Free The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 by Otto Penzler Page B

Things become so
hasty
at the end, so hurried and awkward and tedious—it can be very dissatisfying, if you understand me.” She was no longer holding Mattie’s arm, but looking into her eyes with something in her own expression that might almost have been a plea.
    â€œI think I do,” Mattie said. “I wouldn’t have once.” They were walking unhurriedly toward the water, and she could see the small surges far out that meant the tide was beginning to turn. She said, “You’re more or less human, although I’ve had a few nasty dreams about you.” Olivia Korhonen chuckled very slightly. Mattie said, “You feed on the fear. No, that’s not it, not the fear—the
knowledge.
Fear makes people run away, but
knowledge
—the sense that there’s absolutely no escape, that you can come and
pick
them, like fruit, whenever you choose—that freezes them, isn’t that it? The knowing? And you like that very much.”
    Olivia Korhonen stopped walking and regarded Mattie without speaking, her blue eyes wider and more intense than Mattie had ever noticed them. She said slowly, “You have changed. I changed you.”
    Mattie asked, “But what would you have done if I
had
run? That first time, at the Bridge Group, if I had taken you at your word and just packed a bag, jumped in my car, and headed for the border? Would you have followed me?”
    â€œIt is a long way to the border, you know.” The chuckle was deeper and clearer this time. “But it would all have been so messy, really. Ugly, unpleasant. Much better this way.”
    Mattie was standing very close to her, looking directly into her face. “And the killing? That would have been pleasant?” She found that she was holding her breath, waiting for the answer.
    It did not come in words, but in the slow smile that spread from Olivia Korhonen’s eyes to her mouth, instead of the other way around. It came in the slight parting of her lips, in the flick of her cat-pink tongue just behind the white, perfect teeth; most of all in the strange way in which her face seemed to change its shape, almost to fold in on itself: the cheekbones heightening, the forehead rounding, the round chin in turn becoming more pointed, as in Mattie’s dreams.
    . . . and Mattie, who had not struck another person since a recess fight in the third grade, hit Olivia Korhonen in the stomach as hard as she possibly could. The blond woman coughed and doubled over, her eyes huge with surprise and a kind of reproach. Mattie hit her again—a glancing blow, distinctly weaker, to the neck—and jumped on her, clumsily and impulsively. They went down together, rolling in the sand, the grains raking their skins, clogging their nostrils, coating and filling their mouths. Olivia Korhonen got a near stranglehold on a coughing, gasping Mattie and began dragging her toward the water’s edge. Breathless and in pain, she was still the stronger of the two of them.
    The cold water on her bare feet revived Mattie a moment before her head was forced under an incoming wave. Panic lent her strength, and she lunged upward, banging the back of her head into Olivia Korhonen’s face, turning in the failing grip and pulling her down with both hands on the back of her neck. There was a moment when they were mouth to mouth, breathing one another’s hoarse, choking breath, teeth banging teeth. Then she rolled on top in the surf, throwing all her weight into keeping the struggling woman’s bloody face in the water. The little waves helped.
    At some point Mattie finally realized that Olivia Korhonen had stopped fighting her; she had a feeling that she had been holding the woman under much longer than she needed to. She stood up, soaked and shivering with both cold and shock, swaying dizzily, looking down at the body that stirred in the light surf, bumping against her feet. There was a bit of seaweed caught in its