Loves Music, Loves To Dance

VI SATURDAY February 23

On Saturday morning, Charley read the New York Post with intense fascination.

COPYCAT MURDER was the banner-sized headline. The similarity of Erin Kelley’s death to the True Crimes program about Nan Sheridan was the focus of the story on the inside pages. Someone had tipped an investigative reporter from the Post about the letter to Nan Sheridan’s mother warning that a young woman from New York would be murdered on Tuesday night. The reporter, quoting an unidentified source, wrote that the FBI was on the trail of a possible serial killer. In the past two years, seven young women from Manhattan had disappeared after answering personal ads. Erin Kelley had been answering personal ads.

The circumstances of Nan Sheridan’s death were rehashed in full.

Erin Kelley’s background; interviews with colleagues in the jewelry business.

Their responses identical. Erin was a warm, lovely person, immensely talented.

The picture the Post used was the one Erin had sent Charley. That delighted him. The network was going to repeat the True Crimes episode about Nan ’s death Wednesday night. That would be so interesting to watch. Of course he’d taped it last month, but even so, to see it again, knowing that hundreds of thousands of people would be playing amateur detective. Who did it? Who was smart enough to get away with it?

Charley frowned. Copycat.

Copycat meant they thought someone else was imitating him. Anger rushed through him, stark, raging anger. They had no right not to credit him. Just as Nan had had no right not to invite him to her party fifteen years ago. He’d go back to the secret place in the next few days. He needed to be there. He’d turn on the video and dance in step with Astaire. It wouldn’t be Ginger, or Leslie, or Ann Miller in his arms.

His heart began beating faster. This time it wouldn’t even be Nan. It would be Darcy.

He picked up Darcy’s picture. The soft brown hair, the slender body, the wide, inquiring eyes. How much lovelier would that body be when he held it, rigid and cold in his arms?

Copycat.

Again he frowned. The anger was pounding at his temples, causing one of the terrible headaches to begin. It is I, Charley, alone who has the power of life and death over these women. I, Charley, broke through the prison of the other soul and now dominate him at will.

He would take Darcy and crush the life from her as he had crushed it from the others. And he would confound the authorities with his genius, confuse and bewilder their tiresome minds.

Copycat.

The people who wrote that should see the shoe boxes in the basement. Then they’d know. Those boxes that contained one shoe and one dancing slipper from the foot of each of the dead girls beginning with Nan.

Of course.

There was a way to prove he wasn’t a copycat. His body shook with silent, mirthless laughter.

Oh yes, indeed. There was a way.