from behind the slenderest of blinds. The sensation was heightened when he suddenly stopped and turned toward the mirror that shielded me. I held my breath. He began to approach. Not me, I reassured myself. He can’t possibly see me while the light’s off on my side. It’s his reflection.
It was all I could do to keep from running away. At the same time, I was fascinated, dying to know what Paul would do. The tension that built up on both sides of the mirror was electric. Every hair on the back of my neck was standing up.
He seemed to be drawn by something he saw in the mirror, and he approached it almost reverentially. He locked eyes with his own reflection, but given that he was standing in front of me, it was as though he was actually staring into mine. I didn’t dare move. Paul leaned over and gently touched his forehead to the glass, slowly rocking from one side to another, still maintaining eye contact with his reflection.
He reached over finally and gently brushed the glass with the back of his fingers, as if he were caressing the cheek of someone he saw there. Beyond the mirror. He rested his palm against the glass as I stared right into his unseeing eyes.
“Oh, baby,” he whispered. “Where have you taken us now?”
I shivered as my own private horror movie played, forcing me to watch things I found grotesque and inexplicable. Reality as I knew it was distorted, turning inside out and parading itself before, daring me to pick out the truth. I was trapped in a web of voyeuristic intimacy. This was too private to bear and too hypnotic to flee.
The spell was broken abruptly when the door opened behind Paul and he hastily composed himself as Officer Campbell entered the room.
Then I turned and ran out of the observation room, Alice escaping from Looking Glass Land, where everything was recognizable but too sinister to be familiar. I almost ran smack into Detective Kobrinski, who was coming to fetch me.
She shook her head. “Something else, huh?”
“Ladies’ room. Where?” I managed to gasp out.
“Down the hall, second door on the left,” she answered, stepping back out of my way.
The door opened as I was reaching for the coarse brown paper towels on the sink. Detective Kobrinski came in and shut the door, leaning back against it quietly while I dried my hands and face. After a moment, she said, “You sick?”
“No.” I looked into my bag, to avoid looking in yet another mirror, and found a comb I didn’t even know I had. I combed out my hair by feel, even if it didn’t really need it.
Pam looked quietly triumphant, convinced she had the right guy. I was no longer so sure, in spite of the weird confidence Paul had unknowingly just shared with me.
“Quite a case, huh? That guy is about as cold as they come.”
“Sounds like the Paul I knew,” I said, putting my comb away. I turned to her. “But after you left…” I told the detective what I’d seen. “It was downright eerie,” I concluded.
She took it in and nodded once or twice. “You know, I wouldn’t trust that guy as far as I could spit him,” she said thoughtfully. “Guys like that honestly don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong, and that gives their words the ring of truth. As far as they believe, they didn’t do anything and can’t understand what all the trouble is about.”
“This was eerie,” I repeated. I didn’t yet have the words to explain what convinced me that she was on the wrong track.
“I wonder,” the detective mused. “Everyone knows that those mirrors are two-way. It was probably just a little performance for whoever was back there. You told me what he was like. And I’ll be able to review it on the videotape, too.”
I shivered. “I don’t know. I know I might have said I remembered that he had been calculating, but I don’t think anyone is that good a liar. Something was going on there, something that we don’t entirely understand yet.”
Kobrinski waved my doubts aside. “In any case, it will all be cleared up when I speak to the folks in Michigan. Look, Ms. Russo will be done with her statement in a minute, and the two of you can get back to Shrewsbury.” She put her hand on my arm and looked genuinely touched for the first time, not evasive, not sarcastic. “Emma. You’ve done