Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Gabriel grinned. This was one of the many things he loved about Seavy County. He knew of no other place in the world where he could have this kind of conversation.

  “How about in the real world?” he asked.

  Denne’s smile was halfhearted and dismissive. “I don’t specialize in the real world.”

  That wasn’t exactly true either, but Gabriel wasn’t going to argue. He shifted a little, his legs growing tired from crouching.

  “Look at this.” Denne pointed at a space in the thin, strawlike hair. “No ears. Not even a place for them.”

  Gabriel did look. The skull was perfectly rounded along the side, the skin—with no obvious scales—stretched taut. “I expect you’ll find a lot of differences.”

  Denne gave him a look of surprise. “God, I hadn’t even thought of that. I was just going to look for what killed her. But this is something, isn’t it?”

  “Alien Autopsy,” Gabriel said, talking about a video they had both seen and laughed over. “Think of all the tourists we’ll get on this beach now.”

  If anything, Denne grew paler. “I’m not letting this information out. The last thing we need is the National Enquirer here, making us all look like hicks.”

  Gabriel smiled. Now that reaction was pure Denne. He would rather avoid controversy and public notoriety than claim the discovery of the century.

  “What do we do with it?” Gabriel asked.

  “We’ll treat this like any other body we find on the beach,” Denne said. “Full crime-scene investigation. Those people over there think this is human, right?”

  He nodded toward the tourists.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel said. “They didn’t give it a good look.”

  “Perfect. Then that’s what we tell the Anchor Weekly News. A body on the beach, suspicious death.”

  Gabriel gave him a sideways glance. Denne hadn’t moved from his crouch, his hands hovering over but not touching the body.

  “You want to use county money to investigate this,” Gabriel said.

  “Damn straight,” Denne said. “If everyone thinks we might have a murder, no one’ll argue the state crime lab budget. They have better equipment than I do.”

  “I thought you didn’t want outsiders to know about this.”

  “They’re not going to examine her,” Denne said. “They’re going to look at the stuff around her, just like they would for any other crime scene.”

  Gabriel nodded. Sometimes he liked how Denne thought.

  “All right,” Gabriel said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Three

  Madison. Wisconsin

  Lyssa Buckingham first heard the sirens when she stepped off the bus at the corner of University and Linden, but she didn’t think much of them. Sirens had become a fact of her life since she’d moved so close to the University Hospitals and Clinic. Sirens, and bells from the First Congregational Church just a block away, and in the fall, there would be shouts from Camp Randall Stadium during the Badger football games.

  Inconveniences that she didn’t mind, just like she normally didn’t mind taking the bus. On this day, though, it was a different matter. The bus’s air-conditioning had been out, and since she’d left her office at five like the rest of Madison, the bus was crowded. She’d had to stand for the full two miles, swaying in the intense heat, and as she had gotten off, the bus nearly drowned her in hot, smelly diesel exhaust.

  Lyssa adjusted her bookbag so that it fell across her back. Her purse was heavy enough by itself, but the bag—filled with the research materials she had finally gotten from a rare-books Web site—made the purse seem like it weighed nothing.

  In her right hand, she carried her briefcase, filled with this week’s papers from the course she had specially designed for the summer session: “Women and the Vote, 1868 to 1922.” She got to talk about all her favorite female pioneers, from Susan B. Anthony to Victoria Woodhull to Sojourner Truth. And she made the students understand that voting wasn’t just a right; it was a privilege, one many of them wouldn’t have had a hundred years before.

  Lyssa wasn’t enjoying the class as much as she usually did, partly because of the heat, and partly because she was still tying up the last few details from the divorce.

  Emily still didn’t understand what had happened, and Lyssa didn’t want to explain it to her. In fact, Lyssa was perfectly willing to play the bad guy in the entire situation.

  No little girl needed to know that her father thought she was a demon when he was off his medication. No little girl needed to know that her father had carried her sleeping form to the shore of Lake Mendota one hot summer evening and would have drowned her if Lyssa hadn’t awakened with a sense that something was about to go terribly wrong.

  Lyssa had had the same sense all day, but she hadn’t known why. She suspected it was the heat. Heat made her uneasy and restless. She had never really learned how to cope with it. She had grown up on the Oregon Coast, where the temperatures usually hovered between forty-five and seventy-five degrees year-round. And Oregon, like so many Western states, had very little humidity.

  The sheer amount of moisture in the air in a Wisconsin summer was enough to make anyone ill at ease.

  But it wasn’t just the heat and humidity; it was also the memories they raised. Her ex-husband, Reginald, had always been a little crazy in the heat. He studied it, as if it were something that had been sent from the heavens to attack him personally.

  Before Reginald had been diagnosed, indeed, before the symptoms had shown up, a psychologist had diagnosed his obsession with heat, global warming, and the coming end of the world as guilt.

  Reginald was the prodigal son of the Walters family, the only Walters who didn’t work for Walters Petroleum. He had tried to work for the family business, wanting to make the company environmentally responsible, but that went against the Walters way.

  Reginald lived off his portion of the family trust, but he pretended he had nothing to do with them. If people asked him, back in the days when he was lucid, who he was and what he did, he told them he was a classics professor, which was true.

  He also saw it as another failure in a life filled with failures.

  Lyssa never did. She thought Reginald brilliant, creative, and interesting—at least, she had when they’d met at the University of Texas in Austin. She had also seen him as courageous, going against the family in their home state, often showing up at protests in the oil-drilling fields and getting his picture on the front pages of the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News.

  Lyssa never had that kind of courage. She had run away from her family as quickly as she could and had never tried to fight them on their home turf.

  She walked the three short blocks to the house the UW had provided her for this semester. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright design, donated by an alumnus in his will. Eventually the university planned to turn the house into a museum, but until then, the UW got its use out of the place by renting it at minimal price to visiting professors.

  Lyssa wasn’t visiting, but the house had been empty, and she had been promised its use for another year. After that, she would have enough money in her savings account—provided there wasn’t another financial emergency—to put a down payment on a house, or at least a first and last on a moderately comfortable duplex.

  The divorce had left her broke and frightened and more than a little guilty. Wives promised to stick by their husbands through thick and thin, and she had fully expected to do that.

  But Reginald’s schizophrenia—which had appeared full strength in the middle of May a year before—had made being traditional impossible. The psychiatrists never believed Lyssa that Reginald had shown no symptoms before. Being schizophrenic, the doctors claimed, didn’t develop over time like Alzheimer’s or diabetes. It usually manifested long before someone’s thirty-fifth birthday.

  The doctors claimed that Reginald’s schizophrenia had to have existed before, and that Lyssa had done him a disservice by taking him off his medicat
ions.

  The doctors also claimed Lyssa’s negligence had hurt Emily. For a while, until Lyssa hired the best lawyer in the area, it looked like the State of Wisconsin was going to remove Emily from the Walters household for good.

  Lyssa had managed to shield Emily from all of that, somehow, and Emily didn’t remember most of the bad stuff, since Reginald had been aware enough to stay away when the paranoia and hallucinations started.

  But some magazine journalist got wind of Reginald’s illness. The journalist was already doing a piece for The Atlantic on the link between the duPont family’s business and the mental illness that ran in that family. With the advent of Reginald’s bizarre schizophrenia, and mental illness in other wealthy families whose initial source of wealth had to do with chemicals or petroleum, the journalist felt he had a wider story.

  The Walters family heard about the story before Lyssa did, and they swooped in to take care of Reginald. He got flown to their doctors, taken to their clinics, and forced to live in their ways. He couldn’t really defend himself against the family any longer.

  And the family decided to make Lyssa the villain, claiming that she had ignored his illness until it got extreme. That was when the need for the divorce had become crystal clear.

  After that, she knew that to keep her daughter out of the custody of the state or the Walters grandparents, who had never visited Emily, not once, and had never acknowledged her with a Christmas or birthday card, let alone a gift, Lyssa would have to get out of the marriage quickly.

  She managed to, while the Walters family focused on quashing the negative publicity raised by Reginald’s illness. Reginald managed to come back for the custody hearings, since he wanted joint custody, but Lyssa couldn’t agree to that, not with the Walters doctors claiming that Reginald wasn’t schizophrenic at all, just “exhausted,” and refusing to give him proper treatment. Without the treatment, he might try to kill Emily again.

  The Walters family stayed out of that battle. For the first time, Lyssa was pleased that they refused to acknowledge her as their daughter-in-law, and Emily as their granddaughter. It made the final fight that much easier. She doubted she would have been able to win otherwise against the Walters fortune.

  Lyssa pushed the damp hair off her forehead. Her hair was black and heavy, and she had kept it long until the beginning of this summer. She couldn’t face more heat and humidity with long hair trailing down her back. She had cropped her hair short, and Emily’s too, making them both look a bit like the Gainsborough painting the Blue Boy—young and somewhat surprised at the way things had gone.

  Lyssa didn’t feel young anymore. She’d known, when she’d turned thirty, that her future would be different, but she hadn’t realized how different. The past four years had aged her.

  She suspected it would only get worse.

  As she approached the house, she realized the garage door was open. She sighed. She had asked Emily time and again to close that door. Madison was a relatively safe town, but now that they lived near Camp Randall Stadium, they would be subject to game-day pranks and other student mischief.

  Even though football season wouldn’t officially start for another month and a half, Lyssa wanted the safety habits ingrained early. She didn’t want Emily to be anywhere near drunken students and football fans on game weekends.

  In fact, if Lyssa had more money, she would leave town for the two days of festivities around each home game.

  Living here was very different from living in the house she and Reginald had built near Lake Mendota. She had loved that house and she missed it, but she hadn’t fought for it.

  She had hoped that she would inherit it when Reginald moved back in with his family, but once the press crisis was over and the stories quashed, the Walters family let Reginald come home. Lyssa had seen him once, the day the divorce was final. He had looked stable, although she suspected that was his attorney’s doing, but too thin. He claimed to be back on his medication, and he seemed calm enough. But there was something odd about Reginald now, something that hadn’t been obvious before.

  Lyssa, who had never been around mentally ill people before her husband got sick, wasn’t sure if the oddness was a manifestation of his illness or something else. And even though she had never mentioned this to anyone, the something else had frightened her.

  She mounted the old-fashioned stone steps that led to the house’s ugly orange front door. For all of Wright’s talk about wanting his homes to blend into their environment, he had fallen in love with the kinds of 1950s colors that were only part of the environment in the fall, if then. No wonder the alumnus had gifted out the home. If it were Lyssa’s, she would sell it to some Wright fanatic and buy herself some place livable.

  As she stepped inside, she wished for air-conditioning. The interior seemed hotter than the exterior. She’d closed curtains before she’d left and set fans in strategic places throughout the house, but they never seemed to keep the rooms cool.

  She sighed, set her bookbag on the sharp flagstone stairway, and called for Emily. Her daughter was probably outside, where it was a half degree cooler because of the breeze. Lyssa mounted the step, walked past the open living room, and turned left into the kitchen.

  The phone sat on the counter, beside the dirty lunch dishes. She felt a thread of irritation. Sophia always spent her afternoons on the phone. She never did the work that Lyssa had hired her for.

  If only Inez were available all of the time. Inez found ways to entertain Emily and keep the house clean. Sophia just took care of herself and let Emily run amok.

  Fortunately, Emily wasn’t the amok-running type.

  Lyssa opened the refrigerator and reveled in the blast of cool air that hit her. She took out a can of lemonade and rubbed the cold metal against her forehead. A heat headache had started to form there.

  “Sophia?” she called halfheartedly. She would probably find Sophia in the back bedroom, the one that Lyssa had converted into a den, with the television and the computer. The room was small enough that she could keep an eye on Emily when she surfed various Web sites and still pretend to be watching television.

  Lyssa popped the can open and took a long sip. The lemonade was too sweet, but the sugar would help her headache and perk her up just enough to find the strength to make some kind of evening meal.

  She tried not to think of the elaborate grill that she and Reginald had splurged on the summer Emily was born. Lyssa had loved that thing, and she had loved using it on the back patio on hot summer nights.

  She had never understood the rest of the country’s preoccupation with grilling food until she moved east and discovered that most kitchens were too hot to use in the summer, even with the air-conditioning on.

  “Sophia?” Lyssa said as she wandered down the hall. The television wasn’t on, which surprised her. Both Inez and Sophia seemed to love daytime television.

  Lyssa would have objected except that Emily was picking up Spanish from Inez’s soap operas. Sometimes people learned things in spite of themselves.

  Lyssa passed Emily’s room to get to the den. Emily’s bed was made and her clothes were folded in the laundry basket—a small miracle that didn’t seem like one Sophia could have gotten her to perform. The book Emily had been reading, Little Women, which she had discovered on her own, was gone from the nightstand.

  Lyssa smiled. Emily was probably sitting on the porch, engrossed in the adventures of Jo, Beth, and Marmee.

  The house seemed quiet enough for that. If Emily was reading, it seemed odd that Sophia wasn’t inside, talking on the phone, listening to the radio, or watching television. Maybe they had walked to Randall Street. But it seemed too hot to do that as well. Sophia rarely showed that kind of initiative.

  Lyssa peered into the den. The television was off, and so was the computer. No one sat on the dingy secondhand couch she’d found at a nearby yard sale. The book Emily planned to read next, Little Men, still rested on the edge of the oak bookshelf, where Emily kept all of her t
o-read pile.

  No Sophia, no Emily, and now Lyssa was getting nervous.

  A movement caught her eye. She looked through the window into the backyard. Sophia was running from bush to bush, and she was shaking them frantically.

  Lyssa had never seen Sophia that active. Her loose cotton dress was covered with sweat, and her blond hair was falling out of its bun.

  That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.

  Lyssa started for the window to shout out of it, to find out what was going on, then changed her mind. Her neighbors at the lake house had always learned her business, and it had become a nightmare—one, she suspected, that had led to the press finding out about Reginald. This time, she wanted to keep her problems to herself.

  She ran through the house and out the back door. The screen banged shut.

  Sophia stopped near the overgrown rosebush as if she had been caught robbing a bank. She turned slowly, hands up, as if to show she had nothing in them.

  “Mrs. Walters,” she said, her voice shaking.

  Lyssa froze at the top of the porch steps. Sophia hadn’t called her Mrs. Walters since the divorce was final in May. Sophia had been very careful to learn Lyssa’s new last name—actually her old last name, her maiden name—and to use it whenever she could.

  This slip, and the fact that Sophia didn’t seem to notice she’d made it, alarmed Lyssa as much as Sophia’s behavior had.

  “I do not know what happened,” Sophia said. “One minute, she was here. The next, I do not know. She does not come when I yell.”

  Lyssa was having trouble taking a breath. Her worst nightmare was coming true: Emily had been abducted, just like those poor girls on TV a few years ago. Children disappearing right out of their yard.

  The air seemed still. Next to her, a bee buzzed its way across the pioneer roses that grew below the porch. The heat seemed worse than it had all day, and for a moment, Lyssa thought she was going to faint.