Pretty Broken Things

by Melissa Marr

  He nods.

  “There’s this woman. She disappeared, and she was here. There’s a picture of her here in your city.” I find the picture on my phone and lean forward, showing him. “She’s lost, and . . . I need to find her.”

  It sounds impossible saying it aloud. I’m trying to find one woman in the entire city. She might not even live here. She might have been passing through. In some ways I’m no closer to finding Teresa than I was before.

  “A lot of people get lost here,” he tells me. “Not so many get found.”

  Without meeting her, I already know that Teresa is the sort of lost that might not be able to stay found, but I need her to surface enough that I can figure out how to stop the Creeper.

  The little apartment I’m renting on Esplanade—one of the ubiquitous short-term rentals in the city—isn’t what I’d call nice or even comfortable. The walls have the sort of stains that say the owners aren’t even trying to hide the damage. It’s filthy in the way of old forgotten houses, dirt layered to the point of creating raised marks on the wooden floor, and water stains on the ceiling. Last minute options aren’t great. It was either a rental with a kitchen or a room in a soulless hotel. I like having a kitchen.

  I drop my bag in the main room, grab my sunglasses, and set out. Unfortunately, med school and funeral director’s classes didn’t include classes on finding missing people. I suspect it would be easier with help. A part of me wants to ask Henry to come here, but I can’t imagine that going well. I’ll go to the police department and to the coroner—or let the Durham Police Department handle that.

  Right now, I want to see if I can find Teresa. I have four days to walk throughout this city and look for her.

  I start by walking into the French Quarter with a vague grid in mind. Street musicians, drunken revelers, and Midwestern couples pace by me. I probably look more than a little wide-eyed. I don’t know how many people live in the city or if Teresa lived here when that picture was taken. But whatever Sharon couldn’t tell me makes me think that she knew that Teresa was living here and not just temporarily visiting.

  Why would a literary agency have pictures of one of the Carolina Creeper’s victims? Was someone doing a book on him? I’d like to say that no one would exploit a woman like that, that the people at Sharon’s agency would care enough about the women who’d died and one who was lost because of him . . . but nothing Sharon had told me about her co-workers made me think that.

  Several hours later, I’m forced to admit that simply walking around looking at strangers wasn’t likely to get me anywhere. I stop in a coffee shop on Royal Street and show the barista Teresa’s pictures while I wait for my drink.

  “I’m looking for this woman.”

  The man looks at me. “Don’t work here.”

  I try a smile. “Okay . . . but do you know her?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t know her, don’t know nothing.” He hands me my coffee and walks away.

  I try a few other shops and stores. Asking around isn’t as random as simply staring in the faces of strangers, but the closest I come to any sort of answers is a very tattooed and pierced girl who asks, “Why you want her? Is she in trouble again?”

  “Again?” I echo.

  She shrugs. “People don’t come ‘round askin ‘bout her ‘less she done something.”

  “So you do know her?”

  She shrugs again.

  “I don’t mean her any trouble,” I try. “She’s been gone, and—”

  “Sometimes los’ things better off stayin los’.” The girl shakes her head, sending a twist of braids and beads rattling. “Let her stay los’. Better for her. Better for you. Better for ever’one.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Can you tell me—”

  “Don’t know her.” She folds her arms over her chest. “Musta thought she was someone else at firs’, but lots a women look like her come through here. Don’t know dem. Don’t know her. Don’t know you.”

  She starts to walk away.

  “Someone hurt her. A man. He killed other women. Tortured them, and I need to find him.” I sound desperate. I know it, but I feel even more desperate than I sound. “I need to stop him.”

  Her stern expression doesn’t change. “Can’t help you.”

  I follow her.

  “I don’t want to hurt her. Honestly. I just want to stop him. Maybe I can get her to help or . . .” I’m not going to tell anyone that Teresa’s a rich woman, that finding her would mean she got her inheritance. “If you know where she is, can you tell her I’m looking for her? I can leave you my”—I pull out a pen and grab a business card from the store to write on—“numbers and email and . . . please?”

  She accepts the card I extend to her.

  “Thank you.”

  She says nothing as she drops it in the trash.

  24

  Michael

  The screams wake me. My first thought is that they’re not human. The next is that they’re coming from within the apartment.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.” Tess is standing in the middle of the room. Her head is bowed, turned toward the bathroom. “I know better.”

  “Tess?”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t make me leave.”

  I don’t see anyone else here; now I’m fairly sure that it was Tess who screamed. “What’s going on? Is someone here?”

  She ignores me, staring toward the bathroom. “I can do it. I can. I’m good, Reid.”

  “What?”

  I walk to stand in front of Tess. The touch of my hand on her shoulder is enough to make her start screaming again. I flinch backwards. I’ve never heard a scream that comes close to this, not even in a horror film. It’s not a sound that any person should ever make—and it was my touch that did it.

  She’s cringing away from me, crouched on the floor, shrieking. Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I’m not sure a person can prepare for this. When she stops shrieking, I drop to my knees and crawl toward her. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t touch her if that’s how she reacts, and she’s not answering me. I’m not sure who she is answering, who this Reid is.

  “I can do it,” she repeats between gasps. “I will.”

  “Tess!”

  “Please! Just don’t make me go home.”

  “Tess, can you hear me?”

  She stares, and even though her eyes are open and she’s speaking, I’m not sure she’s actually awake. I’ve heard of night terrors, but I thought they were something only children had. Maybe it’s a psychological break of some sort? Either way, I try to talk to her as if she were in either a nightmare or a hallucination.

  “You’re in New York, Tess. Reid’s not here. Reid’s not here, Tess.” I sit on the floor in front of her, filling her entire field of vision.

  For a moment, she doesn’t react. Then she frowns. “Michael?”

  I nod, relieved. I can’t call the police, an ambulance, but I can’t just write this off as a nightmare, either. What do you do when someone loses their grip on reality? I push away my worries and reassure her: “I’m here.”

  She stares, shakes her head, and insists, “You need to go. Reid doesn’t like it when I talk to people. I can talk to the pretty girls, but . . . he won’t want me to talk to you.”

  My relief disappears as quickly as it had come. Anger flows in, despite my attempts to be kind, and my voice is harsh as I tell her again, “Reid’s not here, Tess.”

  She looks away, and that’s it. She’s gone. Her moment of lucidity passes. She’s whimpering again. “Where is he?”

  I’m not prepared for this, not prepared for the parts of Tess everyone warned me about. I don’t know who Reid is, but I know this is the secret she’s been hiding. Reid is the reason she didn’t want to leave New Orleans. He’s behind her scars.

  A domestic violence case isn’t nearly interesting enough for my book. The thought comes unbidden in the moment. I thought she was my sparrow, my start of a story that w
ould prove that I’m more than a one-book-success. Domestic violence, though? That story has been written too often. Despite how heinous it is, it doesn’t shock readers anymore. I’m not sure it even shocks people when it’s real.

  “Come back to bed, Tess. Reid’s not here. It’s just us. In New York. We came here for a holiday.” I keep talking as I take her face in my hands and make her look at me. “Reid isn’t here.”

  Again, she stares at me in confusion before replying, and I almost wonder if the whole thing is an act—until I recall those screams. I cannot even begin to fathom what would cause a person to make such a horrible noise. I think back to the scars that twist through the tattoos that cover her body. The scars were there before the ink.

  “Don’t touch me,” Tess says softly. “I still have their blood all over me. People will ask questions if you go out with blood on you.”

  I stare at her.

  “Just leave before he gets back, Michael.” She says it as if she’s the one trying to calm me down. “I’ll be okay. He loves me. He only hurts me until I pass out.”

  I don’t know how to reply to her. I don’t imagine it will matter. She isn’t here, not in the same time and place where I am. Tess’ mind is in a memory, one I’ve entered when she looks my way.

  “Where are the others? Do you know them? Are they in danger? Can you help them?”

  “No.” She looks away again, and in the next moment, she’s scurrying backward like a crab. She shrieks again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I shouldn’t have . . . I won’t. I’ll be good. Don’t make me go.”

  She grabs a vase, looks down, and slams it on the floor like she’s hitting something or someone. She crashes the remaining piece in her hand downward again, shards of pottery slicing her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers, staring at the floor.

  I don’t know if I want to ask what she’s beating. Am I watching her kill someone? Is that the thing that she’s hiding? Did she kill Reid?

  “I don’t want to. I don’t. I’m sorry.” She stands, glances at her hand where the blood is dripping.

  A shard of the vase is still clutched in her hand.

  Tess looks at me, and I don’t think it’s me she’s seeing. Earlier I intruded into her memories, but right now, she seems like she’s only seeing shadows from her past. I just watched her re-enact what I think is a murder, and at the least was a brutal assault—and now she’s advancing on me.

  I shove her away with enough force that she hits the wall and slides down to the floor.

  The shard in her hand drops, and she looks up at me. “Michael?”

  25

  Tess

  When I wake in the New York rental, I find myself in the corner of the room, gasping for air, shaking all over. I hurt. I don’t know what happened, what I did, but I can tell I fell.

  Five nights. I’d made it five nights. I try to think of the details of the now, try to pull up lists in my memory, try to find a trick to help anchor me.

  It isn’t working.

  Nothing is working.

  Michael crouches down in front of me, not touching me but so near that he’s all I can see. “Tess, are you here? With me?”

  I nod. Whatever he saw was bad. I can tell that much. The look on his face is somewhere between horror and fascination. If there were only one memory of mine that would cause that, I’d know more. I lived with Reid for several years though. There are a lot of bad things stored away in my mind. Sometimes, even now, these episodes leave me with new images that I can’t fathom forgetting. I will get another tattoo. It’s how I process them.

  “Where are we?” Michael asks, and I realize that my silence has gone on too long. He’s nervous. I don’t see any cuts or blood on him. When I have to swallow to speak, I realize my throat is dry. That means I was screaming. I look around: The police aren’t here. That’s a relief. At home, my neighbors are used to my middle of the night episodes. They don’t call the cops. I wasn’t sure about people on the road, but I’ve seen them look away from worse things. Reid held a knife to my throat in a diner. No one called the police then, either. Neither New York nor New Orleans is to blame. People are simply too self-serving in a lot of places, small or large.

  “New York,” I tell Michael. “We’re in New York in an apartment you rented for the week.”

  He stares at me, looking for something in my eyes that I’m hoping he can’t find. It’s not just my aversion to intimacy that makes me prefer a revolving door on my bedroom. I don’t know the whole of the things that happened when I was with Reid, but I remember enough to know that some secrets are best left buried.

  Being closer to being Teresa made memories come to the top. I know that. The part of me that used to be Teresa feels bad about the things Reid did. The part of me that was raised away from sharp things and dark memories doesn’t like what we’ve done to survive. Sometimes, I think she’d rather we had died in those years when we were with Reid.

  I have red on my hands--and on my arms, my belly, my eyes.

  “I’ve never seen anyone have a night terror,” Michael says.

  I shrug. “It happens.”

  “Who’s Reid?”

  I push to my feet, wincing a little as I realize that I’ve cut myself again. Sometimes the night terrors include attempts to escape my house. In New Orleans, I have a lock on the top of the door where I can’t reach it in my nocturnal ramblings. That usually keeps me from waking in the street or on a car hood or sharing a stoop somewhere out in the city like I used to do, but now, in the midst of the terrors I claw at the door. It’s easier when I keep my fingernails short. I learned that lesson fairly quickly.

  This time, my only concerning injuries are the cuts on my hands. I look down to see the shattered remains of a vase. The memory of flight is common when things come back. Reid hurt me. I learned to let him, but early on, the instinct to resist was hard to overcome. At the end, it was worse. When memories surface too intensely, trying to escape is a constant.

  I look at my hand. I obviously grabbed a piece of the broken vase. It gouged my hand deep enough that stitches wouldn’t be amiss. Going to the hospital leads to questions. It means police. Reid taught me to stitch myself, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.

  I don’t think Michael would be okay stitching me back together or seeing me do it.

  As I try to step around Michael, he moves back, but he doesn’t walk away. “Tess, who’s Reid?”

  “Someone I knew.” It’s not anywhere near the whole truth, but telling him that Reid is the last man I loved is not an option. Of course, telling him that Reid would kill him for touching me might be wise. If Reid knew that a man held me, if he knew that a man touches the parts of me that were his alone, we would both bleed.

  But Reid doesn’t know where I am. If he did, I would certainly be his again. I would likely be dead.

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” I tell Michael.

  “That . . . that was not normal.” Michael can’t seem to decide if he’s horrified or intrigued. “Everyone said . . .”

  “That I was a raging mess? Dangerous? Only willing to fuck and duck, willing to do unbelievable things, disconnected from now here and there? Have I missed anything?”

  “Tess . . . I like you. You know that, don’t you?”

  I smile at him. “And I like you. No one has been allowed to sleep next to me in a long time. You just saw why.”

  “I want to understand.”

  “It was just a nightmare.” This part I can do. It’s easier than the truth. Lies are how the days become manageable. They’re like air sometimes, necessary. I ball my hand into a fist to keep the blood contained and add, “Everyone has nightmares sometimes.”

  He looks at me, shakes his head, and steps back again. He lets the lie sit on the floor between us until the moment for calling me out has passed. For that, I’m grateful.

  I glance at my hand. “Let me get this cleaned up.”

  Despite the fist, blood is starting to
trickle over the edge of my hand, and I don’t want to try to clean it off the hardwood floor. Blood stains too easily on old wood. Carpet is better. Tile can be good. Bleach and a good brush will get it out of most surfaces if you’re fast enough, but old wood—or porous tile—can be a real pain.

  Bath tubs are best.

  I push away the reasons I know those things.

  By the time I wash the cut in my hand, making sure there are no tiny pieces of glass in the wound, I realize that I have no proper bandages. I grab a handful of paper towels to absorb the blood for now. Toilet tissue gets messy when it’s wet, and the last thing I want is to get anything in the wound where it’ll fester. My hand wrapped in paper towels, I walk in to see Michael sitting on the edge of the bed, exactly where I left him.

  “I need to go to the Duane Reade and get some gauze.”

  “That’s it?” Michael watches me with an expression I can’t interpret and don’t know if I want to. “You wake screaming like I’ve never heard anyone scream, beg some guy called Reid, telling me you have ‘their blood’ on you, and then you’re just going out for gauze?”

  I hold up my hand. The paper towels already show bright red. “That was a nightmare, and I don’t want to get real blood everywhere.”

  Michael shakes his head. He doesn’t speak. Reid would’ve spoken. He wouldn’t even have lied.

  But Michael and I stay that way, me in the doorway bleeding and him sitting on the edge of the bed staring. He’s asking me for more than I can give. He might not be saying it aloud, but he’s asking all the same. His silence is because of questions that I can’t answer. I can let Michael manipulate me, but not as much as he wants.

  He wants to touch my shadows, and that isn’t free. Not for either of us.

  “I can find my own way back home. I just need to get this cleaned up first. There’s surely a bus or something . . .”