“What was he like? As a kid?”
Still not using the name.
“I don’t know what he was like with you,” she began, moving her coffee cup in little circles. Jazz’s, neglected, had gone cold. “But living with him, I could tell. Early on, I could tell there was something wrong with him. I didn’t know how wrong, obviously, but I could tell he was… off. And for a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me because no one else seemed to notice. Not Mom and Dad, not that I’d expect them to. But not my friends or their parents. Not teachers. No one. They all thought he was this… this gregarious, funny kid. But I knew the truth.”
“He was hiding it for them,” Jazz said quietly, “but he let down his guard around you.”
“I guess. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought it was funny, to let one person see the truth…. I don’t know. He pushed things, but he never crossed a line. Not while I was around, at least. I know he killed some pets, some stray cats and dogs. But I could never prove it. And back then, you did that and people just shrugged and called you high-strung. It was different.
“From the outside, he seemed normal,” she went on. “He would tease me and bug me. I was his older sister. That’s normal. He messed with my Barbie dolls….” She shivered suddenly, chilled by the memory. “I mean, I’ve heard… I’ve been told that a lot of boys do that to their sisters’ dolls. But there was something…. It wasn’t just cutting off their hair or drawing on them. He used to… he used to cut the, y’know, the breasts off….”
“Like he did later,” Jazz whispered in awe. “As Green Jack.”
Samantha shuddered. “Green Jack. Oh, God. That’s what he called himself sometimes. I remember he was just a kid and there were days when he would say, ‘I’m not here anymore. It’s just Green Jack now.’ Mom and Dad didn’t notice or didn’t care, but it always freaked me out. I used to think that’s why he did it—just to freak me out. And when he got arrested, a part of me was like… was like, ‘He did all of this just to freak me out.’ Which is crazy, isn’t it?”
Jazz considered himself an expert on crazy. As best he could tell, Aunt Samantha didn’t come close.
“If only I’d seen a newspaper or read a website from back east, when he was calling himself Green Jack. Maybe he would have been caught earlier….” She struggled to regain her composure.
“Aunt Samantha…” he cautioned. He sensed—knew—that they were headed into dark territory, down into the memory mines, where the ore was densest and the danger greatest.
But he couldn’t stop her. Not now. She went on. “One night I woke up and he was standing there, in my bedroom. In the dark. I was fourteen, so he must have been eleven. Maybe ten. I don’t remember when it was in the year. But he was just standing there. Naked. Staring at me.”
“Did he—”
“No. No, he never touched me. And I was never afraid of that, if you want to know the truth. Somehow I knew I was safe. I think… I think because I was related to him, I was somehow off the list. Back then, at least. Now, who knows? Maybe he’s changed.”
Could he have changed? Jazz thought it possible. But change wasn’t always for the better.
Just then, they heard a light thump from upstairs. Aunt Samantha jerked as though awakened gratefully from a nightmare, and the kitchen somehow became brighter than the sunlight through the window should have allowed.
“She’s early,” Samantha said brusquely, and rose, setting her coffee cup in the sink. “I’ll help her get started. Maybe you can get breakfast going?”
“Sure. Hey, Aunt Samantha?”
She paused in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“I changed my mind. You can call me Jazz.”
CHAPTER 22
Connie sat on her bed in a lotus position, legs folded over each other, her wrists resting lightly on her knees, eyes closed. There was a single yoga studio in Lobo’s Nod, and Connie didn’t like the woman who led classes there, so after three she’d bailed. Ginny Davis—poor, dead Ginny—had lent Connie a set of yoga DVDs that looked like they’d come from the ancient 1990s. Then again, yoga was an ancient practice, so maybe that was appropriate.
At any rate, she’d learned a lot from those DVDs, techniques she’d used over the past year to relax herself, especially before a performance. But right now, she was having trouble centering herself. She couldn’t get those deep, cleansing yoga breaths she craved.
Images of Jazz flashed through what was supposed to be a clear and passive mind. Jazz in the hotel room. Next to her in bed. On the floor. Jazz at the airport, with her father…
It was no good. She couldn’t relax. She blew out a frustrated breath and opened her eyes.
“Whiz!” she yelped. She must have been more relaxed than she’d imagined. Or at least more distracted—her younger brother had managed to sneak into her room without her hearing the door open.
“You are in so much trouble!” Whiz said, with something like awe in his voice. He wasn’t even taking delight in his older sister’s travails. He was just impressed at the sheer level of trouble, like a man reaching a mountaintop only to see a taller peak in the near distance. “I didn’t think you could get in this much trouble!”
“I know,” Connie said, pretending not to care. She couldn’t keep up the pretense for long. “Uh, exactly what have you heard? What did they say while I was gone?”
Whiz scampered over to her bed and plopped down next to her. “Dad was cussing.”
Ouch. Never a good sign. As if Connie needed to know, Whiz proceeded to reel off the exact words Dad had used. Connie blinked. She hadn’t even known Whiz knew some of those words.
“What about Mom?”
“She cried. Not much. Just a little.”
Connie deflated. Her father’s anger was one thing. Bringing her mother to tears was another. She didn’t know why, but those tears touched her more deeply than her father’s anger ever could. In a way, she was glad her parents didn’t know this. Such knowledge would make controlling her almost trivially easy: Don’t do X, Y, or Z, Connie—you’ll make your mother cry.
“Was it worth it?” Whiz wanted to know. “You’re gonna be grounded until, like, you’re eighty years old.”
“They can’t ground me that long,” Connie said.
“But was it worth it? You know”—and here Whiz looked around as if under surveillance and dropped his voice to a near whisper—“S-E-X?”
As much as she wanted to drop-kick Whiz into a garbage chute most days, Connie had to admit she loved the little snot monster, who was simultaneously too grown-up and too childlike. After busting out a plethora of Dad’s four-letter words, he still felt the need to spell out sex.
“We didn’t have S-E-X,” she informed him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Well, that’s good. ’Cause Mom was really worried about that.”
“Dad wasn’t?”
“Dad was…” Whiz hesitated. “Never mind.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
Whiz shook his head defiantly.
“God, it’s more of his black/white crap, isn’t it? It’s not the nineteen-sixties. It’s not like when his parents were growing up or even when he was growing up. It’s—”
“That’s not it,” Whiz said quietly.
“What’s not it?”
“The black-and-white thing. The racial stuff.”
Connie stared at her kid brother, searching his expression for signs of one of his pranks or tricks. But he was utterly solemn, totally serious.
“What do you mean? Ever since I started dating Jazz, it’s been ‘white men this’ and ‘black women that,’ and ‘Sally Hemmings’ and—”