. And your deck.”

  “The sun is on it until almost four.”

  “But now,” said Debra, moving to the back of the apartment. “Now it must be pleasant. You’re up a little, too. I prefer second floor apartments, don’t you?” She stood at the sliding door, looking at the catch, at the type of lock. Gwen, the good hostess came over and slid the door open.

  “And you have a screen. You can leave it open and get the air.”

  “Not likely,” said Gwen. “Security’s lousy here.”

  “Really?”

  “And for what we pay,” said Gwen.

  Debra made a sympathetic face and checked the height from the ground: the Strangler would manage that easily, she thought. She smiled and agreed with Gwen that most realty management companies were criminal.

  Back at home, Debra took a screwdriver and experimented with the catch on their sliding door. The hardware looked to be a better grade than the Sedgwick Elm’s but did not prove durable. She stood out on their patio and looked at the sprung latch with considerable contentment.

  When Lance returned, Debra stopped her evening runs, but she found herself thinking about dark sidewalks, the thick row of pines along one side of the Sedgwick Elms complex, and the ease with which a jogger blends with the unremarked life of a street. She felt that she had two lives, one in which she was Debra Aken, editor, researcher, agent, a woman who went to Mr. Jose’s salon every other week and had her groceries delivered from La Epicerie, and the other, in which she ran the shadowed streets of their suburban town like a maenad, hair flying, eyes wild, possessed by violent, not to be examined, emotions. This latter woman understood the Strangler and breathed his air.

  Lance was working hard on the new novel, and Debra was kept busy editing. They said very little about their own situation, united as they were in their desire to get the project done, to meet their deadline, to be
finished with Deadfall, which Debra, at least, was beginning to find wearying. She sensed the crisis would come when the book was finished, when she’d managed to extract another large advance and another favorable contract. That was when Lance would make his move, and Debra intended to be ready.

  She might have continued to bide her time, if she hadn’t received the e-mail. Was it a Freudian slip or a calculated gamble which had led Gwen to write daken@aol instead of laken@aol? Debra had opened the message and scanned it perfunctorily before she realized what she was reading. “I wouldn’t ordinarily want you to rush a single word,” Gwen wrote, “but the sooner you’re done, the sooner we’ll be together.” That was the heart of it; the rest was an unsavory (and rather ungrammatical) mix of sex and sentiment, in which the Gwen expressed herself with more vigor than Debra would have expected. She sat at the machine seething. Should she hit the forward button and send this straight to Lance and let him know that she knew everything? Should she call him in from the yard— he was fond of sitting out by the pool with his laptop— and show him what had come up on her screen?

  Once she would have; Debra was fearless where her own interests were concerned. But now she felt the temptation of the night streets, the shadows leaping ahead and racing behind, the security spots piercing the black foliage, the sounds of cars passing, and the rhythmic thock, thock from the tennis courts behind the Sedgwick Elms.

  She carefully did not plot any course of action; the future remained unknown, unknowable, and she was content with that. But it was a nervous, alert contentment. Debra knew that she was waiting for something, and that something arrived when Lance announced a trip to New York for a meeting with a programmer who knew a great deal about computer espionage. Matt Dillard needed help to unravel a key problem in Deadfall, and Lance said he’d stay overnight and take his friend out for a really good dinner once the plot details were sorted out. Debra said that sounded like an excellent idea.