But when she picked up, she did not hear the voice she feared. She had heard some of the other women had received phone calls after their assault, possibly from the assailant. She had heard from the police that there were others who had been attacked recently. When the phone rang, the call came through a line that a few weeks before had been cut by the blade of a knife. When she discovered that photos she kept of herself were missing, she knew they had been taken but couldn't be sure by whom.

The attack she had endured was inescapably real but, in its aftermath, she faced a sense of unreality so powerful that she kept in her pocket the scant newspaper clipping about her assault to remind herself that it really happened. Karen felt as though she were being pushed aside and forgotten. The hospital had run out of rape kits, and the nurse who examined her was rude, she thought, 'mocking.' The rape crisis center had no therapists to recommend, only women around her age who offered more sympathy than expertise. She had opened the Yellow Pages and called a resource new to the town where she had gone to school and now lived, something called a rape crisis center.īut the police seemed to want more from her, even after she had told them everything she could remember. She had gone to the local hospital and submitted to an examination. She had called the police on the night of the attack, when she finally convinced herself that she might be safe. It had been weeks since she had been attacked there, but the apartment still felt to her like a crime scene, a place that had been turned over and rummaged through.

Karen was alone in her apartment when the phone rang. Editor's note: This story contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of sexual violence and a murder investigation.

Salt Magic, Skin Magic by Lee Welch