There was only one place to go with my work and I had been avoiding that for twenty years. But some of the kids in my building were taking their portfolios east and they ragged me and hassled me until I gave in and agreed to accompany them.

Most of them knew I had worked, in my youth, with Laura Mars, but I had always refused to talk about her. It was no different on the airplane, though they plied me with liquor. I sat in my seat, tense and silent and...frightened. I could not explain the fear to save my life, but it was there. Fear of New York, fear of old memories, fear of...her.

It didn’t look the same, really. I scarcely recognized Manhattan, though I had lived and worked on the island for a year and had wandered it extensively. The building where Laura had lived and had her studio was still there. One or two of the kids that I was with idolized her later work and wanted to make what amounted to a pilgrimage to the place.

"It’s an apartment building. They’re all over the city."

"But you know which one it is."

"I’ll put you in a cab and give them the address. I am not going there. I spent enough time in that godforsaken building to last me a lifetime and I’m not going back."

"Hey, Sara, settle down," Rocky soothed. He laid a hand, covered as always in black woolen gloves that he had cut the fingers off of, over the top of mine. "You don’t need to go along if you don’t want to." He took my head in the back of his hand and briefly rested his forehead against mine, purple hair falling over my brown stuff.

"You guys go on...I’ve got to stay here anyway, look through what I brought. Here..." I scribbled the address on a scrap of hotel stationery and pushed it into Rocky’s hand. I remembered how excited I had been to set out across the city to that very place. Now the thought horrified me. But the kids were thrilled and I really didn’t want to wreck it for them, so I kept the worst of it to myself and sent them on their way.

Once I was alone I called room service and had them send up a bottle of wine. I had no need to look through my portfolio. I already knew what I was going to show - probably the worst of the shit in there. I wanted to go home, be obscure, do shoots for Dayton's and Target and make a comfortable living and never think about New York or Laura Mars again, and try to drive John Neville from my dreams.

We had known she was crazy, we young ones. Someone had even said she was crazier than a shithouse rat, but I didn’t agree with that. Laura Mars was far from reckless.

I had gone to New York two weeks after graduating from high school, with a folder of photographs and all of the poignant enthusiasm of the young. I had been fascinated by Laura Mars’ work since first seeing it and my only ambition was to find out from my idol whether or not I could hope to make a career in fashion photography.

It had taken me a month to even get her to look at my work I had written her letters, called her secretary, done everything but mugged the woman in the street. I knew my pictures were nowhere near as good as hers, but I was positive I could learn and I had heard she occasionally hired assistants and would she consider hiring me. A solid month of this, and finally the secretary had called my grungy little flat to invite me to meet with Miss Mars.

In retrospect, I asked myself why it happened so quickly. Some of the people I met later told me that it had taken them six months to get in to see her, to be hired for a job they scarcely kept for as many weeks.. There were a lot of them, these former assistants of Laura Mars. It took me a while to discover why

I remembered how carefully I had dressed, how nervous the subway ride had made me and how the glittering building had represented a side of Manhattan I had only dreamed of seeing up close. Miss Mars had been out when I arrived and I had sat tensely waiting, wearing my best Jessica McClintock off the rack granny dress and feeling like a complete fool.

I got five minutes of Laura Mars’ expensive time. She looked at my portfolio over her lunch. I sat silently, thinking that her shoes probably cost more than everything that I had on and I was a fool to think that she might ever take me on and I should just excuse myself and run before she could laugh in my face.

"These are quite good...Sara, is it?"

"Sara Finnegan, Miss Mars." I clasped my hands together in my lap to stop their excited shaking.

"I think we might be able to find something for you to do. Can you be here tomorrow morning at eight o’clock?"

At that minute I gave myself away for the Minnesota girl that I was. I started smiling helplessly and didn’t much care if she saw me shaking. "Yes, Miss Mars. Tomorrow morning at eight, Miss Mars. I’ll be here."

She gave me one of those automatic smiles and I floated out of the office. I felt as though I were on my way at last.

For the first two or three months, Laura Mars could do no wrong. I know the few friends I bothered to write to got tired of the name and I suspected my long suffering parents did as well, though they never let on. Laura Mars, Laura Mars, Laura Mars until it seemed I knew nothing else. I put in twelve and eighteen hour days, though I never took a photograph more important than one meant to check an angle or a bit of lighting. I had nothing to complain about, migod, I was working in New York, with one of the premier fashion photographers of the day. I met supermodels and designers and journalists. I was ‘my assistant’ or ‘Sara’, if I was lucky, and these people scarcely noticed I was there, but for a while I became quite the namedropper.

Then I started to notice my employer as a person, as a woman, and not as the walking goddess I had at first convinced myself she was. And I didn’t always like what I saw.

She had a mania for clothes. At first I called it tremendous style, after a while I

called it pointless. She spent an average of an hour a day simply prowling Macy's and Bloomingdales and Saks, and that didn’t include all the exclusive little shops and boutiques she dipped in and out of all day long, looking for accessories for a shoot. I was a good little assistant and I followed uncomplainingly, carrying her bags and telling her she looked stunning in something when what I really thought she needed to do was sit down and eat a sandwich.

She would spend obscene amounts of money on a dress or a jacket, often dropping more on a single piece of clothing than she paid me for eighty hour weeks. She would wear the piece twice, then send her devoted little acolyte to a consignment shop with it, because she had been seen too often in it and someone might remember. At first this bit of logic made perfect sense, then it really sunk in. The woman spent more on her clothes than she did on her employees. Sometimes her expenditures on simple bottled water outstripped my food budget, and I got by on twenty dollars a week by living on ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese. I would not have paid it so much attention but for the fact that she sometimes acted as though giving me work was a great favor being conferred on me. I would have given the world to have been able to stalk out of her studio, having given her the Freddy Fender quote of the week, but I needed her, so I bit my lip and stayed on.

I lasted longer than any of her previous assistants. She would tell me that, give me a smile and all but pat me on my nappy little head. I wanted to ask her why she thought that was, but held my tongue. Then the murders started.

She ‘claimed’ to have dreamed them and, hey! presto, there they had been done. By that point I was meeting regularly with all of her former slaves and they only confirmed something I had long suspected, the woman slept very little. I also noticed that the models being murdered were people who had not got on well with a certain photographer. In fact, I had been told by a couple of them that they would never again work with Laura Mars if she was the last photographer in the city. Furthermore, that their murders had been staged to look like examples of a new direction Laura had been thinking of taking in her work.

I considered calling the police anonymously to report this, but long before I could work up the courage to do such a thing, Detective John Neville arrived on the scene and I lost most of the rest of my ability to think straight. The man was a fantasy come to life, every little girl’s tall dark and handsome dream. Soft spoken, black eyed, with a tender lower lip and an impossible head of thick dark hair, my little northern plains daydream had suddenly found legs and was walking around.

The first time he spoke to me, in his professionally courteous fashion, I lost my heart. And when it became apparent to me that he, in turn, had given himself utterly to Laura, it nearly killed me. To have been so close...and to have it snatched away before I had a chance to get used to the idea that I couldn’t have it was even worse. Oh, I knew I

was too young for John Neville, too inexperienced and unsophisticated for such a man. Eventually, when I hadn’t seen Neville in a while, I expected that he would remain in my memory as a crush and nothing more. That was having things go as expected, including Neville maintaining a strictly clinical relationship with my boss. But the morning I came in to work early to find him in the studio half of the apartment, wrapped in a towel and checking his messages on my phone was like having someone drive it into my head with a spike. I started dying by inches.

She finished me when she killed John Neville. I was called by a frantic Laura to come and sit with her, Neville had been the murderer and he had come to the apartment to kill her but had made her kill him instead and a lot of other incoherent shit that made no sense. It was the first day off I’d had in two weeks and the last person I wanted to look at was Laura Mars, but she sounded hysterical and on the worst sort of caffeine jag, so I hauled myself to the apartment.

It had been an awful sight, a shattered mirror, blood on the carpet and Laura, sitting in the middle of the floor tearing up all the photographs of the new things she was thinking about doing. It should have looked fishy to me even then, but she’d told me John Neville was dead and I was in a state of shock. I was eventually able to get her to stop, and even managed to talk her into going to bed. She would only do so if I promised to stay in the apartment while she slept and by that point I think I might have been willing to set myself afire and leap off the roof if it meant I might be shut of her for five minutes. I tucked her into the bed that she had shared with Neville, the one that was bigger than the entire room I slept in, and then I settled down on her couch to stare at the broken mirror and the bloodstain on the carpet.

Laura Mars had taken him, all right, in every way it was possible to take someone. And there wasn’t a thing I could say. I had kept it all strictly to myself; in best ‘schoolgirl crush on the teacher’ fashion, I had never revealed what I believed I felt for Neville to anyone, let alone Laura Mars. Though I had never said a word, Laura had known and it had infuriated her. Neville might have known, but being an officer and a gentleman, he had said nothing about it, to spare me the humiliation.

I reached into the pocket of my sweater, felt something small and square there, and pulled it out. John Neville’s card, the one he’d given me after the one interview he’d conducted with me. "Call me if you think of something you might have forgotten," he had said. And there was something I had forgotten...the sound of his voice. I asked myself, could I be blamed for wanting to check the veracity of my hysterical employer? I dialed his direct line, and waited.

"15th Precinct, Roncalli speaking."

"Could I speak to Detective John Neville, please?" Could my voice have possibly been any smaller?

"Neville isn’t in, Miss. Is there something I can do to help you?"

"Could you take a message for him?"

"Sure, Miss...can you hold for a minute?"

At that point I decided it was all true. Quietly I hung up the phone. I put my back to the mirror and the spattered blood and I left the apartment. In best melodramatic fashion, by the end of the day, I had also put my back to New York. I never returned, never aspired to anything more than what my town could offer me, never married, never had a family...I just walled myself up. I was too afraid to do much more than play at things.

It was easier. Ultimately I gave up even trying to have intimate relationships with men, because my vivid dreams of Neville quite literally drove them away. It was nothing they’d done or hadn’t done...it was just...they weren’t Neville. By the time I was thirty I was used to the idea of spending my life alone. I took a loft in the warehouse district to live in and work out of, and I never hired an assistant. I wasn’t about to put anybody through that dogs’ life. Now that I was closer to forty than to thirty I was even relatively comfortable. I could befriend the youngsters around me in the building with a clear conscience.

I had totally ignored the wake-up call I’d asked for at seven. I had killed most of the wine before going to bed at midnight and I knew I would be in no mind to go harass the condescending bastards setting up the showing. They could wait for my pictures until I felt like getting them there. I dragged my tail out of bed at nine and headed for the shower, ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that wanted to know why the kids had not got me up when they left.

By the time I got out of the shower the little voice was in full cry and I made up my mind to speak to Rocky about it when I got to the gallery. But Rocky was not at the gallery, nor were any of the rest of the kids, not even Elizabeth, who was the most driven to get to New York of all of them. I threw my portfolio at the first person I saw, told them to put up anything they liked the looks of, and climbed in another taxi. I thought I heard someone yelling to me to find out where the rest of the show was, but I couldn’t be sure.

Nobody answered when I knocked on the door of the room Rocky was sharing with Daren, and when I tried the door it was locked. I crossed the hall, to the room Elizabeth and Jeni had taken and got identical results, with one exception.

"What the hell?" I muttered, trying the knob. The door opened easily and I stepped inside. Possibly they’d all had the same idea I’d had, had got themselves some cheap wine and had just all fallen asleep in a chummy heap. Heaven knew they did it enough in Daren’s loft back home. I would go inside and nudge them all awake, drag them down to the gallery and get the showing on the road before allowing them to come back and collapse.

They were in bed...well, who was I to look down my nose at that. But Elizabeth was with Rocky and those two never saw eye to eye about anything, never mind the fact that Rocky was quietly gay. And Daren and Jeni...well...they were trying to get past a fling that hadn’t worked out and then I saw what was really the case with my young friends and it all came back in a rush and I started to whimper as I backed out of the room in search of a phone.

"Right this way, ma’am, we’ll have you sit someplace quiet." The uniform was very understanding. She had obviously taken her community relations classes seriously. She led me through the open office quickly, so as to get me out of the worst of the chaos.

I was placed in an office and the door shut behind me. I familiarized myself with the room - whoever called this place home away from home was organized... almost too organized for someone like me. All the files were neatly piled, the desktop was clear, manuals were standing side by side in the bookcase. Even the pen cup was neat...no more pens than it could hold and all of those leaned in the same direction.

"Is she in my office?"

"Yes, sir, she is."

"Good. I do not want to be disturbed, this will be hard enough without that."

No...no...the voice...it couldn’t be. I glanced downward and then saw the nameplate sitting on the desk. Master Detective John Neville.

The door opened and I forced myself not to look right away. My world was being rocked on its foundations as it was, I didn’t need him to see it in my face.

"Ms. Finnegan, is it? John Neville, homicide. Thank you for coming..."

It was him, soft spoken and stylish as ever, and as he came around his desk and sat down, I got my first look at him in twenty years. He had filled out - probably joined a fitness gym within five minutes of the opening of the first one. I remembered Neville...it was one reason he and Laura had got on so well, they had both been on top of the trends, on top of fashion. The suit was an Armani or I didn’t know what one looked like, just as the shoes were Cole-Haan and the watch was a Rolex. The hair...well, there was a bit less of that, but that would also be in keeping with fashion. It was beautifully cut and impeccably combed, anyway. I would have expected no less of him.

"Are you all right, Ms. Finnegan?"

"Yes, I..." I stopped myself. I did not need to maintain a polite lie, my four young friends had been brutally murdered and nobody in their right mind would expect me to be all right. And John Neville, in my opinion, had always been in his right mind.

"No. No, Detective Neville, I’m not all right. My friends were slaughtered and I was the one to find them. Forgive me...I’ll get hold of myself in a moment."

I looked down at my hands, I could not bear to look him in the face.

"Funny...but you remind me very strongly of someone I once knew. Have you ever been to New York, Ms. Finnegan?"

"I lived here for a short time, several years ago." I decided there was no point in being coy, he’d figure it out sooner or later. "I worked for Laura Mars, as her assistant. During the time of the murders." I raised my chin to meet his gaze, and watched in amazement as he all but flinched.

"Of course...little Sara. And then that name..." He sat back in his chair and stared at me.

"It’s been years. The last I heard anything about her was in 1984, something like that. The last five years or so that she worked, every photograph she took looked like a crime scene. Finally people stopped giving her commissions. They said she was a little ahead of her time. She was unsettling, is what she was. And now nobody knows where she is...she just vanished. Good riddance to bad rubbish."

"That hotel room...I had not seen a crime scene like that in twenty years. When I walked into the room, Laura Mars was the first name I flashed on, and now...here you are as well."

I looked at him, and for one of the few times in my life was able to read another person’s mind.

"I think you’d better read me my rights, then," I said.

"I have no idea what you mean."

"Please. I’m not the ignorant little girl I was then, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what you’re thinking. The murders went on while I was here and they stopped when I left. Now I’m back, they’re starting again. I would think the very same thing if I were you. But it was not me, check my movements, I’ll be fingerprinted if you want and you can check against them. I did not murder my young friends."

I stood up, as did Neville, and he filled the tiny office.

"Sit down, Ms. Finnegan. Please."

I could remember going out one night for Chinese, at the behest of that voice, because he and Laura were otherwise occupied and couldn’t be interrupted for a little thing like food. I had done it...just aching the entire time, knowing what was going on and what would stop temporarily as soon as I returned. I had done it because there was nothing I could refuse that voice.

It appeared that I had not outgrown that inability to act the adult. I sat down, as he had asked.

"I am not implying that you had anything to do with the deaths of those people. I want to ask you what you might know about their final hours," Neville said, quietly.

"Very little, to tell you the truth. I stayed in last night. At around eight I called room service and had them send up a bottle of wine."

He wrote this information down, and I knew he would be checking. I would remain a suspect until he had eliminated me. Standard police procedure, nothing more and nothing less.

"Were they with you?"

"No, they were gone by then. Rocky and Jeni are...were...great fans of Laura Mars’ work and they were aware of the time I spent in her employ. They discovered that I remembered where Laura had lived, and they had wanted to just go and see the place. Kind of silly, really. They had wanted me to go with them, but I had refused. That was the last place I wanted to see."

"Do you remember when they left?"

"Just before I ordered the wine, so it had to be around eight," I answered.

"Did you hear them come in?"

"No, I didn’t. I went to sleep about midnight, might have been a little before. I woke up around nine and took a shower. I expected they would make a night of it. Clubbing had been all they could talk about for a week." I drew a faint smile from the man. Clubbing had been his hobby.

Neville sat back in the chair, fiddling with his pen. It didn’t look like any of the beat up specimens in the pencup. Unless I missed my guess, it was a Waterman. His Countess Mara tie lay across the broad chest, and I followed its length to the flat belly and if I didn’t stop staring *that*, if nothing else I had done in my life, would be a crime.

"What brought you back to New York?"

"The...the kids and I are...were..." I stopped, unable to continue. Neville was up instantly. He offered me his handkerchief - silk - and stuck his head out the door, commanding someone to bring water and coffee and...he looked speculatively at me for a moment...a cold Coke, so that I could have my pick.

I dabbed at my eyes very carefully, mascara would be hell to get out of silk. "Why did you tell them Coke?"

"That was your brand at one time."

It was the only brand I would drink, in fact, and if he remembered that he would remember a lot of other things as well, some of them I would have preferred to have had forgotten.

"Is there anything else, Detective?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Are you in some sort of hurry?"

"I’d like to go home," I said.

"I have every intention of taking you back to your hotel...Sara."

I had taken the sound of my name home and slept with it in my head, awakened with it in my ears. I had been incredibly pathetic, as a girl. I had to, *had* to hold on to some shreds of self-control.

"I intend to go home, Detective Neville. Only to the hotel long enough to gather my things and settle the bill. Then I’m going home. This city holds nothing but tragedy for me. I have to go home and inform some families what happened to their children."

"The coroner will be taking care of that as soon as the autopsies are complete," Neville said.

"You don’t need autopsies, their eyes were torn out and arranged on the damn dresser..."

That was enough for Mrs. Finnegan’s daughter. The drinks were coming in as I was headed out and as far as I was concerned, the only way Neville would keep me in New York one minute longer than necessary would be to arrest me on suspicion of murder.

He caught up with me at the elevator banks, as I punched the buttons in frustration, trying like hell to get a car sometime before the end of the millennium.

"Sara, I have more questions."

I stiffened at the sound of his voice. But could I refuse?

"Fine Ask me on the way back to my hotel."

He took my elbow and there was another shock to my system. Neville had never once laid a hand on me. I felt immense strength in the simple touch. Somehow I was able to draw something from that, to straighten up and face the man himself. He was only doing his job, and that was amazing enough in that everything I had known up until a half an hour before had told me John Neville was dead.

"Come this way, Sara. We can take my car."

I wondered what sort of little number this was and, sure enough, I found out. Neville drove a Corvette, and not just any Corvette. He drove a 1962 Stingray, a classic sports car. It made my little Miata look like a hairball on the carpet.

Neville slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and drove in silence, negotiating the Manhattan traffic with the ease of long experience. I sat beside him in a miserable little ball, watching the way he handled the gearshift, watching his hands on the wheel, anything to avoid his face. It was becoming harder and harder to reconcile the reality of the situation now to what the reality had been such a short time ago, and on top of the deaths of my friends this was the absolute limit.

I went directly to my room. There was a guard outside the door to the room the girls had been using and it was tightly sealed with crime scene tape. Neville, as the chief homicide investigator in the precinct, was allowed to crack the tape and go inside, but I noticed that he was careful to initial, date and time the piece of tape that he cut, and to sign a logbook to confirm his time of entry. When the door started to open for him, I went inside my room.

I had intended to begin packing what little bit I had removed from my luggage, instead I sat down on the bed nearest the door and shook. I stared at the door itself without really seeing it. The feeling of disorientation was complete and frightening. My friends were dead, and Neville, whom I had believed was dead, was not. So where was Laura Mars? Where in the name of all that made sense was that whacked out bitch?

"Sara? Open the door."

Neville hadn’t spent much time in the room, maybe all he’d done was go through the scene to see that nothing had been overlooked. In any event, the knock, soft but firm, and the voice combined to bring me out of my trance. I opened the door, stepped aside to let him in, and was all over him with what I had been itching to ask since he had walked into the office. But instead of a dignified, intelligently worded query, I hit him with the words of a commercial that had always made me laugh, in a black humored way.

"I thought you died!"

Neville, taken aback. I wished I had my camera. But he recovered quickly and answered me in a way that indicated he’d given some version or another of the truth quite often, and was possibly tired of doing it.

"She told you that, and she might even have believed it. I was very close to death at the time, but she never accounted for the fact that when an officer is down, heaven and earth are moved, and gunshot wounds are rarely fatal instantly, the way the movies show would have you believe. It was very close for a time, and I spent several weeks under guard in the hospital...but as you see, I recovered."

"Under guard?" I asked.

"At first, her story had to be checked, which made me the prime suspect, and then all the other plausible stories had to be checked as well. You had to be eliminated as a suspect, in fact, but there was nothing on you then...no more than there is now, I suspect. By the time I was back on my feet she had disappeared, and the trail had gone cold. I worked for several years in Miami, on a reciprocal exchange basis, and came back here in 1988."

"Why Miami?" I asked him.

"It was warm. And I wanted to go to a place where the woman might not think to look for me."

"But...I thought you loved her."

"I did, Sara. Until she shot me," he said, simply. "That tends to cool a man’s ardor."

I faced away from him. If he had only turned those black eyes on me...he would never have had to deal with any of that nonsense. But if I said so, he would laugh now just as he would have laughed then. I pulled my suitcase off the sidechair and dropped it on the bed.

"Why are you packing?"

"I told you, Detective..."

"John. Call me John, as you did before."

The voice caressed me yet again. I had forgotten...when he was off the clock and coming to be with Laura, I had been instructed to call him John. Laura hadn’t liked that concession, as I recalled...but then, she hadn’t liked the fact that Neville...John...had treated me more humanely than she had.

"All right...John. I told you, I’m going home."

"We cannot allow you to leave, Sara," John said, softly.

"And you can’t make me stay."

"But we can."

I continued putting my things together, fetching toiletries from the bathroom and odd bits from the dresser. "I owe it to those kids, to tell their families what I can, to see if there’s anything I can do for them after the police leave."

"I understand that, Sara. But until the department clears you, you will not be given permission to go," John told me.

I was totally ignoring him. "Jeni was from Warroad. Ever heard of Warroad? All they do up there is play hockey and make windows...it was a big deal for her to get down to Grand Forks two or three times a year. Minneapolis was...light years...away from that, and New York...beyond imagining. The very thought of coming to this shithole of a town left her speechless. She couldn’t believe she had come so far."

"Sara, this is not your fault."

I continued, just as though he had not spoken. "And Rocky...poor kid. Took him forever to figure out he was gay, not just too devoted to his work to bother with girls..."

"Sara, stop doing this to yourself."

"It’s not my fault, but I feel like it is anyway. I should never have come back here, ever!"

John was silent for a long time, a very long time. I felt the black eyes on me but kept my head down, sunken in misery. I could feel how vulnerable I was and did not want Neville extracting anything from me in such a condition. After a moment, there was a comforting hand on my shoulder.

"Sara, this does not have to be done now. I can come back in the morning."

"That would be better, John. I’m afraid I won’t be much good to you for awhile."

"You take this...my card. It has my home, business and cellphone numbers on it. If you think of anything that might help, or if you just want to talk, you call me."

Another stiff little square pushed into my hands. For some reason, it made me think of the first one, and how I probably still had it someplace in my wallet.

"Will you be all right tonight? I can get someone to come by, talk to you, if need be," John offered.

"Forever the trendsetter, aren’t you, John. No, thank you, I’ll manage. I won’t need your departmental grief counselor. They grow us tough out in the boonies."

Besides, I had no intention of being there when he returned the next day.

"All right, Sara. You sleep as best you can," he said. "And remember to call if you want."

Sure...chat with him on the cellphone as he sat in the latest trendy watering hole with a trophy brat on his arm.

"I’ll be fine. I’m sure you’ve got a rough night in the clubs ahead of you, so you go on..." I sounded decidedly sarcastic, if quietly so, and a black shadow passed over John’s features briefly. Without another word, he let himself out. Twenty minutes later, I was on my way to LaGuardia.

I had been home for ten hours and had had time to sleep and to arrange for my portfolio to be shipped home, when I received a call from the Minneapolis Police Department.

"Sara Finnegan?"

The official tone of voice...I had heard enough of that recently.

"Yes?"

"Detective Johnson with the homicide division, ma’am. We’d like to ask you a few questions."

"I’ve been out of town for the last two days. I just got in last night..."

"We understand that, ma’am, but there are a few questions we need to ask you just the same. Can we send a car for you?"

"I can walk, I’m only a few blocks away." I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. "I’ll leave now. Should I ask for you?"

"Yes, ma’am. Johnson, Homicide. They’ll call me and I’ll come down to get you."

Johnson had no office, instead he took me into an interrogation room. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened after I had fled New York the second time. As soon as I was seated, and armed with a Coke, Johnson picked up the telephone and punched up a line. "We have her here, Mr. Neville. Go ahead, sir."

"Sara, I told you not to leave." Not one to prevaricate, that Neville.

"And I told you what I had to do. I’m sorry, John, but surely by now you’ve been able to trace my movements. You must know there’s no way I could have been responsible for what happened," I replied.

"Yes, we know that. But I want you to look at some photographs taken early this morning. They should be on your fax machine, Detective Johnson."

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing...a woman, posed seductively in a bathtub, with her throat slit from ear to ear, so deeply it looked as though the head would fall backwards from its own weight. The water standing in the tub was so impossibly red it was hard to see any other detail, but it appeared that something had been...inserted...into the woman, and left there.

I had seen something like this before...not identical, the throat was a new touch...

but I had seen so many atrocities they all tended to run together in my mind.

"Oh, John! Where..."

"The hotel room you left. They were able to get it cleaned out and rerented that afternoon. To this young woman. A sales representative from Cleveland."

I pushed the photographs away from me, horrified. There were more of the poor woman, taken from every possible angle in the cramped room. I couldn’t look at them.

"Sara...whoever did this wanted you, and knows they were unsuccessful," John said.

"Laura Mars..." I whispered. "I knew it wouldn’t last forever."

"What’s that?" Johnson asked me.

"I’m sorry...sorry, John, I can’t..."

I was making a habit of fleeing unpleasantness and this was no different.

"Sara, you need to talk to us," John said.

"You know who’s doing this as well as I do. Ask Laura Mars, when you find her!" I said, before I ran from the room in search of a restroom.

I noticed a patrol car parked across the street from my building and I had a strong hunch they would follow me if I decided to go out, but I was sick. Physically ill, sick at heart, name it. Some poor woman had died because she had had the bad luck to be placed in a room once registered to me. I didn’t wish myself dead in her place, on the contrary I wished her alive once more and all of us rid of Laura Mars.

I was drawn to the shoebox in my closet. Normally I only went to that box once a year, to thrust with shaking hands under the lid a single envelope, unopened. The handwriting on it was as familiar as my own. Once a year, usually around Christmas, Laura Mars reminded me that she knew where I was. I had long since guessed that the price I paid to live was my continued silence. I had no idea what she wrote me, whether a letter brimming with her peculiar psychosis or a single, unsigned holiday card, and I did not care to know. The reason I went to the shoebox was to find out where she had been sending the cards from.

Until 1983, the cards were routinely postmarked New York. There was no return address, though I could hardly imagine her maintaining her posh style of living as her income steadily decreased. For all I knew, she ended in the Village, where I had been. In 1984, the card was postmarked Atlanta, while in 1985 she had sent her yearly missive from San Antonio, Texas. For both the years 1986 and 1987, those cards were postmarked Miami, and the knowledge of that nearly stopped my heart. John had been in Miami until 1988. She knocked around until 1993, when the card was mailed from the main post office in the city of Minneapolis, approximately ten blocks south of where I lived. In 1996, she landed back in New York, and appeared to have been there since. But she had been in Minneapolis, and she had been in Miami...and for all I knew she was here again. I stuffed the cards back in the box and jammed the box back into my closet. Then I curled up in the center of my bed. I had never wanted the impossible more than I did at that exact moment. I wanted John Neville.

The sound of hard knocking on my door awakened me, but only very slowly. I was dreaming that I had concealed myself somehow and that Laura Mars was attempting to gain entrance to my hiding place. If I moved, somehow it would compromise my concealment so I had to fight to be still and undetected.

"Sara! Sara Finnegan! Open up!"

In my dream, John Neville was calling to me but I was not sure if it was truly him or just one of Laura Mars’ tricks. All my instincts told me to hold still and perhaps the voice and the pounding would go away.

It was the hasp being torn away that awakened me. I’d had the doors fitted especially by Architectural Recyclers and repair and replacement of the locks would cost a small fortune.

"Sara, you can let us in or we can come in ourselves, up to you..."

It was John...really John Neville, in the wilds of flyover-land. I ran to open up. I had something I had to tell him.

John wore a variation of an outfit I had seen him in many times and he took my breath away. Instead of a turtleneck he wore a black crew neck sweater, thin and somewhat formfitting. His jeans were levis 505’s, trim, almost pressed looking, and he had the same London Fog raincoat I remembered from before. I flung myself at him and held on. He caught me in his arms and though I wasn’t sure he exactly appreciated how I came in for a landing, he did nothing to put me away from him. In low tones he dismissed the officers that had come along, and he walked me inside, voice soothing, touch quieting.

"You should never have run, Sara."

"If I hadn’t, I would have been the one in the bathtub. John...there’s something I didn’t tell you...that I have to show you."

"Show me?" It sounded as though he had expected to be told there was something I needed to tell him, but he didn’t know the half of it.

"Sit down...can I get you something to drink? Let me take your coat, this might be a while..." He slipped out of his coat and handed it to me. If he was on duty, it was obviously pretty serious if it could take him away from the Tribeca and the Stingray and that closet full of Armani and Polo for weekends.

"Nothing, thanks. Show me, first of all." He sat down on the edge of my bed and watched as I fished again for the shoebox. When I had found it, I turned, holding it in my arms and looking at him guiltily.

"I should have told you about this, but I’ve schooled myself over the years not to mention it. It’s always seemed safer for all concerned if I didn’t."

"What is it?"

I could think of no adequate way to explain it to him. I had to satisfy myself with merely handing over my secret horror.

I could tell by the way his black eyes widened in his face that John recognized the handwriting on the envelopes. I remained standing as he counted them, turned each one over for some sort of distinguishing mark that might give him a place to begin a search. Laura had been careful. There was nothing but the telltale postmark, and that meant nothing in itself.

"Do you mind if I open one?"

"No. Go ahead, if it will help."

John slit one of the envelopes open with an elegant little penknife and removed...a single sheet of paper.

"Dear Sara -

Whatever else you might have, whatever else that was mine that you might have taken, you can’t have John. You can never have John. I saw to that. You know what you need to do if you don’t want to end up the way he did.

Laura"

"What?" John said, sheer confusion suffusing his features.

I shrugged. "She thought...that you and I were..."

"I never looked at you that way," John said.

Thank you so much for rubbing my nose in it, Neville, I said to myself.

"You were courteous to me, and she didn’t like that. She thought it meant something else. Nor did she like the thought that I...knew the truth about the murders. I helped her...I know that means you may have to arrest me, but I can’t pretend anymore."

"You helped her...with what?"

"Setting up those scenes...she would call me after the fact, spend an hour or so...and she needed help, so she claimed. It was her way of punishing me, I think, because she had it in her head I was a better photographer than she was...that was a joke, but I couldn’t convince her of it. Thing is, it backfired on her and she had to keep me on long after she might have got rid of me because I knew too much. And once she fell in love with you she had to keep me closer yet."

"Why?"

"Because she...knew how I felt. And she knew that the first place I went would be to you, if she turned me loose."

"And how did you feel?"

"What difference does it make? I was a young girl, fresh out of high school and doing exactly what I wanted to do. I was meeting famous people...she photographed John Travolta, for crying out loud. I had stars in my eyes all the time. I had six crushes a week," I replied.

Until the last one, I finished, in my own head. Because I didn’t get a chance to work it through on my own.

For the next several minutes, John busied himself with the envelopes and the little penknife. It appeared that each envelope contained essentially the same thing. When he had finished reading them all, he squared the envelopes into a neat little pile and took them to his coat.

"John...what are you doing with those?"

"I have to take them with me, Sara, show them to the district attorney."

"Why?" I asked.

"You know the statute of limitations never runs out in the case of a murder," he began, in a patient voice.

"I know that."

"I believe I can persuade him to offer you immunity if you step forward, but we need to be able to convince the DA that you have spent the last twenty years in a state of fear. These letters will help."

"I understand, John...it’s just that...I’m embarrassed." I sat down on the bed beside John and stared at his shoes, soft blue-gray loafers.

"Embarrassed?" he asked.

"Yes, very much so. The woman is crazy, but she knows how to control me and I hate to think of someone else seeing how stupid I was and continue to be."

"Believe me, Sara, they see worse than this every day. Let me present it to him, so that we can put you under some kind of protective custody. If she *is* still out there, I think you might need it," John said.

"How long will that take?" I asked.

"I think I can have something definitive by tomorrow, day after at the latest," John answered.

John already had the letters and I knew enough about the way Neville worked to know that he would not surrender them. So, there was no point in my asking him to return them, that was clear.

"And if he won’t offer the immunity?" I asked

"Let me worry about that. I know the man."

John smiled at me in much the same way as he had when he was seeing Laura and I was hanging around in a state of complete nervousness. It had been meant to settle me down enough so that I could be sent home and thus got out of the way. This one was meant to settle me so that he could leave in good conscience.

"Sara. Look at me."

I raised my eyes to him, biting my lip.

"Trust me, Sara. I can take care of you. You know that."

I nodded.

"If you trust me, I can find Laura, keep you safe. Do you believe me?"

I remembered Laura telling me, as she ripped up all of her incriminating photos, how he had looked at her and said ‘look at this body, this is my work. I’m the one you want.’ This reminded me in some ways of that, the almost obscene self-confidence. But there was nobody who could protect me as well as he could, and I had a definite hunch that I might need protection.

"Yes, John. I believe you."

I had to get out of the sleeping area of the loft. That was far too evocative of everything that I had lost out of my life. I stepped toward the front of my living space.

"Stay clear of the windows, Sara."

"What for?"

"Humor me." Neville followed me to the far end of the loft, where the couch and big-screen TV were situated. He sat himself down.

I stepped back from the window and drew the blinds. There were reasons for this, I was sure, but I had no idea what they were.

"Why so nervous, Sara? Come sit." He patted the spot beside him on my couch, smiled, made beckoning motions with his fingers. Seemed he had changed his mind about leaving so soon. I swear, if I’d had pockets to jam my hands in, I’d have done it. I had been closer to John than ever before in the last day or so, had even thrown myself into his arms in sheer terror, but I had yet to sit with him, next to him, by invitation. It created a level of intimacy that otherwise did not exist between us. I had never been encouraged to stick around in the past, so it had always been hi and good bye. I wasn’t used to this.

I sat beside him, and if I hadn’t been so familiar with my own birthdate I would have sworn I was nineteen again, or still, or perpetually. He reduced me to this blushing incapacity effortlessly and that was bad enough without knowing that he had the same sort of regard for me as he might have had for some curious new lichen on a rock.

"Have you always lived here?"

"No...I took this place in 1990, closer to the center of things and to the people who get me commissions. Before this I lived on the West Bank, by the university."

"This is the kind of place I would have expected to see a successful artist living and working."

I burst into laughter and before I knew it I was in that twilit land between tears of hysterical amusement and tears of hysterical fear. John made me take his handkerchief again, only this time it was fine linen...a little more casual, certainly. It took me a while to get myself under some sort of control again.

"Artist?" I finally managed, and then went off into gales of laughter again. "Me?"

"That was what you always claimed to be working toward."

"Oh...artist..." I was starting to wind down. "That’s too funny, John. I was so young. I had no idea what I was talking about."

"Laura would never have taken you on if there was no potential in you," John said.

"There was potential, all right...for exactly what I turned out to be...a competent commercial photographer. Laura was the artist." I stopped dead, right there, and shivered despite the comfortable conditions in the room. She certainly had been; if I closed my eyes and thought about it, I could hear her directing me in the placement of her...models...before they stiffened too much.

"But you took some very nice cityscapes, Sara. I particularly remember one shot from the Palisades...I bought it from you. I still have it. The only thing I saved from that period of my life."

The grin I gave him was decidedly twisted. I could feel it distorting my face.

"You might have tossed it, for all of that. What did you pay for the thing...fifty dollars? She docked me as much as you gave me for that piece."

"What?" John was incredulous.

"You heard me. She docked me the price of my one and only sale in New York...by that time I knew there was no arguing with her. Besides...Laura took me on because I knew which end of the camera was the business end and I was naive enough let her get away with walking on me because of who she was. She couldn’t hang on to an assistant to save her life. It didn’t get ugly until later, and then I had to stay."

I sat back, which landed me closer yet to John, but now I was lost in memories and couldn’t have cared less where he was.

"I always thought she treated you very well."

There was that sick grin again. "She did, when you were around. And it was fine when I managed to fade into the woodwork. The rest of the time, the woman was a monster. She was hypercritical, and she taught me nothing I hadn’t learned in high-school photography class. I was there to run errands and make her look good. She couldn’t stand the idea of anyone stealing an ounce of her thunder."

I was making myself uncomfortable with this line of reminiscing, and sitting next to John Neville only made it worse. I rolled out of the sprung couch and headed for the kitchen.

"Are you hungry, John? I can manage a decent stir fry."

"That sounds good."

"I could just run out and get it, if you’d rather not wait for me." I stuck my head out of the kitchen to see where he was, and I found him examining my bookcase. There was another reason to tell myself that John Neville was out of my league. The man had probably completed his masters degree, while I had categorically refused to set foot in a classroom once I finished high school.

"No!" John said, quickly and emphatically. He almost seemed frightened.

"I can order in as well," I said with more than a touch of uncertainty.

"Anything you have will be fine, Sara."

"Is something wrong, John? You seem very apprehensive."

"No...no. Just...just tell me about your books. You have quite the collection here. I never knew you were a reader.’

I eyed him warily for a minute. That was evasion or I knew nothing about it. I stepped inside my tiny kitchen and set oil to heat in my wok. Moments later John showed up in the doorway.

"What about your books?"

"What about them? I was always a reader, I just never had time when I was in New York."

"I never thought you were the military history sort," John continued.

"What did you expect, Ansel Adams collections and Margaret Bourke-White biographies? John, what’s wrong with you?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Is there anything I can do to help you?" Neville asked.

"No, it’s under control. Just talk to me, please. Tell me what’s bothering you."

"What would you expect me to say?" John replied.

I busied myself chopping vegetables. "You chased me away from the window. You’re very jumpy. You’re making me fidgety. I want you to talk."

"Call it a hunch."

He stepped over to the stove on his own and began to sear the meat, muscles in the broad back rippling under the thin sweater as he moved. I dumped in the vegetables and took over from him. As always, the stir fry was quick. We were seated opposite one another on the couch before I really knew it.

"Has she always known where you were?"

I munched up a forkful of the food. John had added a little more ginger than what I liked, I could tell. "Yes. Somehow or another, she has."

"Tell me, Sara," he urged, in a soft voice. "Needs more ginger. I just guessed."

"About the notes?" I asked.

"Yes. About the letters, as much as you can tell me."

I sighed deeply, dropped the plate to my lap and stared at it, looking for a way to begin.

"Okay. When I first came home I moved back in with my parents in Brooklyn Center, where I had grown up. I got a job with Dayton Hudson Advertising...just a few blocks from here. When the first couple of cards came I wasn’t surprised, because she’d had my parents home address on file, in case something happened to me. Then the drive into work every day started getting to me and I decided to move myself a little closer into town. I came into Roseville, just off Industrial Boulevard. I didn’t fill out a change of address card, either. I just let my mail keep going to my mom’s house until I could notify everybody. I moved in June, and that December her little wake up call came to my apartment in Roseville."

John had stopped eating, was writing on a notepad that he’d grabbed off the table, using one of my funky little artsy-fartsy pens. "How long did you live in Roseville?"

"Five years. By that time, I was ready to branch out on my own and my apartment wasn’t big enough to handle everything I needed to be able to do. So I took the top floor of a big old Victorian in Dinkytown. That’s down by the University, near the West Bank campus."

"How did you handle the forwarding of your mail?" John asked.

"I had my first computer...little 386...so I notified everyone via email, or I called my bank and my credit card companies to tell them. And I did it all before I moved, so I wouldn’t have to file the change of address form."

"And that December, she sent you her yearly note to the Dinkytown address?"

"Right on schedule. That I could understand, because it was also my business address. It’s always been the Roseville thing that got me, told me that she was watching. She might have called my mom, lied to her and got my address from her. She might not have had any suspicion that I moved, Mom would have just given it to her...oh, she’d love to hear from you...but one way or the other, she got it."

"And you moved here when?" John asked.

"In 1990, after my parents died. I bought this place."

"Has there ever been a man in your life that she might have got to?"

"Not for years," I said. "I haven’t dated since just before I moved here. I had a man living with me in Roseville for a while, but I never changed my address the entire time he lived with me, and she already knew it. Can I ask you a question?"

"Go right ahead," John said.

"Do you think she knows you’re alive?"

John sat back. He put down the pad and pen, took up his fork and ate, but did not appear to be aware of doing it. "I have no idea," he said, at length. "After 1988, it would have been a simple enough matter to find out."

"Then why did she wait for me to go to New York to start in again?"

"That creates the assumption that she does know. If I’m what she wants..."

"You told her you were, once," I said.

"Once. But if that *is* the case, she would have had no difficulty finding me. Assuming, on the other hand, that she still thinks she killed me I would guess she thought you were finally going to go to the police and be damned to her. Another murder would focus suspicion on you once again, for exactly the reasons you mentioned to me before, and possibly even secure a conviction on purely circumstantial evidence," John said, reflectively.

"Thinking as she does that I ruined her life, I suppose she’s decided it’s high time she ruined mine. She did a number on me twenty years ago, it hardly matters now," I said.

"I cannot understand what you mean, you ruined her life."

I looked into the black eyes, measured the sharp intelligence there against the simple fact of his overwhelming maleness. Would he understand how a woman’s mind worked? I decided probably not. I’d had yet to meet a man that did.

"She always saw me as a some kind of a threat...to her reputation, to her relationship with you...I don’t know why she hired me to this day, but I know she kept me around to keep an eye on me. She didn’t want me taking advantage of my contacts with her clients to undercut her commissions, she didn’t want me figuring out a way to show up where you were..." I stopped there.

"Is that how all you women work?"

I laughed at his tone. "At some level or another, I think we all do, yes. We women are very suspicious of one another. We don’t need men to keep us down. We do a fine job of that ourselves. We really don’t...play well together. Divide and conquer, or something like that."

John regarded me levelly for a long minute. "Where would she ever have got the idea that you were a threat? All I remember of you is an eager little girl, quiet and efficient and scared of me."

Not scared of you, Neville, I thought. Don’t flatter yourself. I wanted to fuck you stupid, and Laura Mars knew it. I could have done it, too, and Laura Mars knew *that*, as well. I couldn’t move for fear of losing my job, and having you laugh at me for a little girl thinking she had what a man wanted.

"Fair enough," was what I said. "The only thing I had going for me when I moved to New York was nerve. I had saved a thousand dollars but that didn’t go far, considering I had to set up something approximating housekeeping. I had a portfolio with nothing but some portraits of my friends I had done in photography class, some dippy landscapes I had taken over the years, some still life shots of woodpiles and fruit, pictures of my cat, and some runway photos I had taken at the home economics sewing unit fashion show. Nothing. It wasn’t anything anybody couldn’t have done with a Polaroid. The sum total of my work at eighteen and I traipsed all the way to New York with it thinking that it would be enough to get me work with Laura Mars. Oh, I was loaded with nerve."

"So what happened to it? How did she ruin your life?’

"She ruined my confidence," I said. "I wanted to be a fashion photographer and by the time I was through I doubted my ability to take a photograph of a...shoe, let alone the person wearing it. If I’d had a chance to try, and had honestly failed, that would have been one thing. But I never got that chance, and before she was done with me I questioned whether I could photograph people at all. I knew I could do drills, and piles of towels, so when I came back here, I went into commercial photography. It’s a living, a decent living, but I don’t like it as well."

Neville seemed to accept this explanation and that relieved me. If he had asked me why I had never married, or why I was not in a relationship, I would have been unable to continue.

"I never got the impression you were anything but friends."

"That was what she wanted you to see. And I had strict orders not to set you straight. We were so deep into the cover up by then..." I stopped, sighing.

"Did you have any idea how insane she was?" he asked me.

"Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the kids say. I knew I was doing wrong. I knew it could land me in prison, possibly even the electric chair. She was making me do it, I didn’t know how to stop, and I couldn’t face it. I was just a kid. I had no real idea how far gone *she* actually was until I walked in there and she told me she’d killed you. She’d always seemed a little paranoid, but I just put that down to living in New York."

"You should have gone to the police. You should have come to me," John said.

"She threatened me, said if I said a word to you that I would be prosecuted and convicted right alongside her. I knew nothing about immunity or turning state’s evidence. I believed her," I said.

I got up, took the half-empty plates and congealed food to the kitchen. Quickly I scraped the leavings into the disposal and refrigerated the rest, and then went to hurry back to the living room and Neville’s companionship, figuring that he was sitting where I had left him. Instead, I ran headlong into his solid chest.

I expected him to put me away from him, as he had done when he first arrived and I had hit him from his blind side. He had held me a minute, I suppose mostly to make sure I didn’t fall on my backside, and then he straightened me up. This time he maintained the embrace, even tightened it up a little once he was sure he had hold of me.

"That you lived with this for twenty years is amazing to me," he said, his voice a low rumble that came to me as much through his chest as through my ears.

"I wish I had known."

"Known what, Sara?" Neville asked.

"That you were alive. You were the only person that would have believed me. As long as I thought you were gone, there was no-one to tell...the rest of them believed it had been you, it had been so neatly packaged up by that freak."

Neville’s deep chest rose and fell under my cheek in a deep sigh. "Can you possibly believe that I wanted an end to the memories as well, so much so that I made no effort to contact anyone connected with the case after I got back?"

"Utterly, John." I caught myself running my hand up and down his chest and forced myself to stop. Even though I felt as though I was coming alive after a lengthy dormancy, there was no way this cosmopolitan man would accept my attentions...he was too aware of himself for that. I was sure of it.

"Sara..."

I lifted my chin, always obedient to that voice. As though my body knew something my brain did not, my hands were already pulling the sweater out of the waistband of his jeans, and his look told me he wanted me to finish my personal

resurrection.

John was gone when I awoke in the wreckage of my bed. I had bought the antique sleigh bed with the anticipation of bringing a man to it...slowly that ambition faded and I had become proud of it as the only truly nice piece of furniture I owned. Now, as I lay languid and sticky between the wrinkled sheets, I reflected that I had finally brought a man to it and it might have been an army cot for all I cared about it, because I would have lain down for John Neville in the street.

A note leaned against the pillow he had used. He had wadded it up in his sleep and had left it that way when he slipped out of bed.

"I have returned to New York, and will call you with the results of my meeting with the DA.

John"

No dear, no love at the end...just the stuff that mattered, though he probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. He would have called it doing his job...but had the night before qualified as necessary duty?

I stayed put for a while, luxuriating in the smell of us clinging to the sheets, the faint essence of his cologne especially pleasing to me...then I got up. I had food to buy, errands to run, and I wanted to get the car out and flog it, since the Miata had sat too long in its parking slot.

It upset me that I could not lock my door securely now that John was gone. I had not thought of the damaged hasp over the course of the night I had just spent in his arms but now it took on real implications. What if someone got in and robbed me...most everything I had of real value was easily carried off and there were no end of ways out of the building. It never occurred to me that anybody with more sinister intent might be in my city watching me, and might want access to my loft.

I was gone for a good share of the day, what with having to run to Minnetonka to get my car looked at, to South Minneapolis to meet with a very difficult client over lunch, to Richfield, since I was in the neighborhood, to do my grocery shopping, and to a Home Depot to get some decent looking, heavy duty door locks, to hell with Architectural Recycling. I finally wandered in about seven, lugged my four bags of groceries up the freight elevator, and got back in for good.

The first thing I did was put the food away...an ingrained habit learned at my mother’s knee. Everything else could wait in the face of preventable spoilage, by God. Then I went to the answering machine and saw...no light. Nothing from John, nor from anyone else, either. That was impossible...there was always someone squawking into my phone, whether my brother wanting me to baby-sit or a client or even a telemarketer. I lifted the handset and got thick silence. Christ! Just great, the phone was out.

I booted up the computer and tried to dial into the internet. This worked fine, so I could only presume my voice line was bad...or cut off? I had paid the bill, hadn’t I? In the face of some of the things I had been asked to cope with over the last days, I couldn’t remember. US West would get an earful if they had cut my lifeline off, and all I would have to do is walk down to Nicollet Mall to give it to the cheap bastards.

"Sara."

My fingers froze on the keyboard, my brain froze in my skull, my heart froze in my chest.

"Laura?"

"Good memory for voices, Sara."

I turned towards the sound of her voice, and was shocked by what I saw.

The painfully thin, stylish female I remembered had been replaced by an utterly ordinary woman of late middle age. Cotton slacks and blouse, in cuts Laura would never have allowed in her closet covered a body that had thickened only slightly. Her face betrayed her age the most, lines cut deeply by her eyes and from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were mad.

"It’s good to see you again, Laura. What have you been doing with yourself?" For a minute I thought of diving for my purse and the cellphone in it, but two things stopped me. For one, the purse was in the kitchen, a long sprint away, hardly a simple dive. For another, Laura had a gun.

"Don’t lie to me, Sara. You never could lie well."

I stood, staring down the muzzle of the short barrel revolver, waiting for her next words.

"How did you get in here?" I asked, but I already knew the answer.

"Your door was unlocked," Laura answered. "Another failing of yours, always too trusting."

I noticed my Leicia was sitting near her, on a table. That was the best camera I owned, more important to me even than the digital camera I had recently purchased. I didn’t like the thought of her hands on it, but there wasn’t much to say.

"I work as a portrait photographer in Sears stores," Laura spat, "to answer your question. I was the most influential and progressive fashion photographer in the world, and I’m reduced to taking pictures of snot-nosed toddlers and bovine mother-daughter combinations."

"And I take it that’s all my fault," I said, flatly.

"Finally, a bit of the truth out of you."

"Want some more? You were the most influential and progressive murderer in Manhattan, too." I was damned if I was going to let her frighten me the way she had when I was a girl. Maybe time had stopped in 1978 in her head, but it had marched on quite smartly in mine and we were going toe to toe as women now, equals in the eyes of God and John Neville.

"I’m going to forget you said that," Laura said, grandly. "I need you for something."

"You want money, Laura? You look like you could use some, Sears isn’t known for high pay. You can have what I’ve got here...I can make more."

Oh, that was a mistake. She began to shake, I first noticed it when I saw the barrel of her little nickel plated .38 begin to quiver. I could tell I had punched a button or three, but just how hard remained to be seen.

"You...are going to give me more than money. You are going to give me my career back, my reputation."

"How can I do that? Most of today's designers wouldn’t know you from Adam, Laura. And the ones that do remember you think you were nuts," I said.

"How can you know that, living in this miserable dump of a town?"

"Oh, great. Now I get a cheap Bette Davis imitation on top of it, how do I rate all these thrills? How do I know??? I tried to get commissions from all of them, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Ralph Lauren, all of them, and they wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole. Why? Because I worked for Laura Mars...murdered a detective and disappeared without a trace!" I yelled. "You’re done, and you took me with you, you stupid cow! Between your benevolent instruction and the one-hundred percent rejection rate I enjoyed when I did have guts enough to try again, I haven’t a prayer in fashion photography and that was all I ever wanted to do. I don’t owe you jack shit, woman."

"You’ll be my model. I already know what the theme of the shoot will be," Laura continued.

"I’m no model and you can kiss my cracked ass if you think you’re going to force me with a gun the way you used to with your eyes...bug ‘em out at me and have me running around in circles," I said.

"Why aren’t you trying to placate me, I’m obviously insane."

"We agree on that much, but you’ve been watching too many of Lifetime’s Rape-of-the-Week films. There is no placating you and if you want to go off and kill me you’ll go off and kill me. So I might as well go down fighting. Besides...I’ve already been to the police. They have every letter you’ve written in the last twenty years."

She looked shocked, but recovered quickly. "There was only one who would have believed you."

"And who do you think I gave them to?" I asked, softly.

"That’s impossible! He’s dead!"

"You went out of your way to try to see to it, didn’t you, but you screwed up! Just like you screwed up everything else before and since!" I responded. I felt like I had a sort of an upper hand, even though she had the gun. It wouldn’t last long, but it was there.

"John Neville is dead!" Laura nearly screamed at me.

"He spent the night last night, Laura, right here. Go sniff the sheets, you can smell him all over them...maybe you’ll recognize his cologne. I know I did."

The woman went berserk, and it was a good thing for me that she didn’t do anything more complicated with the pistol than club me over the head. I fought her because I had the distinct feeling I was fighting for my life. But I don’t remember much about it because I was too busy trying to live through it. I know hair was pulled, furniture knocked over, glass broken in the course of the thing and the old building was so solid that nobody heard it. Of course, the loft below me had been occupied by Daren, which explained some of the lack of response. Finally she got me upside the head and knocked all the fight out of me.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to I was upright and it felt like my hands were on fire. The pain radiated up my arms to my shoulders, which were hyperextended. A cool draft blew across my naked breasts. A gauzy scarf had been tied around my waist and this fluttered in the same draft. I felt wetness dripping down my side, down my face.

When I looked down...down?...I saw every stitch of clothing I owned piled helter-skelter around my feet, tossed on the floor, silks and cottons and woolens tossed every which way.

"What in hell?" I demanded of Laura. I shivered deeply at an especially brisk gust.

She was clicking away with my Leicia, and she didn’t bother to look up when she answered me. "Shooting my triumphant return to the limelight. It’s called Crucified for Fashion."

"Oh, here we go with that again."

The moisture had continued dripping, unabated, down my face. I put out my tongue and caught a drop of it.

"I’m bleeding! What have you done to me?"

Laura stopped shooting, looked up with a dreamy and utterly deranged smile at my right hand, which I depended on almost as greatly as my eyes in my work. I turned to follow her gaze, and when I saw my hand I knew where I was, knew why I was bare-breasted and bleeding like a stuck pig from half a dozen places, why I was teetering on an unsteady stack of books on top of a kitchen chair.

The heads of two tenpenny nails protruded from my extended palm.

The Fashion in question was all over the floor at my feet.

And I was being crucified, not for fashion, but for Laura Mars’ hopeless desire for rehabilitation. I had no doubt that when she was done she would leave me there to hang until I died, or until I decided to cripple myself to be free and kicked over the books, let my own weight tear me off the wall . Either way, I would no longer be an obstacle to Laura.

I screamed, hopelessly, and then I think I blacked out again.

The building had originally been constructed to house the manufacturing plant of the Creamette’s Macaroni Company and for some reason oaken beams had been built into the loadbearing walls. I had no idea why, perhaps it had been to anchor machinery. In any case, in my loft area, the beams bisected to form the shape of a cross. It was this configuration that she had nailed me to.

I don’t know how long I hung there, drifting in and out of consciousness. Laura shot endless rolls of film, squeezing every drop of value from the sight of me up there. Once in a while she would jab me, to freshen the flow of blood from the gash in my side or from my hands and head by making me jump. I felt myself getting weaker as the hours passed, knew then that her last shots would be of me dead.

"Sara...Sara...!"

Footsteps, running up the stairs, John’s voice shouting my name and sounding frightened.

"John!" My voice was barely audible. "John! Is that you!"

Neville kicked my poor double doors open and leaped into the room, followed by a couple of Minneapolis’ finest. The world stopped.

"Sara...one of you get an ambulance...Sara, how..." John said. One of the uniforms thumbed his radio, asked for EMT’s.

"I didn’t believe her, John. I’m sorry, Sara."

"God, Laura...why this? Why her??" John asked.

"She wanted my career. I had to stay ahead of her, and I knew she would never be smart enough to think of the things I did. Then you came on the scene and we were so right together and then I realized she wanted you and would take you, too. So first I had to involve her...and then you came and told me that you knew the truth..."

"I told you I was going to give you a chance to run, that I did not want to be the one to arrest you," John finished.

"And I saw a way both to remove suspicion from myself and to make sure that she never had you as well. By killing Neville, I killed two birds with one stone."

"I cannot believe you destroyed your own life for that reason. I never saw her that way," John told her. "I would have closed the case and ridden off into the sunset. There was no room in my life for a nineteen year old child."

Laura turned astounded and victorious eyes on me. Did she honestly think that Neville would take up with her again? It appeared so, almost.

"There could, on the other hand, be plenty of room for an almost forty year old woman," John continued, slowly. I assumed that was meant to let Laura know she hadn’t a chance in hell. I didn’t for a minute think he meant it.

"She won’t survive the evening," Laura screamed. She turned and leveled the .38 at me, and the Minneapolis cop fired before John could say a word. It was a clumsy shot and I was glad I had nothing in my stomach. I would have vomited it all up when the 9mm slug tore out the better part of Laura’s throat. She was dead before she hit the floor.

John immediately lost interest in Laura, stepped past the gory remains like they were so much garbage. He stood below me, staring up at me with fright in his eyes.

"John...help me," I whispered, whimpering. I hated to whimper, but my legs were going to give out.

"I don’t want to use a claw hammer," John said, his voice strained. He had apparently spotted the one Laura had used to nail me up.

"I’ll fall, John...and it’ll tear my hands apart."

The books started to slide then. The ambulance attendants barreled in with a gurney, stood and watched as a crazed man took a claw hammer to a naked, screaming woman and pried her down from the wall, then carried her tenderly out to his rental car to drive her to the hospital himself.

My hands are still very stiff. I can only take photographs on a limited basis most days, and not at all when it is cold. But I have photographed Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Richard Scavullo has complimented my work, and so I have seen it in Vogue. It is enough for me right now. John says the sky’s the limit now, and I think he might be right.."