Each Man Kills

A first-person narrator crosses into Central Europe to find the woman he loves after she stops writing, only to discover she has become engaged to a mysterious newcomer and has grown thin and withdrawn. When he returns from a fruitless search his final confrontation is forestalled by the sight of the couple dead together yet uncannily preserved and peaceful. The narrator recalls her claimed psychic gifts, local superstitions and his own jealous obsession while he tries to unravel how love, illness and unsettling occult hints might have combined to produce a fatal, enigmatic outcome.