Читаем Dagger Key and Other Stories полностью

  “Did you hear about those college girls dying over in Waterford?” she asked.

  “No, I haven’t been keeping up.”

  “Two college girls died a few days apart. One in a fire and one in a drowning accident. Wanda asked for a look at the case files. The Waterford police had written them off as accidents, but Wanda had a friend on the force and he slipped her the files and showed her the girls’ apartments. They both lived off-campus. It’s not that Wanda’s any great shakes. She has an undistinguished record. But she had the idea from reading the papers—and they were skimpy articles—a serial killer was involved. Her friend pooh-poohed the idea. There wasn’t any signature. But it turned out, Wanda was right. There was a signature, very subtle and very complicated, demonstrating that the killer was highly evolved. Not only did she figure that out, she caught him after two days on the case.”

  “Aren’t serial killers tough to catch?”

  “Yes. All that stuff you see about profiling on TV, it’s crap. They wouldn’t have come close to getting a line on this kid with profiling. He would have had to announce himself, but Wanda doesn’t think he would have. She thinks he would have gone on killing, that putting one over on the world was enough for him.”

  “He was a kid?”

  “Fourteen years old. A kid from Black William. What’s more, he’d given no sign of being a sociopath. Yet in the space of three weeks, he went from zero to sixty. From playing JV football to being a highly organized serialist. That doesn’t happen in the real world.”

  “So how come Wanda’s not famous?”

  “The college is trying to keep it quiet. The kid’s been bundled off to an institution and the cops have the lid screwed tight.” Andrea picked at her salad. “What I’m suggesting, maybe everyone is being affected, but not in ways that conform to your model. Wanda catching the kid, that conforms. But the kid himself, the fact that a pathology was brought out in him…that suggests that some people may be affected in ways we don’t notice. Maybe they just love each other more.”

  I laid down my fork. “Like with us?”

  A doleful nod.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “You said you’d been plotting for months to make a move.”

  “Yes, but it was a fantasy!”

  “And you don’t think you would have acted on it?”

  “I don’t know. One thing for certain, I never expected anything like this.” She cut her volume to a stage whisper. “I want you all the time. It’s like when we were nineteen. I’m addicted to you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Same here.”

  “I worry that it’ll stop, then I worry that it won’t—it’s wreaking havoc with my work. I can’t stop thinking about you. On a rational level, I know I’m an animal. But there’s a place in me that wants to believe love is more than evolutionary biology. And now this thing with the stars. To think that what I’m feeling could be produced by something as random as a wavefront or a supernatural event, or whatever…it makes me feel like an experimental animal. Like a rabbit that’s been drugged. It scares me.”

  “Look,” I said. “We’re probably talking about something that isn’t real.”

  “No, it’s real.”

  “How can you be sure? I only just brought the subject up. We can’t have been discussing it more than five minutes.”

  “You convinced me. Everything you said rings true. I know it here.” Andrea touched a hand to her breast. “And you know it, too. Something’s happening to us. Something’s happening to this town.”

  We stepped back from that conversation. It was, I suppose, a form of denial, the avoidance of a subject neither of us wished to confront, because it was proof against confrontation, against logic and reason, and so we trivialized it and fell back on our faith, on our mutuality. Sometimes, lying with Andrea, considering the join of her neck and shoulder, the slight convexity of her belly, the compliant curve of a breast compressed into a pouty shape by the weight of her arm, the thousand turns and angles that each seemed the expression of a white simplicity within, I would have the urge to wake her, to drive away from Black William, and thus protect her, protect us, from this infestation of stars; but then I would think that such an action might destroy the thing I hoped to protect, that once away from the stars we might feel differently about one another. And then I’d think how irrational these thoughts were, how ridiculous it was to contemplate uprooting our lives over so flimsy a fear. And, finally, having made this brief rounds of my human potential, I would lapse again into a Praxitelean scrutiny, a sculptor in love with his stone, content to drift in-and-out of a dream in which love, though it had been proved false (like Andrea said, an animal function and nothing more), proved to be eternally false, forever and a day of illusion, of two souls burning brighter and brighter until they appeared to make a single glow, a blazing unity concealed behind robes of aging flesh.