She should leave. She should turn around right now, rush down the stairs, and get out of here before she saw something she did not want to see. Her mouth filled with a sickly taste. She should call the police. She should get out and not come back.
But she couldn’t. Something had happened to a person she cared about. As loudly as her instincts screamed Run! Eureka could not turn her back on Madame Blavatsky.
She stepped over the bloody landing, onto the fallen door, and followed Polaris into the apartment. It smelled like blood and sweat and cigarettes. Dozens of nearly extinguished candles flickered along a mantel. They were the only source of light in the room. Outside the single small window, an electric bug-killer zapped in a steady beat. In the center of the room, sprawled across the blue industrial carpet, in the first place Eureka suspected and the last place she allowed herself to look, was Madame Blavatsky, dead as Diana.
Eureka’s hand went to her throat to choke off a gasp. Over her shoulder, the stairwell to the exit looked endless, like she’d never make it without fainting. On instinct, she felt in her pocket for her phone. She dialed 911, but she could not bring herself to press the call button. She had no voice, no way to communicate to a stranger on the other end of a line that the woman who’d become the closest thing Eureka had to a mother was dead.
The phone fell back inside her pocket. She moved closer to Madame Blavatsky but was careful to stay beyond the spread of blood.
Clumps of auburn hair lay on the floor, surrounding the old woman’s head like a crown. There were bald patches of pink skin where the hair had been ripped from her scalp. Her eyes were open. One stared vacantly at the ceiling. The other had been torn completely from its socket. It dangled near her temple, hanging on by a thin pink artery. Her cheeks were lacerated, as if sharp nails had dragged across them. Her legs and arms were sprawled at her sides, making her look like a kind of mangled snow angel. One hand grasped a rosary. Her patchwork cloak was slick with blood. She had been beaten, shredded, stabbed repeatedly in the chest by something that left much larger slashes than a knife. She’d been left to bleed out on the floor.
Eureka staggered against the wall. She wondered what Madame Blavatsky’s last thought had been. She tried to imagine the kind of prayers the woman might have said on her way out of the world, but her mind was blank with shock. She sank to her knees. Diana always said that everything in the world was connected. Why hadn’t Eureka stopped to consider what The Book of Love had to do with the thunderstone Ander knew so much about—or the people he’d protected her from on the road? If they were the ones who’d done this to Madame Blavatsky, she felt certain they’d come in search of The Book of Love. They had murdered someone over it.
And if that was true, Madame Blavatsky’s death had been her fault. Her mind went to the Confession booth, where she’d go on Saturday afternon with Dad. She had no idea how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers she’d have to say to clear that sin.
She should never have insisted they carry on with the translation. Madame Blavatsky had warned her of the risks. Eureka should have connected the old woman’s hesitation to the danger Ander said Eureka was in. But she hadn’t. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to. Maybe she wanted one thing sweet and magical in her life. Now that sweet and magical thing was dead.
She thought she was going to gag, but she didn’t. She thought she might scream, but she didn’t. Instead she knelt closer to Madame Blavatsky’s chest and resisted the urge to touch her. For months she had longed for the impossible opportunity to cradle Diana after her death. Now Eureka wanted to reach for Madame Blavatsky, but the open wounds held her back. Not because Eureka was disgusted—though the woman was in gruesome shape—but because she knew better than to implicate herself in this murder. She held back, knowing that no matter how much she cared, there was nothing she could do for Blavatsky.
She imagined others coming upon this sight: the gray pallor Rhoda’s skin would take on, the way it did when she was nauseated, making her orange lipstick look clownish; the prayers that would stream from the lips of Eureka’s most pious classmate, Belle Pogue; the disbelieving curses Cat would spew. Eureka imagined she could see herself from outside herself. She looked as lifeless and immobile as a boulder that had been lodged in the apartment for millennia. She looked stoic and unreachable.
Diana’s death had killed death’s mysteries for Eureka. She knew death was waiting for her, like it had been for Madame Blavatsky, like it was for everyone she loved and didn’t love. She knew that human beings were born to die. She remembered the last line of a Dylan Thomas poem she’d once read on an online grief forum. It was the only thing that made sense to her when she was in the hospitaclass="underline"
After the first death, there is no other.
Diana was Eureka’s first death. It meant that Madame Blavatsky’s death was no other. Even Eureka’s own death would be no other.
Her grief was powerful; it just looked different from what people were used to.
She was afraid, but not of the dead body before her—she’d seen worse in too many nightmares. She was afraid of what Madame Blavatsky’s death meant for the other people close to her, dwindling as their numbers were. She couldn’t help feeling robbed of something, knowing that she would never understand the rest of The Book of Love.
Had the murderers taken her book? The thought of someone else possessing it, knowing more of it than she did, enraged her. She rose and moved toward Blavatsky’s breakfast bar, then her nightstand, searching for any sign of the book, being as careful as possible not to alter what she knew would be a crime scene.
She found nothing, only heartache. She was so miserable she could hardly see. Polaris squawked and pecked the edges of Madame Blavatsky’s cloak.
Everything might change with the last word, Eureka thought. But this couldn’t be Madame Blavatsky’s last word. She deserved so much more than this.
Again Eureka lowered herself to the floor. Her fingers found their way across her chest intuitively, making the sign of the cross. She pressed her hands together and bowed her head in a silent prayer to Saint Francis, asking for serenity on the old woman’s behalf. She kept her head bowed and her eyes closed until she sensed that her prayer had left the room and was on its way into the atmosphere. She hoped it made it to its destination.
What would become of Madame Blavatsky? Eureka had no way of knowing who would find the woman next, whether she had friends or family nearby. As her mind reeled around the simplest possibilities of getting Madame Blavatsky help, she imagined terrifying conversations with the sheriff. Her chest tightened. It wouldn’t bring the old woman back to life if Eureka embroiled herself in a criminal investigation. Still, she had to find some way to let the police know.
She gazed around the room, despondent—and then she had an idea.
Back on the landing she had passed a commercial fire alarm, probably installed before the building became a residence. Eureka stood and stepped around the pool of blood, sliding a little bit as she crossed the door. She regained her balance and tugged the sleeve of her tracksuit over her hand to avoid leaving fingerprints. She reached for the red hatch and pulled the metal handle down.
The alarm was instantaneous, earsplitting, almost comically loud. Eureka buried her head between her shoulders and started toward the exit. Before she left, she gazed into the room once more at Madame Blavatsky. She wanted to say she was sorry.
Polaris was perched on the woman’s shredded chest, pecking lightly where her heart had once beat. He seemed phosphorescent in the candlelight. When he noticed Eureka watching, he raised his head. His black eyes gleamed demonically. He hissed at her, then squawked once, so shrilly it pierced the sound of the fire alarm.