Page 73 of If Looks Could Kill
“Tell me, Pearl,” Miss Stella says, “who has made you a Medusa like me?”
I am not like you, Pearl tells herself. I am not like you.
“Did anyone touch you? Today, I mean?”
Pearl was taken aback. “We went walking. I’m sure I brushed against all sorts of people.”
“It will have been a man,” Miss Stella tells her. “It won’t have taken much.”
“How,” demands Pearl, “can a chance encounter have the power to ruin my whole life?”
As soon as the words escape her, she feels the bitter irony. Easily. That’s how.
“Not for nothing do the ogre parents in fairy tales lock their daughters in towers,” muses Miss Stella. “It’s a dangerous world, and young women are the coveted targets of much of the danger. As to whether a chance encounter should have such power, I can only say that it does.”
Pearl thinks of Cora and Freyda. Chance encounterswith herhelped to ruin their lives.
“So whoever did this to me,” Pearl says, “will bump into people here and there, cutting a swath of destruction wherever he goes? Destroying one life after another?”
“Oh, no, my dear,” Miss Stella says urgently. “I don’t know that I’d call it ‘destruction.’ But either way, he won’t be allowed to do it for long. Because you will stop him.”
Pearl feels the small hairs on her arms prickle.
“You’ll find him,” Miss Stella says. “You feel the pull, don’t you? You can smell him?”
Pearl flinches. “There is something,” she admits. “I keep feeling… something.”
“It’s a call,” Stella tells Pearl. “It will lead you to your quarry.”
Pearl presses her fingers into her temples. “I thought the idea was that Medusa—that we—turn men to stone. Just by looking at them.” She closes her eyes. “Or them looking at us.” She sits upright in her seat. “Have I killed people? Those men? I don’t think—”
“There, now,” Miss Stella says soothingly. “You haven’t killed anyone. You couldn’t.”
Relief washes over Pearl. “We can’t actually kill?”
A small smile plays over Miss Stella’s lips. “Oh, we can,” she says. “But baby hatchlings almost never do. They’re too new. Too frightened and confused.”
So much for relief. Babyhatchling? “But then…”
“To kill,” explains Miss Stella, “takes will, and fury, and conviction to see it through.”
Pearl edges away from Miss Stella. “That’s horrible.”
“What?” asks Miss Stella archly. “Would you rather it were easy?”
I am a killer now. Pearl remembers her dream, about him. I wanted to kill him, and now I can. This frightens her far more than snakes.
After a while, Pearl speaks. “I stunned Tabitha tonight.”
Miss Stella tilts her head to one side. “At first glance?”
Pearl shakes her head.
“Then you must have wanted to.” She smiles wryly. “It takes real intent to impact a woman. At least, that’s been my experience.”
Pearl swallows the guilt that bubbles up then. It’s true. She had wanted to. Some Salvation Army sister she was.
Never mind.
