“DO YOU WANT TO FINISH her off, or shall we let her suffer?” asks Miss Miller, as the girl Christopher loves crumples face forward on the bed, still pawing feebly behind her, trying to remove the ice pick protruding from her lower back. Deflected by her lumbar spine, the point has slipped sideways at an angle and penetrated her right kidney. She is bleeding to death internally. “I assure you, it’s all the same to me.”
No answer. Christopher, backed against the headboard, hugs his drawn-up knees.
“I know what’s going through your treacherous little mind,” Miss Miller adds, lifting the hem of her dress primly as she sits down on the corner of the bed. “You’re thinking there’s still time to save her. Snatch her up in your arms, drive her to the hospital. Be a hero.”
Mary has begun keening his name now—Chrisseee, Chrisseee. Miss Miller raises her own weak voice as best she can over the shrieking. “But before you do that, Ulysses, think about what will happen if she doesn’t make it—if she dies on the way. What are you going to tell them? That I did it? And if I tell them you did—that you raped her and stabbed her?”
“Chrisseee. Chrisseee. Help meeee.”
“Just who—excuse me, whom—do you think they’re going to believe, Ulysses?”
Mary, weakening: “Chrissy it hurts Chrissy oh god what’s happening . . .”
“You or me, Ulysses? The poor, feeble, disfigured schoolteacher, or the boy who’s left his seed inside the victim, a boy who’s already killed a man with an ice pick?”
Christopher covers his ears with his hands, trying to block out not just the women’s voices but his own internal cacophony—the crowd noise.
“ . . . it hurts Chrissy it hurts so bad help me Chrissy . . .”
“Finish her, Ulysses. It’s the only way.”
“. . . please Chrissy oh God Chrissy I hurt I hurt so bad . . .”
Ulysses . . . Chrissy . . . Ulysses . . . Chrissy . . .
“SHUT UP! EVERYBODY JUST SHUT UP!”
* * *
Silence. Silence in the bedroom, silence in the forest. With the sun almost directly overhead, the chiaroscuro effect of the dappled sunlight was more intense than ever, luminous white columns where the sun penetrated the forest canopy, dense black shadow where it did not.
Irene Cogan closed her notebook and leaned forward. “Do you need a break?” she whispered. Maxwell was facing away from her; her lips were inches from his ear.
His head moved slowly to the left, then to the right. No.
“Are you sure?”
A nod.
“Go on, then. What happens next?”
Slowly he turned to face her. His eyes were dull, his face expressionless. “Kinch,” he replied. “Kinch happens next.”
* * *
Miss Miller watches from the doorway—she’s backed away in order to avoid being splattered. When Kinch is done, she approaches the bed, leans over, taking care to keep the skirt of her dress out of the gore, picks up Mary’s left hand, slips off the ring she gave her at dinner, wipes it clean on the corner of the sheet, slips it back onto her own finger. Only then does she address Ulysses.
“Clean this mess up,” she tells him. Then an afterthought, as she absentmindedly fingers her current wig, a cheap polyester affair she was given before she left the hospital: “Oh, and save me the hair. I think I’m going to take up wig making.”