A lot of things went through my mind in the second I saw her. As she stood there, combative and uncomfortable at once. Chin raised, belligerent; glance sidelong, shy. I thought: Who am I supposed to be here? What am I supposed to be like? Angry? Vengeful? Chilly? Just? Lofty? Compassionate? Christ, it was paralyzing. In the end, I just stood back and let her enter. She walked into the middle of the room and faced me as I closed the door.

Then she shrugged at me. One bare shoulder lifted, one lifted corner of her mouth, a wise guy smile. She was wearing a pale spring dress, the thin strings tied round her neck in a bow. It showed a lot of her dark flesh. I noticed a crescent of discolor on her thigh beneath the hem.

“I’m not too sure about the etiquette here,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe you could look under ‘Entertaining the Girl Who Killed Your Best Friend.’”

I gave her back her wise guy smile. “Don’t say too much, Susan, okay? I gotta go in to see the cops on Monday.”

She stopped smiling, nodded, turned away. “So-what? Like, Jim told you everything? About us?” She toyed with the pad on my phone table.

I watched her. My reactions were subtle but intense. It was the way she turned, it was that thing she said. It made me think about what Jim had told me. It made me look, long and slow, down the line of her back. It made my skin feel hot, my stomach cold. An interesting combination.

I moistened my lips and tried to think about my dead friend. “Yeah, that’s right,” I said gruffly. “He told me pretty much everything.”

Susan laughed over her shoulder at me. “Well, that’s embarrassing, anyway.”

“Hey, don’t flirt with me, okay? Don’t kill my friend and come over here and flirt with me.”

She turned round again, hands primly folded in front of her. I looked so steadily at her face she must’ve known I was thinking about her breasts. “I’m not flirting with you,” she said. “I just want to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“What he did, that he beat me, that he humiliated me. He was twice my size. Think how you’d like it, think what you would’ve done if someone was doing that to you.”

“Susan!” I spread my hands at her. “You asked him to!”

“Oh, yeah, like, ‘She was asking for it,’ right? Like you automatically believe that. Your buddy says it so it must be true.”

I snorted. I thought about it. I looked at her. I thought about Jim. “Yeah,” I said finally. “I do believe it. It was true.”

She didn’t argue the point. She went right on. “Yeah, well, even if it is true, it doesn’t make it any better. You know? I mean, you should’ve seen the way it turned him on. I mean, he could’ve stopped it. I’d’ve stopped. He could’ve changed everything any time, if he wanted to. But he liked it so much… And then there he is, hurting me like that, and all turned on by it. How do you think that makes a person feel?”

I am not too proud to admit that I actually scratched my head, dumb as a monkey.

Susan ran one long nail over the phone table pad. She looked down at it. So did I. “Are you really going to the cops?”

“Yeah. Hell, yeah,” I said. Then, as if I needed an excuse, “It’s not like they won’t find someone else. Some other guy you did this stuff with. He’ll tell them the same thing.”

She shook her head once. “No. There’s only you. You’re the only one who knows.” Which left nothing to say. We stood there silent. She thinking, me just watching her, just watching the lines and colors of her.

Then, finally, she raised her eyes to me, tilted her head. She didn’t slink toward me, or tiptoe her fingers up my chest. She didn’t nestle under me so I could feel the heat of her breath or smell her perfume. She left that for the movies, for the femme fatales. All she did was stand there like that and give me that Susan look, chin out, dukes up, her soul in the offing, almost trembling in your hand.

“It gives you a lot of power over me, doesn’t it?” she said.

“So what?” I said back.

She shrugged again. “You know what I like.”

“Get out,” I said. I didn’t give myself time to start sweating. “Christ. Get the fuck out of here, Susan.”

She walked to the door. I watched her go. Yeah, right, I thought. I have power over her. As if. I have power over her until they decide not to charge her, until the headlines disappear. Then where am I? Then I’m her Lord and Master. Just like Jim was.

She passed close to me. Close enough to hear my thoughts. She glanced up, surprised. She laughed at me. “What. You think I’d kill you too?”

“I’d always have to wonder, wouldn’t I?” I said.

Still smiling, she jogged her eyebrows comically. “Whatever turns you on,” she said.

It was the comedy that did it. I couldn’t resist the impulse to wipe that smile off her murdering face. I reached out and grabbed her hair in my fist. Her black, black hair.

It was even softer than I thought it would be.

MR. GRAY’S FOLLY by JOHN CONNOLLY

It was, said my wife, quite the ugliest thing she had ever seen. I had to admit that she was correct in her assessment.

This was not, generally speaking, a typical occurrence in our relationship. As she approached late middle age (with all the grace and ease, it should be added, of a funeral party stumbling in a cemetery), Eleanor had grown increasingly intolerant of views that diverged from her own. Inevitably, mine appeared to diverge more often than most, so agreement in any form was a cause for considerable, if muted, celebration.

Norton Hall was a wonderful acquisition, a late-eighteenth-century country residence with landscaped gardens and fifty acres of prime land. It was an architectural gem and would make us a wonderful home, since it was simultaneously small enough to be manageable yet spacious enough to permit us to avoid each other for significant portions of the day. Unfortunately, as my wife had duly noted, the folly at the end of the garden was another matter entirely. It was ugly and brutal, with unadorned rectangular pillars and a bare white cupola topped with a cross. There were no steps leading up to it and the only way of gaining access to the interior appeared to be by clambering over the base. Even the birds avoided it, preferring instead to take up positions in a nearby oak tree, where they cooed nervously amongst themselves like spinsters at a parish dance.

According to the agent, one of Norton Hall’s previous owners, a Mr. Gray, had built the folly as a memorial to his late wife. It struck me that he couldn’t have liked his wife very much if that was what he had built in her memory. I was not overly fond of my wife much of the time, but even I didn’t dislike her enough to erect a monstrosity like that in her memory. At the very least, I would have softened some of the edges and stuck a dragon on the top as a reminder of the dear departed. A little damage to the base had been caused at some point by Mr. Ellis, the gentleman who had owned the house before us, but he seemed to have thought better of his original impulse and the area in question had since been repaired and repainted.

All things considered, it really was a frightful eyesore.

My first instinct was to have the blasted thing destroyed, but in the weeks that followed, I started to find the folly appealing. No, “appealing” isn’t the right word. Rather, I began to feel that it had a purpose, which I had not yet surmised, and that it would be unwise to meddle until I knew more about it. How I came to feel that way, I can trace to one particular incident that occurred about five weeks after we took occupancy of Norton Hall.

I had taken a chair and placed it on the bare stone floor of the folly, as it was a beautiful summer’s day and the folly offered the possibility of both shade and a pleasing aspect. I was just settling down with the paper when the strangest thing happened: the floor moved, as if, for a single moment, it had somehow become liquid instead of solid and some hidden tide had caused a wave to ripple across its surface. The sunlight grew sickly and weak, and the landscape shrouded itself in drifting shadows. I felt as if a strip of gauze from a sick man’s bed had been placed across my eyes, for I could faintly smell decay in the air. I stood up suddenly, experiencing a little lightness in the head, and saw a man standing among the trees, watching me.