Innocence

After she had been reduced to blackened bones and greasy ashes in the abandoned rock quarry that he’d found well outside the city, he would return the car to the garage. He would go into the house to open the front door and leave it that way, with some object belonging to the girl left on the threshold to prevent the door from closing. He would depart by a side entrance. After an investigation, the police would believe that the highly neurotic and fearful daughter, having found her father dead, fled the house. And when they never found her… Well, it was a big and sometimes dangerous city where thirteen-year-old girls, possessing more street smarts than Gwyneth, disappeared with regularity.

The curator was surprised not by his depraved desire or by his capacity for extreme violence, but he was amazed at how quickly and elegantly—and with what cunning detail—he planned the disposal of her corpse. He almost felt as if there might be a second self within him, another and even more confident J. Ryan Telford who had been waiting, perhaps impatiently, for him to recognize their combined potential.

Now, on the night of the murder, Telford went from the kitchen into the house manager’s office. He found a desk drawer divided into compartments and devoted to keys: those for the four vehicles, for the front door, and for numerous other locks, all tagged and clearly labeled.

He did not use the elevator, lest he alert Gwyneth, but climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. The landing offered a single door that granted access to her apartment. As quietly as possible, he disengaged the lock, entered a foyer, and closed the door behind him.

Leaving the foyer, Telford found himself in a large drawing room furnished with antiques and emblazoned with at least a score of huge red poinsettias to provide it with the spirit of the season. The girl admired poinsettias, and her father gave her everything he could to compensate for her cloistered existence.

The curator found her on a window seat in her bedroom, back against the niche wall, legs drawn up on the upholstered seat, in full Goth, the cityscape as her backdrop. She was reading a book.

The instant Gwyneth saw him, she knew that something monstrous had happened to her father and that something no less horrific might soon happen to her. She realized that a mere scream would not save her, and that her only chance would be to encourage him to believe that she was even weaker, more shy, and more timid than he thought.

As he approached her, she looked down at the book, as if she were so detached from the world that she didn’t understand what his appearance meant, and she pretended to read, although in such a way that he would know it was mere pretense and that she was afraid. He pushed a button on a wall plate and put down the automatic pleated shades that covered the windows beside her. He sat on the window seat near her feet and watched her pretend to read, enjoying her attempt to hide her fear.

After a minute or two, he told her that her father was dead, and he described in detail what he had done and the consequence of a good dose of oleander toxin. Because he wanted so much to see her grief, she grew determined to deny him tears. She failed to have that degree of self-control, and the tears came, although she didn’t sob or make any sound. By the thirst in Telford’s voice, Gwyneth knew that her tears excited him. She made no effort to blink them away, for they had become a tool with which to manipulate and deceive him.

He didn’t touch her yet. From what her father had told him, he knew the anguish that the slightest touch would cause her; therefore, he savored the dread with which she anticipated his hand on her skin.

In fact, when he finished telling her about her father’s fate, he began to explain what he was going to do to her, where he would caress her and all of the ways by which he would enter her. “When I’m finished with you, cutie, you’ll wonder why a simple touch once offended you, and you’ll feel soiled so deeply that there will be no hope of ever being clean again. It’ll feel like not just one man violated you, but as if the whole world rubbed up against you and used you.”

She didn’t need to fake her tremors. The pages of the book rattled in her hands, and she put it down beside her, though she still did not look at him. She crossed her arms over her breasts.

He spoke of a certain pleasure that a girl could give to a man, and he asked her if she had ever dreamed of doing that. He had a list of obscene questions, and he kept pressing them upon her so that it almost felt as if he were touching her.