The Third Dead Body

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Nina Kiriki Hoffman is the author of several novels, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Thread That Binds the Bones, A Fistful of Sky, A Stir of Bones, Spirits That Walk in Shadow, and Catalyst, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, such as Firebirds, The Coyote Road, and Redshift. Her work has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award four times each.

In the nineties, Hoffman went through a summer where she read one serial killer biography after another. “I was in the grip of some monstrous curiosity about how far humans will go,” she says. “My favorite book that summer was about a case that wasn’t even solved at the time, The Search for the Green River Killer, by Carlton Smith and Thomas Guillen. Part of my thinking in ‘The Third Dead Body’ was to give the victim a voice. There were so many victims. In this case, where the serial killer was the celebrity—as so often happens—I wanted to focus elsewhere.”

I didn’t even know Richie. I surely didn’t want to love him. After he killed me, though, I found him irresistible.

I opened my eyes and dirt fell into them. Having things fall into my eyes was one of my secret terrors, but now I blinked and shook my head and most of the dirt fell away and I felt all right. So I knew something major had happened to me.

With my eyes closed, I shoved dirt away from my face. While I was doing this I realized that the inside of my mouth felt different. I probed with my tongue, my trained and talented tongue, and soon discovered that where smooth teeth had been before there were only broken stumps. What puzzled me about this and about the dirt in my eyes was that these things didn’t hurt. They bothered me, but not on a pain level.

I frowned and tried to figure out what I was feeling. Not a lot. Not scared or mad, not hot or cold. This was different too. I usually felt scared, standing on street corners waiting for strangers to pick me up, and cold, working evenings in skimpy clothes that showed off my best features. Right now, I felt nothing.

I sat up, dirt falling away from me, and bumped into branches that gridded my view of the sky. Some of them slid off me. The branches were loose and wilting, not attached to a bush or tree. I used my hands to push them out of the way and noticed that the backs of my fingers were blackened beyond my natural cocoa color. I looked at them, trying to remember what had happened before I fell asleep or whatever—had I dipped my fingers in ink? But no; the skin was scorched. My fingerprints were gone. They would have told police that my name was Tawanda Foote, which was my street name.

My teeth would have led police to call me Mary Jefferson, a name I hadn’t used since two years before, when I moved out of my parents’ house at fifteen.

In my own mind, I was Sheila, a power name I had given myself no one could have discovered from any evidence about me.

No teeth, no fingerprints; Richie really didn’t want anybody to know who I was, not that anybody ever had.

Richie.

With my scorched fingers I tried to take my pulse, though it was hard to find a vein among the rope burns at my wrists. With my eyes I watched my own naked chest. There were charred spots on my breasts where Richie had touched me with a burning cigarette. No pulse, but maybe that was because the nerves in my fingertips were dead. No breathing. No easy answer to that, so I chose the hard answer:

Dead.

I was dead.

After I pushed aside the branches so I could see trees and sky, I sat in my own grave dirt and thought about this.

My grannie would call this dirt goofer dust; any soil that’s been piled on a corpse, whether the body’s in a box or just loose like me, turns into goofer dust. Dirt next to dead folk gets a power in it, she used to say.

She used to tell me all kinds of things. She told me about the walking dead; but mostly she said they were just big scary dummies who obeyed orders. When I stayed up too late at night reading library books under my covers with a flashlight, she would say, “Maybe you know somebody who could give those nightwalkers orders. Maybe she can order ‘em to come in here and turn off your light.”

She had started to train me in recognizing herbs and collecting conjo ingredients, but that was before I told the preacher what really happened when I sat in Grand-père’s lap, and Grand-père got in trouble with the church and then with other people in the Parish. I had a lot of cousins, and some of the others started talking up about Grand-père, but I was the first. After the police took Grand-père away, Grannie laid a curse on me: “May you love the thing that hurts you, even after it kills you.” She underlined it with virgin blood, the wax of black candles, and the three of spades.

I thought maybe if I left Louisiana I could get the curse off, but nobody I knew could uncross me and the curse followed me to Seattle.

In the midst of what was now goofer dust, I was sitting next to something. I reached out and touched it. It was another dead body. “Wake up,” I said to the woman in the shallow grave beside me. But she refused to move.

So: no fingerprints, no teeth. I was dead, next to someone even deader, and off in some woods. I checked in with my body, an act I saved for special times when I could come out of the numb state I spent most of my life in, and found I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. All the parts of me that had been hurting just before Richie, my last trick, took a final twist around my neck with the nylon cord he was so fond of, all those parts were quiet, not bothering me at all; but there was a burning desire in my crotch, and a pinprick of fire behind my eyes that whispered to me, “Get up and move. We know where to go.”

I looked around. At my back the slope led upward toward a place where sun broke through trees. At my feet it led down into darker woods. To either side, more woods and bushes, plants Grannie had never named for me, foreign as another language.

I moved my legs, bringing them up out of the goofer dust. All of me was naked; dirt caught in my curly hair below. I pulled myself to my feet and something fell out of my money pit, as my pimp Blake liked to call my pussy. I looked down at what had fallen from me. It was a rock flaked and shaped into a blade about the size of a flat hand, and it glistened in the dulled sunlight, wet and dark with what had come from inside me, and maybe with some of his juices too.

The fire in my belly flared up, but it wasn’t a feeling like pain; it felt like desire.

I put my hands to my neck and felt the deep grooves the rope had left there. Heat blossomed in my head and in my heart. I wanted to find the hands that had tightened the rope around my neck, wrists, and ankles. I wanted to find the eyes that had watched my skin sizzle under the kiss of the burning cigarette. I wanted to find the mind that had decided to plunge a crude blade into me like that. The compulsion set in along my bones, jetted into my muscles like adrenaline. I straightened, looked around. I had to find Richie. I knew which direction to look: something in my head was teasing me, nudging me—a fire behind my eyes, urging me back to the city.

I fought the urge and lifted more branches off the place where I had lain. If I was going to get to Seattle from here, wherever here was, I needed some clothes. I couldn’t imagine anybody stopping to pick me up with me looking the way I did. I knew Richie had worked hard to get rid of all clues to who I was, but I thought maybe my companion in the grave might not be so naked of identity, so I brushed dirt off her, and found she was not alone. There were two bodies in the dirt, with no sign of afterlife in them except maggots, and no trace of clothes. One was darker than me, with fewer marks on her but the same rope burns around her neck. The other one was very light, maybe white. She was really falling apart. They looked like they must smell pretty bad, but I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t smell anything. I could see and hear, and my muscles did what I told them, but I didn’t feel much except the gathering fire inside me that cried for Richie.

I brushed dirt back over the other women and moved the branches to cover their resting place again.

Downslope the trees waited, making their own low-level night. Upslope, open sun: a road, probably. I scrambled up toward the light.

The heat in my head and heart and belly burned hotter, and I churned up the hillside and stepped into the sun.

A two-lane highway lay before me, its yellow dotted center stripe bright in the sun. Its edges tailed into the gravel I stood on. Crushed snack bags and Coke and beer cans lay scattered in the bushes beside the road; cellophane glinted. I crossed the road and looked at the wooded hill on its far side, then down in the ditch. No clothes. Not even a plastic bag big enough to make into a bikini bottom.

The heat inside me was like some big fat drunk who will not shut up, yelling for a beer. I started walking, knowing which direction would take me toward town without knowing how I knew.

After a while a car came from behind me. Behind was probably my best side; my microbraids hung down to hide the marks on my neck, and Richie hadn’t done any cigarette graffiti on my back that I could remember. A lot of tricks had told me I had a nice ass and good legs; even my pimp had said it, and he never said anything nice unless he thought it was true or it would get him what he wanted. And he had everything he wanted from me.

I could hear the car slowing, but I was afraid to look back. I knew my mouth must look funny because of the missing teeth, and I wasn’t sure what the rest of my face looked like. Since I couldn’t feel pain, anything could have happened. I bent my head so the sun wasn’t shining in my face.

“Miss? Oh, miss?” Either a woman’s deep voice came from the car behind me, or a man’s high one; it sounded like an older person. The engine idled low as the car pulled up beside me. It was a red Volkswagen Rabbit.

I crossed my arms over my chest, hiding the burn marks and tucking my rope-mark bracelets into the crooks of my elbows.

“Miss?”

“Ya?” I said, trying to make my voice friendly, not sure I had a voice at all.

“Miss, are you in trouble?”

I nodded, my braids slapping my shoulders and veiling my face.

“May I help you, miss?”

I cleared my throat, drew in breath. “Ya-you goin’ do down?” I managed to say.

“What?”

“Down,” I said, pointing along the road. “Seaddle.”

“Oh. Yes. Would you like a ride?”

“Mm-hmm,” I said. “Cloze?” I glanced up this time, wondering if the car’s driver was man or woman. A man might shed his shirt for me, but a woman, unless she was carrying a suitcase or something, might not have anything to offer.

“Oh, you poor thing, what happened to you?” The car pulled up onto the shoulder ahead of me and the driver got out. It was a big beefy white woman in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. She came toward me with a no-nonsense stride. She had short dark hair. She was wearing a man’s khaki cloth hat with fishing flies stuck in the band, all different feathery colors. “What ha—”

I put one hand over my face, covering my mouth with my palm.

“What happened—” she whispered, stopping while there was still a lot of space between us.

“My boyfriend dreeded me preddy bad,” I said behind my hand. My tongue kept trying to touch the backs of teeth no longer there. It frustrated me that my speech was so messy. I thought maybe I could talk more normally if I touched my tongue to the roof of my mouth. “My boyfriend,” I said again, then, “treated me pretty bad.”

“Poor thing, poor thing,” she whispered, then turned back to the car and rummaged in a back seat, came up with a short-waisted Levi’s jacket and held it out to me.

I ducked my head and took the jacket. She gasped when I dropped my arms from my chest. I wrapped up in the jacket, which was roomy, but not long enough to cover my crotch. Then again, from the outside, my crotch didn’t look so bad. I turned the collar up to cover my neck and the lower part of my face. “Thank you,” I said.

Her eyes were wide, her broad face pale under her tan. “You need help,” she said. “Hospital? Police?”

“Seattle,” I said.

“Medical attention!”

“Won’t help me now.” I shrugged.

“You could get infections, die from septicemia or something. I have a first aid kit in the car. At least let me—”

“What would help me,” I said, “is a mirror.”

She sighed, her shoulders lowering. She walked around the car and opened the passenger side door, and I followed her. I looked at the seat. It was so clean, and I was still goofer dusted. “Gonna get it dirty,” I said.

“Lord, that’s the last thing on my mind right now,” she said. “Get in. Mirror’s on the back of the visor.”

I slid in and folded down the visor, sighed with relief when I saw my face. Nothing really wrong with it, except my chin was nearer to my nose than it should be, and my lips looked too dark and puffy. My eyes weren’t blackened and my nose wasn’t broken. I could pass. I gapped the collar just a little and winced at the angry dark rope marks around my neck, then clutched the collar closed.

The woman climbed into the driver’s seat. “My name’s Marti,” she said, holding out a hand. Still keeping the coat closed with my left hand, I extended my right, and she shook it.

“Sheila,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever said it out loud. She. La. Two words for woman put together. I smiled, then glanced quickly at the mirror, and saw that a smile was as bad as I’d thought. My mouth was a graveyard of broken teeth, brown with old blood. I hid my mouth with my hand again.

“Christ!” said Marti. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“If he did that to you, he could do it to others. My daughter lives in Renton. This has to be reported to the police. Who is he? Where does he live?”

“Near Sea-Tac. The airport.”

She took a deep breath, let it out. “You understand, don’t you, this is a matter for the authorities?”

I shook my head. The heat in my chest was scorching, urging me on. “I have to go to town now,” I said, gripping the door handle.

“Put your seat belt on,” she said, slammed her door, and started the car.

Once she got started, she was some ball-of-fire driver. Scared me—even though there wasn’t anything I could think of that could hurt me.

“Where were we, anyway?” I asked after I got used to her tire-squealing cornering on curves.

“Well, I was coming down from Kanaskat. I’m on my way in to Renton to see my daughter. She’s got a belly-dance recital tonight, and—” She stared at me, then shook her head and focused on the road.

The land was leveling a little. We hit a main road, Highway 169, and she turned north on it.

The burning in my chest raged up into my throat. “No,” I said, reaching for her hand on the steering wheel.

“What?”

“No. That way.” I pointed back to the other road we had been on. Actually the urge inside me was pulling from some direction between the two roads, but the smaller road aimed closer to where I had to go.

“Maple Valley’s this way,” she said, not turning, “and we can talk to the police there, and a doctor.”

“No,” I said.

She looked at me. “You’re in no state to make rational decisions,” she said.

I closed my hand around her wrist and squeezed. She cried out. She let go of the steering wheel and tried to shake off my grip. I stared at her and held on, remembering my grand-mère’s tales of the strength of the dead.

“Stop,” I said. I felt strange, totally strange, ordering a woman around the way a pimp would. I knew I was hurting her, too. I knew I could squeeze harder, break the bones in her arm, and I was ready to, but she pulled the car over to the shoulder and stamped on the brake.

“I got to go to Sea-Tac,” I said. I released her arm and climbed out of the car. “Thanks for ride. You want the jacket back?” I fingered the denim.

“My Lord,” she said, “you keep it, child.” She was rubbing her hand over the wrist I had gripped. She heaved a huge sigh. “Get in. I’ll take you where you want to go. I can’t just leave you here.”

“Your daughter’s show?” I said.

“I’ll phone. We’re going someplace with phones, aren’t we?”

I wasn’t sure exactly where we would end up. I would know when we arrived … . I remembered the inside of Richie’s apartment. But that was later. First he had pulled up next to where I was standing by the highway, rolled down the passenger window of his big gold four-door Buick, said he’d like to party and that he knew a good place. Standard lines, except I usually told johns the place, down one of the side streets and in the driveway behind an abandoned house. I had asked him how high he was willing to go. My pimp had been offering me coke off and on but I’d managed not to get hooked, so I was still a little picky about who I went with; but Richie looked clean-cut and just plain clean, and his car was a couple years old but expensive; I thought he might have money.

“I want it all,” Richie had said. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

I climbed into his car.

He took me down off the ridge where the Sea-Tac Strip is to a place like the one where I usually took my tricks, behind one of the abandoned houses near the airport that are due to be razed someday. There’s two or three neighborhoods of them handy. I asked him for money and he handed me a hundred, so I got in back with him, but then things went seriously wrong. That was the first time I saw and felt his rope, the first time I heard his voice cursing me, the first time I tasted one of his sweaty socks, not the worst thing I’d ever tasted, but close.

When he had me gagged and tied up and shoved down on the back seat floor, he drove somewhere else. I couldn’t tell how long the drive was; it felt like two hours but was probably only fifteen or twenty minutes. I could tell when the car drove into a parking garage because the sounds changed. He put a shopping bag over my head and carried me into an elevator, again something I could tell by feel, and then along a hall to his apartment. That was where I learned more about him than I had ever wanted to know about anybody.

I didn’t know his apartment’s address, but I knew where Richie was. If he was at the apartment, I would direct Marti there even without a map. The fire inside me reached for Richie like a magnet lusting for a hammer.

Shaping words carefully, I told Marti, “Going to the Strip. Plenty of phones.”

“Right,” she said.

“On the other road.” I pointed behind us.

She sighed. “Get in.”

I climbed into the car, and she waited for an RV to pass, then pulled out and turned around.

As soon as we were heading the way I wanted to go, the fire inside me cooled a little. I sat back and relaxed.

“Why are we going to the—to the Strip?” she asked. “What are you going to do when we get there?”

“Don’t know,” I said. We were driving toward the sun, which was going down. Glare had bothered me before my death, but now it was like dirt in my eyes, a minor annoyance. I blinked and considered this, then shrugged it off.

“Can’t you even tell me your boyfriend’s name?” she asked.

“Richie.”

“Richie what?”

“Don’t know.”

“Are you going back to him?”

Fire rose in my throat like vomit. I felt like I could breathe it out and it would feel good. It felt good inside my belly already. I was drunk with it. “Oh, yes,” I said.

“How can you?” she cried. She shook her head. “I can’t take you back to someone who hurt you so much.” But she didn’t stop driving.

“I have to go back,” I said.

“You don’t. You can choose something else. There are shelters for battered women. The government should offer you some protection. The police … .”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“I do,” she said. Her voice got quieter. “I know what it’s like to live with someone who doesn’t respect you. I know how hard it is to get away. But you are away, Sheila. You can start over.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.”

“You can. I’ll help you. You can live in Kanaskat with me and he’ll never find you. Or if you just want a bus ticket someplace—back home, wherever that is—I can do that for you, too.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

She was quiet for a long stretch of road. Then she said, “Help me understand.”

I shook my braids back and opened the collar of the jacket, pulled down the lapels to bare my neck. I stared at her until she looked back.

She screamed and drove across the center lane. Fortunately there was no other traffic. Still screaming, she fought with the steering wheel until she straightened out the car. Then she pulled over to the shoulder and jumped out of the car and ran away.

I shut off the car’s engine, then climbed out. “Marti,” I yelled. “Okay, I’m walking away now. The car’s all yours. I’m leaving. It’s safe. Thanks for the jacket. Bye.” I buttoned up the jacket, put the collar up, buried my hands in the pockets, and started walking along the road toward Richie.

I had gone about a quarter mile when she caught up with me again. The sun had set and twilight was deepening into night. Six cars had passed going my way, but I didn’t hold out my thumb, and though some kid had yelled out a window at me, and somebody else had honked and swerved, nobody stopped.

It had been so easy to hitch before I met Richie. Somehow now I just couldn’t do it.

I heard the Rabbit’s sputter behind me and kept walking, not turning to look at her. But she slowed and kept pace with me. “Sheila?” she said in a hoarse voice. “Sheila?”

I stopped and looked toward her. I knew she was scared of me. I felt strong and strange, hearing her call me by a name I had given myself, as if I might once have had a chance to make up who I was instead of being shaped by what had happened to me. I couldn’t see it being possible now, though, when I was only alive to do what the fire in me wanted.

Marti blinked, turned away, then turned back. “Get in,” she said.

“You don’t have to take me,” I said. “I’ll get there sooner or later. Doesn’t matter when.”

“Get in.”

I got back into her car.

For half an hour we drove in silence. She crossed Interstate 5, paused when we hit 99, the Strip. “Which way?”

I pointed right. The fire was so hot in me now I felt like my fingertips might start smoking any second.

She turned the car and we cruised north toward the Sea-Tac Airport, my old stomping grounds. We passed expensive hotels and cheap motels, convenience stores and fancy restaurants. Lighted buildings alternated with dark gaps. The roar of planes taking off and landing, lights rising and descending in the sky ahead of us, turned rapidly into background. We drove past the Goldilocks Motel, where Blake and I had a room we rented by the week, and I didn’t feel anything. But as we passed the intersection where the Red Lion sprawls on the corner of 188th Street and the Pacific Highway, fire flared under my skin. “Slowly,” I said to Marti. She stared at me and slowed the car. A mile further, past the airport, one of the little roads led down off the ridge to the left. I pointed.

Marti got in the left-turn lane and made the turn, then pulled into a gas station on the corner and parked by the rest rooms. “Now wait,” she said. “What are we doing, here?”

“Richie,” I whispered. I could feel his presence in the near distance; all my wounds were resonating with his nearness now, all the places he had pressed himself into me with his rope and his cigarette and his sock and his flaked stone knife and his penis, imprinting me as his possession. Surely as a knife slicing into a tree’s bark, he had branded me with his heart.

“Yes,” said Marti. “Richie. You have any plans for what you’re going to do once you find him?”

I held my hands out, open, palms up. The heat was so strong I felt like anything I touched would burst into flame.

“What are you going to do, strangle him? Have you got something to do it with?” She sounded sarcastic.

I was having a hard time listening to her. All my attention was focused down the road. I knew Richie’s car was there, and Richie in it. It was the place he had taken me to tie me up. He might be driving this way any second, and I didn’t want to wait any longer for our reunion, though I knew there was no place he could hide where I couldn’t find him. My love for him was what animated me now.

“Strangle,” I said, and shook my head. I climbed out of the car.

“Sheila!” said Marti.

I let the sound of my self-given name fill me with what power it could, and stood still for a moment, fighting the fire inside. Then I walked into the street, stood in the center so a car coming up out of the dark would have to stop. I strode down into darkness, away from the lights and noise of the Strip. My feet felt like match-heads, as if a scrape could strike fire from them.

Presently the asphalt gave way to potholes and gravel; I could tell by the sound of pebbles sliding under my feet. I walked past the first three dark houses to the right and left, looming shapes in a darkness pierced by the flight lights of airplanes, but without stars. I turned left at the fourth house, dark like the others, but with a glow behind it I couldn’t see with my eyes but could feel in my bones. Heat pulsed and danced inside me.

I pushed past an overgrown lilac bush at the side of the house and stepped into the broad drive in back. The car was there, as I had known it would be. Dark and quiet. Its doors were closed.

I heard a brief cry, and then the dome light went on in the car. Richie was sitting up in back, facing away from me.

Richie.

I walked across the crunching gravel, looking at his dark head. He wore a white shirt. He was staring down, focused, his arms moving. As I neared the car, I could see he was sitting on a woman. She still had her clothes on. (Richie hadn’t taken my clothes off until he got me in his apartment.) Tape was across her mouth, and her head thrashed from side to side, her upper arms jerking as Richie bound his thin nylon rope around her wrists, her legs kicking. I stood a moment looking in the window. She saw me and her eyes widened. She made a gurgling swallowed sound behind the sock, the tape.

I thought: he doesn’t need her. He has me.

I remembered the way my mind had struggled while my body struggled, screaming silently: no, oh no, Blake, where are you? No one will help me, the way no one has ever helped me, and I can’t help myself. That hurts, that hurts. Maybe he’ll play with me and let me go if I’m very, very good. Oh, God! What do you want? Just tell me, I can do it. You don’t have to hurt me! Okay, rip me off, it’s not like you’re the first, but you don’t have to hurt me.

Hurt me.

I love you. I love you so much.

I stared at him through the glass. The woman beneath him had stilled, and she was staring at me. Richie finally noticed, and whirled.

For a moment we stared at each other. Then I smiled, showing him the stumps of my teeth, and his blue eyes widened.

I reached for the door handle, opened it before he could lock it.

“Richie,” I said.

“Don’t!” he said. He shook his head, hard, as though he were a dog with wet fur. Slowly, he lifted one hand and rubbed his eye. He had a big bread knife in the other hand, had used it to cut the rope, then flicked it across the woman’s cheek, leaving a streak of darkness. He looked at me again. His jaw worked.

“Richie.”

“Don’t! Don’t… interrupt.”

I held out my arms, my fingertips scorched black as if dyed or tattooed, made special, the wrists dark beyond the ends of my sleeves. “Richie,” I said tenderly, the fire in me rising up like a firework, a burst of stars. “I’m yours.”

“No,” he said.

“You made me yours.” I looked at him. He had made Tawanda his, and then he had erased her. He had made Mary his, and then erased her. Even though he had erased Tawanda and Mary, these feelings inside me were Tawanda’s: whoever hurts me controls me; and Mary’s: I spoke up once and I got a curse on me I can’t get rid of. If I’m quiet maybe I’ll be okay.

But Sheila? Richie hadn’t erased Sheila; he had never even met her.

It was Tawanda who was talking. “You killed me and you made me yours,” she said. My fingers went to the jacket, unbuttoned it, dropped it behind me. “What I am I owe to you.”

“I—” he said, and coughed. “No,” he said.

I heard the purr of car engines in the near distance, not the constant traffic of the Strip, but something closer.

I reached into the car and gripped Richie’s arm. I pulled him out, even though he grabbed at the door handle with his free hand. I could feel the bone in his upper arm as my fingers pressed his muscles. “Richie,” I whispered, and put my arms around him and laid my head on his shoulder.

For a while he was stiff, tense in my embrace. Then a shudder went through him and he loosened up. His arms came around me. “You’re mine?” he said.

“Yours,” said Tawanda.

“Does that mean you’ll do what I say?” His voice sounded like a little boy’s.

“Whatever you say,” she said.

“Put your arms down,” he said.

I lowered my arms.

“Stand real still.” He backed away from me, then stood and studied me. He walked around, looking at me from all sides. “Wait a sec, I gotta get my flashlight.” He went around to the trunk and opened it, pulled out a flashlight as long as his forearm, turned it on. He trained the beam on my breasts, my neck. “I did you,” he said, nodding. “I did you. You were good. Almost as good as the first one. Show me your hands again.”

I held them out and he stared at my blackened fingers. Slowly he smiled, then looked up and met my eyes.

“I was going to visit you,” he said. “When I finished with this one. I was coming back to see you.

“I couldn’t wait,” said Tawanda.

“Don’t talk,” Richie said gently.

Don’t talk! Tawanda and Mary accepted that without a problem, but I, Sheila, was tired of people telling me not to talk. What did I have to lose?

On the other hand, what did I have to say? I didn’t even know what I wanted. Tawanda’s love for Richie was hard to fight. It was the burning inside me, the sizzling under my skin, all I had left of life.

“Will you scream if I say so?” said Richie in his little boy’s voice.

“Yes,” said Tawanda; but suddenly lights went on around us, and bullhorn voices came out of the dark.

“Hold it right there, buddy! Put your hands up!”

Blinking in the sudden flood of light, Richie slowly lifted his hand, the knife glinting in the left one, the flashlight in the other.

“Step away from him, miss,” said someone else. I looked around too, not blinking; glare didn’t bother me. I couldn’t see through it, though. I didn’t know who was talking. “Miss, move away from him,” said another voice from outside the light.

“Come here,” Richie whispered, and I went to him. Releasing the flashlight, he dropped his arms around me, held the knife to my neck, and yelled, “Stay back!”

“Sheila!” It was Marti’s voice this time, not amplified.

I looked toward her.

“Sheila, get away from him!” Marti yelled. “Do you want him to escape?”

Tawanda did. Mary did. They, after all, had found the place where they belonged. In the circle of his arms, my body glowed, the fire banked but burning steady.

He put the blade closer to my twisted throat. I could almost feel it. I laid my head back on his shoulder, looking at his profile out of the corner of my eye. The light glare brought out the blue in his eye. His mouth was slightly open, the inside of his lower lip glistening. He turned to look down into my face, and a slight smile curved the corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he whispered, “we’re going to get into the car now.” He raised his voice. “Do what I say and don’t struggle.” Keeping me between him and the lights, he kicked the back door closed and edged us around the car to the driver’s side. Moving in tandem, with his arm still around my neck, we slid in behind the wheel, me going first. “Keep close,” he said to me. “Slide down a little so I can use my arm to shift with, but keep close.”

“Sheila!” screamed Marti. The driver’s side window was open.

Richie started the car.

“Sheila! There’s a live woman in the back of that car!”

Tawanda didn’t care, and Mary didn’t care, and I wasn’t even sure I cared. Richie shifted from park into drive and eased his foot off the brake and onto the gas pedal; I could feel his legs moving against my left shoulder. From the back seat I heard a muffled groan. I looked up at Richie’s face. He was smiling.

Just as he gunned the engine, I reached up and grappled the steering-wheel-mounted gear shift into park. Then I broke the shift handle off.

“You said you’d obey me,” he said, staring down into my face. He looked betrayed, his eyes wide, his brow furrowed, his mouth soft. The car’s engine continued to snarl without effect.

Fire blossomed inside me, hurting me this time because I’d hurt him. Pain came alive. I coughed, choking on my own tongue, my throat swollen and burning, my wrists and ankles burning, my breasts burning, between my legs a column of flame raging up inside me. I tried to apologize, but I no longer had a voice.

“You promised,” said Richie in his little boy’s voice, looking down at me.

I coughed. I could feel the power leaving me; my arms and legs were stiffening the way a body is supposed to do after death. I lifted my crippling hands as high as I could, palms up, pleading, but by that point only my elbows could bend. It was Tawanda’s last gesture.

“Don’t make a move,” said a voice. “Keep your hands on the wheel.”

We looked. A man stood just outside the car, aiming a gun at Richie through the open window.

Richie edged a hand down the wheel toward me.

“Make a move for her and I’ll shoot,” said the man. Someone else came up beside him, and he moved back, keeping his gun aimed at Richie’s head, while the other man leaned in and put handcuffs on Richie.

“That’s it,” said the first man, and he and the second man heaved huge sighs.

I lay curled on the seat, my arms bent at the elbows, my legs bent at the knees. When they pulled Richie out of the car I slipped off his lap and lay stiff, my neck bent at an angle so my head stuck up sideways. “This woman needs medical attention,” someone yelled. I listened to them freeing the woman in the back seat, and thought about the death of Tawanda and Mary.

Tawanda had lifted me out of my grave and carried me for miles. Mary had probably mostly died when Grannie cursed me and drove me out of the house. But Sheila? In a way, I had been pregnant with Sheila for years, and she was born in the grave. She was still looking out of my eyes and listening with my ears even though the rest of me was dead. Even as the pain of death faded, leaving me with clear memories of how Richie had treated me before he took that final twist around my neck, the Sheila in me was awake and feeling things.

“She’s in an advanced state of rigor,” someone said. I felt a dim pressure around one of my arms. My body slid along the seat toward the door.

“Wait,” said someone else. “I got to take pictures.”

“What are you talking about?” said another. “Ten minutes ago she was walking and talking.”

Lights flashed, but I didn’t blink.

“Are you crazy?” said the first person. “Even rapid-onset rigor doesn’t come on this fast.”

“Ask anybody, Tony. We all saw her.”

“Try feeling for a pulse. Are you sure he wasn’t just propping her up and moving her around like a puppet? But that wouldn’t explain … .”

“You done with the pictures yet, Crane?” said one of the cops. Then, to me, in a light voice, “Honey, come on out of there. Don’t just lie there and let him photograph you like a corpse. You don’t know what he does with the pictures.”

“Wait till the civilians are out of here before you start making jokes,” said someone else. “Maybe she’s just in shock.”

“Sheila?” said Marti from the passenger side.

“Marti,” I whispered.

Gasps.

“Sheila, you did it. You did it.”

Did what? Let him kill me, then kill me again? Suddenly I was so angry I couldn’t rest. Anger was like the fire that had filled me before, only a lower, slower heat. I shuddered and sat up.

Another gasp from one of the men at the driver’s side door. “See?” said the one with the shock theory. One of them had a flashlight and shone it on me. I lifted my chin and stared at him, my microbraids brushing my shoulders.

“Kee-rist!”

“Oh, God!”

They fell back a step.

I sucked breath in past the swelling in my throat and said, “I need a ride. And feeling for a pulse? I think you’ll be happier if you don’t.”

Marti gave me back her jacket. I rode in her Rabbit; the cop cars and the van from the medical examiner’s office tailed us. Marti had a better idea of where she had found me than I did.

“What’s your full name?” she said when we were driving. “Is there anybody I can get in touch with for you?”

“No. I’ve been dead to them for a couple years already.”

“Are you sure? Did you ever call to check with them?”

I waited for a while, then said, “If your daughter was a hooker and dead, would you want to know?”

“Yes,” she said immediately. “Real information is much better than not knowing.”

I kept silent for another while, then told her my parents’ names and phone number. Ultimately, I didn’t care if the information upset them or not.

She handed me a little notebook and asked me to write it down, turning on the dome light so I could see what I was doing. The pain of scorching had left my fingers again. Holding the pen was awkward, but I managed to write out what Marti wanted. When I finished, I slipped the notebook back into her purse and turned off the light.

“It was somewhere along here,” she said half an hour later. “You have any feeling for it?”

“No.” I didn’t have a sense of my grave the way I had had a feeling for Richie. Marti’s headlights flashed on three Coke cans lying together by the road, though, and I remembered seeing a cluster like that soon after I had climbed up the slope. “Here,” I said.

She pulled over, and so did the three cars following us. Someone gave me a flashlight and I went to the edge of the slope and walked along, looking for my own footprints or anything else familiar. A broken bramble, a crushed fern, a tree with a hooked branch—I remembered them all from the afternoon. “Here,” I said, pointing down the mountainside.

“Okay. Don’t disturb anything,” said the cop named Joe. One of the others started stringing up yellow tape along the road in both directions.

“But—” I was having a feeling now, a feeling that Sheila had lived as long as she wanted. All I needed was my blanket of goofer dust, and I could go back to sleep. When Joe went back to his car to get something, I slipped over the edge and headed home.

I pushed the branches off the other two women and lay down beside their bodies, thinking about my brief life. I had helped somebody and I had hurt somebody, which I figured was as much as I’d done in my first two lives.

I pulled dirt up over me, even over my face, not blinking when it fell into my eyes; but then I thought, Marti’s going to see me sooner or later, and she’d probably like it better if my eyes were closed. So I closed my eyes.

Table of Contents

Start