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“How do you… why would you think that?”
“Because it’s the safest place. There’s a TV show, Dexter, about a man who kills people and gets rid of them in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen it.”
They have seen it, of course.
This is terrible. Like she’s reading his mind. Their mind, because when it comes to their captives—and the sacrament—he and Em think alike.
“You have a boat. Don’t you, Professor Harris?”
This girl was a mistake. She’s a sport, an outlier, they might not come across another like her in a hundred years.
He goes upstairs without saying anything else.
3
Em is in her study. It’s crammed with so many books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that there’s barely room for her desk. Some of the books have been set aside in a corner to make room for a thick folder with WRITING SAMPLES printed on the cover in neat block letters.
Two framed pictures flank her desktop computer. One is of a very young Roddy and Em, he in a morning suit (rented) and she in the traditional white bridal dress (purchased by her parents). The other shows a much older Roddy and Em, he in a joke admiral’s hat and she with a common sailor’s Dixie cup cocked rakishly on her beauty shop curls. They are standing in front of their newly purchased (but gently used) Mainship 34. Em has a bottle of cheap champagne in one hand, which she will soon use to christen their boat the Marie Cather—Marie as in Stopes, Cather as in Willa. Their marriage has always been a partnership.
On the screen of her computer, Em’s watching Ellen Craslow sitting on the futon in her cage, legs crossed, head in hands, shoulders shaking. Roddy bends over Em’s shoulder for a closer look.
“She stood there until you were gone, then just collapsed,” Em says, not without satisfaction.
The girl raises her head and looks up at the camera. Although she’s been crying, her eyes look dry. Roddy isn’t surprised. It’s dehydration at work.
“You heard everything?” he asks his wife.
“Yes. She’s intuited a lot, hasn’t she?”
“Not intuition, logic. Plus, she recognized the woodchipper. Neither of the others did. What are we going to do, Emmie? Suggestions, please.”
She considers it while they look at the girl in the cage. Neither of them feel pity for Ellen, or even sympathy. She is a problem to be solved. In a way, Roddy thinks the problem is a good thing. They are still relatively new to this. Every solved problem adds to efficiency, as every scientist knows.
At last she says, “Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”
“Yes. I think that’s right.”
He straightens up and idly thumbs the thick folder of writing samples. This spring semester’s writer-in-residence at Bell’s greatly respected (almost legendary) fiction workshop will be a woman named Althea Gibson, author of two novels that reviewed well and sold poorly. As with several previous in-residence authors, Gibson has been more than willing to have Emily Harris do the initial applicant winnowing, and although the pay is a pittance, Em enjoys the work. This was an offer Jorge Castro declined, preferring to go through the stacks of writing samples himself. Thought having Emily do the pre-screening was beneath him. Em has noticed how many fags are uppity, and thinks it’s probably compensation. Also… all that solitary running.
“Anything good in here?” Roddy Harris asks.
“So far just the usual junk.” Em sighs and rubs at her aching lower back. “I’m beginning to think that in another twenty years, fiction will be a lost art.”
He bends and kisses her white hair. “Hang in there, baby.”
4
When Em comes down the stairs at noon on the 24th, the maggots and flies are back on the slab of liver. She looks at them crawling around on a perfectly good cut of meat (well, it was) with disgust and dismay. They simply have no business being there so fast. They have no business being there at all!
She pushes the meat toward the pass-through with the broom. And although Ellen looks exhausted, the cracks in her lips bleeding, her complexion the color of clay, she again blocks the hinged panel with her foot.
Em takes a bottle of water from her apron pocket and is delighted by the way the girl’s eyes fix on it. And when her tongue comes out in a useless effort to moisten those parched lips… that is also delightful.
“Take it, Ellen. Brush off the bugs and eat. Then I’ll give you the water.”
For one moment she thinks the stubborn girl means to give in. Then she says what she always says: “I’m a vegan.”
You’re a bitch, is what you are. Emily can barely restrain herself from saying it. The girl is infuriating, and it doesn’t help that the goddamned sciatica has kept her up half the night. An uppity, smartass bitch! BLACK bitch!
