know that. I mean I didn’t know her name.”
“She was one of those students that stay after class and ask you more questions about what you’ve been teaching. She probably did it because she was too shy to ask the questions in class, but, still, she had a genuine intellectual curiosity.”
“Is she . . . dead?”
“Oh, no. Sorry. I think I always refer to my students in the past tense. No, she’s fine, as far as I know. She didn’t come back to the five-year reunion, but one of her friends said she’s in law school down in D.C. and doing well. I like to think she’ll become a prosecutor and go after men like Dustin Miller.”
“She won’t have to go after him, though. You took care of that.”
“Yes, I did. Right before he died I said Courtney’s name to him so that he would know why he was dying.” Saying those words out loud felt immensely satisfying, and Matthew worked to not let it show on his face. To not smile.
“And you think he knew in that moment. You think that he wasn’t just utterly terrified.”
Matthew leaned forward a little. “If all he felt was utter terror, then I still did my job. He was a bad man. He was going to make many, many women miserable.”
“But wasn’t there a possibility that he would change? That maybe what happened with the student at your school, as horrible as it was, was just a one-time thing? Maybe he would have gone on to get married, raise children, become an okay person.”
“First of all, what he did to Courtney was enough. For that he deserved to die. You know, I overheard him make a joke about her after she left school. He and his friend were talking about which girl had the biggest breasts now that Courtney was gone. They didn’t use the word breast, of course. No, trust me. He was a bad person. Personalities don’t change. Do you remember the night you came over for dinner with your husband? You asked me about teaching, and I said something about how wonderful it is to watch kids grow up before my eyes, the changes that take place between freshman year and senior year?”
“I remember that.”
“It’s only partly true. I watch these kids mature, watch them go from awkward adolescence into adulthood, but what I never see is their personalities change. They are who they are. If they are kind their freshman year—even if they make mistakes or get in trouble—then they are kind senior year. It goes the other way as well. I knew that Dustin Miller was going to be an abuser of women his whole life, before I even heard what he’d done to Courtney in St. Louis. It was just in him. It was the same way with my father—he preyed on the weak.” Matthew felt his voice rising, and he took a breath, told himself to talk at a lower volume. “Nothing would ever change that fact. He was what he was.”
“And you changed him? You changed Dustin Miller?”
“Yes, I did. I changed him from the living to the dead.”
“That’s, uh, a pretty big change. Lots of people probably think like you do, but not many people act on it.”
“I’m not like many people.”
She hadn’t touched her beer since sitting down, but she looked at it now and took a small swallow. “Do you think you can stop?”
“Stop killing people?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re here, because you think you can stop me?”
“I’m here because you asked me to meet with you, because you said you wanted to tell the truth to someone. I assumed that maybe you wanted to unburden yourself of some guilt, maybe find a way to stop what you’re doing.”
“I can see why you’d think that, but that wasn’t why I wanted to talk with you. I thought, maybe, that you’d understand what it is that I do. I’ve seen your artwork, and I thought—”
“You think you’re some kind of artist as well.”
“No. I don’t. I don’t think that, but I do know that when I kill someone—when I do it well enough—that what I feel afterward is close to the way I feel when I look at a piece of perfect art.”
“Why is that?”
“You must know the feeling. When you create something—like that picture you drew of the teenage girl looking in the mirror and seeing herself with the . . . with the . . .”
“With the deer horns.”
“Yes. When you first