Free Darker Than Night by John Lutz Page A

shirt, making the only sound in the quiet room. A sound that remained to this day in Anna’s mind, that played over and over and begged for meaning and release. She knew it was in her music sometimes, and she tried to stop it.
    Anna, a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, had been too terrified to scream. She was paralyzed; her throat was closed, so she had to struggle for breath. There in her perspiration-soaked bed, her panties and oversize T-shirt seemed so little cover and protection.
    And they were.
    Some of the details of what followed she still chose not to confront. They were hidden somewhere she never wanted to revisit.
    She did recall that her attacker’s sleeves were rolled up and she noticed the jagged scar on his right forearm. Something told her to remember the scar. Remember.
    She knew even through her terror and agony that he was being deliberately rough, trying to hurt her.
    Why? What had she done? She didn’t even know this man.
    Or did she?
    She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind, and she concentrated on being somewhere else, someone else, until this was over. Someone else was being humiliated, soiled forever, ruined forever. The sisters at school had warned her, had warned all the girls.
    Whores! A whore in the Bible! What could be worse?
    You know you’re sinning. You know and don’t care!
    When finally he rose from her, leaving her destroyed and unable to move on the sweat-soaked bed, she saw something pale in the night and knew he was wearing a condom.
    She realized later it wasn’t for her—it was for him. He didn’t want to catch some dreadful disease from her. That made what happened all the more demeaning.
    â€œAnna!”
    Her mother’s voice.
    Anna had dozed off again, lost in the old dreams she thought were gone. No, not gone, but finally confined in a place in her mind where they couldn’t escape.
    But they had escaped. Like tigers. Quinn was back.
    â€œYou’ve overslept, Anna. Get up. This is your big day. What you’ve been slaving for the past four years. You don’t want to be late.”
    Anna made herself roll onto her side, then sat up gingerly on the edge of the mattress, as if the old pain would be there with the old shame. She was thirteen again. Unlucky thirteen.
    That was the problem—Quinn had the power again. When she saw his photograph, his name in print, heard people talking about him, she was thirteen even though she was almost eighteen.
    She wished she could kill him. The nuns would tell her she shouldn’t think such thoughts, but she’d graduated and she could think whatever she wanted now.
    She wished she could kill Quinn. That was her almost constant thought.
    â€œYou don’t want to be late,” her mother warned again.
    And Anna didn’t. She had to concentrate on the present, not the past. Her first day of summer classes at Juilliard. The first day of her music scholarship.
    What she’d been slaving for. Her therapy and escape that, as it turned out, hadn’t quite worked.
    She stood up unsteadily and made her way toward the bathroom.
    Unlucky thirteen. Unlucky Anna.
    At least she had her scholarship. That was all that was left for her, all that was left inside her…her music. Thirteen. A child.
    She knew she wasn’t going to kill anyone.

13
    Quinn sat in the sun on a bench just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park and watched them approach.
    Fedderman looked the same, only a little heavier, the coat of his rumpled brown suit flapping, his tie askew, the same shambling gait. He had less hair to be mussed by the summer breeze, and he seemed out of breath, as if he was trying to keep up with the quick, rhythmic strides of the small woman next to him.
    Pearl Kasner seemed to generate energy even from this distance. She was economical, deliberate and decisive in her movements to the point that there seemed something robotic in her resolute walk. She