“Hi.”
“I’m Crystal.”
He stretched his hand across the table. “Good to meet you.”
“Same. I thought I’d add toiletries to your stacks. I’ve got shampoo and toothpaste.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Most of the kids seemed to know each other well. At first Zac’s remarks amid theirs caused moments of deferential quiet. Then without looking he picked up a grocery bag from the bottom, spilled travel-sized tubes of toothpaste all over his feet, and laughed at himself. The kids laughed too, and as if a barrier had lifted, they plunged into a dissection of biblical themes to be found in Tolkien’s master works.
A grin split Zac’s face. Kids who appreciated something older than they were. The phenomenon became rarer with every generation.
“What did you read first?” Crystal said, glancing around the group. “I started with The Fellowship of the Ring because of the movies. I didn’t even know about The Hobbit until after.”
Answers varied, and then one of them asked Zac.
“The Hobbit,” he said, and a warm memory filled him: reading late into the night, squinting in the wavy light of the kerosene lamp to finish one more chapter.
“I’m sure he wrote that one after,” said a guy named Greg who had expressed half of the opinions aired at their table so far. “You can feel when you read it, he was returning to write the backstory.”
“Are you sure?” This from a quiet girl who had been adding notebooks and pencils to each backpack. She hadn’t said her name. “I don’t think that’s right.”
“Somebody look it up.”
Phones emerged, and Zac waved them off. “The Hobbit came first.”
Greg gave Zac a smirk that made him wonder how annoying his own could be. “Bet me.”
“Nah,” Zac said. “But The Hobbit was published in 1937, and The Fellowship of the Ring was 1954.”
The kids gawked.
Crystal went to her purse and returned with her phone held up. “I have to know if he’s right.” After a moment, she gave a quiet gasp. “You guys, Zac is a genius.”
He wished he could tell them what the story of a dragon’s defeat and a Dwarf-king’s courage had meant in a decade when the poverty around him and the age within him had weighed so heavily. He wished he could tell them how thirstily he had imbibed the great epic seventeen years later, national prosperity returned after a war that had torn the souls of men and women, his included.
Instead he fielded their quizzing as they discovered what they thought was a mere penchant for dates. They went on believing he was only as old as his face, their senior by years instead of a century.
At last the backpacks were filled, and Louise thanked everyone. Zac’s crew volunteered to load up. He sprang into the back of her van and took backpacks passed up to him. By the time they’d finished loading, the kids had invited Zac to Sunday morning service and Wednesday night classes and a book club that met monthly at the coffeehouse.
“I know where it is,” he said when Crystal tried to give him directions. “I had this town memorized thirty minutes after I got here.”
One of the guys laughed. “That’s about it.”
As they dispersed, Tiana jogged up to him.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be, and I’m guessing you don’t either.”
“Perceptive.”
“I cannot go to David’s and listen to another flawless run-through of ‘The Love of God’ and ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ and ‘In Christ Alone.’ Or I will pitch the hymnbook at his head—the one he never opens because, ‘It’s not necessary, love; I looked at the key signature.’”
Her attempt at a Scottish brogue was thoroughly butchered. Zac laughed. “I’m honored to be your alternate.”
“I thought we could get coffee and catch up.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
In the month since they’d met, Zac had seen her and David two or three times a week. Tiana was good company, and returning to his apartment held no charms. Three weeks renting a place did not make it home.
Halfway through their lattes, she set hers down and folded her arms on the table. “I want you to hear me out.”
Zac motioned her on.
“I know what you’ve got planned for tomorrow. David told me.”
He tried to take offense but couldn’t. “No big deal. I’m not dwelling on it.”
“Then you must be coming down with something. You ignored the cookies earlier, and you ordered nothing here but a drink.”
“Watching my sugar intake. Have to maintain my stunt guy physique, you know.”
“Chicago’s an all-day trip at least. David wants to be your backup driver.”
“Not necessary.”
“At least think about it.”
Shoot, even a flat refusal didn’t faze her. “No need.”
She rested her hand on his arm. “I know, Zac. Not just what happened in the park—David told me all of it.”
Saber flashing in David’s hand, blood on fallen leaves. Shovel turning in Zac’s hands, dirt falling into the grave. His arm stiffened before he could block the reflex, and she withdrew her hand and sipped her latte. But Tiana had known about Colm’s execution long before now. This was something else.
Zac had talked to David in the first hours of finding out what Colm had done. Maybe talked too much. “What did he say?”
Tiana’s voice dropped so low he had to lean in to hear her. “It wasn’t only one murder. He was a serial killer.”
Oh, that.
“Even with that I was … Angry isn’t the right word. I was concerned—not just about the law but for you, for all of you, having to carry something like that. But David said there’s no legal method of execution that would work on a longevite.”
In a less somber conversation, Zac would have smiled at her ease with his pet word for them. She had adapted to the science-fiction flavor of his life and David’s faster than any mortal he’d ever known in on the secret.
Her sigh was quiet, conflicted but comprehending. “And he said some of the murders were so long ago, the police would have asked questions—age and all that—dangerous for all of you.”
“Yeah,” Zac said.
“So the four of you had to carry out his sentence.”
“Yeah.”
She tucked her chin under the weight of her next words. “And his name was Colm, and to you and Simon and Moira, he was family. A hundred years of living as family.”
His mask was slipping. He could feel the slide of it, down toward a rise of feeling he refused to indulge. Colm would win something if he did, and Colm had won enough.
“And David said sometime before I was born, Colm told Moira everything for some reason, and said he’d framed you for the whole thing, to keep her quiet. Which was a lie, but it worked.”
Friendship and brotherhood thrown away. Zac himself thrown away, turned into an unknowing hostage. He had stood against a wall blindfolded while Moira and Colm took point-blank shots through the heart of his trust. Even now he wouldn’t know what they had done if David hadn’t joined them: a new brother with new eyes to see clearly.
Zac flinched. What a joke Moira and Colm had made him. But he was inconsequential. Colm had murdered innocent people. People who disappeared, were mourned by friends and family. This was the important fact. Not how it felt in Zac’s chest to be thrown away by a lifelong friend.
He looked up from where he’d been staring at the tabletop. “David talked a lot.”
“He thought I should know everything.”
She still didn’t, but neither did David. For the best.
“I’m really sorry, Zac.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He wasn’t letting it matter. “I’ll be fine.” He had to be.
“I know you will.”
Good. He’d fooled her if not himself.
“But I think you’re making my point.”
“How’s that?”
“David said you’re going to Chicago to get Colm’s things in order. That’s a lot to deal with alone.”
“Nah. He didn’t own property, just rented.”
She tilted her head at him, flinty challenge in the stare. “Zac.”
“Tiana.” He gave her a smile that held no cares. “It’s only an apartment.”
TWO
It was only an apartment.
He hadn’t been here in over a year, but he didn’t have to think about the turns, the street names, the destination of the visitor lot. He turned the car down a quiet tree-fringed lane. Redbrick apartments lined both sides, built sometime around the country’s bicentennial. He parked the car and got out. David did the same then shut the passenger door with force. They’d said nothing for the last hour of the six-hour drive.
Zac stared up at the eighth floor. At the unit in the north corner, the window blinds drawn and sun-faded, stark autumn sky reflected in the glass. He swung Colm’s key ring around one finger. Not a care. Everything fine.
He marched up to the door and let himself inside, scaled the steps two at a time and ignored the lack of windows in the stairwell, the echo of their footfalls that reminded him how close the walls were. He tramped down the eighth-floor corridor to the other end. And stopped. A sour taste filled his mouth.
It was only an apartment.
David stood beside him, his back to the door Zac faced, observing the hallway as if they were on some military mission and every angle of approach needed guarding. Another second or two of hesitation and David would notice. Zac thrust the key into the lock and turned it. Pushed the door open. The place smelled of less-than-fresh produce. Zac stepped in and to one side, allowing David entrance, and shut the door after them.
It all looked exactly the same. The TV stand stood diagonal in the far left corner, the couch along the wall across from it. No other furniture, no adornments on the ivory walls.
“Bit sparse,” David said behind him.
“Nobody came here.” Zac shrugged. “Well, me and Moira, but not often. I think Simon hasn’t been here in five years or more. And when Colm wanted to be social, he went out, found people. Casual, you know.”
No mortal friends for the man who’d called himself a god. Zac shuddered and headed for the kitchen. David followed, not hovering but still making Zac’s spine itch. He should have stuck to what he’d told Tiana last night. He didn’t need company.
The kitchen was last updated in the nineties, faux oak cabinets and all white appliances, never redone again because the landlady didn’t care and neither did Colm. It was a serviceable place for a bachelor to cook. It hadn’t needed to be anything else. Zac wandered to the stainless steel sink. He turned on the faucet, turned away from the sudden odor of old vegetables. He flipped on the garbage disposal and scrounged under the sink, came out with a bottle of bleach cleaner and sprayed it down the drain.
“He never remembered to run it,” he said as he shut the disposal back off. “Until the drain backed up.”
David nodded.
Zac opened the fridge, and the spoilage emanated even stronger from there. He shut it again. They’d have to clean everything out. He left the bottle of bleach on the counter and continued his inspection.
The bathroom off the hall was mostly tidy, the spare bedroom empty as expected. When Zac and Moira had visited Chicago, they’d always spent the night in a hotel. One room remained. Colm’s.
Zac crossed the hall with David a few paces behind. Colm’s bed was unmade, one of two pillow shams fallen to the floor, the beige comforter and sheets twisted and kicked to the foot of the bed. The lamp on the nightstand had been left on, casting soft light over a pristine copy of some historical novel with a pirate ship on its cover. It was all so … personal.
“He would dog-ear pages, but he hated wrecked covers.”
Standing to one side in the doorway, David nodded.
“Something isn’t …” Zac linked his hands at the back of his neck, where the sense still prickled that something was wrong. Or missing.
He turned a full circle in the room. Bed, nightstand, a pair of black leather loafers against the wall, a few clothes strewn about. A small bookcase that held fewer than a dozen books Colm deemed worth keeping. And the only wall decor in the whole place: a shelf on the wall opposite the bed. It held a row of shot glasses, Colm’s souvenir of choice when he decided to keep a souvenir, which wasn’t often.
All the years, all the places, and he had something like twenty of the things. Zac strode over and picked up the one from Colorado Springs, a wraparound image of the state flag. He’d been with Colm when he got it from the gift shop at the top of Pikes Peak. Had their personal association made the place matter to a psychopath?
But then there shouldn’t be the glass from Windsor. They didn’t know anyone there. There shouldn’t be the glass from Rome. Colm had been there only once, with Moira in 1957. There shouldn’t be the glass from Montana. Zac counted. Eighteen. The number wasn’t significant … unless it was.
His hand clenched the Colorado glass. Nausea welled in his stomach.
“What is it?” David said.
The sickness rose into his throat. He swallowed. “Eighteen.”
“Shot glasses?”
“The places, the number … the true number.”
“Of what?”
“Eighteen. Instead of eleven. Kills, David.”
David’s face blanked. Slowly he shook his head. “There’s no reason to assume …”
Whatever else he said became a roar in the back of Zac’s skull as he barreled into the closet. Red veiled his vision. He thrust his arms between garments on hangers, spread them, found only clothes and more clothes. He knelt and dug into an old wooden box, clearly no less than a century old, painted to resemble the texture of cowhide. He tossed the lid aside, heedless of the history or the fragility, and drew out the contents. Silver and gold coin proofs nestled in plastic holders. Dozens of them. The coins tumbled through Zac’s fingers onto his knees, onto the floor.
Nothing else was here.
He looked up when a shadow loomed. David, standing in the doorway.
Blocking the doorway.
“Move, man.” Zac nearly choked on the words.
David sidestepped, and Zac pushed to his feet and stumbled back to the living room. He unlocked the sliding door and escaped onto the balcony. Splinters of wood bit his hands as he gripped the railing. The sky and air opened his lungs, but his stomach still roiled.
Eighteen. The number of mortals murdered. Seven more than he’d known about before. As if his knowing made any difference. He saw them in his sleep sometimes. He saw Colm’s hands around their necks. He saw his friend kill people, though he’d never seen it in reality.
David came to stand beside him, and the human presence helped as it always did. Zac shoved his hands through his hair, elbows propped on the rough wood of the rail. If he tried to straighten up, he’d vomit over the edge. He stayed there, doubled over and breathing through his locked teeth.
“I need a minute,” he finally said. “Before I go back in there.”
“We’ve all day to get it done,” David said.
“They’re mementos.”
“Of his victims?”
“Of the places he found them.”
“We’ll never know that.”
“He’d been to visit me dozens of times. Dozens. And one day we’re in a touristy gift shop in Colorado Springs and he picks up that shot glass and says, ‘It’s about time I added this place to the collection.’”
“He was playing.” Under David’s calm snapped a band of tension. “As he played with Moira.”
“It was the third day of his trip.” Zac’s hands shook on the rail as details came back. Meals they’d shared. Rock-climbing afternoons. Reminiscing about decades past. But the guy hadn’t been with him every hour. “So the first or second day …”
“We ended it, man. We ended him.”
I’m sorry.
Zac didn’t know whom he was trying to talk to. Maybe the victim of that Colorado trip. Maybe all Colm’s victims. Zac might have been typing a text to the man while he was ripping a mortal’s life away.
He straightened slowly, a test, and his stomach didn’t revolt into his mouth. He met David’s eyes. “There’s nothing in that apartment to tell me anything.”
“Did you expect there would be?”
“No. Maybe. I guess I wanted … a reason.”
David shifted on his feet, gazed out past Zac at the line of trees backing up to the blacktop.
“I wanted to know why.”
“Boredom or pleasure,” David said.
He knew that much about psychopaths, but he couldn’t apply those motives to Colm without knowing for sure. He would never know. And it didn’t matter.
The victims, they mattered. “I wanted to find their identities here. A list of names. Jewelry. Polaroid pictures. Maybe DNA that we could ensure got to the police. Something. Anything.”
“He didn’t own a computer?”
“No. He had his phone—that was it.” And Zac had spent days trying to find data on it. There were no incriminating pictures, no password-protected notes … nothing.
“A Spartan sort of man.”
“Yeah, he was.”
“Souvenir glasses are less help than personal jewelry. If that’s what they are.”
“It’s what they are.”
David studied him a moment, nodded, and went back inside.
Enough of this. Colm would laugh and poke Zac’s chest. “Look at me, power beyond the grave. Look at you, all broken up.” Imitation laughter? Maybe nothing had been funny to Colm, just as nothing had mattered to Colm.
Zac would not be the broken one, not over this. He pushed off the rail and walked inside.
He grabbed a black garbage bag from the cabinet under the kitchen sink and stalked to the bedroom. David was already there, pocketing his phone as if he’d been on it. Texting Tiana, probably. Something like Pray for Zac. He’s a real mess.
Well, they could both stuff that notion.
With one hand Zac held open the bag, and with the other he lifted the shelf from its props, balancing all eighteen shot glasses. All eighteen deaths. He dumped it into the bag, and the glasses crashed with a few cracking sounds but mostly clinking. Not good enough. Zac wielded the shelf like a shovel and smashed its rounded end down into the bag. A glass shattered. Then another. And another. And another.
From Sky to Sky Page 2
