Full Dark, No Stars

This vehicle was a truck, and she began to tremble. She went on trembling even when she saw it was a little white Toyota, nothing at al like the giant’s old Ford. When it was gone, she tried to force herself to walk back to the road, but at first she couldn’t. She was crying again, the tears warm on her chil y face. She felt herself getting ready to step out of the spotlight of awareness once more. She couldn’t let that happen. If she al owed herself to go into that waking blackness too many times, she might eventual y lose her way back.

She made herself think of thanking the limo driver and adding a tip to the credit card form before making her way slowly up the flower-lined walk to her front door. Tilting up her mailbox and taking the extra key from the hook behind it. Listening to Fritzy meow anxiously.

The thought of Fritzy turned the trick. She worked her way out of the bushes and resumed walking, ready to dart back into cover the second she saw more headlights. The very second. Because he

was out there somewhere. She realized that from now on he would always be out there. Unless the police caught him, that was, and put him in jail. But for that to occur she would have to report what had happened, and the moment this idea came into her mind, she saw a glaring black New York Post –style headline:

“WILLOW GROVE” SCRIBE RAPED AFTER LECTURE

Tabloids like the Post would undoubtedly run a picture of her from ten years ago, when her first Knitting Society book had been published. Back then she’d been in her late twenties, with long dark blond hair cascading down her back and good legs she liked to showcase in short skirts. Plus—in the evening—the kind of high-heeled sling-backs some men (the giant for one, almost certainly) referred

to as fuck-me shoes. They wouldn’t mention that she was now ten years older, twenty pounds heavier, and had been dressed in sensible—almost dowdy—business attire when she was assaulted; those

details didn’t fit the kind of story the tabloids liked to tel . The copy would be respectful enough (if panting a trifle between the lines), but the picture of her old self would tel the real story, one that probably pre-dated the invention of the wheel: She asked for it… and she got it.

Was that realistic, or only her shame and badly battered sense of self-worth imagining the worst-case scenario? The part of her that might want to go on hiding in the bushes even if she managed to

get off this awful road and out of this awful state of Massachusetts and back to her safe little house in Stoke Vil age? She didn’t know, and guessed that the true answer lay somewhere in between. One

thing she did know was that she would get the sort of nationwide coverage every writer would like when she publishes a book and no writer wants when she has been raped and robbed and left for dead.

She could visualize someone raising a hand during Question Time and asking, “Did you in any way encourage him?”

That was ridiculous, and even in her current state Tess knew it… but she also knew that if this came out, someone would raise his or her hand to ask, “Are you going to write about this?”

And what would she say? What could she say?

Nothing, Tess thought. I would run off the stage with my hands over my ears.

But no.

No no no.

The truth was she wouldn’t be there in the first place. How could she ever do another reading, lecture, or autographing, knowing that he might turn up, smiling at her from the back row? Smiling from beneath that weird brown cap with the bleach spots on it? Maybe with her earrings in his pocket. Fondling them.

The thought of tel ing the police made her skin burn, and she could feel her face literal y wincing in shame, even out here, alone in the dark. Maybe she wasn’t Sue Grafton or Janet Evanovich, but

neither was she, strictly speaking, a private person. She would even be on CNN for a day or two. The world would know a crazy, grinning giant had shot his load inside of the Wil ow Grove Scribe. Even the fact that he had taken her underwear as a souvenir might come out. CNN wouldn’t report that part, but The National Enquirer or Inside View would have no such compunctions.

Sources inside the investigation say they found a pair of the Scribe’s panties in the accused rapist’s drawer: blue Victoria’s Secret hip-huggers, trimmed with lace.

“I can’t tel ,” she said. “I won’t tel .”

But there were others before you, there could be others after y—