Play Dead

And Judy. After all these years, Judy wants to talk about the past. Why? Why couldn’t she just let it be? Why does she insist on keeping the past alive, on helping it thrive with its full wrath intact?

The car exited the highway. The container of kerosene rolled back and forth in the trunk, making a clanking noise when it hit the metallic sides. A book of matches sat on the dashboard. Hamilton was not very far off now.

First Judy.

Then Stan.

Then . . . ?

JUDY made herself a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen. Her eyes glanced at the clock for the third time in the last four minutes:

Six twenty p.m.

If everything went according to schedule, Mark Seidman and Laura would both be arriving in about forty minutes. She realized that she had created a volatile situation by telling them both to be here at the same time. The last few hours had been spent questioning that decision. Judy carefully weighed the risks against the rewards and realized that there was no contest. She had to do it. Enough time had been wasted, enough lives thrashed apart and left to decay in the hot sun.

She took out the Lipton tea bag, read the little health tip on the tag, and tossed the bag into the garbage can. A half teaspoon of sugar and a drop of milk were added. She had hoped to brew up some nice herbal tea. One of the students in her seminar on nineteenth-century American poetry had spent a semester in Asia and had brought her back a whole slew of wonderful teas from mainland China. But, alas, Judy had used them all up already. So it was back to Lipton for today. Tomorrow she would go out to that avant-garde gourmet shop in town and pick up some new herbs.

Tomorrow.

She realized that, like the corny lyrics to that song in Annie, tomorrow was only a day away. And yet it was a lifetime. The Judy who drank tea tomorrow would live in a different world from the one who sat at her table right now. Nothing would be the same. Her life and the lives of those she held dear would be eternally altered—for better or for worse, she could not say.

She sipped the tea, enjoying the feel of the hot liquid sliding down her throat. The hands on the kitchen clock kept trudging forward. Judy was not sure if they were moving too slowly or too quickly. She knew only that the future was coming. Her emotions darted from one extreme to another. One minute, the wait made her nearly burst with anticipation; the next, she dreaded the thought of hearing the inevitable knock on her door.

She picked the key ring off the table and held it front of her. Four keys hung off it: two for the car, one for the house, and one for the safety-deposit box that held her diary from nineteen sixty. Laura was about to learn all about the contents of that diary. She was about to discover the secrets that had been kept from her for so many years. And once she did, Judy prayed it would all be over.

But would it?

Judy took another sip of tea. It tasted bitter.

LAURA’S leg shook, but as usual she did not realize it.

Damn. How much longer before this plane lands? Anxiousness overwhelmed her. She found herself biting her nails, craving a cigarette, reading the boring airline magazine, memorizing the emergency exit locations on the plastic card, learning how to throw up into a paper bag in three different languages.

All of this for a lousy one-hour flight to Hamilton.

The leg continued to rock. The blue-haired woman seated next to Laura shot her an annoyed glance.

Laura stopped her leg. “Sorry,” she said.

The blue-haired woman said nothing.

Laura turned back to the airline magazine. She flipped mindlessly through the pages. There had been no reply to the numerous calls she had placed to Judy last night, save Judy’s voice on an answering machine. What had she meant last night? David had been dead for more than six months. Now, after all this time, Judy wanted to tell her something about his death. But what? What could her aunt possibly know about David’s death?

And the tone of her voice—so frightened. No, more than that. Petrified. And what was all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? What was so important that Aunt Judy could not say it over the telephone? What kind of photographs did she want to show Laura? What was all this talk of the past? Why did Aunt Judy want Laura to wait until seven p.m. today to see her? And how could all of this possibly be connected to David’s death in June?

Too many question. Too few answers.

The blue-haired woman coughed in undisguised irritation.

Laura looked down at her leg. Old Faithful was boogeying again. Her hand reached out and took hold of her knee. The leg slowed before coming to a complete stop.

“Sorry,” Laura offered again.

Ms. Bad Dye glared at her.

Laura returned the glare. Well, fuck you, too, lady.

She turned back to her magazine and continued not to read it. The same thoughts kept racing through her brain. Her suspicions about David’s death now traveled down a new and frightening avenue. Intuition steered her. No longer did things merely appear wrong—they felt wrong. There was a danger here—a danger more horrifying than Laura had previously imagined. She had arrived at a locked closet that held something terrible, something evil, something that threatened to destroy them all. She wanted to run away, to forget that she had ever found this locked door, but her feet were frozen to the floor. Without conscious thought, she reached for the dead bolt. She would soon unlock the closet door, turn the knob, peer inside. There was no turning back now. It was too late to stop.

What was behind the locked door? Laura did not know. In a few minutes the plane would land in Ithaca. A taxi would take her to Aunt Judy. Once there, the closet door would be opened.

THE killer read the sign:COLGATE UNIVERSITY

The car turned tight and entered the campus. The campus was storybook small college. Buildings that would be covered with ivy if it were not for the snow that dotted the barren campus. The place reeked of liberal arts. Students here engaged in intellectual discussions on Hobbes and Locke, on Hegel and Marx, on Tennyson and Browning, on Potok and Bellow. During the day, they went to classes, met friends in the cafeteria, picked up mail at the PO. At night, they studied in the library, flirted during strategic study breaks, had a few beers at a frat house, engaged in whatever with members of the opposite sex.

To these undergrads, nothing existed outside of the campus. Somehow, the whole world with all its problems and complexities had shrunk down into the boundaries of this idyllic upstate campus. And life would never be this good again for most of them. They would never again have a chance to care so passionately about things that did not affect them. They would never again be able to enjoy a dress rehearsal for the real world.

The car slowed. There were very few students around right now. That was good. That was what the killer wanted.