Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

The Devil’s Girlfriend by Brendan DuBois

Her name is Patti Barnes and she is forty-nine years old, lives in a small town in New Hampshire, and in her entire life she has lived in nine states across this great land. She works as a hairdresser and rents a four-room cottage with a rear deck that overlooks a slow-moving river and has a small fireplace. Through her years of living and accomplishments and travels, she is only certain of one thing: If she were to die right at this very moment, the first line of her obituary would read, Patti Barnes formerly of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and one of several girlfriends of Ted Bundy, notorious serial killer...

There. And won’t that make people reading their morning papers sit up and take notice when that day comes, though she hopes it doesn’t come too soon.

Right now all she cares about is getting through her life, day by day, making a quiet and comfortable living wielding scissors and combs. Maybe not much of a career, but one that was recession-proof and depression-proof, especially in this time when hi-tech jobs are being streamed overseas to Calcutta and Lahore and Djakarta. People will still need to have their hair cut. That was something one of the parlor owners told her, out there in Seattle one year, back when the dot-commers saw their bank accounts and five-bathroom homes melt away like frost on a spring lawn. You can outsource everything from data processing to customer service, but no bright young boy with the dream of a million stock options by the time he was twenty-five was ever going to come up with a way to outsource haircutting.

The parlor owner — Katie, that had been the woman’s name — was heavy and wore too much makeup and cracked a lot of un-PC jokes. A nice boss, but one day, like the others — the so very many others — when she found out that Patti had dated Ted Bundy, had once briefly been his lover, she whispered two things to her:

“Oh, you poor girl.”

And, later, almost hesitantly, “What was he like?”

This day starts off like so many others: up whenever she feels like it, for she hates having to get up at a particular time. She had grown up in a trailer in a place outside Steamboat Springs — laughingly called a park, though the scrub grass never grew more than three or four inches, and the wind whistling at night through the cracks in the sheet metal would sometimes keep her up at night, trembling in her small bed. Living there meant getting up at six twenty-five A.M. Monday through Friday to catch the bus, which meant walking down a dirt road for nearly a half mile. Saturdays and Sundays meant a whole ten or fifteen minutes more of sleep; there were always chores to do and sunlight was wasting, as her mom would tell her, coughing and wheezing after another three-pack-a-day habit burned through.

So today, she gets up at 8:11 A.M. for no particular reason, dresses in sweatpants and sweatshirt, and goes out to the small yard behind the cottage to start splitting wood. It’s a cool morning in late May, and though there’s no reason to be cutting wood — the cottage has a nice little oil furnace and the nights aren’t cold enough anymore to start a fire in the woodstove — she still loves the exercise. She buys the wood in eighteen-inch-long chunks, and loves the sound of the axe whistling into the wood, the solid chunk when it lands, and the satisfying crack when the wood splits open. The yard, with shrubbery on two sides, is hidden from prying neighbors, and at the rear is a small stream called the Wonalancet. She breathes hard as she splits wood, and when she’s done she goes back in and eats breakfast and showers up. As she dresses, she wonders if this will be the day when the whispers start up again.

She has told this story over and over again, to police detectives and attorneys general, and a judge or two, plus a number of newspaper reporters. Once an older woman researching a book — never written, Patti was sure, for she had never seen it listed on one of those bookselling Web sites — came to Colorado to talk to Patti about Ted Bundy and his crimes. She was a journalist and had brought with her a large notebook and even larger cassette recorder, which she delicately balanced on a coffee table that Patti had bought at a yard sale for ten dollars. Grace was her name. Sympathetic, yet she had been a slick and easy one. She starting off asking Patti about her background and her history, and Patti had enjoyed the attention, for Grace had been different, that’s for sure. Quiet and nodding at all the right places. Patti told her about growing up in Steamboat Springs, an only child of a single mom, dad dead and unknown, living in that damn trailer that creaked and groaned when the winds came down out of the Rocky Mountains.

She had been young and poor and had hung around the resort, working odd jobs as a lift attendant and waitress and feeling an aching hunger when all the rich and successful people came through the resort, like phantoms, but giggling and living and treating her as if she didn’t exist, except when it came to taking drink orders or cleaning out a hotel room or helping some forty-ish New York woman who wore a ski outfit that cost more than Patti’s clothing budget for the year onto a ski lift.

Then Ted sailed in. He had been charming, and she had fallen under his spell. After only a week of knowing him, she moved in with him.

He was a graduate student, studying law. At night, in their tiny apartment, he would mesmerize Patti with his tales and dreams of being a successful lawyer, then a state representative, and then maybe a congressman... who knows? With Ted, anything was possible. He wasn’t like the rich phonies who came in and out in seven- or fourteen-day chunks of time; he had a hunger too. A hunger to succeed, to do great things, to be rich and be somebody.

And Grace, breathing softly, asked Patti gingerly, “And you didn’t suspect?”

No, of course not, she had replied. Who would? And this was back in the 1970’s, before the Internet, before the cable news channels, before the media-driven obsession with serial killers. There had been some stories about women being reported missing around the ski area, but Come on! she protested. This was an innocent time, a time when you were still coasting from the fired-up sixties, when all things seemed possible. Except that the bright and handsome and charming Ted who shared your bed most nights, the Ted who had all these wonderful dreams that he shared with you, this was the same Ted who drove out with his white VW Beetle at night, with handcuffs and wooden club, to stalk and attack young, longhaired women, fracture their skulls, cuff them to his car, and drive off someplace to rape and strangle them.

And then, tired and exhausted, Ted would come home and crawl into bed, laughing and alive, kissing you and kissing you, and you would think all things were possible, indeed, save for the possibility that your man, your Ted, was the one responsible for those chilling lists of disappeared women.

That’s what it had been like, she told Grace, who breathed and nodded in all the right places, as the interview sort of dribbled off as evening progressed. Then Grace got up to leave, and at the door, Grace had gently touched her cheek and said, “You poor, poor, girl,” and kissed her full on the lips.

Now she’s at the hair shop, Kut & Kurl, in a small strip mall just outside of a town that boasts a pretty downtown and a prep school that is famous around the world for its age and its teaching. Not that Patti has anything against the prep school, but she’s sure that the faculty and students there go someplace further up the food chain than Kut & Kurl for their hair needs. And nothing against the ladies who run this place, but good God, let’s try for some originality at least, right? How many Kut & Kurls are there in the country? Dozens? Hundreds? She had even worked at a Kut & Kurl near Venice Beach, California, and that had been a blessing for two years — working in such a magical place, with the wide beaches and sunsets and the winters that weren’t even winters. A special time, until that awful day, when she had to pack up and move East.

This particular Kut & Kurl is busy this morning, with the old ladies lumbering in, dropped off by sons or daughters or grandchildren. Most of the poor dears didn’t have enough hair left to fuss over, but they came to the salon as regular as church. It was a chance to gossip and talk and get out of the house and the painless drone of the televisions. Patti is envious of their steady lives.

The morning goes by fairly fast, with three regular appointments and one walk-in, all male, and she talks just a bit as she works, not overwhelming the men, whom she knows mostly wanted to get a good haircut and then get the hell out. They didn’t tip as well as the women, but then again, they didn’t need nor demand much, so she is able to churn more of them through than women.

After the walk-in leaves, she goes out for a break as well, just to get out of the salon and the chatter and the soft rock station playing in the background and the smells of the hairspray and chemicals. She sits on a concrete planter, stretches out her legs, and lets the May sun warm her face. As much as possible, she wonders if this was what it meant to be at peace with oneself.

Peace.

Such a wonderful concept.

She looks across the parking lot to the street, and beyond the street, to a small pond rimmed with park benches where she likes to spend her lunch break in warmer weather. She wonders if this will be one of those days, if the sun gets high enough and those clouds don’t move in and—

A car comes into the parking lot. A dented light blue Ford Escort.

A young woman steps out, hesitant at first. She is in her mid twenties, it looks like, with long, dark brown hair down her back. She has on pressed jeans and a short leather jacket. A camera is slung over her shoulder. She holds a notebook in her hand.

Something heavy starts to press against Patti’s chest.

The woman comes over, a shy smile on her face.

The weight gets heavier.

Patti wants to stand up and run, but she can’t.

God help her, it’s time again.

And her feelings for Ted were mixed, right after he got arrested, as she remembered telling a police detective working on the case.

At first, of course, she believed in his innocence, had to believe in his innocence. The detective had nodded politely and had taken notes in his cluttered office, and she had gone on saying, you don’t understand, and when he just grunted a reply, she had kept quiet. For it was hard to say that she had to believe in Ted’s innocence in order to believe in herself. For how could it have been otherwise? How could a woman be so dumb and dopey to live with a man who was accused of being one of the worst serial killers in the United States? Who had supposedly started his dark arts back in Washington State?

So she had kept the faith.

Even when the newspapers started reporting stories about what Ted did in Seattle.

Even when the newspapers started reporting stories about what Ted was suspected to have done in Colorado and Utah.

And even when she appeared at a court hearing, crowded up front along with the other spectators, she wanted to let Ted know that she was there, that she supported him, and that she wanted to talk to him. But it never happened. Not once. His lawyer refused to let her see him, and even after he had interviewed her, over and over again — trying to set up alibis for Ted, she was no dummy — she never got a chance again to talk to Ted face to face.

Only once did she ever catch his eye.

At one of the court hearings, when it was clear that the evidence against Ted was mounting, Ted looked back from his conference table with his lawyer, to look at the crowd of spectators look upon him, and she caught his eye. Patti and Ted. Looking at each other. His look was... it was cold. Unyielding. Emotionless. And then he looked away.

She had stumbled out of the courtroom and puked in the hallway outside, knowing that for a fair number of women, that expression on that man’s face had been the last thing they had ever seen.

So in New Hampshire, the young lady is now upon her. She looks over at the hair salon and then at Patti, and she says, “Excuse me?”

“Yes?” Patti is amazed at how hard it is to hear her own voice.

“This... this is where Patti Barnes works, am I right?”

What to do, what to do, what to do. Deny all you want, she thinks, and this young girl — yes, Patti knows it’s not PC but she can’t help herself, she is just a girl — will keep on sniffing around and around. By now she knows reporters, knows how they work. Knows how tireless and ruthless they can be when they feel like they’re being snowed. Better to end it now, she feels.

“Yes,” she says. “And I’m Patti Barnes.”

A quick, nervous nod. “My name is Beth Hanley. I’m a reporter for the Sentinel. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

She tries a smile, knows it’s not much of a smile. “Questions? About what?”

The reporter looks down to her open notebook, like she’s embarrassed to look Patti in the face. “I’d like to do a story about you.”

“Me? Why?”

The face is still down. “I... I understand that years ago, you used to date Ted Bundy. The serial killer. Is that true?”

The heavy sensation in her chest increases.

“Yes,” Patti finally says. “Yes, it’s true.”

Reporters.

When they were finished interviewing detectives, police officers, district attorneys, the judge, neighbors, and everybody else, they fell upon her, like a horde of locusts descending upon a solitary cornstalk. They followed her from her apartment to the police station, from her apartment to the courthouse, from her apartment to anywhere else.

At the very first, because it felt like the polite thing to do, she did talk to the reporters, but they were insatiable. Over and over again, the very same questions:

What was Ted like?

Did you ever suspect he was a killer?

Were you ever afraid?

And most of the reporters were men, tall men, short men, bearded and clean-shaven men. Some dressed in suits, others in jeans and dress shirts with neckties. All with their little notebooks or cameras, or tape recorders and microphones, all pushing and prodding and trying to drag out one little bit of information that no one else had gotten yet. It was as if they were incessant suitors, demanding to know if any previous suitor had gotten to “first base,” and couldn’t she go just a little bit further this time, please, please, Miss Barnes. We’ll never tell anyone; your secret will be safe with us.

There were always the unasked questions from the men, as well, questions she knew that they wanted to know:

How was Ted in bed?

Why did you think he hooked up with you?

And...

Honey, no offense, but why didn’t he rape and murder you as well?

Well?

Well?

So just before Ted was going to trial, it had proven to be too much, so she had fled home to Mom, back to the same trailer in the same park, the same wind whipping down from the mountains. Mom had put on thirty pounds since she had last seen her, had picked up another pack of Marlboro Lights in her daily habit, and after Patti settled back in, Mom came right out and said it: there was a lawyer friend of hers, a nice fellow who had helped probate Dad’s will and who had come to her with a powerful suggestion: there was money to be made, good money, if she just came out and told the real story behind the story. Now was the time, when the interest was there, and—

Patti had changed the subject. She looked at her mother, saying, Mom, please. I just want to get away from it for a while. All right? Away from everything. Here. I just want to be home. I just want to be your girl for a few nights. I have some money saved up. I can pay some room and board.

Crying then, she had said, Mom, please take care of me for a while. All right?

And Mom had been a bit cool, saying that her lawyer friend was trying to do the right thing, that’s all, but it was Patti’s life now, and if that’s what she wanted, and Mom talked like that as Patti washed and dried the dinner dishes, and that had been that.

A week or so later, after playing gin rummy with Mom and having one Budweiser too many, she had let it all go to her, her fears and memories and what it had been like, living with Ted and then seeing the police there, saying Ted was under arrest for kidnapping, was a suspect in a number of homicides, and would she please come along and talk to them.

All night long, it seemed, she had unburdened herself to Mom, even telling her that little secret of what she had called herself when she found out.

Mom, she said, it was like I was the Devil’s girlfriend. You know?

The damn Devil’s girlfriend.

And Mom had reached over and touched her wrist.

You poor girl, you poor, poor girl.

Then a month later. Standing in a supermarket checkout line in Randolph, scanning a tabloid magazine, she saw, on the bright paper cover, a picture of Ted and a picture of her. Patti Barnes. Taken during one of Ted’s court appearances, when she had walked down the courthouse steps. The screaming headline:

Hands shaking, she picked up the tabloid, opened it up. Saw the words she had told her mother, all the words that night, printed in black type upon white paper. Her secret words, told to her mother.

Right there.

She had walked away from the checkout counter, leaving behind the groceries, and went back to the trailer. Mom wasn’t there — she was working as a secretary at Denver First Savings’ downtown branch — so Patti had packed a bag and left.

She never talked to her mother, ever again.

The reporter is bright but not knowledgeable. Patti is sitting next to her on a bench right by the pond, across the street from Kut & Kurl. Her shift is now over and again, a part of her wonders why she agrees to talk to this young girl. What in God’s name could this girl know that would make any sense, any sense at all?

One of the first things Patti asks is, “How did you find me?”

“A tip.” There’s a shrug of her shoulders. “Somebody called in, said they recognized your face from a book written some years back. About Ted Bundy. The caller said Bundy’s girlfriend was working in town, at the Kut & Kurl.”

Patti is sure her face is flushed. “This helpful tipster. Man or woman?”

“Woman. But she didn’t leave her name.”

Patti folds her arms. “Of course not.”

The young girl flips a page in her notebook. “Ted Bundy was one of the world’s most famous mass murderers,” she starts, and Patti cuts her off right there.

“Sorry, dear, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Excuse me?”

Patti says, “Ted wasn’t a mass murderer.”

“He wasn’t? I mean, the numbers show that—”

“Ted wasn’t a mass murderer,” she presses on. “A mass murderer is someone who kills a lot of people all at once. Like those high school boys who shot up their school in Colorado. Or the loser who goes into a fast food restaurant and starts shooting up the place. That’s a mass murderer. Understand?”

The pen scribbles some more.

“Ted was a serial killer,” she says. “There’s a difference. A mass murderer usually acts out in a rage. Something triggers him, something inside him just snaps. He lets loose with his rage, all at once. And mass murderers... they usually end up dead. From cops or from suicide.

“But Ted was different. Ted was someone who killed over time. He had a... a craving. A fetish. Something that he wanted to do, month after month, year after year. A mass murderer will mostly kill whoever is there. But not Ted. Ted was a seducer. Ted was a hunter. He liked a particular kind of woman, and for the most part, that’s the type of woman he went after. And mass murderers, usually they’re stupid. But not Ted. He was smart. Quite smart.”

Scribble, scribble, scribble. And then the reporter looks up.

“I’m... I’m sorry to say this, but from what you said...”

“Yes?” she asks.

“It almost seems like you’re proud of him.”

Pride. There’s a thought.

Had she ever been proud of her boyfriend, the serial killer?

Once, and only once.

It was in Colorado, and Ted was getting ready for trial, right after being convicted for kidnapping, for having picked up a young woman who had been strong enough to fight back after finding herself in the VW. There had been hearings and lots of publicity and protests and Ted had continued to deny that he had anything to do with the murders of the young women in Colorado or Washington or Utah. The police and the prosecutors had been so sure of what they had accomplished, and how smart they had been to have captured the nation’s most notorious criminal.

And one day, he escaped.

Just like that.

Gone. Made a hole in the ceiling of his cell, crawled through the courthouse building, and got out.

And she had this little shiver of excitement that Ted was loose, was out there, on the run, free from whatever bonds were holding him back, and she was surprised at how unfearful she was. For Ted had never hurt her, had never threatened her, and had only promised love and affection and adventure. By then she was tired of all the official attention from the police and the courts and the reporters, most of them men, of course, and so yes, there was a sort of pride that Ted had outsmarted them all. It made the men a little less cocky, a little less confident, and she was pleased at how she felt.

Pride. Sure, there had been pride.

Until Ted ended up in Florida and bloodily slaughtered two college girls slumbering in their sorority house late one night.

The reporter asks all the right questions, yet Patti feels like the young girl is going through the motions, like she’s not sure what the big fuss is all about. After all, compared to what in hell was going on in the world today, Ted Bundy could now probably be considered a rank amateur. Have his own damn reality TV show or something.

She says, “Why did it take so long?”

“Why did what take so long?”

“To catch him. I mean, it sounds like he got caught because he made a few mistakes. Why did it take so long for the police to catch him?”

Patti shrugs. “It’s a huge country. And if a serial killer works in small towns, how often do the cops there communicate with other cops? Even if the cases are similar?”

The reporter scribbles away. Patti says, “Plus, he was just a bit sloppy. He killed a number of victims within a certain area. Imagine how many more he could have killed if he had just killed one woman, and then moved to another state, and so forth and so on. He could have killed scores more.”

The reporter looks up from her notebook and says, “Can I ask you a few personal questions?”

Patti sighs. “I guess so.”

She says, “Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“Ever been married?”

“Nope.”

“And why is that?” the reporter asks.

The answer is, of course, something she cannot reveal.

After Ted’s arrest in Florida for the murders of the sorority girls, Patti moved to Taos, New Mexico, because of an article she had read in an old National Geographic magazine while waiting in the dentist’s office. The pictures of the Spanish homes and crisp mountain ranges and blue-washed sky had always stayed with her.

Taos was a wonderful city, large enough to lose yourself in, small enough to feel comfy and not alone at all. The mountains reminded her enough of Colorado, and after a number of months, she found a job as a hairdresser. God, that had been a good time, an innocent time almost, far away from her mother and the thoughts of Ted, about to be executed by the State of Florida.

By now she was in her mid twenties, feeling good about having left Colorado and all that crap back there, the stories about Ted, the questions from all the men in journalism, law enforcement, and law offices. She started exercising; there was nothing she loved better than getting up in the morning under the cool desert sky and jogging a mile or two before showering and going to work at Top Cuts. Yeah, that had been the name. Top Cuts.

It was in Taos that she met Randy Phinney, a bronzed man about five years older than her, who worked construction. Thin black mustache and a sharp, barking laugh that attracted her for some reason. She had trimmed his hair a few times before he came right out and asked her out, and she blurted yes before really thinking about what was going on. He was the opposite of Ted: muscular, outdoorsy, and if he had read a book since leaving high school, he sure liked keeping it a secret.

He took her to roadhouses outside of Taos, danced with her to twangy country music that comforted her. She tried horseback riding for the first time in her life — and God, the bruises along her inner thighs took weeks to heal — and weekend camping trips, tents, and sleeping bags tossed in the rear of his Jeep, camping out under the night sky, the stars so bright it almost hurt her eyes to stare at them.

Then one night she went to his rented house, out in a lonely part of Taos, and he was drunk. She had seen Randy with a few beers in him before, but nothing like this. That night she felt something when she came into the cluttered living room — like the heavy air one feels just before a thunderstorm breaks out.

Randy stood there, weaving, like his feet couldn’t quite lay flat on the flooring. His eyes were sharp and there was a rolled-up newspaper in his hand.

She stood there, knowing what was going to happen next. Knew that eventually, something like this was going to happen.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“This,” he said, thrusting the rolled-up newspaper at her. She took it in her hand, unrolled it. There was the picture of Ted at his trial in Florida, looking snappy with a grin and a bowtie. Next, horrifyingly black and white, the “real death” photo the tabloid promised, showing Ted with his head shaved, skin gray, after his electrocution. And there, even worse, was her own photo. Mystery girlfriend still missing. She looked at the story. Written by a man.

She looked up at Randy. “I was going to tell you, it’s just that—”

He strode right up to her, face inches away, and she smelled the stale scent of beer. “Bitch,” he said. “You, you were with that killer. That bastard... What was it like, huh? What was it like?”

She turned to get out of there, when Randy grabbed her arm. She yelped. He spun her around and said, “Damn it, what was it like? What was it like to be with a killer? Huh?”

“Randy, you’re hurting me,” she said. “Let me go, I’ll—”

So it happened.

Like destiny or some damn thing.

He slapped her once, then again, and part of her said, Was this what it was like, for the other women? To know that some man has now grabbed hold of you, some man with murder in his heart, and that there would be no happy ending, no last-minute rescue, just the terror and fear and pain, ratcheting up, higher and higher...

Another slap. Randy was cursing now, and with both of his strong hands, he dragged her by her arms into the bedroom, where the night progressed, through the slaps, the taunting voice, again and again.

“What was it like?”

“Was he good?”

“Am I any better? Huh?”

“Did he teach you anything? Huh?”

Through that long, dark night, she finally learned it all.

The reporter closes her notebook, steps up, and almost as an afterthought, she takes Patti’s photograph with a small digital camera, Patti sitting alone on the park bench, her hands folded primly across her lap. She sits there as the sun slowly sets, the air becomes cooler, and only when a full bladder demands some attention, does she finally get up and walk away.

After that night with Randy Phinney in Taos, she spent a half day in the shower, and then drove out without a word, without a forwarding address, without much of anything, damn it. She drove west until she ran out of land and ended up at the Pacific Ocean, in a small town just north of San Diego. Another hair salon, another apartment, and the whole cycle started up again, after months of peace and pleasure, when a certain man came into her life and dated her and kissed her and said he loved her, right up to the point when he found out. The the same questions:

“What was it like?”

“How was he?”

“What did you learn from Ted?”

It takes only two days for the Sentinel article to come out, and the first time she walks into the Kut & Kurl, she almost weeps with relief from what the other women there do to her. One by one, they come over to squeeze her hand and touch her face and whisper good wishes to her.

Then, like she expects, the men show up.

They’re quiet at first, shy, sitting in the chairs by the door, looking like ten-year-old boys standing against the wall in the gymnasium at their very first school dance. They stare at their shoes or out the windows, but one by one, they request her for their haircuts. She knows what’s going on behind those shy expressions. They are curious. They want to know. They want to know what it’s like and how it happened, and being with someone who talked to Ted and lived with Ted and loved with Ted, well, it’s the next best thing to being there, right?

She trims their hair and beards and mustaches, quickly and efficiently, all the while knowing that it’s happening again.

Oh yes, again and again.

From small town to bigger town to city. Her story gets out and the men come by and eventually one man captures her interest, one man who wants to know everything, and she finds herself succumbing, again and again.

His name is Peter Wickland, about forty years old, old enough to know about Ted and his bloody years of work, but young enough so that he doesn’t know all of the story. He’s stocky but well built, dressed in clean jeans and buttoned dress shirt. He has a close-trimmed beard and nice, thick brown hair. She finds herself enjoying the feel of his hair through her fingers as she works it. He’s a freelance investment counselor, working out of his home at the beach, and after his fourth visit to the Kut & Kurl — about four months after the Sentinel article appeared — he asks her out.

And she says yes.

The first date is just lunch at a restaurant in town, nothing fancy, just a quiet meal and some laughs and then a walk along the park by the river. As they leave the park, Peter says, “I’ve got two things to say to you.”

“Sure,” she says.

“The first is, I’d like to see you again.”

She smiles. It has gone well. “That’d be nice. What’s the second thing?”

He smiles back at her. “I don’t care about the newspaper article, about what happened to you. If you want to tell me, fine. But I won’t ask you.”

She leans forward, kisses him on the cheek, and forgives him on the spot for lying to her.

For among other things, that’s what she has gained over the years, that no matter how many times the men who have come into her life say they’re not curious at all about Ted Bundy, they really do always want to know. Honest to God, that’s all these men cared about was her time with the nation’s most famous serial killer. Men, men, men, it seems all they care about is the blood and the gore and the terror that those women, her poor sisters, went through, and what, if anything, she can tell them to let them in on what had really happened.

And to a man, they were always disappointed.

For a while, it seems like Peter might be the exception, might finally be the one who is different, but like all the others, it comes down to those few months she spent with Ted in Colorado.

After five dates and some kissing and squeezing, she has invited him over to her place for dinner, and she notes the little grimace as he comes into the living room and notices the plastic slipcover on the couch.

She says, “I just like to keep things clean, that’s all.”

“Oh, it’s okay hon,” he says, sitting down. “Just reminds me a bit of my grandma’s place. No offense.”

“None taken.”

She sits next to him and he starts talking about the upcoming weekend and what movie they might see, while she caresses his shoulder, and he smiles and leans over and the kiss and the room gets warmer, and he breaks away and says, “Is it safe?”

“Safe? Safe for what?”

That funny little smile. “Safe to go on. I’ve felt... a bit of tension, that there was a line I couldn’t cross. Patti, I want to kiss you and kiss you and keep on going, and you just seem... reluctant.”

She says nothing.

“Is it... is it because of Bundy? Is that it?”

So, another promise broken.

“Yes, yes it is,” she says.

“Dear heart,” he says, grasping her hand. “You’ve got to let it go... let the past go. Don’t let that evil bastard rule your life.”

Surprisingly enough, tears come to her eyes. “It’s hard. It’s so very hard.”

His voice is reassuring but the words strike home. “You can trust me,” he says. “Tell me everything that happened back there. Everything. I trust you. Honestly, I can help you. I know I can.”

She looks at that smiling face, the beard that she had trimmed, the hair she had cut back and caressed, and she kisses him and says, “You really want to help?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“You want to know what it was like? What I did back then?”

“Of course. But only to help.”

Sure, she thinks. Only to help.

“I bet you want to know what I learned, don’t you.”

A squeeze of her hand is the only answer he offers.

Another kiss, and she leans back and smiles and starts unbuttoning her blouse. “You stay right here, tiger. And I’ll be back after getting ready.”

“Ready for what?”

Another button unbuttoned, and then another. “Just you wait.”

His smile is brighter. “You’ve got it, Patti.”

She leaves the room, her legs trembling.

And on those long nights, staying in hotel rooms, she has wondered how it has all come to this. The long travels, the attempts to set up a peaceful and quiet existence, and then the need begins, the quiet urge that grows stronger and stronger. The hunger. The yearning. That burning feeling.

A feeling that can’t be ignored, until she goes to the phone book and finds a certain phone number, in each community she has lived in, and makes a quiet and unbidden phone call.

Every single time.

So now she is in the bathroom, disrobing. The blouse and slacks come off, and then the bra and the panties, until she is standing there, nude, looking at herself in the mirror. She briefly runs her hands across her skin, feeling its smoothness, feeling the muscles underneath it, the muscles from all those years of working out to make her strong and fit. No Ted was ever going to seduce her, ever again. And no Ted would ever try to harm her. She would never allow herself to be so vulnerable. Never again.

What did you learn, the men always asked. What did you learn?

And she remembered one man, Tom, up near Sun Valley, who asked perhaps the strangest question of them all: Love, he asked, did you learn how to love from Ted?

That thought brings a smile that she observes in the mirror.

For what she learned from Ted wasn’t love, but it was hate. Hate indeed. A hatred so long and so deep that she has carried it with her from town to town, city to city, like some cherished possession. One man, one town, one state at a time. And never to be caught.

A voice from the other side of the cottage. “You okay in there?”

She looks at her nude figure again in the mirror, and then strolls out.

“Coming, Peter!” she calls out, and as she walks to her new boyfriend, sitting patiently on the plastic slipcovered couch, she reaches into the breezeway leading outside and lovingly, gingerly, picks up the sharp axe from next to the woodpile.