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I'-V 'M ' Si' r f ,1 i )'| ' ' i ' ''/ ' ¦ ' ( r I i I < ' I., i • ' I I r, LI' ¦'''.'I',- 1 ^ '•¦//'li ¦¦i! 1,1 l'i'fiVV'^ lifJi-'' I / i ' i.', ,, II / //¦'( '' ' /i'l ' I I ! 11 '' hi I '!/'¦'I''' 'i I ' ' fi ii /: ' ! ! I I ; I . I ri I ' .Ik:» Saturday, 31 July 1999, 12:33 AM A studio apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn New York City, New York She sat in the exact center of her own apartment, and waited. The collar of her crisp, white cotton shirt lay open, just as he had left it. The blood on her neck had dried, and the tender skin there itched under the sticky crust. The handcuffs, finally, lay still. Tested, the chains and shackles had held, and she was weary of fighting them. With the irons, he had bound her to and through an old, heavy office chair—solid walnut, too sturdy for her to destroy, even if she wanted to. And, she thought, he would have known that she wouldn't. Though the ruddy scratches on her wrists pained her, the knowledge that her struggles had scraped the foul and dirt-encrusted bonds over the polished antique—uselessly, by God—^hurt almost as badly. Wrist to wood to steel to wood to wrist, the hated things left broad, brick-red stains on her skin, on the shining walnut, and on the center pillar of her home, and there was nothing she could do now but watch, and wait, and remember. He hadn't left a light burning in the apartment, but through the windows—the enormous, beautiful, north-facing, morning windows she'd rented the loft to have—the city gave her enough light to see by. The neon, the cars, the streetsigns silhouetted the studio, her workshop, and gave the apartment its own sky line. There, the easel and its half-cleaned painting standing tall above the borough. Beside it, a modem sky scraper, all angles and difficult curves: her quilt stand stretched with a cavalry flag and draped in mending lin ens. The workbench, a little apart from the better neighborhood, was a warehouse and factory, the roof busy with neat rows of bottles, cleansers, jars, brushes, boxes of gloves and cotton swabs. The desk, large, straight-lined. lO seUte