Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 20

EIGHT NURSES MURDERED IN CHICAGO

Normally it was comics or movie magazines;

I don’t know why I reached for True Detective. Something eye-catching on the cover?

Stood, in mid-sixties drugstore fluorescence, and read

about the body of a woman found in an alley,

between trash cans, in what appeared, from the photograph,

to be a run-down neighborhood: there were tall weeds.

I owned several Agatha Christies, had seen murder mysteries

on TV, but this made me feel queasy and strangely ashamed—

wrong to look at or be interested in, like dirty pictures.

But not wrong, not much later, to look at the Los Angeles Times. The drawing reminded me of my Clue board: a floor plan

with furniture and entryways, and arrows

showing the path the intruder took.

Used a glasscutter to score a hole in the pane of a French door,

reached in and unlocked it from the inside.

That was the detail that scared me the most,

what woke the stepmother at 4:50 a.m.—

a shatter of glass. She first thought

one of the children had knocked

a tumbler of water off a nightstand.

Then she heard what she later described as a “baleful moan.”

She got up and followed the sound,

opened a door to discover a man standing over the bed

of the senator’s twenty-one-year-old daughter,

flashlight illumining her blood-soaked body—

bludgeoned and stabbed numerous times.

The intruder shone his light in the stepmother’s eyes,

momentarily blinding her; she ran

screaming for help. He retraced

his path: down a circular staircase, through

a hallway into the music room, then out

the French door.

If that could happen at a senator’s mansion,

what about our house?

I was already sick with fear.

Two months earlier, there’d been the faces

of eight nurses—all yearbook smiles and brunette hair—

on the front page of the paper.

How to explain anything so horrible happening in the world?

I read about the ordeal of the ninth nurse,

how she slid under a bed and hid

while, one by one, he took them from the room.

How she listened to the muffled sounds, then to the silence.

Their bodies, strangled and stabbed, strewn

through the house. How she squirmed free

of the torn sheets binding her wrists and feet, but laid still

the rest of the night, until she was sure he had gone

and the room had turned light.

How she pried open the second-floor window-screen

and crawled out onto the ledge.

How many were woken from sleep by her screams.