Karin Slaughter - Like A Charm

'Realize what?'

'How sad the people are,' the woman said. 'It's just that, you know, that was the shock, taking this on. You see them every day, in the street, and you don't notice it. You don't think of it. But you have to think of it in here.'

'Acts of corporal charity,' John Robert said.

'I'm sorry?' the woman said.

'I was thinking of it,' John Robert said. 'That word, corporal. You only hear it used one of two ways. Corporal punishment. Acts of corporal charity. I've always thought they were much the same thing.'

'Do you want me to put the dollar sign on the bracelet?' the woman said. 'Maybe your sweetheart will think you're trying to bring her good luck.'

Mistress Pamela's nails were fake. She broke one during their session, and as he stood in the middle of her room putting his clothes back on she fixed it with a kit she kept in the table drawer.

'That's a souvenir to take home from a holiday in England,' she'd told him.

That was true. He was going to have the marks on his ass for a long time. He was going to have the embarrassment, too, the way he felt standing naked in the middle of her room with blood running down the back of his legs.

'I'll just go and put this on then,' the woman in the shop said. 'I don't care what kind of charity it is. There isn't much in the way of charity anymore. Not round here. People are sad. There's sadness everywhere.'

The woman in the shop did not look sad. She walked away into the back and the lights glinted on the gold in her hand.

He was late getting to the plane in the morning. He was supposed to go on the bus with the rest of them, but he wasn't back in time to get the bus, and the only way they knew to leave without him was because he had remembered the number of one of the other teachers' cellphones.

'I'll be at Heathrow,' he'd said, giving as little as possible in explanation. It wasn't their business, anyway, and he wasn't holding anybody up. His free day had been the last. The rest of them expected to be on duty now, right up to the end. He wouldn't have gone back to the hotel at all except for the fact that he had to get his clothes, and he needed his flight bag to pack away the charm bracelet.

'You have to be at the airport at least an hour before we're supposed to leave,' Carla Massey had said - it was her cellphone, the least sympathetic of the teachers on the trip - and then she'd hung up on him, as if she thought he didn't know what was necessary for travelling these days. He was standing in a phone booth on a windy street he didn't recognize. He still had no idea where he was. He shifted the parcel in his hands and looked at the advertisements taped to the sides of the cubicle. He'd been looking forward to the tall red boxes he'd seen on Doctor Who, but this phone booth was nothing like that. It might as well have been a booth in Boston or New York.

He had the charm bracelet in the pocket of his shirt. It was bulky and awkward there. Bits and pieces of the charms stabbed at him. He moved it around for comfort and went out on the street to find a cab. The parcel felt warm to the touch, as if body heat did not dissipate after death.

'A sticker,' his foster mother had called him when the social workers asked. The social workers came once a month to sit in the plastic chairs at his foster mother's metal kitchen table. They looked at the cheerful yellow curtains and the samplers she bought at craft fairs: If home is where the heart is, I live at Nieman Marcus; My dust bunnies bring Easter eggs; I fight poverty, I work. They took notes on yellow legal pads with plastic pens printed with the words 'Department of Children and Families'. They tried not to look at his foster mother's size, or at the dogs coming in and out of the pet door with the mud of the yard all over them, or at the smoke curling up from the tip of her cigarette. 'He sticks to things,' his foster mother would say, putting the cigarette out in an ashtray overflowing with butts and pale pink wads of chewing gum.

Back at the hotel room, he sat down on the edge of his bed one more time and put the parcel on the bedside table. He went into the shower and washed for the first time in nearly two days. He put his dirty clothes in his suitcase among the clean ones, not really caring, one way or the other, if the clean ones would be ruined or stained. There was no blood on his clothes. There had been blood on him the night his foster mother was murdered, because he'd gone slipping and sliding in it (thud and suck) when he knelt down to turn her over on the drive. She had been chewing gum when she died. When he nudged her, the gum fell out of her mouth. When he looked up to find the moon, the sky was covered with clouds. Once, in the student centre, Lisa Hardwick had grabbed his crotch and squeezed, and he had never been able to tell anybody about it. You couldn't tell people that kind of thing. You could get brought up on charges of sexual harassment.

'It's not so common to find men who like it real,' Mistress Pamela had said as he was reaching for his clothes when the session was over. 'They want to play at it, that's what. They don't want pain. You do.'

'I do what?'

'Like pain,' she'd said.

He got clean underwear and a clean shirt and a pair of jeans out of the same suitcase he'd put his dirty clothes in. He put his loafers on without bothering to look for socks. He found the charm bracelet where he'd left it on the bed. The gold dollar sign was shinier than the other charms. He'd noticed it before. That made sense, somehow. Money was always more fascinating than any of the things it could buy. He wondered who would want to buy a zoo full of miniature animals, especially a snake. He wondered what the dice were for. His foster sisters had bought charms for special occasions as well as for luck. They'd had their nails done at a salon in a strip mall just outside of Keene, carved up like topiaries, studded with glass crystals and multifaceted beads.

'He never lets you know what he's thinking,' his foster mother had said – but she'd had that one wrong. The truth was, he wasn't thinking anything, most of the time. His head was like an enormous sea shell broadcasting the sound of the ocean. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. Everything drifted. Everything was the same.

'It would look better with more charms,' the woman in the antique shop had said, fastening the bracelet round her wrist to model it for him. 'I've never worn charm bracelets myself. I've never understood them.'

He reached forward and raised her arm into the light.

'Charms are supposed to mean something,' the woman said.

He took the parcel off the table and unwrapped it. He'd been careful to cut the hands off up over the wrists. It was easier that way. Wrist bones were impossible to saw through. He had tried. Fingers lacked what he needed: definition, maybe, or just a place to put the bracelet. He always left them with bracelets. He always bought them something before he let them go.

'It's beautiful,' his foster mother had said, that night in the kitchen, before she'd walked down to the end of the drive to talk to the man who wanted cordwood. 'Turquoise plastic. I don't think I've ever seen a bracelet made of turquoise plastic'

'I've got a bracelet in turquoise plastic,' one of his foster sisters had said. 'I bet he stole it from my room.'

Down at the end of the drive there was a wooden gate and a big mailbox, big enough to put packages in. His foster mother hated to go down to the post office with those little yellow call slips to pick up whatever she'd had mailed to her from catalogues. She liked to order special edition plates with pictures of angel-children painted on them that she could prop up on little stands in a display case in the living room. She liked people to admire her collections.

'It's beautiful,' she'd told him again, ignoring her daughter, which she usually did. Then she got up and started down the drive to the gate and her appointment. If he'd waited another month or two before he killed her, it would have been maple season and she would have been boiling syrup on the stove.