Silenced by the Sword by Susan Harper

Author:Susan Harper [Harper, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2024-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

7

When she thought back on that night in the weeks ahead, Greta remembered only snapshots: the way the news of Lydia’s death spread across campus as students began texting each other; the crowds that formed outside her dorm, the ad hoc clusters that seemed to converge spontaneously on lawns and sidewalks; the faces that were by turns stunned or frightened or, in one case, perversely amused. There were odd patches in her memory that she couldn’t recall later, like a dream where one scene flowed seamlessly into the next.

At some point she found herself standing in the blood-spattered room talking to Spence, without having any clear recollection of when he had arrived. A man and a woman in blue uniforms knelt behind him lowering the body into a black bag, the porcelain arms hanging limp and doll-like.

“I know you were close to the victim, so I understand if you’d rather not help with the case,” Spence was saying. He seemed to sense that she hadn’t entirely been paying attention. “Greta?”

“Hmmm?” Greta shook herself out of her reverie. “Why wouldn’t I want to help?”

“Well, you know… it’s one thing when the victim is a stranger⁠—”

“Are you suggesting that because I’m a woman, I’m incapable of shoving down my own emotions and behaving like a professional?” said Greta coldly.

Spence let the matter rest.

Greta mumbled, in a disjointed and confused way, much of what she knew about Lydia while Spence listened. “Brilliant girl. Huge fan of Dickens and Orwell. Ran her own book vlog.”

Spence let her talk, only occasionally interjecting with questions when he felt she was drifting away into irrelevancies. There was something unpleasantly dreamlike about the whole scene, the way she was being made to discuss Lydia in the past tense when they had spoken only a few hours before. With hindsight she wished she could have gone back just those few hours and warned her or invited her to the lounge that night where she would have been safe in the company of a dozen other people. Would that have saved her life? Perhaps temporarily. There was the small matter that they still didn’t know who had killed her…

As for that, it was the savagery of the attack that struck her the most. “Sliced her head almost clean off,” Spence had said, sounding almost impressed. Of course, he wouldn’t have been impressed if he had known her. But he was right about one thing—it suggested an unusual depth of hatred towards Lydia.

“Did the victim have any enemies, that you’re aware of?”

Greta hated how Spence kept calling Lydia “the victim,” as if she didn’t have a name. She shook her head. She was feeling a touch overwhelmed and it was taking every ounce of restraint to hold her tears in check. She wasn’t going to embarrass herself by crying in front of him. “No, from what I could tell, she was one of the most beloved students on campus. Her professors had nothing but kind things to say about her. She recently broke up with a boyfriend, but even they remained friends.

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