Sins of the Flesh. Colleen McCullough

had rented the top floor of an old three-family house in Persimmon Street, Carew, very early in January of that year; she signed a one-year lease and paid, in cash, her first month’s rent, her last month’s rent, and a damages deposit of $100. If she had a car it must have been randomly parked on the street, as no one knew it or was aware of its existence. As a tenant she was remarkable in only one respect: she was extremely unobtrusive. No one ever heard her music or her TV or noises of her moving around; she passed people on the stairs in silence, and never seemed to entertain visitors. The details furnished by the rental agency were scant: she had said she was a secretary, gave two written references and a driver’s license in verification, and presented so favorably in an anonymous kind of way that the agency never bothered checking. Most three-family houses saw the landlord living on the premises, but Carew was a student-resident district, so Tennant’s landlord owned fifteen three-family houses, and used his realty business as a rental agency. When July’s rent came due on the first of the month, Miss Tennant didn’t pay it, and ignored the agency’s reminders. This led to the discovery that Miss Tennant had no telephone—amazing! Several personal visits to her home by the clerk delegated to handle the affair never found Miss Tennant there, and thus matters stood when August arrived. She was now well and truly in arrears, and no one could remember seeing her since June.

      The delinquency now attained a certain urgency, for early September saw the new academic year’s influx of students pour into rental agencies looking for furnished accommodations: Miss Tennant had to go, and go fast. In mid-August the realtor went to the Holloman PD and requested that he be accompanied to Miss Tennant’s apartment by a police officer, as enquiries suggested she hadn’t been seen since June, and her rent was overdue.

      Missing Persons leaped to the same conclusion the Realtor had, that Miss Margot Tennant would be found inside her apartment, very dead: but such was not the case. A faint and noisome smell proved to emanate from the refrigerator, where two-month-old fish and meat were in a slow decay. Miss Tennant’s few possessions were removed from the premises and stored until garnishment proceedings saw them auctioned to pay rent and damages, the latter to the refrigerator. Said possessions were meager: a cheap radio, a black-and-white TV, a few clothes and a cigar box of imitation jewelry—no books, magazines, letters or other private papers. Thanks to the refrigerator, they didn’t fetch enough to pay what the missing Mary Tennant owed.

      Each year since had seen the same pattern. Locations were scattered all over Holloman County, but the renting was always at New Year or scant days after, and June the last rent paid by the missing woman before the six-to-eight-week period leading to a report with Missing Persons. The few things in common lent the task of finding the missing women a nightmare quality because the differences only pointed up the similarities.

      Missing Persons had handed the Shadow Women to Detectives and Carmine Delmonico when the third woman vanished from her studio flat on the twelfth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building; now the total had escalated to six. “Ghost” was the sobriquet of a famous case, therefore couldn’t be applied to the missing women, but Delia had suggested “Shadow” as apt, and the Shadow Women they became.

      Something was going on, but what on earth could it be? The Commissioner, John Silvestri, found the case fascinating and kept tabs on it through his regular breakfast meetings with his detectives; since she was his blood niece, Delia yearned to be able to produce something brand-new to offer him, but thus far the pickings were nonexistent.

      One promising hypothesis had been promulgated by Silvestri’s wife, Gloria, who was the best-dressed woman in Connecticut. She decided that each woman was having cosmetic plastic surgery, and that in her own identity she was too well known not to be hounded and embarrassed if news of the surgery leaked. So she became a Shadow Woman for six months.

      “As you well know, John,” said Gloria, stroking her smooth, unscragged throat, “any woman in that predicament would die sooner than confess, even if the price is a murder hunt.”

      “Yes, dear,” said the Commissioner, dark eyes twinkling.

      “The cops never find any clothes worth wearing, do they?”

      “No, dear.”

      “Then that’s it. They’re all movie stars and socialites.”

      “I appreciate your submitting your theory to me in writing, dear, but why have you signed it Maude Hathaway?”

      “I like the name. Gloria Silvestri sounds like old vaudeville programs and fish on Fridays.”

      Enquiries produced no professional cosmetic plastic surgeon operating in the vicinity of Holloman, though the Chubb Medical School had plastic surgeons aplenty, but attached to a famous burn unit. What Maude Hathaway’s effort said was that no stone would go unturned.

      Delia had long passed beyond practical considerations. Her mind had fixed on the reason why any reasonably attractive woman in her late twenties to early thirties would voluntarily isolate herself from her fellow human beings? Not that Delia was fool enough to exclude the possibility that obedience was ensured by a hostage situation like the kidnapping of a beloved man, woman or child, but that stretched the chain laterally as well as added to its length, and the more people were involved, the greater the chances of a situation falling apart. If not a hostage situation, then a death threat of some kind? Yet wouldn’t a woman tortured by worry about a loved one have a telephone in her house? None of the Shadow Women had telephones. Was there a set of rules involved? That hinted at a genuine mania, psychopathy, an utter absence of morals, ethics, principles. Easy enough to impose for a short period, but six months of living under the rigid quasi-mathematical torture of rules was a very long time indeed unless the subject had first been exhaustively brainwashed, which seemed impossible. Had the Shadow Women been jailed for long enough to turn them into semi-zombies? No, because what people they had met had seen them as nice, conversable, ordinary. Prison left visible scars.

      There was something Delia called a “gibber factor,” though only a Jess Wainfleet would fully understand what she meant by the term. To Delia, no human being was truly inviolate, meaning that he or she could not be broken. Everyone had a breaking point wherein mental torture caused the mind to snap. The human being shattered into small pieces, unable to cope. In Delia’s world, they became a “gibbering idiot”—her father’s phrase—and resigned their hold on sanity. Six months of relentless mental torture would trigger the gibber factor, Delia was sure, yet what evidence was there that the Shadow Women had spent six months under relentless mental torture? The answer: there was no evidence. Each woman, she was sure, had commenced her strange six-month isolation voluntarily, and nothing left behind in the rented premises suggested that July and early August were any different from the earlier months.

      That told Delia each of them owned an average intellect; that they were satisfyingly entertained by whatever their radio and television broadcast, and that if they read at all, it was newspapers, magazines and throw-away paperbacks. If they played solitaire or dominoes or did crosswords, any evidence was gone, and that probably meant they hadn’t. Everything left behind was cheap, ordinary and uninspiring: over-the-counter medicines, supermarket cosmetics. After Mary Tennant, no perishable foods were left behind, and none of the six had left household cleaners or a stock of plastic bags. Had someone cleaned up? If so, no attention had been paid to fingerprints, for the same set was found all over each apartment, presumably the occupant’s. None was on file with any large agency—a dead end.

      Plenty of people vanished for a few months, then turned up unwilling to give an explanation; Missing Persons was full of files solved that way—by the subject—and from thence were sent for permanent storage to the Holloman PD repository out on Caterby Street. But no matter how innocent a disappearance might be, the file on closure was a fat one, thanks to biographical data accumulated as the investigation ground on, always too slowly to please the relatives. Whereas the Shadow Women were thin files, devoid of biographical data; none had a past, none seemed likely to have a future. Certainly no one had ever come forward with information about any Shadow Woman, and the date was rapidly approaching for 1969’s victim to bob to the surface.

      They rented at the beginning of January, paid first and last month’s rent, vanished by the end of June, and were invaded by the letting