
“The Gingerbread Girl” (July 2007 issue of Esquire) begins with the death of Emily Owensby’s baby. It was “defective.” So Emily takes up running. She runs so much she pukes. Henry, her husband, argues with her about her new obsession. She hurls a book at him and flees the house, and her marriage.Emily relocates to a shack owned by her father on the southern Florida coast near Naples. She runs along the beach and encounters a dead body in the trunk of a Mercedes. Soon thereafter, she unexpectedly meets the owner of the car. Jim Pickering can boast possession of a yacht, a Mercedes, and a winter home in Florida he inhabits when Chicago gets too cold, yet when Emily looks into his eyes, she “saw nothing in them she recognized as sanity.” In addition, he “looked crazy. In fact, there was no doubt about his state of mind.” Perhaps several Constant Readers are scratching their heads at this rather implausible creature.
Pickering laboriously binds Emily to a chair with duct tape so she can hardly move, even though his intent is apparently to rape and murder her. How to rape a person fastened securely to a chair? Pickering would need to kill her or at least knock her out, then undo all the tape, then rape her. But then, why the tape job in the first place? Just to ask who might know she was at his house? Why would such a madman even think about that?
Pickering improbably decides to exit the house to kill someone Emily said knew she was there. While he’s gone, she manages—after herculean effort—to free herself just as he returns. They fight. She wins. She runs through the house but can’t get to the main door to leave. Pickering runs after her. She’s trapped! She barricades the door to the room. Just as Pickering breaks down the door, Emily crashes through a window. Freedom! She runs along the beach with Pickering not far behind—and he’s carrying a big pair of kitchen scissors.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.