The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Pitman was asking did I know what a garrote was, and I right away said no, no I did not know what a garrote was, though in fact I did, but I knew that Pitman would not wish his eighteen-year-old wife who had only graduated from high school a few months before to know such a thing. Pitman raised himself above me on his elbows peering into my face. He had horse-eyes that seemed just a little too large for his face, beautiful dark staring eyes showing a rim of white above the iris. They were eyes to express mirth, wonderment, rage. They were not eyes to make you feel comfortable. Pitman said, “A garrote is a thing used to strangle. It’s two things. It’s a thing like a cord or a scarf you wrap around somebody’s throat, and it’s a thing like a tick or a rod you twist that with. So you don’t have to touch the throat with your actual hands.”

Pitman was touching my throat with his hands, though. His hands that were strong, and big. Circling my throat with his fingers and thumbs and squeezing. Not hard but hard enough.

I laughed and pushed at him. I wasn’t going to be frightened by Pitman-teasing.

I asked if that was how the woman at Star Lake was strangled, and Pitman ignored my question as if it had not been asked. He was leaning above me staring at me. I remembered how at the wedding ceremony he’d been watching me sidelong, and when he caught my eye he winked. Just between the two of us, a flame-flash of understanding. Like Pitman was thinking of that first secret between us, how he’d handcuffed me in the police cruiser on Hunter Road.

How reckless Pitman had been! Risking all hell playing such a trick on a fourteen-year-old girl. Misusing his authority. Sexual harassment it would have been called if given a name. Except we’d been fated to meet, Pitman believed. That day or some other, in a town small as Au Sable Forks, we’d have met and fallen in love.

Of course I’d never told my parents. It was the great secret of my girlhood as it marked the end of my girlhood. Never told anyone except my cousin Andrea but by that time I was seventeen, a senior in high school confounding my parents and teachers by deciding not to apply for college as I’d been planning and everyone was expecting of me.

(Secretly) engaged to Pitman by then. (Secretly) making love with Pitman every chance I had.

He was saying now, stumbling out the words as they came to him: “A garrote takes time. A garrote takes planning. Anybody who garrotes his victim, it’s ‘premeditated.’ There’s a sick purpose to it, Lucretia. You wouldn’t know.”

Damn right, I wouldn’t know! I was trying not to panic pushing at Pitman’s hands, easing them from my throat. His big thumbs I grasped in both my hands as a child might. It wasn’t the first time Pitman had put his hands on me in a way to frighten me but it was the first time when we hadn’t been making love and it hadn’t seemed like an accident.

Pitman said, “See, if you garrote somebody you can strangle her till she passes out, then you can revive her. You can strangle her till she passes out again, then you can revive her. You don’t exert any pressure with your own hands. Your own hands are spared. It’s a cruel method but effective. It’s the way Spaniards used to execute condemned prisoners. It’s rare, in the United States.”

This was a long speech for Pitman. He was drunker than he’d seemed at first, and very tired. I knew not to let on any uneasiness I felt for that would offend Pitman who deemed himself my protector. I only laughed now, pulled his hands more firmly away from my throat and leaned up awkwardly to kiss him.

“Mmmm, Pitman, come to bed. We both need to sleep.”

I helped Pitman pull off more of his clothes. He was big and floppy like a fish. By the time I leaned over to switch out the lamp Pitman was asleep and snoring.

It was that night the thought came to me for the first time: It’s a garrote I am in.