John Betancourt: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

He flung Decameron out the window. Mort heard him scream all the way down. Then he heard the splat! It was such a satisfying sound.

Mort looked out the window to see his triumph, twenty-one floors below. He saw a man standing on the sidewalk. An ordinary man. Drenched with Decameron’s blood.

Mort was horrified. It was as if he was watching Patricia’s death all over again, from a different, more terrible view — the same way God must have seen it.

“I didn’t check to see if anyone was walking down the street,” Mort wept. “I forgot to look.”

But he would not forget now.

Her name is Patti Barnes and she is forty-nine years old, lives in a small town in New Hampshire, and in her entire life she has lived in nine states across this great land. She works as a hairdresser and rents a four-room cottage with a rear deck that overlooks a slow-moving river and has a small fireplace. Through her years of living and accomplishments and travels, she is only certain of one thing: If she were to die right at this very moment, the first line of her obituary would read, Patti Barnes formerly of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and one of several girlfriends of Ted Bundy, notorious serial killer...

There. And won’t that make people reading their morning papers sit up and take notice when that day comes, though she hopes it doesn’t come too soon.

Right now all she cares about is getting through her life, day by day, making a quiet and comfortable living wielding scissors and combs. Maybe not much of a career, but one that was recession-proof and depression-proof, especially in this time when hi-tech jobs are being streamed overseas to Calcutta and Lahore and Djakarta. People will still need to have their hair cut. That was something one of the parlor owners told her, out there in Seattle one year, back when the dot-commers saw their bank accounts and five-bathroom homes melt away like frost on a spring lawn. You can outsource everything from data processing to customer service, but no bright young boy with the dream of a million stock options by the time he was twenty-five was ever going to come up with a way to outsource haircutting.

The parlor owner — Katie, that had been the woman’s name — was heavy and wore too much makeup and cracked a lot of un-PC jokes. A nice boss, but one day, like the others — the so very many others — when she found out that Patti had dated Ted Bundy, had once briefly been his lover, she whispered two things to her:

“Oh, you poor girl.”

And, later, almost hesitantly, “What was he like?”

This day starts off like so many others: up whenever she feels like it, for she hates having to get up at a particular time. She had grown up in a trailer in a place outside Steamboat Springs — laughingly called a park, though the scrub grass never grew more than three or four inches, and the wind whistling at night through the cracks in the sheet metal would sometimes keep her up at night, trembling in her small bed. Living there meant getting up at six twenty-five A.M. Monday through Friday to catch the bus, which meant walking down a dirt road for nearly a half mile. Saturdays and Sundays meant a whole ten or fifteen minutes more of sleep; there were always chores to do and sunlight was wasting, as her mom would tell her, coughing and wheezing after another three-pack-a-day habit burned through.

So today, she gets up at 8:11 A.M. for no particular reason, dresses in sweatpants and sweatshirt, and goes out to the small yard behind the cottage to start splitting wood. It’s a cool morning in late May, and though there’s no reason to be cutting wood — the cottage has a nice little oil furnace and the nights aren’t cold enough anymore to start a fire in the woodstove — she still loves the exercise. She buys the wood in eighteen-inch-long chunks, and loves the sound of the axe whistling into the wood, the solid chunk when it lands, and the satisfying crack when the wood splits open. The yard, with shrubbery on two sides, is hidden from prying neighbors, and at the rear is a small stream called the Wonalancet. She breathes hard as she splits wood, and when she’s done she goes back in and eats breakfast and showers up. As she dresses, she wonders if this will be the day when the whispers start up again.

She has told this story over and over again, to police detectives and attorneys general, and a judge or two, plus a number of newspaper reporters. Once an older woman researching a book — never written, Patti was sure, for she had never seen it listed on one of those bookselling Web sites — came to Colorado to talk to Patti about Ted Bundy and his crimes. She was a journalist and had brought with her a large notebook and even larger cassette recorder, which she delicately balanced on a coffee table that Patti had bought at a yard sale for ten dollars. Grace was her name. Sympathetic, yet she had been a slick and easy one. She starting off asking Patti about her background and her history, and Patti had enjoyed the attention, for Grace had been different, that’s for sure. Quiet and nodding at all the right places. Patti told her about growing up in Steamboat Springs, an only child of a single mom, dad dead and unknown, living in that damn trailer that creaked and groaned when the winds came down out of the Rocky Mountains.

She had been young and poor and had hung around the resort, working odd jobs as a lift attendant and waitress and feeling an aching hunger when all the rich and successful people came through the resort, like phantoms, but giggling and living and treating her as if she didn’t exist, except when it came to taking drink orders or cleaning out a hotel room or helping some forty-ish New York woman who wore a ski outfit that cost more than Patti’s clothing budget for the year onto a ski lift.

Then Ted sailed in. He had been charming, and she had fallen under his spell. After only a week of knowing him, she moved in with him.

He was a graduate student, studying law. At night, in their tiny apartment, he would mesmerize Patti with his tales and dreams of being a successful lawyer, then a state representative, and then maybe a congressman... who knows? With Ted, anything was possible. He wasn’t like the rich phonies who came in and out in seven- or fourteen-day chunks of time; he had a hunger too. A hunger to succeed, to do great things, to be rich and be somebody.

And Grace, breathing softly, asked Patti gingerly, “And you didn’t suspect?”

No, of course not, she had replied. Who would? And this was back in the 1970’s, before the Internet, before the cable news channels, before the media-driven obsession with serial killers. There had been some stories about women being reported missing around the ski area, but Come on! she protested. This was an innocent time, a time when you were still coasting from the fired-up sixties, when all things seemed possible. Except that the bright and handsome and charming Ted who shared your bed most nights, the Ted who had all these wonderful dreams that he shared with you, this was the same Ted who drove out with his white VW Beetle at night, with handcuffs and wooden club, to stalk and attack young, longhaired women, fracture their skulls, cuff them to his car, and drive off someplace to rape and strangle them.

And then, tired and exhausted, Ted would come home and crawl into bed, laughing and alive, kissing you and kissing you, and you would think all things were possible, indeed, save for the possibility that your man, your Ted, was the one responsible for those chilling lists of disappeared women.

That’s what it had been like, she told Grace, who breathed and nodded in all the right places, as the interview sort of dribbled off as evening progressed. Then Grace got up to leave, and at the door, Grace had gently touched her cheek and said, “You poor, poor, girl,” and kissed her full on the lips.