Night Corridor by Joan Hall Hovey Page B

own good.
     
    The salmon-colored runner, edged at either end with silky fringes, lay folded atop the other items in the trunk. She picked it up and it slid both weightless and weighty through her fingers, the fringes tickling her wrist, as if tiny insects walked across it. She let it fall beside her on the bed.
     
    Next, was her father's Bible with its black cover and well-turned pages. She held the weight of it in her hands. Every night, they would sit in the parlour and he would read aloud from a passage he'd chosen earlier in the day, his handsome face animated and commanding, like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, while she and her mother sat quiet as mice. His captive audience. His congregation.
     
    She used to imagine that God looked like her father. To the child she was, God and her father were interchangeable. She'd been taught that God was love. As a teenager, she would come to know his wrath.
     
    'You won't be seeing that boy again,' he had bellowed, standing over her in the kitchen that day. 'If you try, I will lock you in your room and nail the windows shut. I'll tie you to a chair if you force me to.'
     
    She saw his flushed face in her mind, the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, his face dark with rage.
     
    She had disgraced them. Demeaned them and herself in the eyes of God and society. 'We will not accept a bastard child into his family.' Scripture rolled off his tongue: 'A bastard child shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord…' She would go away to bear this spawn of Satan, and give it to a Christian family to raise. 'Perhaps if you throw yourself on his mercy, God will forgive you your whoring ways.'
     
    All through his rant, her mother had sat silent and weepy at the table, her hands twisting a tissue into contortions in her lap, of no help. Caroline had felt only contempt for her.
     
    'I am not a whore,' she had cried. 'Please…William and I love each other. We want to get married.'
     
    I hated her far more than I hated him, Caroline thought now. I hated her for her weakness. But she had loved them both too.
     
    Over the next days, as promised, she was locked in her small, windowless room, allowed out only to go to the bathroom. Downstairs, the phone rang and rang, and she knew it was William calling. She rattled her doorknob and begged them to let her talk to him, but her pleas went unheard. She was wild with her need of him, to feel his love, his arms around her, comforting, telling her that everything would be okay. But it was not to be. Once, she heard voices downstairs, one an angry rumble that belonged to her father. The other softer. William's. He was trying to reason with her father. She held a thread of hope, until she heard the door close.
     
    Then, on one impossibly golden summer's day, they drove her to another province where they committed her to a home for unwed mothers. She never heard from William again.
     
    Now, standing over the trunk, tears pricked her eyelids. She batted them away, returned the Bible to the trunk and closed the lid. She would do no more of this tonight.
     
     
     
    Twenty
     
     
     
    The murdered woman was identified as forty-eight year old Pearl Grannan. Like the other two victims, she'd been beaten and strangled. The smell of pine was strong here, cut with an underlying odor of death.
     
    "I saw a flash of purple in the bushes," the man said, clearly distraught at finding a dead woman in his path. "I moved in for a closer look, and that's when I realized it was a person lying there. I ran back to the house and called 911. Brought the wife back with me in case I was seeing things."
     
    The purple turned out to be her polyester slacks. "Beat hell out of her, the crazy bastard," the man said. "Blood in her hair."
     
    Red hair, O'Neal noted.
     
    "Poor woman," his wife said, her voice trembly, her own face under her knitted blue and white stocking hat, drained of color. "It's that killer, isn't it? No one's safe. Why can't