Full Dark, No Stars

As if I’d know. I’ve got a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut and an advanced degree in old lady detectives who spend at least a quarter of each book exchanging recipes I crib

from the Internet and then change just enough so I won’t get sued for plagiarism. I could go into a coma or die of a brain hemorrhage in the night. Patsy would find me the next time she came in to

feed the cat. You need to see a doctor, Tessa Jean. And you know it.

What she knew was that if she went to her doctor, her misfortune real y could become public property. Doctors guaranteed confidentiality, it was a part of their oath, and a woman who made her living

as a lawyer or a cleaning woman or a Realtor could probably count on getting it. Tess might get it herself, it was certainly possible. Probable, even. On the other hand, look what had happened to Farrah Fawcett: tabloid-fodder when some hospital employee blabbed. Tess herself had heard rumors about the psychiatric misadventures of a male novelist who had been a chart staple for years with his tales

of lusty derring-do. Her own agent had passed the juiciest of these rumors on to Tess over lunch not two months ago… and Tess had listened.

I did more than listen, she thought as she looked at her magnified, beaten self. I passed that puppy on just as soon as I could.

Even if the doctor and his staff kept mum about the lady mystery writer who had been beaten, raped, and robbed on her way home from a public appearance, what about the other patients who might

see her in the waiting room? To some of them she wouldn’t be just another woman with a bruised face that practical y screamed beating; she would be Stoke Vil age’s resident novelist, you know the one,

they made a TV movie about her old lady detectives a year or two ago, it was on Lifetime Channel, and my God, you should have seen her.

Her nose wasn’t broken, after al . It was hard to believe anything could hurt that badly and not be broken, but it wasn’t. Swol en (of course, poor thing), and it hurt, but she could breathe through it and she had some Vicodin upstairs that would manage the pain tonight. But she had a couple of blooming shiners, a bruised and swol en cheek, and a ring of bruises around her throat. That was the worst, the sort of necklace people got in only one way. There were also assorted bumps, bruises, and scratches on her back, legs, and tushie. But clothes and hose would hide the worst of those.

Great. I’m a poet and I don’t know it.

“The throat… I could wear a turtleneck…”

Absolutely. October was turtleneck weather. As for Patsy, she could say she’d fal en downstairs and hit her face in the night. Say that—

“That I thought I heard a noise and Fritzy got between my feet when I went downstairs to check.”

Fritzy heard his name and meowed from the bathroom door.

“Say I hit my stupid face on the newel post at the bottom. I could even…”

Even put a little mark on the post, of course she could. Possibly with the meat-tenderizing hammer she had in one of her kitchen drawers. Nothing gaudy, just a tap or two to chip the paint. Such a story wouldn’t fool a doctor (or a sharp old lady detective like Doreen Marquis, doyenne of the Knitting Society), but it would fool sweet Patsy McC, whose husband had surely never raised a hand to her a single time in the twenty years they’d been together.

“It’s not that I have anything to be ashamed about,” she whispered at the woman in the mirror. The New Woman with the crooked nose and the puffy lips. “It’s not that.” True, but public exposure would

make her ashamed. She would be naked. A naked victim.

But what about the women, Tessa Jean? The women in the pipe?

She would have to think about them, but not tonight. Tonight she was tired, in pain, and harrowed to the bottom of her soul.

Deep inside her (in her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. The man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and

knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment’s hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger.

- 18 -

She chipped at the newel post with the meat-tenderizing hammer, by then so tired she felt like a dream in some other woman’s head. She examined the mark, decided it looked too deliberate, and