The Girl from the Well

“I don’t think your mother would want you watching all this,” he says after considerable time has passed.

The girl shoots him a suspicious look. Few adults, in her experience, would condescend to talk to children the way this man does with such impunity. She takes an earbud out of one ear. “Mommy’s a policewoman,” she says. “We were driving home from school when the alert came on her radio. She was the closest to the crime scene, so she had to investigate. Mommy says we don’t have enough cops in this town, so we always have to adapt. She told me to stay inside the car,” she adds, as if this was a trivial detail not worth repeating. “But it was stuffy inside.”

“That is true,” says the Smiling Man, whose interest wanes slightly once the girl divulges her mother’s occupation. “But I don’t think she’d like to hear you’ve been talking to strangers, either.”

“Mommy said talking to strangers is dangerous,” the girl admits. “Are you a stranger?”

“I live in Massachusetts,” says the Smiling Man. “So I suppose you can call me a stranger. Can you say Massachusetts?”

“Massachusetts,” says the girl. “I’m not an idiot. Are you dangerous?”

The Smiling Man laughs at her courage. “Well, it was dangerous for that man over there, wasn’t it?” he asks, sidestepping her question and pointing toward the crime scene, where the crowd surges closer, straining to see more of the dead man as the medical technicians begin loading the body into the back of an ambulance. A flock of reporters (eight) swarm around the police officers (five), firing volleys of questions into the air at them like bullets. “They say he was a stranger, too.”

“That’s true,” the girl concedes. “Maybe strangers can also be dangerous to each other.”

The man laughs again, amused. “My name is Quintilian.”

“Sandra,” the girl counters and adds, “That’s a weird name.”

“My mother named me after a Greek philosopher.”

“Mommy named me after her favorite soap-opera actress.”

“Sandra is a nice name.”

“I wish she’d named me after someone more famous. Like Marie Curie. I think Marie is a nice name. Or maybe Marie Antoinette.”

“Marie Antoinette had her head chopped off by a group of angry Frenchmen.”

The girl is unfazed by his choice of words. “But she got to go to parties and wear wigs and eat a lot of cake. What are the names of all your other friends?”

“What friends?”

“All those kids sitting on your back.”

The man stills suddenly, and his smiling face changes. His gaze is now wary, and his hand slowly dips into his coat pocket and stays there. “There aren’t any kids on my back,” he says, trying to sound like a patient adult dealing with a rather precocious child.

“I can see them. They’re grouped all around you, and they don’t look very healthy. Why are they all afraid of you?”

“What an interesting child you are, Sandra,” the Smiling Man says. “What a funny little child.” From his pocket he withdraws a folded handkerchief, sending a faint whiff of chloroform into the air. He should not be doing this so close to the police cars, he knows, but sometimes the thrill of it fuels his motivations.

“You’re quite creative when it comes to making things up, aren’t you?”

“Sandra!” a woman’s voice calls from where the throng of people is thickest, laced with a mother’s worry and panic. “Sandra! Where are you?”

This produces a most unusual change in the Smiling Man. Where his body had been tense and coiled, as if he was biding his time to spring, he now relaxes and slides back against the bench. His hand slackens, and he slips the handkerchief he is toying with back into his pocket, out of sight.