thinning eyebrows. Despite the sweltering heat, Angela had taken to wearing jeans and long shirts in lieu of shorts and tank tops in order to hide the bloody scabs that marked her shoulders and thighs from her nervous scratching.
The masking of her symptoms, however, was a venomous crutch that made things worse. The better Angela was able to conceal her habits of self-mutilation, the more dramatic her dependency on them became. She tried to stop herself with subtle tricks that had worked in the past. She kept the tips of her fingers slick with Vaseline to make more difficult the grasping of her eyebrow follicles. And she clipped her nails down to the soft pads of her fingers to make them benign tools as she dug into her skin. She was managing thus far to keep the worst of her breakdown hidden.
The vomiting, however, was becoming a problem. Thomas noticed it the other morning. When he checked on her, Angela had told him it was the result of bad Chinese food. In reality, the nausea came every time she worked herself into a frenzy with thoughts of the stranger from the alley. Each morning after Thomas left for work, Angela spent hours pulling the curtains of the kitchen door to the side so she could stare out into the alley. A routine developed: pull curtain, check alley, secure lock, lift phone, listen for dial tone, repeat. The only thing that broke the cycle was the need to vomit. Her stomach turned whenever the image popped into her mind of the man standing in the alley and peering through the open garage door and into her kitchen, which sent her to the bathroom in violent flurries of retching.
It was during a rare moment of lucidity a week after her encounter in the alley, when Angela had discovered an expired bottle of Valium from her previous doctor. Swallowing a tablet every six hours, Angela found, took the edge off, allowed her to sleep at night, and brought her mind back from the encounter in the garage. It was a temporary fix until she could reason with herself and calm her mind. She had beaten the obsessiveness before. She could do it again.
Under the calming effects of the Valium, Angela convinced herself that it was possible, and even likely, that her encounter in the alley was nothing more than a Good Samaritan offering his help. And it was very unlikely that the horror of the missing women could stretch this far out to the fringe of the city limits, where she lived a quiet life. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her shaking fingers as she poured her morning coffee. She stopped her gaze before she could look for the hundredth time out the back window and into the alley. Instead, she forced her thoughts to focus on the missing women and the profiles she had created. It had been days since she thought of them.
She retrieved the press clippings from the chest in her bedroom and spread them across the kitchen table. For two hours, Angela studied the missing women and the notes she had made about each of them. Perhaps it was the clean slate of her mind coming off a lost week of paranoia, or the Valium freeing her thoughts to flow in ways they hadn’t in the weeks before, but as she read through the profiles, she saw something she had missed previously. Her mind ran through the catalogued information, like scrolling through microfilm at the library. Articles she had read over the past years suddenly came together in her mind and she saw a pattern that had always been there, waiting to be discovered, but to this point had gone unnoticed. Her mind raced and she jotted notes, but the bleached-out exertion from fighting her OCD for the last week had frayed her neurons and brought self-doubt. Surely, she was wrong.
Pushing her insecurities aside, Angela scribbled notes frantically as thoughts spilled from her mind, fearful that if she didn’t capture them on the page they’d be lost forever. She recalled with great clarity the newspaper articles she had read years earlier and scribbled names and dates from the images that sped through her mind. When she finished, she looked at the clock. It was approaching the noon hour. She had sat down at the kitchen table three hours ago, but it felt like only minutes.
Quickly dressing in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Angela stuffed her notes into her purse. A wave of nausea came over her as she imagined leaving the house, but she had no choice. She had to get to the library to confirm her suspicions. She knew, too, she would have to take another precaution. She needed confirmation that her thoughts were lucid and coherent, and not the result of her paranoia. And that confirmation could come from only one person.
Angela picked up the phone and dialed her friend Catherine’s number.
“Hello?”
“Catherine,” Angela said in a soft voice.
“Angela?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Are you feeling better? Thomas told Bill that you’ve been ill since the night we had dinner together.”
Perhaps, Angela considered, she hadn’t been hiding her symptoms as well as she imagined.
“I’m fine, but I need to talk with you. Can we meet?”
“Sure. Is something wrong?”
“No. I just need some help. Can I stop by in a while?”
“Of course,” Catherine said.
Angela hung up without saying good-bye, ran to the bathroom, and then vomited.
CHICAGO
August 1979
ANGELA MITCHELL SPENT TWO HOURS AMONG THE LIBRARY SHELVES, pulling books and skimming pages. She sat at the microfilm station and spun old rolls of newspaper articles that dated back to the summer of 1970, nearly a decade earlier. She scribbled notes until her uncanny mind saw clearly the pattern she suspected existed. She spent thirty minutes plotting her findings onto graph paper and creating a line chart that translated her findings to paper form so others might understand her discovery.
She organized her notes, returned the microfilm to the shelf, and hurried from the library. Catherine’s house was just two blocks from her own, and at 3:00 P.M., Angela pushed through the wrought iron gate that led to the front stoop. Even before Angela could knock, Catherine opened the door.
“Woman, it’s ninety degrees outside,” Catherine said as Angela walked up the front steps. “Why are you covered in denim?”
Angela looked at her jeans and button-down shirt. She was less concerned with how her fashion choices would react to the sweltering heat as she was with hiding the scabbed-over claw marks that covered her arms and legs.
“I’m behind on laundry,” she finally said.
“Come into the air conditioning.” Catherine pushed open the screen door and waved Angela inside.
They sat at the kitchen table. “So what got you so sick? Stomach bug?”
“Yes,” Angela said, glancing quickly into Catherine’s eyes, her first bit of eye contact, then back down to the table. “But I’ve been over it for the last few days. You know how Thomas worries.”
Thomas had pushed hard during the first year or two of marriage for Angela to mix with his friends’ wives. But Angela had always felt judged by them. They whispered about her when they thought she wasn’t listening, and treated her like a child when she didn’t respond to their boisterous ways. Catherine Blackwell was different. Angela felt accepted when she was with Catherine, who never asked foolish questions or gave confused looks when Angela grew quiet with anxiety. Catherine had always made her feel comfortable, and stood by her whenever anyone treated Angela badly. The first time the two ventured to lunch together, a condescending waitress had scolded Angela for not speaking loudly enough.
Speak up, honey.
Her
