Red 1-2-3

37

She wrote down everything she could remember in a cheap notepad that she’d purchased at a local drugstore. She was excited, like a teenager waiting for a prom date. For the first time, she actually felt like she was a genuine part of the mysterious process. She described the other mourners in detail when she pictured them in her head: This older man wore a gray suit that didn’t fit him and a lime-green tie; this woman was at least seven months pregnant and really uncomfortable. She quoted every word and phrase she could recall from the doctor’s eulogy: “No one except Sarah knows why she made her final choice…” She identified the pieces of music that she recognized-Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and a sonata by Mendelssohn. She put down every banal snatch of conversation she had managed to overhear in the line of people filing into the small chapel-type room: “I hate funerals,” and “This is so sad,” and “Hush, kids, this is quiet time…”

At the very bottom of her report, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf added: I’m certain that Doctor Jayson didn’t recognize me. I averted my eyes and kept hidden behind other people. I sat in the very back, and ducked out as soon as she finished speaking. Then I waited across the street from the funeral home parking lot until everyone left, including the doctor. She didn’t even look my way.

She added one other note: There was no sign of Jordan at any point. If she had come to the service, I would have spotted her immediately.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf had always believed that her nondescript, mousy features were a hindrance. She never stood out in a crowd, and all the years of her life she had been jealous of the popular girls-then women-who did. She was even a little irritated that her doctor hadn’t seemed to notice her, even though she had taken steps to avoid being seen. But this sense of mild anger was replaced by the notion that her appearance-her very ordinariness and the way she blended seamlessly into any crowd-was suddenly an advantage. She did not know that her husband, had made nearly the same point early in his book.

I was a fly on the wall, she thought, seeing everything and hearing everything and noticed by nobody. She looked down at the pages filled with her report: clear, legible, concise handwriting, all in a secretary’s precise style.

It was, she imagined, a totally different way of standing up and being counted. You don’t have to make a loud noise or be extra-special beautiful, she told herself. You don’t have to be six feet tall, or have red hair like the women going into the book. When you have words at your disposal, it automatically makes you special. It was wildly seductive for her, magical and utterly romantic. She looked at the notations stretched across the lined pages in front of her and hoped that her language was descriptive and accurate.

She suddenly realized that her husband had never asked her to write something for him before. This made it even more special. That she had been trusted with the task of attending the service was deeply satisfying.

“It’s crucial for everything that’s going into the new book,” her husband had said as he watched her get ready, picking out a simple, nondescript gray jacket, dark slacks, and a pair of tinted glasses-not quite sunglasses, but just dark enough to obscure her eyes. “I can’t be there, but I need to know everything that happens.”

She had not asked why or questioned him when he’d told her that she had to avoid being recognized at all times. Instead, she had fixed her hair, combing it in a completely different style than usual. She had been surprised when she looked in the mirror at how the woman staring back at her wasn’t her.

He had also coached her on what to say if someone did recognize her. “Just act surprised, and say that you knew Sarah’s husband from some years ago, when he was a student. That will work. No one will ever ask a follow-up question.”

Smiling, he had told her what school the dead husband had gone to and where he’d done his undergraduate work before joining the fire department. He also told her that Sarah’s husband had been taking some night school graduate writing courses at the local community college. “Just say that’s where you met him,” he told her. “A shared interest sadly cut short by accident.”

She had followed every instruction to the exact letter, and, she believed, done it better than he could ever have hoped for. She congratulated herself. You should have been an actor. A performer. This may have been your first time on a stage, and you nailed it.

For an instant, it felt to her like she was writing a chapter of her own that would go, word for word, directly into his book. This gave her a great thrill.

She could hardly sit still as she bent over her notes, rummaging through every memory of the service, adding every element that popped into her head, because she knew that even the smallest observation might be the one that made the entire description work, and that might make the scene work, and then the chapter, and ultimately the whole book.

Looking up, she suddenly saw headlights cutting through the night, turning into their driveway. She pushed herself to her feet, excited.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf went to the front door to open it for her husband. It was as if her years reaching to the early edge of old age dropped away from her in that moment. She was no longer the quiet, sickly, worried woman who occupied the hidden, unimportant position at his side. She was as filled with intense passion as she’d ever been on any night since they’d first met. She was, she thought, Mata Hari. A femme fatale.

Now that they knew something, it only frightened them more, because it underscored how little they actually did know.

The three Reds argued shrilly.

“There’s absolutely no reason for her to be there, which means there’s only one reason,” Jordan said forcefully. “She has something to do with this.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Karen responded fiercely. “Damn it, Jordan, we can’t go jumping to every conclusion we think is obvious, because maybe it’s wrong.”

“That woman only connects two of us-not three,” Sarah said, jumping into the midst of the fight. “Three. All of us. That’s what we would need to understand who the Wolf is.”

“The fact that you don’t know who she is and we do, that’s all we need,” Jordan snorted.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Karen responded.

“So, let me ask you this: Does stalking and killing three strangers who just happen to all have red hair because you’ve got some kind of fairy fucking tale obsession make sense? Really, does it?”

“It must. Somehow. Some way. It does.”

“Great. What you’re saying is we’re no closer to finding out anything and doing something about this fucking Wolf because we’re not sure? That’s just great. I mean, just fucking wonderful.”

Jordan paced around the room, waving her hands in frustration. She knew one thing only: She wanted to do something. Anything. The idea of waiting to die was, she thought, killing her. The irony of this was lost on her. She knew she was being impulsive. She just no longer thought it was a mistake.

Sarah plopped herself back into a chair, trying to discern why a stranger had come to her funeral and why this would make her so upset. She told herself that there had to be funeral groupies who occupied their own desperate lives with attending every sort of service they found advertised, so they could shed false tears and think they were lucky because their own lives, as miserable as they might be, hadn’t ended.

She stared at the computer screen, where the woman’s partially obscured face was frozen. Why couldn’t she just be someone like that? Of course she could. But she might be someone else entirely. Sarah looked over at Karen and Jordan. The two of them represented polar opposites. One was in a hurry to strike back. One was being overly cautious. It would have been nice, she thought, if she had fit in between, a force for reason. This wasn’t the case. A part of her wanted to run, right at that moment, take advantage of her new Cynthia-life and leave the others behind to face the Wolf. She could be safe. He would be satisfied with the remaining Reds. She could be free. A wave of selfishness nearly overcame her.

She fought it off. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said briskly, a schoolteacher imposing order on an unruly class. “We do some stalking of our own.”

Jordan waited until she heard the sound of the closing door echo through her dormitory. She went to her window and watched until she saw the teacher who doubled as a dorm parent scuttle off into the evening darkness.

Right behind her was a gaggle of teenage girls, her dorm mates. They were all heading over to a dance at the school’s art gallery. She could already hear the raucous chords of a local rock group covering the old Wilson Pickett song In the Midnight Hour wafting over the campus. She seized a small screwdriver, the type designed for fixing electronics, and her plastic-encased school ID card. She had already removed her shoes so she could move quietly down the hallway.

There was a notable advantage to living in a hundred-year-old Victorian that had been converted to single rooms for upper-class students. The door locks were notoriously ancient and flimsy, and a bit of common knowledge passed down from student occupant to student occupant was how to use the stiff plastic edge of the ID card to jimmy open any lock.

She hoped that the door to the dorm parent’s one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor would have the same lax security.

It did.

She flicked the edge between doorjamb and lock, twisted her card with a practiced motion, and the door popped open. She was even lucky enough that the woman had left her desk light on, so that Jordan could move rapidly through the rooms without stumbling over the unfamiliar furniture arrangement.

What she was looking for would be either on the desk or near a bedside phone. It didn’t take more than ninety seconds for Jordan to spot it.

Students were not supposed to have access to this blue-jacketed binder emblazoned with the school’s name and logo beneath the words “Confidential Faculty/Staff Directory.” If they-or their invariably upset parents -wanted to contact someone in the administration or on the faculty, the school’s website listed e-mail addresses and official phone numbers. But the directory that Jordan had seized from beneath a stack of student papers had information not so readily available.

She flipped it open to the section entitled “Dean’s Office.”

There, next to “Administrative Secretary,” was a name, along with office and home phone numbers and an address, and even more conveniently, in parentheses, a man’s name. The secretary’s husband.

Her hand quivered as she read the name. Are you the Wolf? For a moment, her head spun dizzily. Jordan breathed in deeply, settling her racing pulse and clenched stomach. Then she copied everything from the directory entry onto the back of her hand in black ink. She didn’t trust herself not to lose a scrap of paper. She wanted this information tattooed to her skin.

She could feel a rush of fears and confidences all clashing together within her. She fought off every sensation, telling herself to remain calm, remain focused, to return the directory to the exact same position it had occupied when she found it. She reminded herself to make sure that she had disturbed nothing and left no trace of herself in the faculty member’s apartment, not even the scent of her fear. The air in the apartment seemed harsh, like bitter smoke. She urged herself to use stealth, make sure that she exited the room with as much quiet and secrecy as she had used when she arrived.

Don’t let anyone see you, Jordan, she admonished herself. Be invisible.

For an instant, she thought it was funny. She had broken in and acted like a burglar, violating a school rule that would get her dismissed instantly, but she had not stolen anything except a small piece of information that might be larger than anything she had ever before held in her hands. It was like stealing something that could be either priceless or worthless.

She moved across the room quietly and put her ear to the door. She could hear no one outside. She inhaled rapidly, like a diver readying herself to plunge beneath black waters, and slowly turned the handle to let herself out. She wished in that second that she’d brought her filleting knife with her. She decided that from that point on, she would keep it close at hand.

Now the band was covering the Rolling Stones’ “She’s So Cold,” doing a passable imitation of Mick, Keith, and the lads, right down to the lead vocalist’s plaintive pleas encapsulated in the lyrics. The local group was wedged into a corner of the art gallery’s main room. Usually, the gallery sported student, faculty, and alumni works, but the open space was easily converted into a dance floor. Someone had replaced some of the overhead lights with a huge silver ball that reflected flashes of light onto the packed dancers.

The music reverberated off the walls; the students gyrated or collected in knots, closely pressed together, shouting above the band’s sounds. It was hot and loud. There was a refreshment table to the side, where a pair of the younger faculty dispensed plastic cups filled with watered-down red punch. A couple of other teachers hung by the sides, eyeing the students, trying to make sure than none of them snuck off hand in hand for some illicit contact. This was an impossible task. Jordan knew that the heat in the room would translate into connecting. Someone will lose his or her virginity tonight, she told herself.

Three times, she had elbowed her way through the dense, twisting pack of dancing students, moving diagonally across the floor each time, pausing once or twice to twist her body in circles, so that she might be mistaken for one of the party-goers. Her eyes, however, were fixed on the exits and on the faculty trying to prevent the inevitable sneaking off to quiet, dark places.

Jordan had been to enough of these dances to know what would happen. The teachers would spot a couple trying to exit together. Or, they’d be smart enough to realize that the sophomore leaving from the right intended to meet the senior exiting on the left, and both would be halted.

She waited, biding her time. When she saw a couple trying to leave, she slid behind them. She knew what would happen.

“Where do you think you two are going?” came the demand from the teacher. He confronted the couple, who at least had the sense to stop holding hands, and who were replying sheepishly and nervously that they meant no harm and didn’t mean anything and weren’t doing anything and had no possible idea what the faculty member thought they might conceivably be up to.

And, in that moment of confrontation, Jordan slipped through the door.

She made her way rapidly down a corridor. With each step, the music faded a bit more. At the end of the hall, she stopped. To her right were stairs, to her left another hall that led to the bathrooms. There would be faculty watching each bathroom. It was too obvious a place for a quick grope between couples or a fast swallow of an ecstasy pill or snort of cocaine. The kids who wanted to use the dance to cover a marijuana smoke invariably were wise enough to head outside, so that the telltale scent of the drug couldn’t be detected by the houndlike capabilities of the faculty noses.

The stairs to the right went down to a second flight, where there were drawing and sculpture studios. The studios would all be watched by a teacher making rounds every fifteen minutes or so, because they were a favorite making-out location. She intended to bypass these obvious spots, head out a ground-floor door, and, sticking to the shadows, make her way into the science and physics building next door. It was a little like being an escaping prisoner of war, dodging light towers and guards.

There was an advantage to being a four-year senior. By the time graduation would arrive, one knew all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of the school-such as which doors weren’t locked.

Ignoring the classrooms just inside the entrance, Jordan headed down another flight of stairs. The labs were below and their windows didn’t look out on the main walkways and quadrangles of the school, but faced toward the playing fields. It was dark-the only light was reflected from the art building where the dance was being held, which was well illuminated. It was quiet; Jordan’s sneakers slapping against the floor and her breathing were the only noises close by-everything else was rhythm and blues and rock and roll coming from the band a building away.

At the third lab door, Jordan stopped and turned the handle. The room was black and gray. She could make out the shadows of lab equipment spread out across wide tables, where students did experiments.

She whispered, “Karen? Sarah?”

From a corner shadow, they responded, “We’re here.”