The Admirer

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  He squeezed Hornsby’s neck until tendon pressed against bone. He had only a moment to decide. He could move his hands around to the front and press until Hornsby’s body fell limp. Surprise would slow Hornsby’s movements, surprise and disbelief. He would go down wondering how the world could be so bad. Then one quick shove and Hornsby would be over the rail. He wouldn’t even have to kill Hornsby on the bridge. As long as Hornsby was unconscious, he would drown in the shallow water. He looked up and down the bridge. The playing fields. The library. Boston Hall. The Ventmore dormitory. There were so many eyes. He released Hornsby.

  “I had better call Dr. Le Farge and tell him to cancel the study.”

  “You can’t do that. Alisha left this morning. She’s probably in Switzerland by now.” Hornsby’s voice shook. “The treatments start in a week. You said they’re expecting her.”

  “I’ve run out of money.”

  “You haven’t!”

  “No. I haven’t. In fact, I just received a rather large windfall from an old friend. But Dr. Le Farge has no way of knowing.”

  “They won’t take her off the study. They need her for science.”

  “Do you think it would be hard to find someone to take her place? Do you think there is any shortage of wealthy women who would pay for a second chance at life?” He leaned close enough to smell the police chief’s breath. Coffee. Bile. “Le Farge is offering a miracle, not some new chemotherapy that will extend her life another six months while she vomits up blood. This is the real thing, and it comes at a cost. The cost is your soul.”

  “I’ll think of something. I’ll figure something out.” Hornsby had gone pale. “Please. Don’t take Alisha off the study. She has nothing to do with this. It’s not her fault. Blame me. Hurt me.”

  I still might. He watched Hornsby hurry away, almost running. Hornsby just needed a little fear to put the hustle back in his step.

  He dug his nails into the wood of the bridge railing. He had to move quickly. In a few days, Alisha Hornsby would show up at the Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève and find out there was no study. There was no Dr. Le Farge, no miracle cure. Then Hornsby’s honor might win out over self–interest, although he could still be blackmailed. There would be Giles and Thompson’s youthful optimism to contend with. But if everything went according to plan, none of that would matter. If everything went according to plan, Helen Ivers would disappear as quickly and completely as the whores in Battambang.

  ****

  On Monday morning, Helen was surprised when the first telephone call came from Robert Hornsby.

  “Heard you were talking to Officer Thompson about the legs,” he said gruffly.

  “Do you have some news for me?” Helen asked. She wasn’t going to a debate whom she talked to and why.

  “Look, I know you and I got off to a difficult start,” Hornsby said. “I called to say I’m sorry. What with my wife being sick, I haven’t been myself.” His apology was as warm as a frozen lake.

  “This is unprecedented,” Helen said.

  “I just want to repair relations with the college. We’ve all been under a lot of stress, trying to solve this case.” Hornsby coughed. “And I’ve got some news for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “You were right. The DNA on the legs matches Carrie Brown, and we’re pretty sure it was a suicide. The torso belongs to another woman. We got a positive ID on a homeless woman. Crystal Leigh Evans. Probably another suicide. It’s not her first attempt. I talked to a therapist who used to see her when she was at the asylum. He said this didn’t surprise him.”

  “What didn’t surprise him?”

  “A suicide. Crystal saw the media attention and, in her mind, that meant Carrie Brown was a star. She wanted that. We got the Berkshire–Western people looking for the bodies. We figure the same thing happened twice. First time, the train lifted the body. The second time it was the legs. Could be coyotes, though.”

  “Mr. Hornsby, you’ll forgive me, but this sounds farfetched. Two suicides?”

  “It’s not that unusual. When there’s a widely publicized attack or suicide, next thing you know, someone’s trying it themselves. We saw that with 9/11. The Trade Center went down and then, don’t you know, some idiot with a two–seater flies his plane into the side of the U.S. Bank building in Seattle. Gets the plane stuck and has to have the building’s security staff help him out.”

  “You’re telling me two women committed suicide on the train tracks and each time their body—or half their body—was carried away or…?”

  “Eaten. It happens.”

  Helen paced across her office, stretching the phone cord until it almost pulled the phone off her desk. “I just don’t believe it.”

  “You haven’t worked in law enforcement. You don’t understand this town.”

  Helen was about to say, I don’t need to understand this town to know when I’m hearing bullshit. Something in Hornsby’s tone stopped her. She had believed him until now. She had believed the dying–wife story. He was an old man, in over his head, with two rookie cops underfoot. Gross negligence, shielded by Rotary Club loyalty, in a town where people were defined by their grandfather’s property lines more than their own accomplishments. Or failures. Now there was an edge to Hornsby’s voice that stiffened the hair on the back of her neck.

  “Is Officer Thompson helping you with this?” Helen asked.

  “He’s away.”

  “Away?”

  “He’s looking into some poachers; guess they’re hunting mountain lions. Some environmental protection group is up our ass about it.”

  Poachers?

  “What about Darrell Giles?”

  “Officer Giles is on administrative leave for discharging his firearm without cause.”

  “Who did he shoot?”

  “It was at a Fourth of July party this year. He fired a police–issued weapon seven times. Shooting cans off a stump. He could have killed someone.”

  “Shooting cans. That’s…” Helen stopped.

  You don’t understand this town.

  “I’ll call Carrie Brown’s next of kin this afternoon,” Helen said. “Thank you for contacting me. I hope your wife is all right.”

  ****

  “Carrie’s dead,” Mrs. Brown said, before Helen had a chance to speak. “The legs. Of course. We knew. We saw it in the news.” Then the woman let out a soft cry, like the last breath escaping a sparrow.

  Helen pressed the receiver to her ear, as though she could somehow press her sympathy onto the Browns. They reminded her so much of her parents.

  “Deidre, please put down the phone,” Mr. Brown instructed his wife. “Tell me what I need to know, Ms. Ivers.”

  “DNA confirmed that the legs belonged to your daughter, Carrie.”

  Helen hated delivering the news. She hated the fact that the Browns must hear about their daughter’s death and understand that even that news led to another tragedy. The freakish manner of their daughter’s death would taint the sympathy they received. Even as the neighbor’s consoled them, they’d be thinking about Carrie’s naked legs bound to the train tracks.

  “I’m so sorry,” Helen said.

  “Oh, Carrie,” Mr. Brown said.

  In the background, Mrs. Brown cried quietly.

  “How do we go about arranging for the body to be sent out? We don’t want to fly to Massachusetts.”

  The body. Helen had been dreading that question.

  “The police have not recovered the body. They believe it may have been transported by the train.”

  “Damn her,” Mr. Brown said. It was not a passionate outburst. Something in his calm piqued Helen’s curiosity.

  “Are you surprised?” Helen asked as gently as she could.

  “We knew this was coming. We just didn’t know when. Carrie was sick,” he said, his voice flat.

  Helen had a vision of her own father trying to make sense of Eliza’s illness, words like “schizoaffective disorder” and “atypical antipsychotics”
catching on his tongue like the answers to an exam.

  “I know this is hard. Can you tell me about Carrie and why you thought this might happen?”

  The phone crackled and Helen closed her eyes to listen.

  “When Carrie was five, her aunt broke a leg.” Mr. Brown spoke slowly. “Carrie was obsessed with it. She wanted to touch the cast, to put her fingers under the plaster. Finally, she started pretending her leg was broken. So what, we thought. We gave her an old pair of crutches. She was just a kid playing pretend. We said she wanted to be a doctor. That’s what we told our friends.” He gave a strangled laugh.

  “Then when she was about ten, there was a boy in her school who was missing his left leg. A birth defect, you know. She talked about him all the time. We thought it was a crush at first. But it wasn’t right. The things she said. The way she said it. Like she was hungry for it. She wanted to talk about it all the time, and we got strict with her. Told her we didn’t want to hear that kind of garbage. Maybe we should have been softer on her. Maybe if we had got her help right then…”

  Helen could tell he had asked these questions a thousand times before.

  “In high school, she cut up her legs real bad.” The man’s voice wavered. “It was awful. We had some friends. Their daughter used to cut herself, little perfect razor marks. So clean, you could barely see them. This wasn’t like that. It was like she was trying to carve her bones out.

  “She used one of my hunting knives. I was always so careful with my rifles. Not even Deidre knew the gun safe combination. I was never going to be one of those fathers who leaves his loaded rifle out for his kids to play with. But the knife. It wasn’t even a real hunting knife. It was a souvenir. The psychiatrist said it was a plea for help. He said if we spent more time with her, took an interest in her hobbies, she’d get over it.” He was crying now. “But I know she was trying to cut her legs off.

  “She was always so tall and graceful. She never put on an ounce of weight. Everyone at church always said she should be a model for J.C. Penny’s. But Carrie wanted her legs cut off. She wanted to go around in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She ran away when she was seventeen. We tried to find her, but what were we going to do? How can you understand a beautiful, healthy girl who wants to cut her own legs off? He raised his voice. “Were we supposed to get her a wheelchair? Fix the house so she could get around? What she wanted was an abomination.”

  “Had you been in touch with her recently?”

  “She ran away when she was seventeen. She got back in touch when she was twenty–three, came home for Easter one year. We were proud that she put herself in college, but we weren’t really a family. We didn’t talk to her but once or twice a year. I knew she still wanted to do it, to cut off her legs.”

  Helen thought about Blake and the devotees. The “ultimate commitment” he had called it. Being disabled frees us to be who we really are. But it hadn’t freed Carrie. It had killed her.

  ****

  After she talked to the Browns, Helen called Eliza’s psychiatrist.

  “Helen!” She could hear Dr. Linda Crestwell shushing her receptionist and closing a door behind her. “How are you?”

  Helen resented Crestwell’s overweening sincerity. A professional hazard, Helen guessed. Nonetheless, Crestwell was the best in Pittsburg, maybe in her field.

  “I’m absolutely fine,” Helen said. “I’m calling with a professional question.”

  “Ah. The Pittock legs. I’ve been following the case,” Crestwell said. “Body Integrity Identity Disorder, that’s my diagnosis.”

  “Body…?”

  “Body Integrity Identity Disorder. BIID. You’ve heard of transsexuals, yes? They possess the body of, say, a man, but feel as though they were meant to be a woman. It sounds strange, and, of course, we don’t like to think that our gender defines us, yet it does. Men can be nurses; women can be doctors.” Crestwell chuckled. She was proof. “I’m not talking about those kinds of distinctions. Deep inside, however, our gender does determine a great deal of our experience. And it’s more than your parts. It’s DNA. It’s in utero hormone exposure. It’s properly developed sex organs. One aberration in any of those factors, and it’s possible the individual’s body won’t match their neural map. So, you get a transsexual. His body is male, but his…or her…mind is different.”

  Helen tapped the end of her pencil against her chin. “But we don’t wake up every morning and think ‘I feel like a woman’ or ‘I feel like a man.’”

  “No. But close your eyes. You still know where your hands and feet are, yes? Even if you can’t see them. Even if nothing is touching your skin. You know where your body is. We call it proprioception. Proprioception works, in part, because the mind has a map of the body that is separate from just feeling things on your skin. Your map matches your body, but what if it doesn’t? Imagine your neural map has a penis.”

  “That’s hard to imagine.”

  “For you. For a transsexual woman, that’s everyday life.”

  Helen tucked the phone under her ear, twisted her hair into a knot, and secured it with the pencil.

  “So what does this have to do with the Pittock legs?”

  “People who suffer from BIID have a neural map that ends above the left knee or at the left wrist. You can have right–sided BIID or dual BIID, but it’s less common.”

  “Do you think it’s probable this was a case of BIID?” Helen asked.

  “Possible.”

  “The police say there were actually two cases. First the Pittock legs and then a suicide.”

  Helen could almost picture Crestwell brushing her coarse, gray hair off her forehead. She would wear a sympathetic, no–nonsense expression.

  “It’s possible,” Crestwell said. “Copycat suicides, copycat crimes… that’s not a stretch.” She paused. “But, really, how are you, Helen? How are you doing?”

  Helen gave Crestwell a brief rundown on the college’s financial problems, her plans for a capital campaign, and highlights from her alumni visits.

  “I see,” Crestwell said. “And this is very important to you? Do you feel enriched by these challenges?”

  “Damn it,” Helen said after the phone was securely back in its cradle. “I’m fine.” She felt a lump in the back of her throat and tears welling up in her eyes. She tipped her head back so the tears wouldn’t mar her mascara, then blinked several times and got back to work.

  Chapter Forty

  The last meeting of Helen’s week was with the attorney in charge of distributing Adrian Meyerbridge’s funds. Although distracted by thoughts of the Browns, there was no putting off the meeting. Pittock needed the money fast. Helen met Meyerbridge’s attorney in her office. Everyone else had gone home. The attorney spread the paperwork in front of her.

  “Mr. Drummond has already signed all the necessary documents,” the attorney explained. “You sign here to accept the gift.” The attorney handed her a pen.

  Helen looked at the figures, and her forehead wrinkled. “Five hundred thousand. Is that all?”

  “Is that not the figure you agreed to?”

  Helen had never heard the exact figure. Five hundred thousand was a lot of money, but not the kind of money that bought buildings. Helen sighed. Adrian was Drummond’s friend.

  “I wasn’t clear on the details. If Mr. Drummond has signed, then this is the figure.”

  ****

  “It doesn’t add up,” Helen whispered. She was eating a late dinner at the Craven when Terri called. “Two women. The body. The copycat theory. I don’t trust the chief of police.” She spoke so softly Terri asked her to repeat. “I can’t,” Helen whispered. “I’m in the pub.”

  “And the spies are everywhere?”

  “This is not Los Angeles. People here know each other. They listen.”

  “You’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist,” Terri said.

  The waitress arrived with Helen’s deep–fried special. Helen projected her voice into the phone. “The we
ather’s been great here. Just a touch of fall.”

  “You don’t sound okay.” The humor dropped out of Terri’s voice.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  Helen was about to hang up.

  “Wait. Can I at least talk to you about some non–privileged information?”

  “All right.” Helen poked at her food. “You talk. I’ll listen.”

  “I did a bit of research on your Adair Wilson.”

  “She’s not ‘my’ anything.”

  “Well she could be. I don’t think you have much to worry about. It looks like trouble has a way of finding Adair Wilson, but that’s not to say she is trouble. The part about her thesis advisor was half–true. They were sleeping together, and her advisor is married to the dean of business. As for the allegation that she blackmailed her advisor to get her first teaching job, I don’t believe it.

  “First of all, she took a year off after getting her PhD, if you can call working on Broadway time off. At Duke she was hired by a five–person committee and, from everything I gather, they liked her from the start. They were impressed with her work and only let her go because they did not have a tenure–track position open. I don’t think her advisor had enough clout to get a whole committee to roll over. She might have wanted to,” Terri continued. “Adair Wilson might have pressured her to. But the advisor doesn’t have those kinds of connections. No one on the committee knew the advisor personally. And Wilson was at the top of her game. Duke was lucky to get her.”

  Helen pushed a piece of fried fish across her plate. The breading cracked to reveal white flesh lined with gray veins. She had no appetite.

  “What about Marshal and the story about the janitor?”

  “That’s a harder one. Ultimately, Wilson just backed this woman up. The woman, Anat Al–Fulani, didn’t speak a lot of English. Wilson helped her navigate the system. I’m not saying it was smart, but it could have been well–intentioned.”

  Helen leaned back in her booth. “Thank you,” she told her old friend.