John Saul - Black Lightning

And it felt good. So good.

Then an image came into his mind, an image of Anne Jeffers. Her face seemed to be suspended before him, and as he gazed into her eyes, the Experimenter’s fingers closed around the still-throbbing heart in his hand. Just as when he’d held Anne’s lingerie a little while ago, the Experimenter’s grip on Kumquat’s heart tightened.

As with the lingerie, he crushed the heart into a shapeless mass.

Shapeless, and lifeless.

Being the center of attention wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. When Heather first arrived at school, it had been great. Everybody already knew that a body had been found in the park early that morning, but only Heather had known who had actually found the body, and whose body it was that her mother had stumbled across.

“Except it wasn’t really Mom who found her,” she explained at least ten times even before the first class. “It was our dog.”

Though she hadn’t actually been there, Heather built a highly detailed image of the scene in her imagination. By the third telling she was able to recite it as vividly as if it had been she herself whom Boots had pulled off the trail and led over to Joyce Cottrell’s maimed corpse. “He was tugging at the leash and barking like crazy, and finally Mom gave up and went to see what he’d found.” Heather felt a delicious shiver as she repeated the story her father told her when he’d gotten back from the park. “And then, when she saw who it was, she nearly fainted!” Though her father hadn’t actually said that, Heather was sure it must be true, because every time she tried to imagine what it would have been like to find Mrs. Cottrell’s body under one of the bushes in the park, she felt a wave of dizziness. Of course, her mom hadn’t actually fainted, since that would have prevented her from calmly finding a phone, calling the police, and then guarding the body until the authorities arrived, all of which Heather was pretty sure her mother had done.

“But who was it?” someone would invariably ask as soon as Heather let it be known that her mother had recognized the victim.

“Our next door neighbor,” Heather would reply. Then she would begin doling out the details of Joyce Cottrell’s life.

During first period it had been terrific. Everyone wanted to talk to her, and even hunky Josh Whitman passed her a note asking if she wanted to have lunch with him. But by third period, when Heather was almost five minutes late because people kept asking her questions even after the bell rang, she was starting to tire of telling the story. By lunchtime, when it became totally clear that the only reason Josh Whitman wanted to eat lunch with her was to hear about the murder, she was thoroughly tired of talking about it.

Now, as she and Rayette Hoover left the school at four, Heather was pleased to see that almost everyone else was already gone; at least she wouldn’t have to tell the story all over again. “Want to go over to Broadway and get a latte?” she asked Rayette.

“Okay,” Rayette agreed.

As they walked across Capitol Hill toward Broadway, Heather could tell right away that Rayette was struggling not to talk about the one thing that everyone in school had been talking about all day. Heather could also tell that Rayette was losing her battle, and silently made a bet that Rayette wouldn’t last out the next block. Within half a block Rayette’s curiosity got the better of her, but when she spoke, Heather had to give her friend points for trying to be indirect.

“What was it like having lunch with Josh Whitman?”

“He invited me to the prom,” Heather replied, injecting just enough excitement into her voice so Rayette actually fell for it, at least for a split second. Then Rayette’s lips stretched into a wide grin that exposed the set of braces she usually took care not to reveal to anyone.

“Get out of here, girlfriend!” she hooted. “That big football stud just wanted to know the same thing we all did! Now you just tell me everything you know about that woman who got killed. This is Rayette, honey! Come clean!”

“There isn’t anything to come clean about.” Heather sighed. “I mean, no one even knew Mrs. Cottrell. She was really weird. She didn’t have any friends, and she hardly ever even went out of the house except to go to work. Sometimes you could see her eating all by herself, just sitting at this really huge dining room table all by herself.”

Rayette shuddered. She’d always thought there was something spooky about the big house next door to the Jefferses’. Ever since she and Heather had gotten to be friends in sixth grade, she’d known the woman who lived there was kind of weird, but to think of her actually getting murdered … “What do you think happened?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

Heather shrugged. “How am I supposed to know?” she asked. “It’s not like I knew her or anything.”

“I didn’t say you should know what happened. I just asked what do you think happened. Like, was it someone she knew?”

Heather shrugged. “She didn’t know anyone.”

They were walking south on Broadway now. As they came to Prospect Street, Rayette stopped. “Let’s go up there and see where your mom found her,” she said.

Heather’s eyes widened. “They’re not going to let us do that. They’ll have the whole place blocked off.”

“No they won’t,” Rayette insisted. “Some guy got shot down by my uncle’s last year, and they didn’t have the cops out there more than a couple hours. Come on.”

Turning left on Prospect, Rayette started purposefully up the hill toward the park, and a second later Heather followed.

“Where was it?” Rayette asked as they came to the broad swath of lawn that stretched from Prospect up to the road that curved around the base of the hill containing the reservoir.

“I don’t think you can see it from here,” Heather said, not sure she wanted to go looking for the place where her mother had found Mrs. Cottrell. “Dad said Mom was up by the reservoir.”

“Then let’s go.” Rayette set off once more, cutting diagonally across the lawn to the place where the road came closest to the reservoir. Crossing the road, she scrambled up a steep, well-trod path that led to the flat track around the reservoir.

“Can’t we go around by the museum?” Heather complained. “This isn’t even a path!”

“It is, too,” Rayette retorted. “Besides, why should we go all the way around when we’re already here?” Pausing at the top of the slope while Heather caught up, she surveyed the area, immediately spotting a small knot of people who seemed to be staring into a thicket. Now that her goal was within sight, Rayette began having second thoughts. “ ’Spose there’s gonna be blood all over the ground?” she asked.

Heather grabbed her friend’s arm to steady herself; the very thought of finding a pool of Joyce Cottrell’s blood was enough to make her dizzy. “Can’t we just go over to my house?” she asked. “I mean, if we’re not going to go for lattes—” Before she could finish her sentence, she heard her brother’s voice calling to her.

“Hey, Heather!” Kevin was shouting, waving frantically. “Look over here! This is where Mom found her!”

She didn’t want to see the place at all, but knew that she’d better try to get Kevin home before their parents found out what he was doing. Heather followed Rayette over to where Kevin, together with Justin Reynolds, was regaling half a dozen people with the tale of the discovery of the corpse earlier that morning.

“There was blood all over the place,” Kevin was saying. “And she was all torn up. Boots was chewing on her arm, and—”

“Kevin!” Heather shrieked, grabbing her brother and clamping a hand over his mouth to silence him. “Come on! We’re going home right now!”