The Woman in Darkness

by Charlie Donlea

  The Thief lay on his bunk now and folded his hands across his chest as he waited. There was an imbalance in the universe. He could feel it in his gut. Passing time had never been a challenge. At least, not for many years. But of late, since the parole board had stamped him approved, time became something more difficult to manage. His sentence was coming to an end, and he allowed himself to taste what waited on the outside. It was a dangerous practice to entertain thoughts about the freedoms that might soon come to him. It was especially dangerous to imagine the satisfaction of finding her. Still, despite the hazards, he closed his eyes as he lay on his bunk and imagined finally coming face-to-face with her. What a joyous moment it would be. The woman who had put him here would finally receive retribution.

  “Forsicks,” the guard said, interrupting his thoughts. “You got phone privileges today?”

  He sat up quickly and stood from his bed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The guard turned his head and in a booming voice yelled down the length of the cell block. “One-two-two-seven-six-five-nine-four-six.” His voice echoed off the walls and conjured prisoners to the front of their cells, where they stuck their arms through the bars and rested their elbows on the metal as they watched what was transpiring.

  Forsicks’s cell door rattled open and the guard motioned for him to take the lead as they walked down the long galley. Seeing nothing exciting, the other prisoners melted back into their cells. A door buzzed as they approached the end of the gangplank and Forsicks pushed through it. Another guard was waiting for him on the other side. He did a quick pat down, and then motioned him toward an isolated pay phone on the wall.

  Forsicks went through the practiced routine of navigating the automated prison phone system that allowed outgoing collect calls, dialed the number from memory, and listened to the staticky ring through the receiver. After the eighth loop of buzzing, the call went to voice mail, where he learned that his attorney’s mailbox was full.

  The universe was off. Something was wrong. All of his fantasies about finding her began to fade.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  THE VOMITING CONTINUED FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with the stranger in the alley. Her head swam with vertigo and her stomach roiled with nausea every time Angela thought of that morning. The dirty couch had sat abandoned for the entire day. The garbage men hadn’t touched it. The couch sat at an odd angle at the precipice of the open garage door, and Angela imagined they assumed it was there temporarily while the garage was being cleaned. She had watched through the slit in the curtain that covered the kitchen window as the garbage truck stopped in the alley and the guys emptied her overflowing trashcans into the back of the truck before hopping back onto the fender as the driver continued down the alley. Angela couldn’t bring herself to open the kitchen door and run to the alley to ask them to haul the couch away.

  It was early afternoon when Angela had heard the honking that day. Her neighbor was attempting to pull his car into the garage directly across from Angela’s, but couldn’t make it past the couch to cut the tight angle. As was typical in Chicago, the constant honking of one’s horn was the chosen solution to nearly every problem a driver faced, from slow-moving traffic, to kids playing ball in the street, to a deserted couch in an alley. When the honking reached five nerve-racking minutes, Angela had finally gotten up the nerve to leave the house. She pulled the couch back into the garage, shut the door, and hurried back inside to bolt the door behind her. Once. Twice. Three times, to be sure.

  She told Thomas about the day’s adventure as soon as he’d gotten home. He suggested they call the police, but when they discussed it further, Angela was at a loss for exactly what she would be reporting. That a stranger, and likely a neighbor, had been kind enough to offer his assistance? That a cat had frightened her the night before and filled her with the sense that she was being watched? Angela knew how that conversation would go. She could already see the sideways glances the officers would give each other while Angela stuttered through her explanation, all the time doing her best to avoid eye contact. The nervous plucking of her eyebrows would be looked upon like a contagious disease until the officers excused themselves to speak with Thomas in private about his paranoid wife, who was clearly making more out of things than was there. The further she discussed the incident with Thomas, the more absurd it sounded to call the police.

  More pressing now, a week later, was Angela’s fear that she was on the verge of an obsessive-compulsive breakdown. That she even recognized its imminent approach, like thunderclouds on the horizon, could be considered progress. Years before, the affliction would descend upon her without warning to steal a week or a month as the demands of her mind sent her on meaningless tasks of redundancy. But in the new paradigm of her life, Angela not only sensed the collapse approaching, she fought like hell to prevent it. While she battled her condition, she also worked hard to hide the worst of her symptoms from Thomas. The lack of eyelashes was camouflaged by a thick application of mascara to the few follicles that remained, and a shadowing pencil bolstered her thinning eyebrows. Despite the sweltering heat, Angela had taken to wearing jeans and long shirts in lieu of shorts and tank tops in order to hide the bloody scabs that marked her shoulders and thighs from her nervous scratching.

  The masking of her symptoms, however, was a venomous crutch that made things worse. The better Angela was able to conceal her habits of self-mutilation, the more dramatic her dependency on them became. She tried to stop herself with subtle tricks that had worked in the past. She kept the tips of her fingers slick with Vase-line to make more difficult the grasping of her eyebrow follicles. And she clipped her nails down to the soft pads of her fingers to make them benign tools as she dug into her skin. She was managing thus far to keep the worst of her breakdown hidden.

  The vomiting, however, was becoming a problem. Thomas noticed it the other morning. When he checked on her, Angela had told him it was the result of bad Chinese food. In reality, the nausea came every time she worked herself into a frenzy with thoughts of the stranger from the alley. Each morning after Thomas left for work, Angela spent hours pulling the curtains of the kitchen door to the side so she could stare out into the alley. A routine developed: pull curtain, check alley, secure lock, lift phone, listen for dial tone, repeat. The only thing that broke the cycle was the need to vomit. Her stomach turned whenever the image popped into her mind of the man standing in the alley and peering through the open garage door and into her kitchen, which sent her to the bathroom in violent flurries of retching.

  It was during a rare moment of lucidity a week after her encounter in the alley, when Angela had discovered an expired bottle of Valium from her previous doctor. Swallowing a tablet every six hours, Angela found, took the edge off, allowed her to sleep at night, and brought her mind back from the encounter in the garage. It was a temporary fix until she could reason with herself and calm her mind. She had beaten the obsessiveness before. She could do it again.

  Under the calming effects of the Valium, Angela convinced herself that it was possible, and even likely, that her encounter in the alley was nothing more than a Good Samaritan offering his help. And it was very unlikely that the horror of the missing women could stretch this far out to the fringe of the city limits, where she lived a quiet life. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her shaking fingers as she poured her morning coffee. She stopped her gaze before she could look for the hundredth time out the back window and into the alley. Instead, she forced her thoughts to focus on the missing women and the profiles she had created. It had been days since she thought of them.

  She retrieved the press clippings from the chest in her bedroom and spread them across the kitchen table. For two hours, Angela studied the missing women and the notes she had made about each of them. Perhaps it was the clean slate of her mind coming off a lost week of paranoia, or the Valium freeing her thoughts to flow in ways they hadn’t in the weeks before, but as she read through the
profiles, she saw something she had missed previously. Her mind ran through the catalogued information, like scrolling through microfilm at the library. Articles she had read over the past years suddenly came together in her mind and she saw a pattern that had always been there, waiting to be discovered, but to this point had gone unnoticed. Her mind raced and she jotted notes, but the bleached-out exertion from fighting her OCD for the last week had frayed her neurons and brought self-doubt. Surely, she was wrong.

  Pushing her insecurities aside, Angela scribbled notes frantically as thoughts spilled from her mind, fearful that if she didn’t capture them on the page they’d be lost forever. She recalled with great clarity the newspaper articles she had read years earlier and scribbled names and dates from the images that sped through her mind. When she finished, she looked at the clock. It was approaching the noon hour. She had sat down at the kitchen table three hours ago, but it felt like only minutes.

  Quickly dressing in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Angela stuffed her notes into her purse. A wave of nausea came over her as she imagined leaving the house, but she had no choice. She had to get to the library to confirm her suspicions. She knew, too, she would have to take another precaution. She needed confirmation that her thoughts were lucid and coherent, and not the result of her paranoia. And that confirmation could come from only one person.

  Angela picked up the phone and dialed her friend Catherine’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Catherine,” Angela said in a soft voice.

  “Angela?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Are you feeling better? Thomas told Bill that you’ve been ill since the night we had dinner together.”

  Perhaps, Angela considered, she hadn’t been hiding her symptoms as well as she imagined.

  “I’m fine, but I need to talk with you. Can we meet?”

  “Sure. Is something wrong?”

  “No. I just need some help. Can I stop by in a while?”

  “Of course,” Catherine said.

  Angela hung up without saying good-bye, ran to the bathroom, and then vomited.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  ANGELA MITCHELL SPENT TWO HOURS AMONG THE LIBRARY SHELVES, pulling books and skimming pages. She sat at the microfilm station and spun old rolls of newspaper articles that dated back to the summer of 1970, nearly a decade earlier. She scribbled notes until her uncanny mind saw clearly the pattern she suspected existed. She spent thirty minutes plotting her findings onto graph paper and creating a line chart that translated her findings to paper form so others might understand her discovery.

  She organized her notes, returned the microfilm to the shelf, and hurried from the library. Catherine’s house was just two blocks from her own, and at 3:00 P.M., Angela pushed through the wrought iron gate that led to the front stoop. Even before Angela could knock, Catherine opened the door.

  “Woman, it’s ninety degrees outside,” Catherine said as Angela walked up the front steps. “Why are you covered in denim?”

  Angela looked at her jeans and button-down shirt. She was less concerned with how her fashion choices would react to the sweltering heat as she was with hiding the scabbed-over claw marks that covered her arms and legs.

  “I’m behind on laundry,” she finally said.

  “Come into the air conditioning.” Catherine pushed open the screen door and waved Angela inside.

  They sat at the kitchen table. “So what got you so sick? Stomach bug?”

  “Yes,” Angela said, glancing quickly into Catherine’s eyes, her first bit of eye contact, then back down to the table. “But I’ve been over it for the last few days. You know how Thomas worries.”

  Thomas had pushed hard during the first year or two of marriage for Angela to mix with his friends’ wives. But Angela had always felt judged by them. They whispered about her when they thought she wasn’t listening, and treated her like a child when she didn’t respond to their boisterous ways. Catherine Blackwell was different. Angela felt accepted when she was with Catherine, who never asked foolish questions or gave confused looks when Angela grew quiet with anxiety. Catherine had always made her feel comfortable, and stood by her whenever anyone treated Angela badly. The first time the two ventured to lunch together, a condescending waitress had scolded Angela for not speaking loudly enough.

  Speak up, honey.

  Her name is Angela, not Honey, Catherine had said. And she’s almost thirty years old, not twelve.

  From that moment, Catherine Blackwell was not only her protector, she was Angela Mitchell’s closest friend.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, no,” Angela said. “Thanks, though.”

  “So what’s so urgent?”

  “I know this is going to sound crazy,” Angela said, pulling a folder from her purse. It held newspaper clippings and her biographies of the missing women, in addition to the reams of paper from her latest research trip to the library. “But I’ve been looking into the women who have gone missing.”

  This caught Catherine’s attention. “Looking into them how?”

  “I’ve been collecting bits of information about them from the papers and from newscasts.”

  Catherine pulled one of the pages across the table. It was a Chicago Tribune article about Samantha Rodgers, the latest girl who had disappeared from the streets of Chicago. Catherine had watched one of the news reports about the missing girl with Angela when they all had dinner together the week before. The girl’s picture was at the top of the article, a crease bent through her photo, where the clipping had been folded and stashed in Angela’s binder.

  “Why are you collecting all this?” Catherine asked.

  Angela looked up.

  “I’m obsess—” Angela caught herself. Speaking the word “obsessed” out loud would be confessing to her friend the dark affliction that had plagued her life. It was unlikely, Angela understood, that Catherine hadn’t already recognized the signs of her condition, but Angela stopped herself, nonetheless.

  “I can’t stop thinking about them,” she finally said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s hard to explain. When my mind gets focused on something, it’s hard for me to … let it go. So I started collecting information about the girls, and I think I’ve found something.”

  Angela spread the information across the table. She had printed articles from newspapers and microfilm at the library, as well as pages from the books she had referenced, and her own notes that filled the first third of her spiral notebook.

  “Five girls have gone missing since spring. Here are the dates each disappeared.” Angela pointed to a different page. “Here is a list describing each victim—age, race, ethnicity, occupation, and physical characteristics, like hair color, skin tone, eye color. You get the idea.”

  Angela pushed the handwritten list to Catherine.

  “The police say each disappearance is random. They believe the same man has taken all of these women, but they believe there is no connection between each woman. From what I can tell, they’re right about that. The women, in relation to one another, have no association. But the police say The Thief strikes unsystematically. That’s not true.”

  Catherine looked at Angela. “How long have you been working on this?”

  “All summer. Since the women started to go missing. It’s all I do, really. All I’ve been able to think about. But in reality, I realized this morning that I’ve been working on it much longer than just this summer. I just wasn’t aware of it until now. Until I put it together.”

  “What did you put together?”

  Angela lifted a random sheet of paper from within the scattered Xeroxed pages. “Look at this. I categorized all the characteristics of each missing girl—age, race, occupation, physical qualities—all the things on that list you’re looking at—and then I went back to look not just at missing persons cases, but also homicides in and around Chicago that involved women who match those charac
teristics.”

  Angela produced the handmade chart she had created at the library.

  “Look here.” She pointed at the graph paper. “On the bottom of my graph are years starting in 1960 and going all the way through to today, the summer of 1979.” Angela ran her finger from left to right across the bottom of the page. “On the vertical axis is the number of homicides of women who fall into the category of these missing women. Again, age, sex, race, physical characteristics. Now look, from 1960 to 1970, the number of homicides that involved women who match these descriptions was flat.”

  On the graph, a horizontal line ran from 1960 to 1970 without any substantial spikes or dips.

  “But in 1970,” Angela said, “there was a sudden uptick in homicides involving these types of women.”

  On the chart, Angela’s handwritten line spiked upward dramatically in 1970.

  “These are all the homicides in Chicago?” Catherine asked.

  “No. In 1970, there were more than eight hundred homicides in and around Chicago. This graph only represents homicides involving women who match the characteristics of the five women who have gone missing this summer.” Angela tapped the page again, tracing her finger over her graph. “The increase in homicides begins in 1970 and continues until 1972, then tapers out but stays high relative to the entire decade of the 1960s. Then, this year, 1979, there is a sudden drop again back to levels equal to the sixties.”