Steven Womack - By Blood Written

It felt good to be out of the apartment. Priscilla hadn’t had a walk since the latest snow had started falling the previous Friday. She was in her third day of hibernation and starting to get a touch of cabin fever. At seventy, Priscilla still considered herself in good shape, and she liked to walk.

Ten minutes later, she crossed the barely passable parking lot of the Bookstar and stepped into the lobby. The archi-tects who supervised the conversion from movie palace to bookstore had done a wonderful job of preserving the look and feel of the building. A grand staircase curved to the right up to what had once been the balcony, but was now the children’s books section. To her left, Priscilla stopped and glanced-as was her habit-at the framed pictures and autographs of the stars who had once visited the theater. Her favorite was Errol Flynn, although the photograph of Johnny Weissmuller in a business suit was also very appealing. And next to the framed pictures of movie stars was a white stone tablet mounted on the wall in a clear Plexiglas box covered with the autographs of famous authors who had visited the building since it became a bookstore. Priscilla’s favorites, as always, were the mystery writers, especially the women: Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Sharyn McCrumb, Deborah Crombie. She loved mysteries; they were her life. She read eight to ten a week.

“Hello, Miss Janovich,” the young, pretty girl behind the cash register said as Priscilla passed the counter.

Priscilla turned, smiled. “Hello, Karen,” she said.

“The new Grafton just came out in paperback,” the clerk offered. “I pulled a copy for you, just in case.”

“Bless you, my dear,” Priscilla said. “And did you save me a copy of the Sunday Times ?”

“Didn’t have to.” The girl walked around from behind the checkout counter and stepped over to the pile of newspapers in a rack by the wall. “With the weather like this, we haven’t had much of a run this morning.”

“You know, I have to have my Sunday Times ,” Priscilla warned. “If that stack ever gets low, you pull one out for me.”

“I will,” the clerk said, picking up a copy of the newspaper with both hands so as not to spill any of the inside sections.

As she handed the newspaper to Priscilla, she suppressed a giggle. Her boss had told her how Priscilla Janovich had made a single three-day trip to New York City once in her entire life, back in 1965, and ever since had considered herself both an authority on and a native of the city.

“Thank you, dear,” Priscilla said, handing the exact change for the newspaper across the counter.

“See you Wednesday, Miss Janovich,” the girl said.

“You be careful in this weather, dear,” Priscilla warned as she walked away.

Twenty minutes later, Priscilla Janovich carefully measured a pony of vodka into her steaming cup of chamomile tea. The vodka cooled it off just enough to swallow and en-hanced the already relaxing effect of the herb.

The fat yellow longhair padded into the living room just as Priscilla sat down on the couch and put her cup on the end table to her right.

“Hello, Prissy,” she said. “Where’s Doodles? Where’s Doodles, baby? We’re all going to sit together and read now.”

In a gesture of Pavlovian feline behavior, the obese cat managed to hop up onto the couch with only a minimum of panting. Priscilla leaned over and rubbed her hand across the top of the cat’s head. The cat purred like a tiny motor-boat.

Priscilla unfolded the first section of the Times and settled in for a long afternoon. She sipped the tea, the first wash of vodka over her tongue burning ever so slightly, and began reading. She read the lead story-an article on the upcoming New York City senatorial campaign-carefully, along with two sidebars that interviewed the opposing candidates.

She read thoroughly, thinking over each issue, each statement, and painstakingly formed an opinion in an election in which she would never be allowed to vote.

She finished the jumps to that article, then turned back to the front page. There was an in-depth story on the latest unfolding Israeli peace initiative, followed by an interview with a senator who had unleashed yet another scathing attack on the president.

“Don’t they ever get tired of it?” Priscilla asked Prissy out loud. “You’d think they’d leave the poor man alone.”

Prissy raised her head and purred loudly.

“Yes, Prissums, that’s right,” Priscilla agreed. She finished the front-page lead story, then turned to page two of the first section. Most of that page was covered with a long feature story headlined:

SERIAL KILLER, DUBBED “ALPHABET MAN” BY FEDS, ELUDES CAPTURE FOR SEVEN YEARS

Priscilla smiled. She was particularly fond of serial killer stories. Was it Mary Higgins Clark who’d written that wonderful novel about the serial killer, or was it that Patricia Cornwell?

“No matter,” she whispered. After a while, they all began to run together.

Priscilla read on:

CINCINNATI, OHIO: On a blustery June Monday in 1995, nineteen-year-old Susan McCrory left her home in a suburban Cincinnati neighborhood and climbed into her Ford Escort station wagon en route to her summer job at a nearby McDonald’s. She never made it.

Priscilla Janovich read the news account as if it were a novel, creating visual images in her mind as the story unfolded of a young woman home from college on summer vacation who worked the morning shift at a local fast-food restaurant. The young woman disappeared, and for several days there was no trace of her. Then two teenage boys who’d rented a storage unit to store their fledgling garage band’s instruments opened the door and found the young woman’s body on the cold concrete floor. She’d been horribly murdered, tortured slowly and for a long time before death mercifully released her. On the cinder-block wall behind the drum set, a letter had been painted on the wall in blood: the letter A.

Priscilla shuddered. What a horrible story, she thought, and continued reading. Nine months later, the Times reporter wrote, a second body was found in Macon, Georgia, in a rest stop just off the junction of I-75 and I-17. The twenty-year-old blond was a clerk at the rest stop’s welcome desk, a job she’d taken to make extra money to help pay for her own wedding. The only clue in that murder: the letter B painted in blood on the back wall of the men’s room stall where the poor girl had been found.

The next murder took place out West, this time in Scottsdale, Arizona. A young girl who worked as a gas station attendant had been strangled, raped, tortured just like the first two, and stuffed into a metal locker used for storing tools. On the inside lid of the locker, again neatly painted in blood, was the letter C.

Priscilla read on, as the reporter described several more of the murders in great detail, others in less. When she got to the part about the two girls at Exotica Tans in Nashville, she let out a sharp gasp that was loud enough to startle Prissy, who leaped off the couch and disappeared into the kitchen.

Horrified, Priscilla read the end of the story, which summarized how little the police had on this killer, and how the FBI had proven itself especially inept at moving the investigation forward. The Times reporter noted that considerable pressure was on at the J. Edgar Hoover Building and that heads were expected to roll if something didn’t break soon.

“My, my,” Priscilla muttered, polishing off the last of her vodka-laced tea. “What a world.”

She turned the page and went on with the newspaper, her senses lulled by the drink and the quiet of the day. She hadn’t slept well last night; hadn’t slept well in years, to be truth-ful, and she was finding that the older she got, the more she needed the occasional cat nap. She smiled at the thought, cat nap , and wondered where Doodles had gone.