Excerpt from “I See Her” (Previously published in the Redwood Coast Review)
I stand at the hotel window looking down through the glass cleaner I have sprayed and forgotten to wipe away. Three stories below, on the path in the dunes, a woman was murdered. There is nothing left to indicate what happened there but all the same I can see her.
She is standing naked, halfway up the dune, her hair whipped across her face as if she’s already being scratched off a page. Her breasts and the dark thatch of hair between her legs are startling on her bright skinned body. She is a tall woman.
The smell of cleanser stings my eyes so finally I raise my cloth and wipe it in circles around the pane, finishing it off with neat clear horizontal rows.
I cannot go into her room, though it has shown up on my list today. The policemen are through with it now and someone has to vacuum and dust all that black powder they’ve left behind. It’s on my list because I’m the most thorough housekeeper here, but I can’t go in, I can’t even put my hand on the knob of the door. Her things will be gone, I know, but I am afraid there will still be something, a used washcloth, a lingering perfume.
We have all been questioned and questioned again. My eyes fill when I shake my head no and say I never knew her. It’s true, I never did speak with her, or glimpse her more than a couple of times that week, but wasn’t I one who gave her the towels that she dried her body with the last time she washed? Wasn’t I the one who made the bed for her, who thumped the pillows full for her head, who pulled the clean sheets up and tucked them tight so that when she slid into them she would rest and feel safe and warm? I do the same for everyone but something about her always made me extra careful in her room, as if she deserved the best I had. I think of her sleeping there, the cool cotton against her skin after a day at the beach and a big seafood dinner, I can see her hair on the pillow, her smooth white neck half turned in her sleep.
They cannot find the knife or the dress she was wearing but what do you expect, they are small time beach town cops and the most they’ve ever done is catch a houseful of adults sniffing cocaine through fifty dollar bills. This is their chance to be like the cops on television and they ask questions you know they’ve only heard before, just like you, but they lean back in their chairs, their gun belts squeaking and you know when they go home they tell their wives about the case and a whole new feeling has entered them, a feeling of importance and virility and purpose. They’ll never catch the one who did it. I have a feeling he’s all the way up the coast now, hearing the news about his girlfriend with shock and alarm and grief. Don’t ask me how I know, sometimes these feelings come so strong they can’t be anything but truth.
Sometimes I see her body on the dunes as the sun is rising over the grasses and she is dark with blood. I’m not so upset by the vision, she is no more dead or alive than the hundreds of carcasses you find on a beach every day, empty crabs and dead jellies, the tiny spines of half-eaten fish. I think there are probably worse places to be dead.