In the dream—she knows that she’s dreaming because she hasn’t seen this stream in years and she will not think about it when she’s awake—it is colder than it was on that day, cold enough for snowflakes to spiral out of a white sky and melt at the touch of the too-warm ground: crisp air, filtered sun, fishy smell of dark mud. It snowed once while she was in Italy, but it wasn’t here, it wasn’t at this place. On the hazy weft of her dream the two memories are woven together: the day of snow close to the highlands and the body floating in the stream.
Later on they would find the things the body had lost, wedged by the swift water into the edge of the streambed: her rings, the heart-shaped necklace with its broken clasp, the narrow silver bracelets with inlaid turquoise that she, Emily, had always envied as she watched them slide up Francesca’s slim brown wrists. Francesca, the unmarried daughter of the man next door, young woman with a bright smile riding by the house on her bicycle every morning to go to her library job. Francesca then, a dappled shadow flying across the road, and Francesca now, in the heart of this dream: floating on her back in the cold dirty water, her long black hair full of dead leaves and her half-open eyes clotted with silt.
Emily was alone, in the countryside, having strayed beyond the grounds of the rented house. It was very early in the morning, birds just starting to wake up, the light filling everything as it spilled over the misty horizon. She stood on the big fishing rock and looked down into the foamy water. Francesca’s rigid legs stuck out from beneath the sodden mass of her gray skirt. She was bare from the waist up. Her breasts were beautiful, large and round, floating on the gentle current. Her nipples were full and dark like plums. The ragged knife wound between them was pale and bloodless, shedding eddying curls of translucent skin. Against her will, Emily imagined tiny fish swimming in and out, nibbling on the blood until it was gone. Her mind offered up this image to erase the heat from her loins, kindled by the sight of Francesca’s bare breasts.
They aren’t sexy because she’s dead, she tells her dreaming self. She was beautiful when she was alive and that’s why you thought about her sometimes while drifting off to sleep, even though you were too young to know that it was okay to wonder about the girls beneath their clothes the same way you wondered about the boys. They still look alive even though she’s dead, like maybe she’s in the bathtub or something if you ignore the stab wound. Like she’s been caught skinny-dipping. If you ignore the stab wound it isn’t gross at all.
But dreaming Emily feels sick, nauseous in a hollow and echoing sort of way that she won’t experience again until she’s at her first crime scene; dreaming Emily has restless seas inside her belly and that stubborn pubescent heat simmering up from below through the heaving and hollow sound of her breath trapped inside her ears, dumb animal response to bare dead breasts. It haunts her thoughts for weeks, nauseous because she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her; her own breasts in the mirror don’t make her feel this way, or the breasts of her classmates glimpsed in the locker room after swimming practice. Only Francesca’s breasts, dead even though they don’t look dead and Emily can’t imagine them living even though she tries, erasing the stab wound with her mind, drawing in a bathtub with her mind, erasing the skirt and the dirt, drawing in curls of steam and candlelight. She draws in moonlight and imagines Francesca’s perfume dissolving into the green scent of lake water and wants to touch those breasts, wants to lick away the flavor of an Italian summer.
But at the end of her fantasy, they are always cold.
The dream is full of snow. It comes down, soft, and touches Francesca’s nipples. It doesn’t melt. It clings to the dead skin and Emily feels warm. Hot, even. Her breath billows out into the snow like clouds of steam. Wrapped tight amidst the two memories, of snow and dead nipples, her own body heat melting back into her skin and suffocating her.
Things get soft and fall out of focus. The countryside recedes and she drifts up into the reddened darkness behind her closed lids. She’s rolled tight inside her blankets. She pulls her arms out.
Some part of me must still be sleeping—dreaming about waking from a dream—because I hear that goddamned song, the song that haunted me the summer of Francesca. I’d know that piano riff anywhere and if I heard it, on the radio or in an elevator, it would make me feel just like this: fluttery and nervous on the inside, like my guts have gone through some metamorphosis and want to fly away. What is it called again?
Emily turns onto her stomach. Her arms wrap around the pillow and pull it under her cheek.
Do you really wanna see me crawl? And I’m never gonna make it like you do…
“Makin love outta nothing at all,” she murmurs, throat dry and dusty with sleep. “That’s it.”
She settles into the mattress. Icy adrenaline unwinds in the pit of her belly. In a blink she’s awake, full of slow even breaths and stillness. She lifts her head and looks at the nightstand. Her cell charger is there, limp and coiled, but her cell phone is gone. Her mouth goes dry. She pulls her legs beneath her and sits up. Her weapon is gone. She flings off the covers and looks around, checks the floor, peeks under the bed. Her mind traces a route downstairs to the kitchen, taking note of all the doors and alcoves along the way. She straightens up and freezes. Listens.
Downstairs, the stereo in the living room is on. The volume is low, but it isn’t too low for her to make out the melody. Her jaw tightens. Her adrenalized caution starts to smolder.
“Okay, someone is fucking with me,” she whispers. “But…how?”
Have I ever told anybody about me and that song? Anyone at all?
Her lips tighten. She moves to the bedroom door and peers out into the hallway. She listens for shifting floorboards.
Emily slips out into the corridor and looks to the head of the stairs, aware of the cream walls and the pristine blue carpet, the simple frames of her photographs hanging on the walls as though their positions had been mapped out with a level and a tape measure; new eyes slip down over hers, intruder-eyes, taking this reflection of her life apart by the arrangement of her living space, a casual dissection that is comforting when it’s aimed at the victims she investigates every day but feels like tasting swamp water when she does it to herself. Hatred chokes her, flaring out at whomever dared come into her bedroom while she was sleeping and take away the government-issued tools of her safety, turning her home into a place both foreign and vivisected.
Her mind turns the intruder into a targeted silhouette and pumps it full of bullet holes. The image soothes her. Instinct tells her that the unsub is already gone, that he or she knows that particular musical calling-card will be more than enough to crawl under her skin.
“Still,” she mutters. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
Emily slides down the hall with her back to the wall. She checks each room before pulling its door closed. She races down over the stairs, into her kitchen, grabbing the phone off the charger, and catches her reflection in the microwave: pale-faced, bright patches of red riding her cheekbones, chest rising and falling with a combination of exertion and anger. Her gun and her cell phone are arranged on the center island. She snatches them up, hating her widened eyes and the way they dart around as she works her gun free of its holster. She looks ridiculous, standing there in her bare feet and Miso Hot pajamas, hair messy, cordless clutched in one hand and gun held in the other, breathing hard and trying to look everywhere at once.
The Air Supply song ends. It begins again.
This is what he wants. Hotch’s voice speaks up inside her mind. It hits all the right spots inside her and she starts to relax. This is what he wants. He wants you to feel out of control. This is what he does.
It must be a CD. A blank CD filled up with as many copies as it would hold. I wonder how long it’s been playing?
She goes into the living room. She glances at the darkened TV screen. The remote control is lined up with the edges of the coffee table. It holds down a folded piece of paper.
Emily looks around the room. Her heart has slowed down but it’s still thrumming against her ribs.
I shouldn’t touch it. I shouldn’t…wait.
She opens her cell phone, turns on the camera, and takes a picture. One up close, one from a distance. She picks up the remote and turns off the stereo. The paper is folded in thirds and without the weight of the remote one of the edges springs up. The paper is crisp and white, clean and unremarkable. It started life in a paper factory, some small forest town stinking of fumes, and languished in a wrapped ream until someone thumbed this piece off the top of the pile and used it to write…what?
She picks it up. Through glass she hears the sound of the garbage truck backing up. The paper rustles between her fingers. The silence is a canvas of waiting memory.
You could’ve been a term paper or a government document or someone’s Christmas card list. But instead, you ended up here: the bit player and the leading role on a stage of manufactured fear.
She opens it.
Black ink, capital letters slanting hard to the right, narrow and well-formed. She sees the letters, commits their proportions to memory, before she sees the word. Even before she sees the red at the bottom of the page she knows how tall the letters are, that they came out of a place of calm, and she can almost imagine the hand that made them:
DON’T.
Below that, drawn in slow strokes, the red eye of providence.
She lifts the paper to her nose. She sniffs the ink. Sharpie.
She puts the note down. She sits on the couch and looks at the phone.
She takes a breath and punches in a number with her thumb. She puts the phone to her ear.
“Hi. This is Emily Prentiss. I need all my codes changed. No, no, everything is fine. I just…feel the need.” She stares at the stereo display. “Also, I want a locksmith. Can you recommend one?”