According to the lab techs, there’d been a pool of blood on the floor, which had been cleaned up with a product called Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner and paper towels-there were little spit ball, or blood- ball, remnants from the towels stuck in the cracks of the Mexican tiles. The blood spatters on the wall had simply been missed by the killer or killers, who hadn’t noticed the thin sprays of blood entwined in the floral pattern of the wallpaper.
Frances was gone, and probably dead, and they all knew it. Alyssa cried, sporadically and unpredictably, for four weeks, caught in the bureaucracy of mysterious death, a slow- motion nightmare. No body, just the blood-and the cops coming around, and the reporters, and the cameras, and then the lawyers and the accountants, trying to work through the law. What to do about Frances’s car? I’m sorry to have to ask at a time like this but Frances’s belongings are still in the apartment, and if she’s not going to be able to pay the rent next month we have a young couple who are looking…
WHEN HER HUSBAND, Hunter, had been killed, he’d managed to die with his typical neatness. Trusts in order, will in place, lists of assets and debts, a file of real estate holdings, careful records of stock- purchase dates, garnished with instructions for everybody. He’d been a control freak right to the end. He’d probably never felt a thing, his silly seaplane dropping like a rock into the Ontario woods, witnesses all around.
When he’d died, she’d been stricken, but had recovered, and knew even on the day of his death that she would recover. They were married, but they’d been psychologically split for years, living separate lives in separate rooms; with a little sex now and then.
FRANCES, THOUGH, was different. She hadn’t had her life yet; she hadn’t died-if she were dead-doing something voluntarily. And she was Alyssa’s blood. Whatever their conflicts-and they’d mostly concerned the father and husband, Hunter-they would have been worked through. They only needed time, and they hadn’t gotten it.
So Alyssa cried, short violent jags at unexpected moments. And she looked for her daughter, the only ways she knew: she called people, politicians, who called the cops, who whispered back that something was going on here… The politicians apologized and temporized and shuffled away. She’d become a liability.
And she looked in the stars. She did her astrological charts, using the latest software, she talked with a master on the East Coast, who wondered aloud if Frances might still be alive. His chart for the girl showed a passage of darkness, but not death. Nothing that big.
“Alive?"
"It’s a possibility that has to be examined,” he said, in tones portentous even for a wizard of the Zodiac. “I see an instability, a hovering, a waiting…”
The cards said the same thing. Alyssa had picked up the Tarot as a teenager, believed in the cards, used them at all- important business junctures-and she’d done so well. So well.
And though the cards and the stars agreed that Frances, or some part of her, remained in this sphere, there was never a sign of her.
THE BURDEN, the insanity of it all, was crushing. Alyssa lived on Xanax and, at night, on Ambien. Then she began to take Xanax to lay down a base for the Ambien; and then a glass of wine as a base for the Xanax, as a base for the Ambien; and still she didn’t sleep.
She rolled and turned and her mind cranked twenty- four hours a day, a long circle of jangled thoughts. Sometimes, during the day, from the corner of her eye, she’d see Frances sitting on a couch. She’d come downstairs in the middle of the night, having heard Fran’s music playing on the stereo, only to have it fade as she came closer.
She felt cool breezes where there should be no drafts, as though someone had walked past her. And she saw omens. Crows on a fence, symbols of death, staring at her unafraid, but mute. A fireball in the sky, when she happened to be thinking of Frances. Fran’s face in crowds, always turning away from her, and gone when she hurried to them.
Was Frances alive? Or dead? Or somewhere in between?
FAIRY HAD SOME of the answers, or believed she did. Alyssa was a blond, good- hearted, New Age modern woman. Fairy was dark, obsessive, Pre- Raphaelite-and where Alyssa floundered, trying to comprehend, Fairy knew in a moment what had happened to Frances, and focused on revenge. Fairy stepped out of the shower, toweled off as she walked into the bedroom. When she was dry, she threw the towel on the bed and chose Obsession from the row of perfume bottles on the dressing table. She touched the bottle to her neck and the top of her breasts, judging herself in the dressing mirror as she did.
She didn’t call herself Fairy; others did. But it fit-with a pair of gossamer wings, she could have been Tinker Bell’s evil twin.
Then Loren appeared. “Looking good. Really, really good. Your ass is…”
“I don’t have time to fool around, I’ve got to get dressed,” Fairy said. “But you can watch me.”
“I know, time to go,” Loren said. “I’ll watch you undress, later.” She looked straight into his hungry dark eyes, patted her breasts with the flats of her fingers, fluffing up her nipples, and got dressed: black panty hose, a light thermal vest for warmth, a soft black skirt, a black silk blouse threaded with scarlet, tight over the vest. Back to the mirror, she painted on the lipstick, dark as raw liver, penciled her eyebrows, touched up her lashes; smacked her lips like women do, adjusting everything. Arranged the fall of the hair: like a black waterfall around her shoulders.
“Wonderful."
"Thank you."
"That’s what you get, when you sleep with an aesthete.” Fairy walked back to the dressing closet and took out the short black leather jacket, pulled it on: the jacket gave her shoulders, and a stance. Two-inch black heels gave her height. Ready now.
“The knife?” Loren asked. “Here.” She touched the breast pocket on the jacket; could feel it in there, new from Target, hard black plastic and soft gray steel, sharpened to a razor’s edge.
“Then-let’s go.” Loren smiled, teeth flashing, his face a white oval above his dark clothing, and Fairy reached out, took his hand, and they went.
Loren was the one who’d found Frances’s killers; together they’d scoured her laptop, her photographs-thousands of them, taken with a cell phone and a point- and- shoot Nikon, some of them stored electronically, but hundreds of them printed out, stacked in baskets, stuck to the front of her refrigerator, piled in drawers: a record of her life, from which the killers emerged.
There were three: “I can actually feel her hand on their shoulders,” he told her. “These are the people who did it.”
The three were scattered through the stacks of photos, but they were all together in one of them. The photo had been taken at a party of some kind, the three people peering at the camera, laughing.
“You’re sure?” Fairy asked. “Never more. Blood on their hands, missus,” he said. “I want them,” she said “Revenge,” he said. He smacked his lips. “It’s so sweet; revenge tastes like orange juice and champagne.” Fairy laughed at the metaphor and said, “Everything with you goes back to the senses, doesn’t it? Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell…"
"That’s all there is, missus…”
THEY BOUGHT A CAR to hunt from-bought it at a roadside person to- person sales spot, along Highway 36. Gave the seller an envelope full of cash, drove away in the car, an aging Honda Prelude. Never registered the change, never bought insurance; kept it out of sight.
They began to scout, to make schedules, to watch. Early on, it became apparent that the bartender was at the center of the plot-the fulcrum of Frances’s Goth world. He took in people, places, events, and plans, and passed them on. He knew what was happening, knew the history.