Mindy May's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Mindy May kept a killer's confession in pieces, and she could not fit them together. She was the village healer, and sick people talked to her. During checkups, they let their guards down. One said, "I washed my hands for an hour." Another said, "He begged near the frozen pond." A third whispered, "The knife went into the snow." Mindy remembered every word. But dozens of patients came to her clinic. She did not know which fragments belonged to the same mouth. So the killer sat hidden among honest patients. Tonight she spread her notes across the table. Each scrap held one confession line, copied in her small hand. She sorted them by fear, by tone, by the season each patient mentioned. Nothing lined up. A man who spoke of the frozen pond might be describing a dream. A woman who mentioned a knife might have gutted a fish. Mindy pressed her cold fingers to her eyes. Without knowing who said what, she could accuse no one. Then she remembered the pad. A patient had left it behind three weeks ago. It was a clean notepad, thick with blank lined pages, its top edge bound in blue and red. She had set it on her shelf and forgotten it. Now she took it down. The patient had torn off the used sheets, but the pen had pressed hard. Faint grooves marked the top blank page. Mindy rubbed a pencil sideways across the page. Gray filled the flat parts. White lines rose where the pen had dug. Words appeared. "I washed my hands for an hour." "He begged near the frozen pond." "The knife went into the snow." Her breath caught. Three of her floating fragments sat here in one hand, on one pad. They belonged together. One patient had written them, then dropped the pad while dressing. The same person had also spoken them aloud during a checkup, in pieces, over weeks. Mindy did not have a name on the page. But she had something better than guessing. She had a match. These three lines were now one confession, spoken by one person. That narrowed her suspects from dozens to a handful. She could recall which patients had spoken any of these three lines during their visits. The killer had said all three. She closed the pad and pressed it flat against her chest. Her hands shook, though the room was still. For weeks the fragments had drifted apart, useless. Now they held together, and the shape of one guilty person pressed up through them. Mindy pulled a fresh sheet toward her and began a new list. At the top she wrote the three joined lines. Below, she wrote the names of every patient who had spoken even one of them aloud. Four names. One of them had said all three. Tomorrow she would visit each. The killer was no longer hidden in the crowd. He was hidden among four.