If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.

 

 After you find a bigger task to dread, the little chores will be a breeze. Here’s another reason to have a devil on hand. It does make all the little demons more . . . bearable. Another Mrs. Clark extension to the theories of Mr. Whittier.

 

 We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we’ll create one.

 

 None of that is bad. It’s just the way human beings operate. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.

 

 After her daughter disappeared the second time, Mrs. Clark dipped a cotton swab in a can of mineral oil and sealed the grout between each bathroom tile. It took most of a weekend.

 

 She ran a dust cloth along the narrow length of each miniblind.

 

 All those tedious jobs, for the time being they were made bearable by the telephone call that might come. The police detectives calling to say they’d found the remains. Or, worse, they’d found Cassandra alive.

 

 That girl robot who could sit all day, painting the blue jays that screeched outside her window. Or watching that damned goldfish swim around and around its bowl.

 

 That . . . stranger with her toes and fingers gone.

 

 What Mrs. Clark didn’t know is, the police had found Cassandra. A Cub Scout came out of the woods, not talking. Quiet with a secret, the discovery he’d found. Out looking in the woods, following a little stream up a canyon, climbing over rocks where the water pooled behind before it tipped over and dug out a pool there, this Cub Scout was looking for a hole big enough it might hold trout. Green moss crested and ebbed around the rocks, and trees stood with branches holding each other back. In that shade, there was Cassandra Clark stretched out on one side, her hands folded under the side of her thin, pale face as if she were asleep. Cassandra, naked on a bed of this thick, soft moss, under where the leaves from a hawthorn tree hung down in a curtain all around.

 

 The Scout tells someone adult, who calls the sheriff. Before dark, a string of detectives have followed the creek up that canyon. By dark, they’ve gone home, a crowd of people not talking about what they saw that day at work.

 

 None of them call Mrs. Clark. At home, waiting, she turns each mattress in the house. She washes the second-floor windows. She dusts the top edge of baseboards. Every job too miserable most times, is nothing compared to just waiting. She cleans the fireplace, the telephone never so far away she can’t grab it on the first ring.

 

 This second disappearance, no one tied yellow ribbons to anything. Nobody went door-to-door, searching. Or lit prayer candles. No psychics called.

 

 Not even the television stations dropped by while Mrs. Clark cleaned and cleaned.

 

 That’s another night Cassandra waited in that canyon, across a stream, and halfway up a rocky slope, a long carry from any forest-service logging road. No footprints marked the path, and her bare feet looked clean, as if she’d been carried.

 

 By then, it was too late to measure the potassium in her aqueous humor. Her arms could bend, so she’d been dead longer than two days. Rigor mortis had come and gone.

 

 That first team of detectives, they hung a microphone in the curtain of hawthorn branches. The same way they’d mike a murder victim’s grave after a recent funeral. Because the killer has to come back. The killer has to talk, to tell this story until it’s used up.

 

 Other stories, they use you up.

 

 To the only audience a killer can risk having, his victim.

 

 Cassandra on her bed of moss. The microphone hanging above her, connected to a tape recorder and a transmitter broadcasting to a sheriff’s deputy perched on rocks across the canyon. Far enough away he can swat mosquitoes without giving himself away. The headphones over his ears. Sitting on the ground, crawling with ants. All the time, listening.

 

 In his earphones, birds sing. The wind blows.

 

 You’d be amazed how many of the killers come back to say good-bye. They’ve shared something, the killer and the victim, and the killer will come to sit at the grave and talk about old times.

 

 Everyone needs an audience.

 

 In the deputy’s earphone, black flies buzz, here to lay their eggs around the damp edge of Cassandra’s eyelids, her blue lips opened just a crack. The flies lay eggs inside her nose and anus.

 

 At home, Mrs. Clark has wrestled the refrigerator away from the kitchen wall so she can vacuum the compressor coils on its back.

 

 On the bed of moss, Cassandra’s blood has settled to the lowest side of her, leaving the parts you can see, her breasts and hands and face, looking painted white. Her eyes open and sticky-dry from the sucking tongues of insects. Her blond hair. Her hair rolls out yellow and thick from the back of her head, but dull, the way hair looks cut off and dead on the floor in a barbershop.

 

 Her cells are digesting themselves, still trying to do some job. Desperate for food, the enzymes inside start eating through the cell walls, and the yellow within each cell starts to leak out. Cassandra’s pale skin starts to slip, sliding slack over the muscle underneath. Puckering and wrinkling, the skin on her hands looks loose-baggy as cotton gloves.

 

 Her skin is marked with bumps beyond counting, a field of what could be tiny knife scars, every bump moving, grazing between skin and muscle. Every bump the larva of a black fly. Eating the thin layer of subcutaneous fat, tunneling just under her skin. The entire surface of her, of her arms and legs, a constellation of moving lumps.