by Jeff Gelb
“Thank you,” he said to Aunt Beth, handing her the cup.
“Don’t you believe my sister?” Aunt Beth asked.
“Do you?” He glanced at Jessica Ann, but spoke to Aunt Beth. “I’ll talk to the girl tomorrow. Maybe she should stay with you tonight.”
“That’s not my decision,” Aunt Beth said.
“Maybe it should be,” he said, and excused himself and left.
Aunt Beth looked very tired when she sat at the table with Jessica Ann. She spoke quietly, almost a whisper.
“What you told me … is that what really happened, Jessica Ann?”
“Mommy thought Mark was going to do something bad to me.”
“You love your mommy, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re also afraid of her.”
“Yes.” She shrugged. “All kids are afraid of their parents.”
“Beth,” Mommy said, suddenly in the archway, “you better go now.”
Aunt Beth rose. She wet her lips. “Maybe I should take Jessica Ann tonight.”
Mommy came over and put her hand on Jessica Ann’s shoulder. “We appreciate your concern. But we’ve been through a lot of tragedy together, Jessica Ann and I. We’ll make it through tonight, just fine. Won’t we, dear?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
Both Jessica Ann and her mother were questioned, separately and individually, at police headquarters in downtown Ferndale the next afternoon. Mommy’s lawyer, Mr. Ekhardt, a handsome gray-haired older man, was with them; sometimes he told Mommy not to answer certain questions.
Afterward, in the hall, Jessica Ann heard Mommy ask Mr. Ekhardt if they had enough to hold her.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I don’t think this is going to let up. From the looks of that lieutenant, I’d say this is just starting.”
Mommy touched Mr. Ekhardt’s hand with both of hers. “Thank you, Neal. With you in our corner, I’m sure we’ll be just fine.”
“You never give up, do you?” Mr. Ekhardt said with a funny smile. “Gotta give you that much.”
Mr. Ekhardt shook his head and walked away.
Jessica Ann watched as her Mommy pulled suitcases from a closet, and then went to another closet and began packing her nicest things into one of the suitcases.
“We’re going on a vacation, dear,” Mommy said, folding several dresses over her arm, “to a foreign land—you’ll love it there. It’ll be Christmas every day.”
“But I have school …”
“Your break starts next week, anyway. And then we’ll put you in a wonderful new school.”
“What about my friends?”
“You’ll make new friends.”
Mommy was packing so quickly, and it was all happening so fast, Jessica Ann couldn’t even find the words to protest further. What could she do about it? Every kid knew that when your parents decided to move, the kid had no part of it. A kid’s opinion had no weight on such matters. You just went where your parents went.
“Take this,” Mommy said, handing her the smaller suitcase, “and pack your own things.”
“What about my animals?”
“Take your favorite. Aunt Beth will send the others on, later.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
“Who’s your best friend?”
“You are.”
“Who loves you more than—”
“You do.”
The girl packed her bag. She put the framed picture of Daddy in the middle of the clothes, so it wouldn’t get broken.
They drove for several hours. Mommy turned the radio on to a station playing Christmas music—”White Christmas” and the one about chestnuts roasting. Now and then Mommy looked over at her, and Jessica Ann noticed Mommy’s expression was … different. Blank, but Mommy’s eyes seemed … was Mommy frightened, too?
When Mommy noticed Jessica Ann had caught her gaze, Mommy smiled that beautiful smile. But it wasn’t real. Jessica Ann wasn’t sure Mommy knew how to really smile.
The motel wasn’t very nice. It wasn’t like the Holiday Inns and Marriotts and Ramada Inns they usually stayed in on vacation. It was just a white row of doorways on the edge of some small town and a junkyard was looming in back of it, like some scary Disneyland.
Jessica Ann put on her jammies and brushed her teeth and Mommy tucked her in, even gave her a kiss. The girl was very, very tired and fell asleep quickly.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep, but when she woke up, Mommy was sitting on the edge of Jessica Ann’s bed. Mommy wasn’t dressed for bed; she still had on the clothes she’d been driving in.
Mommy was sitting there, in the dark, staring, her hands raised in the air. It was like Mommy was trying to choke a ghost.
“Sometimes Mommys have to make hard decisions,” Mommy whispered. “If they take Mommy away, who would look after you?”
But Jessica Ann knew Mommy wasn’t saying this to her, at least not to the awake her. Maybe to the sleeping Jessica Ann, only Jessica Ann wasn’t sleeping.
The child bolted out of the bed with a squealing scream and Mommy ran after her. Jessica Ann got to the door, which had a nightlatch, but her fingers fumbled with the chain, and then her Mommy was on top of her. Mommy’s hands were on her, but the child squeezed through, and bounded over one of the twin beds and ran into the bathroom and slammed and locked the door.
“Mommy! Mommy, don’t!”
“Let me in, Jessica Ann. You just had a bad dream. Just a nightmare. We’ll go back to sleep now.”
“No!”
The child looked around the small bathroom and saw the window; she stood on the toilet seat lid and unlocked the window and slipped out, onto the tall grass. Behind her, she heard the splintering of the door as her mother pushed it open.
Jessica Ann was running, running toward the dark shapes that were the junkyard; she glanced back and saw her mother’s face framed in the bathroom window. Her mother’s eyes were wild; Jessica Ann had never seen her mother like that.
“Come back here this instant!” her mother said.
But Jessica Ann ran, screaming as she went, hoping to attract attention. The moon was full and high and like a spotlight on the child. Maybe someone would see!
“Help! Please, help!”
Her voice seemed to echo through the night. The other windows in the motel were dark and the highway out front was deserted; there was no one else in the world but Jessica Ann and Mommy.
And Mommy was climbing out the bathroom window.
Jessica Ann climbed over the wire fence—there was some barbed wire at the top, and her jammies got caught, and tore a little, but she didn’t cut herself. Then she was on the other side, in the junkyard, but her bare feet hurt from the cinders beneath them.
Mommy was coming.
The child ran, hearing the rattle of the fence behind her, knowing Mommy was climbing, climbing over, then dropping to the other side.
“Jessica Ann!”
Piles of crushed cars were on either side of Jessica Ann, as she streaked down a cinder path between them, her feet hurting, bleeding, tears streaming, her crying mixed with gasping for air as she ran, ran hard as she could.
Then she fell and she skinned her knee and her yelp echoed.
She got up, quickly, and ran around the comer, and ran right into her mother.
“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?”
Her mother’s hands gripped the girl’s shoulders.
Jessica Ann backed up quickly, bumping into a rusted-out steel drum. A wall of crushed cars, scrap metal, old tires, broken-down appliances and other things that must have had value once was behind her.
“Mommy …”
Mommy’s hands were like claws reaching out for the girl’s neck. “This is for your own good, dear …”
Then Mommy’s hands were on Jessica Ann’s throat, and the look in Mommy’s eyes was so very cold, and the child tried to cry out but she couldn’t, though she tried to twist away and moonlight fell on her face.
&nb
sp; And Mommy gazed at her child, and her eyes narrowed, and softened, and she loosened her hands.
“Put your hands up, Mrs. Sterling!”
Mommy stepped away and looked behind her. Jessica Ann, touching her throat where Mommy had been choking her, could see him standing there, Lieutenant March. He was pointing a gun at Mommy.
Mommy put her head down and her hands up.
Then Aunt Beth was there, and took Jessica Ann into her arms and held her, and said, “You’re a brave little girl.”
“What… what are you doing here, Aunt Beth?”
“I came along with the lieutenant. He was keeping your mother under surveillance. I’m glad you have good lungs, or we wouldn’t have heard you back here. We were out front, and I’d fallen asleep …”
“Aunt Beth … can I live with you now? I don’t want to go to a new school.”
Aunt Beth’s laugh was surprised and sort of sad. “You can live with me. You can stay in your school.” She stroked Jessica Ann’s forehead. “It’s over now, Jessy. It’s over.”
“She couldn’t do it, Aunt Beth,” Jessica Ann said, crying, but feeling strangely happy, somehow. Not to be rescued: but to know Mommy couldn’t bring herself to do it! Mommy couldn’t kill Jessica Ann!
“I know, honey,” Aunt Beth said, holding the girl.
“Mommy does love me! More than anything on God’s green earth.”
The child didn’t hear when Lieutenant March, cuffing her hands behind her, asked the woman, “Why didn’t you do it? Why’d you hesitate?”
“For a moment there, in the moonlight,” Mommy said, “she looked like me…”.
And the cop walked the handcuffed woman to his unmarked car, while the aunt took her niece into the motel room to retrieve a stuffed bear and a framed photo of Daddy.
The Gray Madonna
Graham Masterton
He had always known that he would have to return to Bruges. This time, however, he chose winter, when the air was foggy and the canals had turned to the color of breathed-on pewter, and the narrow medieval streets were far less crowded with shuffling tourists.
He had tried to avoid thinking about Bruges for three years now. Forgetting Bruges—really forgetting—was out of the question. But he had devised all kinds of ways of diverting his attention away from it, of mentally changing the subject, such as calling his friends or turning on the TV really loud or going out for a drive and listening to Nirvana with the volume set on Deaf.
Anything rather than stand on that wooden jetty again, opposite the overhanging eaves and boathouses of the fourteenth-century plague hospital, waiting for the Belgian police frogmen to find Karen’s body. He had stood there so many times in so many dreams, a bewildered sun-reddened American tourist with his shoulder-bag and his camcorder, while diseased-looking starlings perched on the steep, undulating tiles up above him, and the canal slopped and gurgled beneath his feet.
Anything rather than watch the medical examiner with her crisp white uniform and her braided blond hair as she unzippered the black vinyl body-bag and Karen’s face appeared, not just white but almost green. “She would not have suffered much,” in that guttural back-of-the-throat Flemish accent. “Her neck was broken almost at once.”
“By what?”
“By a thin ligature, approximately eight millimetres diameter. We have forensic samples, taken from her skin. It was either hemp or braided hair.”
Then Inspector Ben De Buy from the Politie, resting a nicotine-stained hand on his arm said, “One of the drivers of the horse-drawn tourist carriages says that he saw your wife talking to a nun. This was approximately ten minutes before the boatman noticed her body floating in the canal.”
“Where was this?”
“Hoogstraat, by the bridge. The nun turned the comer around Minderbroederstraat and that was the last the driver saw of her. He did not see your wife.”
“Why should he have noticed my wife at all?”
“Because she was attractive, Mr. Wallace. All of these drivers have such an eye for good-looking women.”
“Is that all? She talked to a nun? Why should she talk to a nun? She’s not a Catholic.”
He had paused, and then corrected himself. “She wasn’t a Catholic.”
Inspector De Buy had lit up a pungent Ernte 23 cigarette, and breathed smoke out of his nostrils like a dragon. “Perhaps she was asking for directions. We don’t know yet. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find the nun. She was wearing a light gray habit, which is quite unusual.”
Dean had stayed in Belgium for another week. The police came up with no more forensic evidence; no more witnesses. They published photographs of Karen in the newspapers, and contacted every religious order throughout Belgium, southern Holland and northern France. But nobody came forward. Nobody had seen how Karen had died. And there were no nunneries where the sisters wore gray; especially the whitish-gray that the carriage-driver claimed to have seen.
Inspector De Buy had said, “Why not take your wife back to America, Mr. Wallace? There’s nothing more you can do here in Bruges. If there’s a break in the case, I can fax you, yes?”
Now Karen was lying in the Episcopal cemetery in New Milford, Connecticut, under a blanket of crimson maple-leaves, and Dean was back here, in Bruges, on a chilly Flanders morning, tired and jet-lagged, and lonelier than he had ever felt before.
He crossed the wide, empty square called’t Zand, where fountains played and clusters of sculptured cyclists stood in the fog. The real cyclists were far busier jangling their bells and pedalling furiously over the cobbles. He passed cafes with steamy, glassed-in verandahs, where doughy-faced Belgians sat drinking coffee and smoking and eating huge cream-filled pastries. A pretty girl with long black hair watched him pass, her face as white as an actress in a European art-movie. In an odd way, she reminded him of the way that Karen had looked, the day that he had first met her.
With his coat-collar turned up against the cold and his breath fuming, he walked past the shops selling lace and chocolates and postcards and perfume. In the old Flemish tradition, a flag hung over the entrance of every shop, bearing the coat of arms of whoever had lived there in centuries gone by. Three grotesque fishes, swimming through a silvery sea. A man who looked like Adam, picking an apple from a tree. A white-faced woman with a strange suggestive smile.
Dean reached the wide cobbled market-place. On the far side, like a flock of seagulls, twenty or thirty nuns hurried silently through the fog. Up above him, the tall spire of Bruges Belfry loomed through the fog, six hundred tightly-spiraling steps to the top. Dean knew that because he and Karen had climbed up it, panting and laughing all the way. Outside the Belfry the horse-drawn tourist carriages collected, as well as ice-cream vans and hot-dog stalls. In the summer, there were long lines of visitors waiting to be given guided tours around the town, but not today. Three carriages were drawn up side by side, while their drivers smoked and their blanketed horses dipped their heads in their nose-bags.
Dean approached the drivers and lifted one hand in greeting.
“Tour, sir?” asked a dark-eyed unshaven young man in a tilted straw hat.
“Not today, thanks. I’m looking for somebody … one of your fellow-drivers.” He took out the folded newspaper clipping. “His name is Jan De Keyser.”
“Who wants him? He’s not in trouble, is he?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Can you tell me where he lives?”
The carriage-drivers looked at each other. “Does anybody know where Jan De Keyser lives?”
Dean took out his wallet and handed them 100 francs each. The drivers looked at each other again, and so Dean gave them another 100.
“Oostmeers, about halfway down, left-hand side,” said the unshaven young man. “I don’t know the number but there’s a small delicatessen and it’s next to that, with a brown door and brown glass vases in the window.”
He coughed, and then he said, “You want a tour, too?”
Dean shook his head. “No, thanks.
I think I’ve seen everything in Bruges I ever want to see; and more.”
He walked back along Oude Burg and under the naked lime-trees of Simon Stevin Plein. The inventor of decimal currency stood mournfully on his plinth, staring at a chocolate shop across the street. The morning was so raw now that Dean wished he had brought a pair of gloves. He crossed and recrossed the canal several times. It was smelly and sullen and it reminded him of death.
They had first come to Bruges for two reasons. The first was to get over Charley. Charley hadn’t even talked, or walked, or seen the light of day. But amnio had shown that Charley would be chronically disabled, if he were ever bom; a nodding, drooling boy in a wheelchair, for all of his life. Dean and Karen had sat up all evening and wept and drank wine, and finally decided that Charley would be happier if he remained a hope; and a memory; a brief spark that illuminated the darkness, and died. Charley had been aborted and now Dean had nobody to remember Karen by. Her china collection? Her clothes? One evening he had opened her underwear drawer and taken out a pair of her panties and desperately breathed them in, hoping to smell her. But the panties were clean and Karen was gone; as if she had never existed.
They had come to Bruges for the art, too: for the Groeninge Museum with its fourteenth-century religious paintings and its modern Belgian masters, for Rubens and Van Eycks and Magrittes. Dean was a veterinarian, but he had always been a keen amateur painter; and Karen had designed wallpaper. They had first met nearly seven years ago, when Karen had brought her golden retriever into Dean’s surgery to have its ears checked out. She had liked Dean’s looks right from the very beginning. She had always liked tall, gentle, dark-haired men (“I would have married Clark Kent if Lois Lane hadn’t gotten in first.”). But what had really persuaded her was the patience and affection with which he had handled her dog Buffy. After they were married, she used to sing “Love Me, Love My Dog” to him, and accompany herself on an old banjo.
Buffy was dead now, too. Buffy had pined so pitifully for Karen that Dean had eventually put him down.
Oostmeers was a narrow street of small neat row houses, each with its shining front window and its freshly painted front door and its immaculate lace curtains. Dean found the delicatessen easily because—apart from an antique dealer’s—it was the only shop. The house next door was much shabbier than most of its neighbors, and the brown glass vases in the window were covered in a film of dust. He rang the doorbell, and clapped his hands together to warm them up.
