We’re back on sparagmos, the act of tearing people to pieces. And the foot in the shoe. I don’t say anything by accident, you know that. Or you will anyway.
So. Pan sees Echo in the woods, and hears her, and he wants to possess her beauty. But he’s also a musician, a great one—the term “Pan pipes” comes from that fact, of course—and he is admiring and jealous at the same time of the way she can sing back any sound, the way she can even re-create perfectly the supposedly inimitable beauty of his own playing.
So, naturally, he tries to sleep with her.
But this time it’s Echo who does the rejecting. She guards her maidenhead, the usual nymph stuff. Runs from him in the time-honored fashion, refuses his advances. The way nymphs are always trying to do with Zeus, though usually he turns into a bull or a swan or something and tricks them into coming close and then rapes them.
The ancient Greeks: a weird people.
I got offtrack there. Pan tries to sleep with Echo, and she says no, so he goes mad, and being a Greek god and therefore mental, he whips his followers up into one of their frenzies—the word “panic” comes from this—and they tear Echo into little bits with their bare hands, and scatter her and her blood all over the woods.
But the earth. The earth loves Echo’s music, so the stones and the trees and the plants take her into themselves, and they preserve her voice inside them, so that anytime anyone shouts or sings, Echo imitates their voice perfectly, calls back to them.
And this way Pan is thwarted, because he can still never possess this girl or her amazing voice. Every time he plays his pipes, she pipes them back at him from the rocks and the trees and the caves, echoing his beautiful music, taunting him.
Do you see?
The whole world preserves her voice, so she can accuse her destroyer over and over again.
I read this, and I thought:
Oh.
I remembered the voice saying, “I want justice.” I thought about how the voice had appeared to me first at the police station, after I found the foot. I thought of Echo’s voice left behind after her death, to punish Pan. My own suspicion, which I had pushed down inside myself.
What if the voice …
I took a breath. I didn’t know how to ask the question indirectly. “Are you … are you one of the murdered women?”
Silence—but mixed with interest. Focused interest. The eye of that giant predator turning slowly to look at me.
“He killed me and you did nothing.”
The voice’s voice was laced with venom. The voice of a snake, almost, all whisper and serious hatred. And this is how stupid I was: I took that “you” as collective, like an indictment of the whole town, the police, the justice system, whatever.
It didn’t occur to me the voice was talking to me. Singular. Saying that I had done nothing. Like I said, I was stupid. You’ll see.
Back then I just said: “Someone killed you. Is that right? And now you’re just … a voice. Like a kind of ghost, but one that only speaks.”
Silence.
“You want me to find out who did this to you? You want revenge?”
Silence.
“I think I’ll just turn the TV on, watch a movie.” I held my breath. Usually if I said something like this, the voice would tell me to slap myself or walk into a wall. I had done that a few times, walked into the wall, for considering anything that might be construed as entertainment.
Silence, still.
I sat there in wonder. The voice was a ghost, murdered by the Houdini Killer, and she wanted me to make it right. That was why she appeared after the foot, that was why she was so angry, that was why she’d picked me. Hell, I guessed it was probably her foot.
I knew what I had to do now.
I had to find the Houdini Killer. If the police couldn’t do it, maybe I could. People who hurt other people always get away with it, don’t they? That was what I’d wanted to tell Mr. Nakomoto.
Well.
Maybe not.
IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:
I was not right thinking that the voice was a ghost.
I was very, very wrong.
I’d already read a lot about the Houdini Killer and what it amounted to was:
0.
Absolutely nothing.
No one knew anything because there were no bodies, only a foot—thanks to me—and nothing to link the girls, except their work.
Since the foot, of course, there were some more conjectures: most of the stuff online—the voice was cool with me researching online as long as I didn’t go on Facebook or whatever—agreed that the killer must have dumped the bodies at sea, and that was how come the foot ended up on the beach. Just like Dad said.
So they cross-referenced the dead women’s client lists and the membership lists of the strip clubs, where they could, with people who owned boats. But they didn’t find anything.
I know this because:
I was in the kitchen with Dad one morning, and I asked him, as casual as I could, if his buddies at the police station knew anything about the foot and the whole maritime-burial theory.
“You want to know what the cops are doing about finding this guy?”
“Uh … yeah.”