Paul Solomon walked up the cobblestone path to Susan's front door with a knife in his hand. It wasn't the knife, but it was from the same set. He didn't plan to use it. He merely wanted to confront the woman. When he recovered the deleted text on his computer, Paul knew that he had to meet with her. After putting it off for several days, he'd called Susan on the telephone, and with considerable effort, had kept his voice calm and quiet.
"I need to see you," he'd said.
"Okay," Susan had replied. "Just give me some time to get dressed. Be here in an hour."
His neighbor had sounded normal, maybe a little too normal. He'd heard no grief in her voice. As Paul rapped on her door on that bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, he wondered exactly what he was going to say. Eventually, he knew he would ask the question. "Did you murder my wife, your own best friend?" Ultimately, those words, or similar, would leave his lips. Unless, unless something she said or did convinced him that he was wrong. And surely, he had to be wrong. Carolyn's murder had been too bizarre, too twisted. Susan just couldn't have anything to do with it, could she?
He heard Susan coming to the door and, with a sudden pang of guilt over what he'd suspected, he shoved the knife deep in his jacket pocket.
The woman who answered the door was not the person he expected. The sensible Susan Barfield, a woman in her mid-thirties, a woman who'd always been like an older sister to Paul and his wife, was gone. Today, she was dressed in a translucent nightgown with ultra-provocative, spiked, high-heel shoes. Her dark hair, always previously tied up in a tight, conservative bun, now cascaded freely over her shoulders. The effect was stunning, startling, erotic, and wholly inappropriate.
There was a diamond-shaped opening in the gown which revealed her creamy, white navel. This was cruelly ironic, since Carolyn had been stabbed in the stomach and, according to the police, left to slowly bleed to death on the carpet in their suburban living room. Surely, there was no doubt at this point. Susan had killed his wife.
"Come in, my wicked boy," she said. She grabbed him by the belt buckle and pulled him inside. An instant later, she pushed back the open jacket, pressed her athletic body again his chest and kissed him with a hot, open mouth. "Oh, Paul, I've wanted this for so long," she said. "Carolyn is gone, but now we can be together, forever."
Almost against his will, Paul found himself returning her kisses, found himself becoming aroused.
He felt a sudden horror of self-loathing and tried to push her away but she clung to him, tenaciously.
Paul glanced over her shoulder at the Renoir print which hung on the wall in her living room. The picture of a young woman in a garish nineteenth century ballroom added much to the decadent feel of the moment. "Susan, Susan don't do this," he said. She answered his protests by unbuttoning the front of his shirt and tenderly kissing his naked chest.
"You shouldn't have come here . . . not so soon after what happened our little precious doll," she said. "But, but I'm glad you did. I want to feel your power. Hurt me. Hurt me, lover."
Little precious doll. That had been her pet name for Carolyn. "You crazy bitch!" Paul said in a loud, hoarse, irrational voice. "You killed my wife!". He grabbed Susan by the hair and slapped her hard across the face. She staggered and fell back on her elegant, over-stuffed davenport.
"Yes, Paul. I love it," she said. He moved to her and slapped her face again, even harder, this second time.
"Oh, do it again!" she said.
A third slap was followed by a fourth and a fifth. In reaction to the blows, her hand brushed against a flowered throw pillow and knocked it off the couch.
Paul took a deep, calming breath and looked over at Susan. Her lip was now split and swollen. A trickle of blood oozed out of the corner of her mouth and she wiped it off with the back of her hand.
"It feels so good, wicked boy. So very good. Please, hurt me some more."
Paul reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the knife. "I'll hurt you all right. Just like you did to Carolyn." He lurched forward and, zeroing in on her exposed belly, thrust the knife into her body. Blood poured from the wound like strawberry syrup over a dish of ice cream.
Susan began to moan in pain as Paul looked down at the red which now covered his knife. Suddenly horrified, he dropped the weapon onto Susan's plush, gold carpet. Meanwhile, his victim pulled herself to her feet in an almost inhuman display of determination and strength, and staggering forward, threw her arms around Paul's neck. She pressed against his chest, planted a last, weak kiss on his lips, then fell to the floor. Paul looked down at his shirt and saw an incriminating stain from Susan's wound, smeared across its front.
He looked down at the woman. Strangely enough, there was a smile on her face, but that smile quickly began to fade as more and more of her life poured from her stomach. She turned deathly pale and her features became a mask of pain. He grinned with satisfaction and wagged a finger at her.
"Paybacks are hell, Susan," he said. Haven't you ever heard that expression? Now, you'll suffer just like you made Carolyn suffer. " According to the cops, it had taken Carolyn twenty or thirty minutes to die. His wife had been stabbed once, only once, with a knife from her own kitchen, but the cut had been deep, painful and ultimately fatal. She'd bled to death while her killer calmly stood by and watched. It was only right that Susan should suffer the same fate.
"Paul, you know what happened to Carolyn. I loved her, almost as much as I love you," she said." Susan touched her bloody naval and her fingers turned bright red. "And I didn't kill her."
The words were a lie, they had to be. No fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, but the computer had been left on in the living room when Carolyn died. Hungry for clues, the police scoured the hard drive, hoping that Carolyn had tried to leave a note on it, or
that the killer used it somehow, taking a file or seeking information. No such file was found, however. It may have been deleted, but the police couldn't recover anything with the machine's undelete utility. Fortunately, Paul had a little more computer knowledge and a lot more luck. He knew that his Windows system might have left a trace of a deleted file in its temp directory, so after the cops left him, he ran an exhaustive search and found the following text fragment:
"...st standing there.
She fell down for the first time after 4 minutes.
She stopped trying to stand up again after 10 minutes.
She wanted to take her shoes off but I wouldn't let her unbuckle the straps.
My little precious doll may be stained but we mustn't lose any parts!
I told h...".
The fragment had been hauntingly familiar to him. He could almost hear Susan's voice as he read it to himself. "Of course you killed Carolyn, Susan-dear. I saw your note."
"What note?"
"Your note on the computer. The one you tried to delete. You referred to Carolyn as your 'little precious doll.' Who else calls her that?"
"You do, wicked boy," she said in a weak, quiet little voice. "That's what you've always called her."
"No. No, she was your precious doll, not mine, Susan."
"She was our precious doll, wicked boy. And the three of us could have been so happy together. If only this hadn't happened, if only . . ." Her eyes fluttered shut.
"Susan. Susan!" He called out her name to no avail. The woman had lost consciousness. Blood began to drip off her body and puddle onto the carpet. She'd fallen directly underneath her crystal chandelier and its gleaming gemstones pointed at her like accusing fingers.
Paul tried to think. He'd been out of town when Carolyn was murdered. Her carpool mate had found her remains. Paul had been hundreds of miles away, in another city. Which city? It may have been Portland. In his confusion and emotional exhaustion, he couldn't quite remember. But he'd definitely been out of town.
No. Susan had killed Carolyn. Susan had lusted after him for months, lusted after them both. Carolyn would never have agreed to a menage a trois. So Susan had to get Carolyn out of the way.
Maybe it was partly Paul's fault. Maybe he'd given Susan a little too much encouragement. There had been an occasional kiss, an infrequent caress, a few friendly slaps on her shapely rump. That didn't excuse what she did. That didn't make up for the death of his wife.
Paul knelt down and rested his hands on the unconscious woman's thigh. Her flesh was warm and inviting. He knelt over to kiss and lick the still-oozing wound. Blood stuck to his mouth like gory red-brown lipstick.
Susan kept her own computer in the corner of living room, on an antique mahogany desk. Paul walked over to the machine, booted it up, then began to type a few words.
"She kissed me and I slapped her. I slapped our Susan-dear again and again. Then my knife became my manhood and plunged into her sweet flesh.
She stood and held me in a final embrace, but she was weak and could not stand for long. It was all over in 5 minutes, maybe 10.
She passed away too quickly, but even death could not mar her beauty."
Paul read what he had written, then deleted the file from the computer and turned his attention toward the dead woman. He picked up his knife, wiped its handle clean of fingerprints and laid it back down on the carpet.
Paul then lifted Susan's body and set it on the couch, smoothed out her nightgown and brushed wisps of dark hair out of her face. He grabbed a cloth from the kitchen and carefully wiped the blood from her fingers. In fairness to Susan, everything had to be absolutely perfect. A second precious doll was stained, but he made sure that she still looked her very best.
[end]