He should’ve wondered more, because he was almost right. Marlowe wasn’t drugged up, but she did have
strong homicidal tendencies. So strong,
in fact, that she’d already killed four people. People who’d taken her in for the night, as AJ had. People who'd fed her a decent meal, as AJ
had. People who let her into their
homes, unassuming, as AJ had. It was
easy, really, the way she’d done it all and not been caught. She was born on the streets, no fingerprint
record. The police were lost as to a
motive, even. Truth be told, she had no
motive, except jealousy. She was
ashamed of where she was, where she lived, and these people had it all. Money, power, love, food, shelter, new
clothes... even basics she didn’t have, and it made her so angry. What did they have that she didn’t? Why couldn’t that be her in the string
pearls and black cocktail gown? Why did
they get to live in a two-story complex and she lived in a doorway if she was
lucky? It wasn’t fair, and she figured
if she had to pay for her parent’s shitty lifestyle, then why couldn’t they
share in her pain? Oh, and she made
them feel it, too, her pain. They
screamed for her. They must feel it. Sometimes they cried, and she knew
they felt her pain then, because she cried with them. And that was how it went.
She’d sneak in on them while they slept in their beds at night, then tie
them down and gag them. She didn’t
knock them out though. She wanted to
make sure they saw it, saw what was happening.
It was happening inside her, too:
a knife plunging down, sometimes carving slowly, other times sawing
away, and they were all screaming. When
the noises in her head and around her got too loud for her to handle, she
silenced them with a quick jerk of her knife over from where the noises came,
and then all was dead calm. Later, she
would take her bag and leave the house, the knife she’d used placed carefully
back into the holder in which it always sat.
As she thought about
all these occurrences, Marlowe sought out the knife holder on top of the
counter. It held five excellent carving
knives, and one large serrated-edge carver.
She put down her glass and walked over to them after AJ had left. She touched each one, and decided on the
ten-inch long, one-and-a-half-inch thick slicer, the smallest one of the
bunch. She removed it from the holder
and placed it in her duffel bag, then loped up the stairs to take a shower.
After a nice, long
soak, scrub, and rinse, Marlowe crept back into her room and put on her clean
clothes. It was always a t-shirt and
jeans, but the money she’d taken from her victims would only get her so far
until the next one, so she’d bought all her clothes from the Goodwill. She pulled the knife from her bag and
admired it in the light from the bathroom.
Thin, black handle; slim, shiny blade that could’ve cut the light in
half. It was deadly, like the person
who possessed it then, and it was also deceptively beautiful.
Marlowe stole across the hall
with her weapon, and cracked open AJ’s door.
Sure enough, he was asleep and turned away from her. She tiptoed over to the other side of his
bed, and saw something flash in the dim moonlight. With a questioning look she crouched down beside him. In his arms was a framed picture of a young
woman. “I hope we can spend forever
together. I love you with all my
heart,” it said at the bottom in a fancy script. His girlfriend? She wondered, and that’s when she saw
them. Tears. Dried on his cheeks, on his nose, and several glistening ones
that had yet to dry on the picture. She
looked around the room then, and took in what she saw. On his nightstand was a bottle of Jack
Daniel’s Whiskey, and the remains of a joint in an ashtray. She leaned closer to him and sniffed. His breath reeked of alcohol, and his shirt
smelled faintly of weed. Suddenly his
body gave a slight shudder, and his shoulders began to shake. He was crying in his sleep. He gripped the picture harder and mumbled
‘Amanda’ before resuming his cry. Marlowe
saw all this, and she couldn’t take it.
She put the knife under his bed and crawled into the corner, thinking about
what she had almost done.