One Cold Night

she could take her daughter’s hand between both of hers.
    “Darling, I don’t think you need to worry about Dave. He’s a good man and I believe he will handle this just fine.”
    “I know, Mom. I should have told him sooner, but I wanted to tell Lisa first. It seemed only right.”
    “Of course it was right.”
    “I hoped it would make her happy.”
    Carole smiled sadly. “It’s a big helping of information all at once.”
    “Maybe it was too much; maybe she would have been better off not knowing; maybe—”
    “She was going to look. She would have found you. You just spared her the trouble.”
    Spared her the trouble by dumping another trouble right on her, Susan was thinking when the doorbell rang. She opened the door and looked into the hall,but no one was there. On the floor, propped against the baseboard, was a flat cardboard FedEx envelope. She picked it up and saw that it was addressed to her. The return address was nothing but a messy blue scrawl in the upper left corner: Bronx.
    She sat down at the table and pulled the paper zipper across the top of the envelope. She wasn’t expecting anything, but sometimes she got business mail at home. Across the table, her father’s spoon clinked against his cup. Her mother jostled the roses into a prettier arrangement. Susan reached inside the envelope.
    Inside was a single sheet of lined yellow paper, frayed across the top. It was a letter, dated that very day.
    Dear Susan,
By now you know I’m gone. I am not alone. I am with the only man who will ever really love me. Tonight we will marry and then we will be joined for eternity. A closed casket will be best. I belong to Him now.
    Lisa
    Susan felt light-headed as her eyes skipped across the unfamiliar script, round and upright like rows of eggs. There was a wispy quality, as if someone had applied only enough pressure to make the words visible on the page.
    “What’s wrong, Suzie?” Bill said. He scraped back his chair; Carole followed, and they came around the table to stand behind Susan and read over her shoulder. Soon Carole’s wailing voice filled the loft as she buckled into Bill’s arms.
    Susan reread the letter carefully.
    A closed casket. To hide what? Mutilated bodies sped through her mind, torn from a lifetime of accumulated imagery. Her brain was a TV turning thousands of channels; a magazine flipping decades of pages; billboards flashing past for years; headlines and lyrics and footsteps plodding on a deserted street; unheard screams. The images poured into her consciousness at an astounding rate. She hadn’t known they were inside her, and now she couldn’t push them back. She squeezed shut her eyes and tried and tried not to see Lisa’s body taken apart bit by bit, by him, in some twisted revenge.
    But was Peter really capable of such violence?
    She thought of Becky Rothka and became confused: Did this mean that he, Susan’s first lover, the father of her only child, had killed a girl before? It was impossible to believe. And yet...
    She dropped the letter onto the table and ran into the bathroom. Kneeling over the toilet, she retched out her insides, all of them: stomach, brain, beliefs, hopes, intentions. After splashing her face with cold water and rinsing her mouth, she returned to the dining table and picked up the yellow sheet. She read the letter once again.
    “Mom? Does Peter Adkins’s name ever come up back home?”
    “We live so far away now,” Carole answered. “I almost never run into his people. As far as I know he got a job somewhere, moved away.”
    “Moved where?”
    “Well, I don’t know. Away.”
    “Do either of you think there’s any chance Peter found out about Lisa?”
    “We bent over backward making sure that boy never found out!” Bill said. “What are you saying, Suzie?”
    “You don’t think it’s him? ” Carole asked. “Suzie, you knew him best. Could he really do something like this?”
    “I never thought so,” Susan whispered. “I have no idea.”
    Back then he had seemed capable of anything, which was largely what attracted her to him; he was powerful and he had enormous dreams.
    Carole’s tears started again and the two women succumbed together, reaching for each other’s arms, drawing close. Behind her, Susan heard her father leave the room. He returned a moment later with the two detectives and gestured to the letter, which lay crooked and ugly on the table. They read it silently.
    “Anyone call the chief yet?”
    “I’ll