Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  She let out a short breath, but he kept on going.

  “Once that’s gone, I won’t know you,” he said. “And I won’t even know myself. All I’ll know is hunger. And all you’ll be is...food. Flesh.”

  She was crying, more out of frustration than anything else. “I know that,” she said. “All I’m asking is that you give me a chance. Let me see if I can deal with it, instead of pushing me away.”

  “What?” he said. “You want to watch or something?”

  “If that’s what it takes, yeah.”

  He reached out and cupped her jaw, and his touch gave her such hope and relief that she knew she was in so much trouble. “You have to promise me something,” he said, his thumb brushing her lower lip.

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’ll walk away,” he said. “Promise me that if it’s too much, too monstrous...you won’t stay. If you can’t take it then you can walk away and I will never hold it against you, I swear.”

  “You’re pushing again.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, pulling his chair closer with an ungraceful scrape. But his knees were between hers and his hands were on her face and that eased so many cares, just to have him and touch him. “I just don’t want to hurt you. I never want to hurt you.”

  She had no more fight left in her. “Okay,” she said, as his mouth brushed the corner of hers.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. I swear.”

  *

  Everyone always talked about the old-people smell in these places, but it was a whole other world for a witch. As Ruby padded down the hallway – one sneaker too tight on her extra toe – she felt the ghosts slipping at their tethers, like balloon strings in the hands of careless children. Waiting to float up and away from the bodies they’d inhabited for seventy, eighty or more years.

  Clementine trailed at a distance, shivering the air in a way only Ruby could see, so excited by the thought of these soon-to-be-vacant bodies that Ruby could guess what she was thinking. Hop into an old one and wait for the original tenant to move out.

  Poor thing. She was too much spirit to understand how easily these bodies wore out.

  “He’s in here,” said the nurse. “Don’t get many visitors these days. I expect he’ll be pleased to see you.”

  There was a cardboard plaque on the door, the kind you could slide in and out on little metal runners. Cheap to change, and changed often. It said Mr. Maurice Blanchard, in thick blue fiber-tip writing.

  The old man sat in a needle cord rocker, his cataract fogged eyes peering into a TV screen, where Homer Simpson was eating his way through a pile of donuts. The nurse switched it off without asking permission and twitched open the flowered drapes. “Young lady here to see ya, Maury,” she said. “Isn’t that a nice surprise?”

  Maurice Blanchard swiveled his tired old turtle head about. He was bald but for a little white fringe over each ear, but to Ruby even the age-spots on his scalp were beautiful in their strangeness. Eighty-one last birthday, the nurse had said, the kind of age that Ruby had never even dared to dream of. Not until recently.

  “It’s Mr. Blanchard to you, Miss Piss,” he said, in a surprisingly loud voice. “Have some fuckin’ respect for your elders.”

  The nurse pursed her lips. “And how about you have some manners for your guest, Mr. Blanchard?” she said, and offered Ruby a chair. “I’ll bring you some tea.”

  She bustled out before Ruby could thank her. Ruby sat slowly. The old man narrowed his eyes and reached out to a side table, fumbling with arthritic hands between three or four pairs of glasses in a plastic container. He found the ones he was looking for, spat on the lenses, rubbed them on his sleeve and finally settled them on his hump-backed nose.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s been a while, Gloria.”

  “I’m not...” Ruby started to say, but Clementine shivered around her ankles, for all the world like a cat doing figure eights around your legs. She ignored her and started again. “You don’t know me, Mr. Blanchard. I wanted to ask you about Gloria. You know her?”

  He gave her a leery dirty-old-grandpa look. “I know you,” he said. “Number of times I had to dig your white-trash ass out from under the mailman. And the plumber. And the guy who came to trim the trees. Only you was on top that time, riding him like a rodeo clown. You remember him, Gloria? Jesus – that kid coulda been anyone’s.”

  “The kid?” said Ruby, leaping eagerly on the thing she’d come to learn. “There was a kid?”

  But he was drifting somehow, floating off into the holes in his worn old brain. She could feel Clementine nosing at the gaps in his head, assessing him in the same way a buyer might have checked out a trashed house with room for refurbishment. “What happened to your eyes?” he said. “They used to be blue. They’re black now.”

  “That’s ‘cause I’m not Gloria, Mr. Blanchard,” said Ruby. “But what about the kid?”

  He shook his head, dentures clicking as they shifted in his lower jaw. “They never found the bodies, you know. Just the odd bone here and there; he’d toss ‘em out on the road for shits and grins, just toyin’ with the police, I guess. Said they found marks on all of them. Marks like teeth.”

  Oh, this was hopeless. Poor old Mr. Blanchard was away with the goddamn fairies. Somewhere inside his head was the information she wanted, but it was fogged and gray, distorted with time and forgetfulness. Clementine settled into a hole in his memory, tidy as a kitty-cat curled in a sink. There was no recovering the memories where the hole was now, but Clementine acted like a bridge, allowing severed connections to rejoin.

  Maurice Blanchard looked at Ruby like he was seeing her for the first time. “You’re not Gloria,” he said.

  “No,” said Ruby. “I’m Ruby. You don’t know me.”

  He blinked, his eyes all big and fishy from behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “What is that you want?”

  People seemed to be asking her that question a lot lately. Everyone but Ro. She could feel the old man’s brain sparking to life, new connections switching on the lights and shining in the dark corners of his mind. Filtered through Clementine, Ruby saw flashes of his memories – a blonde in a blue satin slip, the half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort swinging between her fingers, smudged lipstick and laughter. Police officers standing at the door, delivering bad news, news so bad that he had no words for it, even in memory. It was only a feeling, a bleak, broken, everything-is-fucked-for-sure-and-forever feeling...

  “What are you doing?” he said, squinting as if his head hurt him. “Get out of my head. What do you want?”

  “I just want to know if Gloria ever had a baby.”

  Mr. Blanchard went rigid in his chair. Clementine flew out of his head in terror, like she’d bumped up against something worse in there, something that scared her even more than the bad-news feeling.

  The old man’s limbs shook. His eyes rolled back in his head. Ruby called for a nurse and fought the urge to flee. Mr. Blanchard fell out of his chair and she tried to remember what to do when this happened. Were you supposed to stick something in their mouths to keep them from biting their tongues, or was that the worst thing you could do? She pulled the chair out of the way of his flailing arms, just as the nurse came running.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. One minute he was talking to me and the next...”

  More nurses came. Ruby stepped back, knowing she should stay, but Clementine had shot out of there like a rocket and she had never seen her familiar so scared before, not even in the Raines house.

  “Come on,” she said, talking under her breath as she hurried back down the Ben-Gay smelling hall. “You little fraidy cat. What’s gotten into you lately? It’s just a baby. Not like I’m asking you to help me do anything unnatural.”

  She climbed into the rusty Thunderbird she’d driven since she was sixteen, meaning to put distance between herself and her newest mistake. Once she was away she pulled over to pick at a bug bite, squeezing a r
ed bead of blood to the surface of her skin, hoping to call Clementine back to her side. But there was nothing. She hummed and bled and hoped, but whatever Clementine had seen in that old man’s head had scared her into the kind of freakout that Ruby knew could last for weeks. Taming spirits was a little like getting on the good side of a feral cat; it took forever to build up their trust and that all that hard-earned trust could disappear in an instant if you tried too hard to give it a worming pill.

  Ruby drove home, bad shocks bumping over dirt road all the way into the woods. Ro’s truck was there and her sensitive nose picked up the smell of something cooking.

  She frowned as she stepped out of the car; all these years married and she’d thought Cicero Jones didn’t know a spaghetti strainer from the hole in his ass.

  It was a flat, cafeteria kind of smell, like ground beef tossed in a pot with too few onions and cooked until it was a thrilling shade of gray. Ruby opened the door and stopped stunned at what she saw there.

  There was a woman stirring a pot on the stove. Her stove.

  You picked a fine time to take fright on me, Clementine.

  The woman looked up. Her eyes were blue and her brown hair was mussed at the back in a way that said she’d been happy homewrecking before she picked up a spoon and started stirring that pot. She had a pale, smudgy little face of a kind all too familiar to Ruby, the kind of face that bloomed like a rose at fourteen or fifteen, and before twenty was already scrawled all over with the fine lines of booze, drugs, babies and man drama.

  “Oh shit,” she said, and her hand went to her waist. She was wearing a crop top and her gauzy hippie skirt billowed out below the waistband. That hand on her belly said it all, and Ruby knew right then she could never forgive her.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doin’ in my house?” said Ruby.

  “Ro!” said the girl, looking frightened, as she should have. As she turned Ruby saw a tattoo on her wrist – Lilly – and remembered her from a nearby bar. She’d been wiping down tables and Ro had laughed at her – “How dumb does a chick have to be to get her own name tattooed on her hand?”

  The bedroom door opened and Ro stepped out, vaporizer in hand, wearing that pained look he sometimes got when he was bracing himself for what he called ‘drama’. Too bad. You didn’t get to dip your dick in drama, bring it home and then bitch about wanting a quiet life.

  “Jesus, Ruby,” he said. “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Never mind where I’ve been,” she said. “What the hell is this?”

  He huffed up a cloud of dank steam and glanced over at Lilly. “This ain’t what it looks like.”

  “Oh, it ain’t? Cause it sure looks to me like another woman just came along and set her shoes under my bed.”

  “He said you had an open relationship,” said Lilly, and right there was Ro’s answer about just how dumb a girl had to be to get that tattoo.

  Ruby looked her up and down. “And you believed him?”

  Ro sighed. “What was I supposed to do, Ruby? You disappear for days on end –”

  “– days?” said Ruby, waving a hand at the slight bump at Lilly’s waist. “You must think I’m as dumb as she is, Cicero Jones. I know that ain’t the work of a few days. More like four months, judging by the size of her.”

  “A man’s gotta spread his seed, Rube. It’s natural. Like, evolution and shit.”

  Figured. He spent hours vaping weed in front of the Discovery Channel and he thought he was Charles Darwin. What the hell was it about that drug that made people think they were smarter than they really were? The number of nights she’d lain awake listening to him and his cousins ramble in circles on and on about the Illuminati and the pyramid on the dollar bill and how women had evolved to like the color pink because of berries and shit.

  “I’m your wife,” she said, in a last desperate attempt to appeal to sober reality.

  “You’re a werewolf,” he said.

  Poor little Miss Dumbass. She looked back and forth between them for a sign that this was some kind of joke, but Ruby had wanted reality and Ro had given it to her. There was no getting away from it; that part was true.

  “You people are crazy,” said Lilly, backing away from the stove.

  “Oh, baby,” said Ro. “You ain’t heard the start of it.” He waved the vaporizer at Ruby. “This here is a grown ass woman who walks around the woods buck naked and talking to her imaginary friends. Thinks she’s a witch and all.”

  Lilly scrambled into her shoes and grabbed her bra from the couch, stuffing it into her purse.

  “He’s a werewolf, too,” said Ruby, happy to twist the knife. “And so’s that baby in you, probably. It’s genetic.”

  “I’m leaving,” said Lilly, all too grandly for a woman who had half her underwear in her purse and the other half probably still under a married man’s bed. “And I’m not coming back.”

  “Good,” said Ruby, and opened the door for her. “Eat dirt and die, trash.”

  For a moment she felt like sticking a foot in Lilly’s behind and punting her down the steps, but she wasn’t that mean. Not to a woman with a baby on board, no matter how much she hated that woman and her stupid baby. Weak, she thought. You’re weak; the old lady of the Keys would have never showed that kind of mercy.

  She watched Lilly scurry off down the dirt track for a moment, then closed the door and turned back to her husband. The murder in her heart must have shown in her eyes, because he almost looked sorry.

  “Don’t you look at me like that,” he said. “You’re just as guilty.”

  Ruby frowned, half sick and tired and half wearily curious to see how he was going to justify himself this time. Pyramids, pink berries, flying saucers built by Nazis – sure, why not? Let’s hear it. “How’d you figure?” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose.

  “It’s in the Bible, Ruby. Says if you look at someone with lust in your heart it’s as good as doin’ it.”

  She laughed. “The Bible? Since when did you read the fuckin’ Bible? And who’d I look at with lust in my heart? I should be so goddamn lucky. All’s I see in the way of men is your skinny fat ass and your cousin Jared with the onion breath.” She racked her brains to think of another, and that set her off laughing again. “Not Kaiden? You think I’m stocking up on batteries for Kaiden? He’s on the ‘roids – everyone knows it. Y’all can tell by the acne.”

  “No,” he said, stamping his foot like a child. “Not Kaiden. That spic kid. That piece of Keys shit you found with his face in the rain barrel. Once you’d hosed the crap off him you was looking at him like Christmas come early.”

  “That? Jesus – you’re still on that? You put a baby in the bartender, you asshole.”

  “Well, I can’t fuckin’ put a baby in you, can I?” he said. “Even if you didn’t lose it every time, who’s gonna babysit the kid while we’re holed up howlin’ and sniffin’ one another’s buttholes for three days a month, huh?”

  She could have killed him them. She looked at the meat hammer hanging on the rack and wondered how many smacks it would take to break his skull open, scoop out the brains and toss ‘em in with Lilly’s nasty-ass Hamburger Helper or whatever it was she’d been cooking. Make a brain stew that actually made you dumber by eating it.

  But she didn’t. “That’s where you’re wrong, Cicero,” she said, and her voice felt cold and keen as a kitchen knife. “Cause I’ve been learning shit.”

  He laughed. The cheap, no-good, lazy sonofabitch. He laughed. “Learning what? The only books you ever read have greased-up men fagging it up all over the covers.”

  “Maybe,” said Ruby. “But at least my lips don’t fuckin’ move when I read ‘em.”

  He crossed the trailer in one bound. “That’s a low blow, you bitch,” he said, his gray-blue eyes all sharp at the corners in a way that once meant they’d take this fight to the bedroom. But not now. “You know I’ve got that learning difficulty thing.”

  Not now. It hit her in that moment – j
ust how tired she was of him. He complained about Clementine and the size of her ass, about the mascara marks she left on the pillows and the romance novels she left on the nightstand, and all these things had been enough to reproach her. Once. Before she realized that she could be tired of him.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “They got tests for that, and you never took no tests. I mean, I guess being bone-ass stupid is technically a learnin’ difficulty...”

  His hand came up, but she shook her head and there was something in her eyes that made him stop.

  “You smack me again I’ll bring the roaches right back,” she said. “Or them spiders that crawl into your mouth while you’re sleepin’.” She picked up her car keys from the table.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Out,” she said, and it was that easy, that hard. A huge little nothing, just saying goodbye to it all. As she passed the stove she picked up the spoon and tasted the mess of his dinner. “Next time you decide to get all Big Love on me,” she said. “Maybe pick out a sister-wife who can cook?”

  Next time. There wasn’t going to be one, but he didn’t need to know that. Let him sweat.

  She got back into the Thunderbird and drove off, a little voice in her head saying there had been a hundred last times already and why was this any different? But it was. Perhaps all it took to make it real wasn’t as dramatic as the broken teeth and the black eyes and the never agains, but just the dull, heavy knowledge that you were bored, and had been for a long time.

  Ruby turned on the radio. It was tuned to an old rock station; she liked loud guitars and driving rhythms, singers who sounded like their hearts were about to burst. She sang along as she drove south, humming along to the slow smolder of Riders On The Storm, the spaces between her bones buzzing softly with that witchy energy she used to call Clementine back to her, to hold herself in shape.