The End of the Pier by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

FIVE

He stood right off the path through the woods where she’d had to walk on her way home and breathed in the moist night air.

What had delivered her into his waiting arms but the wish of his dear dead angel mother, to make up for the pain she’d caused him? She’d left her last letter to that bristle-bearded old man who’d done nothing but sit at the kitchen table and drink their money away.

The queer had escaped from jail! It still made him snigger. The queer got out and gave him a perfect reason for doing it on that particular night, when he’d been hanging back because he thought it was too soon—too soon after the Butts woman.

It wasn’t because he thought he was in danger. No, it was because he liked watching her.

He liked watching her walk down Main, skittering along with her head down, her feet hardly touching the pavement. She was like a leaf, a pale brown leaf, thin and ribbed and blown about by any wind.

He sighed, tonight, remembering.

And remembering, he found the cold handle of the knife jutting up from his hip. He could almost hear the rustles in the woods that he’d heard that night in June when she moved along the path. Coming towards him.

He leaned back against the tree, leaned his head back until his face was pointing upwards through the branches, his neck taut, as taut as hers had been. He ran his fingers smoothly up and down, up and down, and felt the answering tautness below, could feel his jeans begin to strain.

“Nancy.”

He whispered it even now and could imagine her all over again.

She’d started, out there in the unshadowed darkness, a dark so complete that only the stark whiteness of the ash trees in the cold moonlight could pierce it.

And his eyes. But his eyes had burned out patches of these woods, turned the hard dry leaves beneath their struggling bodies to cinders.

“Hullo, Nancy.”

He heard her intaken breath, could see her fighting with the dark, trying to make out where the voice had come from. He giggled.

She’d tried to yell, but it came out a gurgle that he simply reached out and cut off, one hand around her neck, dragging her body towards him. Before he drew out the knife, he would make her understand that he was master and she nothing more than a pitiful wood creature, a squirrel or a rabbit.

He’d clamped his hand around her chin, squeezing her mouth up to his, felt his tongue like an asp darting, darting at her teeth as if he’d sting her to death.

And then she was on the ground, both of her hands held as if roped by his one hand, and, dreamlike, the knife appearing in the other, cutting into her clothes, her flesh like butter, trailing straight down from her chin, and all the clothes fluttering and unresisting beneath the tip.

As he plunged into her he shrieked. He felt the pure righteousness of it. Her eyes were hollow, white, turned back in her head as if she dared not look at his blinding eyes.

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