Pretty Peg

by Skye Allen

  Jerome shook my hand. Neil kept his left tucked in his pocket, false brightness on his face as he offered his right to the doctor. Eye contact, then Neil took two short steps to stand against the door as Jerome consulted the orange form. I signed at Neil to take his hand out and show it to the doctor, but he shook his head and resumed his stoic hunter-gatherer-man look, so I sat on the paper-covered examining table and tried to lock down my scattered thoughts. I watched the level eyebrows in Jerome’s smooth forehead. The Woodcutter’s forehead. Keep it together, Josy. Don’t tell him who you are, and everything’s going to be fine.

  I couldn’t tell from here if the door was locked, couldn’t remember if it had clicked when it shut. Neil was thumbing his phone, probably getting 911 ready on the screen. Would it matter? If Jerome decided to kill me, it would only take seconds. And he was a doctor. He could probably wheel my body out the back, and no one in the waiting room would notice anything. I took a slow breath to calm my nerves, the way Laura had taught me. It didn’t help. I was still terrified.

  I ran our stupid plan through my head. There was no way this guy was going to tell me anything. I wasn’t a detective. This was a foolish, dangerous errand, and all the people in our families, Neil’s mom and his little sisters and the rest of the Grant family, were all going to suffer when Neil came back with a broken hand, or worse, and I came back dead. We should just go home now before this day got worse.

  Home to the one sister I had left, who was going to get killed before the end of the week. If Jerome was the Woodcutter, at least I’d know that. Maybe I could get the Summer Queen’s special forces to do something. They didn’t know where he was, but now it was possible that I did. Laura’s supposed to be safe when she’s at home. And when she’s with Professor Hill. I don’t know if my being all bound to the Faerie Realm means my “clan” is actually safe from the Woodcutter. Shit. What am I doing here?

  When Jerome finished looking at the intake sheet, he looked up at me with pale eyes. “Who are we seeing today?”

  I gulped down the fear in my throat and said, “Do you remember Margaret Grant?”

  His mouth wobbled, and his shoulders bunched. He kept meeting my eyes. “I knew a Margaret Grant once,” he whispered. Then he cleared his throat and seemed to pull himself upright. He clicked his pen.

  “I need to ask you about her,” I said.

  “There was a woman with that name who worked with me through an NGO in Kabul. I’m sorry, is there a reason for—this is a health clinic. I have patients who need to be seen this morning. Now if you’re not here as a patient…,” he said, quizzing me with his expression. He was all business now. Whatever had come over him, it was hidden away again.

  “Just give us a few minutes,” Neil said in a voice that was not loud but that could have cut diamond. He was wedged between the counter and the door, but he didn’t look cornered. He stood perfectly straight, oblong head high, eyes level on Jerome.

  I remembered Neil a few hours ago in Tilden Park, lost under whatever spell the Queen had cast. If Jerome was capable of glamouring humans, he wasn’t trying to do it to us. Yet. A sneaking voice in my head said this felt all wrong, that this soft-handed doctor who treated migrant workers for free could still be a killer.

  I wished I had some kind of guide, someone who could tell me what to expect from an exile of the Summer Court who’d probably murdered my sister. Someone like… but I wasn’t planning to see Nicky again, not after what happened last night. I curled my fingers into my palms, not a fist, just a way to protect one small part of myself.

  In the car, we’d brainstormed a list of questions, but now that I was in the harsh light of the clinic room with Jerome actually in front of me, I saw that none of them were any good. Are you him? That was what I needed to know, but I couldn’t just come out and say it. My skin felt greasy and so fatigued it could slide right off my face, I’d slept in a parking lot in a town no one knew I was in, and the memory of the leftover spaghetti I’d eaten last night just made me feel more hollow. I tongued my furry teeth. Are you him?

  “I’m sorry?” Jerome said, eyebrows raised.

  I must have spoken out loud. “I just need to…. I found some stuff about Margaret. Some puppets and stuff she left. I know she didn’t just get killed by an insurgent or some random guy. I know it was somebody she knew. Who meant to kill her.” Well, that came out smoothly. I blew the rest of my air out through closed teeth.

  “So you came all the way to Shelton.” His voice was high and reedy. Timothy, last night in the park, had sounded just like that. “How did you find me?”

  I shuffled the notion of “cyberstalking” around in my head, trying to make it sound less psycho than it was, but before I could speak, Neil said, “Your brother.”

  Jerome’s already pale face went gray. He choked out a half syllable, and the center of his body seemed to shift from his puffed-out chest to knees that dived outward before he got his footing back. His torso caved in, and his voice was small and fearful. “You were sent by the Lady. I have kept the terms. I would not breach them, deeply as I long to return home. You are of the Court?” He was addressing Neil. He thinks Neil’s fey. Can’t they tell?

  Jerome was afraid of us. I rolled that around in my head. If he thought we were here from the Summer Court to bust him for some rule violation—if the Summer Queen already knew where he was—then he couldn’t be the Woodcutter. Could he? My body told me There’s no danger here. It’s not him.

  “We’re not—we’re human,” I said. I thought about the Queen’s protection, the firewall that was now supposed to come between me and fey trouble, and I took a chance and changed my mind about my entire plan. “Margaret was my sister. I’m Josy. Josephine.”

  “Another mortal girl—Peg’s sister. Oak and thorn. Pretty Peg’s sister here.” Jerome spoke like he’d forgotten we were there. He sank onto the little rolling stool beside the table and pushed fish-white fingers into his hair.

  If he is the Woodcutter, this is some tricky kind of glamour he’s pulling. But I don’t think he is. I met Neil’s stony eyes over the doctor’s hunched back. Neil had pulled his hand out of his pocket and was rubbing it with his opposite thumb.

  “Jerome—” I started and then resettled myself on the cushioned table to wait for his head to rise up out of his hands. “We know the Summer Queen. We know Blossom and Timothy and, and Nicky. We drove all night to get here. My sister was in love with you. You have to tell us what happened to her.” My voice sounded much braver than I felt.

  “You’re really her sister?” His watery eyes were the green of mint ice cream, and they were searching me hard, all over, as if Margaret was going to pop right out of me.

  I nodded. The air in the tiny room was sour, Lysol layered over vomit. I looked around to see if the room had a window, but the fluffy clouds in the corner of my eye turned out to be on a poster.

  “Oh, child, she loved you.” Jerome said it to the floor. He reached into one khaki pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. When he finally looked up again, his strange eyes were wet. He said in a stronger voice, “I want, I need, to avenge her. To kill the one who took her from me.”

  I stared at him. I knew the Woodcutter was someone in the Faerie Realm who loved my sister. It made sense that it was someone who wasn’t anywhere near the Court anymore. I didn’t think it was him now, but that was just instinct. I had to be sure.

  I remembered Nicky telling me the Folk can’t lie. So I said, as deliberately as I could through the wobble in my voice, “I thought you were the Woodcutter. Are you?”

  He winced with his whole body, as if I’d punched him. “No.” There was a world of defeat in that one syllable. He went on, “But I will stop him. I must, if I can only find him.” His speech sounded stiff coming from a man with a belt full of clip-on electronics and my orange Xerox still in his soft hands, but I told myself that by now I should be used to elves talking like they belonged to The Fellowship of the Ring.

  I looked at Neil
, who met my eyes with a cautious shrug before his face shut down in pain again. I have to get him to the hospital. Soon. We should have started with that instead of coming here first.

  “Tell us what happened that night.” That was Neil, with the overly calm speech that I knew meant he was about to lose his temper completely.

  “We had a fight,” Jerome admitted. “The quarters were—the conditions were awful. There’s a war going on right outside your walls, you’re trying to treat these miserable, pointless cases like malnutrition—can you imagine, mortals not having enough to eat? With the vats of money being poured into those weapons….” His eyes bounced along my size-twenty hips, and he reset his face to bland politeness. “We all fought. It was impossible, cooped up with the same four people. Dr. Christie and Dr. Gordon, they were married, plus the two of us. There was a family who lived in the neighborhood. They almost broke us all.” He described the mother with the endless injuries, a broken arm one Sunday, a thumb bent and disjointed the next. They knew her husband was hurting her, but all they could do was treat her. They couldn’t get her away. The two sons, one lamed by a mine explosion, the other growing a long beard and spending his hours at the mosque listening to an imam who wanted him to prevent his tomboy sister from ever attending school, let alone visiting the western doctors down the block. The little girl’s cough that he could hear from the street. “So that night. Her name was Fereshteh, she was maybe nine. The night she died. We knew she, we couldn’t go, do anything… so Peg went out for a smoke in the front garden.”

  “Margaret didn’t smoke,” I objected, but Jerome was still talking.

  “I knew where she was. There was nowhere to go. There was a curfew in Kabul. She couldn’t have walked to the end of the street without being stopped.”

  “They found her a block away,” I said. Why couldn’t I be quiet? It wasn’t like I knew any of this firsthand.

  “I went to bed. I went to bed. I had noise-cancelling headphones—we had luxuries to get through Kabul. I wish I’d never…. I just shut her out. That night. That’s what happened.” His unnerving eyes met mine full-on for a brief second, and then he pinched the skin between them with his fingers and took a long breath. “The Court was right, my punishment. I came home from Afghanistan and was judged. And so I live far from my people now. I did not protect my beloved.”

  “The police came later, right? The Afghan police or the UN or somebody?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t the one who identified her. That was Dr. Christie, our senior doctor. Much later, hours. She was, she had been—” He stopped and looked at me.

  “She suffered. Yeah.” I felt a wave of exhaustion that had less to do with sleep deprivation and more to do with Margaret’s last few hours. The hours I’d been playing in my mind for the past five months and two weeks, my nightly movie. I didn’t want Jerome to recount the details. To say the words strangulation, stabbing. To say the word heart. To say the word rape. And make it true by saying it.

  “It’s not… please believe that I am not endorsing the savagery my people are capable of. Pride themselves on. But the Winter Queen’s champion killed Pretty Peg as an act of war. She was a…. The Folk have killed, yes. But to torture a mortal as if for sport…. And no”—he must have seen the question on my face—“I never saw the Woodcutter. I don’t know who he is.”

  As if for sport. They cut my sister’s heart out of her body. That’s their idea of a good time. I felt dizzy, sickening stars pouring down through my vision, and I gripped the thick padding of the table under my knees. The paper crackled and tore in my fingers.

  All three of us were silent. I took deep breaths to keep myself from needing to throw up while the Margaret movie played in my mind. The greenish fluorescent tubes in the ceiling whined, and the bent minute hand in the metal-caged wall clock marched loudly from 8:19 to 8:20 and then to 8:21. For the first time I noticed the decoration hanging over the cupboard: a branch of broad-leaf oak with glossy leaves that looked like holly twined around it. Something in the leaves flashed gold when I moved my head, and I thought, That’s a fey thing. He’s homesick.

  “What did you fight about?” I finally asked, mostly to test my voice before the white noise of the room sealed it in.

  “Her brother. She had been to—” And then Jerome looked at my face. “Oh, little leaves of spring. Be damned my name.”

  “What about my brother?” I said, shuddering in spite of the warm air banging out of the radiator. Dreading the answer.

  “She had been to speak to him, confront him. Reconcile, she thought, maybe, if he asked her forgiveness. You know.” He looked a question at me. Do you?

  “Yes.” I remembered the cold phone calls between my parents after Dad moved out with Robert, the shrouded atmosphere in our all-girl household. I learned later that it was Margaret’s weekly trips to the psychiatrist that got Mom started on her pill habit. Robert was supposed to have had a stable home with Dad so he’d be able to stay in school, and Mom was supposed to keep Margaret safe. I went on, “Robert wasn’t there. He was in Kandahar then. He was doing engineering work on the highway.” I’d tracked the movements of his unit obsessively during his tour of duty. I still wasn’t sure if I’d cared back then whether or not something bad happened to him, exactly. I just needed to be the first to know. I didn’t want Mom to be shocked by that “regret to inform” visit when it came. I wanted to break it to her gently.

  “Peg had heard that he was in Kabul. He didn’t—he wasn’t expecting her, she said. She just, well, she was so concerned about her mother, your mother, or that’s what she said. She went to see him, maybe about a week before she died. She wouldn’t tell me what they spoke of.”

  “But my brother was there? He was in Kabul?”

  He nodded, his throat working, as if he didn’t want to give anything away. “I never saw him, but yes, Peg did.”

  “And that was it.” I let that news rock me. She had actually seen Robert. Robert, our household monster. Mom would never know what they said. Was he sorry? Had Margaret ever felt any peace? I felt my heart thumping in its cage. This was all too much for me.

  Jerome was talking: “We’d been arguing ever since. I didn’t want her to go, not alone. And that night we were so upset by that little girl’s death. That was the last time we ever spoke. Dr. Christie told Peg about Fereshteh, and she took his cigarettes and went outside before I could talk to her.” He swallowed and rubbed his hair. “And I went to sleep. Oh, if I had just…. None of it matters now. The petty day-to-day. I would give…. I’m a coward. I should have avenged her death. And I have had a very long, too long a life.” Jerome stood up then, in a liquid movement that reminded me of Nicky. Do all the fey move like tigers?

  He wants us to leave, I realized as I found myself standing on the floor again. He was much taller than me. He swung around to Neil. “And now, young man, if you will allow me,” he said, and he reached out his hand. The wide-eyed look Neil threw at me made him seem like a cornered child, but he surrendered the injured hand. “I would normally dress the set with something that resembles familiar medicine for my less informed audience members,” he said, but his speech itself was a diversion—he was holding Neil’s purple-red hand between his cupped palms and gazing down at it with a laser expression. I heard a deep, quiet note like the sound of a bow across the strings of a bass somewhere far below our feet, and for a brief second there was a glow in their three hands, like all the light in the room was concentrated in that one space of flesh. I breathed in the sharp smell of freshly split wood.

  Neil and I both stared at his hand. It was no longer swollen. The terrible white line from the car door was gone. He flexed his fingers. “It was—”

  “Broken. The first and second metacarpals. Hairline fractures, but they would have given you a lot of pain.”

  “They did.” Neil’s voice was a little boy’s, full of wonder. He turned his wrist, widened the fingers out, and curled them into a claw.

  Jerome turned to me the
n and took my hand in his bony one, and I wondered if he was going to do something to me too, but he bent his springy head and spoke in a low, burning voice. “You are in the Lady’s favor. Will you give her a message?” The confident doctor was gone. This was an urgent speech from a wounded man.

  Not man. Fey, I reminded myself. His pale eyes searched mine. “Sure,” I said.

  His hand felt smooth, like sanded wood. “I am still her servant. I am faithful to the terms of my exile. Will you tell her?”

  “Okay,” I said, and he tightened his grip on my hand for a second before releasing it, like it was a hug. I felt him release air from his lungs, rather than hearing him sigh.

  Jerome reached across Neil to pull the door handle, and we had to squash ourselves against the wall because it opened inward, and then we were back in the hallway behind the reception desk. “Friends, travel safe. Quién es el próximo?” The last was called to the tough woman at the front desk as I was nudged into the waiting room with a hand between my shoulder blades.

  The chairs had filled up since we’d gone in. There was a young mother waiting, with an infant in a fabric sling across her chest and a little girl in a pink T-shirt but no pants playing with a cracked tennis ball near her feet. Her bunched shoulders reminded me of Laura.

  With that thought, the relief I had built up about Neil’s hand dissolved. Frustration bloomed. We’d come all this way, and for what? To find out I was wrong, that Jerome wasn’t the Woodcutter? So I still didn’t know anything.

  And Margaret had seen my brother, actually seen him and talked to him. Robert, the guy with the power to change one family into two. When I was thirteen, Mom sat me down at the edge of her bed one night. I was expecting the sex talk, but instead what she said in her school-secretary voice was, “Josy, Margaret doesn’t want you to know this, but you need to know that Bobby touched her when they were children, in her private place.” That was as far as she got before she ran into the bathroom to cry.