John Lutz - Pulse

“Is it something I did-or didn’t-do?”

“For God’s sake no, Annie! It’s the economy. I wasn’t kidding when I told you times were hard. You know we’ve lost some big accounts. The company simply can’t justify paying so many employees.”

“I’m not the only graphic design artist there.”

“And I’m not the one who decided to let you go. It was a board decision.”

“Aren’t you on the board?”

“You know I am.”

“Boards are just a way to dilute responsibility,” Ann said.

“C’mon, Annie…”

“Did you fight for me?”

“Hell yes, I fought.”

She didn’t believe him. The lie was in his eyes like an ominous object floating just beneath the surface of dark waters. He wasn’t leveling with her. He’d decided to end her employment, probably as a way to end their affair.

And there the bastard sits. On my bed.

“So you thought you’d drop by one more time and have one last piece of poor, dumb Ann before telling her she’s being cut loose. Or did you expect to keep coming over here and dropping your drawers while I was drawing unemployment?”

“That’s not in the cards, Annie. It can’t be.”

“Better damn well believe it.”

“The board knows you’re good, and you’ll probably soon be working for the competition. How’d it look if you and I were still having this secret affair that everyone knows about?”

She had a hard time catching her breath. “Lou… I can hardly get my mind around this.”

He hung his head. “Me, either. We just got caught up in circumstances.” He raked his fingers through his damp hair and looked at her petite, tight body. But it was an oddly impersonal appraisal, as if he were assessing a piece of statuary rather than a real person. Ann realized he was fixing her in his memory. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever slept with.”

She was still struggling with her comprehension.

“I’ll have your stuff sent here to you,” he said, “along with your final check. You know how they are. They don’t want you in the office once you’ve been severed.”

“ They? You are they.”

He stood up and looked at her sadly. “Did I ever say I wasn’t?”

She rubbed her towel with vicious abandon over her mussed wet hair, squinting at him through flying droplets. “You are really a sack of shit, Lou.”

He nodded in silent agreement, put on his shirt, and left.

Central Florida, 2002

Sophia wanted everyone to see what she had done. That was why the sky was a cloudless blue, and the only breeze was soft and cool. The air was so clean and clear it seemed possible to see details half a mile away, like looking through a pair of powerful binoculars.

It didn’t require binoculars to see what Sergeant Ed Hall of the Florida State Police was looking at.

The sergeant stood staring down at a dead girl. She looked so frail beneath the wreckage of the barn. And there was something about her injuries, even beneath all that blood. There seemed to be dark rings around the flesh of her wrists, and the flesh was wrinkled. The same marks were around at least one of her ankles, too.

A length of rough-hewn beam lay across her midsection, and it appeared that it had come down and smashed her rib cage. Not much doubt as to what had killed her.

But what had she been doing in the barn almost nude? It was possible that the fierce winds of the hurricane or a trailing tornado had stripped the clothes from her.

Except for another oddity, at least to Hall’s way of thinking. She was wearing black thong underwear. A strange thing, for a kid her age. Unless she’d been older than she appeared now, dead.

The thing about the underwear that struck Hall as odd was that he’d just come from the eastern part of the state, following the wide swath of Hurricane Sophia, and he remembered the Ambersons being found dead in the wreckage of their house. One of the cops there had been saying it was hard to tell, what with the condition of the bodies, but it looked like Nathan Amberson might have been shot.

His wife, Flora, had been found nearby, her body also mutilated by fierce winds and debris. She’d been mostly buried in wreckage, and nude, like this poor as-yet-unidentified girl.

Hall had known the Ambersons slightly. Flora, though getting along in years, had been an attractive woman, and was rumored to have been sexually adventurous in her youth. Hall knew that some of the rumors were true. Husband Nathan, in fact, had once been talked out of shooting an unwanted suitor with a shotgun.

Hall stared down at the dead girl under the barn and rubbed his bristly jaw. A black thong on Flora Amberson, maybe.

On this girl, never.

But that wasn’t the only thing about the girl that didn’t set well with Hall. It was something about her eyes. Something that made it hard to look into them.

They reminded him of other dead eyes.

New York, the present

Professor Elaine Pratt stood tall and slim in designer jeans and a crisp white blouse, the practical kind of outfit she usually wore to teach summer courses. She had on her cameo necklace on its gold chain, and a gold bangle bracelet. Her dishwater-blond hair was shoulder length, her eyes brown and intense beneath a wisp of bangs.

There were only a dozen students in her business psychology class, seven female, five male, but they were among the brightest attending Waycliffe College. All of them were in the Vanguard program for advanced students. When they graduated, they would be more than ready for the world beyond the ivy.

The room was bright from a long bank of jalousie windows, and furnished with rows of small gray metal desks and a wooden table up front. There was a large flat-panel screen behind Professor Pratt, and an open laptop computer nearby so when necessary she could PowerPoint salient information. She believed imagery was crucial to learning.

A wasp droned persistently against the closed windows, bouncing off the glass, going nowhere.

“I can see that some of you are upset,” the professor said to her class. “There are signs that you’ve been crying. It’s a sad thing when someone as young and promising as Macy Collins dies. It’s even more tragic because her life was taken from her violently.”

There was no sound from the class other than a few sniffles. Three of the students showed no emotion at all, other than impatience. They obviously wanted to get the mourning over with so they could begin class.

“This is, despite its sad dimensions, positive,” the professor said, “an opportunity to express and understand that whatever the circumstances, we must press on. There is a time for grieving and emoting. This is not it. That is not a coldhearted assessment of the situation, but a pragmatic one. In the wider world there will come times when you’ll be faced with similar situations. What will be right won’t seem right. Vestiges of childhood concepts of morality, of rights and wrongs, can haunt and cloud your logic. It must not. You can’t let it. Your opposite number somewhere will be yielding to no such delusions. He or she will have long ago locked them away so that they’re no longer a part of the decision-making process. The earlier you learn to compartmentalize, the better for all concerned.”

“Except Macy Collins,” Juditha Jason said. Juditha, known on campus as “Jody,” didn’t say it in a tone of disagreement. She seemed to be speaking thoughtfully, and mainly to herself.

“Macy will not lodge a complaint,” Professor Pratt said. There were a few snickers. “In the military,” she said, “there was an officer who, shortly before a major battle, stood before his fresh recruits, a dead enemy at his feet. He kicked the dead man in the head. Then he opened his canteen and poured water into the corpse’s gaping mouth. He made his troops do the same. He was teaching them there was nothing to be feared from the dead. They had nothing more to do with the living. They would not feel nor benefit from your respect, your empathy, your regret, or any other emotion. They were simply… the dead.” She met the gazes of each of her students. “He doubtless saved many of his troops’ lives with that demonstration. They learned that there is a time for grieving, and then the dead are simply inanimate objects. Am I making myself understood?”