“My God,” Tony whispers. Roz stifles a scream. Charis doesn’t make a sound. Time has folded in upon itself, the prophecy has come true. But there are no dogs. Then it comes to her. We are the dogs, licking her blood. In the courtyard, the Jezebel blood. She thinks she is going to be sick.
“Don’t touch her,” says Tony, but Charis needs to. She reaches forward, reaches down and tugs, and Zenia revolves slowly, and looks straight at them with her white mermaid eyes.
Lv
She isn’t really looking though, because she can’t. Her eyes are rolled back into her head: that’s why they’re blank, like fish eyes. She’s been dead for several hours, or at least that’s what the police say when they arrive.
The hotel people are very worried. A dead woman in their fountain is not the kind of publicity they need, especially with business down the way it is. They seem to think it’s all Roz’s fault for suggesting that the lights be turned on, as if this is what caused Zenia to materialize in the fountain. But as Roz points out to the concierge, daylight would have been worse: hotel guests would be having breakfast in their rooms, going out, on the balcony for a little fresh air and a cigarette, looking down, and you can imagine the uproar then.
Because they were the ones who found the body, Tony and Roz and Charis have to wait around. They have to answer questions. Roz grabs hold of the conversation and quickly sticks in her story about the gloves; it would not be at all wise to tell the police that they’d rushed over to the Arnold Garden Hotel because Charis saw a vision while staring into a candle. Roz has read enough detective novels to know that such a story would immediately cast suspicion on Charis. Not only would the police think she’s a nutbar—well, objectively speaking, Roz can see it—but they’d also think she’s a nutbar capable of shoving Zenia off the balcony herself, and then having amnesia, followed by an attack of psychedelic vision-producing guilt.
At the back of Roz’s mind there’s a sliver of suspicion: maybe they’d be right. There was enough time for Charis to come back to the hotel before turning up at the Toxique for dinner. She could have done it. So could Tony, who has been frank about her murderous intentions. So could Roz herself, for that matter. No doubt the fingerprints of the three of them are all over the room.
Maybe it was someone they don’t even know, some stranger, one of those pursuing gunrunners or whatever, in that yarn Zenia fobbed off on Tony. But Roz doesn’t credit that. Instead, there’s a worse possibility, much worse: it might have been Larry. If what Zenia said was true, he would have had a good motive.
He was never a violent child, he would walk away from the other kids rather than argue; but Zenia could have threatened him in some way. She could have tried to blackmail him. He could have been on drugs. What does Roz really know about Larry, now that he’s grown up? She needs to get home as soon as possible and find out what he’s been up to.
Tony has dragged Charis off to one side to keep her out of harm’s way. She just hopes Charis will shut up about her vision, which—Tony has to admit—was accurate enough, though somewhat after the fact. But what really happened? Tony counts the possibilities: Zenia fell, Zenia jumped, Zenia was pushed. Accident, suicide, murder. Tony inclines towards the third: Zenia was killed—surely—by person or persons unknown. Tony’s glad she took her gun home, in case there are bullet holes, although she didn’t see any. She doesn’t think Charis could have done it, because Charis wouldn’t hurt a fly—it being her belief that flies might be inhabited by someone related to you in a previous life—but she’s not that sure about Roz. Roz has a temper, and can be impetuous.
“Did anyone know this woman?” says the policeman. The three of them glance at one another. “Yes,” says Tony. “We all came to see her, earlier today,” says Roz.
Charis starts to cry. “We were her best friends,” she says. Which, thinks Tony, is news to her. But it will have to do for now.
Roz drives Charis to the ferry terminal, and then she drives Tony home. Tony goes up the stairs to West’s study, where he’s plugged into two of his machines via the earphones. She turns off his switch.
“Did Zenia.call here?” she says. “What?” says West. ‘Tony, what is it?”
“This is important,” says Tony. She knows she’s sounding fierce but she can’t help it. “Have you been talking to Zenia?
Has she been here?” She finds the idea of Zenia rolling around on the carpet with West among the synthesizers highly distasteful. No: unbearable.
Maybe, she thinks, West did it. Maybe he went over to Zenia’s hotel room to beg and plead, hoping to run off with her again, and Zenia laughed at him, and West lost it and heaved her off the balcony. If that’s what happened Tony wants to know. She wants to know so she can shield West, think up a watertight alibi for him, save him from himself.
“Oh, yeah,” says West. “She did call, I don’t know—a week ago. But I didn’t talk to her, she just left a message on the machine.”
“What did it say?” says Tony. “Why didn’t you tell me? What did she want?”
“Maybe I should’ve mentioned it,” says West. “But I didn’t want you to get hurt. I mean, we both thought she was dead. I guess I would’ve liked her to stay that way.”
“Really?” says Tony.
“She didn’t want to talk to me,” says West, as if he knows what Tony’s been thinking. ‘‘She wanted you. If I’d had her on the phone in person I would’ve told her to forget it; I knew you wouldn’t want to see her. I did jot it down—where she was staying—but after I thought things over, I threw it out. She’s always been bad news.”
Tony feels herself softening. “I saw her, though,” she says. “I saw her this afternoon. She seemed to know that your study’s on the third floor. How would she know that, if she’s never been here?”
West smiles. “It’s on my answering machine. ‘Third floor, Headwinds: Remember?”
By this time he’s unwired and standing up. Tony goes over to him and he folds himself up like a bridge chair and wraps his knotted-rope arms around her, and kisses her on the forehead. “I like it that you’re jealous,” he says, “but you don’t need to be. She’s nothing, any more:”
Little does he know, thinks Tony. Or else he does know and he’s pretending not to. Squashed up against his torso, she takes a sniff of him, to see if he’s been drinking a lot. If he has, it will be a dead giveaway. But there’s nothing besides the usual mild scent of beer. “Zenia is dead,” she tells West solemnly.
“Oh, Tony,” says West. “Again? I’m really sorry.” He rocks her to and fro as if she’s the one who needs to be consoled, and not him at all.
When Charis gets back to her house, still shaky but under control, there’s a light on in the kitchen. It’s Augusta, taking a long weekend break, paying a visit. Charis is glad to see her, though she wishes she’d had time to tidy up first. She notes that Augusta has washed the dishes from the last couple of days and has done away with a couple of major spider webs, though she’s known better than to disassemble Charis’s meditational altar. She has noted it, however.
“Mom,” she says, after Charis has greeted her and has put on the kettle for bedtime tea, “what’s this chunk of stone and this pile of dirt and leaves doing on the living-room table?”
“It’s a meditation,” says Charis.
“Christ;” Augusta mutters. “Can’t you put it somewhere else?”
“August,” says Charis, a little tersely, “it’s my meditation, and it’s my house.”
“Don’t snap at me!” says August. “And Mom, it’s Augusta. That’s my name now”
Charis knows this. She knows she should respect August’s new name, because everyone has a right to rename herself according to her inner direction. But she chose August’s original name with such love and care. She gave it to her, it was a gift. It’s hard for her to let it go.