Leslie Glass - Burning Time

She looked down at the complaint sheet. “You’re getting some letters,” she prompted.

He corrected her. “My wife is getting letters.”

“Is Mrs. Frank the complainant?” April said, turning her head a little, as if looking for her.

Dr. Frank colored slightly. “Yes. I’m making the inquiry for her.”

April looked down. She had done the same thing earlier that day when a man loudly told his three- or four-year-old son in a store not to whine like a woman.

“Women don’t whine,” the boy retorted. “You mean, don’t whine like you, Daddy.”

The doctor seemed very nice, but his wife’s not being there about her own complaint made April wonder. Her mother, Sai Woo, said she was suspicious. “Must have smelled something bad when baby. Always asking questions, not believe answers,” Sai Woo liked to say.

April closed her face to her thought that a big part of her didn’t like doctors. Her mother wanted her to marry a doctor. This one was clearly rich and looked like a Kennedy. Kennedys seemed to prey on women. He opened his leather briefcase and took out some envelopes.

“My wife and I are concerned. What can you do to stop this?” he asked, handing them over.

She took the pile and examined it. There were sixteen envelopes in all, each containing a letter. She pulled them out and quickly glanced through them. The first few had only a few lines on them, after that they got longer. The last four were several pages. All were typed on the same plain paper with black ink from a very old ribbon. On the top right-hand corner of each there was a neatly penciled number and date.

“You numbered and dated them?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She studied the paper. Plain white bond. She felt its thickness with her fingers. Not bad paper, but the typewriter was very old and hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Some of the letters were filled up. The whole thing looked kind of funny to her. Why did he number the letters? She could feel him watching her as she worked her way through them.

“When did you start numbering the letters?” she asked.

“After the third one,” he answered.

April read the third one carefully. What makes a good woman go bad? Breaks a man’s heart like a wheel . She looked up at the furrowed brow and saw that he was more than watching her read the letters. He was studying her .

“Why this one?” she asked.

“After this one I knew they wouldn’t stop.”

She could smell Sergeant Sanchez before she saw him, did not turn her head. He had come back exactly on time. For a second she was aware of the gun at her waist. Why did the doctor think they wouldn’t stop after the third letter?

“Why?” she asked.

“The person writing these letters has a grievance. He’ll keep at it until he’s satisfied.”

She read on. They were kind of strange, but she didn’t see a threat in them. Each one had the same drawing on it that looked like a Chinese symbol but wasn’t—a semicircle with jagged edges and maybe spokes, or maybe it was swords on fire coming out of a sun going down. The last ones had other drawings on them. The letters rambled on about missiles in the Persian Gulf War and soldiers blowing things away, motorcycles with missiles on them and other weird stuff. They were all signed The One Who Saved You .

She paused, shuffling the letters back into order. “Do you know who it is?”

He shook his head.

“Well, do you know what the writer’s grievance is?”

“My wife’s an actress. She was in a film.”

April looked around sharply. Sergeant Sanchez had assumed his favorite position at his desk which was no longer his because the shift was over, and Dr. Frank was blushing again. That was the way he showed his face. What kind of film would make his face red? So some loon didn’t like the movie.

She squinted at the top postmark. It was illegible, as if the machine had canceled improperly, or run out of ink. She couldn’t read it at all. Each of the other fifteen envelopes had a smeared postmark. The letters were addressed to Emma Chapman with the same typewriter.

“Emma Chapman?”

“My wife’s maiden name.”

“Does she always use it?”

“Yes.”

April nodded. Okay. “Well, Dr. Frank, the thing is, there’s nothing illegal about sending people letters unless there’s a threat in them. It’s really a postal matter.”

“I see a threat in them,” Dr. Frank said.

“Where?” April asked.

“All the way through. His tone is threatening, the talk about missiles and revenge, about a woman going bad. You know about the cases of disturbed people becoming obsessed with actresses and trying to kill them, or kill somebody else to get their attention?” He spoke with great intensity, but his folded hands rested calmly on the desk between them.

“If you remember the Hinckley case, you’ll understand this is a potentially very dangerous situation.” He lifted his hands for a second, then let them drop.

She nodded. Everybody remembered the case. So it was more than a public relations thing. Still, how did he know the letter writer was a man, and where exactly was the danger? She couldn’t start investigating a potential crime, the nature of which was completely unspecified.

She pushed the letters, now ordered and back in their envelopes, to the empty space between them. “What do you want me to do, Dr. Frank?”

“I’m concerned. I want it to stop,” he said, not actually asking her to do anything.

There was no return address on the envelopes. The complaint on the sheet did not justify sending the material to the lab. She looked up. Sergeant Sanchez had his head slightly cocked to one side. He didn’t say a thing, but she got a message from him anyway. That was disconcerting. She couldn’t read Jimmy Wong’s mind; how come she could read Sergeant Sanchez’s mind? The message was for her to take the letters.

“Okay,” she said. “Leave them with me.”

The doctor looked both doubtful and relieved. April could understand doubtful. There was no reason for people to think the police could solve anything. Truth was, most everything was needle in house-stack, as her mother would say. She gave him a receipt for the letters and took his business card. She looked at it briefly, but it didn’t reveal what kind of doctor he was.

25

Troland had just about reached his favorite part, no longer feeling any fatigue, when the girl woke up. She opened her eyes and within an instant she was hysterical. Her hands and feet were tied, but the middle of her body had no restraints. She began straining and bucking. Her eyes were enormous, about to pop right out of her head. She made sounds like no sounds Troland had ever heard. It was like she was having an epileptic fit. Her skinny body went rigid. Her head shook from side to side, and she was screaming from the inside because her mouth was taped.

“Shut up.” It freaked him out.

She didn’t shut up.

“Look, shut up!” he screamed. “I have a gun. See, it’s loaded. I have a knife, too. I’ll cut you up in little pieces.”

The noise didn’t stop.

“You want me to finish quietly, or blow your head off?”

Snot and tears ran down her face. Troland was disgusted. After all his trouble, now she was a mess.

“Okay!” He put the gun down and roughly wiped her face with a towel.

He considered hitting her, knocking her out, but didn’t want to spoil his work.

“You want me to take the tape off?” he said.

She nodded.

He hesitated. “You better not scream,” he warned.

She shook her head. He reached over and pulled the tape off. For a second she breathed deeply through her mouth, and then in gulps, crying with no tears.