Michael Prescott: Riptide

The bloodshot eyes under plastic…the swollen mass of her tongue…

She retched again, dry heaving because luckily she’d had little breakfast and there was nothing left in her gut.

She never got used to it, and it took its toll on her. Her friend Maura was always telling her to pack it in, get a nice, safe private practice, stop going to crime scenes and traumatizing herself. Sensible advice, but she wouldn’t listen.

Cupping her hands under the spigot, she splashed cold water on her face. The sting, hard as a slap, centered her.

When she raised her head, she saw her reflection in the mirror, a pale ghost image framed in wheat-colored hair. In January she’d turned thirty, but she looked younger. She had a child’s face with a child’s large eyes. She expended a lot of energy making people treat her as a grownup. Maybe that was one reason she wouldn't walk away from her job.

Leaving the bathroom, she deposited the photocopied threat message in her study, a small businesslike room overlooking a backyard garden in need of tending. There had been a tool shed in the backyard once, many years ago. Her mother had removed it and planted flowers on the ground where it stood. She tended those flowers until the day she died.

Jennifer had grown up in this house and knew every squeaky floorboard. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, tall and narrow, two stories of cedar oak shingles and gingerbread trim topped by a high gable and slanted roof. The house was planted on a narrow lot edged by a tangle of sweet pea vines and a low hedge resembling a hunk of moldy cheese.

The House of Silence. That was how she had always thought of it, because of the long, tense silences of her childhood.

It had gone up in 1908, at the start of Venice’s prosperity. After a long decline, the district had now entered a new, affluent phase, in which old homes were purchased as seven-figure teardowns. Real estate developers were constantly after her, but she refused to sell. The house had been built by her great-grandfather and handed down through the generations. With her parents dead, it was her last link to her family.

Besides Richard, of course.

She wondered how much longer she could hold out. The cost of living was rising, and her income wasn’t keeping up. She would stay as long as she could, and not just out of family loyalty. She loved the sea, the wet breeze and misty mornings, the cheerful chaos of the Venice boardwalk, and she loved the old house for its faded, funky charm, its narrow hallways and strange angles.

Upstairs she stripped, then stood in the shower and ran the water hot until the old pipes were banging. Steam rose, white and scalding. The water cascaded over her, burning the last traces of the crime scene off her body.

The hot water ran out abruptly, replaced by a chilly downpour. Damn water heater.

She toweled her hair dry in the bedroom. The high stained glass windows over her bed gave the room an aura of sanctity that was somewhat offset by the montage of erotic 1920s postcards on the wall.

From her closet she grabbed a pair of baggy woolen pajama bottoms she wore as pants, and a peach blouse two sizes too big. Like every shirt she owned, the blouse had long sleeves that concealed the four-inch rope of scar tissue on her left forearm.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she heard raucous barking from across the street. The nasty Rottweiler owned by her newest neighbors, penned in a side yard.

She glanced out the front window and saw the dog at the gate, gnashing its teeth. A few yards away, a child no older than five was approaching cautiously, but not cautiously enough.

Then she was out the door, sprinting barefoot across the street.

The kid-a boy, she could see that now-waggled his fingers at the dog in a friendly greeting. The Rottweiler retreated a couple of steps and stopped barking, but Jennifer knew this was only a feint, a ruse to disarm the victim.

The boy extended one hand to pet the doggie. He had just begun to insert his hand between the wrought-iron twinings of the gate when Jennifer reached him. She yanked him back, and the Rottweiler, cheated of its prey, launched itself at the gate, barking and snapping ferociously.

The gate shook under the dog’s weight as the fanged head thrust between the bars, white teeth gleaming.

The boy started to cry.

Jennifer held him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

When the boy was calm, she knelt by him and asked if his mommy or daddy was around. Mutely he pointed to the house.

She took him by the hand and led him to the front door, which hung ajar. She rang the bell and waited until a heavyset housekeeper appeared.

The woman saw the little boy and broke into a flurry of excited recriminations. Jennifer didn’t speak Spanish, but she got the idea. The boy was her son, and he had wandered off without permission.

He went inside, running past his mother to escape further chastisement. The housekeeper looked at Jennifer with a grateful smile. “He was cause trouble?” she asked in halting English.

“No,” Jennifer lied. “No trouble. I just thought he shouldn’t be out on his own.”

She crossed the street, returning home. It was the first time she had ever rung that doorbell. She had no idea who owned the new house. She had never seen them, only their vehicles going in and out of the three-car garage.

As recently as ten years ago, everyone on the street knew each other. Now almost all her old neighbors were gone. The new arrivals hid behind fences and multiple locks. There was a new unfriendliness in the neighborhood. More wealth-but less joy.

She wondered if that was true everywhere.

By two o’clock she was ensconced in her study, bending over an anonymous letter from a man with murder on his mind.

When she was at work, there was nothing else, no outside world, no past or future, only the white examination table and the sheet of lined paper in the glow of the full-spectrum lamp.

Though the message was unpunctuated, badly spelled, without margins or paragraph breaks, it conveyed the writer’s thoughts quite effectively.

I am going to hunt you down bitch amp; take you out it will hurt don’t make plans for the futur you wont be around long ennough for it to matter…

And much more in that vein.

Immediately she pegged the writer as male. Women used intensifiers-“I am so angry…you are such a good friend”-and emotive language, laden with “I feel” statements. They qualified their remarks, even in the heat of strong emotion. No such markers were present in the note on her examination table.

It wasn’t difficult to isolate the letter’s key motifs. The most obvious was resentment of the victim for her superiority.

even perfect people die…maybe everrybody wants you but I only want you dead…before you die I will spit in your perfect face

She wondered if he actually did spit in her face when he killed her. It might be possible to do a DNA test. The plastic bag could have protected the evidence even after the body went into the water. She made a note of it.

His fixation on her appearance suggested that he regarded his own looks as inadequate. It also strongly suggested a sexual obsession with the victim, an impression reinforced by other language.

I pity you bitch I feel sorry for you beccause I know whats coming amp; its coming down hard

It didn't take a psychology degree to see the repetition of the word coming and its proximity to the word hard.

There was a second motif-rejection.

Your not going to walk away, he warned, perhaps recalling a time when she had in fact walked away from him. Youll be humiliated no pride amp; youll begg me for mercy.