"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive."  Sir Walter Scott

             It was the summer of love; it was the summer of hate. It was the summer I learned about death. Not the demise of neighborhood dogs whose “tombstones” I planted in my symbolic sandbox cemetery. This was real death, jabbing my life with the first sharp prick of my calling.

             I hadn’t thought about those days in years, but when I received an envelope this morning from a maximum security prison, it reminded me. I get these quite often, since I’m an expert on serial killers – which I refer to in my own wily shorthand as SeKs. People wonder how I can open these notes, since they could be anything from lascivious verse to death threats, but they don’t bother me. I’m often asked how I know these “monsters” so well, and I just shrug and say I read a lot. They accept that. People see what they want to see. That works for me.

             I picked up the envelope and thought again about my first lesson so many years earlier in how dangerous some people can be. Images passed through my mind of dead girls, crime scenes, cops in despair, and Clarissa. It was all just a mélange now, a primer in everything I needed to know to do what I now do. And it began with the first find.

             On a sweltering August afternoon during the late sixties in a town known then as the Midwest’s hippie haven, Lee, my older brother, was frying tortillas. He made them greasy the way I liked and the hot aroma of crushed corn was driving me crazy.

             “Salt ‘em good,” I said. I never got enough. As he flipped one onto a paper towel, I grabbed the salt shaker, turned it upside down, and watched the white crystals disappear onto the tortilla’s oily surface. My mouth watered.

             That’s when Jeff and Kenny rushed in.

             “You won’t believe this!” Kenny shouted. “We just left the police station!”

             “Whadja do?” Lee kept frying, not even looking up. He didn’t see how flushed they were, but I could tell something was really up. Their shirts were damp and dark, and they smelled of dusty perspiration. I didn’t know them well, but Lee sometimes bailed hay with them on a farm down the road. I liked Jeff’s large brown eyes but Kenny always looked at me as if I should be out skipping rope with the girls.

             “We were out working our old field down off Gideon’s Road,” said Kenny. “We were gassing up the tractor and heard this car door slam over behind where the old farm house used to be. We couldn’t imagine who could be out there –  you know, no one ever goes there, except –”

             He glanced at me, slightly pinker. I knew what he was going to say. I might’ve been only twelve but I knew what people did in cars on those dark farm roads besides looking for ghosts. I chewed my warm tortilla, licking salt from my lips, and looked him straight in the eye, the way my friend Clarissa had taught me. She was the bold one, but imitating her seemed to work: He turned away.

             “We thought maybe someone was bringing us lunch,” he continued, “so we went over to have a look.”

             Lee smirked and nodded. With his spatula, he pressed the flat corn patty deep into the melted grease. He was a quiet type, kept to himself, and didn’t usually say much, no matter how exciting something was. At least he didn’t say much to me. In fact, we never played “Cliff” or “Knife” anymore. The older he got, the more of a distant figure he became on the horizon of my existence.

             “Someone had just made a new path off the road,” said Kenny. “It kind of made us nervous. We couldn’t imagine who’d be out there on our property.”

             “We heard some rustling.” Jeff nodded fast, as if he needed to talk. “And then the car door slammed again and whoever it was drove away. We heard him take off on Gideon’s road, but couldn’t see the car. Then we ran to the other side of the building and spotted fresh tire tracks that cut off across the weeds, so we followed ‘em. Had to be him that did that. They were really fresh. They went for about twenty feet, and then we saw some crows on the ground over by this one spot, so we checked it out. That’s when we saw this...this black thing lying there with bugs crawling on it, and it smelled like sh – ” He shot me a look.

             “We couldn’t get too close,” Kenny added, “because it stunk and there were flies buzzing all over it. Nearly made me vomit, it was so bad.”

             Jeff interrupted him. “The skin was sort of a dark brownish-red, and you could see that animals had been eating it. It was all bloated and the bite marks went down several inches. I didn’t know skin got thick like that. We couldn’t even see a head, really. Just this mushy thing at the end of the torso, but you could see it was some kind of animal and there was nothing left on the ends of the legs. We were sure it was a deer. We thought maybe we should bury it so the animals wouldn’t drag it all over the field.”

             I stopped chewing. The tortilla seemed suddenly tasteless.

             “But when we got closer,” Kenny continued in a quiet voice, “I saw an ear. I mean, a human ear! It was chewed pretty bad, but I thought maybe it was human, you know? The way it looked on the head.”

             “Human!” I said. “Really?”

             “And I saw…” Jeff stopped then and sat down on a kitchen chair, as if a hideous memory had just washed over him. He started breathing deeply. He looked like he was going to be sick right there. I moved the salt shaker to make room for his arm and decided against another bite. I sensed I wouldn’t want to be eating.

             He took a deep breath and told us: The body had been chewed up pretty badly and he could see the torso moving in an odd way, like there was something inside. Then from a hole in the stomach area an opossum emerged, grimy from the rotting entrails on which it had just been feeding. Jeff had gotten sick right then and there.

             I pushed my tortilla away. I felt contaminated, as if Jeff had touched the thing and brought something from it into our house.

             “That’s when we ran away,” said Kenny, “and drove over to tell the cops. We still didn’t really know what it was, but I thought we should report it.”

             Lee looked up from his cooking. Now he was interested. I could see that Kenny was still nervous as he went on. “I don’t think they even believed us. They acted like we were pulling a prank or something. But finally two guys drove back with us to check it out. Then they called for some help. You should’ve seen all the cop cars that came.”

             “So did you see the guy that drove away?” Lee asked.

             I sat forward. I wanted to know this, too. For all the fun of getting sickened by their descriptions, I was more interested in the one who who’d done it and returned for another look. I had a reason for that. A literary one, if you will.

             “All we saw were tracks,” Jeff told him. “I don’t know if he was just checking on the body, or what. I heard the cops talking about it. They said they couldn’t tell if the thing was a guy or a girl, but it looked like it’d been dragged back and forth across the ground a few times. It was just lying there in a pile of trash. But it had been dead awhile, I guess. There were maggots in it and things in the ears and it didn’t have any feet, like animals had eaten ‘em. Some parts fell off when they tried to put the body in the bag to take it away. I think everyone wanted to get sick when that happened. I guess they don’t know who it is. That was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

             “I think they found something else, too,” said Jeff. “A shoe or purse or something, over by the driveway, but we couldn’t see what it was. They wanted us to stay back.”

             “So they took it away?” I asked.

             Jeff nodded. “I don’t know if there’s still some part lying around somewhere, but I think they got most of it into the body bag. They told us to leave in case the guy came back. They thought it might be dangerous and they don’t want us back there for awhile. It’s roped off now. They’re not letting anyone on the property. I guess they’re staking it out.”

             “Don’t you want to go back out?” I asked. “Just to see?”

             Lee flashed me a disgusted look. He didn’t like my ghoulish side. He often complained about what I did because he wanted me to be normal. Once I wore this vinyl yellow-and-blue checkerboard skirt to school with a lacy blouse and some half-assed go-go boots (we couldn’t afford the real thing so I got K-Mart imitations), and he went ballistic. I guess my being conspicuous made him, as my brother, conspicuous as well, but I didn’t much care. I was a free spirit.

             “I don’t think I ever want to go back out there.” Kenny rubbed his hand over his belly. “Makes me sick just to think about it.”

             Their story made the next day’s newspaper. Clarissa and I read about it together as we listened to Gladys Knight on CKLW. It was a time when Timothy Leary urged us to try LSD, astronauts died violently, blacks rioted across the country, and hippies preached about free love. My associates were the school outsiders who cherished Black Sabbath and sensed the disturbing undertones of the Beatles’ new directions with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We affirmed the excesses of Morrison and Joplin. Inspired by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, we smoked a bit of dope and explored the occult. Clarissa, especially, reached for intensity, and sometimes she scared me.

             So that day, we were in my room, sprawled on my iron-framed twin bed, surrounded by magazines like Tiger Beat that had articles about the miniskirt craze and the Rolling Stones. We wondered together how in the world we could manage to look like Twiggy. Clarissa had a real figure and always looked great in her clothes, Bohemian as they were, but she was definitely not the Twiggy type. She also had dark hair that she wore thick and wavy, with straight bangs that nearly hid her dark eyes.

             I didn’t always call her Clarissa. She hated her name, so she had picked another that she said suited her better. In fact, she had tried out several names, each lasting about a month, and then had settled on Zelda, because she loved Fitzgerald. But when I think about that name now, it gives me the creeps, so I’ll call her Clarissa.

             Anyway, she read the newspaper article while I listened because she had a richer, deeper voice. She sounded more like nineteen than fourteen and since she finished three books a week, she was practiced.

             “A body found yesterday on a farm,” she read, “was tentatively identified as that of a nineteen-year-old coed who disappeared suddenly without a trace on July 9th.”

             “God,” I exclaimed. “That means she was lying out there for a month, out in the open, without any clothes.” I shivered at the image. “In the rain and cold. Exposed.” I believed that everything had feelings, even my stuffed animals. I’d once vacated my bed so they’d have more room to sleep comfortably. It seemed to me that a corpse would still feel the cold and wet weather. She might even have been aware of that ‘possum creeping up to her, snuffling around as she waited to find out what it would do, and then feeling it burrow into her. What would that be like, I wondered, to have one of those grotesque creatures chewing on my stuff?

             I voiced this out loud, but Clarissa ignored me. “Authorities are attempting to establish that the body is definitely that of Emily Ceasar, who was last seen by her roommate. The body, decomposed beyond recognition, was found – oh, look, they have Jeff and Kenny’s names! Look!”

             I sat up and looked at the paper, shocked to see not only their names and ages, 15, but also their addresses printed for all to see.

             “Suppose the killer sees that,” I mused. “I mean, if he gets scared that they saw his car or something, he might go after them. Why’d they print their addresses?”

             Smokey Robinson came on the radio, with the sixth of ten Motown songs in a row. Clarissa went on to read about the medical examiner and the tests being performed to establish identity, and whether or not there was a bullet wound. But I was no longer listening. I was thinking about the girl again. Lying down on my back, I stared up at the constellations I had painted on my ceiling – Capricorn for me, Virgo for Clarissa, the Big Dipper because I liked it, and Sagittarius because I wanted to fall in love with a Sagittarian. No one could really see these “points of light” unless they looked hard because they were white on off-white ceiling paint, but the “right people” knew they were there.

             “So someone just snatched her away and killed her,” I whispered, hardly daring to breathe. “I wonder if she was hitching. I wonder if the killer was handsome or exotic. It’s so weird. One day she was walking around and the next, someone got her and that was it. Her life was over.”

             “He cut off her hands and feet.”

             “What?” I sat up to scan the paper. “It doesn’t say anywhere that he cut off her hands and feet. It just says they were missing. They could’ve been eaten off by animals.”

             “Or cut off.” When Clarissa took to a fantasy, she could be pretty stubborn, and hers tended toward the morbid.

             “He just left her out there,” I pointed out.

             “And went back to check,” Clarissa reminded me. “Jeff and Kenny must’ve been within feet of him! Suppose he saw them! He might’ve grabbed them and killed them, too! In fact, he must have seen them. That’s why he drove away. And now he knows what they look like.”

             “I wonder who he is.”

             “I wonder why he’d cut off her hands and feet.”

             I shrugged. “He’s crazy.”

             She continued. “The body was found on its side, face down, and was so decomposed that authorities had a difficult time determining whether it was a man or a woman.” She scanned down and read the last paragraph. “Miss Ceasar was described as weighing one hundred ten pounds, five foot two inches tall, with brown hair and wearing glasses. Hey, how much do you weigh? You’re about this height.”

             I didn’t want to say how much I weighed, so I mumbled that I didn’t know. But Clarissa was right. If I stretched myself, I was just over five foot two and, depending on whether I was dieting, often weighed about one hundred ten.

             Clarissa laughed. “If I wanted to find this guy, I could use you as bait.”

             “I’m getting contact lenses,” I pointed out.

             Then Clarissa’s eyes lighted up with a plan. “You wanna go to the murder site?”

             “Go? You mean now?”

             “No, tonight. When it’s dark. Maybe he’ll come back.”

             I felt suddenly cold. I couldn’t imagine creeping around in the weeds in the dark. Maybe her hands and feet were still out there somewhere. Surely, it smelled really bad, and probably some animals would return to see if she was still lying there. I didn’t want Clarissa to think I was scared, but I didn’t want to go. Then I thought of a way out.

             “Yeah, he’ll come back,” I commented with an air of wisdom. “That’s what the police are thinking, aren’t they? And they’ll catch us if we show up there.”

             Her face fell in disappointment. I knew her real intent. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to see the old farm, but she’d probably had some devious idea about setting me up. I sure was not going to any murder site with her, especially not if there were man-eating ‘possums around or scattered body parts. I didn’t know Clarissa well enough at that moment to realize she wouldn’t give in so easily. But at that moment she just shrugged in response as if she didn’t care, so I turned my attention back to the newspaper.

             It hadn’t been that far from our house. The field where Jeff and Kenny had found the remains of that girl was only a few miles away. I imagined the killer driving from there up through our town, maybe taking a left turn and driving over to our street. The girl’s parents lived in a town at the end of our road, so he might just drive past our tri-level house at some point, maybe glance in my upstairs bedroom window while I was undressing. I don’t know why that sent a frisson through me.

             It was like the time some friends and I camped out in the backyard one night in my parents’ tent when I was ten. Someone told us that a violent mental patient had escaped from the state hospital five miles down the road. We were sure he was armed with an ax and that he’d check in the back yards to see if there was anyone around to kill. We felt pretty vulnerable, but I remember something else, too. I wanted him to unzip the tent door and wade in among us girls, seeking one on whom to expend his rage. I wanted to see what madness looked like. The idea had excited me.

             I never told anyone else until I met Clarissa and she understood. I’d sensed that she would. Within moments of meeting her, I realized that we both embraced that verve that swells at the edge of danger.

             We’d encountered each other in the school library the year before. I knew she was two grades ahead of me but when I saw her reading Dracula, I felt bold.

             “You like vampires?” I asked.

             Her brown eyes shone as she looked up and I cringed over my washed-out pallor and thin reddish blond hair. I wished it was summer so I’d have a tan at least. But she didn’t seem put off. A prism hanging from a leather thing around her neck refracted red and blue shades of light onto her black sweater. I smelled a trace of exotic Indian incense in her dark hair.

             “I love vampires.” Her voice was throaty. “But the women in these novels are so insipid I don’t know why anyone cares about them.”

             I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly because I didn’t know that word, ‘insipid,’ but her expression of distaste conveyed my own feelings for other characters in the novel. The only one that had gripped me was the fiend, the dark aristocrat, the bloody count who slept in the earth – the vampire. I wished he’d come for me some night.

             “I know what you mean,” I said, even though I didn’t. I should have realized right then that this would be our position henceforth, me trying in vain to match her sophistication. “I can’t find any good books that have people who love vampires in them.”

             “I know. I’ve read everything, and there’s not much out there. It’s deplorable.”

             I then made a bold move, which was unusual for me. I told her my big secret. “I’ve written one.”

             “You’ve written a book?”

             “It’s not published or anything, but I keep it under my mattress at home. In sections. No one knows about it.”

             “How old are you?”

             I blushed. “Does that matter?”

             “No, not really. Is it any good?” She shifted in her chair and the glimpse I got of her body made me realize that she was almost a woman.

             I shrugged. “I guess you’d have to read it.”

             “You’d let me?”

             “Yeah, I guess.” I had spoken too soon and there was no turning back. “I mean, maybe you could help me with it. It’s not finished or anything. I don’t even have a title for it yet. But I’ve written a lot of pages…”

             Suddenly I didn’t want to confess that I’d written over a thousand pages. That sounded a little demented. “…oh, about seventy-five or so. I have some good characters, and there are also some ghosts in it. I’ll show you if you want to see it.”

             We agreed to meet again the next day after school. I could tell someone like Clarissa how exciting it was to think about a killer because she felt the same way. In some ways, she intimidated me, but I still wanted to be around her because I sensed that my life would change as a result. I had no idea at the time how true that was.

             There was a lot of talk about the murder for about a week or so. People were angry. They felt the girl had it coming. “What had she been doing out with a man like that, anyway?” “That’s what happens to single girls who make themselves accessible.”

             Clarissa and I followed it in the newspaper. Just as she’d suspected, the killer had cut off the victim’s feet, one forearm and hand, and several fingers from the other hand, as if in some grisly attempt to conceal her identity (that’s what the paper said). Where those parts were was anyone’s guess. We figured the killer had at least kept the fingers. We imagined him with a box full of body parts in his house somewhere.

             From the evidence, they could tell that he had first dumped the body on a pile of empty bottles and rusting cans near some box elder trees. The corpse had then been moved five feet away, where it lay for awhile, and then moved another three feet. One of the reporters surmised that animals had dragged it, trying to get meat off the bones. That idea made even Clarissa shudder, and it was almost too disgusting to think that the killer himself had moved her around, despite his obvious visit to the site the day of its discovery. After an extensive search, the girl’s clothing was found on the property, beneath some corrugated paneling. Her blue striped dress had been ripped down the front.

             Subsequently, we learned that the killer had stabbed her thirty times in the chest and abdomen, and had beaten her savagely. It appeared that he’d smashed her legs, breaking them in several places. The oddest thing about the case was that a young man had gone to the funeral home where the remains had been taken and asked if he could take pictures of the corpse. He’d claimed, falsely, to be a family friend. Later, they could only recall that he had been angry that they’d been unable to fix her up well enough for a photo, but no one remembered what he looked like, except that he was white, seemed around the age of twenty, and drove a Chevy. And he hadn’t had a camera.

             This particular bit of information was quite a tease for Clarissa. She pondered it over and over, wondering why this guy wanted a photograph of such a decomposed corpse. If it was the murderer, he could have taken pictures the whole time she lay out in that field, and maybe he did. Did he want one in the coffin to complete his collection? Or had he been playing with everyone, risking getting caught?

             “He must be a necrophile,” she concluded.