Savage Girl

This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.
Copyright © 2014 by Jean Zimmerman

Prologue

Manhattan. May 19, 1876

I wait for the police in the study overlooking Gramercy Park, the body prone on the floor a few feet away. Outside, rain has cooled the green spring evening. In here the heat is stifling.

Midnight. I've been in this room before, many times in the course of my twenty-two years. The Turkish rug on the floor, the Empire chairs, the shelves of uncracked books, all familiar to me. A massive mahogany partners desk, from England, in the William IV style, installed as proof of the late victim's diligence, a rich boy's insistence that he is, after all, engaged in honest work.

Of the dead man, a schoolmate of mine, I feature two possibilities. She killed him, in which case they will surely hang her. Either that or I killed him, in a fit of madness the specifics of which I have no memory.

This last is not as unlikely as it sounds. I have taken the rest cure for neurasthenia several times and every so often suffer faints, waking to find a small swath of my life gone. Peculiarities of the recent past, a series of strange incidents and dark coincidences, force me at least to entertain the idea that I am a monster.

The fact that in recent months I developed a passionate hatred for the dead man increases the possibility of my involvement in his demise.

On the other hand, if she is indeed the murderer, I can prevent her day of reckoning only by taking the burden of guilt upon myself.

So you see, either way, if I must assume her guilt or confess my own, it works out much the same, demanding identical action on my part. My path is clear. I need to be caught red-handed. I have to wait in this room until discovery, alarm, arrest.

I summon up the mental image of a stern-faced detective with a fat, unkempt mustache. Mr. Hugo Delegate-for that is my name-you must accompany us to the Tombs. Will he place me in restraints? Will it be that