THIRTY-FIVE
I’m about to enter Room 12 to meet with my first client of the day. Mr. Watts, who lost his younger sister so long ago that his only photo of her is age-cracked and sepia-stained. A hand on my shoulder stops me. I turn, confused.
Jane’s businesslike as she reaches out and scrubs her thumb hard over my lips. I can taste her skin, a trace of acerbic hand soap. It’s such a surprising moment that I stand completely still, an obedient child being tended to by an impatient parent.
Jane pulls her hand away and holds up her thumb as if she’s showing off courtroom evidence. Her finger is bloodied with lipstick. “Still wearing your favorite lipstick?” she asks. “Your other clients won’t much like that trashy color.”
Instinctively, I touch my mouth. “I forgot. I’m sorry, Jane. It won’t happen again.”
“Why are you here?” Jane asks.
I’m very aware of how vulnerable we are, standing in the doorway of Room 12. Anyone could spot us. Down the dim corridor, a few doors are snapped shut, but others stand ajar, waiting for clients and bodies. I catch the edge of something from Room 10: a plea, a sob.
“Even after all that mess with Ana and Renard, you just keep coming back. You vanished for those few days and I thought you were gone. But here you are.”
“I’m not going to abandon my clients,” I say. “They rely on me.”
She makes a noise deep in her throat. “And what about you?” she asks. “Do you rely on your clients?”
My face is hot with embarrassment at how easily she’s figured me out. Jane’s right. There isn’t any reason for me to return. But I’m not sure how else to fill my days. All that stretching space, staying inside my skin without the reliable relief of the lotuses.
Jane reaches out and pats my upper arm, a gesture without warmth. “You’re not the first person to use this as a place to hide,” she says. “And you won’t be the last. But you’re certainly the longest standing. I admit, I’m curious to see what it would take to chase you out.”
I’m fixated on hide. My body feels as if it’s been turned inside out, everything dark and protected revealed to sudden and corrosive light. “Mrs. Renard told you?” I ask.
“Told me what?”
I can’t tell whether there’s a challenge beneath her voice. “Nothing,” I say. “Whatever you think about me, Jane, I’m here for my clients. That’s all.”
She glances at the smear of lipstick on her skin, then wipes her thumb along her skirt. “I’ll send your next client in, Eurydice,” she says.
It’s not much of a home,” I say. At the threshold, my key in the lock, I stop, balking. “I’ve never gotten around to decorating, or—”
“Edie, it’s fine,” he says, and touches me between my shoulder blades. “I’m just glad you invited me.”
I let the door swing open. Such a small apartment that we can take stock of it from the doorway. I cleaned recently. Somehow it makes the space feel sadder, the harsh scent of lemon cleanser floating out. This sign that I’ve tried to impress him, and how inadequate the space still is. The space I occupy is a mere fraction of his home.
Patrick follows me in. Over our heads, a neighbor’s music judders like machine gun fire.
“How long have you lived here?”
“A few years,” I say.
“You still haven’t unpacked?” He’s teasing; he gestures at the tidy row of boxes that lies against one wall.
“Oh,” I say. “That’s my clients’ information.”
Patrick’s face tightens into purposeful seriousness. He glances again at the unmarked boxes. When I imagine the scene through his eyes, the boxes multiply. So many other lives and other deaths and other bodies. I wonder if he’s discomfited by this visual evidence, summing up how much time I’ve devoted to strangers’ loved ones.
“Would you like a drink?” I ask. On the way home from work this evening, self-conscious, I sought out and purchased the same label of wine that Patrick keeps at his house.
“Sure,” he says, producing a smile. It’s almost as if he’s doing me a favor. I feel like a child hosting a tea party for an indulgent adult.
But when I return from the kitchen, he’s gone. Clutching the pair of wineglasses, I hurry down the hall to find him in my bedroom. My heart blanks. He stands in the center, surrounded by the spread of photographs. Photos on my bureau, on my nightstand; fanned on the floor and the windowsill. I didn’t think to hide them. They’re such a natural part of my life’s landscape that my eyes don’t register the Braddocks’ memories anymore.
“Patrick, I’m so sorry—” I start.
“Why would you be?” he asks.
“You’re not upset?”
He seems puzzled. “I gave these to you.”
The bright orange of the lotus bottle stands out on my bureau. It’s been nearly a week since we left Lake Madeleine. We’ve been avoiding the subject of when he’ll next see his wife.
Patrick leans to retrieve a photo from the center of my unmade bed. He examines it before turning the Polaroid toward me. “Where did you find this one?”
Sylvia and Henry. “At the lake,” I say. “She must have left it behind by accident, during one of their visits.”
He lets go of the photo. His wife drifts to the floor.
My hesitation only lasts a second. “I went to see him,” I say. “Henry.”
Patrick stares. “You’re not serious.” And then: “Does he know who you are? What we do together?”
“No,” I say quickly. “No. He knows that we know each other, but—he doesn’t know about her.” I don’t mention that I’ve been visiting the Damsons’ home on a regular basis, that I’ve sat with Viv and pored over the dregs of Patrick’s private life.
“Edie,” Patrick says, and inhales, letting the breath out again in a heavy sigh. “You can’t do that. He’s not part of this. Going after him is only going to get me in trouble.”
“After what you told me, I had to talk to him.”
“Don’t be stupid.” He’s tired, irritation worn so thin that it doesn’t hold any roughness. “Henry and I have been avoiding each other. It’s shitty, but it’s a truce. Now you’ve gone to him, I don’t know how he’ll react, what he’ll do—”
“Something he said bothered me,” I say. “He said that he hated to think of Sylvia out there in the water, all alone. But you left the cabin right after she did. You didn’t tell Henry where you were going. How did he know you didn’t go after your wife?”
Patrick rubs his hand over his mouth.
“What if he followed her?” I ask. “He knew she was alone. He knew you weren’t with her because he came after her. Maybe Henry had more to do with her death than he admits.”
“No,” Patrick says. “Don’t go down this path. We know what happened.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, he’s gentle. “I know why you’re saying this. You don’t have to.”
“Why am I doing it?” I ask.
“You’re trying to help me,” Patrick says. “Take away my guilt. But I know what I did. I hurt her and I lost her. It was my fault that she died that night.”
I consider this, too surprised to argue.
“Or maybe you’re doing it for yourself,” he goes on. “Proving that I didn’t drive Sylvia away. You can’t be with me until you convince yourself that she wanted to live, and that she wanted to live with me.” He tucks my hair behind my ear, the unexpected intimacy of his fingertips warm at my temple. “If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll understand.”
“About our plan?” I ask.
“I want to do it,” he says. “I was going to tell you tonight. But if I’m too late—”
“Patrick,” I say, and everything else falls away.
“We’ll go,” he says. “Leave this place behind. There’s nothing here for me, hasn’t been for a long time. If Sylvia had stayed with me, we would have moved away and found a fresh start somewhere else. It’s what we can do now.” He pauses. “Unless you have a reason to st
ay.”
The Elysian Society; Room 12; my faithful white dress. My clients. Will any of them really miss me? Or will they shrug, sigh, resigned to the minor inconvenience, moving on to the next body? I imagine a world without other people’s perfume and jewelry. Without the love of strangers constantly surrounding me and not quite touching me.
“I want to go,” I say. “Of course I do.”
Her office is empty this morning, door nudging open at my touch. It’s the first time I’ve come to Mrs. Renard’s office and found it abandoned. Without her presence, the space seems shrunken. A rib cage without a heart. The book spines transform from mystical artifacts to shabby discards; the windowpanes are dust-dulled.
When Mrs. Renard returns, I’m waiting. She pauses in the doorway, eyes blank and then widening just a fraction. I can tell she’s disturbed to see me. I sit up straighter.
“Eurydice,” Mrs. Renard says, clicking the door shut behind her. Taking her place behind the desk, her hands float briefly over the spread of papers and pens, as if checking that I haven’t touched anything. “I’m not prepared to meet with anyone today.”
“I’m here about Thisbe,” I say.
No change in her expression. “I don’t recall a Thisbe.”
“She only left at the end of January,” I say.
“January?” she repeats. “Eurydice, we’ll go to the waiting room right now and I’ll ask you to name the bodies there. Bodies who have been working for years. You won’t be able to.”
“I have reason to believe that Thisbe was killed by a client,” I say.
The moment stretches out. I want her to comfort me: lift away the guilt that’s been winding through me, erase this other version of the Elysian Society. But Mrs. Renard smiles, sudden and ingratiating. It’s eerie on her, contradicting her usual imperiousness.
“Laura Holmes worked as Thisbe,” I continue. “It was her body they found. Laura was possessed when her body died. My fear is that she ran away with a client while she was overcome. She didn’t even know what was happening. And he killed her.”
Abruptly, Mrs. Renard leans over her desk, hands knotted together. I can see her pulse in her neck, fast and hard.
“I need your help,” I say. “You can look up the clients who worked with Thisbe and find out who might have done this to her.”
“I couldn’t protect her,” Mrs. Renard says. “I tried. Trust me.”
I sit back in the chair. My fingers twitch instinctively, as if I’m trying to grab hold of a steady surface at the beginning of an arcing fall.
“She was running away from herself,” Mrs. Renard says. “I’ve seen quite a few of those types pass through our doors. People hoping to make quick money before they move on to the next place. I was happy to give Thisbe a chance, but she was sniffing around in the wrong places. Dangling too much in front of her clients. I’ve always been careful to give clients just enough, you understand,” she says. “Give them too much, and who knows what will happen?”
I have a vision of Mrs. Renard sizing us up judiciously, weighing us like cuts of meat. Slicing off a pinkie finger or the crook of an elbow, arranging a pair of lips or a single glistening eyeball on a plate. Serving us to clients with a brisk smile.
“Thisbe—” she starts.
“Laura,” I say. “Call her Laura.”
A startled blink. “Laura, then,” Mrs. Renard says, as if humoring a child. “Laura wasn’t strong in her own identity. She was easy prey. When someone else wanted her body more than she did, there wasn’t even a struggle. It all happened so quickly.”
Nausea pulls tight along my jawline.
“I was sloppy,” Mrs. Renard says. “I can admit that. I go to great lengths to protect my bodies. But I’ve been exhausted. This job, it may weigh on you, Eurydice, but you have no idea how it weighs on me. And sometimes I fail. Sometimes I let the wrong clients through. Laura paid the price for that. It’s something I’ll always have to live with.”
A woozy sensation rushes across my scalp. “Who was it?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, eyes narrowing slightly.
“The client,” I say. “Who was the wrong client?”
“Oh, well,” she says. “It scarcely matters, does it? A man whose wife wasn’t the woman he pretended she was. His wife was deeply troubled, a fact he hid from me quite cleverly.”
“Tell me his name,” I say.
A knowing smile. “Mr. Richards,” she says. “A new client. You’ve never met him.”
The relief I feel is watery and thin, spiked with an awareness of the betrayal I just committed. I shouldn’t have needed to ask. I should trust Patrick completely by now.
“Why didn’t you help her?” I hope Mrs. Renard can’t sense the chagrin that pushes this question out too fast.
“I did what I could,” Mrs. Renard says. “I turned Mr. Richards away. I made sure Laura stopped taking the lotuses. Some people might have sent her onto the streets. Those smaller operations, I’ve seen them do that—abandon the bodies. Let nature sort them out. Wandering and unnoticed. It’s a cowardly way. I took her with me. To my own home.”
Her voice holds a steely defiance, as delicate as a wire. That frightens me more than if she’d been angry. It’s a sign that she’s been defending herself in her own mind, all these months.
“What else could I do?” Mrs. Renard asks. “Laura came to me with no family, no background. I wanted to help her. I’ve never done that before. Taking a body into my home.”
There’s disgust in her voice, as if she opened her life to a creeping contamination.
“I kept her in my bedroom,” Mrs. Renard says. “I treated her like a normal person, trying to get through to the poor creature. She was calm enough at first. I brought her food and water. I gave her a new outfit. A sundress, not much different from what you girls wear here. So that it would feel familiar to her. But that damn earring—I couldn’t take it off. Any time I tried, she’d react as if I was trying to cut off her ear. I let it stay. That chintzy little bauble. Taunting me.
“Sometimes I tried to talk to her as Laura, to see if she was still there. But God knows Laura was a stranger to me already. I couldn’t tell one woman apart from the other. And the look in her eyes, Eurydice. Like talking to a wild animal. She’d seem to see me and understand me and then—poof, she’d be right back to her own world.”
“You could have helped her,” I say, my chest tight. “Laura didn’t deserve that.”
“What about the other woman?” Mrs. Renard says. “It’s easy to feel sorry for Laura. But consider the other woman. She comes back into a body to find that it’s all wrong for her. All the rage of her past life poured into a new envelope and it’s splitting at the seams. I had to watch this. I had to watch her for weeks, unraveling. After a while, she tried to escape when I opened the door. Tried to attack me. She stopped eating. I did what I did out of mercy, Eurydice.”
I can feel each separate bead of sweat sliding from my skin. “It wasn’t a client who hurt her at all,” I say. “You killed her.”
“No,” Mrs. Renard says, calm, as if she’s just now considering and then dismissing the idea. “No. She was already gone. Both of them were gone. I couldn’t very well let it continue on. I ended the whole thing. There was no other option.”
The details of Hopeful Doe’s murder—ones presented by sleek newscasters, peppered throughout news pieces—come back to me now. Blunt force trauma; a clinical term, when I first heard it, so simple that it became a contradictory euphemism. Now I fill in details, flesh out the scene with fingernails and teeth. Mrs. Renard with Laura’s body: taking her, unresisting, by the throat, knocking her head against the wall. Again and again, her skull giving like tapped eggshell. Or slamming some heavy household object, a shovel, a bat, against her chest.
The intimacy of the death, the necessary violence involved, is a woozy shock. I can’t look at Mrs. Renard’s hands where they lie on the desk, bare and obscene.
“I’d heard about that hou
se from other bodies,” she says. “I gleaned scraps here and there, during interviews over the years. I didn’t even know that the house was scheduled to be torn down. It was perfect. An act of fate. Or so it seemed,” she says. “I’ve tortured myself since then. The what-ifs. If the house hadn’t been scheduled for demolition, that neighborhood girl wouldn’t have gone nosing around where she didn’t belong. If that Fowler bitch hadn’t decided to take justice into her own hands. If. If. But it doesn’t matter. The danger has passed.”
“You have to tell somebody,” I say.
“Why?” The genuineness of the question makes my heart sink. “Everyone has moved on. There’s no mystery to her. A girl like Laura, found dead—it’s not a tragedy. Nor a rarity.”
“And if it happens again?” I ask. “Another body ends up possessed?”
“It was a single mistake,” she says. “Weigh all the good the Elysian Society has done over the decades, my dear, and then weigh it against this. One casualty. A girl with nobody in the world to miss her.”
I look around the office, hoping to find something to anchor myself here. But everything slides away, refusing to fall into familiar territory.
“If you’re wondering whether to be a hero, I’ll ease your conscience,” Mrs. Renard says. She sounds almost kind. “It won’t do any good. They can look, but they can’t prove anything. Your testimony won’t hold water. You’re not exactly a respected member of society. Besides—do you want the authorities investigating our clients? Think of all the innocent people who will come under the microscope.”
I understand at once what she means. His face comes back to the forefront of my mind.
“If you’re threatening me,” I say, “you should know that Mr. Braddock has done nothing wrong. I’m not concerned.” But my desperation from earlier, when I asked, Who was it?, still hangs in an oily film in the air.
“Oh, Mr. Braddock is an upstanding citizen, at the end of the day,” Mrs. Renard says. “The kind of man a woman like you would never meet without doing what you do. It’s lucky for you, isn’t it, that he’s favored you with his attention?” She settles back in her chair, runs her tongue over her lips. “I take it your relationship with Mr. Braddock is becoming more personal. You must know everything about him at this point. And he knows all about you.”
The Possessions Page 25
