Tell Them Katy Did Read Online Free

Claire said nothing. “You can’t get away with it, you know. People get caught for murder. They never get away with it.”
    “Well, but, we wouldn’t hear about the successful ones, would we? If someone got away with it, I mean.”
    Lisa said nothing. Under the expert makeup, her face paled, making her lips redder still, as if they were berry-stained.
    “You have a reputation, Lisa,” Claire said. “All those married men, all those jealous wives. Who on earth would ever suspect me? And everyone thinks I left town earlier today, you’d heard that yourself. I’m on my way to California already. That’s what everyone believes.”
    “The gun,” Lisa started to say, but Claire interrupted her.
    “The gun’s not registered. Anyway, I’ll toss it somewhere along the road, far enough away from here that even if it’s ever found, no one will connect it to you. Or me.”
    Lisa squared her shoulders, summoned up a trace of the old Lisa, brash, confident, almost arrogant. It was, Claire thought, an admirable performance, under the circumstances.
    “Surely you don’t really mean to kill me,” she said. She gave Claire a disbelieving smile, her head tilted in that way she had, and took a step in Claire’s direction. “Over one lousy little kiss?”
    Claire smiled too. “It was lousy, wasn’t it?” she said.
    The log cracked again in the fireplace. Claire started, and pulled the trigger. The bang was louder than she expected. She winced and jerked her hand, but as close as she was there was no possibility of her missing.
    She stood, looking down at the dead woman on the floor, the pale yellow silk splashed now with scarlet. She thought she ought to feel remorse, but to her surprise, she didn’t. An eye for an eye. Lisa had killed Jason, as surely as if she’d shot him. Fair was fair, wasn’t it?
    There was a clatter of footsteps on the stairs and Will, Lisa’s ten-year old boy, charged into the room. “Mom, I heard…” he said, and stopped short, staring. His eyes, his expression, reminded her of Jason’s, that other time. When he’d barged in unexpectedly.
    “Will,” she said, astonished. “I thought you were spending the weekend with your father.”
    “My dad’s got the flu,” he said. He looked from her to his mother, and back to her. His face was ghost white. “Are you going to shoot me?” he asked after a long moment. His voice cracked a little but he stood his ground, arms at his sides, at attention.
    She had turned toward the door when he dashed in, had forgotten the gun in her hand. She realized now she was pointing it at him.
    “No,” she said. She lowered her hand, took a step backward, and dropped into the chair by the window. “No, I’m not.”
    Outside, it had started to snow again, a furious wind whipping the big flakes against the pane in waves. She thought of the waves in California, the way they seemed to pause for a second or two—translucent in the afternoon sunlight, like they were carved from jade—just before they rolled up onto the beach.
    “You’d better call the cops, Will,” she said.

Midnight Special
    A Note from the Author
    It is a bit of a departure from form to write an introduction to a short story. In this case, however, I thought it might interest the reader to have some idea how I came to write a story that is so fundamentally different from my usual work.
    It is not that the story is heterosexually oriented, nor that the protagonist is a female, that makes it so different, nor even the fact that she is a black woman. I have said in the past that a white author could not write specifically about the black experience, but assuming this woman to be a part of my contemporary culture, there are surely enough similarities in our day-to-day experience to make the transition, if not easy, certainly not undoable. After all, we all share certain tendencies, likes, needs, fears, wants, and from them a competent author should be able to construct a story that crosses