to her normal routine of nurse's duties at the little hospital in our family's town, teaching Sunday school, and dating a local pharmacist.
For a month longer, I stayed with my parents, with my belongings stored in their attic and toolshed. There was a healing quality in the house with the big front porch and the rose garden, the known neighbors. But most of those neighbors found it impossible to be natural around me; the best managed it, but the sheer horror of my victimization defeated the rest.
I tried hard not to be a tragic figure, tried desperately to reclaim my past, but I finally acknowledged defeat. I had to leave Bartley, to forget Memphis, to go somewhere new.
"And why did you pick Shakespeare?" Marshall asked me.
"The name," I said, almost surprised that someone else was with me. I pulled my T-shirt back over my head. "My name is Bard, as in the Bard of Avon. This is Shakespeare."
"You picked it off the map like that?"
I nodded, stood. "I'd tried a couple of places earlier that didn't work out, so random selection seemed as good a method as any." I stood still for a moment. It was such an effort to move.
"I'll see you later," I said. "I don't want to talk any more now." I lifted the bag with my gi and obi inside and strode out, not forgetting to turn and bow as I reached the door.
I drove home automatically, trying to keep my mind blank. It had been years since I had told my story, years since I had relived it in full. They had been good years, having people look at me quite normally, as if I was a full woman, not a thing, not a victim.
Now Chief Friedrich had indicated he knew who I was, so he knew I'd killed someone. Maybe he'd think I had had some kind of flashback and killed Pardon Albee, too. The pointed question about a personal relationship might mean that he suspected I'd killed Pardon because he'd paid me unwelcome attention. Knowing Pardon, that was a strange idea.
I sat on the side of my bed when I got home. I tried to picture myself as a vigilante, as some kind of - who was the girl who'd been raped in Titus Andronicus? Lavinia... yes, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue had been cut out by her attackers so that she could not reveal their identity. But Lavinia, I remembered, managed to tell her brothers somehow, and served the attackers to their mother as lunch, since the mother had permitted the rape to happen.
I wasn't set on gaining some kind of vengeance on all men for what had happened to me. But I certainly wasn't a trusting person anymore, and I definitely never expected much of people, and I would never be surprised to hear of any perfidy again.
I did not believe in the underlying goodwill of men or the unspoken sisterhood of women.
I did not believe that people everywhere are really the same, or that if you treat people kindly you will get kindness in return.
I did not believe in the sanctity of life.
If all the men were lined up in front of me, the four rapists and the man who cuffed me, and I had a loaded gun ... I would kill them all, I thought. But I'm not scouring biker bars across America and I'm not standing in the post offices looking at wanted posters to see if they've done anything else. I haven't hired a private investigator to look for them.
Did that speak to my sanity, or did that say I would commit murder only if it was convenient? I felt a tingling all over, like a hand that had been asleep prickling as it woke up. I'd felt that before after the times when I couldn't dodge remembering. It was the rest of my personality seeping back into the shell I became when I immersed in the memory.
I turned down my covers, checked that my alarm clock was set, and gratefully crawled into bed. I reached over to switch out the lamp.
I'd kill the woman, too, I thought, feeling a wave of weariness sweep through my body. The woman I'd never seen. The bikers I'd never actually seen, only heard, felt.
But Pardon Albee - could Friedrich really believe I'd kill someone like that, someone I knew in the ordinary course of my life?
Of course he could.
I wondered what weapon had been used to kill the landlord.