Please, listen. This actually happened:
Shannon goes to work. Shannon, hater
of cops, calls 911 in a panic.
Please, help me they are trying to kill me please help me.
She runs out of the house that belongs to
the man who hired her for the evening. Runs
to a neighbor's and bangs on the door.
Again, please, help me they are trying to kill me please help me.
The kindly man/neighbor does try,
calls the police, but she runs off and
hides
beneath the parked boat in the yard, then into
the ink of the night. M/n
spies a car searching and driving, her driver. She did have
a John and a driver.
(Mike-the driver drove her to John then waited three hours
for the business to be done. Then, he says, he heard screaming
and was summoned by John to remove her. Neither claims to
have touched her.)
(Mike-the-driver says he searched the long island for almost an hour, but she
wouldn't come near him. Shannon ran into the brush and
the bramble. Then he left her.)
The police, long-hated by Shannon, cannot find her.
Months pass.
One cop led by a nose on a dog finds bones in the bracken, thinks he found her.
It isn't Shannon. Nor is the next set nor the next nor the next nor the next.
This growth is a tomb eleven women deep, one job strong, sex-working women, selling
their time to men without faces, until there was one face to remember.
(The thesaurus lists the following synonyms for "prostitute," none of which
seemed accurate here unless used to describe the murderer:
hustler betrayer cheater deceiver)
More and more months.
One quarter-mile from where she was last seen running, Shannon's purse is found in the copse.
Then Shannon's jeans. Then her shoes. Then, a quarter-mile from the jeans, deeper in the
swamp-reeds, Shannon. Or what was Shannon. Her tell-tale metal-jaw, a gift given years prior
by a nettled boyfriend, tells them.
But.
The cops rule that for Shannon, hater of cops, it wasn't the killer of eleven just like her, the killer
at large, but an unhappy
accident. Shannon,
they say, who was likely psychotic, ran on her own into the night-bramble, the catch-weeds,
the pricks, the gorse, then dropped her purse,
fell out of her shoes,
and out of her
jeans then, simply, yielded
to the ever-present elements.
Her family. They don't buy it.
Do you buy it?
What we know:
Shannon did die. Eleven others did, too.
The town held its nightmares as real as cadavers.
It does, it still does.
Shannon was scared. She was scared.
And now, I am quoting my husband,
Evil is male, it is most assuredly
male.
