CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
If Something Were To Happen
Bryony and Rikki-Tikki hardly missed a practice. The sound of her fists rhythmically hitting against his open palms was both soothing and empowering. Sometimes Syrina would come in and watch, and scream: “Go for his eyes, Bryony! This murderer wants to take you down! Go straight for his eyes!”, but usually it was just Bryony and her very precious Rikki-Tikki.
“Rikki-Tikki, you have become a brother to me,” she told him.
He grinned. “Nothin’ like fighting to make you feel like family.”
It was the evening before Eddie had to play at the station, and they were having an especially lovely practice with fists and feet, and Bryony’s ponytail flying through the air.
In the midst of the delightful mayhem Rikki-Tikki said: “Everybody seems to have been touched by fate so far, except maybe for Eddie. I wonder when his turn will come.”
He watched carefully as Bryony’s eyes lost their starlight glimmer and the bones of her face seemed to press against her skin.
“Ah, you almost forgot us,” the bones whispered to Rikki-Tikki, “but indeed, here we are. We are death and fragility and decay and we lurk ever so close to the surface. How cunning we are! We ride around inside of Bryony’s skin and we are as intertwined with her as murder. There is no escape.”
But Bryony didn’t stop or flee. She thought of the many people she had lost—of her young friend Samantha Collins’ horribly proper funeral, and the way Teddy Baker had broken her heart, and how her darling Jeremy had broken her life, and then she thought of her sweet, sweet, brave and strong Eddie. If something were to happen . . .
“You shall not touch him,” she silently warned fate, and the stars on her wrist glittered as she continued to punch and kick with a newly ferocious determination.
Rikki-Tikki nodded his head in satisfaction.
Later at his apartment, he massaged his bruised hands while fate hissed and scrabbled at the window outside.
“She might not beat you,” he said aloud, “but she’s going down fighting.”
Before crawling into bed, he pulled his sparring pads out of the closet. He was going to need them from now on. The girl was blinking the stardust out of her eyes. She was getting good.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
All in the Packaging
A fairly decent arrangement, if he had to say so himself. And he did. The pendant was perfectly placed. It was ready.
The murderer took a second longer to admire his work, and then ran. He ran, as the Star Girl ran, running so that he was not caught, running away from what he had done, because somewhere inside he knew he was doing A Bad Thing, and people who do Bad Things are the kind of people who are supposed to run away. Perhaps subconsciously he ran away from Eddie, who was now at this very second threatening anybody who would ever harm or even disturb his Bryony, and the murderer had left the gift in a memorable way, yes, but not a nice way, or even a fairly decent way. In fact, he would upset the Star Girl very much.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The Gift
“I found a body in the water this morning,” Bryony said to Police Detective Ian Bridger.
He was young, and he tried to seem hard, but somehow he wasn’t able to pull it off. He was a sweet man underneath, the kind that called his mama and worked on the neighbors’ cars without expecting payment. This was maybe why the girls was able to talk to him so freely when her tongue had frozen up with his partner. His partner hadright through her, looked at the body as though it was nothing except an annoyance. It wasn’t an annoyance; it was a woman. At least it had been. Once.
“Why were you at the lake?” the detective asked her. He spoke softly, afraid that if he raised his voice he would spook this young woman, this poor shuddering girl who had seen such a terrible sight. Her eyes had faded, the irises dimmed from whatever color they had been, to a pale gray. Her pupils seemed to be shaped like stars. Those eyes kept roving to a small cactus sprung up next to the water. Strange that a desert cactus should suddenly grow there, but while the detective was merely curious, this girl looked absolutely haunted by it.
Bryony wished she had a coat to pull around her. She felt bare, as though she wasn’t wearing enough to keep herself decent. It was a horrible feeling, a sad and alone type of feeling, and she wondered if she would ever feel fully dressed again.
Detective Bridger didn’t look away from her shame, however, but into her eyes, and spoke..
“I went jogging. I usually go jogging, and then I end up watching the water. It feels . . . ” She couldn’t seem to think of the word and eventually just skipped over it “ . . . somehow,” she finished, and Detective Bridger nodded. He understood, he was the kind of man who believes.
“She was breathtaking,” Bryony said. “Ethereal in the water. I felt like I was looking at a sprite. I felt like I was seeing something nobody on earth was allowed to see, and somehow I managed to get a secret glimpse. I have never seen anything so lovely.”
The detective looked at her carefully. He was watching all of the thoughts and feelings as they shadowed her face, and they told him more than her words ever could.
“You don’t seem to be very surprised,” he said.
Bryony laughed and it was a bitter, bitter sound.
“I’m not surprised, not really. These things always seem to happen. It has been this way since I was a girl, so I am used to it. Each time somebody dies, it is sad. Each time somebody runs across bones or hair or somebody’s eyes staring into the sky when they don’t intend to be staring there . . . it is shocking, just for a second. There is horror, just for a second, and then it all goes back to normality. The rise and fall of life. The sound of breathing, the feel of feet pounding the sidewalk. I realize I am alive, I have cheated through to another day and I am appreciative. Nobody appreciates life quite like I do, detective. (He very much liked the way that she called him “detective”. It sounded different than when anybody else, including his wife, did so.) “But it is wearying sometimes, knowing that they died because of me. It is a great responsibility to bear.”
Being an astute detective, of course he questioned that. “What do you mean, because of you?”
He did not think she was involved in the murder. She didn’t have that way about her, the almost manic undertone to her words many killers possess. She spoke with sorrow, fatigued by the words she had to say. But Detective Bridger was thinking about the eyeless woman, discovered in a dumpster at Safeway, and the scared punk they pulled in for questioning. While the guy burbled about Mountain Dew and something about throwing fish, Detective Bridger worried about the possibility of a serial killer. He thought perhaps the killings might be related to the string of sometimes fatal robberies that had been occurring in the city, but that robber had been put out of commission by a fierce young woman and her saucepan, (and after interviewing her in the hospital, he could easily picture her bloody vengeance) and still the killings continued.
But still, he was a kind man, and being a kind man and a good detective went hand in hand for him, so he had to ask.
Bryony smiled at him then. “Detective, when you look at me, what do you see?”
He thought, Is this a trick question?
He thought, “What a strange thing to ask.”
He thought, “I see a lovely young woman, a woman that I wish I had known as a child. She reminds me of somebody I am absolutely certain I have never met. And she is going to die. She is going to die. She is going to wash up on the shores of the lake like this woman here, and somebody is going to find her with her hair waving around her pale face, and her fingers loose in death like they never had the chance to be in life. And somebody is going to identify the body, and when he does his heart is going to break, and I’m going to stand there and watch him silently shatter apart in the way that loved ones do in the face of death. And after he leaves, I am going to stand for a long time looking at the face of this woman, the way that her eyes will gaze a
t the stars until it is time to pull the sheet over her face, and I won’t be able to do it. I simply won’t.”
Bryony nodded at him. “Exactly,” she said. “Exactly. So you know.”
And they both cried together.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
A Question that is Never Asked
Eddie blew everybody away down at the station, just as he hoped. He was a little upset that Bryony wasn’t there like she promised, but he figured she had a good reason. And she did, because when he was nervously strumming the first few words of his new song, she was sobbing into the detective’s shoulder, thinking of the life she would never get to live with Eddie.
Too soon. Too soon. It was coming.
The body floating in Lake Washington had been a particularly young and pretty girl whose name is not important. It would have been to her family if they had been aware of her death, but they hadn’t been in contact with her for years, ever since she left to run away with a man named Mike. Every girl has dated a Mike in her life, and very few of them have turned out to be a good decision, but it happens. This Mike turned out to be a typical Mike situation, and as soon as the girl told him that she was having a baby, he left her. Now this turned out to be a miscalculation on the girl’s part, and there really was no baby, but since she found out the true depth (or lack thereof) of Mike’s character, she decided that she was better off without him. As she would have been under most circumstances, but the very sad fact of the matter was that if she had been with Mike that particular night, she most likely would still be alive. So dead and without the roguish Mike, or alive and with him . . . really, either of these two options were undesirable, although one was preferable over the other.
But at the time of her murder, she was Mikeless, in a state of Without Mike, and it was a very simple thing for our murderer to step behind her, bash her in the back of the head, and hold her underwater until her fine existence was finished. A tiny star pendant was affixed to her neck (for Bryony’s pale skin simply begged to be adorned with stars), and her body was brought to rest in the water where Bryony would be sure to see her in the early morning. Tomorrow was Wednesday, you know. Several large rocks in her pockets kept her in place so that she did not float away, and after a few exploratory pecks, the ducks left her alone.
And it was done.
The murderer was angry that Bryony did not take the necklace from the girl’s neck and put it on her own. He chose it with such care. He presented it with such panache. But after further examination, it made sense and he forgave her. Bryony was a sweet girl, a decent girl, and obviously misunderstood the murderer’s intentions. She would most certainly not think to rob the dead, and didn’t realize that the gift was expressly for her. Next time it would be made clear.
But that is not the matter that is being discussed, is it? The matter at hand is Eddie. And Eddie was successful at the radio station and unhappy with Bryony.
He found her sitting on the lifeguard’s chair, staring at the water. The detectives had long since gone away. The body long since removed.
“I missed you today,” Eddie said. His hands were in his pockets, and he was trying to be cordial, trying to be polite in case there was a reason, a very good reason that Bryony wasn’t there. He hoped it was the case, that she was busy or had a Very Important Phone Call, or some other valid excuse that kept her when he wanted her there so badly, when so much depended on his intricate playing. For Eddie was quite hurt. As a matter of fact, few things had ever hurt him that much, and at the time he was unable to think of anything else that stung him as badly. The memory of playing her special song and constantly flicking his eyes to the corner of the room to see if she had discreetly crept in, well, it made his cheeks burn. Bryony better have a good reason, was all that he could think.
She flew out of the chair and into his arms with so much force that he nearly fell backward.
“Oh, Eddie. I found a body here this morning, floating in the water. Or rather, she found me, and I couldn’t leave her here, because she was so alone, you see. I wish that I could have seen you. I am so very proud of you, Eddie, and I hope you aren’t angry with me. Today was such an important day, and you have worked so hard for it, but I couldn’t leave her here. Her feet were bare and I had never seen toes as vulnerable, and she was so . . . ”
She couldn’t say any more, and she didn’t need to, because suddenly Eddie knew without a doubt the body was sent there specifically for Bryony, that it was a message, that it was time. It was time to run.
“Bryony,” he said, and she looked up with her large eyes. “Pack your clothes. We are going to see your father. Immediately.”
Her smile was like the water, courageous with an undercurrent of calm, terrified violence underneath. “We are?”
Her father, hooray!
But the desert was another matter.
She pushed her hair out of her face and the stars around her wrist glittered. Eddie suddenly knew they were being watched right now and he couldn’t deny it even if he wanted to. Of course, he would deny for the sake of tough, masculine appearances because underneath his creativity, Eddie really was a sensible man.
“We are,” he said, and held her close. This was the way it was supposed to be, and he knew it, and suddenly it seemed silly to even pretend otherwise.
“Bryony, when we see your father . . . ” He didn’t know what to say. Shouldn’t this come easy? Shouldn’t he have thought of it in advance? Shouldn’t this a luminous and a shining moment that they would both remember forever?
Her eyes. Her eyes. She looked at him and took him apart piece by piece and put him back together as something better than he had ever been before. She was everything he had ever needed, and suddenly he realized with perfect clarity he was everything she had ever needed, too. He couldn’t be any more perfect to her. If she could have anything in the entire world, anything at all, she would stand right there with her perfect eyes and she would say in a calmly determined voice, “I would like Eddie Warshouski, please.”
“Yes,” he said to her.
“Yes?” she asked him. She held onto his hands as tightly as she possibly could, and yet her little hands were so fragile. Bird bones, tiny ribbons of calcium. He could smash them so easily. Anyone could.
“Yes, and yes, and yes,” he said again, urgently. Tonight, if they could, but it would only be proper to marry with her father there, and anything else would greatly devastate the man’s feelings.
“Really?” she asked, and she glowed. Nuclear happiness, delight ascending. He expected light to shoot from her fingers and toes, but no, it only shimmered under the surface of her skin.
“I love you,” he said. In those words was everything else he meant, things like: Why waste time? And: Why did it ever take me so long to figure it out? And: I will miss you so very much when you are gone, it will devastate me. He also thought: I am marrying the stars and I have never been so happy. Ha, take that, Chad the Fish guy, it sucks to be you. There was a myriad of other things he thought about, too.
“I love you,” is all that Eddie actually uttered, and somehow those words were enough.
“When are we leaving?” asked a radiant Bryony.
“Right now, love,” Eddie answered.
He grabbed her hand and they ran across the grass and to the parking lot, laughing.
The murderer wasn’t laughing. This was an unfortunate turn of events, for these things are much harder to carry out with a doting man in tow, especially one that is stealing the Star Girl’s exceptional smiles. If there is one thing that is true, though, it is that if you really want something badly enough, it is always possible.
And it is true. It is true.
Unless, unfortunately, your name is Bryony Adams and what you want is to live.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Child of the Sky
Detective Bridger sat at his desk with several grisly pictures spread out in front of him. Lovely young women without heads, without hands, without eyes. Women wi
th their heads shaved and women with their bodies disassembled. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular linking them together, but the sheer number of victims caught his attention, and the sadness around their tender mouths kept it.
How many mothers will pick up the phone to call their daughters, and then suddenly sink into a chair when they remember nobody will answer? How many little girls will grow up without somebody’s gentle hands braiding their hair? What the good detective didn’t want to admit to anybody, especially himself, was that whenever he closed his eyes he saw Bryony Adams’ face staring up at him from each portrait.
Bryony devoid of skin and clothing and emotion. Bryony imperceptibly shaking her head and saying, “Why didn’t you help me, Detective Bridger? Why did you let me slip away from this world when you took one look at me and you knew?”
The current victims were heart wrenching, but how much worse will Bryony’s death be because he knew ahead of time, and was unable to stop it?
He knew instinctively that when the moment came, when this child of the sky was murdered and left lying in a broken heap of muscle and bone and tissue somewhere, the stars would darken and life would not be nearly as beautiful as it was before.
He had to save her. He had to try.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
The Desert is Waiting
Syrina and Rikki-Tikki were, of course, thrilled with the news that Bryony and Eddie were getting married. Syrina immediately dumped her coffee can of spare change out on the bed, but it wasn’t nearly enough to buy a plane ticket. She pouted briefly but was quickly caught up again in the splendid rush of excitement.
“When?” Syrina asked, helping Bryony throw her meager belongings in a pleasingly large suitcase. “When is the wedding?”
“Hopefully tonight,” Bryony said, “although it is more likely that we’ll get married tomorrow. I have to be realistic, you know.”
“Yes, indeed you do,” Syrina agreed. “That’s my girl. How I wish we could come. But here, wear this dress and think of me at least once during the ceremony. It will look stunning!”
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