CHAPTER TEN

At ten o’clock that night, standing behind a heavy plum-colored drape, Mayra looked up the sloping road that led to the funicular plaza and the Park Hotel, where the staff lived, and watched people in civilian clothes move out of the hotel to the funicular station by multiple dozens. The Bürgenstock was being evacuated. Soon a skeleton crew and the security police would be the only people scattered at different stations around the grounds. By now, except for security police, perhaps, she and Mr. West were the only two people in the Grand Hotel.

She waited for night to come. She pulled a small bed lamp down to the floor. She put it under the bed before she lighted it so that none of its glow could be seen through the window outside the hotel, then she began carefully to take apart the scrapbook. The words of the past seemed as eerie and terrible as the scenes themselves must have seemed to Mama. Pictures of dark, shapely, somehow Italianate women were displayed prominently on the pages. Miss Baby looked like a slut. Miss Pupchen looked like a child. Miss Mary Lou Mayberry—well, it was fairly possible that Miss Mary Lou Mayberry did look a little like her. But the eerie and uncanny thing, with her perceptions now so frightened and heightened, was that all of them, somehow, looked in some way like each other, so they must have looked like someone else who was buried deep, deep, deep within Edward West’s tenebrous mind.

She had transparent acetate tape. She took up two pages of brutality, viciousness and murder, put out the light under the bed and moved toward the doorway that led into the corridor. She unlocked the door. It clicked heavily. She began to tremble, leaning against the wall. She could not make herself open the door. She talked to herself. She told herself that she had to go out into the corridors and do her work. She was so soaked with sweat that her hand slipped as she tried to turn the doorknob. But she opened the door.

The corridor was softly lighted. She was at a far end on the first floor. The other end was approximately eighty yards away. The door into Mr. West’s apartment was on the second floor, positioned at the center of the corridor, facing the staircase and the entrance to the elevator. The building was as silent as a mortuary. She stayed close to the wall and glided silently along the heavy carpet to the staircase. She hugged the wall of the staircase as she moved herself, against her will and against her fright, down the stairs—impossibly slowly. She made herself think of what she had to do and how she must study well, in advance, how it must be done, so that she could flee to her hiding place again. This time to Willie’s room. She reached the second floor. She was facing the door to Mr. West’s apartment. She started to move toward it when she heard a sudden sound just above her and she almost cried out. She felt physical pain from the tension of the muscles of her neck and face. She clung to the wall, waiting for light to fall on her. Moments passed. She remembered the security guard Walt had said he was going to post outside her door. He had kicked his chair or had leaned it against the wall.

She made herself move again. She chose the full newspaper page, mounted on black cardboard. A screaming headline said: SHOWGIRL BRUTALLY MURDERED. POLICE VOW CAPTURE OF KILLER. There was a three-column portrait of Mary Lou Mayberry.

She tore off a strip of tape and fixed the page to Mr. West’s door. She anchored it there with two more pieces of tape. She backed away to the elevator door and taped Miss Baby’s newspaper page on it. She held her hand tightly across her mouth and lower jaw and gripped hard, so that she could not cry out, and moved like an undersea diver across the corridor again. She came up to Mr. West’s door as though she were in a trance. She pressed the door bell heavily. The dog barked frantically inside the apartment. She turned and ran. She went down the staircase and disappeared. She was on the second floor landing and was moving swiftly and silently downward when she heard Mr. West open his door. She reached the first floor before she heard his scream of horror. She ran desperately along the first-floor corridor to Willie’s apartment. Fumbling with the skeleton key, she let herself in, then locked the door behind her, gasping for breath. She moved into the living room. Willie was sitting there, smiling up at her.