The sun is strong today. Too strong! Too much light!
She whipped closed the window curtains, anxious to bring back the cool, shifting shadows of her underworld. Her heart was beating so fast now, her lungs laboring, her skin beading with perspiration.
Calm down, she counseled herself. You have plenty of time... plenty of time . . .
She would prepare for this event the way she always did—like a machine. First she selected her clothes. Black again . . . black for mourning, black for death . . .
Next she found the mask.
Her masks existed in many forms, but for this performance, she went to a closet and dug out the plastic kind—a copy of the one she’d used on Bay Creek’s bridge, above that snaking canal of water that carried away her old self, which spanned the distance that led to this new one.
After laying out everything on the bed, she sunk to her knees, smirking with a thought: Years ago, that woman had gone down on her knees in a bedroom, too. But not to pray . . .
With a deep breath, she lifted the mattress and groped around for the cold steel shaft. Fingers closing on hard metal, she pulled, letting the mattress fall with a muffled thud.
Feeling the weight of the weapon, she smiled. Here was something better than prayer. Here was power. The power to defend life and exact death. The power to make three women’s lives a living hell.
The same way they did for my mother . . .
She stroked the dark trigger, so cool and smooth, recalled the joy of pulling it, only once before—on her mother’s persecutor.
I showed him what premeditated really was, didn’t I?
First she’d bought the gun, so easy, just a weekend drive away. Then she’d stalked him, all the way from Long Island, waited for him to leave the restaurant, then his club, finally the bar. At last, he came back to the Manhattan parking garage, tipsy, distracted . . .
She’d dressed with perfect irony—a young mother, cradling an infant. Hera breast-feeding Hercules. Only this son of Zeus had a belly full of bullets, and when the gun discharged in the chilly gloom, light flashed like the light from Hera’s breast to create all the stars of the Milky Way.
She cackled, recalling the man’s shocked face; his fat, falling body; the light of life leaving his eyes. Such a brilliant lawyer! Such a brilliant mind! How dazzling are you now? In your coffin? In your grave?
The getaway had been easy. No one saw her. No one stopped her. But she learned a valuable lesson the next day, watching those idiot news people report the execution.
Beware of all-seeing eyes. They record everything: comings and goings, sins and secrets . . .
The gods of the underworld had been with her that night. The police ignored the security camera’s image of a bundled up mother, her face obscured as she carried her child. Instead, they focused on more promising suspects: a young punk with a mugging rap sheet; a vagrant with mental problems; a worker on parole.
From then on, she remembered to look out for those all-seeing eyes—or find a way to trick them. All-seeing people were another matter. People like Clare Cosi.
That woman just wouldn’t stop prodding and probing; pushing and snooping. The stupid Coffee Lady might even be smart enough to unmask her. Which is why she must die this afternoon. And once that nosy barista is gone, I can begin my grand finale . . .