The dead woman’s kitchen. Cold, waxy bacon fat thick in a frying pan on the stove. Pale nitrile gloves cast off by Bureau agents, draped on chair backs and depending from counter edges and puddled on the floor, as if they were the collapsed remains of anemonelike sea creatures displaced from a distant ocean by means unknowable. Dirty plate and flatware on the table, left by a woman known to be uncommonly neat. And the journal containing thousands of repetitions of the phrases and clauses with which she laboriously constructed a message, evidence of an obsessive need to convey a condition or experience that frightened and oppressed her.
Sometimes at night, I come wide awake…
Sheriff Luther Tillman turned five pages before he found a further construction of the sentence, which was when Rob Stassen said, “I’ve got ice in my veins.”
On the page: Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull…
Luther said, “The FBI must have pored through this. They aren’t so incompetent they’d have overlooked it.”
“But then they would’ve taken it with them,” Rob said. “Lord alive, it’s a key piece of evidence.”
The FBI’s behavior was inexplicable. But Luther was more focused on the awfulness of what they had found here, saddened to read this evidence that Cora Gundersun had indeed been suffering from mental illness of one kind or another.
He turned three pages before he found the point at which she had managed to extract from herself the next part of the sentence.
Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull, and it speaks to me…
Two pages later, there was more, and three pages after that, and four pages after that, until her handwriting ended and all the remaining pages of the journal were blank.
Luther read aloud the complete message. “ ‘Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull, and it speaks to me, speaks in an evil whisper. I believe it’s laying eggs in the folds of my brain. It tells me to sleep, and so I do. I forget the spider for days at a time. Until I come wide awake again at night and feel it crawling, feel it squeezing out its eggs in my brain, and the spider says, Forget me. The spider will be the death of me.’ ”
The refrigerator compressor switched on, and Luther looked up with a start.
“Poor Cora,” said Rob Stassen. “Sounds strange to say that, considering what she did today. But, Lord alive, she was sure sick. What now, Sheriff?”
Closing the journal, tucking it under his arm, Luther said, “Now we look through this place from end to end and see what else the FBI didn’t think was important.”