And yes, there were yellow jonquils.
Bryony already had a purple flower in her hair, and when she turned to Eddie, her eyes were radiant.
“Thank you so much! What a magnificent sight, so much life after such a terrible time with that man. The way he looked at me, it made me want . . . I never thought I . . . You’re so good to me, my darling.”
She walked into his arms and he automatically closed them around her, and she was bouncing from foot to foot happily, a buzz of exquisite joy, already tossing the terror of this morning aside like discarded clothing, because what was the purpose of it really? Why dwell when there was happiness and life and Eddie and flowers. My word flowers in this very room!
Eddie stared over her head at the spill of blooms, and he wondered how something so friendly and beloved could also be so sinister. He wouldn’t have been surprised at all if suddenly they started hissing and rattling their stems in a threatening manner, dragging Bryony into them and filling her mouth and nose with pollen and broken stamens. But no, there they lay, innocent and sweet and full of good feeling. They infused Bryony with a happy pleasure. She was thinking that she was home now, surrounded by flowers the desert could never produce, recently escaped from impending death, and maybe it was over, maybe that was the end of it and she could live, really live without always glancing behind her shoulder, and wouldn’t that be lovely? Wouldn’t that be truly remarkable?
She climbed onto the bed and slipped under the sheets, and the flowers nestled around her, snuggling into her hair and the curves of her body like warm children, and there she fell asleep. It had been such an exhausting day. Eddie pulled up a chair and watched her, unable to bear the idea of touching those flowers. They bared their fangs and snapped at him, but slid their delicate petals soothingly over the gashes on Bryony’s white face and arms.
When she dies, “she’ll look just like this. I will fill her casket with all of the flowers it can hold, and they will love her and she will love them, and she will not be alone.
Except, Eddie had another idea, struggling to break the surface of his misery. The attacks on Bryony seemed to be coming closer together, and although he thought he had understood before, now he realized completely how his life would truly be without her. How dark, how empty of magic. Bryony had swung from the red velvet curtains of mystery that finally opened in his mind, and now that he saw sunlight and tasted pure snow, how was he to live without?
Certainly when the time came, her casket would be full of flowers. But he was beginning to realize now he needed to leave room inside, plenty of room.
Eddie isn’t a particularly large man, but he wanted to make sure there was enough room to accommodate him and also Jasmine the Guitar, because he intended to serenade Bryony to sleep every night throughout the eternities.
CHAPTER FORTY
Stitches
“Mr. Culpert, would you mind passing the rolls?”
“Please, call me Peter.”
So it was the weekend, and the cozy and sparse apartment was suddenly full of guests. There were Bryony and Eddie, and they had invited Syrina and Rikki-Tikki over, as well, and Peter Culpert—the man who wanted more than anything to murder Bryony—was their guest of honor.
“Thank you so much for saving her life,” Syrina said, clasping both of Peter’s hands with her own. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”
Yes, thank goodness I was stalking her from the bushes, Peter thought.
“Yes, thank goodness I was jogging just then,” he said aloud. “What a remarkable coincidence.”
Rikki-Tikki snorted. “Nah, it wasn’t a coincidence. Death sort of has a thing for Bryony, if you know what I mean, and we’re all set up like chess players to thwart it sometimes.”
Peter tilted his head to the side and looked at Rikki-Tikki. “Death has a thing for her? Whatever do you mean?”
Bryony studied her hands, now released from the bandages, but still covered with chilling black stitches everywhere. She looked as though she had been sewn together by a mad scientist, and since the doctor was having a particularly bad day when he did the stitches, it wasn’t very far from the truth.
Peter looked around the table, and everybody suddenly seemed very interested in their fingers and hands and each other’s outfits.
Bryony looked up and smiled. It was painful to see, because her lip was split and her eye was still blackened, but at least most of the cuts on her face were up in her hairline, and the black stitches weren’t as noticeable as they could have been. The double rows down the side of her neck, however, were another matter entirely. Syrina’s stomach lurched each time she saw them. Rikki-Tikki’s face went unnaturally pale. Eddie balled his fists and the muscle in his jaw jumped. Peter shook his head internally and thought: You were so clumsy, you stupid kid. You really should have practiced before you scarred up a work of art like Bryony. I shall do a much better job of it.
Conceited? Yes. A bit smug? Certainly. But then Peter Culpert has been killing innocent young women for a long time, and he considers himself to be a master at his work. There is unearned pride, and then there is pride in a job well done, and although his skill is a terrible and atrocious thing, it cannot be said he didn’t work long and hard for it. So to be fair, one must give Peter his due, albeit grudgingly.
Hooray, Peter, one cheers halfheartedly. Such a good job, woo-hoo.
Now one hopes that the Seattle City Police Department happen to have two or three well-armed officers stumble across Peter in the midst of a murder and they taze him and handcuff him, and put him in a cell for a good long time. Then perhaps the cheering will be a little more exuberant, and the joyous “Yahoos” will ring through the city with unbridled passion and enthusiasm. Wouldn’t that be simply splendid!
“It’s all right, Peter,” Bryony said. “You don’t have to talk about it. I’m sure this is quite uncomfortable for you. But we all know, and that is the way of it, and it isn’t so big and scary if you just acknowledge it. I am going to die. It has always been this way, and I am used to the fear.”
Peter frowned. “I can’t believe you just accept your death like that.”
When Bryony looked at him, her pale moon eyes showed her sorrow, and our murderer was taken aback. Sorrow? Sorrow, in one so vibrant and young?
“And what would you have me do? Would you have me deny it? Pretend that I was going to have a long life full of wonderful things I always hoped for? Oh, how I wish it. It doesn’t work like that. I am very happy, in a way. I have no choice but to grab at the things I want, because if I don’t, they are going to skitter away. How would that change you, Peter? How would it be, if you knew you didn’t have any time, and you had to do the thing you wanted most, right now?”
Peter looked around the table at everybody’s faces. They were happy, they were bonded. The house had every vase and extra cup and mug full of excess flowers, and the house was warm, perfumed, full of love and the cold calculations of a killer.
Peter stuffed a roll in his mouth and talked around it.
“Oh, I’d probably do what I wanted most in the world, I guess. There wouldn’t be any reason to wait.”
Bryony smiled and nodded, but Eddie’s eyes were narrowed.
“And what would that be?” he asked Peter. “What do you want more than anything else?”
Peter hesitated and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’d really have to think about it.”
That is really the smartest thing he could have possibly done, for what he was thinking was vastly different.
Why Eddie, he thought as he took a mouthful of beef stew, I would kill your wife. Right here, right now, with everybody watching and helpless in their horror to stop me. That is what I would do.
“Delicious dinner,” he said sincerely, and smiled.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Death Like a Crown
Detective Bridger woke up thrashing.
He gasped and waited for his heart to sl
ow down, which took longer and longer to do.
“Dreaming about that girl again, sweetheart?” asked his wife. Her lovely face was full of sympathy, and traces of apprehension lined her forehead. Her husband had a tender soul and she was beginning to fear for him, because it seemed harder for him to shrug out of the coat of grime and murder he wore home each evening. He was growing distraught and driven and she knew the impending death of this lovely girl was behind it. Although she hadn’t seen the woman herself, she believed in her darling Ian, and she believed him when he said this girl wore death like a crown, and the crown was growing heavier and more difficult to endure, and one day her frail bones would snap entirely under the weight of it.
“I have to go over the files again,” he said, and then he was gone. She knew he would be locked in the home office for the rest of the night, scouring the files he had gone over a hundred times, searching for something different to give him more insight.
She moved over to his side of the bed and pondered in the darkness. She was frustrated at first, angry and even a little jealous at the attention her husband uncharacteristically lavished on this case.
“What is it about this girl?” she had demanded. She was going to go further and say some particularly unkind things when she saw her husband was searching for the exact words to explain everything to her, so she sat on the bed and listened.
“I spend my whole life finding bodies and then trying to figure out who killed them. It’s too late; the damage has already been done but I still try my best so the family can have some peace. Some justice. But this girl . . . ” Ian took his wife’s hands in his own and spoke earnestly. “If you only saw her, you would know. She is like a small flower blooming from a crack in the busy sidewalk. Beautiful and hopeful, struggling so hard to put down roots somewhere, and it’s a delight to see, but at the same time your heart drops and you hold your breath because you know somebody is going to step on that flower and crush it. That is how I see this girl. Her fate is already determined, but she is trying so hard despite that. And her friends! Oh, my darling, you should see how they all fight. It may be the first time I have ever seen real courage. They deserve somebody’s help, do you understand that? They’ve earned it. As for me, this is my chance to find the killer before the body is discovered. Perhaps I can stop it before the damage is done. I have to try.”
Ian wouldn’t be back to bed tonight.
His wife got up and put on some coffee.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Falling into Fish and Flowers
Eddie no longer spent his days playing Jasmine the Guitar at Pike Place Market.
“Where’s your husband?” Chad the Fish Guy asked Bryony one day. He was trying hard not to look at the noticeable stitches on her hands and face, but it was difficult. Bryony helpfully held her hands out for him to inspect. He touched them gingerly.
“He’s busy,” she said. “He’s recording.”
Chad the Fish Guy was impressed. “Wow. When things started to take off for him, they really took off.” He ran his finger over one of her new scars with some trepidation, but she grinned at him.
“They don’t hurt, not really. You don’t have to be so gentle. Yes, I’m very happy for Eddie, but I’m sad because I miss him. I’m lonely without him. Are you ever lonely, Chad?”
Chad was always lonely, but he would never say. He was constantly surrounded by people, and especially by women, but he was always lonely. He often curled up in his cold apartment and wished he had somebody warm who would stay with him, or a fun-loving roommate, or a best friend. But that was not to be, at least not for our Chad the Fish Guy, who did not know how to treat women with respect, and didn’t know how to treat men besides anything except competition. So, who did he have left? Nobody, that’s who.
“I don’t get lonely, Bryony,” he said jauntily, and Bryony, perhaps sensing those words were big circus balloons full of nothing but popcorn-scented air, stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.
“I am glad we are friends. You are a special man, and special to me, and I want you to know that when the time comes, I am going to have everybody flash through my mind, and when it is your turn, I will take an extra second to reflect on you and think, ‘Oh, my favorite fish guy, how I am going to miss him when I am dead.’”
Chad didn’t know what to say. He was moved, a new and unusual feeling to him. Usually when he felt any emotion about a woman at all, it was typically desire, and then he would whisk her off to his apartment and promptly become annoyed with her before the evening was through. But he knew that desire was the wrong word for whatever he felt for Bryony. Oh, certainly he entertained little fantasies of her every now and then, especially one where she showed up at the market, knocked Eddie across the head with Jasmine the Guitar, and leapt into Chad’s masculine arms crying: “Now that I am free from that awful Eddie, I want you and everybody down here at Pike Place Market to know that Chad Pufferhoff is the man for me. I will use all of my feminine wiles to seduce him into making me Mrs. Pufferhoff, and in the meantime, we shall fall over backward in rapturous joy, landing in either fish or flowers, according to where we are standing at the moment. To wit, to woo!”
But that fantasy and others like it notwithstanding, Chad knew he didn’t want to forget Bryony’s name one day, and he wouldn’t be annoyed with her before the night was over. In fact, he wanted her to be around forever, kind of like the sister he never had. Only he has heard that the words “desire” and “sister” do not go together in the same sentences. So perhaps Bryony isn’t quite like a sister to him, but maybe a far off relative, like a second cousin once removed? Chad the Fish Guy Pufferhoff wasn’t certain of that either, because Bryony was certainly closer than that. Family relationships are so confusing.
She was looking at him, covered in stitches and shiny new scar tissue, her mouth turned down at the corner because of the cut there. Suddenly Chad was filled with a feeling he had never, ever felt before, and it was all-consuming.
He swept Bryony up into his arms, and her shoes dangled a good two feet off of the ground. “Oh,” she said in surprise, and then she was silent, because she knew deep in her heart that Chad had a Very Important Something to say.
“Bryony, you’re not my sister or my roommate or even my second cousin once removed, but I have to tell you this: I am jealous of Eddie, he gets to see you stagger around in your bathrobe and I don’t. I’m jealous of Syrina who was lucky enough to live with you and I never got that chance. I’m jealous that you have people come over to your house, and I’m not one of them. I want to be your friend. And when you die, I don’t know how I’ll ever come back to work, because I’ll look at your flower stand and there will forever be something missing. Something bright, something that came from the stars. And I’ve never cared what happened to other people before. You have always been kind to me, and for some reason I want to be kind to you, and it makes the world a different place. I don’t know what this feeling is called, but it’s not uncomfortable, per se. Just different.”
Chad stopped talking and realized he was still holding Bryony. He put her down and stood there awkwardly. Bryony started to laugh.
“Chad, there is a name for that feeling, and it is called love. You love your family and you love your friends. You love me and I love you, and this makes me happy. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on me in the market while Eddie is gone? To make doubly sure I am safe? If it isn’t too much to ask.”
Chad’s chest puffed up with pride, and he was most pleased to help keep watch over perhaps the only friend he would ever know, and he vowed to be vigilant. And this was a kind and gracious thing for him to do, and made him more of a man than anything else in his life. But love, although beautiful, can also be unkind, and one is apt to get his heart broken. This is exactly what happened to our dear friend Chad Pufferhoff turned Fish Guy. For not more than half a week later, Eddie still had not come back to the market, so Chad kept his promised close eye on Bryony, who seemed to be t
ired and full of sorrow for some reason. And he noticed a man in the background, a man he had seen before two or three times, watching Bryony. Now Chad is a professional at knowing what a man sees in a woman, and he could tell this man wasn’t interested in Bryony’s smile or her laughter, but was zeroing in on the pulse in her neck, and the short, choppy breaths she occasionally unconsciously took, and something about that made Chad’s hackles rise.
This time the man slipped off and headed down into the dark spaces beneath the fish market and Chad wiped his hands and followed him. Down and down they went, farther and farther into the labyrinth. Chad thought he had lost the mysterious man, but turned a blind corner to find that the man waiting.
“So you really were following me,” he said conversationally. “Unbelievable.”
Chad pulled himself up to his full height, trying to look intimidating. “I think you want to hurt Bryony, and I won’t let you do it.” His voice was strong, and Chad was proud of himself. Hmm, loving someone really does give you strength, he thought. How proud Bryony would be when he told her.
The man didn’t look fazed. “Of course I want to hurt her. We’re each other’s destiny, she and I. I was born to kill, and she was born to die, and isn’t that convenient? Lovely, really.” Something flashed in his hand, and Chad’s mind said “Oh!” and it said “No!” and it tried to say something else, but it was lost in the pain of being stabbed two, three, four times in his chest.
The man sighed. “I was hoping for more. Oh well, thems the breaks.” He wiped his knife carefully on Chad’s shirt, and stepped smartly away.
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