Cutlass Keep

The Governess

They fish the first body from the river just before Thanksgiving, like it swam in with the tide. It's all over the news, staining the conversation as visiting aunts and uncles debate in hushed voices at the dinner table. Everyone has a theory, although most of them sound the same, but it's all table-talk. They care about it in the same roundabout way that they care about local weather patterns, and community college basketball. Then they go back to work after the weekend, back to their own suburban homes in their own whitewashed cities and they forget all about the unidentified body pulled from the waters of Cutlass Keep.

That's when they find the second body, and within the week, a third. Soon it becomes another thing to check on the morning channel, along with the traffic and stocks. Any chances of rain, Margaret? And did they find another body?

Long-distance friends and family learn to ask about it on the phone. How is everything? They catch The Fisherman yet? That's what the people have started to call the unnamed disposer of bodies. One or two suspicious drownings and/or suicides, that's understandable. Around the fourth body, people start to get suspicious. The term serial killer starts getting thrown around. When the numbers reach double digits, there's no pretending anymore.

But the case isn't serious, until Mr. and Mrs. Kastell are fished out of the river. It's still early spring, early enough for the water to be close to freezing, the air still bitter and cold. The case isn't serious, and then it is, the way that all things become serious when very rich and very famous people are involved.

Mr. and Mrs. Kastell, the elitist of the elite, the faces of Cutlass Keep, are found floating belly-up like goldfish that someone forgot to feed--and suddenly, the city's worried.

Elsa Kastell always said The Fisherman was a stupid name for the murderer. She said no fisherman worth his salt would throw their catch back. She said "Catch-and-release nonsense was made up by vegans and tourists." She said if they wanted a more apt name, they should have just stuck with The Bastard, because it got the point across better.

"What if it's a woman?" Her husband asked, amused. "Women can be serial killers, too."

"Of course we can," his wife said, smoothing the pleats of her skirt; the style was called Georgia Peach, but not because of the color, which was in fact a light beige. Rather, because the skirt itself made the bottom of its wearer resemble the fruit, which was why it was so expensive. When she dies wearing that skirt, this will be what Anais remembers. "But women can be bastards, too."

"Maybe it's a euphemism," Patrick Kastell pressed, and he clearly didn't have any stock in the argument and was simply being cheerfully obstinate, the way he was sometimes. Elsa Kastell knew this as well, and narrowed her eyes at him. "Like sleeping with the fishes, or something to that affect."

"Well of course it's a euphemism. I highly doubt the serial killer is an actual fisherman, Kastell." She always called him by his surname, unless she was upset with him. She said Kastell the way someone else might say sweetheart. She said Patrick the same way she said bastard.