Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  He straightened, stretched and came down the steps. “Do you have anyone to come and stay with you, family?”

  As if. As if I’d bring anyone into this mess, even if there were anyone. Into a danger I knew was waiting like a creeping fog. Out there. Somewhere. Near. God knows where from God knows what. Odd question though, from someone who seemed to regard me with official suspicion. Who, from some of his questions, appeared to suspect I was making things up. Not without cause, I had to admit, from his perspective anyway. Maybe he was implying I needed a witness. Maybe he felt the shadows gathering. Who could tell? He was an impassive bastard.

  “No,” I said finally. “I have no family.”

  “The report is back on your husband’s car,” he said. “The brakes and the steering were tampered with.”

  He stood there in the bright noon sun like a stone god, only the blue jewels of his eyes alive in that stone face, watching my reaction and waiting for me to dissolve.

  A bit difficult, when one is completely paralyzed.

  He seemed to grow until he filled my whole sight, would topple and crush me. I closed my eyes, tried to breathe. It was difficult. I drew in one breath. Two. Opened my eyes. Opened my mouth, as dry as ashes, and whispered, “That was the main reason for our big argument. He wanted me to take the car that night.” I didn’t think Thresher heard me. Might not matter if he did. My word only.

  “Ms. St. Claire, in light of this discovery about your husband’s vehicle, do you have any thing to change or add to your original account of the circumstances?” Coming from a cop that was a hostile statement.

  I could only shake my head.

  His pager buzzed again. Never taking his eyes from me, he reached in a pocket and drew out his cell phone. He grunted a couple of times and said curtly, “I’ll be there.”

  He stared at me for another long moment and turned on his heel.

  I found my voice, though it was high enough to make a dog whine. “Sergeant Thresher.”

  He half turned his head, like a predator.

  “Did your people check the rest of the cemetery? At the back? For other open graves? The amount of blood… More than one creature might have been raised last night.”

  7.

  I heard the front door slam as I slid the bolt on the back. By the time I got to the front, I heard his car shoot away like a blood-lusting weasel. My non sequitur hadn’t been really that, just out of sequence. Just a half-formed, something’s-missing thought that finally chose that propitious moment to erupt.

  Whatever. After dropping his bomb, he’d gone without further grilling.

  I collapsed on the couch, slept for four solid hours and woke wrinkled, thirsty, and hungover, with a mind still not able to think much beyond which foot to put before the other. Changing into jeans and sweatshirt, I decided laundry had become a priority. My compassionate leave was up. I must check with the municipal office tomorrow for assignments, and I needed something clean to wear. Particularly underwear, but I might as well catch up on the lot, and it would take forever in my apartment-size machine. Maybe the ritual of routine activity, the commonplace normality of that chore, would settle my mind. I gathered my laundry into a bundle buggy and set out.

  Two streets up and one street over, a mini-mall hosted a laundromat, video store, beer store and a 7-Eleven. I could stock up on eggs and bread, some cheese and fruit, on the same trip.

  The laundromat was nearly empty. Except for a sprawled teenager with earbuds and an iPod, bobbing his head and picking his nose in time, and a freckled, overweight mother immersed in a bodice ripper and a bag of chips. Her kinderkid, a cute, towheaded brat with a bowl cut, trudged round and round the row of seats between the washing machines and the bank of dryers. He waved a plastic sword in one hand and pushed a duck on wheels with the other, all the while happily chanting a line from some television show over and over. Obviously, a multi-tasker. At least it wasn’t scissors. Other than that, the place was quiet.

  I dodged past him and took three machines at the far end for myself—darks, lights and delicates. I parked my cart and went next door to buy groceries, then stood outside among the cigarette butts by the overflowing trash can to eat an apple.

  This section of town seemed relatively clean of entities. Maybe Ric had made a recent pass through it because of the elementary school on the next block. Some parents objected to their children meeting the disembodied daily on their way to and from, though I had the feeling some of the older kids probably thought it was cool. Children attracted some types of ghosts, the restless, hungry ones. Sometimes, unfortunately, nasty ones as well. Probably drawn by the excess energy, like the little kid in the laundromat. I wondered if he’d slowed down any. I dropped the apple core in the garbage bin and went back to see.

  He hadn’t. Same song, same sword, same circle.

  A small woman in a forest-green tracksuit and a stone-gray windbreaker sleeve-tied around her shoulders like a cloak stood filling a washer next to mine. Ornate, carved combs swept back her hair, brick red, from a delicate, ageless face. Her ears, contrary to popular description, were not pointed. She had no aura as such; she was pure shimmer.

  She smiled and looked me up and down, green eyes crinkling, and turned back to her mixed wash. Sheets and men’s clothes, mostly, brightly stained, in a wicker basket by her feet. Cold water wash for blood.

  Perhaps Ric’s passing encounter with the dullahan prepared me, but I should have been more surprised than I was. I took my hand away from the useless bag of salt hidden in the kangaroo pocket of my sweatshirt. Rowan and red alder alone would serve for such as she.

  “These machines are wonderful, indeed,” she said, “so saving on the hands and back. No more wringing until the arms feel they’re wrenched from their sockets and the fingers aching from the cold! And it a busy time and all.”

  “I can imagine,” I gasped, partly because the kid had rammed his push toy at my ankle and whacked me across the shins with his sword. I was in his way. Or I was a dinosaur, or a giant. Or both.

  “Patrick, don’t bother the lady.” His mother spoke without looking up from her book.

  The sidhe looked down at the miniature Cúchulainn in Bob the Builder overalls. He grinned up at her. She glanced over at his oblivious mother, speculatively.

  “Intermarriage!” She snorted. “Some I grieve, some I don’t. I grieved for your mother.”

  My mother? My mother was a foundling, they told me, of unknown family.

  Oh.

  My thoughts revolved and dropped like the clothes in the dryer drum opposite. Had I been too young to understand the caoine, the keening that precedes the death of one from a family under protection? About to ask, memory of a legend washed my mind with caution. You must never question the Weeper, the bean sidhe, the bean-nighim, the Woman of the Ford, no matter her aspect. Her words are a grace. Never ask or your soul is forfeit.

  For other reasons, my soul was likely forfeit, but I wasn’t going to risk upsetting a sidhe.

  “I imagined I heard an owl in the night,” I said slowly, as my last washer stopped with a clunk. “And I saw a crow at dawn.” I stared at the bundle she dropped in her machine, wondering if I recognized anything.

  “None of yours this day, Cousin,” she said, cheerfully.

  I really don’t remember transferring my wash loads. She reminded me not to toss my good bras in the high heat of the commercial dryer.

  Cousin?

  Did she consider me some sort of half-breed blood kin?

  “I passed by your orchard in the evening. You must take care. I have seen the corpse-pale at your doorstep.”

  She closed the lid of her machine and walked away, her red running shoes making small slapping sounds on the tiled floor, like wet wool on river stones. The russet hair flowing down her back was as long as mine.

  She paused and looked back over her shoulder. I could barely hear her over the rush of water filling the machine. “No curse runs with power forever, Leannan, I have heard
, for the dead are grateful for rest, even those from the small barrows.”

  Cousin?

  I don’t remember trundling home.

  8.

  That evening I found, among other revelatory and unpalatable items of information, the principal reason Nathan married me.

  After a meal of egg and toast, which sat uneasily in my stomach, I unlocked Nathan’s private filing cabinet and continued sorting through his papers, a wastebasket on one side and a hanging file on the other and a pile of “maybe keep” in front. Feeling perverse, I began at the last file in the bottom drawer. Besides the sorting being a necessary executrix chore, I had the vague idea, more of a hope, I might discover something to give me an inkling, a clue, a reason, for this sudden explosion of malice.

  Instead, I found a copy of his uncle’s will.

  The provisions of which included a Gothic-type codicil that Nathan be married at the time of his uncle’s demise, otherwise the house, the bonds, the investments, would go to charities named therein. If Nathan married, but subsequently divorced or sought an annulment within the first year of the espousal, the estate would likewise default to those charities. However, in the event that Nathan died during the first year of his marriage, the estate would become the property of his surviving wife absolutely. I concluded the uncle was an errant homophobe, who believed marriage was either proof of its absence or a cure in the event of its presence. I also concluded that the document, in the hands of someone like Sergeant John Thresher, provided a perfect motive for Nathan’s murder. Our anniversary was next month. Poor Nathan. He’d come so close to realizing his financial ambitions.

  I checked the dates on the document. Nathan had proposed to me a bare week after its execution. A month after we met. I sat there a long time, flipping back and forth the pages of the document, not really seeing it. I wasn’t sure if such restrictions on a legatee were valid but that wasn’t the point, if Nathan believed they were.

  Something that had been mortally wounded, but still alive inside me, died.

  I knew, and hadn’t minded, that my Talent gave Nathan a certain status, a cachet, within his anti-apparition organization and ensured his presidency, even though our views did not exactly coincide. It was how I met him, after all, as a guest speaker addressing one of the society’s conferences. I considered it a form of dower, in a quaint manner of thinking.

  But this, his uncle’s will, proved it had been a lie from the beginning. A deception I had facilitated, made easy, because I was so frigging flattered that someone who seemed to admire me not for my looks, but for myself, who professed affection, who didn’t appear to consider me a viable form of vagina dentate, as some did, or as others, an adventure prize. That dear delight faded, soon after his uncle died, for reasons I had assumed at the time were more my fault than his.

  I had been simply Nathan’s stone for a couple of birds. Whoever sent Nathan’s zombie after me might be using the same efficiency of technique for killing disruptive, uncooperative birds.

  Nathan, I discovered eventually, adamantly desired the absolute elimination of all Godforsaken: all ghosts, spirits and apparitions. Perhaps he exhibited a family trait and he was like his uncle, with just a different phobia.

  I took a more laissez-faire attitude. Unless the disincarnate constituted a hazard, or a disturbance or distress to the living, I believed they should be ignored, or at least tolerated. Further, there were definitely times when ghosts assisted the living, an assistance that balanced, in part, the spiteful viciousness they sometimes exhibited.

  Nathan, because of my profession, assumed my views ran with his. He took my position as a personal insult and a betrayal when he was confronted with it, first over Dumbarton and later over the adjoining cemetery. I discovered he considered my Talent a taint, tolerated only because of its usefulness toward his cause.

  No doubt a double irony hovered here. Nathan’s ghost would surely emanate and it would be malignant. I could deal with that, but I wondered if I would be haunted by his cold and condemning presence all the rest of my life.

  In the same file, I found the executor’s final financial statement from the law firm representing his uncle’s estate.

  As a widow, I was extra wealthy. Wealthy beyond my own inheritance, the house and property, and our joint account. If I lived. There was a default provision attached to Nathan’s will as well—his estate, in the absence of living heirs, would go to his beloved association. Nathan had been an orphan, like me.

  The paper blurred. I switched on the lights. The phone rang a minute later. A hang-up as soon as I said hello.

  Nathan’s accident had been an attempt at murder. I knew that now. However, that revelation didn’t serve to exculpate me.

  Unless John Thresher had overstated the forensic findings for some obscure reason of his own, the ritual murder of the caretaker put a decidedly different light on Nathan’s animation and subsequent attack on me. Someone wanted me dead too. As I saw it, the main motives for murder were money, malice and madness. I might well be the object of all three.

  I had problems and I needed a drink. I went through the arch to the dining room and dug the decanter of port out of the sideboard, poured myself half a glass and guzzled it. The frigid snarl of brambles inside me loosened. I poured another half glass.

  Something thumped on my front door. The way things were going I wouldn’t give odds it was a someone.

  I parked my goblet on the hall table and unholstered the baseball bat from the umbrella stand before I flicked on the porch lamp and peered through one of the narrow sidelights to see what was afoot.

  Another problem stood there. Almost ogre size. Two hundred or so pounds of problem. Sergeant John Thresher, waiting, well back, with his hands easy on his hips and Dumbarton sniffing his pant legs.

  He looked good in casual. Even nicer than the suit this morning. But I didn’t make the mistake of thinking his leather jacket, turtleneck and jeans meant this was a social call. Casual clothes didn’t change the fact he was a cop with a grindstone mind and this was business. I didn’t have to read his aura to know it.

  I slid the chain and opened the door wide.

  “It’s after eight o’clock, Sergeant. Do you know where your animators are?”

  Pour a drink into me and my mouth runneth over—which is why I avoid alcohol most of the time.

  Ole blue eyes took in my blunt instrument and nodded. “Ms. St. Claire.”

  He glanced down at Dumbarton sniffing at his pants.

  “Don’t even think of it,” he said.

  Dumbarton lowered his hind leg, flicked a black ear, grinned up at him—dripping phosphorous—and ambled off. To decorate the driver’s door, I hoped, if he hadn’t already.

  Thresher turned to watch Dummy disappear off the porch into the shadows.

  “So you do have a guard dog—of sorts. Of the Mauthe Doog lineage, I would guess.”

  “I suppose so. Useful for trespassers.”

  “Trespassers?”

  I shrugged and gestured the man in. Recalling his peremptory style this morning, I gestured him to one of the tweed and basswood abominations by the fireplace. I wasn’t feeling gracious. It was not a comfortable chair for a large man.

  “The typical Pot of Gold legend attached to the property. Treasure hunters with metal detectors show up every now and then. Dumbarton usually takes care of them.”

  I propped the baseball bat against the chair arm and stuck my goblet on the mantel before I sat. He waited until I settled in the other chair before he also sat down, rather gingerly.

  “No doubt your suspicious mind thinks I am celebrating. I am not.” Pointing to the open file drawer across the room, I added, “I just discovered I was married for money. Not mine. His, in a manner of speaking. That conclusion tends to chill one’s self-esteem considerably.”

  Two thoughts collided in my head and erased the warmth of alcohol. One was that he hadn’t reacted to Dumbarton in the usual manner—which was usually with profanity, i
f not outright hysteria, followed by assholes and heels in the opposite direction. Most people didn’t even see Dummy unless he wanted them to. The other, this morning he recognized the caretaker’s shade as just that, not a live, corporeal, solid body. Most people would have rammed on the brakes, automatically. A double reason to be double cautious in dealings with him.

  I looked him over. He looked me over. I wondered if I had dribbled port wine down my front. He crossed his legs. I crossed mine.

  I said, finally, “I shouldn’t be surprised about Dumbarton, especially considering you’re a psi-crime expert. You have Talent of some kind.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Ms. St. Claire, who might have had an animus against your husband?” So, he was starting with Nathan. Smart man.

  “Besides me, you mean?”

  He didn’t even pretend to be discomfited by my directness. In fact, he looked amused. The skin around his eyes crinkled and the corners of his mouth twitched. Maybe he had me figured. Maybe not.

  “Yes. In addition to yourself, then, since you’ve expressed it that way.”

  I unclenched my hands and turned them palm up.

  “I have been trying to think and not doing too well at it, I’m afraid. I’m not at all familiar with his associates from before we were married. He didn’t mention any past feuds. Someone from his organization, the ASP, possibly? There were hard feelings over his winning the presidency, I understand. Not everyone cared for the direction he took the society, which was away from the original environmental causes for the paranormal proliferation research. Remote, I think, but possible.” I sneaked a quick glance down. Nope, no dribbles.